ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "The Namesake" by Gale Massey

November 18, 2019

The Namesake

By Gale Massey

Mom’s hands were blue and purple, bruised from the IV that had pumped essential fluids into her eighty-five-year-old body. She was sitting up in bed, buffeted on every side by pillows meant to keep her upright, and biting her overgrown nails that she ripped off with her teeth and spit on the floor.

“Someone keeps taking my clippers,” she said, gnawing at a cuticle.

It’s true. Stuff goes missing all the time in this place and she needs a new pair of clippers almost monthly. Televisions are bolted to walls not so much for viewing convenience but because they disappear. Smaller things like remotes and combs are hopeless and have to be worked into the budget. Her wedding band has been locked in a safe for years though, and the indentation on her ring finger has finally filled in.

I sat next to her bed in a blue plastic chair, annoyed at the volume of the television across the hall. That old man had been snoring for a half hour but anytime I tried to turn down the volume he woke up and cursed me. Every five minutes I told myself I could leave in just five more. But I wouldn’t leave until she drifted off to sleep.

Having forgotten that I was sitting next to her bed, she startled when she noticed me. She stared for a moment, then said, “I never realized how pretty you are.” I had to laugh, having been told my whole life that I could be her twin. I sometimes wondered if I’d been cloned in a secret government laboratory.

Once, when I was thirteen and wearing cut-off jeans, Mom had complimented me. She was standing at the stove working through a supper of green beans and meatloaf when I came inside to set the table. “You have nice legs,” she said. My teenage self was stunned with self-consciousness. Mom didn’t hand out compliments often, so I accepted her words as true. Never have I doubted my legs.

Now, meeting her eyes as she bit another nail, I felt that same weird sense of pride. I was the prodigal daughter. Part of me longed to be the small child standing behind her, folded into her skirt, anticipating the moment when she found something pleasing about me. I wanted to ask why she sent me away all those years ago, but I couldn’t ask. She had suffered loneliness in her old age, and I didn’t want to add to the pain she’d endured through the death of two husbands and her own physical demise.

And I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the truth. I was afraid she’d say what she’d never said before: that I got to do what I wanted.

For one year, the year before WWII ended, Mom got to do what she wanted. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, she played softball at North Shore Park in downtown St. Petersburg where a league of old men who had not gone to war played against a team of high school girls. Mom’s nickname was Ace and she was their best pitcher. Halfway through the first inning they would pass the hat around the bleachers. The girls almost always won but they split the money with the old men. Mom made enough to ride the bus, buy sodas and lipstick, sometimes a new blouse.

She and her high school girlfriends volunteered at the veteran’s hospital on Boca Ciega Bay. She turned eighteen a month before the soldiers came home. They were boys, thin, wounded, and handsome, determined to create the future their country had promised and the war had threatened to destroy. They wore starched uniforms with caps cocked sideways and took the girls to the movies, bought them hamburgers and ice-cream floats, and eventually, inevitably, gold bands.

Mom met Dad the summer after she graduated high school and by fall, they were married and expecting. She had five kids in eleven years and then Dad died.

On my sixteenth birthday Mom gave me a beat-up Chevy and I got a job at the mall. Within a few months I had met a girl. The first time we kissed I decided I understood the world more than anyone ever had. But that same month the church’s music director’s wife divorced him because it turned out he was queer. Everyone hated him. Anita Bryant was on television condemning homosexuals to hell and I started keeping to myself. Mom didn’t notice. She was busy with her job at Sears, a bowling league, and the church softball team. We rarely spoke. Not that it mattered. I was reading Walt Whitman by then, convinced I knew more than she ever would. Eventually I broke up with that girl and started going to seedy bars. That’s what you did back then, if you were queer. I never saw the music minister again and soon enough Bryant’s career as an anti-gay activist tanked.

Sometimes on my way out at night I drove by the ballpark to watch Mom pitch. For a moment after she released the ball, she’d be poised like a ballerina on one foot, the floodlights of the outfield softening the red clay of the infield. The ball rose in an impossibly high arc and dropped straight over home plate. Nothing for the batter to do but swing and miss.

Small town queer bars in the seventies were windowless and dank, converted garages with low ceilings and pot-holed parking lots, and filled with joyful broken drag queens and dykes dressed like men. Felons were comfortable in these places. One night a freakish looking old man extinguished a book of matches on his tongue, told me he’d just gotten out of jail, and asked if he could buy me a drink. I fled. Alone, I would drive the bridges and byways along the southern edge of Tampa Bay, comforted by long stretches of desolate beaches, wondering where, if anywhere, I belonged.

Mom and I rarely spoke and we never fought. But three months after I turned eighteen, still living under her roof, I felt in all fairness I should tell her I was gay. Menopause had made her fierce and I misread that for open-minded. Instantly, I realized my mistake. Speechless and horrified, she walked out and slammed my bedroom door behind her.

The next morning I was still asleep when she blew back into my bedroom as angry as the night before. She told me that when she’d been my age, she’d kissed a girl and that after my father had died, she’d been tempted by her best friend. For a moment I thought she was commiserating, but then she said, “If I can resist temptation, so can you.” Then, she told me to pack my things and get out of her house because the Lord would not want her to house a homosexual.

I headed to the closest big city, Atlanta, Georgia, where I disappeared into menial jobs, books, and the bar scene. Eventually, I put myself through college. Sometimes I thought about my mother, a woman who had kissed another woman and found it tempting. I wondered if she’d married her second husband, a hyper-religious man, to thwart what might have been her true nature. Had she been born a couple of decades later, she would have had more choices. Choices that I, her doppelgänger, had the latitude to pursue.

We hardly spoke for twenty years. Sometimes I called on Christmas, sometimes she called on my birthday. Once, when her second husband left her for a waitress at their local diner, she called me, distraught and at the edge of a breakdown. I bought a Greyhound bus ticket and headed south. Rolling down I-75 watching the billboards fly by, I was heady with the notion that I was needed and that Mom was finally getting her freedom, but by the time I got home husband number two had come to his senses and dumped the waitress. Deflated, I turned around and headed back north.

Many years later, I met the woman who would become my life partner at a party in Mexico. She was the opposite of my bookish self. While I had read about the world, she had traveled it. It was clear that any chance at happiness rested in getting to know her. I began commuting from Atlanta to St. Petersburg. How odd, it seemed, that love led me back to my roots. She and I settled within miles from Mom who was a widow again and in her eighties.

Proximity gave me and Mom a chance to spend some time together. There were lunches and family birthday dinners. She was always up for a party if it included ice-cream and cake. Somewhere along the way she and I fell into the habit of kissing each other goodbye. We didn’t talk about it and I don’t remember which one of us started it. I like to think it was her. Maybe it was a fad, something she’d seen other people do but over time it became natural, as though we had always been kind to each other.

We spent an afternoon going through old photographs and letters and she came across a letter from a high school friend. She softened, touching the letter with her fingertips, seemingly lost in a memory. I’d met this woman once and it dawned on me that this was the girl Mom had kissed. At that moment I understood why Mom had named me after this particular friend and it gave me a lofty sense of belonging, like a queen’s illegitimate child. Later I realized the second woman Mom had loved was my old Sunday school teacher. After their husbands died, she and Mom had grown close again, going to baseball games and church together. When they got too old to leave home, they’d watch the games on TV keeping each other company on the phone, complaining about bad calls, and waiting for the umpire to call the final out.

She had moved into an assisted living center after losing her house in the last recession, and her medical needs demanded twenty-four-hour care. We sat together while the sun slanted low and orange in the window. I showed her the ring my partner had given me and she was happy because she loved the woman who would soon be my wife. Mom folded her hands over the soft rise and fall of her belly. In our earlier clumsiness we had botched the act of letting go. She had needed anger in order to set me free, when all she meant to say was, “Go now, go while you can.”

One winter afternoon in her last year, I visited her. She was sitting in her wheelchair wrapped in a blanket and waiting for me on the porch outside her building. The trees were bare and the grass had gone brown. A shadow crossed her eyes. She looked up and pointed, proud that she’d seen them first and could now show them to me. High in the clean blue air a migration of geese flew in from the north. As they came closer, we heard them calling out over and over again, harsh and exciting, until Mom thrilled, grabbed my hand and cried out, “They’re back! They’re back. Oh look, they’ve come back.”

About the Author:

Gale Massey’s debut novel, The Girl from Blind River, received a Florida Book Award and was a finalist for the Clara Johnson award for women's fiction. She has received fellowships at The Sewanee Writers Conference and Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise. Her stories and essays have appeared in Lambda Literary, Crimereads, Sabal, the Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Bay Noir, and Saw Palm. Massey, a Florida native, lives in St. Petersburg.

About All Accounts:

All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Shut Set" by Merrill Cole

November 15, 2019

Shut Set

By Merrill Cole

show me the shut faces in

faces in shadow

in shadow show me

shut

over what she was saying

he was saying saying you

lend me your tongue or

your time again

your tongue or your life

or lend me your life

and it’s time

no face to stop it

time to say no

face to stop it

only the noose say no

only the noose knows

she didn’t say you said

she set

wet pieces of shudder wet

pieces of shudder

for sale you were saying

red roses wet

pieces of he said

for sale pieces

set

About the Author:

Merrill Cole is Professor of English and Advisor to the Queer Studies minor at Western Illinois University. His poems have appeared in such venues as Bellevue Literary Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He is the author of The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality and the translator, from the German, of the 1923 Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Self-Portrait as Cedar Chest" by Carolyn Oliver

November 14, 2019

Self-Portrait as Cedar Chest

By Carolyn Oliver

Generous size to
hold what it hides.

Opened without leave,
draped with what doesn’t fit.

Crouched under the window,
basking beneath the night.

When it slams shut,
count your fingers:

here’s a hinge never
soured with rust.

About the Author:

Carolyn Oliver’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Booth, Glass, Southern Indiana Review, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry and the Frank O’Hara Prize. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to more of her writing can be found at carolynoliver.net.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Medellín" by Yuly Restrepo Garcés

November 13, 2019

Medellín

By Yuly Restrepo Garcés

I’m only visiting. It’s dawn and you’ve fallen dead asleep on top of me, on your stomach, your head between my breasts. Outside, a vendor pushes his cart and announces tamales from Santa Elena. Pork, chicken, bacon, he says. He’s the first in an onslaught that will bring avocados, tomatoes, ice cream, jellies, flowers, papayas, pressure cooker rubber rings, and brooms through my aunt’s street. I can’t sleep. Last night you came over to my aunt’s house, and we drank a lot of beer and talked about our Catholic schoolgirl days before I moved to America. I was in awe of how much you remembered of a time you spent in a drug haze. My aunt said you couldn’t go all the way back home in your state, so you stripped down to your underwear and lay in the bed I’ve been sleeping in for weeks, my temporary bed until I have to go back to America, and I lay next to you. Soon after, I felt your hands under my t-shirt, stroking my back, my breasts, and right away I turned to you. Here we are as we were the first time I came back to visit since moving away and after so many visits in between when we did none of this. Last night, when you said, “Embrace me tight,” my heart bolted not away from me, but right to the quick of me. I wonder if you can hear it now as the grey light of morning enters through the window, with your ear as it is, poised against my chest.

When I visited three years ago, you had been sober ten years. Not a single drag from a joint or drop of alcohol. Now we meet outside a museum where the featured exhibit is a series of painted replicas of nature-scene stickers we used to collect in an album when we were children. Poppies in a field, amebelodons, yellow ducks, a wild boar, a sperm whale. You open your backpack to show me a joint, two small bags of white powder, a few spheres floating in liquid inside a vial.

“Why did you bring that?” I ask.

Last time I visited, your hair was natural brown and went past your shoulders. Last time I visited, you spent four hours in the gym every day. Today your hair is short and peroxide blond and shaved on one side. Tattoos cover your arms. You ran five kilometers before you came to meet me.

“Because you’re the only one who’ll do this with me,” you say.

You’re right. We take a cab to a love motel and inhale poppers and drink wine and make love. That’s what I want to call it. There’s a jacuzzi and a stripper pole in the room, but all you want to do is lay your head next to mine and tell me stories of your childhood, when you owned the only chemistry set in your small mountain town and exchanged your classmates’ school lunches for a go at it. You didn’t like the healthy food your mom packed—green apples, salads, natural juices with no sugar. Theirs were potato chips and bologna sandwiches and sodas and candy bars.

Before we leave, you vomit in the toilet, on the floor. I flush down the white powder. I wonder what else I’ll have to do so you’ll want to stay with me longer, as if I’m not the one who will leave in the end.

We’re sitting at a bougie pizza place where you used to work, with servers and toppings like plums and lentils that have been soaked in coconut milk. There’s still weeks until goodbye. We haven’t made love yet. I’m not under the impression that we will.

I let you order whatever you want. You know what’s best. I can’t get used to the sight of you drinking, but you down four glasses of wine, one after another. You sit against the wall, from which a portrait of a mermaid on a desert island looks down on you as you tell me that a couple of months ago, when you got fired from another fancy restaurant, you came home to find your dad ailing, saying he knew he would die soon. You’d never wanted to die yourself as much as you did then.

I want to keep listening, even when the things you say break my heart. A very long time ago, you’d thought sobering up meant you could have everything and give him everything, but in reality, you say, in reality there’s no recompense, is there? So why do it? Why stay sober? I want to say, “For us,” but what right do I have? I’m only visiting. So I do the next best thing. I try to remember every moment, capture every object you’ve touched and surrounded yourself with, save the color of your voice in my memory for the deep longing I know is ahead—itself a kind of addiction.

About the Author:

Yuly Restrepo was born in Medellín, Colombia, and came to the United States nearly twenty years ago as an asylee. Her writing has previously appeared in Catapult, PRISM International, Natural Bridge, and Zone 3. She is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, a MacDowell fellow, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Vow," "My Crimes," "Ribbons and Elastic," "Sensibilities," and "Flowerbed ♥ Boot" by Audra Puchalski

November 12, 2019

By Audra Puchalski

Vow

Our love is leonine, is wrapped in fur, is maned. The mass of it—
the mane—lends our love
its gravity, draws us to it, such that we don’t know if
we are held to our love by our love’s
gravity or if we ourselves are pieces of our love, two bits
of matter adding mass to the mass
of our love. If we are drawn
to the mass of our love or if we are part of the mass
of our love, our massive impressive engaging large
love. Our love is the sun, wreathed in golden light.
Our love is lowercase for purely aesthetic reasons.
Our love is meaningless:
a collection of sensations and memories and
an undying desire to be together forever and that’s it,
nothing more to it. Our love
is an orchid coevolving with its pollinator: our love
has an extremely long tongue. Our tongue
is galloping through a flowering, buzzing, golden meadow
on the back of a white horse tossing
its massive, flowing mane. The lion runs alongside
the horse, two flowing manes. All poems
must mention lions, horses—that’s the law on the planet of our love,
the only planet I know, the one
I have evolved to breathe and cultivate my microbiome
on. I could not survive another biosphere. My body
would collapse like a society
collapses, like a government, and my body, ungoverned,
would crumble, a granite stair, a stair made of
impractical materials,
under too many heavy booted footsteps.
And the fragments of my body would rise
one by one, from the hostile alien surface of not-our-love
and drift slow and distant as asteroids towards
home.

My Crimes

I’m so tired of my crimes, spinning
in the center of the room. My crimes,
a machine with a spicy voice ticking
and purring. A machine that appears, that
scratches, that flees. A feral machine
that bites. I’m tired of the room
where I pile on blankets woven from
my crimes. I was found guilty, sentenced by
the judge (me) to sleep beneath
this pile of misdemeanors, of felonies,
of parking tickets soaked with my tears.
Do I have regrets? No! I wanted this.
I deserve this. I am so tired of my tears
and their tides and all the crimes
I had to commit to earn them.
I’m tired of the loud noise of the crimes
and how it keeps putting me to sleep.
What even are my crimes? Did I actually do
any of them? Who was I, in the room—
the smoke from the woman’s cigarette
unfurling through the slatted city light?
How can I do crime when I’m being torn
apart by tiny movements of the air?
At least that explains why I’m so
tired. So tired I forget why I came in here.
I forget my whole list of crimes. I forget
my trial and my wide open life stuffing
clouds down its throat. I swim towards
the surface. I don’t remember anything
but that light.

