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Nonfiction Feature: The Acolytes by Eva Niessner

Close your eyes, and imagine.

You are a 12-year-old girl and real boys do not like you, and you are not sure if you like them. But the ones in movies—the ones in films and TV shows, the ones in fantasy and sci-fi stories, the ones with wings and horns and fangs and elf ears—you like them. You like when they are nice, except you also like when they are mean. They’re hurting, maybe. They need someone to be kind.

Your heart beats faster when you think about being kind in this way, to this kind of person. There is something growing an inch a day inside you like a well-watered sunflower. There is something reaching for the light, and you do not know what it is named.

In real life, you know that boys will laugh at you or ignore you altogether. You have a moon face and a bob that curls up unstylishly. You exist at two ends of the academic spectrum, either raising your hand with feverish desperation to be called on because you know the answer or doodling or reading under the table because you cannot be bothered with long division. You don’t know any of the members of *NSYNC, and you can’t tell any of them apart. None of them can do magic, so you don’t really care. You check out fat books from the library and delight in how hard it is to fit them in your backpack. You are, in short, a hard sell to a boy your own age.

But your girl friends who also like elves and pirates and vampires, they don’t see anything strange about you. They can be just as loud, take up just as much space, when they see you in the hallway. They invite you to the movies and then to sleepovers so you can debrief over the men, men, monstrous men, the stranger the better. 

In real life, they like you for who you are. The stranger the better.

In real life, you start devoting yourself to female friends in a way that other girls do not. 

Do you like the male characters that you have all bonded over, or do you like the bonding with the girls more? Do you like writing longhand in the notebook about how they will fall in love with you all and take you to live in a mansion, or do you like the way they are delighted by your stories? 

Perhaps they are the same plant, a cluster of shared roots, but these feelings sprout separately, and they do not look connected from the surface. 

 

Imagine you are in high school and you can’t decide if you’re gay because you still pine for the men you see in the movies. You play at dating boys. You want them to like you, but when they do, you start to hate them. When they show you attention, you feel smothered. You notice their every flaw with scientific precision. You break up with your first boyfriend at your locker because you don’t even want to look at him anymore, even though he never did anything wrong. When you tell him it’s over, he makes a face that you’ve never seen before.

But you’re boy-crazy, right? Can you still be boy-crazy if you only want boys that can never be attained? You think maybe you’re girl-crazy too, but that is the part you do not say out loud. No one seems directly opposed to it—your parents voted for Obama and spin David Bowie records, and your grandmother speaks fondly of the gay men she worked with at a now-extinct airline. Still, you feel a little dizzy when you think about telling people you’re girl-crazy. It is easier to talk about elf men. It’s a little easier to believe that you will be the queen of his kingdom than that your feelings for someone else might be returned.

You want to believe this isn’t all there is. Boys who tell their sisters they’re fat, boys who share their girlfriends’ nudes. Boys who flirt with you as a joke, the joke being no one ever really would. Boys who follow your friends home until they agree to date them. Boys who do not know their girlfriends’ birthdays or eye colors. This can’t be all there is. Please, God, this can’t be all there is.

 

Imagine, now, you are in your twenties. You are openly bisexual. You are in graduate school. You’re doing what you love, right? You’re doing what you love? 

You’re studying creative writing and you’re going to teach and your dreams are coming true and you are so stressed that you have developed a persistent twitch in your left eye. When you look up reasons that might be happening to you, Google says that it may be caused by caffeine intake and anxiety. You have just received word that a family member checked in to an inpatient mental health facility, and you understand that now is not your turn to break down. Maybe next week. Maybe after this paper.

Really. You are doing what you love. Promise.

By now you have decided that you do not want an ordinary man at all, and your youthful attempts to date them look silly and costume-ish, like when you used to wear your mom’s homecoming dress, pretending to be a bride. You talk to women online. You meet people who don’t really fit into any kind of gendered category. You flirt. For the first time in a long time, you are pursued in a way that feels good by people who are your own people. Imagine a dog who keeps turning back to make sure it is being chased, a dog grinning as it runs. You like being chased. 

But it is the imaginary men who have brought you together. They are the reason you have met. They are the ones you’re escaping with, when the reality you’ve always desired is now making it hard to inhale all the way. You all felt the same way about the same men. 

There is a word for this now. Fandom. You aren’t unusual, now, people like you, the acolytes. All of you together, plotting their every move, making them kiss, making them beg, dressing them up like paper dolls in war uniforms and tuxedos and chain mail. Which man, you ask by creating these works, is most like you? Which one can you make most like you? When you write, who are you inhabiting? Who could love you like they love him?

You do not really doubt that you are a girl, but these men are not solid forms, they can be stepped into, they can be worn. You can give him life, in your stories, and he can give you confidence. You can imagine—you can imagine someone might love you with the piercing desire that this man, whichever one you’re thinking of, has been loved. He is not even real but he is so loved, and you are real but he has been exalted by a thousand keyboard clicks in a way that you can’t even get your head around. If he has died in fiction, he has been mourned in real life. If he has killed or maimed or betrayed, he has been forgiven. This, say the acolytes, pointing to a man who has committed atrocities, is my baby.

It is not strange to you that the other fans you talk to were brought to you by these sorts of men. The people you meet might also like baking and houseplants and true crime, things you enjoy independently of this fantasy world, but you would never have found these friends if these men had not been the chapel in which you all gathered. It is not strange to be connected by how you will hurt these men, in the privacy of your fiction and in the public square that is online fandom. It is not strange to bond over stories where they cry, where they lose one another, where they hate one another, where they cry again. These works are offered up to the crowd like a sacrificial lamb, tied and presented before a blade. 

