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set in Absara
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su bmit @ qui e tl i g h tn i n g . o r g
Contents
curated by
Meghan Thornton + Rohan DaCosta
featured artist
Natalie Fabri | fabrikations.com
Midnight
listen, I want to tell you a story but first I need
you to love me when I am red and raw,
love me so brightly that I become someone who could
raise an unbroken child
bestow a name and new leaves
in an illusion of permanence,
despite the flat line and the fluorescent light. love me
for the way I wake up
to stitch the ragged edges
together into something like whole.
love the way that I cast a shadow,
because I am no longer a ghost or in pieces.
love me still when I flinch and try to hide it
as you come crashing
through the trip wires of my body,
when new tenderness feels like the same thing as old
violence,
love me so well
that you already know somehow
1
to wait
until there is nothing else
for me to do but to look back and meet your eyes
and begin at the very beginning, again,
listen
2 S a ra h H e n r y
come home to sleep heavy sad
giant dreams about waves of water
coming in from the ocean, covering all the houses,
drowning the mountains, all these water dreams
because I can’t stop drinking alcohol and I don’t want
to
go to meetings again, all these
water dreams because my father
is stranded in the desert where it only
rains twice a year, he’s eating potatoes boiled in
salted water,
asks me to buy a guitar from him because he’s so
broke and
needs the money, him and his new wife and her
twelve
year old son from a different marriage, fleeing from
Texas,
wide sky country for the poison glare and baked rock,
I fly down to visit and cover their bodega groceries,
Write my name and my tips on their bills and receipts
try to wash their dishes and they push my hands
away, I try to make jokes and stay light and sing my
songs and play guitar and believe in love and the
future,
we tell each other we love each other and we mean it,
I drink tequila from the freezer and accept a Valium
Sa ra h He nry 3
I pass out in the kid’s bed so he has to sleep on the
couch
In the morning dad goes to the ranch to visit his
sister
takes her to the hospital for radiation, her tumor
has spread from her neck and now it’s taking up
half of her face, I watch her take her shirt off and
hook a bra
around her ribs, a living skeleton, her breasts
the only soft part of her body now, she always
wanted to get thin and the devil heard and took the
fat from her body, multiplied her cells into infinity
turned the flesh necrotic peeling from her neck, I last
ten minutes and go to the kitchen to hide
my dad is pretty good about it, hands me a paper
towel
to press against my face, we eat frozen lasagna
and I start drinking day old kitchen wine,
there might be fruit flies in it and I don’t care-
my new step mother is kind and she
asks me if I want to take a walk and we go outside
and walk out towards the edge of the property
lined with barbed wire, coyotes print in the dust
wind shaking the leaves of the palm trees-
it sounds like rushing water-
4 S a ra h H e n r y
I take it all in, breathe the oxygen
two lungs in my body right and left, one heart
twisted choked up I can’t dig it out I keep trying
I turn around look back and see the sunset, the sun
hazing
down the dusk, the light of it stripped orange and
gold
across the sky, like the center of a flame.
Sa ra h He nry 5
m ak Vossoug
Sia hi
The B
e st P o et o f A m e r i c a
Kenya.
7
No one has ever said that to me, he said.
My friend, the driver said, you are saying the thing you
should not say.
Why?
No, the driver said. Not secret. But quiet. I drive for
Lyft. I use the map on my phone but I don’t need it.
The people like to see me use the map.
Why?
8 S i a ma k Vo ssoug h i
When will they hear all you know about San Francisco?
Manuel said.
Some day, the driver said. But I can’t have two homes.
Kenya is still my home.
No.
I promise.
Si a ma k Vossou gh i 9
Any last summations? I said.
The driver laughed. He stopped the car and the girl got
in. She was pretty in a way that somebody with money
would love some day. We all went to our deepest
sobriety and stayed there the rest of the way.
