of course the fish didn’t want to be in the poem would rather have been left to wallow in the muddy bottoms
its scaleless skin soft against silt not gutted, its heart left beating on the cutting board as some lesson to a child
but we were hungry and the image keeps feeding me how a thing could be so alive and dead the sharp beauty of after
like how my father’s heart kept beating after the crash spilled him through a shattered windshield into the creek—
no one said drunk driving, the old folks called it: there, but for the grace of God, go I gin running the generations like water downhill
whatever he meant to show me in the twitch and pulse of it I can’t remember or forget
Beth Suter studied Environmental Science at UC Davis and has worked as a naturalist and teacher. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, New American Writing,Barrow Street, DMQ Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. Her forthcoming chapbook Snake and Eggs was a finalist in FLP’s New Women’s Voices Contest. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. You can find her at facebook.com/bethfsuter.
Let’s Be Mushrooms + Night Blooming Cereus
Tom Paine
Let’s Be Mushrooms
Let’s be mushrooms, you and I, when we die— we are not egotist trees, pith and heartwood, raging, cursing with raw bark and wild sap, shaking influencer fists at the bemused sky. We will do the work in the eternal crematory, roasting coffee and crimes; senators and saints. Little will be known of our gracious generation. What they will proclaim as us—our fish-bellied, gilled-umbrella eyes,peeking like whack-a-mole from the forest floor, belies the supreme scale of our secret selves below their hustling feet, where we will live as one, unseen and unafraid, in our conspiracy of rebirth, a subterranean veil of life-giving lace–(neither of us ever needed earth to spin to know sun is not the only star).
Night Blooming Cereus
There is a light, a light like angels rising from the grave, sneaking in, blinded with love. Angelic light is bright on you as you sleep on this morning. Sometimes I feel a night blooming cereus has stalked our bed into clouds. Unbidden, insane sensibility; a strange displacement, but extra-real, there is emptiness except our bedroom. This disassociated floating arises like this: a lone scarf of swirling silken chalk slowly pinwheels, permeates. Love: it is happening again, I whisper, everyone is crazy! Let those awake to death-making go drive and work. I bless your moist, flickering eyelids. Everything else, everything outside this box of love, their time, is a lie.
Tom Paine’s poetry is upcoming or published in The Nation, The Moth (Ireland), The Rialto (UK), New Contrast (South Africa), Volt, Vallum (Canada), Glasgow Review of Books (Scotland), and elsewhere. Stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Awards, and twice in the Pushcart Prize. His first collection Scar Vegas(Harcourt) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.
Notes from a Field on Fire + Félix González-Torres– “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed), 1991 + Multiclausal Exercises in Translation
Day Heisinger-Nixon
Notes from a Field on Fire
The grasses the grasses the grasses are everywhere now,
& none of them native to the landscape.
Inside of my two bedroom, one bath apartment, I am recording from the field.
The fieldnotes are as follows: The subject ruins their hair with coconut oil in the bathtub.
The subject burns their skin in the sun in a polyurethane raft & blisters down to their fascicles, applies silvadene for a week.
The subject cannot distinguish a boning knife from a mezzaluna, the poor animal.
O mammal you are my love. O lovely I am lapsing into tulips for you, into lilies.
Today, the open-air markets are growing sour from disuse. Today, a storm falls through all of them in concert.
Wednesdays are my Fridays, someone announces, Saturdays, my Mondays.
Corporate time shifts its weight constantly in the bottomless light, avocado toast closing in on its imminent extinction.
My future is growing ripe with endangerment.
The clusters of birds in my window discuss the dissolution of their most irrelevant factions.
Condors, cranes. Between them, the wind inserts itself–– an empty discourse.
The ocean, invariably, kisses strangers at new altitudes, blushes in her rising heat.
The months are falling out of me & I am annually a woman in June next to a woman in June.
I’m sorry I’m sorry, I say matutinally to the wars.