The spectacle can be overwhelming, but it sends your blood rushing. It reminds you of being a girl and thinking about placing the bandage on the monster’s wound, how it might growl and pant and flinch but not run away. It reminds you of studying art history and seeing saints, dazed and sobbing, ecstatic at the sight of what no one else could see. You could be on the shuttle bus or in a common area on campus, but in another universe, waiting for him to appear, him, him, on your phone, in your head. 

 

You meet someone online. You meet a person who sees you like a medium sees ghosts. They see you like you have never quite been seen. At first, you imagine you need to put all this away, for their sake. You’re loved romantically by a real person now, so what do you need with your silly little monsters and villains? But no mad scientist can truly destroy their own creation, and you have spent years, decades, breathing life into these imaginary men. You cannot kill your darlings, not this late in the game.

And maybe you don’t have to. Your beloved is no stranger to this game. Maybe they like the same sorts of monsters and men. Maybe they have more to show you.

They teach you about space programs and about horror films. They’re a writer too. They wax poetic about Stephen King. And they show you Twin Peaks. 

Smarter people than you have had smarter things to say about the show for years, and you’re so new to it. The coronavirus has been making headlines for months by the time you get around to a show that was airing before Desert Storm. But you are struck by one thing above all others—the way that the unreal can be made real by force in this show.

If everyone believes in the same thing, isn’t that thing real? Maybe the show is a metaphor for abuse, for family secrets, for the way that girls will cry out for help in a thousand ways and never be heard. Maybe the world is simply cruel, and girls will be used, and the harder they try to name their own terms, the harder they will be trampled. Women in Twin Peaks suffer endlessly. Madonna and whore, sinner and saint, they suffer. 

Maybe that’s the way of the world, the real world.  

But maybe this show is also a warning and an invitation. We can create our own reality—at our own risk. 

You are loved by a person who encourages you. They are excited to hear about how your day went. They let you cry about the trivial and the terrible and hold you tight. This isn’t all there is, you want to tell yourself as a girl. There is more than a life being flirted with as a joke and a death wrapped in plastic. There is love, and it is real. 

 

You were imagining someone, all this time. If you are a certain kind of person. You were imagining a character that you loved in a way that felt like staring at the sun. And you still love them, even if it’s been years, decades, even. You may have a mortgage and a cubicle and a spouse and a Labradoodle and children and a Honda and a membership to a gym you never go to, but you also have him, living inside you like a dormant gene. You may never show symptoms again of your girlhood obsession, but he will be there, caught like popcorn in your teeth. 

Will you let him live inside you peacefully, or will you evict him by force?

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes, and maybe, just for a second, he will be standing in front of you.

 

Eva Niessner is a graduate of the Towson University’s Professional Writing program and specializes in creative nonfiction. Her work has previously appeared in Grub Street, and she has also been published in Baltimore Magazine.  She lives in the Baltimore area with her partner and cats. She enjoys ghost tours and caring for plants. 

 

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Review of Lillies on the Deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems

By Chase Hollobaugh

 

Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems is the latest collection of poetry from Irish poet Oisín Breen. The collection contains two long-form works as well as four shorter poems. 

As someone who has traditionally only read short poems, I felt the long-form works were an adjustment, but their effect was not lessened by their length. My favorite of the two is “The Lovesong of Anna Rua.” The poem begins with the lines:

                     “Ha-ra-hao-  Ha-ra-hao- Rah-Hao- Ha-Rah-Hao-

                      Ha-ra-hao- Ha-ra-hao- Rah-Hao-”

which creates a sense of chanting in the poem. Breen continues this throughout the poem, using different words and phrases as each section develops. This singsong nature takes full effect, backed by added spaces between sounds, when the speaker says: “Anna- Aye-Anna- Aye-Anna- / Aye-.” Some of these chanting lines do get hard to parse, however, as Breen uses hyphens to create long strands of words that run into one another, such as with 

“Mai-ha-ra-ma-way-wahama-whup-tama.” 

While these lines do require the reader to pay more attention to the poems, they serve to break up the ideas within, and allow readers to pause in between Breen’s sections of dense imagery. For example, Breen writes:

“Melancholias, forced fixed euphorias, thrills, spills, and

hackneyed blue-eyed boys and girls who, sunning

themselves, with ice-cream dripping down their noses,

as their faux-saintliness has gravity itself inverted,

conceive of nothing other than being like and unto one

and other”

in section three of the poem. From the first word, a reader’s mind is drawn into thoughts of sadness, only to be thrust back into a sense of joy with the paradoxical “euphorias.” The image of children enjoying ice cream is then thrown into contrast with the accusations of “faux saintliness.” The additional image of inverted gravity adds a surreal quality to these lines, and obfuscates the image of children playing in the sun and enjoying their ice creams. While these layered images can make the poem hard to parse, they do not make it impossible. If nothing else, a reader could get lost within the images, trying to imagine each and every scene, before connecting it back with the rest of the work and the meanings of the poems. While getting lost may affect reader enjoyment, it did not negatively impact me as I read through the poems.