10 S i a ma k Vo ssoug h i
onzale
e th G z
z ab Ja
m
E li M y a b u e l i ta s e
Look at my tongue!
11
My abuelita, my grandmother, never learned to speak
English despite having lived in the United States for
almost fifty years. My grandfather coaxed her from
the little town in Mexico her ancestors had founded
back when land was granted by the king, and took her
2,000 miles north to Detroit. This was the 1940s, when
it was common to find signs in restaurants prohibiting
dogs and, what I’m assuming the sign-printers believed
their logical corollary, Mexicans.
12 E l i z ab e t h G o n za le z Ja me s
My daughter is currently obsessed with jokes:
A drizzly bear!
Pencil-vania!
14 E l i z ab e t h G o n za le z Ja me s
At some point I must have said, I’m hungry, and she
understood.
I nodded.
16 E l i z ab e t h G o n za le z Ja me s
red construction paper. I will remember how her love
poured from her like Ganymede with his bottomless
pitcher and, even though I might secretly long for the
moment their mother will pick them up, I will answer
their questions as best I can, slip them pieces of candy
before dinner, glue together the things that have come
apart.
19
breathes on them as God breathed
life into man, building
a shrine for fire,
where the flames dance like Shiva’s
speaking in tongues,
casting a woeful
look over her shoulder, as if she
only now could see what’s coming,
like those immolating
20 K r i s t e n R e mb o l d
the girl’s name
in incantation,
running, astonishing her
with her body, outstretched
arms.
Kri st e n Re mbold 21
Kate Folk
D i n n e r w it h C r ai g
23
meant to or not, some things after all, such as stomach
enzymes, proceeding independent of the human
construct of intention. As long as that didn’t happen—
being annihilated by snake digestive acid I mean—I
was thinking it might be convenient to move my stuff
inside the snake, to set up my apartment in there so
long as I could emerge at regular intervals, rather than
how it is now, eking out a life in the diminishing gaps
between the snake’s body and various walls.
24 K at e F o l k
into my apartment I walk straight into the snake’s
mouth. Those gestures made me feel like the snake
was in this thing with me. I mean I felt less victimized
by the situation than I otherwise might have, if the
snake hadn’t seemed to make an effort to swallow my
furniture into itself, and anyway the snake can’t help
how it’s gotten so big, it’s another thing out of anyone’s
control just like with the stomach enzymes. It’s dark
and kind of wet in the snake but I have flashlights and
once you’re in the main room it looks more or less the
same, only much darker in spite of the flashlights, and
yeah pretty wet. I do have to leave every few hours,
like with permit parking, because that’s when the
stomach acid starts to settle into my skin and if I let it
go too long it does corrode my flesh, but again, that’s
hardly the snake’s fault. I still have to leave the snake
to shower and of course to leave the apartment and do
the things I do during the day, which admittedly have
become fewer since I began living in the snake.
I went out for dinner again with Craig tonight and he’s
got a new girlfriend. Actually, it’s the old girlfriend, but
he swears this time it’s different. I say sure, I’m sure it is,
and I mean it. I believe in Craig and I believe whatever
he tells me. “What’s new with you?” Craig asks.
Kat e F olk 25
“Well, I should be getting home now,” Craig says when
I’ve finished talking about the snake. I bet Craig wants
to get back to his girlfriend.
26 K at e F o l k
nca Barela
Bia
Bro od
My father, despite everything my mother ever said,
was always up for an adventure, and rarely ever
27
when the animals started to grow into teen versions
and see how big our chickens and one rooster had
grown. We named them and took care of them
without realizing that of course, our dad with the
rough hands and soft voice,
28 B i an c a B a r e l a
even though we had reached a stage
in our young lives when it was no longer acceptable
to openly cry,
Bi anca Ba re la 29
a Webste
Emm r
S a d S o u ls
31
back—I would be right to blame myself.