In my dreams, I’m always pointing at the sky. I’m always highlighting the nitrogen in the syrupy air.
Highlighting the starlings articulating a spot of oil bleeding through the afternoon’s golden sheet.
The man in the field of my dreams is a sopping wet man.
The boy in the field plays with the moss beetles, coleoptera leaving bodies in fits & starts––
wing-cases & shells, littering the clammy feculence.
Please notify the landlord that the lawn out front is dying. I’m sorry I’m sorry. Here, take my money.
Félix González-Torres– “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed), 1991
Now I am wondering if it’s appropriate–– the way I’ve made our moment of intimacy so public. The weight of our two heads forming two fabric bowls in the pillows, almost a soup dinner arrangement on the bed. On the bed in Manhattan, on the bed in San Antonio, on the bed in Seoul, the divots are cold in your public absence. The white sheets are almost blue. If I order some fries, will you eat them here with me, your moon body waning under the State’s milk-blue eye? Your moon body a pile of bonbons & saltwater taffy in their cellophane wrappers, shrinking in the corner. It’s raining today & it’s hard to believe that it’s possible to make love in this kind of weather, but the grasses seem to be getting along just fine. The world’s various waters seem to be getting along just fine & the President prays & pays for their poison as well. My friends are the kind of people that would drive out to the city just to see a billboard of an empty bed thirty years too late, mustering up, even then, enough heartache to cry into the tulips along the interstate. It’s been another wild year & more people have died than necessary, each body swimming in its own queer toxins, in the ornamental killings of this great police state & I’m trying to figure out, in the end, who is going to get up & shake out the sheets.
Multiclausal Exercises in Translation
After Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Traduire les phrases suivantes en français.
I enter a store and forage a jackfruit I won’t buy.
I sit on a bench in the park and regard the sun.
I speak to strangers and they speak back.
I am still afraid of some dogs and some dogs are afraid of me.
I don’t speak to strangers if I can avoid it.
I sit in a plastic chair at my parents’ house and behold a flock of geese.
I count every pill to see if my prescription will outlive my coverage.
I stop and sit to watch the West.
I consider HRT, but can’t imagine my face in the mirror.
I complain and say Fuck you health insurance, I don’t need you.
I get nervous when health insurance says Haha. Same.
I am in debt and watch a flock of city parrots circle the sun.
I am at a company meeting and they discuss the ghosts in the women’s bathroom.
I say Fuck you panic attack and panic attack asks me if I’ve tried yoga.
I identify plants for my friends and they tell me to stop.
I pop my shoulder out of its socket and think of Pangea.
I become a red country and cannot bear to watch myself.
I say This one’s agapanthus and they say No, seriously, stop.
I study German declensions and benefit from white supremacy.
I become a particular wind––turning and turning and in love in the West.
Day Heisinger-Nixon is a poet, essayist, interpreter, and translator. Raised in an ASL-English bilingual home in Fresno, California, Day holds an MA in Deaf Studies from Gallaudet University and is an MFA candidate in creative writing: poetry at New England College. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Apogee, Peach Mag, Boston Review, Foglifter, Gasher, and elsewhere. They are currently based in Valencia, Spain, and can be found online @__day_lily__ and at dayheisingernixon.com.
Blizzard + Dying Words
Chris Forhan
Blizzard
That’s a good word—blizzard—blurred, swift, the sound fishing up from below
a long ago downdraft, snow, fast flicks at my bedroom window, I was ten,
fine film of water blearing the glass, orange slices in a bowl on the bedside table,
beneath the needle the Beatles keening You don’t get me. Blizzard: is that the word
that floated into my head then? What does it matter. He’s gone, that boy
is dead, now that I have thought, so late, to make him speak.
Dying Words
Clod is gone, and nincompoop: useful names for us once. They vanished as my sad dying dad did and one or two childish wild loves— so slow to erode I took no notice till a flitter of wind undid them.