If the long-form poems are intimidating, then the shorter poems will offer a more familiar option to readers of short form poetry. “Six Months Bought with Dirt: the Bothy Crop of Arranmore” may still seem intimidating to readers expecting short line lengths, as its stanzas more closely resemble paragraphs, but will no less offer an engaging reading experience to anyone who takes the time to imagine the pictures Breen is painting throughout each stanza. Lines like “They knelt in the dirt, above the worms, and seedlings / Dampened off, pressing their hands beneath the earth, seeking / A grip” create haunting images of farmers clutching at the ground, pulling it apart to tend their crop. These dense stanzas come together beautifully in the last three lines as well, as the speaker condenses the thoughts and motion of the poem into a succinct and lasting image.

  My favorite short-form work in the collection is “At Swim, Two Pair.” Once again, Breen constructs an eerie image as the speaker describes the declining marine life he is watching swim across the water. The poem repeats the line “Two pair, where once moved a score and six” at the middle and conclusion of the poem. This line, when combined with “mother, sister, and kin” in the first line invokes an image of 26 women swimming, as their number is slowly reduced to four. When combined with the animals mentioned in the last stanza, the image shifts to fish or other marine life that are hunted as they travel along waterways.

While much of the poetry within Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín can feel heady and overwhelming with imagery to the reader, it rewards careful readings with an equal amount of depth. The collection boasts re-readability as well, as new meanings spring forth from the reader’s focus on different aspects of each poem. All in all, the collection contains a wealth of expansive imagery contained within six poems.

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Poetry Feature: Lonely Asteroid’s Ode to a Rover by Chloe Ziegler

Follows: Curiosity Rover Sings Happy Birthday to Itself

 

I’ll kiss you like the autumn
sun to a horizon, just
at seven. 
And I’ll miss you like lost
stars in smog, just  
past heaven. 

Curiosity does best me when
I hear you sing alone oh

My Dear, I won’t be long. Just   
hold your galactic gates till
dawn, and remember how 
I love you.

 

Chloe Ziegler is a senior attending Towson University who has had works published in Towson High School’s Colophon. She has gained several years of editing experience while working on both schools’ literary magazines. This is in pursuit of a lifelong passion for literary journals and writing that began in a second-grade after-school poetry workshop. As shown in her poem, she is an outspoken feminist and activist via her literary works and also on social media.  Chloe is also featured in Volume 72. 

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Poetry Feature: #buryyourgays

She sees my neck
choker wrapped
dares to graze
the skin beneath
the disbelief 
my head is not yet
rolling

In every dream
I hold her hand
and feel her gaze 
as the sun
the earth cracks
my lover must fall
to the flaming tomb
the fate of every sinner’s 
choices

I open up
on date night
the series finale 
we cannot wait to see
the tension build
before the kiss
we start to believe
in happy endings 

The lover is shot
thrown off the cliff
sacrificed 
the moral of the story
set

She has to go
she doesn’t text
I crawl back in 
my sleeping bag
my closet closed
and cozy

 

Ashley Robles is a queer, Hispanic artist currently residing in San Antonio. She studied English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin and is working to normalize chronic illness in her corporate and creative life. Her work has been published in The South Carolina Review, Messy Misfits Club, Grim & Gilded, and Unstamatic, among others. She is a recipient of The Bermuda Triangle Prize and is part of Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s 2022-2023 Poetry Collective cohort, where she is currently working on her first poetry collection. Robles can be found online everywhere @mzashleypie

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Exploring the Opposite Viewpoint in Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

By Rileigh Hartman

 

 Lily King’s short story collection, Five Tuesdays in Winter, preserves an ever-constant pull towards love through affliction and desire. The second story of the collection, which the book is named after, details the love a bookseller has for his employee. Described as reticent by his preteen daughter, Mitchell’s longing for Kate is thoughtfully disguised through his silence. However, in the end, there is a twist; she had been falling for him too. Mitchell thought his feelings were unrequited until she caressed his cheek, the fullness in his chest reason enough to lean in. But now, the story begs the question of how it would read if Kate was the focus instead. To answer this (and nudge the irony), I wanted to use her viewpoint to explore the possibilities of who Kate may be and what she may have felt during the story.

~ ~ ~

  Kate followed Lincoln to Portland. She was estranged in their shared apartment; coasters under her water glass, clothes still tucked in boxes— she never planned to stay. But she didn’t like to think of herself as someone who wouldn’t find love, that she was incapable of it. She could charm anyone, but it always led to them misplacing her, forcing her into boxes she didn’t check. Sometimes, she believed that if she tried to fit where people thought she should go, she’d find love there. Or if she went against fitting in, then not finding love was more intentional than contingent. The only time Kate felt sheltered was between book covers.

  When Paula, Mitchell’s daughter, complained about her Spanish teacher one Saturday afternoon, Kate offered to help. If she was honest with herself, speaking Spanish again would only stir up memories of Peru she didn’t want to revisit. Maine was nice anyway: decent views and handsome company. Later on the first Tuesday evening, it took her longer to pick out an outfit. The bookstore was home by then, and she treated it as such in her secondhand jeans. But it felt different to be going into Mitchell’s home— she wanted to look like she wouldn’t fit. Then Mitchell stared at her for a moment longer than usual when he opened the door, and she was suddenly seamless; settled in his gaze as she remembered what it felt like to be wanted somewhere. During her time with Paula, Kate wanted to ask if Mitchell had seen other women since his wife left, but he didn’t seem like the type of person who’d try to find love twice.