Ribbons and Elastic

We dance and our bodies
are elastic, the party expands
to fill the room. The larger it gets
the tighter, like an elastic. We party
harder and harder, faster and faster
like hot air inside a balloon.
I tried to tie a ribbon to my life,
couldn’t get the bow to hold—
but what I do know is,

I have hope for my anxiety.
I believe she’ll succeed—she loves
establishing procedures and filling
out forms. Emergency contact
name: House Party Balloon Carcass Detritus
Relationship: How do so many of us survive
for so long with bodies so soft, physiologies
so fragile, surrounded by dangers
and toxins and why did I not die
long ago on a gorgeous wooded highway
amidst the green hills in the clear
endless sunshine? My body dragged off
the road, my antlers coincidentally
pointed towards the sea?

Sensibilities

Eczema blooms slowly on my left arm, a pink
rough-petaled carnation falling open.

Life feels like watching someone paint a picture of
a paintbrush painting a picture:

I want to take my shirt off
and lay it in the wet paint
so it sticks. All these layers of separation

dilute our wild imaginings until they break
and fall off the canvas. But
I’m really happy
because I made myself a cool t-shirt

and I wanna make more. That’s
what it’s like. Like I wanna ride the horse so
I paint its saddle on,

and that’s what I do with my mind. Furnish it,
decorate it, “cultivate my sensibilities,” as Laura used to say,

Design and deepen and accent my interiority.
Put a diva in a pink dress in my diner,
dancing on the counter. Eczema blooms

on my left arm, then right, and I erase it
with allergy medicine that’s supposed to go up your nose,
because my power is vast

and I have not yet found its limits. I’m struck by
the sudden feeling there’s
a pulse to everything and

I can hear it, or I can’t not hear it because I
am it, and it doesn’t matter if that’s real because

I’m in the river now with the rocks and crayfish, the little leaves
I tossed as a child
to watch them float.

They’re still floating. I’m carrying them
in my hands and hair.
I’ve built my whole life out of them.

Flowerbed ♥ Boot

This bouquet of neurons is how
I pull my hand away from nothing.

This garland of nerves alerts me
to a foreign object

lodged beneath my skin,
stinging. This hum

obscures your voice.
Some blossoms,

you stomp on them,
you just release their seeds.

Your larval heart
sleeps in a honey pot.

I fumble in the weak light of
your pale impassive face. A girl

once killed a spider because
she thought it was the moon.

About the Author:

Audra Puchalski lives in Oakland, California. Her poems have also been published in Juked, Cotton Xenomorph, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook is forthcoming from Headmistress Press in 2020.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "What Happens Next" by Joni Whitworth

November 11, 2019

What Happens Next

By Joni Whitworth

I woke up most winter mornings of 1999 in faded flannel sheets, sandwiched between my dad and Blaze, our elderly Doberman. The alarm went off at 5:15 a.m., but we usually snoozed it a few times due to the cold: a pervasive, wet Oregon chill that breezed through our 1880s Yamhill County farmhouse and left a dewy sheen on the wallpaper. Blaze, Dad, and I had to share space because of the cold and lack of central heat, but also because of the sadness. Mom had left us about a year prior on account of my inherent wickedness. She’d been threatening to leave if the rain, the neighbors, and the three of us didn't start acting right.

I can't recall now what acting right would have entailed, but clearly none of us did it because in October of ’98, after a Girl Scout Juniors troop meeting in the basement of a church whose God never spoke, Mom told me she was going to make a new life for herself in California. She got an apartment near Disneyland and rarely looked back. It rained from October to June.

Dad and I didn't have an easy way with words. We made up for what we couldn't voice about the sadness with snuggling. We’d wander the house at night wearing four or five layers each, sipping on a piping hot calcium-magnesium drink that was supposed to ward off nightmares. Then we’d slip under massive piles of quilts and hold each other and Blaze until dawn. To this day I feel an urge to cuddle, a desire to find comfort in the arms of a manager giving me feedback, a flight attendant handing me a ginger ale, a grocery store clerk reminding me that quinces are not in season.

In those days, breakfast was a harried affair of puffed rice with skim milk before heading out the door. We drove over backcountry roads dusted with frost, past filbert orchards and nurseries that grew starter trees for The Home Depot. After half an hour we'd arrive at our carpool drop-off point, which was the house of my older classmate and friend, Emma. She lived in an A-frame home on the way to our school. Emma had two parents, central heat, and a rescued husky/shepherd mix, who would howl wildly whenever my dad’s tires would crunch over their driveway gravel. This was Emma’s signal to wake up and run down to unlock the front door for me. I’d hug my dad goodbye, dash through the rain, squeeze through the front door, and throw my wet backpack and raincoat on the entryway floor. The house was always still dark at that time, and Emma’s parents would be asleep. My dad would wave and pull away to drive ninety minutes to a bookkeeping job in Portland.

Emma’s home was blissfully warm. I’d doze on the entryway sofa for an hour or so while her family tromped around the house, waking up, making eggs over easy with thick slabs of succulent ham, Folger’s coffee, and orange juice from a freezer can. Her family seemed very rich to me, but in retrospect, we were all teetering on the highest rung of the lowest class.

Emma’s mom was a harsh and unsympathetic figure who mostly relegated me to the sofa while they enjoyed private family time, which meant breakfast, before we’d clamber into their van and carpool the remaining thirty minutes to school. She did, however, permit Emma to make me a cup of chamomile tea before we left each morning. Perhaps you’ve had chamomile tea before— often recommended for colds and flus, fragrant, inexpensive, easily found, and enjoyed around the world. I wish you could try Emma’s chamomile tea.

She’d start by carefully filling a porcelain china cup a sliver past half-full with scalding water. Then she’d add one tea bag from a giant bulk box and wait beside me while the tea cooled. She didn’t touch me much. I felt our upper arms resting together as we watched the tea steep, or she’d brush a passing hand by my back, but she felt like a thousand fireplaces: a melting that reached into my inner places. She’d heap in spoonfuls of brown sugar and stir slowly until the water had dissolved every crystal. To this, she’d add a dash of heavy cream.

When I think about being gay, I don’t pathologize my coming-of-age narrative or turn to Lady Gaga for a “born this way” anthem. Instead, I wonder if my path to queerness was laid in the quiet and in-between moments. I loved Emma. I loved her tea. Simple. This was before I learned about the gender binary, femme ritual, sandal brands, derby daddies, bathhouse etiquette, goddess worship—all the theory and culture that came later and perhaps only complicated my senses. My feelings for Emma were too serene to be lust, too embodied to be theoretical. She served that tea to me with half a slice of rye toast every school day. Y2K came and went.

In July, we learned that the bookstore down the lane from where Emma lived was planning an elaborate midnight release party for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We eagerly counted down the days. When the evening of the party came, we dressed up like witches and waited, cross legged, on the faded blue carpeted floor of the bookstore, listening to the excited whispers of a hundred witches and warlocks. We all screamed when midnight struck. The bookstore employees wheeled out towering carts of wrapped books, which we grabbed and began to read immediately, shushing the bad, noisy children aside us. We stayed up furiously reading until almost everyone had gone home, and a reporter took our picture for the News-Register, the community newspaper of the Willamette Valley.

Summer in the new millennium felt bolder. Peonies and blooming lilac trees dotted our potholed roads, which I could skip down all day since school was out. Blaze started sleeping outside, guarding the farmhouse. Dad was away a lot, either because of work or the sadness. Maybe it was the heat or the alone time that emboldened me, or maybe it was inherent wickedness, but that summer I took a neighbor girl to my hot attic and kissed her on the mouth. I pulled down her cotton underpants and watched as she pulled down mine, and as neither of us knew what happened next, we stayed that way for hours, kissing, cuddling, sweating.

What happens next is a grand dichotomy: moments of terror and beauty, more than any one thing or the sum of some rapid harvests. In the season of the mustard bloom, vintners came with out-of-state money, and the gravel roads all got paved. My blueberry pie took third place at the fair, and the neighbor girl’s stepdad died of an opioid overdose, as many local parents did. The valley got a beautiful new bypass; traffic's down by forty percent. I took a job pouring wine for tourists, and Emma moved to Denver, where she eventually married an electrician who is successful and emotionally abusive to her. All the Harry Potter books, then the films, were released to great critical acclaim. Now, in the quiet and in-between moments, I search online for tips and tricks on how to spread a father’s ashes, for rescue dogs, and for women on Tinder. I explain to them that touch is more than a love language. It is my native language.

About the Author:

Joni Renee Whitworth is an artist and writer from rural Oregon. They have performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. Their writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the neurodivergent body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Oregon Humanities, Proximity Magazine, Seventeen Magazine, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, Unearthed Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom Journal, Dime Show Review, and The Write Launch.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Fragments for a Triptych" by David Meischen

November 8, 2019

Fragments for a Triptych

By David Meischen

i.
San Francisco’s delicious chill.
Sand and swings and slides—Bosch
by way of Dr. Seuss, your sons among
these children in motion. Their cries
jangle like a fracas of grackles.

ii.
The odor lifts you
out of your seat, pushes you
up the aisle, your infant son
leaking a trail of stink. Floor space
by the door where you boarded
the aircraft will have to do.

iii.
Your fingers work the wing nut
that holds the spare in place, you
in your Italian suit beneath the van’s
raised hatch, your sons in the back seat.
Shimmering blacktop, cloudless sky.

iv.
Retinas on hiatus, visual data
a scrim you look through, you drift
into pure sound. Children at play—
their noises carry you elsewhere.

v.
Automatic. Automaton.
Unpin. Unpin. The noxious diaper
surrenders to an air sickness bag.

vi.
You drop back into yourself.
This bench. This playground.
Muted circus music drifting
from the carousel. How long
were you gone? Seconds? Minutes?

vii.
Again you set the tire iron.
One at a time the lug nuts resist.
Perspiration pools along the dam
of your glasses, flows over.
Salt sting and blinding sun.

viii.
Your three-year-old has
disappeared among the scrambling
children, their noises suddenly like silence.

ix.
Forefinger and thumb, you
insert a pin into the fresh diaper corner,
click the point into place. Scent of line-dried cotton.

x.
Panic itches at the edges
of your vision, eyes sweeping
the playground while memory lights
on a moment in Blow-Up. A woman vanishes,
movie magic abducting her. The camera stops,
the actress steps away from gathered extras,
the film rolls again.

xi.
A current moves along the neural
pathways of your arm, restraint snapping
loose at the elbow. Against the bright white day,
your tire iron spins. From the windows
of the van, your sons bear witness.

xii.
The playground swirls
and does not stop,
does not reveal the child,
the name you have by heart.

About the Author:

David Meischen has been writing poetry and teaching the writing of poetry for thirty-five years. Anyone’s Son, Meischen’s debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. A Pushcart honoree, with a personal essay in Pushcart Prize XLII, he received the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters. Meischen has fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in Assaracus, Copper Nickel, Gertrude, Pan’s Ex: Queer Sex Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, Meischen lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Mermaiding" by Faith Gardner

November 7, 2019

Mermaiding

By Faith Gardner

I’m a paid mermaid at the Mermaid Lounge, off Highway 5, have been for a year now, since I was legal. Once eleven rolls around I’ll dive in the wall-tall, dinge-blue aquarium and swim a little show. I wear a seashell bra and smile. I’ve got long dark hair that trails like a veil. I have a shimmery waterproof tail. I made it myself on my Singer.

Mermaiding’s my part-time gig, eleven to one each night. My boss Iris said she thinks it’s bad for the skin to stay in longer, and Iris is very concerned about everyone’s skin. So I bartend before and after, and when I keep my outfit on—hopping behind the counter, making everybody hoot and holler—I may spill Pabsts but I sure do make amazing tips.

Queenie doesn’t see it that way. She thinks everything in this town’s a dead end and spends all her time outside the nail salon planning her escape. She googles hostels and checks plane ticket prices to Mumbai, Panama, Cambodia. Less touristy, she says, smacking her gum. And cheaper. As if it would matter to Queenie, who’s never been outside the county. Even I’ve been to San Francisco and San Diego. But she’s like a sister, we’ve been roommates since we turned eighteen. Sometimes when she comes out from the shower with her towel wrapped around her like a minidress, steam pouring out the doorway, I imagine sucking the beads of water from her skin, then look away.

Some nights after work, Queenie comes to the ML for drinks. She orders manhattans and long island iced teas. She wishes she was in New York and writes in her Moleskin about it. I’ve peeked. She talks to men, her acrylic nails clawing the air for emphasis. She tells them she has a dream of becoming a pilot. That she wants to see the world at 600 miles per hour. When she brings men home, I hear everything, because we share a wall. And I know if Queenie’s faking it. Queenie always fakes it.

But I’m a mermaid. People love to watch me. And when Queenie drinks too many manhattans and long island iced teas and crawls into bed with me weeping about how badly she wants an African safari, I remind her that we have a life here. That I have a career I love. I rub lotion on my itching screaming skin. Queenie mumbles into my pillow that I’m crazy and there’s more to life than swimming around a bar’s fish tank and popping the lids off Olympias. I cuddle up next to her, hear her snore. I’m glad she’s too sauced to find her own bed, and I pull the sheet down and look at her back. I wonder if one day we’ll get boyfriends and all this will be stories.

I have a worsening skin problem. My arms are pink and stingy in their elbow-pits. Queenie says I’m allergic to this town. At work, Iris approaches me with a knitted bag filled with ointments and expresses her concern. She asks me if I need a break from the water and I tell her no. I open a Papst, pour a Bud, yell at people to not smoke inside. Queenie’s sitting at a table with a man she’s sat at the table with before. One she’s brought home. I burn and think of what she’s saying over there, some same old crap about how awful her life is, how she wants to leave but can’t.

A baby-faced guy in a black T-shirt’s got his elbows up on the bar. He’s telling me he comes here just to watch me swim. I smile. He asks me about my tail. Lots of men ask about my tail, but I like this one—his dimple, the scar above his lip. I like that as I smile at him, Queenie is there in the background at her table, tiny from the distance, and it’s almost as if she’s sitting on Babyface’s shoulder. Babyface’s name is Derek. As we talk, I realize I’ve seen him around. I’ve opened his bottles and taken his ones. I’ve swum and he’s watched, and I’ve been oblivious, as usual. Queenie leaves the bar stumbly with the man. I go home alone, with Derek’s number written on my hand, and I can hear the headboards hammer through the walls. I put in my earplugs and try to breathe normally.

What is wrong with me, I ask the bathroom mirror. The rash has spread along my arms. It is reaching for my wrists, it is headed for my shoulders. These past few weeks Queenie’s been with her guy, whose name is—as if he could get any more typical than he already is—Guy. She buys expensive pottery and researches the Peace Corps on her laptop. I call Derek, who whispers into his phone about his life in LA. The comics he draws. His ex-girlfriends and their various problems. Our conversations last hours, but I postpone hanging out after work because I want my rashes to go away first. He still watches me mermaid from eleven to one. Sometimes, through the murky glass, I watch him back and smile.

Queenie and Guy screw all night long, and I wear earplugs and turn my fan on high to block out her orgasms. They still sound fake. I have dreams we kiss and I wake up mad at her and then let it go by breakfast. She doesn’t talk about exotic places so much lately. Packages have been arriving every day from Overstock and Amazon. Last week she mentioned college. When I peek in her Moleskin all it says is Guy, Guy, Guy.