Always some mindless spring is spidering forth out of absence, upright sticks in sludge something-or-othering into fusses of pink and yellow.
Whatever is lost returns, just in fresh form. What good is that?
O lion, turning your back, padding grandly away into tall grass, let me follow for once to where you go. Of what you show me there, I’ll say nothing, I promise.
Chris Forhan’s latest book is A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He has also published a memoir, My Father Before Me, and three books of poetry and has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis.
I Wish It Were Enough to Be–– + The Saddest Thing
Fay Dillof
I Wish It Were Enough to Be––
the word that comes to mind is ducklike–– go about saying nothing but thank, thank, thank
you to the flowers in the tall grasses. There’s little to say about the body
in pain. Little, in fact, when sickness eclipses, about anything at all. Everyone else––
my husband and daughter, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, niece–– are searching for sea glass, skipping stones,
while back at the house, a whirligig spinning, I’m lying in bed, thinking about this morning when I went into the biting sea, the shock
intensified me right into existence, while now––I’m so sick
of being sick––and boom––like yesterday’s lightening-less thunder, I’m not really here in the dark.
If only what’s happening to me were like that cattail out the window,
soft as childhood sadness, catching the light.
Or, how earlier––the small gray rocks along the shore, as I approached, became birds.
The Saddest Thing
She’s in the kitchen, drinking coffee–– instant––my baby, now fifteen.
Leave me alone! I’m not ready! my grandmother, our family’s only other
instant coffee drinker (one cup with sugar and cream, before sleep) used to shout
in bed each night to her dead husband. I wrote that description
thirty years back. Your storyfails, the teacher had said, to conveywhy losing a grandmother
is not just but the natural order of things. As if the natural order of things
un-bewilders grief? The saddest thing that’s ever happened,
my daughter insists now––meaning the dryer-shrunk condition of the beanie
she pinched from her dad. She loves her father and me equally.
And her father more. Is it wrong
I always carried her strapped in the ErgoPack, facing me?
If I calibrate how long and when I’m allowed to put everything down,
the answer, Never. Drive across that bridge
of self-disdain, I instruct myself, imagining a tollbooth
and, beyond it, a slip of sky.
Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Spillway, FIELD, Rattle,New Ohio Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. Fay has been awarded the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and the Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry, and has received a John Ciardi Scholarship in Poetry at Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship in poetry at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a grant from Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and an Anne Bastille Residency at Adirondacks Center for Writing. She lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California where she works as a psychotherapist.
There and Back
Maggie Maize
Mama and I wanted to see the country. We made the 3,409-mile train trip from Emeryville, California to Savannah, Georgia, where I’d start Savannah College of Art and Design and hopefully “figure it out.”
California Zephyr
Emeryville — Chicago
51 hours 40 minutes *
Capital Limited
Chicago — D.C.
17 hours 25 minutes *
Palmetto
D.C. — Savannah
13 hours 8 minutes *
*delays not included
The double-decker Zephyr slowed to a crawl through the Sierras. We were behind schedule before we left California. Private freight companies owned most of the tracks and controlled dispatching, so we’d stop to let them pass. This order was a much different picture than pre-boarding. Turns out that Amtrak functioned on trust and people who disliked flying. No metal detectors. No pat-downs. No liquid limits. Only half-assed ID checks.
That evening we rattled 70+ mph through the Great Basin. Passenger trains usually use stretch breaking to increase tension between cars for a smoother ride. That wasn’t the case that night. Perhaps the engineer assumed we were asleep and wouldn’t notice sharp jolts. Our car jostled; beds pitched. It’s difficult falling asleep with your fight-or-flight senses excited. Somehow the safety straps latched to the ceiling weren’t comforting either.
I’d been pushing the tragic stories about derailed speeding trains from my mind. Then Mama said, “I had an earthquake dream.” That gave me something new to think about: sweet California, years overdue for a catastrophic earthquake.