  At Westy’s, Kate always searched for the Mitchell-renowned mushroom soup after he mentioned it to her, and the glimmer in his eyes appeared. It had been years since he’d seen it, but she still enjoyed their inside joke: fitting into a space she didn’t know could exist. Kate couldn’t bring herself to smother her smile when she saw Mushroom Soup written on the menu. As she opened the door to the bookstore, she couldn’t tell what she was more excited for: the soup or the look on Mitchell’s face when she offered it to him. Of course, the latter won. When Mitchell brought up Mrs. White and Kate asked what she was like, he went quiet. But Kate didn’t disrupt his silence; she liked it. There was no place to fit in or out of. He said that she was like her. Even without knowing Mrs. White, Kate felt like she and Mitchell could love each other in a way that only they could understand.

  Paula asked her to stay for dinner on the fifth Tuesday— Valentine’s Day. She’d wanted to decline but it sounded better than going to the mall again, the reminder of how alone she was. Upon arrival, Kate handed Mitchell a small chocolate box, noticing how his eyes stayed trained on the gift instead of her. Time never caught up to when Mitchell knocked on the door to tell them dinner was ready and Paula stood abruptly, leaving a red stain on her quilt. Kate ran to the local pharmacy, never feeling more out of place with her lack of a motherly touch. Yet, she’d grown to realize that being around Paula and Mitchell was like reading her favorite book for the first time again. So, she ran back to the house.

  The quilt was tucked in Mitchell’s hands when she left Paula’s room. They walked to the laundry room, and when they faced each other after washing the quilt, the space between them felt smaller. Mitchell asked why the drunk man last week told them they have the same eyes. It wasn’t true— Mitchell had green eyes, she had brown. But she knew what the man saw. He was fearful that she would leave but loved her anyway; she was fearful that he’d misplace her but desired him regardless. Kate remembered the word Paula used for him— reticent— but could only think of herself, which spurred her fingertips to caress his cheek. He pulled her closer, and Kate thought about how she would never leave his side as she leaned in with him.

~ ~ ~

   Five Tuesdays in Winter follows two complex individuals who have quietly chosen each other. The significance and irony of their relationship is how they were both reticent but we, the reader, only received one side of their story; we were only seeing Mitchell’s world sculpt around Kate. In the rewrite above, her character is translated from the specks we’re given of her through Mitchell’s point of view. Kate is subjective, yet we’re given just enough information about her that it becomes clear she shouldn’t be left in the reader’s peripheral. As Mitchell demonstrated, being reticent doesn’t mean untroubled. 

  Lily King’s collection carries the theme of only sharing one side of a love story. While she accomplishes making her reader ponder the romantic probabilities for each story, it leaves little room for discovering the unacknowledged character’s perspective. In Five Tuesdays in Winter, the surprise ending gnaws at the unsettled relationship between Kate and Mitchell, making it feel unfinished. But letting the reader know what Kate was going through and what she could have been thinking about strengthens their bond and puts their relationship on more solid ground, creating a well-rounded love story and breathing life into her love for Mitchell.

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Fiction Feature: The Scrubber by Blake Kilgore

Mr. Low was bent, sweaty, and his back ached. Nevertheless, he continued steady, erasing the phallic symbol scribbled on the third bathroom stall door in the eighth grade boys bathroom; there was no hurry. This was already the tenth one this year. Big and small, short and long, heavy on the balls or thick on the bat, last year he’d scrubbed away more than 25. You’d think these boys would get creative, at least experiment with the notion of a woman’s body. Nope, just poorly drawn and vastly exaggerated representations of their own sprouting organs.

Walker Low washed his hands, head bowed, and avoided his reflection. He pulled a paper towel from the third dispenser he’d replaced this year. The kids had a strange desire to destroy any aid to hygiene. Several of the sink handles had also been torn off, sometimes while running, so they sprayed in all directions, flooding the bathrooms. Stuffing sinks or toilets with massive wads of paper was a favorite pastime that also induced a wretched overflow. Soap dispensers were mostly made of plastic, so they had to be replaced a few times a week. And it was truly incredible how many times kids decided it was a good idea to just crap in the middle of the floor. 

Right now the bathroom was pristine, and it felt like an accomplishment to eradicate the grime, but Mr. Low knew there was always something more to clean.

“Custodian to the auditorium, ASAP!”

Drying his hands and shaking his head, Mr. Low smirked, then frowned as he shuffled down the hallway toward the Jack Dee Wright Performing Arts Center. Who would believe he’d seen good Mr. Wright—wealthy businessman, philanthropist, and school board president—in a most untoward predicament just a few years before? All Mr. Wright had been wearing were purple and black argyle socks and a matching bow tie, and his gaunt frame was pulsating against Jenny Watkins, lovely young wife to Johnny Watkins, the superintendent of schools. Mr. Low was invisible. Neither of the two cheaters knew they’d been caught, and he decided to let the community keep their false icons.

Here came Ms. Hartshorne, the aged vice principal, who was suffering from an illness she tried to hide. She always smiled, and her gait was proud, her voice strong and clear. But Walker saw the pills, heard her vomiting late at night, and cleaned up the blood she’d failed to completely rinse away.

“I’m sorry, Walker. I don’t know why they can’t call you ‘Mr. Low’.”

Walker smiled.

“Well, anyway, come on, and let’s take a look. Bob’s freaking out because ol’ Jack Dee is coming tonight for the fall symphony and some kids took it upon themselves to welcome him with some adolescent art sculptures.”

“Let me guess?”