My rashes just get worse. I go see a dermatologist, who scratches his head and says eczema? I wear sleeves at work now outside the tank. I wear sleeves all through August. Derek and I talk over the bar. He’s leaving as soon as his aunt’s house sells. If I’m ever going to woo or be wooed, I need a cure for my arms. Queenie tells me I should quit the ML, that the water is dirty and making me sick. No, I say, throwing one of her New Yorkers across the room. I’m a fucking mermaid.

This chick shows up to work one Saturday with seashells on her tits. She’s wearing jeans. I’m cleaning up puke with a mop and bucket. What the hell, I say to Iris. Iris pulls me into her office and says, let’s talk. But really she just talks. She writes down homeopathic remedies on a post-it like some kind of doctor and tells me to go take it easy until my skin gets better. Peppermint oil, milk baths, fuck you, Iris, I say. Iris doesn’t care if people say fuck to her. She asks if Sheila can borrow my tail. Absolutely not, I say, and go home.

Queenie’s painting her toenails on the leather sofa and I tell her she shouldn’t bring her work home with her. It’s supposed to be a joke but neither of us laugh. She has the TV on mute, some reality show about brides. I tell her I’m temporarily on leave from the ML and she gets up and hugs me like this is good news. She follows me into my room, crawls on my bed, blows on her toenails. She snuggles up to me and we lay in silence and I can hear my heart. It’s so loud I can’t believe it’s only a tiny muscle there inside of me. She kisses my neck and I don’t move and she asks, is that okay? When she kisses my lips, I taste the whiskey. Queenie, I say, what are you doing?

She pulls up my sleeves. She puts her face against my arms and her cheeks cool the itch. That place, she says, has made you sick.

The next morning Queenie is grumpy. My nails look awful, she says, squinting at her toes. She leaves my bed and says nothing. She brushes her teeth and I can hear her sigh. She comes into the doorway and drapes an arm there and says, I’m moving out, okay? That was what I meant to say. We don’t talk about it. The apartment door slams and I hear her car vroom and then nothing.

Desperate, I go to the grocery store and buy gallons of milk. I take a milk bath. I try to squeeze out tears but for some reason, I barely care that Queenie says she’s going and anyway I think I shouldn’t believe her. As soon as I get rid of these rashes, I’m going to be a mermaid again. Just watch me.

I go back to bartending at the ML, but the rashes are improving too slowly to let me back in the water. I watch Sheila with contempt, the pathetic green tail she obviously made, and botched, herself. Her blah-blond hair, medium-length, nothing like a real mermaid. She’s bone-skinny, no-tits. And yet she draws a crowd of yokels there to see her every night. Nobody but Derek seems to miss mermaid-me. Queenie doesn’t even come to the ML anymore, she’s into the late night BBQ place a few miles down the road. Derek is leaving soon. I invite him over for a good-bye dinner. He’s been a fun flirtation, a distraction, and at night, in hushed voices on our phones, we’ve become intimate friends.

It’s fall, and it’s not just the colors of the grass and the leaves that spin from the trees and die in the streets. It’s not just that, it’s the pace—the slowing, the emptiness of the apartment. Queenie has cleared boxes and crates of her clothes and shoes and travel books out. I still don’t believe it’s real. I still think Queenie will realize she’s made a mistake and will come crawling back. She’s never loved a man more than a month. Derek comes over for his goodbye dinner. I cook salmon in tin foil, vegetables, uncork a bottle of wine. I pretend I’ve done this kind of thing before, but really I’ve only listened through the door while Queenie’s done it.

A bottle of wine later, I tell Derek about how I much I love mermaids. How as a kid my favorite movie was Splash. How I used to tie my feet together and swim all summer long, hold my breath for minutes at a time in the bathtub. He puts his hand on my knee and shakes his head. A shame, he says, it’s a damned shame. I take off my sweater and show him my rash, thinking, this is it. He doesn’t flinch. Put on your mermaid costume, he says, and come sit on my lap.

He fondles my seashells, runs a hand along my waist, caresses the plastic material of my tail. I try to draw the string to loosen the seashells but he says don’t. I stand up to take off my tail but he says keep it on. He says, I like you just like this. I sit back down. I like me like this, too. We relax. This is fine with me, just sitting here, a dry mermaid on a man’s lap. I can feel his erection through my mermaid tail and I’m glad I don’t have to feel responsible for it.

We stay sitting like that for a long time, until I hear him snoring. I’m thinking about Queenie and hoping she’s having a terrible night. I’m hoping she calls and comes stumbling drunk back to me again. I’m hoping my rashes clear up and back into the tank I go.

Derek takes me to breakfast in the morning. He orders tofu instead of eggs and the waitress shudders as she pens it on her pad. He tells me to come visit him in LA. At first I hesitate, but then he reminds me about movies and TV and all the mermaid parts. If the ML doesn’t work out, he says, you can come down there and try to make it as a mermaid in a bigger pond. I wonder if he’s joking as I wave goodbye. But the first thing I do when I get home that night after bartending and blond mermaid-ignoring is google apartments and auditions in LA. I find Disneyland, where a Little Mermaid delights little girls all year long. Her hair is so very vermilion. I start drafting emails to potential jobs, citing my extensive mermaid experience. I kiss my elbow-pits where my rashes are healing. I put on Splash for the first time in years and say all the lines with Madison. But then I stop and shut down my computer and forget about everything, because Queenie is home, and crying, and calling for me.

About the Author:

Faith Gardner is the author of The Second Life of Ava Rivers and Perdita. Her short fiction has been published in places like ZYZZYVA, PANK and McSweeney's online. She lives in the Bay Area. Visit Faith online at www.faithgardner.com and follow her on twitter @iamfaithgardner.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Skepticism" by James Chapson

November 6, 2019

Skepticism: Five Demonstrations

By James Chapson

“We admit the apparent fact,” say they, “without admitting that it really is what it appears to be.” . . . [I]n his work On the Senses, [Timon says,] “I do not lay it down that honey is sweet, but I admit that it appears to be so.”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX.105

It was a warm day, or so it seemed,
and the sea was calm, but it might have been
snowing, in reality, and the sea rising in towering waves.

It had all the appearances of a criminal war,
unjustifiable on any grounds, but
it may have been necessary and honorable,
as it seemed to those who started it.

In the fog-wrapped, golden city,
the young were discovering sex and drugs,
but whether this was a model of the angelic life,
or a trap set by demons, is pure speculation.

Though the bomb apparently vaporized
tens of thousands of innocents, perhaps
they had merely left for a picnic on the beach.

I will admit we sat beneath the willow tree,
practically in one another’s arms,
but I could not say that his lips were sweet,
only that they appeared to be so.

About the Author:

James Chapson was born in Honolulu, Hawai’i, received an MA in English/Creative Writing at San Francisco State University where he studied with John Logan, William Dickey, and James Liddy. He has published three full-length collections of poems with Arlen House, as well as a number of chapbooks from White Rabbit Press, hit & run, and Adjunct Press, and others. He taught writing at U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for many years, and was poet laureate of Milwaukee in 2013-15.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Winter Counts, the 1970's, Stories from the Odd Years" by Stuart Lishan

November 4, 2019

1971: First Male Love

Chapter 1: Driving West toward Tarzana

The first real live naked woman that I lusted after sexually, I saw for the first and only time at the Classic Cat strip club on Van Nuys Blvd., in the Panorama City section of the San Fernando Valley. She was lithe, tall, long-limbed, slowly gyrating her hips onstage as I brought out another vat of fried chicken legs to the free buffet. I was working for a caterer called “Weddings by Al.” We made the food for the Classic Cat. I was a freshman at Van Nuys High School.

There were three guys in the club at the time. Two of them, shooting pool in the back, wore white work shirts that said “Trane Heating and Cooling” on them. The other was a guy in a suit, eating fried chicken. He had taken off his jacket and had rolled up his sleeves. In the background a porno was playing, some guy who looked a bit like him, standing, shirttails out, his tie dangling over his belly, his pants pulled down around his legs along with his briefs as a woman sucked his dick in a hotel room. As she moved her mouth up and down around his member like some oil rig pump jack, he talked out loud about driving directions.

“You take the 405, get off at Ventura Blvd., and drive west towards Tarzana.”

I remember thinking it odd that the guy eating fried chicken was staring at the film, and not at the beautiful naked woman standing in front of him, glaring at us both as she slowly moved her hips back and forth onstage. I was, though.

Chapter 2: The First Cock I Sucked…

Belonged to a boy in my high school named Andy. We had been swimming at his house, his parents and two sisters off somewhere, when he suggested that we go skinny dipping in his pool. After a while he suggested we go inside, where we sat cross-legged on his parents’ bed.

“Don’t you ever want to touch yourself like this?” he asked. I remember thinking, as he fingered his penis, that he had the most delicate fingers I had ever seen. I so wanted to kneel down before him, say, “Oh, you poor thing,” and take his cock between my lips, the way I had seen it done in those pornos at the Classic Cat.

Well, at least that was my fantasy for many years after. I imagined Andy stroking my hair, his body getting tauter and tauter, until he came into my mouth. I would lick it off then and kiss him deep and wonderingly on his chest and face and in his mouth, my tongue deep inside him. What really happened was that I sat on his parents’ bed and showed him how I masturbated.

Andy never hung out with me much after that. He preferred the company of a boy named Allen, whom I heard some ROTC guys call “Little Alice” behind his back.

1973: “the white mutation of its dream”

Chapter 1: “- and then/ I could not see to see -”

-- Emily Dickinson

Decades removed from the 1970s, in an honors seminar about poetry and song lyrics that I was teaching at The Ohio State University, where we were all, including me, completing weekly writing assignments centered upon the poems and the lyrics that we were playing with, assignments that I called in our syllabus “Assays/Essays/Explorations/Expectations/Analysis[ters]/Amusings,” I wrote the following about “Cape Breton” by Elizabeth Bishop:

What I love about Bishop is how much she enables us, forces us even, to look hard. In the doing of that, that looking, we discover, in a sense, through the senses, how we know; that is, how we know where to go to know.

Look at a poem like “Cape Breton.” The road described therein that “clambers along the brink of the coast” (23) takes us “in the interior / where we cannot see” (31-32).

What I take Bishop to be saying here is, in part, that the process of looking takes us to where we, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, cannot see to see. Like those “admirable scriptures on stones by stones” (35), the process of writing enables that. So, in a sense those stony hieroglyphs mirror our own scriptures, our own writing, as in Bishop’s poem, and as in these assay/essays…, which, at least in their best parts when the writing strikes us as most “right,” take us “in the interior/ where we cannot see.”

And it’s a process, and it’s kind of hard, because what we’re looking for is almost in a not there sort of there-ness, “like rotting snow-ice sucked away/ almost to spirit” (16), or like the articulations of those “thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward / freely, dispassionately, through the mist” (37-38). Is it any wonder, then, that the man stepping off the bus with a baby (47) lives in an “invisible house beside the water” (50), or that “The thin mist follows / the white mutation of its dream” (52-53)?

Chapter 2: The Invisible Kid as Cape Breton

Christmas Break. Driving down from Reed College where I had just started that autumn, the person who was driving us from Portland to L.A. where our respective families lived, a fellow student older than me to whom I had paid twenty dollars for the ride, stopped in Santa Cruz where we were to crash for the night. Just after we arrived, we were standing in the living room of a low-slung bungalow house where a bunch of U.C. Santa Cruz students lived, when Hank Rashan, a kid a year older than me when we were at Van Nuys High School, and who was also a student there at the U.C., walked through the doorway.

I didn’t know Hank well, but I had observed that he was an arrogant prick who liked to push people around, not physically, but through force of his personality and will. He had come to the house we were staying at because he knew someone who lived there, one of the girls. He was demanding that she hurry up and get ready to leave. He hadn’t even said hello. I mentioned to him that we were at Van Nuys High together. He hadn’t noticed me yet in the scrum of people standing there in the living room, but now he did. He cocked his head just a scooch, peered at me for a moment, not long, as if he was looking at the not-there that was standing there before him, the short, skinny, long-haired kid wearing wire-rimmed glasses, before he turned away and said, “Maybe.”

1975: First Female Love

Preface: An “Assay/ Essay/ Exploration/Expectation/Analysis[ter]/

Amusing” on Cole Porter:

I love the way Cole Porter skates on the blades of his wit and cleverness across an internal rhyme or couplet, creating in the process a wonderful surface dazzle on a song lyric:[LS1]

“Oh, charming sir, the way you sing

Would break the heart of Missus Crosby’s Bing.”

(From “It’s De-Lovely,” 110)

He: If you ever catch on fire, send a wire.

She: If you ever lose your teeth and you’re out to dine,

Borrow mine.

(From “Friendship,” 106)

If you can’t be a ham and do “Hamlet,”

They will not give a damn or a damnlet.

Just recite an occasional sonnet

And your lap’ll have “Honey” upon it.

(From “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,”104)

One could go on and on, just as ever-expansive Cole Porter seems to go on and on, in drunken delight over the rhythms of his melodies and the cleverness of his lyrical hooks (“You’re the Top” has 7 verses, for example; “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love” has “only” five, but each one is approximately sonnet length). But then sometimes, reading Porter’s lyrics, one finds something different, something deeper, something more craving and vulnerable lurking in his words:[LS2]

Night and day under the hide of me

There’s an, oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me

(From “Night and Day,”119)

“Hide” works the street of meaning in both senses, of course, as in “under our hides we truly hide what is most truly, truly ourselves.” And then there’s the pause around the “oh,” as if the thought of that “hungry yearning” makes our singer/sayer/seer pause at the heartbreak of that thought and feeling. And so methinks we’ve broken through the ice of cleverness here and are swimming through to something deeper. And I wonder: is this how the wavelengths of what we now call “gaydar” got deflected and refracted in the “old days,” as they bounced through and off the walls of that dreaded closet, even for one with as much wealth and cultural capital to gain access out of it on occasion as Cole Porter?[LS3]

Chapter One: After the First Date with Her: [LS4]

Standing on her porch after she had gone inside, I thought of what Clara Schumann had written in her diary after she had visited her husband in Dr. Franz Richarz's asylum in Bonn in 1855: “It was the briefest of kisses, just a brush of lips against my cheek, but for years I felt it.”

Chapter Two: Preemie

Her love for me was briefer than a bruise.

Chapter Three: The End

Lifting her hands from a tub full of beer and ice and cupping them around mine, she said, “Here, feel how cold these are.”

Coda #1

Years later, I saw her again in passing, in Manhattan, outside the Godiva Chocolatier on Fifth Avenue. I was waiting on the sidewalk while my sister bought something inside, when I saw Salvador Dali. The grand old man was shorter that I would have thought. His white hair fell to his shoulders, and his famous mustache, also white now, seemed more clipped than I remembered from his pictures. But it was through his mustache that I recognized him. A long flowing leopard skin coat draped over his shoulders like a cape. He walked slowly, fully upright but with a cane, regally, it seemed to me. Perhaps the entourage of people who followed him, like pilot fish, I remember thinking, solidified that perception. He said nothing, but he nodded at those who, like me, made eye contact with him.

I noticed her walking down the sidewalk from the opposite direction, just after she had finished crossing W. 52nd Street. She wore a sensible yellow dress that hemmed at her knees. Wearing white high heels, she stepped purposely, a black Michael Kors purse dangling from her left arm. A necklace of what appeared to be pearls adorned her neckline. Her blond hair was set in a sort of flip, like Gidget in that T.V. show from the ‘60s, but this was the 1980s.