The second time I got that phone call, she didn’t make
me any promises, instead layering one apology over
another, eulogizing herself before there was even a
body. She thanked me for my friendship, tossing out a
casual goodbye the same way you would at the end of
a party you didn’t really want to be at.
32 E mma W e b s t e r
I got to keep Chloe, somehow, and it’s my most selfish
victory. Because I don’t know if she stayed because she
really wanted to, or because she just didn’t want to let
me down.
That was two years ago. And even though there’s always
a part of me that’s waiting—waiting to learn that the
progress she’s made has all been a lie, waiting for the
call that this time she just did it without consulting
me first—she’s still here. She kept her promise, and she
stayed.
Emma We bst e r 33
- SET 2 -
h Arantza Ama
ra do
Sa S a n c t u s Sp ir it u s, 15 12 r
35
ody Nixon
Mel
O c e a ni c F e e l i n g ,
a f t e r C h rist c h u r c h
I.
37
various bits of wood and rope that make up a boat.
“Port” and “Starboard” come from the Vikings, did you
know that?
II.
III.
38 M e l ody N i x o n
anxious, fitful sleep; this is a rough morning.
Raed and I talk about this after a white, Australian
gunman murders 49 people in a mosque in my
homeland, New Zealand.
Me lody Ni xon 39
thoughts as voice messages over WhatsApp, because
we live in different cities in the Bay. We talk about
social media’s role in white supremacy, in narcissism,
and the alienation it produces, while we check the
news on Twitter.
IV.
40 M e l ody N i x o n
V.
VI.
Me lody Ni xon 41
VII.
VIII.
42 M e l ody N i x o n
On some elemental level you could say that nothing is
ever breaking.
IX.
Me lody Ni xon 43
materializes before you. “Oh, that!” you think.
44 M e l ody N i x o n
is topher Berna
C hr rd
T h e R o s e S h ip w r e c k
45
The ghost of a sea swallows the ghost of a ship
under the ghost of a sky: listen, you can hear them,
the ancient sailors singing like the sirens,
calling you to sea—to sea—to sea –
steel gray, enamel blue, and white with foam,
to join the ships that blossom like so many roses
and scatter their petals as they perish, and drown,
and sing,
like them, calling the next generation
to sea—to sea—like us—well? will you brave it?
will you build your ships of roses and brave the sea?
or is its storm a terror worse than childhood’s,
not to be escaped, the waves and wind
the white of a cage, the ice and snow cold bars
in a burning sky that seals the world and twists
down on our heads even as we heave
out into the open sea, our white sails out
like butterfly wings, our hopes so many hooks
the wild sea can catch and hold us with,
like love itself, a bark, a cage, a brand?
46 C h r i s t oph e r B e r na rd
toward the dark,
though the storm is coming, shall we spot the
thunderhead
and steel our sheets till they thrum in the underwind
and the water flails and hisses over the bulkheads
and churns and cries and crashes in our wakes
like an arrow thrusting us ahead, to sea,
to sea, far out, pushing us till we fly
into the storm? Shall we build our ships
of roses? Shall we flower over the whirlwind sea?
Ch ri st op h e r Be rna rd 47
th Crossman
Ru
Dreams
49
time I saw her she had said we should hang out some
time, do some collaging or something. She was nice
like that.
“You can talk to her about it, I’m not trying to hide
anything, but” here was the point.
50 R ut h C r ossman
pissed off about the whole thing” you had said, barely
able to stand before you pulled me in, vicious and
needy, to bite my lips to shreds.
That was the night of the first dream: you and I walked
on a beach hand in hand and then she appeared out
of the blue. I begged her forgiveness, told her I didn’t
know what I had done, but she just smiled at me and
said oh girl, you’ve got it bad. As soon as her mouth closed
my eyes popped open and I looked at you snoring next
to me in your undershirt, the moonlight catching the
strands of gray in your chest hair, the badly executed
eagle tattoo on your arm. In the morning I told you I
had to go without making eye contact and you kissed
my forehead, cupping my hair and whispering “see you
soon.” I didn’t know what to do.