Ms. Hartshorne led Mr. Low down the aisle to the front row, where the backs of several chairs had new and unfriendly juvenile inscriptions below the plaques marked “reserved for the school board”.  There were chairs enough for eight school board members and their families. So, a whole row of slurs and epithets, and each chair was covered with Saran wrap and a gloss of varied human excrement. The air teemed with rancid odor.

“Well, there are no poorly drawn male organs here. That’s a first.”

“Sorry, Walker.”

Ms. Hartshorne left Mr. Low to the work. He gathered his supplies: a screwdriver, trash can, gloves, a mop, disinfectant spray, and several disposable wiping cloths. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the auditorium and wondered what other mischief all the dear children were up to while he was so thoroughly occupied.

That night, Mr. Jack Dee Wright and his sweet and unknowing wife sat in clean chairs in the front row with their two youngest daughters. Their oldest, Veronica, played the flute in the front row of the woodwind section. She had lovely purple bows in her hair and wore a matching skirt that showed off her long, slender legs. Mr. Low sat in the back, unseen and ignored, but he enjoyed the music too. Afterwards, when all of the families had gone, he’d sweep through each row, thoroughly removing the debris carelessly left behind. If each person would just carry out what they’d brought in, it would save him an hour he could spend with his own children, but he didn’t complain. 

When Walker Low got home well after dark, his wife, Leticia, was up. She met him at the door, kissed him gently on the cheek, and squeezed him around his waist. Then she led him to their kitchen table, sat him down, and pulled off his boots. She’d kept a kettle simmering while she waited, and hearing its shrill whisper, she poured a steaming cup of tea and stirred in some honey. Then she placed the warm mug snuggly between Walker’s worn hands.

Walker cupped his fingers over hers and leaned in, drew deep the aroma of mint, then smiled. He clasped one of her hands to his face, and closed his eyes, kissed it gently, then laid it back down. After a minute, he spoke.

“Well, what is it?”

“So—Bobbie’s team got new sweat suits. They got stripes down the side and their name on it and all. Coach Willis says Bobbie don’t have to get one, but he’ll sorta stick out if he doesn’t.”

Walker couldn’t remember his boyhood teams having anything special. Sometimes they didn’t even have matching jerseys, and he always had to wear hand-me-down high-tops. Kids these days always needed new this or that, but and to his mind, all that extra gear hadn’t improved little Bobbie’s jump shot in the slightest. 

He also remembered having to borrow some younger kid’s brother’s glove whenever they played baseball and how deeply embarrassed he’d felt.

“What else?”

Leticia tried and failed to smile.

“Ellie’s struggling with her numbers again. Her teacher says she’s falling too far behind. She passed on a list of tutors.”

She sighed and sat back.

Walker leaned in.  “So?”

“We’re over budget again this month, Walker.”

Walker Low bent over the tea, letting the steam moisten his face. He took a long, slow drink, sat back, and closed his eyes. 

“Well, I bet they still need help for the tournament this weekend. I could ask Ms. Hartshorne to add me on for Saturday.”

“Walker, you need a break, too, and we’ve all been looking forward to being together this weekend for the show.”

Walker put his elbows on the table, rubbed his eyes.

“Didn’t you say Ellie’s main dance is in the second act? If I hurried, I might not miss the whole thing.”

Leticia covered her face.

A few minutes passed, then Walker stood and leaned over his wife, kissed her on the top of her head.

“It’ll be alright. You’ll explain it to Ellie for me, okay?”

Leticia stood, and the couple walked hand in hand down the hall of their small apartment and shuffled quietly inside their children’s bedroom. They knelt between the small beds. Lifting hearts in prayer, they silently asked for protection and for a beautiful and prosperous future. Deep in his heart, Walker asked the good Lord for more time at home with his family.

***

The next morning, Mr. Low was up early and back at school before anyone else. He liked the silence of dawn. No matter what destruction was done to his building each day, it always started out new, with fresh hopes for learning and growth among the children. Even though they increased his workload immensely, he still loved them. He also cared for the teachers, even though some of them were unkind.

One snappy teacher barked at him almost every day about erasing the chicken scratch notes he’d wanted to be left untouched. Mr. Low asked if he could leave a note on the board, but that seemed like a bridge too far, and so the young fellow continued to berate him like a child whenever they met.

“When are you gonna shampoo these damn floors?” another teacher demanded. Mr. Low wanted to tell her that he’d put in a request to do just that, five times, but Mr. Jack Dee and his friends at the school board did not feel that was a necessary expense. He’d also asked for funding to repair the roof leak over the basketball center court, but the board couldn’t find those funds either, and so Mr. Low had to endure the ire of coaches who thought it was his fault their games and practices were postponed or canceled whenever poor weather settled in.

Even Jack Dee had complaints, but they were of a different sort. He didn’t think it was a risk to share his true feelings with the likes of a no-name janitor. 

“Can’t wait to get out of this town. Being overrun, if you know what I mean? I can barely understand what half of these new parents are saying in their broken-down English, and what the hell kind of religion do they practice over in that temple? Purple people with their many-armed goddesses. Dammit, when I moved here this was farm country. Quiet, and everybody looked like me. No offense.”

Apparently, ol’ Jack Dee only noticed late that Walker Low was black. He wondered what the president of the board and local hero said about him when he wasn’t around. But of course he knew Mr. Wright only thought about him now because he was in front of his face, listening to him whine. He wouldn’t think about him again until he turned down another budget request, and then he’d probably be grumbling and calling him “uppity”.