She didn’t appear to notice the great artist when she passed him and his entourage, or me. She didn’t seem to notice anyone or anything, but stared straight ahead, what we call “looking blankly,” “staring into space,” or “lost in thought.” Her lips were pursed, her mouth taut, turned downwards. I had heard she had gotten married, but I remember noticing a discolored band of skin on her finger, where her wedding ring would have been.

Coda #2

About a year before my “experience” with Andy, I remember my mother asking me if I was a homosexual. This would have been early 1970, when I was fourteen. We were alone in her Mazda, driving home from the Trader Joe’s off Westwood Blvd. I sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead, as if I was “looking blankly,” “staring into space,” or “lost in thought.” I waited nearly the full length of a red light before I answered meekly, “No.”

“Good,” she said, and drove on.

1977: The Writer

What first struck me about Jim Krusoe were his fingers. Like Andy’s, his were long and delicate. Not like guitarists have, like the rock star John Doe, on the cusp of his fame then, who hung out, like I did, at the Tuesday-evening public poetry workshops at the Beyond Baroque literary arts center in Venice. No, Jim didn’t have muscular fingers like that. His were much more thin and deft.

Beyond Baroque has since relocated to a more commodious space in a reconverted fire station on Venice Blvd., but the old Beyond Baroque was housed in a squat, square two-story house that its founder, George Drury Smith, used to own, on what was then called Washington St., about a block east of a dive bar called “The Brig,” memorable in part for its neon sign that sported a picture of a boxer who looked like Rocky Marciano.

You’d park your car and follow a driveway that led to a courtyard out back where Chinese-style lanterns hung from a bamboo fence. You stepped inside a slider door and found yourself in a scratched linoleum-floored room that couldn’t have been larger than fourteen feet by fourteen feet. Floor to ceiling book shelves ringed it, filled almost to sagging with volumes of poetry and literary magazines.

Creaky metal folding chairs were set up in a layered half-circle, with the center reserved for the evening’s workshop leader. Sometimes it was Jack Grapes. An actor who also ran Bombshelter Press, he was a jovial, roundish man who had the gift of being both funny and insightful in his comments. Sometimes the workshop leader was Francis Dean Smith, a sweet white-haired woman whom I was told had once been married to Charles Bukowski. She was quieter in her comments, but always, almost to a fault, generous. Every third week Jim led the workshops.

Spare, tall, elegant, Jim sat facing us in his folding chair, his head tilted as he listened as someone read his or her poem. Sometimes his eyes closed as he listened. Sometimes from his work shirt pocket he’d take out a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers, followed by a bulging packet of Bugle tobacco. He’d sprinkle a thin line of Bugle on one of the Zig-Zags that he had spread out on the lap of his Levi’s, and then with those deft fingers he’d gently twist it until it was a wrinkled, white grub of a cigarette tapered at both ends. He would still be listening to the poem, or to the responses to the poem from the group of us, as he stroked one of the ends in and out of his mouth.

When Jim finally responded, he might say something like, “Your poem is like a clear glass of water that has been set out on a mantel piece, as the afternoon sun slants through the window, so that a rainbow fills the glass with light.”

Like some sort of Zen koan that we had to figure out, I don’t think most of us knew what Jim was talking about when he said stuff like that, at least not at first. I know I didn’t, but I didn’t much care. Jim gave up his offerings with such encouragement that I couldn’t help but love him. Yes, I loved Jack’s talky, wacky, wise-cracking style, so much like his poems, and I loved Francis’ earnest generosity, but Jim was the first serious writer that I was acquainted with in the flesh whom I really wanted to emulate, the first writer I knew who said, when asked if he wanted to go out with the gang afterward for coffee at The Jolly Tiger, “No, I’m sorry. I have work to do.”

1979: Graduation

My senior thesis at Reed College was titled “The Rain Ringing Off River: Poems and a Study of Mythopoeia in the Poetry of Galway Kinnell and Others.” The “Others” were W.S. Merwin and, well, me. Looking back on it now, it seems such a pretentious, absurd idea, and I wonder that my advisor didn’t try harder to dissuade me from the notion of discussing my poems alongside theirs. For it would have been enough for me just to have submitted a creative writing thesis, the way most of my fellow writers on campus did, but I just couldn’t help myself, it seemed, from writing nearly a hundred pages of turgid, flaccid academic prose to go along with my collection of poems.

Kinnell had read at Reed earlier that semester. When the post-reading reception was over, my friend Andrea and I had the honor of driving the great poet back to his motel. He had been flirting with her all evening, and now he suggested that they go up to his room. As I dropped them off, he smiled at me a bit tipsily and said that he could hook me up with his friend, the poet James Merrill. For a straight guy his “gaydar” wasn’t bad, or maybe it was just sharper from all the wine he had been drinking. I said that would be nice and asked if I could send him a copy of my thesis. I had been trying to screw up the courage to ask him all evening. Now was my last chance. I never did meet James Merrill, but six months after graduation I received a postcard from Kinnell. On the back he had scrawled that my comments about his work were better than many of the critics who had published work about him. Remembering it now, I think it was his way of poking fun at them, the way Marianne Moore does in that poem of hers in which she describes “the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea.” But I didn’t think that then. Mostly I felt disappointed, turning the postcard over and over in my hands as I stood in front of the mailboxes in my parents’ apartment building, that Kinnell had said nothing about my poems as I had so dearly hoped he would.

Looking at them now, decades later, at those poems that I wrote so very long ago, I can say without too much patronization that they aren’t bad, some of those poems, parts of that “some” at any rate. They reveal the person that I was, and that in some uncomfortable ways I still am.

… Like us, it too reflects light out of itself.

A hopeless boat of flight

It wants to wander air;

If turned upside down

You could hear it softly

Sobbing. It knows only thirst.”

§ From “The Umbrella”

… I am a ring on a finger of water

Moving outward, a long time.

Boats of leaves gather in

My wake and pull for me.

They can’t stop me creeping

Underneath, the roundness

Reaching in, the long process of breaking up.

§ From “The Fisherman”

How much does one “thirst” and “softly sob” in a life? How long is that process of “breaking up”? In those instances when I turn away, or sometimes invite those invitations that come my way, I suppose I’m still teasing out answers to those questions, still figuring it out as part of the work I have to do.

About the Author:

Stuart Lishan’s creative nonfiction has been published in venues like The Truth About The Fact, Specter Magazine, Arts & Letters, Creative Nonfiction, and Brevity. I'm also a published poet and fiction writer, with work published in places like Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Literati Quarterly. I received my MFA from Columbia University, and I teach creative writing and poetry at The Ohio State University.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Leave a Trace" by Lance Garland

November 3, 2019

Leave a Trace

By Lance Garland

As the horizon reveals itself in shades of ocher and tangerine gas, my surroundings slowly come into focus. We’ve been climbing by the light of our headlamps for hours. Back home, my life has been rendered unrecognizable. I’ve been in the dark and wanting to give up this climb for weeks. Only my childlike wonder moves my footsteps higher.

I can’t see the summit, only the headlights of my rope-team partners, who are for the most part strangers. Alone on Mount Rainier, in a drastically shifting life, never did I think that I’d be climbing a volcano with grief fueling my footsteps. I’m not that kind of guy. This was supposed to be a victory climb, a childhood dream come true. Now, it just feels like a casualty of youth, what little is left.

My team-lead is slow, and the pace makes it hard to stay warm. Is it the altitude that makes everything he says frustrate me? We’re only at 11,000 feet, almost 4,000 feet of nearly vertical terrain to go.

He stops abruptly, waits for us to gather. “I think it’s time for a break.”

I’ve only barely begun to feel warm again from the last break. Slowly, and with great effort, he takes off his pack, opens it, removes his down jacket, puts it on, pulls out a tightly packed bag, unfurls it, pulls out an energy bar, peels it open, and begins to take his first bite. The rest of the team has already eaten their snacks and gathered their things. Our fearless leader is only halfway through his bar. The third rope-partner and I put our packs back on, hoping to encourage him to continue. He doesn’t seem to notice. My teeth start hitting each other, frigid and angry. In laborious fashion, he begins his ritual in reverse, taking care to stow everything perfectly in his pack before picking his ice axe back up and finally asking, “Are you guys ready to— ”

“Yes,” we both state emphatically, stepping forward with our words.

I’m frustrated because the team in front of us is breaking away. I should be on that team. The alpine wind is gaining momentum so I zip up my hood. I’m frustrated from more than this climb. No matter how hard I labor, no matter the amount of my passion, I can’t seem to grasp the elusive thing I seek. Back home, most of my colleagues are married, have children. My life is nowhere near where I thought it would be by this point. What’s wrong with me?

In my culture, the ability to get married is a new concept, a right that we’re still learning to believe possible. For the first year of our relationship, my lover, Bastian, told me how much he longed to get married, to have kids. We even named our future children. Things were aligning perfectly, same needs, same desires. He even allowed me the space to be my adventurous self, was my emotional support as I attempted to become Seattle’s only openly gay fireman. I was in awe of his love and it seemed the lasting kind.

In Paris, his romanticized city, a city I had only just walked in for the first time, I proposed to him on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge over the River Seine, the Eiffel Tower so close one could almost reach out and touch it. The stuff of storybooks. With a hired photographer to snap the surprise moment, I asked Bastian to marry me by reciting a bespoke poem for the occasion. In my hands, a box, not big enough for a finger, big enough for a hand, a hand I’d wrap a promise with, my time. A designer piece with the inscription, Prorsum, Latin for “Forward.” I had finally found the man I would get on one knee for.

He didn’t give me an answer.

We smiled and played the gracious kind, as the photographer escorted us about the city of love in his small sedan, taking pictures in all the most iconic places to commemorate the day. At the Charles de Gaulle airport, Bastian called his mother and sister, and told them that I had proposed. For a brief moment in time, although he had not said the word, it seemed we were engaged.

But as we flew out of that city of romance, there was something in his hesitation that told of things to come. I looked away, in hope, in constrained patience, in a blind reach toward my dreams.

Many great writers have a chosen city. To my mentors, Salter and Hemingway and Kerouac, Paris was that city. But Paris refused to requite me. It was the rugged city of Lisbon, my chosen city. The city that chose me. Lisbon held my face as I raced through its stone streets, searching desperately for the nepenthe to my sorrow. Portugal gave me that antidote. I was only there because, as a doctor, Bastian travelled the world, attending conferences to teach and learn the newest life-saving techniques. Lisbon was never before on my radar. Here I was in a legendary city, almost by accident. He worked while I explored a city with a deep past. On the banks of the Tagus River I ran, yearning for something that sent so many of their original explorers to sea: a future, the possibilities of dreams.

Through the saline air I ran, a half marathon of touring, when I came upon a shop that called me into it. Sweaty and out of breath I browsed the vacant shop. A kind look from the attendant—that familiar and rare reflection—and soon we both wandered the life of the artist Abel Grade. He uses light and movement in his paintings to create a living picture. I was inspired by one painted tile in particular, with a yellow funicular in a city-lit night. I assured her I’d return to purchase the tile, and we walked out of the studio together.

On the wall outside, a memorial with what looked like the word placement of a poem on it. My eyes lingered. The woman, with those kind, gray eyes, asked if she could translate the Portuguese for me. My lips turned upward in affirmation.

“The poet is giving thanks. Fully thankful in being, which reaches thanks from the pain that he really feels.” The merchant woman places a hand on the back of my arm. “Pessoa lived in the apartment above this studio during 1917.” She moved her hand to the bronze tile on the wall. “There is a bookstore where you could buy an English version…”

A day later Bastian and I explored the castles of Sintra. We met the artist Lanca Semedo while on the descent from the colorful Pena Palace. I bought a painting of the Alfama district in downtown Lisbon as he whispered, “Art depends on the viewer, it can be beautiful or tragic depending on the perspective.” He said it almost under his breath to no listener in particular.

Later, I found the store recommended by the merchant woman. I bought the book, Lisbon Poets, in which I found Pessoa’s “Autopsychography.” The translator had a much different view of the meaning of the poem than the lady in the art shop. Instead of the word “thankful” being used repeatedly, the defining word of the poem to this man was “pretender.”

Was I being thankful for what I was experiencing, even after a proposal without a yes, or was I simply pretending?

On my solitary rambling, through the city that gave my heart solace, I decided that my interpretation of the poem, of life, was like the merchant woman’s. It was not my method to pretend. I would be wholeheartedly myself, and I would be thankful for anything that I received, anything that continued.

It was only later on that journey, on Portugal’s golden beaches, that he said it was a maybe. In the Algarve, we found a way to love beyond our expectations, and it was there that our relationship peaked in the Atlantic sunbeams, salt, and brown-sugar sand.

We spent two years postulating after that, and we continued to travel. He asked me if I wanted to go to Patagonia, said that seemed more my style, a rugged terrain on the edge of Earth. Somehow it seemed a fitting place to reveal to us what we meant to each other, how far we would go for the other. On the shores of Last Hope Sound, in a hotel that resembled a hobbit house, I asked him if he had thought any more of my proposal.

“This is not the place to talk about that.” His words, embittered and costly. A warning to keep away from such a prized and guarded place. I receded far away from him. It seemed we were the only people for miles.

We tramped around Chilean Patagonia, driving across its dirt roads to cross the border to Argentina. The customs shack had an adorable golden lab that shat on its linoleum floors. No one cleaned it up. It was a handsome premonition of our future together. We had a golden retriever puppy waiting for us back home. It was the biggest commitment he could give, becoming a dog dad.

But for now, we had to cross this border, and the Argentine agent was not keen to let us into his country. It took him many a prodding from the young attendant to even come to the front desk. We waited more than an hour. When he finally arrived, hungover and red with fury, there was a palpable threat in his every mannerism.

We made it past the border, driving dirt roads to nowhere. In the midst of an austere landscape, marked only by the occasional herd of sheep, Bastian and I drove for hours. We were deep in the wilderness, lost in it. When the brilliant emerald waters of Lago Argentine came into view we felt the thrill once again of being found, and the color revived in our eyes, and something deep therein rekindled.

A few days later we were back in Chile, under the cathedral mountains of the Towers in Torres Del Paine. I decided there that I would indeed live my dream to climb mountains. In that spiritual moment under those towering stones, I came to the understanding that I was finally ready to climb.

Back home in Seattle, as I began to research climbing schools, I mused whether it was better to walk away from my life with Bastian, but something kept me there. Perhaps it was my history of running away that stayed me, and my desire to move beyond my previous limitations. Perhaps I was creating a new map for my life. Perhaps true love stays. I told myself that even if Bastian ultimately decided that he didn’t want a future with me, at least I could learn how to have a healthy relationship. No one knows the future, so I practiced patience, and a deep gratefulness for this present moment. As I began my yearlong course with a local mountaineering organization, I told myself that my dreams were possible. I would climb toward them.

The training was challenging. People kept dropping out of the program. Months went by. Bastian’s and my relationship went on autopilot. In my awareness of the present, I began to realize that I was becoming a fixture, something reliable in his life, but not fully seen. We were living the life of a long-married couple, but there was no commitment. In flagrant attempts to wake him up, I asked him to focus on us, to be together. There was always an excuse. Work was demanding. He would get around to it. But I began to see his excuses as aversions. Were these aversions also my own? I fell back to the Portugal dilemma: was I thankful, or had I started pretending?

I’ve always disdained being forced to do anything, and I spurn ultimatums, but I needed an answer. A major character flaw of mine: this disdain for ultimatums that I end up giving. I asked him to describe what I was to him, what future he saw with me in his life.