When daylight came, I used clues to “see” beyond the curated views out the window. After all, we passengers couldn’t see the tracks or crossings ahead. I learned to rely on our horn and speed to anticipate towns or traffic. Mama navigated a map, picked names off of signs, tracked landmarks and angles of roads. It’s satisfying being on the other side of the gates, enjoying lunch while all those cars wait for you to pass.
Mealtimes were structured: 6:30-10 a.m.; 11:30-3 p.m.; 5-9:30 p.m. Servers lumped together four passengers into booths. The kitchen was below. That’s where they thawed, cooked, and plated the carb-heavy meals. Salads and veggie burgers—the only variants from yellow food or steak—sold out first, so we ate early.
This car is where you get to practice your train-pitch, a repeatable story that gives fellow passengers an idea of who you are. A train-pitch answers the go-to questions: “Where are you going? Why there? Where are you coming from? What do you do?” The last question stressed me out. I’d been wandering for the past two years. Picking anything felt misleading.
One night we ate dinner with a down-to-earth Virginian couple on their way to Denver. The woman was a weaver. The man was a lawyer who appreciated art. He once offered a re-offender a deal to move somewhere touristy “like San Diego” and paint motorcycle gas-tanks. The offender passed it up.
Near the end of the story, a British accent distracted me. The young man sat down across the aisle and told his strangers that he was a writer. Everyone laughed at his theatrically delivered stories. A few minutes later, his tablemates fell into hushed whispers. He asked his strangers how to approach me and if he should with my mom there. I ordered my interests, so I’d be ready if he got around to asking. He didn’t ask, though. He’d probably already heard me tell the Virginian couple the cluttered version.
The long days were suitable for thinking and writing. How many houses had we passed? What an intrusion—the blaring horn in the standard sequence: long, long, short, long. And this was a single route, a single train. A plane doesn’t have to be very high up for people to disappear, for land to become a patchwork. The train’s wake was personal.
I desired some of the simple living we saw. All the experiences I couldn’t live overwhelmed me. One life, that’s it. Parked, staring at tiny farmhouses while a freighter passed us, I believed I could part with technology altogether and learn what life was supposed to be.
Some days, hovering in the bathroom and walking to the observation car was the extent of our exercise. Of course, you don’t take a cross-country train expecting tremendous activity. But by Colorado, Mama and I were desperate for fresh air. Most stops weren’t long enough to get off. During fuel breaks, we got ten or fifteen minutes to pace the platform and hold our breath through crew members’ cigarette smoke.
It didn’t matter which passenger car we boarded. The key was getting back on since it was the only train of the day. When the thrill faded, I mourned those who stayed off and continued their stories that I’d never converge with again. Dramatic, yes, but also true.
“I’ve only been trying to get you alone for the past two days,” the Brit said. He said it like I’d used great wit to escape him last time. Mama was back in the room, taking a nap, and it probably was the first time we were apart.
The twenty-three-year-old worked for some magazine in Chicago. He was returning to the city with travel articles. He admitted to stretching stories for interest. My weirdo-meter urged me to walk away, but maybe he repeated everyone’s name too often. I also laughed off his persistent offers to buy my sweater.
“So, Maggie,” he said, “tell me your story.”
My still-messy train-pitch came out so flat that he changed the story right in front of me. He took notes in a pocket-sized journal, across from mine, but wouldn’t let me see what he wrote. I confessed how disoriented I felt lately, how so much felt unattainable. “My words” likely made an excellent quote for his fabricated article. He joked that my interest in fiction meant I wrote smutty fanfiction. I should’ve laughed because my objection only emboldened him to detail his intimate relationships. I squirmed, and he beamed. I left him in the booth; he asked to stay in contact.
We arrived in Chicago six hours late and had to scurry to our connection. Tingly sadness sunk in once we were settled. I thought it was because I’d overshared. Little did I know the feeling would pulse back (even years later) each time someone said, “not to worry,” and I’d “figure things out.”