The weight of the job could get him down. Devoted, Walker had to focus on his love for the children, and despite separation of church and state, he prayed silently as he swept the halls and scrubbed the stalls and mopped the floors and helped kids into lockers that were jammed again and again each day.

He knew, perhaps as well as anyone in the building, how much suffering was here. He’d stooped to read forsaken notes that contained unspeakable sorrows. Failed marriages and dysfunctional homes, dying siblings, addict fathers and mothers. Sometimes, the scribbles spoke of cutting and killing, of self-inflicted pain. He’d bring these to the counselors or administration, but they mostly had no names, and so the heartbreak went untreated.

How many times he’d stumbled upon a weeping child hiding backstage in Jack Dee’s auditorium. Or in a locked stall in the boys bathroom. There was not a thing Walker did not observe, and some things grieved him more than others.

Most of the adults in the building loved the children as Mr. Low did, and offered up their lives to see them grow. But there were some who struggled with their own selfish desires. Some were mean to children because it made them feel strong when they’d only felt weak among adults. Some of these worshiped rules and an illusory order and sacrificed children daily at its altar. Others were poor lonely souls who wanted their students as friends, and so they could not be their mentors.

Mr. Harriet was a strange fellow, and Mr. Low saw that his eyes were always wandering below the waist. Walker once asked him if he needed help with anything, and he’d stared the teacher down and firmly gripped his hand. Mr. Harriet pulled back, turned away, and bellowed his curt response.

“You’re the janitor, right? Yeah, I’ll let you know when I need some help, buddy.”

But Mr. Low kept checking in on him, especially when Mr. Harriet became an advisor for the debate club, which met after school. Mr. Low wanted to say something to Ms. Hartshorne. There was nothing more than intuition, though, and he didn’t think it right to ruin a man’s life on a hunch. Still, he cleaned the adjoining classrooms during those debate meetings and happened to be sweeping in the hallways just outside Mr. Harriet’s room as the club let out, and what he witnessed unnerved him.

Mr. Jack Dee Wright’s daughter Veronica was in the club, and Mr. Low had learned she was a real whippersnapper. But she was soft around Mr. Harriet, and while this was not completely abnormal, it bothered Mr. Low, who could not ignore the keen look in the debate club advisor’s eye when he gazed a little too long.

One day, during winter, Mr. Low noticed a group of eighth grade boys in the lunchroom. They were giggling and pointing, and then he saw the object of their teasing was Veronica Wright. She was glancing back and forth from one friend to another and then back to the boys’ table. Suddenly, she stood and flew to the girls restroom covering her belly.

Mr. Low asked one of the lunch aides if they wouldn’t mind checking on her, but when he did, the aide abruptly walked past him to chastise a table of kids for trash left under their table. When she returned, Mr. Low tried again, but she blurted out that she was “really busy” and rushed past him, ignoring his plea. Mr. Low stared at the door to the girls bathroom and waited.

Several other girls eventually went in after Veronica, but came out again pinching their noses and looking miserable. Mr. Low kept his eye on the door, but when he saw Ms. Hartshorne walking by, he asked if she’d check on the girl. Moments later, she was leading young Veronica to the nurse and asking Walker if he’d clean the mess she’d left behind.

Closing the bathroom, Mr. Low went about cleaning up the vomit in and around the sink. He glanced up and saw the look of sadness in his own eyes and then lurched away, back out into the hall, and strode to the main office and Ms. Hartshorne. She said the girl was going to be okay, but there was something dishonest in her tone. Mr. Low nodded and wandered away to clean yet another beckoning disaster. This time some of the seventh grade boys had decided to urinate in the sinks.

The next time he cleaned up puddles of urine was two weeks later, when he was sent to clean the mess beneath Mr. Harriet’s desk. The debate club advisor had been arrested that morning. Mr. Low was near the front doors when they took Mr. Harriet away, his pants stained and his head bowed.

Earlier that morning, Mr. Low had gone into the girls restroom to empty the garbage, and when he pulled out the bag, it tore, and some of the trash fell on the floor. As he bent to sweep those stray pieces, one worn and many-folded note caught his attention. On the outside, written in purple, was the name ‘Mr. Harriet.’ 

Mr. Low leaned over the sink, gripping the sides. His intuition was clanging the alarm, so he slowly picked up and unfolded the note.

I really don’t want to “get rid of it” like you said, but if I did, would you give me a second chance? -V

Mr. Low never saw Veronica Wright again. She’d had an abortion, he heard, her father urging her to do what was best for the family. But he didn’t know for sure and wasn’t one to pry. 

At the end of the year Ms. Hartshorne took an extended leave of absence, and Mr. Low turned to his summer duties, when he’d clean everything top to bottom and make the school new again. He would baptize the floors and walls and lockers and shelves, scrubbing them with antiseptic. All the while, he prayed for the brokenhearted ones he knew were still suffering. He could see their faces, hear their voices. And he spoke their names, wondering if everyone would make it back or if, like Veronica, they would drift out of his life forever. For those he offered a prayer like the one he said for his own children, begging for a beautiful future. He would have to let them go; come fall, there would be another thousand tender souls arriving.