A few weeks before my Rainier climb, Bastian truncated our relationship. He was finally able to say he did not see a future with me in it. With such perfect, ill timing, I moved two hours away from the home Bastian bought in Seattle, into a cottage on an island that was supposed to be our retreat from the city, a house whose previous owner had recently killed himself because he lost his lifelong love. He was only sixty. “They didn’t tell you?” my new neighbor asked with a grief-stricken face. The scars of that love were written through the remains of my new home: the whole house reeked of nicotine, door frames cracked and scraped from a walker of a wife on her long road out of this life, a brand-new bathroom floor amongst faucets of fixtures falling apart. The other neighbor was still scarred by the actions of the previous owner. “He shot himself,” practically whispered out of the mouth of a recent widower, who wondered aloud if we are all destined for such a fate. And here I was, a first-time homebuyer, heartbroken myself, in a home with a history, a history as recent and raw as my breakup. In those first lonely nights—clutching my dog on a lone mattress in an empty room—I begged the resident ghosts to have mercy on me, because I too was grief-stricken. For better or for worse, I was staying in the campsite they abandoned.

To cope, I joked with myself that I moved into Hemingway’s final home, and as a writer it was my job to turn that box full of bullshit into something beautiful, for me, for my ex, and for the previous tenant and his wife.

Only a few months before we were in New Zealand. In Christchurch, the devastation from a past earthquake still visible six years after the quake. It is strange that a different quake from 2011 was still felt in our lives. Much like the Christchurch quake, there was a lost love, a great devastation that created the conditions where Bastian and I exist today.

Before I knew how to love myself, I fell in love with a gregarious man who garnered the affection of those he encountered. But Orion didn’t love himself either. From the start, we were a spiraling dance of comets, careening through the night, coming closer together, pushing each other apart. He was my first true love. “You and me versus the world,” he promised. I relinquished control. Our passion burned brightly, and there was much risk. After a year and a half together, and having just moved into a new apartment together, he left me at the start of a snowstorm. Sporadically, he would return. Months went by. He swore I was the only one, that we just couldn’t live together right then. But the borrowed car wasn’t his. I knew there was another. They say that we accept the love we think we deserve. I accepted and gave all manner of disrespect and belittlement mingled with passion, but I finally said goodbye to Orion. Some years later, he came to me looking for a nepenthe for his heartache. He told me all about Bastian. As he told the story, I put all the missing puzzle pieces into their places. Unknowingly, he confessed that Bastian was the one he was seeing all those months while I lived alone in the apartment we moved into together. Bastian was the one Orion left me for.

The last stop in New Zealand was Kaikoura, a desolate place of catastrophe from another earthquake just weeks before. We were barely able to get there, driving roads that crumbled to dust below us and nearly broke our rental car in half. There in the destruction, in a vacant tourist town, we spent our last night overseas. New Zealand was our last international trip together. The roads washed into the sea.

On the final night together, sitting in the house I helped refashion, I asked Bastian, “Why did you pursue me so fervidly if you weren’t sure. You knew I wasn’t open to you. After Orion—” the frustration muddled my thoughts and words. “I wasn’t in that place. You have no idea how hard it was for me to find the forgiveness in my heart in order to open myself up to loving you. And now, you break up with me.” My words barely audible between the quivering tumult. The sifting of two storylines into one. You only ever see the true story from the end. If great love does indeed grow from deep sorrow, my soul is fertile for its roots.

“I’m so sorry,” is all he could say. With little ceremony, he abdicated my love, our life together.

The next day, the great birch tree in his backyard fell. He said to write that down, a poetic finish. It said all that we could not.

The night before the climb of my childhood-dream volcano, I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s How To Love—a gift given by a concerned friend after returning from Paris, and the aftermath of the unrequited proposal. As I, she too was a remnant of Orion’s life, now made Bastian’s. I am now a remnant of both.

The book spoke of loving lightly, and letting go of those not meant for you, of leaving no impact and other noble pursuits in life. This was the second time I read this, and I returned to it hoping to find some wisdom in the uncertainty.

Although I respect its edicts of letting go, I find an all too similar point of connection in its philosophy and my ex-lovers. The book says to let go if it doesn’t work perfectly. My lovers let go because it didn’t feel right.

As I slowly put this broken house back together, alone, nothing feels right. I wonder how many times I’ll put someone else’s house back together again, only to have to leave. The last time I was alone on a mattress on the floor was when Orion left me for Bastian. Hemingway and the last tenant come to mind. Heartbreak multiplied. Heartbroken, heartsick, a single man living in a two-bedroom... This has happened before.

As I stand on the edge of this volcano, nothing feels right, and yet, I still climb.

Orion said he couldn’t be with me because I want to get married, that I live in a fantasy world. It’s true, for years I wanted to get married while it wasn’t legal. I fought for our right to get married. Not one moment of that felt right. Bastian said he couldn’t see a future with me because I want children and he wasn’t sure this is a world that supports two dads raising kids. But few parts of my experience as a gay man in this world have felt supportive. And yet I persist. We persist.

This climb doesn’t feel comfortable. Just because I can’t see the summit doesn’t mean it’s not there. I bristle at the idea that things come naturally to everyone. My life has been a struggle and upward battle against forces greater than I. The idea that things will simply fall into place and feel right, to me, is an idea riddled with privilege. Things don’t just happen. We have to act. We have to try. And we can’t do it alone. The cleanup doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t feel nice. I would never have loved Bastian were it not for the hard cleanup from the aftermath of Orion. In the alpine landscapes of my heart, I have much stewardship to do if I am to attempt a summit with another.

At basecamp, by the ranger station at Camp Schurman last evening, I imagined a man who will reach the summit with me. As prayer flags rippled with the wind, and a trio of hummingbirds flitted about in the alpine air, the idea struck a chord within me. Maybe it’s not just about one peak, but the ability to keep climbing, because there are many peaks.

On the summit of Mount Rainier, the wind angrily rages. The newborn sun blinds the eye. My imagination had me expecting grand vistas, epic sights, but from this height, the most notable features are the few other volcanoes, sitting in their solitude, spread out in their towering loneliness. The view from up here is desolate, otherworldly. It seems a place of deep meditation, a plane between space. What I thought would be a crowd of jubilant people, instead is a mass of exhausted faces, leaning downward, shoulders heavy. Instead of lingering at the top, most climbers hurriedly leave the summit, more than happy to begin the descent.

At the climax of my relationship with Bastian, he whispered these words to me: “Until you, every breakup I’ve had was because of substance or abuse. I didn’t know people could breakup from a healthy relationship.” With all the heartache from that finality, I can, at least, take solace in the fact that I’ve left a person in a better state than I found them, that I too am left in a better state than before. Perhaps, instead of leaving no trace, we can try to leave the campground better than we found it. Leaving no trace simply isn’t good enough for our generation, good enough for our relationships, or for the earth. So much damage has already been done. So much baggage and trash are already strewn about our lives.

It’s not about the peak, entirely, but also about the exhausted moments where you stop to take a break, to see a view you might never see again: the first birth of light from sunrise, a stray comet whose tail lights up the night and that you alone notice, the morning star far behind, white glacier burning pink at dawn. Those were more beautiful than the summit to me. It’s about the waypoints at base camp, where you pick up other people’s trash, and strangers tie down your tent when the wind is raging and you’re not there to do it yourself. It’s about overcoming your own capabilities, pushing past the hardest moments of your life, and continuing still, not just for yourself, but for everyone else on your rope-team.

It’s not just about a relationship highlighted by travels through Europe, Patagonia, and the islands of the Pacific; treks through far-off mountains, jungles, and beaches; adventures by sailboat, seaplane, and horseback. But it was as much about the mundane days, habitude and home-cooked meals, moments of fragility, vulnerability, moments where breakthroughs happen, of growth because of deep forgiveness, of hard-working love.

And it’s not just about the summit, but also the long way down, the long way out. And it’s not just about this climb.

Maybe loving is about being a good steward, one who doesn’t own, but rather cares for as long as they are able to. Because it’s not my mountain, it was their house before I moved in, and he was never my man, although I’ll always be a part. In all this change, I’ll try to leave my trace—a cleaner campsite, loving memories for those whose path I cross, and words that may last longer than my footsteps. I can only hope to contribute in such a way: to love with gratefulness, not to pretend, and to honor the days. My first mountain taught me that.

There are always other mountains, and maybe, just beyond this vantage point, is someone who wants to climb them.

About the Author:

While Lance fights fire in Seattle, climbs the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and sails the Salish Sea, he writes. He is the author of ITINERANT, an e-book adventure series on Amazon and a forthcoming podcast in 2020. His writing has appeared in OUTSIDE, MOUNTAINEER, and THE STRANGER, who listed his essay, “Assaulted and Silenced,” as The Best American Journalism of 2018. He is a finalist for the 2019 International Book Award in LGBT fiction and a finalist for Memoir Magazine’s 2019 Essay Contest. He resides with his fiancé and two dogs in Seattle WA.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Before the Horses" by Elizabeth Theriot

November 2, 2019

Before the Horses

By Elizabeth Theriot

You stir waves into your coffee. Lately here
it is always midnight. I curl
against your momentary glasses
& want to say tie yourself to my mast,
warn you, say make Ogygia with handfuls of my clay.
You peel rind
from your lips & your face
splashes the ceramic rim.

You first arrived
an unpeeled grapefruit
& later a grapefruit peel. Remember
when you promised to teach
my fingers to unspool?
You ripened quickly, fermented
inside your cask.

Patroclus you are a hydra.
I have kissed so many of your necks.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Theriot is a queer Southern writer with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She earned her MFA from The University of Alabama and is currently writing a memoir about disability and desire. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, with poems featured in their upcoming anthology, "WE ARE NOT YOUR METAPHOR," from Square & Rebels Press. Her chapbook "Dyers Woad" is forthcoming from dancing girl press. You can find her work in Yemassee, Barely South Review, Winter Tangerine, Ghost Proposal, Vagabond City, A VELVET GIANT, Tinderbox, and others.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Places to Avoid at Dusk" by Sarah Capdeville

November 1, 2019

Places to Avoid at Dusk

By Sarah Capdeville

This place feels like home, but only because there’s a guy in flannel eying women from the bar. The music drums something unfamiliar, though that image drags me back—a fizzed spark of gin and tonic at the Rhino on Ryman Street, men wearing flannel for flannel’s sake, and women too, and me in the smoky middle, unsure if this was something I wanted, feared, or maybe a little bit of both.

It’s early enough in the night that the club bouncer let us in at no charge, but late enough that I’m swaying somewhere between sleepy and tipsy, not sure where another drink will put me. Given the DJ getting set up across the room, I’m figuring the latter. My heart flits under my breastbone, a sensation that’s dogged me since adolescence. I dart fingers to my throat, hoping to catch the rumble of blood there, but it’s back to a steady drum slugged with wine.

I lift my chin, a trick for confidence I’ve been trying out, and skirt close to my group of friends. We claim a booth, wander to the bar to order drinks. “A cab,” I say, feigning poise, and the bartender doesn’t card me. I keep my tab open.

Not that I went out much back home. Weekends, I stayed in doing schoolwork while classmates littered old mining quarries with PBR cans. I had a 4.0 to keep up, I told myself, even though half the kids in my AP classes were mooching off their older siblings’ IDs. My first dance, senior prom, I wore a strapless navy dress and my grandma’s pearls, and I lingered on the pillared edge of the ballroom until a guy asked me if I wanted to dance.

I did, but not with him. I scampered back to my group of friends. We left early, shivering in our thin gowns and suits on the walk back to the car. Tiptoed heels across spurs of ice dense as concrete and smooth as glass.

No late nights, no parties, no sliver of recklessness. I set up rules to fill insecurities. My dad taught me which roads to avoid at dusk—Green Meadow Drive, 93 through the Flathead. I didn’t know Montana’s white crosses were unique to the state until I moved two hours away for college, which was two more hours of worldliness. I sipped wine from a bottle passed around a dorm room, pretending it wasn’t the first covert drink of my life, that it didn’t taste like fear and broken metal. Pretending the warmth in my belly wasn’t easing a knot I’d looped too many times to count.

I’ve tipped back plenty of wine tonight, enough to know that my teeth aren’t glinting in the blacklight. Outside of the wooden countertop and lonely-eyed man, not much else reminds me of Western bars; the DJ now bobs to hard rap over the dance floor, where neon lights thread through plumes from a fog machine. My group of friends has moved to circle one wall, but I’ve stayed back in the booth with everyone’s stuff. Someone has to watch it, I tell myself. I tell the same to one of my classmates who plops down beside me, returning to her drink.

“I just can’t keep up anymore,” she sighs. She’s one of the older students in our graduate program, retired from the military. “What are you still sitting here for? You should get out there.”

“Maybe in a bit,” I say. The DJ’s beats are too tight and high; I wish there was a heavy thump of bass that would anchor my footfalls to the floor. I wish I could shake out the tightness in my shoulders, a hesitation that’s always been there. At twenty-five, I can count on one hand the number times I’ve been out dancing—though if I work up the courage, tonight might push it onto my left hand.

My head is fuzzed enough from the wine that I haven’t bolted to the exit yet, though I’m feeling increasingly prodded that direction by the steadily-rising throb of sound. My eyes drift to the dance floor. I have an untiring and unreciprocated crush on a friend, and more often than I should, I catch myself looking in her direction. The decision to come dancing with the group tonight is feeling increasingly rash, especially if all I’m going to do is sit here and pine.

“I used to go out all the time, every base I was at,” my classmate says. She traces the joint of her ring finger. “Take my wedding ring off when feeling single, leave it on when I wanted to be left alone.”

This tugs my attention away from the fogged-up floor. I tilt my head through the dimness.

“Oh, my husband was gay,” she says, sipping her tequila sunrise. “A good friend, also in the military, and this was during Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. People started asking. So we got married. It worked out great for both of us.”

I pull my head back. “That’s really admirable of you,” I say.

She shrugs. “It was what I could do.”

I steal another glance across the room and take a drink. “It still amazes me that wasn’t so long ago,” I say. “A lot has changed. A lot hasn’t.”

The music jumps to a patter of sixteenth notes. I’m thinking of the Gay-Straight Alliance club I joined in high school—as an ally, I told myself—and one friend whose parents asked us to pray for him when he came out. Another friend read the message his mom had sent, something about choices and lifestyles and staying on the right path. We all sat squashed together on a row of couches, unsure what we could do except show support. We didn’t pray.

The fog machine sighs out another navy-tinted inversion. A couple wearing vests strung in Christmas lights strides in front of our table.

“You’re from Montana, right?” my classmate asks.

I nod. “Slower to change there.”

She takes another drink. “I had some friends, two girls, who traveled around the country a couple years back. They said of every state, Montana was the least welcoming to them.”

The acidic bite of the wine needles up my throat. “Really?” I ask.

My classmate offers a small grimace. “Yeah. They said people were pretty cold towards them once they realized.”

“I can see that,” I admit, though I won’t admit how it still hurts to hear. “There are some good places, some bad. You just have to know which to avoid.”

My head trips into a low spin, and I switch to ice water. The music has reached a crescendo too loud to talk over. I’m thinking of pride parades down Higgins Avenue. The two men beaten outside the Rhino for holding hands.

Dating was like dancing, and I only went to that bar with friends, roaming downtown on Friday nights, swallowing heartburn over a gin and tonic someone got me with a fake ID. I was convinced the flannel-decked crowd saw straight through me. They probably did, in more ways than one.

Here, far on the other side of the Mississippi, I watch eclectic bands of people rolling shoulders and shaking hips through the dim fog, and I’m reminded again that this place isn’t home, at least not the home I experienced. It’s no wonder most friends from high school scattered across the country before unhinging their closet doors. No wonder I did the same, six-hundred sagebrush miles from the Montana state line. I was traveling with a good friend, both of us listless in post-college doldrums, and an empty, windblown house in southern Oregon seemed as good as a place as any to start telling. Besides that friend, I didn’t know a soul there, and that was enough. She convinced me to go dancing a couple nights later. Beneath flashing strobe lights, I wound my fingers around an empty margarita glass. Tilted my hips, swayed my shoulders.