The observation car was built for eavesdropping. Complaints buzzed in this shared space. “There’s no wi-fi.” “Why are we late?” “The bathroom reeks.” “My seatmate is spilling onto my armrest.” A young man in a stretched-out T-shirt said into his phone, “I paid $8 for a mini-bar size of Jack Daniel’s.” His unfocused gaze slid over the rusty factory, glowing in the sunset. We’d be late to his stop in Toledo, Ohio. He hung up then struck up a conversation with a neighbor about his $8 shot.
In D.C., we got on the Palmetto, which felt like a dated airplane with its blasé curtains and faded warning signs. This train was single story. Our roomette had a toilet right beside the sliding door but had little privacy thanks to the drape’s age-worn Velcro. Flop the toilet seat down—that was the step to my bunk.
Hot air slurped through the doors as passengers moved between cars. Then we arrived in Savannah. We’d become yet another set of passengers let off before the train’s final destination. The trip felt incomplete, and I thought about the train for the whole quarter. I longed to get back on. So, in November after finals, Mama and I took the 3,409-mile trip back to California.
I recognized the houses and farms I’d fallen in love with back in August. A harsh freeze had blanched most everything dead. In Virginia, an Amish man talked about organic food with an educator. They discussed the corruption of companies claiming to be non-GMO and selling “organic” farmers genetically modified seeds.
A girl about my age joined the conversation, saying she was a religion major. She asked the man why the Amish shun some people from their community.
“They’re excluded from activities like church if they don’t try to live our way,” he said. “It’s that harsh because we want them to repent and reenter the community.” He backed his words with Bible verses. I wonder if the man was satisfied with his own train-pitch.
Then on the Zephyr, there were young farmers headed to Omaha, Nebraska. They wore dirty boots and pointed to fields saying, “They missed harvest by a week.”
I also met Kat, an 18-year-old in the observation car. Her mousy hair straggled over her shoulders. She’d bought a coach ticket, but the windowed car was where she spent most of her time. She boarded in Denver and was returning to rural Northern California after a spontaneous trip to Arkansas, where she was scoping out land. My anxiety seemed novice compared to Kat’s honed paranoia.
She and her boyfriend planned to move to Arkansas, use her solar energy knowledge to go off the grid in the mountains. This prep was for when the government crumbles, technology backfires and inevitably crashes.
Kat and I watercolored at a table, and the train’s wheels squealed long songs around bends. She set down her brush until her storytelling high faded. She’d pick it up, set it back down. This continued for a couple of hours. My train-pitch was no better than last time. For some reason, I told her about my confusion. Much like the Brit and everyone else who I’d told, though, Kat changed the subject. Why did it keep slipping out on the train? I wanted dates when I’d “figure it out.”
Mama eventually came looking for me. I wanted to give her a warning signal, but she was a better audience than I. Kat even backtracked part of her lizard-Illuminati conspiracy for Mama’s reaction.
Kat spoke in absolutes—even if she couldn’t explain. I agreed when she said we’re too dependent on technology, the government knows too much, and money comes and goes. My responses contributed little to the conversation. That’s the way she liked it, or so I thought.
“You know that bad feeling you get sometimes?” Kat said, over her sopping wet painting. Now she was talking to me. “Always trust that bad feeling.”
I’ve thought about Kat a lot since then. I wish I’d asked her how to decipher vague worries from legitimate warnings. California, too, had browned in the early freeze, and the marshland along the Bay was stagnant. The last few hours stretched long. I was ready by the time we arrived at our stop, the last stop. We disembarked with the remaining passengers, and things were still uncertain.
Maggie Maize holds a BFA in writing from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her writing has appeared in Savannah Magazine, Perhappened Mag, Funicular Magazine, and Sledgehammer Lit. She lives in Northern California.