 

Blake Kilgore is the author of Leviathan (2021), a collection of poems. A wanderer, he’s from the South and Midwest and now, the Northeast. Blake used to be a preacher but walked away to find his faith. He’s been winding his way back now, and love of his wife and four sons is a balm. A junior-high basketball coach and teacher, Blake is also refreshed by the idealism of his young students. His writing has appeared in Frost Meadow Review, Flint Hills Review, Lunch Ticket, and other fine journals.

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Poetry Feature: Down at the Club by Barry Peters

mid-winter
my annual descent
into the dark place

dirty immersion
in the muck & mud
& funk-smelling

junk of soul jazz
a gaslit basement
pink-jacketed quintet

rotund bass
walking the dog
saxes & drums

the gummy organ
a rumbling subway
beneath my feet

undersea
melodies adrift
in overcoat pockets

filthy & killer
sugar & spice
in plush booths

& at the heavy bar
another brown drink
in thick glass

a line of draft taps
steeples pointing
up & outta here.

 

Barry Peters and his wife, the writer Maureen Sherbondy, live in Durham, N.C. He has been published in Best New Poets, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry East, and The Southern Review, among others.

 

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Interview With Professor Benjamin Warner

By Holden Schmale

Prof. Benjamin Warner is the author of two speculative fiction novels, Thirst and Fearless. A lecturer at Towson, Ben teaches creative fiction writing and creative nonfiction, among other courses. Recently Warner and fellow writer and former Loyola creative writing professor Ron Tanner decided to take on a new challenge: writing a craft guide. Titled Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, the book is intended for college creative writing classrooms and will be released in summer 2024. I had the privilege of discussing this project with Ben, gaining insight into a process that has been unique even to an experienced author. 

This interview was conducted by Holden Schmale over a series of emails and has been edited for clarity and length.

Holden Schmale: What first led you to want to take on the challenge of making a craft book and stepping away from your niche in fiction writing?

Ben Warner: I know that when I was an undergraduate, I imagined my creative writing instructors went home from teaching their classes in Helen C. White Hall, and then wrote fiction until they fell asleep at 2 a.m. I didn’t understand just how much effort they were putting into preparing for the following class: reading student work, choosing stories to teach, thinking of ways those stories might be discussed, and creating writing exercises. There’s a lot to it, and it’s fun, and now I’ve been doing it myself for close to 20 years. So writing about that process—and hoping that it might offer other instructors and students some insight—feels both natural and rewarding.

HS: How has the writing process been compared to your regular process for fiction? Obviously, you’re reading other pieces and deciding what belongs in the book, but I had the pleasure of reading a preliminary chapter for class, and there is a great deal of writing you must do on top of choosing each piece.

BW: Yes, that’s true. This is less of a textbook than a craft guide, which is its own genre, I guess. Ron and I are putting a lot of effort into explaining concepts, annotating stories, working out exercises that build on themselves, and trying to help students see some of the ways that speculative fiction is built, one element at a time. As you know, there’s a lot that comes up in a creative writing classroom discussion that feels off-the-cuff or improvised—as students and instructor thinking out loud together. In writing this book, those ideas need to be fully and artfully articulated, so that they can be expressed clearly to our audience.

HS: What are you looking for in a piece you are going to include in your craft guide? I won’t use any specific names, in case it ultimately doesn’t end up being included, but the piece you showed me that you were considering was wacky and wonderful.

BW: Wacky and wonderful is a good start. First and foremost, Ron and I are readers, and we want to be moved by what we read. That can mean so many different things. The speculative fiction we’ve chosen to include is inventive, funny, character-driven, odd, unexpected, and comes from a diverse group of contemporary voices.

HS: What, if anything, are you going to take from this experience and apply to your own creative work?

BW: My teaching certainly impacts my creative work, and I think of this book project as an extension of my teaching. When I’m, say, 50 pages into a draft of a novel, I often stop to think: Is there a world here that my audience understands? Have I fully thought through the way that world works? Do I know these characters? Are there places where I’m falling into cliché? These sorts of self-checks come directly from my teaching, and now, hopefully, this book will help make them available to students in other classrooms.

HS: How has your creative writing benefited and/or suffered in the process of working concurrently on this craft guide? Do you find yourself just swamped with the writing load, or do you find yourself inspired from reading so much fiction at (presumably) a higher rate than usual?

BW: That’s a very astute question, Holden, because you’ve identified a problem I didn’t know existed when I started out. For so many writers I know, the hardest part of writing is making the time to write. I teach four courses each semester at TU, and I have a family who I have to make oatmeal and spaghetti for (those are separate meals… I don’t mix the spaghetti with the oatmeal), and so taking on a big project like this means I have less time for whatever narrative I’m working on. But you’re right, too, that reading a lot of contemporary speculative fiction has been inspiring and motivating, and though it might come to nothing, I have started working on a new novel at the same time as I’m working on this book.

HS: How do you find the right balance of borrowed work (short fiction pieces) and your own instruction and analysis within the craft guide? You are in a unique position writing a craft book for creative writing, as opposed to another discipline that may be less example heavy.

BW: We’re dividing the book up into two parts: a craft section in the front that talks about the nuts and bolts of writing a story and an anthology in the back. The examples we use in the craft section are often very short (anywhere from a page to five pages); these stories are small enough to take apart, like engineers cracking open the motor housing of a drill, so that we can ask: How does this thing work? In the anthology, we’re allowing for stories that demonstrate at greater length some of the lessons of character, setting, and conflict that we try to illuminate in the earlier chapters.

HS: What have you taken away from your experience writing about technique? Have you learned anything about yourself or  your own process? Do you see yourself changing anything about your technique after this experience?