I open my mouth, then close it. My friends and I talk a lot about impostor syndrome, of top-notch writers who still admit to feeling like fakes. Here in this club, I feel contrived, like the wine has blushed a mask to my face. It’s slipping away fast. I feel fake among these people who have no hesitations dancing through dusk and dark.

And I feel fake among these memories, lapping back thick with dread, coming-out stories and shocks of violence in a liberal college town. The reality is I go both ways, and for convenience’s sake I could fall for a fly-fisherman and sip drinks at the Rhino with no one batting an eye. I did fall a fisherman once, though never made it past the pining part. At a keg party my junior year of college, I found a spurt of courage beneath all the fear, linked arms with him and spun to pounding bluegrass around the kitchen. Later, as the clocktower across the river counted to midnight, I sped my bike back down Higgins wearing a sober grin. Still pedaling away from that possibility, pedaling hard to a new beat through the cool spring night.

But feelings are never convenient. It took me almost a decade to understand and accept the scope of what I felt, and I crippled my adolescence burying half of those giddy heartbeats out of shame. The other half I weighted with far too much significance, proof against an otherness knotted into a sickness in my gut.

Across the dance floor, the friend who I can’t shake my feelings for bounces with the beat. I watch a moment too long, enough to knock another chip into my heart. Just friends, she’d told me when I asked. For a second I wish I could snuff out those feelings like I used to. Plaster a quick, hard wall and turn the other way, let whatever spark that still catches burn a hole of wrongdoing and not one of longing.

I finish my glass of water and tap the ice cubes into my mouth. I swallow one whole. It slips like a pearl down my throat.

I’m not sure why I’ve shot back all this alcohol tonight, whether against the pining or fear of dancing, but I hate that there’s so much looping in my core, that it takes this much to crack my inhibitions. I hate the walls home stacked, those messages of prayer locked to fault, the silence cutting into kids before they can even ask what it means to feel this way. Montana is a landscape of isolation no matter your gender or orientation. And I’m a product of those limestone gulches, of the people who trim stoicism with drink and break into recklessness like thunderheads over the plains.

Even more I regret the walls I stacked, the rigidity of my own rules that hollowed an absence of experience I can’t get back. I’ll never get it back. Maybe that’s why I’m drunk tonight, chasing a bone-dry thirst to be brash and wild and unburdened by guilt. Maybe I was afraid of alcohol for all those years because I was afraid of what it would dredge up, what a lack of control would loosen my grip on.

And if this was it—watching another woman dance—I wish I hadn’t made those rules for myself. I wish I’d gone to bars dim with Marlboro smoke, gone out with anyone, got my heart broken earlier on, learned better coping mechanisms than paralysis and flight. I wish I’d had that covert drink sooner.

I turn back to my classmate. I can still feel the ice water in my belly, how it weaves through the wine’s iron slosh, how this sharp contrast reminds me of home.

“I’m queer,” I say, which is easier when my mouth is dark with wine, when I’m anywhere but home. Over the music’s electronic pulse and shouts of laughter, it’s the loudest I’ve ever said it. There’s no room in this dark soundscape for an echo, but still I hear those words thrum and settle to the back of my head.

At the bar, the flannel-clad man has given up his scoping. I’m not going to find any bluegrass tonight; I’ve got to ease my muscles into this rhythm. It’s warm outside, but I know that back home winter just won’t quit, that people have given up shoveling snow from their driveways. Soon it’ll turn to packed ice, glossed smooth when the overcast retreats to the coast.

“I’m moving back to Montana,” I add to my classmate. I think of what she gave up marrying her friend, what he gave up, what they both gained. How they sidestepped our country’s laws in order to continue protecting it. There are different kinds of protection, I realize, some barriers we don’t recognize until the view clears on the other side.

“Who knows how it’ll go,” I say. I set my glass on the table, leaving a mouthful of cabernet, and stand. “You alright watching our stuff?”

She waves me on. “Absolutely.”

Gravity banks below me. I keep to the wall, then merge with my group of friends. They grin, opening the circle wider. I’m not feeling buoyed by inebriation or newfound inspiration, but still, I’m out on the dance floor. The tightness holds fast in my shoulders, muscles rolling up the back of my neck as if hunched under a string of inherited pearls.

It was confusion back then, deep-set denial. I picture my heart like one in cardiac arrest—not stopped, but simply quivering, electronic pulses out of synch. I couldn’t tell you what shocked it to a beat I could move to. I couldn’t tell you that it doesn’t fall back into that shaky baseline every once in a while.

I force my shoulders down, collarbones back. Chin up. I’m not sure what to do with my hands, which always seem to curl into themselves. My self-consciousness has snowballed in front of this one friend—just friends—who moves with a freedom I envy. Her smile sparks in the blacklight.

So I give up caring, leave the regret for the morning, for the lonely hours, for the months ahead when I’m deep in the mountains and find myself, strangely, missing these fast beats and bobbing heads. I remember pedaling my bike through the dark, arms spread wide, a different kind of dance, a different kind of rule broken. Below, the fog pools at my feet like rain clearing a valley. I bounce on my toes, churn it from its stalling.

I don’t know how to dance. That’s a foundation of bass-thudded quarries I never touched, and maybe I’ll never reach the underpinning, only know the high ring of its absence. But I can tell you about the roads that catch sunrise while the rest of the world lingers in twilight. I can tell you how to walk on ice, which cracks will hold and which will splinter to midnight waters. I know there’s a rhythm like a heartbeat buried in this terrain of sound. I can tell you what love does when coaxed to silence.

About the Auhor:

Sarah Capdeville received her MFA in creative writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Raised in Montana, she’s worked and traveled across Europe and the American West, including four summers as a wilderness ranger in the Rattlesnake Wilderness, her home of homes. Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Flyway, the Hopper, and Bright Bones, an anthology of contemporary Montana writing.

About All Accounts:

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Pumpkineater" by Sionnain Buckley

June 26, 2019

Pumpkineater
(a fairytale in reverse)

by Sionnain Buckley

Maybe the moral of this story is to not eat the people we love.
But certain things must follow if you let someone get close enough to take a bite.

It would’ve ended differently if it weren’t for everything that came before. I died by her hands but what did I expect—if I tasted so much like pumpkin, she was going to want to eat me. Since the day I arrived, she fed me nothing but pumpkin, so I was going to smell of it, I was going to have it on my lips. The palms of my hands had long ago turned orange. My sex had a wafting perfume of it, I’m sure. I’m sure.

She ate me gently, if you can believe such a thing. She ate me slowly—every night we made love, another piece of me swallowed. The skin between my shoulder blades, one of my little toes, a strand of hair, and another, and another. I may never have noticed, but she got to my lungs eventually, got to my heart and the tender meat of my brain. She saved the best for last, and by then it was obvious.

I noticed my eyebrows were gone one morning, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. This could’ve been the first sign, if I was looking for one. But I never much cared for my eyebrows, and she still looked at me just the same, completely unphased, completely enamored. She leaned into me, lips against my ear, and asked if I wanted pumpkin ice cream for breakfast, whispered it like we were mischievous children. We’d been awake not a minute, and already we were hungry.

She fed me because she loved me. I fed her too. Out of my own hands, letting her suck my fingers clean. We took turns cooking, trying to outdo each other with our experiments: pumpkin soup, pumpkin fritters, curried pumpkin, roasted pumpkin, pumpkin pot pie. Reaching for variation in what never varied. Each day she harvested just enough, scraping a bit more of the walls into a ceramic bowl. Eating your own house is both a convenience and a risk, but I didn’t worry. I trusted her. The shell grew thinner, the house vaguely brighter, but I welcomed the light after so long inside. I missed the sky sometimes, missed the smell of the wind.

It’s hard to know how long I was in there with her. She had no clocks, no calendars, no windows even to watch the sun. Each day bled into the next—we read books, played chess and rummy, shared stories from our childhoods and little secrets. We repainted the kitchen table at least a dozen times—with hordes of butterflies, or a seascape, or portraits of each other, blown up to garish proportions under our dinner plates. She convinced me this was all I needed, to live by an internal sense of time, to live for simple pleasure. We slept when we felt the dreams creep. We woke when our bellies grumbled or our bladders groaned or our bodies wanted.

Our bodies—soft, orange-tinted, aching for each other. We would wake from orange dreams (always orange: the sky, the people, the monsters), reach toward each other in the dark, breathe in the sweat locked in the bends of our limbs. How could I have waited so long, how could I have hesitated? If only I could go back and climb into this bed sooner—the very first night—then I could have had that many more darknesses with her. My mouth is on her and I long for the past. Her legs are between mine and I pull and I pull, if only to bring us back to before.

On the night she first invited me to bed, she made pumpkin pizza. When we finished eating, she wiped a drop of oil from my chin with her thumb and licked it. She asked me if I wanted to hear a folk song she grew up on, and it seemed to me a vulnerable thing to ask. She sang it for me, her voice wavering and scratchy. When we kissed, I told her she tasted like pumpkin. She grinned and said I did too.

There were days before that, or weeks, when she made up the couch every night, gave me her comfiest blankets, her best pillows. She gave me looks too—laughing looks, like she could read my thoughts, or like she knew I couldn’t read hers. It was my first time in a pumpkin, but not my first time getting looks like those. The ones that precede certain questions, certain carefully positioned gestures. It was not a large house. The space filled with the tension until there was nowhere to turn but toward each other.

She was a stranger. I didn’t have to trust her, but she invited me into her house, cut me slice after slice of pumpkin bread, refilled my mug of pumpkin wine, suggested I stay the night. I didn’t know how to say no, not politely, not after she’d fed me. I’d lost count of how much I’d drank, and now something about this wine made me slip my boots off under her kitchen table and suggest a game of chess. I didn’t mention I was something of an ace at the game. Just beat her five rounds in a row, and by then I wanted to stay.

The morning I found the pumpkin she was waiting for me. Or I arrived, and she was there, and she looked at me so evenly that I was convinced someone had told her I was coming this way. She squinted in the sunlight and asked if I wanted to sit and rest, asked if I was hungry. My feet were throbbing in my boots, and I could spare an hour or two, especially at midday when the sun was highest, especially if there was food on the table. So she brought me inside.

It had been about a week that I’d been traveling, southward through the marshes. I knew I had someplace to be, that my message was urgent if not dire, but I couldn’t help but be entranced by the herons, the turtles, the otters, that all scattered before my path. My boots crunched through the mud deafeningly, and I wished for lighter feet, for padded paws or wings, so I could pass silently through that place as well.

My sisters hugged me goodbye on our front step, angling the door so our mother couldn’t see. She knew I was leaving but she wanted to forget it. Food had been scarce in the town for months now—the winter stores depleted, the crops all blackened and dead. It had been decided that someone would go south to the next town to see how they fared, to ask for provisions. I volunteered, hungry as I was, and restless. Tired of watching people pray. I promised I wouldn’t come home without good news. I’d find us something to eat.

About the Author:

Sionnain Buckley is a writer and visual artist based in Boston. Her work has appeared or is slated to appear in Winter Tangerine, Wigleaf, Autostraddle, Strange Horizons, and others. Her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, and she is a 2019 Rhinebeck Resident with The Seventh Wave. She also serves as a prose editor at 3Elements Review. More of her work can be found at sionnainbuckley.com.

About All Accounts:

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "My New Roommate" by Krista Ahlberg

March 1, 2019

My New Roommate

by Krista Ahlberg

I found my new roommate on Craigslist, and right away I knew there was something different about her. I could tell as soon as she walked into the apartment, sniffing the air. She was wearing sandals even though it was December, and I watched her toes curl as she placed her feet ever so carefully, one in front of the other.

She sat on the edge of my couch and politely sipped at the water I gave her, and steam rose from the glass. I looked at her mouth and she looked back at me, and I turned away, feeling rude for staring. She answered my questions about what she was doing in the city, and where she had lived before, and what she was looking for in a living situation, and if she minded that the heat in the room didn’t work very well.

She said nonprofit, Hawaii, somewhere private, no, and not much else, her voice measured and clear in a way I knew I never could have duplicated. I envied her silences even as I babbled to fill them. I offered her the room on the spot, knowing in my parched throat that I’d regret it if I didn’t keep this woman in my life for as long as I could.

When she was gone, I saw that there was a small burn mark on the couch where she’d been sitting. I flipped the cushion.

She moved in the next week, and brought with her slippery black tarps that she put over all the furniture I’d provided for her bedroom. I never saw her sit on the couch again, or lean against the plastic countertops in the kitchen. In fact, she didn’t use the kitchen at all. I never saw her eat, but sometimes she would come in with boxes from the sushi place around the corner and pace into her room with them. Once she was carrying a plastic bag that I swear I saw a tentacle flop out of just before she closed the door.

She spoke to me infrequently, but when she did she was always full of questions about my job, or was I dating anybody, or had I seen any good shows lately—all the stuff I liked to talk about, so usually it was only after the conversation had ended and the giddy rush had left me that I realized she hadn’t said anything about herself.

I continued to gather suspicions: the hall between her bedroom and the bathroom was strewn with tiny dust-like gray pebbles, and when I picked them up they were porous and crumbled in my hand. Every day I swept them up, but every day after she took a shower and locked herself in her room, there were more, and the bathroom smelled of sulfur. The scent followed her wherever she went, and we finally had to take down the smoke alarm after it wouldn’t stop blaring whenever she stood near it.

One night, she asked me if I wanted to go clubbing and I had to google the names of clubs because neither of us knew any. There, I watched her gyrate under the flashing red and green lights, watched the way they captured the curve of her face and left the rest in darkness, her black hair whipping across her back, her legs kicking out strong and wild.

I gyrated with her; I couldn’t help it. She caught me up in the tornado of skirt and hair and sandaled feet, and I felt joy twist through me like fire, the heat pushing up and radiating out through the ends of my hair.

In the midst of a turn, she stopped, and her stillness seemed to increase the movement around her, like a whirlpool or a black hole, the last drops of water rushing down the drain, and I kept turning and stumbled into her. She grabbed me with both hands, and her fingers sizzled into my flesh and her breath tingled on my face. She said, “I’m so empty,” and I had to lean in to hear her over the music. Her lips cupped my ear and she yelled into my head and this time I heard, “I’m so hungry.”

Then she let me go, and I stumbled back, bringing my hands to my upper arms, covering where hers had been, where my skin was scorched, shiny and red in the shapes of fingers.

I watched her spin away from me, and I watched the crowd spin after, people coming close and reaching for the hem of her skirt, her trailing sleeves. Like supplicants, ready to sacrifice everything just to touch her for a single moment. I wanted to warn them not to, but I could only clutch my own arms. She raised her hands above her head and watched them coming, and I saw the blaze of her eyes, saw her tongue dart out to lick the sweat from her upper lip.

She dipped one arm down to point at a boy—sharp-chinned and round-shouldered, milky and virginal and breathing fast. He slid across the dance floor like lava over broken ground, slow and inexorable, and she curled her fingers into his hair, bringing his head up, bringing his mouth to hers.

I left then, but I heard them come in later, and the boy was laughing quietly and my roommate wasn’t saying anything at all. I crept down the hallway and stopped outside her door, listened to the shush of thrown T-shirts and the snick of a belt buckle dropping. Then there was an intake of breath and the longest sigh I’d ever heard, an exhalation that seemed to go on for minutes. The floor under my feet grew warm, and when I reached out and tested the door with the backs of my hands like they teach you to do during a fire, the wood was bright-hot. I dropped to my knees and crawled to my room, then pressed the backs of my hands to the tops of my arms, the red soreness aching between them.

I fell asleep waiting to smell smoke, to hear the floorboards splintering, to see the walls turn black with soot. When I woke up in the morning, the boy was gone, but his shoes were still lined up neatly in our entryway, and my roommate was standing there staring at them. Her skin was lush, almost glowing, and her hair seemed to have grown in the night and now reached past her hips.