Ru t h Crossman 51
of black fading slowly to shades of white through
constant mixing, each tone on the chart a perfect
degree of separation from the last, and I had my final
dream of you, of us: the instructor was standing in a
light filled studio and explaining to me that our squares
were close to each other, our grays only separated by
a little pigment. I saw myself hop scotching over blots
of gray, moving closer and closer to you and I was so
happy. Like I knew a secret.
52 R ut h C r ossman
frey Kingman
Jef
Stopo ver
snored up to eighty
snuck
the air
so sweet at dusk
we stare ahead
at the stop
sitstill
53
k Mavigan
Gar
Depart mental
55
“Hey, how are ya?!?” Ed said, rhetorically, with his usual
Midwest twang, even though he was from New York.
I knew his gleeful greeting was the sweet rainbow
sprinkles on top of a devastation sundae. The large
manila envelope on his desk spoke volumes; he didn’t
need to say another word.
56 G a r k M av i g an
elderly folks—probably Macy’s shoppers—power-
walked through the mall in their off-brand running
shoes for exercise, some starting as early as 6 a.m. Mall
employees called them “walkers.” They robotically
marched around and around like tired cells in a dying
organism.
Ga rk Mavi gan 57
latest concealer. I often left the store altogether to
grab an Orange Julius or Wetzel’s Pretzel, if only to
escape the constant loop of Hall and Oates, Fleetwood
Mac, Madonna, and Dolly Parton.
58 G a r k M av i g an
reassuring arms of Father FAFSA.
***
Ga rk Mavi gan 59
Ed ended his closing remarks by pointing out my
most dishonorable transgression against Macy’s: “I’ve
spoken to your associates, and they told me that it
feels like you’re one of them.”
“No one has come up here and told me that they like
working with you or respect you as a leader,” said
Wednesday.
60 G a r k M av i g an
“What do you want us to tell your team? That you
decided to leave the company?” I chuckled at Ed’s
question; clearly, I was dreadfully nervous about the
rumblings in the Women’s Shoes department the next
morning.
Ga rk Mavi gan 61
Tony Press
H e art
s Like a Great Lake
64 T o n y P r e ss
She simply attempted to act as a saint would act, every
waking moment. She died at 24, of tuberculosis, after
seven years in a nunnery, after a lifetime of ill health.
When she was dying, she feared she had been a failure.
She wondered what, if anything, she had accomplished
in her short life. Reading about her years later, to me it
is evident what she did accomplish: to serve by acting
in a manner as true to her path as she possibly could.
And more, to be sure, because you and I and everyone
who might read these words knows, deep in our Great
Lake hearts, that the best teacher, the most effective
instructor, is example. We change our lives, we sharpen
our minds, and we open our hearts, when we see it,
when we experience it. Imagine meeting each person,
no matter how difficult, as St. Therese, as a bodhisattva,
with love. We can learn from all we encounter, and
teach, too.
Tony Pre ss 65
jacket, “established a new form of dramatic biography.”
Its subject: Percy Shelley; its enthralled reader: me.
St. Therese, with her fears and her legacy; Percy Shelley,
larger-than-life; and even his young bride Mary, she of
Frankenstein fame, she whose grave I once visited in
Bournemouth, England, with the notation that it also
contains Shelley’s heart, all this I carried with me on
the trains north to Madrid, to London, on the plane
to Mexico City, the six-plus hour ADO bus to Oaxaca.
66 T o n y P r e ss
hael Maier
Rac
O bser
vational Learning
The sea casts an aqueous net with the grasping end
of each crashing wave, as if saying, This belongs to me.
Trying to pull back into its belly all the castaway
shells
and bull whip kelp it discarded in a fit of rage,
realizing
it still wants these things.
67
- may 6, 2019 -