BW: I think I’m always changing my technique. Like so many readers who write, I absorb the rhythms of other writers’ language, and those rhythms make their way into my writing. And when I read a story deeply, and break it apart line by line, examining each word choice with a spirit of discovery and admiration (as Ron and I do with the stories we’re using), that syntax and diction gets lodged in my brain. I can’t imagine that it doesn’t change the way I sit down to do my own work. Sometimes I write something that feels a bit too familiar—an expression or bit of dialogue—and I realize that it’s close to a line I know from another story. Those are moments that make me smile, because that bit of language has become an unconscious part of the way I see the world (though I always revise those lines).

HS: Take yourself back to when you hatched the idea to write this textbook. What did you hope to gain personally as a writer? How has reality compared to those expectations?

BW: I really wanted to help students in creative writing classrooms. When I first started writing in college, some syllabi stated explicitly: NO GENRE WRITING. I took that to be the law of the land, that is, what “serious” writers thought about speculative fiction vs. realistic fiction. But that’s not the case. In fact, most of the serious writers I know are great lovers of speculative storytelling. And yet, the fullness of that truth hadn’t made it into the classroom. It seemed like no [one] was willing to commit to the idea that genre writing is suitable for college students to read, write, and talk about. In part, that’s because no textbook about writing speculative fiction existed. So, we set out to write one.

HS: Could you see yourself writing another craft book? How has your experience been compared to the writing of a novel?

BW: I can’t imagine writing another craft book, but then again, I never imagined writing this one. I’m happiest when I’m working on a novel, and I think I’ll always be working on a novel. Even recently, as I was deep into working on this book, I felt a bit antsy that I wasn’t writing a novel (which is probably why I started writing on another novel).

HS: Last question—a broad one. When it is all said and done, what do you hope a reader of your textbook will take away from its content? Where do you expect its best uses to be? The college level? High school? Who do you see benefiting most from its content? A beginner or a more experienced writer?

BW: This is an easy one. We’re writing this book for any writer who wants to feel a bit more confident about writing a speculative story. I’ve met so many students who have told me that they’ve started a novel or a story but got stuck and stopped. Or they didn’t know “where to take it” after 100 pages. We hope that this craft book is a way to help students get un-stuck, or that it will inspire new directions for those who felt inspired enough to begin the imaginative journey in the first place. It’s a weird thing to be moved to make up problems for made up characters. But that’s what writers do. And that weirdness deserves to be helped along!

 

Benjamin Warner is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University’s MFA program. A lecturer at Towson University, he teaches courses in composition, environmental writing, and fiction writing. Ben is the adviser to the Towson University Urban Farm and Veg.

Holden Schmale is a junior at Towson University. He has published a short story titled ‘Acquaintances’ in Fairlight Books online portal. He currently serves as Fiction Editor on the Grub Street staff.

 

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Poetry Feature: BETTY CROCKER HAS LEFT THE KITCHEN by Jane Costain

She’s had it! Enough! She is done
with all that mixing, stirring,
measuring, those dirty pans
to scrub! Away with the apron,
the glued-on smile!
Leave all those books for others
who know no better.

She takes her meals now
in style at restaurants.
A bottle of fine wine 
served in a crystal goblet.
No more sipping the cooking sherry.

In her little black dress with its
slightly scandalous neckline,
her fingers bejeweled (no need
anymore to knead the dough),
her hair now blond, cascading
(no net) about her deliciously
made-up face, she clicks around 
in dangerously high heels.

In fact, she is no longer “Betty”
but “Liz”—and for her,
the words “house” and “wife”
can never be spoken as one.

 

Jane Costain is the author of the chapbook Small Windows (Main Street Rag, 2018) and has privately published A Dozen Centos. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Plainsongs, The MacGuffin, Pinyon Review, and Iris Literary Journal. She has a master’s degree in the creative arts in learning from Lesley College and has taught in public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband, Gary Moore, in Denver.

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Small Press Highlight: Fallen Tree Press

By Marleigh Heffner

Fallen Tree Press is a Maryland publisher that focuses on poetry chapbooks. Terri Simon and Patti Ross, the editors of the press, formed Fallen Tree Press in 2022 following an avid conversation at a bookbinding class in 2017. Simon has written and published multiple chapbooks, including Ghosts of My Own Choosing (Flutter Press, 2017), and has appeared in a number of both online and print journals. Ross has a background in theatrical performance and journalism; she has recently begun sharing spoken-word poetry and published her first chapbook, entitled St. Paul Street Provocations (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2021). Through Fallen Tree Press, Simon and Ross wish to publish a diverse selection of authors and aim to uplift the voices of the underprivileged; they also donate a percentage of their proceeds to charity. 

Fallen Tree Press has two published collections and are rapidly working on their third. Their first publication was an anthology that combined art and poetry. Portraits of Life: An Ekphrastic Anthology is a collection of art by April M. Rimpo and Elaine Weiner-Reed and poetry that has been inspired by their art. Mount Fuji, 36 Sonnets by Jay Hall Carpenter is the press’ second publication; it is based on the series of Japanese paintings 36 Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai. In this chapbook, Carpenter writes about nostalgia, love, and death using the form of Shakespearean sonnets. Both chapbooks can be found for sale on the press’ website.

Simon and Ross wish to help poets get their work noticed and out into the world; they continue to do so as they explore new submissions for Fallen Tree Press’ third chapbook, which can be expected this summer.