She looked at me and smiled. “He must have left his shoes.”

I looked at her smile, top teeth biting her bottom lip. She leaned forward to pick up the shoes, and as she did her hair swung around and brushed the hand hanging by my side, and it flowed cool over my burned skin. She stood up and gestured toward the hallway with the shoes. “I’ll take them to the trash chute. If he left them, he clearly doesn’t want them anymore.”

“Clearly not,” I said, and smiled too. When she stepped out, I brought my hand to my mouth and felt the heat against my lips, the momentary coolness gone but her sulfur smell lingering close.

After that there was a new boy or girl every few weeks, one who disappeared into her bedroom with her and whom I never saw again. I fingered the starfish-shaped scars on my arms, which had faded to mottled pink and felt softer than skin should be, and wondered if I should kick her out. But I had just started a new job and didn’t have time to interview people again, and she never ate my food or left hair in the shower, and honestly she was the best roommate I’d ever had.

Besides, on nights when we were alone in the apartment, I’d linger outside her door on the way back from the bathroom, listening to the thick, still silence inside and wondering when it would bubble over. Wondering if she’d ever invite me in to see for myself what happened on the other side of that door, never sure if I was relieved or hurt that she didn’t, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to remove the possibility entirely.

Eventually, though, it was pretty clear she never would, and I told myself the jump of my stomach had to be relief, and stopped listening at doors. I started dating a guy I met at work who was perfectly nice and talked as much about himself as I did about me, and I told myself that the heaviness in my chest was contentment. I slept over at his house most of the time, and I stopped noticing when my roommate brought people home and what happened in the apartment when she did.

But some nights, she’d call me up and I’d meet her at the club and we’d dance, her hips twirling me around in their vortex. I’d hold my breath and wait to feel that alive thing crawling up from my insides, filling me with fire. I’d look up at her face glinting with light and shadows, and when she smiled I’d finally exhale.

About the Author:
Krista Ahlberg grew up in Colorado, spent a few years in the Midwest, and now lives in New York City, where she works in publishing and keeps her eyes peeled for everyday magic. She has stories published or forthcoming in Rose Red Review and F(r)iction.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions open May 18th and run through June 19th. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Violet" by Jennifer Tubbs

February 22, 2019

Violet

by Jennifer Tubbs

The beginning of the world was purple. When the earth was empty of people and animals, there were spirits stampeding the plains, jungles, forests, groves. The spirits fought, having nothing better to do. The winner—there is always a winner—was lord of the airy domain, where seafoam intersects sky. He—it is explicitly stated—turned his enemies into volcanoes and mountains. Their wrath is felt when they spit lava down on us or shake the ground below our feet. But, those spirits who readily accepted the sovereignty of the pneumatic god found themselves a home in the night sky, winking at each other in complicity. Historically, complicity has been rewarded.

There’s more to the story, but she struggles to remember it now. The slimy packet of human nerves and veins and arteries lying next to its former placental habitat was purple like the jacaranda trees native to her homeland. Purple, right. Now she remembers. Her mother used to tell her the old Rapa Nui creation story to calm her when she was crying. The earth was once wet all over, glorious and limpid with mucus. It was purple, holding its breath for the first human to tumble down.

The first human was the pneumatic god’s son, hurled to the earth by his father as an experiment. He lay on the rocks for forty nights, cold and alone, until his mother opened a window in the sky to look after him.

As in most stories, there was a beautiful maiden. The young man needed a companion in his empty menagerie, so the spirit god plucked a star down and sent her to his son. She traipsed the earth barefoot, looking for her love. She walked for thousands of miles unscathed, since the gods made grass and silvestres grow in her path before each step. And when she touched the grass and silvestres with her bare hands and feet, each blade and petal flew away as a butterfly or bird. This is how we came to have animals. Suddenly, the grass beneath her feet sprawled out in green tendrils, reaching up in lattices of vines to become a jungle. In the night, she lay down in the cool embrace of a banana tree and searched the stars for her people, but she recognized no one, only the halos of their backs turned toward her. She was alone.

Of course, she isn’t alone for long. Beautiful, young maidens never are. She meets the young man, naturally, and they fall in love by some celestial force foreign to themselves. This is how it goes. The mother peeking out of her pale window at night to watch over her son is what we call the moon. The father, the sun. It’s somehow comforting in its predictability. The rhythm and cadence of her mother’s voice are replaced by the hard clicks and punctuated beeps of machines. She likes to tell herself the story when she’s nervous, which she is now. She imagines herself in a banana tree, searching for her family among the stars.

The pool of liquid beneath her feels like urine, the shameful cross of youth, although she realizes it is not. They said it was amniotic fluid. Amniotic fluid, she was told, was her baby’s life support system, a protective sheath like the ozone layer around the earth. She was comforted by this thought, until she remembered she had read somewhere that the ozone layer would be gone in a couple of decades. The baby didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t screaming, which wasn’t a good sign. Still purple, new world purple, jacaranda purple. She had told herself she wouldn’t care. In the moment, she realized she did.

The night before, a chill had shot down the spine of the Andes, reverberating in the dark into Marisol’s home. In ancient times, in her corner of the world, thunder not followed by lightening was considered bad luck. Inauspicious for childbirth, especially. But Marisol wasn’t the superstitious kind.

“We were stupid,” she had told her mother. That’s what the gringos on MTV say. Their long, lean faces contort into remorse by an excessive furrowing of brows and pulling down of the lips. It had always struck Marisol as histrionic, the type of gesture that would embarrass her too much to even attempt. But, it seemed to work for the gringos, with their parents. Then again, their whole families drove BMWs and had golden retrievers, so the circumstances foreshadowed the tactic’s success for them. And the moms—the moms always wore those silver bracelets with their kids’ initials in silver, little letters and hand-painted basketballs and pompoms, reflecting their children’s hobbies. So they probably wouldn’t mind having another kid around, another metal ball for their bracelets, tinkling around all day on their fat wrists. Not like her mother.

“Except for we weren’t that stupid,” she thought. A purple bulb landed on her knee. The jacarandas were in full bloom, tossing their violet petals in the air like rice at a wedding. Jacaranda blossoms mean spring is here, mean asados, mean rolling up the thick blanket of ice spread across the dessert, mean kids playing outside, but not too far away from the watchful eyes of their grandmothers. Spring was Marisol’s favorite season, but this time around it felt lifeless, a type of roadkill that even her crazy cousin Matías wouldn’t eat.

They had used a condom. She had had to go all the way across town to Tía Rebeca’s—not the nun, of course, but the stoner—to avoid the drugstore owner’s tattling to her mother. That gossipy vieja was always sticking her nose in other people’s business, especially when it came to sex and babies. “Maybe because she isn’t getting any herself,” Marisol had thought. Her nails with the rhinestone crosses glued on click-clacked their way across allergy medicine, ipecac bottles, and off-brand Tums, winding up at the shining boxes of lubricated condoms boasting ribbed pleasure for her and tingling sensations to set your love on fire. Dueña Fran had raised an eyebrow. “I dare you,” the eyebrow had said to Marisol.

“I’ll take the Imodium D,” she had said, chickening out. “I got the runs.” Then she hopped on her bike and pedaled all the way to Rebeca’s, where she chose from about twenty different kinds of flavored, textured, colored, and glow-in-the-dark condoms.

“Why the hell do I need a neon green dick in my life, Beca?”

“It’s just for fun. You’ll see. You’re such a virgin, Sol.”

“And why do all these say 2015? Doesn’t that mean they’re bad now?”

“Whatever, do you want them or not?”

“I mean, it’s not like Los is going to buy any.”

Carlos was described by the aging tías with their hair rollers and their lacquered lips as one of those Good Boys Going Places. He had the kind of face that inspired a coddling instinct in most women, an evolutionary tic that has, surprisingly, not been weeded out yet. Maybe that was why she had chosen him. Or it could have been his eyes. They were a sturdy brown. Not caramel, not mocha, none of that bullshit. Brown. But more likely than not, it was his scar. His father had given it to him when he had caught Los taking the car for a joyride. Since then, Los never mentioned the gash on his forehead below the widow’s peak, seeming to forget the incident altogether. Now that she thought about it, Los had always been fascinated with cars, that sterile machinery that was always so off-putting to her. He worked at the shop every day. “Why do you work so much?” everyone would ask him. Ahorrando. Saving money was always the response. He was going to buy a house in the South, where people invite you in from the rain instead of robbing you in broad daylight. That’s what was said, anyway, though neither he nor Marisol knew of a world beyond the fleshy mountains to the east and the vestal salt flats in the north, where people went to die and the land gave birth to the sea.

The sex itself was painless enough, she would tell Papi later, like when they give you laughing gas at the dentist, but you can see what they’re doing to you from above, like a movie. Afterward, he had asked her if she was one of those women who didn’t come. She smiled a pageant smile and started to get dressed in the absence of a vocabulary to accurately convey her disappointment. She wasn’t sure if there were women who didn’t come, but she had always been particularly adept at her nightly ministrations, those frenetic moments after school or mass, muffling her cries with a pillow so as not to wake her brothers or her mother. When that failed, she would bite into her own flesh to keep from screaming.

During her deflowering, the boy, Carlos, had subjected her to the Alphabet treatment briefly before penetration. Marisol entertained the thought that if Spanish had had more letters, like Albanian or any of the Scandinavian languages with their numerous umlauts, it would have worked. As it was, the boy made it to the letter O, tracing the letters on her vulva before he threw in the towel. The penetration itself was clumsy at best. The squeaks emitted from their bodies seemed otherworldly in the moment, as if coming from an alien spaceship, like that old black-and-white show she and her brothers used to watch.

After she had tried seven different pregnancy tests from at least three reputable pharmacies—not including Fran’s—Marisol finally accepted that she had made a mistake. She immediately decided not to tell her mother, who was on a pilgrimage at the time. Instead, she let the secret fester inside her.

“Its teeth are starting to form,” Marisol suddenly said, leaning over to face Papi. “That’s when it starts happening. Six weeks. You can’t see them for a long time, but the stuff is under the gums.”

Papi nodded knowingly, as if she could tell what this meant. Patricia and Marisol had been friends almost since birth. They were baptized and confirmed at the same church. They bought their first bras together. Marisol didn’t tell Papi’s mother that she was gay and Papi certainly wouldn’t divulge Marisol’s latest indiscretion.

“I’m keeping it,” Marisol said. Her voice was hard. “I’m gonna name it Violet.”

Papi handed Marisol a blue popsicle, which dripped on her pants in transit and would leave a stain later. It was a small gesture, but, in doing so, she made explicit her complicity in Marisol’s plan.

“I don’t know what to do. The Internet says I need vitamins and shit. How am I supposed to get that?”

“Over there, they got all kinds of stuff like that. Vitamins, organic this and organic that, I’ve even seen organic dog food.” She grinned, savoring the ludicrousness of such a product. As she did so, she whistled through her front teeth. When she was little, her sisters used to call her Piggy Bank and tried to fit loose coins in between the gap. Papi had gotten her adult nickname, in part, from her distinctive flaite style and, in part due to her dominance in the “game.” The game in question was smuggling drugs to Gringolandia. The drugs ranged from cocaine to heroin, which Papi would never touch herself. Therein lay the moral dilemma for her, having witnessed firsthand its effects. But where there is demand, there will always be supply, she rationalized. Word had spread that Papi was the best in the business; that she was still alive suggested the rumors were accurate, at least this side of the equator.

Marisol rolled her eyes. When Papi went on and on about Gringolandia like everything was unicorns and roses, it grated on her nerves.

“What, you don’t believe me? I’ll show you. No, for real. I’ll take you with me on my next run. You’ll shit your pants.”

That night, Marisol dreamt of organic dogfood. She woke up thinking, “Dumbasses.” But now that she had decided to keep the baby, she needed a plan. The thought of spending the rest of her life with Carlos—if he even reacted well to the news—was suffocating her like the smog that crept in between the window sills, through the doorframes, jostled the dust mites, and draped itself around her like a shroud.

When she got home from school the next day, Marisol found the house empty. It must have been one of the rare occasions on which her mother had taken the boys to their soccer game and left the place to her only daughter. Marisol cracked open her math book, staring blankly as she flipped on the TV. A gringa was belly dancing, accompanied by four live tigers, in a ballroom. Gold lettering in the background read “Sweet Sixteen.” Marisol had gotten a tattoo for her sixteenth birthday. She glanced down at her thigh. Patients is a virtue. An embarrassingly drunken mistake. A cliché. At least her future kid would get a good laugh from it. “Violet, I asked you to clean your room yesterday,” she would scold. “‘Patients’ is a virtue,” Violet would say. They wouldn’t have much money, and Marisol would probably have to work two jobs, like her mother, but they would laugh and cook dinner together every night and Marisol would never force her to eat Brussels sprouts, because even she couldn’t stomach them.

Drinking pineapple juice from the jug, she read Papi’s new messages to her: hows the little nugget today? I got a little somethin for ‘em. As she wondered what the gift could be—it was too early to tell if it was a boy or a girl, so coming up with a gender-appropriate present was difficult right now—she found herself unbuttoning her jeans, conjuring up Carlos and his mechanic’s wrench. Unannounced, Papi’s hands intruded. The brevity and precision of the image startled Marisol. They were isolated from her body, as if in an invisible picture frame. Soon, but not soon enough, they were washed downstream by her consciousness. Afterward, she fell asleep. She dreamt of dancing with the white girls and their tigers, Violet bouncing up and down on her shoulders.

The air at the park smelled like street sopaipillas and ketchup, which made Marisol want to vomit. She played with her nose ring as the waited for Papi. Pulling it in and out, in and out, was comforting. It produced a familiar, dull pain that radiated from her pores. Finally, she made out Papi’s braids from a distance, bobbing toward her station on the bench.

“You go first.”

“No, you.”

Papi pulled out a thin envelope that almost certainly did not contain baby clothes or diapers or prenatal vitamins.

“I don’t want your money. We talked about this,” Marisol chided. When she opened the envelope, a single piece of paper the size of her hand slipped out. It was a one-way ticket to Miami.

“If you don’t like it, you can come right back. That’s the beauty of it. I got one for myself, too. So I can help you out. In the beginning, I mean. If you want.”

The night before, Marisol’s mother was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink as Marisol sliced tomatoes for a salad. They were going to have a nice family dinner together, something they didn’t have often enough, her mother had insisted. She skinned the potato in her hand elegantly, gouging the eyes out with force. Her mouth puckered like when she was about to say something, but second-guessed herself.

Then: “I don’t want you hanging around that tortillera anymore.”

Marisol was silent, fixated on the tomato spilling out red juice onto the linoleum floor.

“What if the boys got the wrong idea? Or the neighbors? Then word would get around to the tías and eventually your grandmother would hear about it. What if she had a stroke? You know I don’t work two jobs so you and the boys can study for nothing. Don’t you have goals? You and Carlos. He’s a good boy. He’s going places. Don’t forget that.” Her chin jerked upward, as if denoting the direction of these places he was going.

“What do you think your father sees when he looks down on you? It’s like you want to upset him.”

“How do we know he’s looking down on us?” Marisol ventured.

Her mother straightened her spine, standing at attention. The rings under her eyes shone like amethysts, a dull glow.

“Okay, Mamá. Okay,” she said. In her psychology class, she had read that lying was sometimes necessary in relationships. Or maybe she had invented that, but it seemed necessary in that moment. She wiped at the red stain on the floor. Her mother went back to scalping the potatoes.

The next day was a branding iron pushed down on her skull. The students were marching on Alameda as they always did in the summer, when they had nothing better to do. She liked to hear them chant, even when it was the trite un pueblo unido jamás será vencido. She was rarely nationalistic, but, she admitted to herself, those words lit a flame in her gut. This time they were protesting against the pension system, tomorrow it would be for free college education. That’s how youth is, Marisol thought. All helter-skelter, like that song. She, however, was resolute. Once she had made up her mind, that was it.

This time, Papi was waiting for her under their tree. Wayward bulbs floated down to rest on her jeans. Marisol liked the way she made no effort to brush them off, but collected them on her lap. They sat in silence as the protestors shouted their demands into the void. Someone smashed a streetlight. He or she was wearing a black bandana and a full gasmask. Soon the cops would come and clear out the area. They would bring with them the dogs, the tanks, the guanacos spitting chemical water. For now, though, it was just the two of them eating popsicles and the kids with their spray cans.

Marisol noticed Papi’s hand on her knee, toying with the petals of a jacaranda blossom. Instead of shrinking away, Marisol reached for the blossom, accidently separating the stamen from the petals. She instantly felt ashamed at such a violent act, even though the flower had clearly been beyond resuscitation for quite some time and, by the time it had reached her knee from its perch in the tree, had already begun to wither.

Somewhere in the distance the tanks could be heard, pulling onto the main street. Their symphony of metallic screeches rattled around in Marisol’s ear, making it hard for her to hear what Papi was saying. The hand slid upward. It was a pendulum, starting at the hard knob of her knee, working its way up to the crease in her jeans where the pubis meets the thigh. Marisol moved her own hand to intercede Papi’s wandering one. But, as in most stories, she eventually gave up, allowing the rogue fingers to complete their circuit.

Papi’s hands were rough, almost like Los’s, inexplicably so, since she did no manual labor that Marisol could think of. She had always been attracted to his hands, the way the cars had transformed them. Maybe it was the process itself, the daily hardening of calluses, the resilience of flesh that fascinated her. She would tell him tonight, she decided. He would be bewildered and his eyes would beg for reassurance, would ask for something to hold on to. She would stroke his hair, nuzzling him on her breast like a baby, and say, “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

Papi’s middle finger was enlarging its territory, centimeter by centimeter. The thought crossed her mind that she could have imagined it was a man’s hand, but she did not. From the corner of her eye, Marisol spotted the tanks and trucks making their way toward the protestors. Then the guanacos finally made an appearance, the cannons lifted on their haunches, pointed at the kids and the girls in the grass. When the cascades of toxic chemicals rained down, splashing Marisol and Papi from the distance, they stood up. They fled the scene at a leisurely pace that could be likened to a stroll, not wanting to grant the cops the satisfaction. They held hands, like when they had gone to protests together years ago, when they were even younger and dumber. The leaders of the protest had all dispersed by now, leaving only their devotees. The young boy with the gasmask and bandana was being arrested. A girl with spikey, pink hair was being frisked. A couple was setting something on fire, maybe a Molotov cocktail, or maybe some trash. They were a hearty breed, the ones that remained. Whether they were brave or stupid was undiscernible from this angle, but Marisol silently conferred upon them her approval.

The air between the two was thick with tear gas. They hadn’t brought lemons with them, so they cried. The type of tear gas used in their country was outlawed internationally due to its carcinogenic effects, but this had, apparently, only made the commanding officers fonder of it. The tears came out involuntarily at first, sucked out of their ducts as if by a vacuum. Then, they started sneaking up out of the pits of the girls’ consciousness, making their way to the surface in sobs. Marisol vomited. It was then that she and Papi realized what the hand’s explorations had meant. They implicitly felt as if some sort of agreement had been reached, a kind of contract had been signed between the two of them. While they couldn’t list all the clauses of such a contract, they felt that it bound them in a significant way. A shared cosmology was beginning to form between them, swirling and diving in and out of their musculatures, spindling into veins and arteries, and, lastly, their cuticles. It would have been stupid to have called this “love.” It was, rather, the creation of a new world.

One of them turned to the other and said, “Let’s just go home.”

Whether or not any time has elapsed since this event is irrelevant. We will find them in the slice of night that precedes the dawn. Historically, this is the witching hour. Scientifically, it has been proven that more deaths, births, and conceptions occur at this hour than at any other time during the day. It will be pitch black when we see them next, illuminated by a nearby dome. The desert will be spread out before them, at once both alien and familiar. It will be purple, like a newborn. In this mirage unfurling before our eyes, so many millennia are collapsed into a tube, a pendant. A sliver of moon will cut through the black like a needle in a pincushion, a window. This time, the air hangs low in the sky. The girls will gulp up the night, knowing it will be their last in this land of volcanoes.

“You sure about this?” one of them will ask.

The other girl won’t answer. Instead, she will kiss the rosary her mother gave her. She will inhale deeply and start walking toward the terminal.

About the Author:

Jennifer Tubbs's stories hark back to her experiences growing up as a vocal vegetarian in cattle country, a budding Buddhist in the land of Baptists, and a closeted bisexual smack-dab in the middle of the giant, Texas-shaped buckle of the Bible Belt. Her outsider’s perspective has had led her to write about women who occupy the status of “Other” as a lens into unseen and overlooked worlds. She is currently working on a novel that takes place in her hometown.

About All Accounts:

All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions open May 18th and run through June 19th. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Submissions open June 1, and wow—a print anthology is on the way!

May 19, 2018

Image from: Visual Response to Federico García Lorca by Crystal Hartman — Image from: Visual Response to Federico García Lorca by Crystal Hartman

All Accounts & Mixture:
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers and Artists

Since the summer of 2014, CutBank's All Accounts and Mixture has showcased poetry, prose, visual art, reviews, and interviews in a forum for LGBTQ writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

This summer, CutBank will expand on this tradition by not only publishing our contributors' work online but also by collecting this year's work with all previous All Accounts pieces in a five-year print anthology!

Submit your best, and become a part of this new collection!

Submissions open June 1st through July 1st via our Submittable page. You'll find full guidelines there, and, as always, there will be no submission fee.

Revisit all of last summer's amazing writers here!

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "The Birth of Venus, c. 1486" by Hadley Griggs

October 10, 2017

The Birth of Venus, c. 1486

by Hadley Griggs

The autumn after I broke up with my boyfriend, I cut my hair. Ropes of curls dropping to the floor, strings of protein I would never see again. Cut hair and it falls softly, surrendering without feeling like you’ve cut off a body part, but burn it and it still smells like burning flesh. When my mom was a teenager working at McDonald’s, her hair was always sticky with french-fry grease. A coworker with a lighter got too close—singe hair and it smells like singed woman. Even here, ocean-side, a candle held to the tips of Aphrodite’s hair lights up like a fuse, wraps through her fingers and around her back and leaves her crowned in flesh-smelling flames. Are you sure? the stylist asked me, her acrylic nails curving over the grips of her scissors. It’s so pretty long. Later, my old boyfriend would send me photos, always the same: his open palm, a solitary bobby pin. Found this in the carpet. Or, This one up against the floorboard. I hadn’t touched a bobby pin in months, and my hair now tickled the bone at the top of my spine—and here, does Aphrodite crave this feeling, the hairs wisping down below her collarbone, down between her thighs? On autumn Saturday nights, the check-out girl at my grocery store has a dark, messy braid that hangs over her shoulder. It casts shadows on her neck, makes her jaw look like a crisp country road. I hand her my crumpled bills and think maybe I miss the feeling of a braid draped over my own shoulder, so that I could say I too, I too, I too. And on your own quiet nights, Aphrodite, reclining nude on the beach, do you look out at the water, remember the drops of blood and the sea foam, the way the red marbled in the bubbles like the afterbirth, or like needlework on Northern drapes, or like red hair tangled—permanently, painfully—among the rocks and shells and fish spines?

About the Author:
Hadley Griggs just graduated in English and likes to write stories about sad people. This is her first publication out of college. She's also a level 14 rogue in Dungeons & Dragons.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose from Kat Williams

October 8, 2017

Mirror || Man

by Kat Williams

Masculinity is fragile, or so I’ve heard.

My boyfriend and I speak of our attractions to athletes. Men. Which shortstop has the best ass? Which college cornerback’s facial hair is most appealing? I’m into kickers. He likes outfielders. He wonders out of aspiration, out of desire to become. He thinks my perspective is different.

Do you think my perspective is different?

My sister and I used to shoot hoopsin our mom’s driveway. My sister cooperated because I forced her to. I played as Marcus Fizer, Iowa State’s 6’8’’ 265 lb star small forward. I loved that a man six feet eight inches tall could have the word “small” in his position’s name. I loved the dark-haired clefts of his muscled armpits and his smooth-shaven head. I wore his kids’ replica jersey one size too big, number 5 in cardinal and gold announced on my stomach instead of my chest. My sister fed me the ball as I drove to the basket and turned a 180, heaving the shot backwards over my head. Sometimes I imagined so hard that I could feel the cold metal of the rim against my fingertips. My sister hated basketball, but she got pretty good at chest passes.

When Fizer got picked in the first round of the 2000 NBA draft, I cried in front of my dad’s 18 -inch television, TNT coming in fuzzy and inaudible. My dad asked if I was crying and I said no. At school, I said I wanted to be in the WNBA when I grew up, but I was lying. I wanted to play for the Chicago Bulls.

He goes to the gym now. My boyfriend, I mean. He didn’t work out before he started dating me. He now knows what traps are, can distinguish between front and rear delts. I do barbell work--deadlifts, cleans, bench presses with endless varied grips--in order cling to a superior sort of masculinity. But the proof is in the body: he lays claim to a chiseled V of oblique, his pectorals have swelled convex. My pecs have grown, too, but they remain obscured by breast tissue. I am soft and curved still, no abdominal muscles in sight.

Which NBA player’s dick is the biggest, do you think? I hate to admit I’m a size queen. What do you call a man concerned with up-and-out-sizing other men’s dicks? A man, I suppose.

I played sports when I was a child because athletic proficiency gave me access to boys and their bodies. I liked to watch the tendons stretch behind their knees as we sucked down Capri Suns on the soccer field sidelines. Ethan’s were the most prominent, though Matt M’s came in close second. Tyler had egg-like muscles that protruded from the outer edges of his legs just above the knee. At my mom’s house after the games, I would rotate my hips in the mirror, searching for those tendons. I never found them. I found flesh--so much fat, so much skin.

There were boys whose bodies looked as soft as mine, or even softer. Some of them were good at flag football. I didn’t talk to them, didn’t stare. Their bodies were of no use to me.

The placement of a body before a mirror is a plea for self-recognition, and neither the self in front of the mirror nor the self reflected in it are stable. The difference is that the self in the mirror is allowed to be a body, nothing more. Would I be satisfied with leaner thighs and apenis, hulkish traps and ham-hocked, vascular forearms? Me, no. But mirror-me? Perhaps.

My favorite NBA player, once Fizer disappeared into the benches, was Allen Iverson. Every time he committed an inexcusable act, my idolatry of him expanded unchecked. After I read in Sports Illustrated that he went to prison at 17 for (allegedly) breaking a chair over a woman’s body in a bowling alley, I asked for his special edition MVP jersey for Christmas.

My dad worked as a bouncer when he retired from his trucking career and he taught me about the intricacies of bar fights. Never get into a fight over a woman, he told me. The stakes are too high. But sports and politics are fair game. He showed me how to put a bigger man in a choke hold, how to leverage against someone much stronger. I don’t know why I’m showing you this, he laughed. You’ll never have to use it.

I don’t deny that my obsession with athletic men’s bodies is informed by a particular fetishization of the athletic black body. It wasn’t just professional basketball. I wanted to be Tyson, Holyfield, and Mayweather. I wanted a camera to watch me throw an uppercut against another black man’s jaw. Even of the boys on the soccer field with me, the ones I admired most were black.

I didn’t want to be a black man or a black boy. I wanted to be an overworked, televised black body. I wanted a crowd to roar at the exposure of my muscles, my skill, my masculinity.

Kevin Love possesses the NBA’s one white body that has ever transfixed me, though in a wholly different way. I stare at before and after shots of his 30-pound weight loss from the ESPN Body Issue. I run my eyes like fingertips over the places where his skin hugs bone and muscle tightly, the hum of anIT band like a violin string, the hollows beginning to form beneath his cheeks. The shoot’s lighting is meant to highlight every shadow of striation. I look at these photos and I see my reflection as it was in the days before I checked myself into treatment: hungry and wanting, but so satisfied with the degree of want I had achieved.

My senior year of high school, I told my dad I applied to five Ivy League schools and he asked if I had heard about work available on fishing boats in Alaska. I think you’d be good at that, he said. Six years later, I told him I had a boyfriend, my first he ever knew of. He made the requisite joke about grabbing his shotgun, but then relented. I guess if this boy needs lesson learning, you’ll wring his neck yourself.

I measure masculinity’s toxicity by the inches of my imagined dick. A tape measure monitors the circumference of my reality-bound chest and biceps. A woman in a white jacket with a pencil through her hair once measured the length of my cervical canal in centimeters to make sure the IUD would fit. Good news, she said. Yours is plenty long. I wish I had been more satisfied to hear this.

He told me he always wanted two daughters, that my sister and I were the outcome he’d hoped for. My mom said he was lying, that during her first pregnancy he had hoped for a son.

I am afraid of how easily I can imagine adapting to life as a man. I am good at interrupting people, especially women. I love to forget my privilege and feel self-righteously wounded when I am criticized. I once sat with my knees widely splayed at a funeral, back hunched with elbows planted on thighs. My sister pressed her knee against mine and whispered, You’re taking up way too much space.

But wouldn’t this apply to life as a cisgender heterosexual man, not the trans man I could be? Oh. Did you think we were dealing in realities, actual bodily earth-bound possibilities? I’m sorry to have misled you.

Wait, I take that back. A man would not be sorry.

At the beginning of high school, I was into skater boys. They had that don’t-give-a-fuck swagger I couldn’t pull off, but they also had bodies marked by lanky sinew, narrow shoulders and streamlined calves. Their bodies never showed in the weight room, where a series of social studies teachers criticized my hang cleans and told me to keep eating, eating, eating. Our school’s state champion shotputter would graduate soon and the coaches wanted me to catch up. But she was 6’2’’, her ass wider than my shoulders. She could bench press two of me. She was black, if you were wondering. We all knew I would never be her.

That weight room, like most weight rooms, was lined with mirrors. The mirrors covered three walls, the fourth wall a floor-to-ceiling window. Through the window I watched the skater boys pop easy ollies and fall off of the building’s entry rails, their oversized t-shirts billowing away from their chests, the points of their knees slicing open their faded black jeans, the air. I lifted a barbell over my head a prescribed number of times and dropped it to the padded floor. Face the mirror, a coach would call to me, and bring your shoulders to your ears.

I always expect a dropped barbell to clang louder than it does.

The simplest way for an assigned-at-birth female to acquire what will be perceived as a man’s body is to become smaller. That is how you lose your hips, bring your waist-to-bust ratio closer to one. The other option is to gain muscle. A lot of it. But genetics govern the results of the second option far more than the first. And even then, mirrors make promises they can’t keep.

The mind is not the same as the body, is it? But without the mind, a body in the mirror can’t be perceived. So the mirror self does not exist--the reflection as existence is an impossibility. Mind, body, mirror: they get in the way of each other’s understanding.

In Laramie, Wyoming, I enter myself in an amateur boxing match held at the Cowboy Saloon. Men in socks and underwear wait to be weighed near the bar’s back wall. There are enough of them for eight or nine bouts. I assume that if another woman does show up, our fight will be first, a warmup for the crowd. When I sign my name on the injury waiver, though, the fight’s organizer claps with excitement. There’s one other girl who wants to fight tonight, he says. You’ll go last. Give everyone something sexy to look forward to.

The bar fills to capacity even though they’re not allowing alcohol. I watch inexperienced bantamweights zip around each other, avoiding, neither of them throwing a punch. I watch one man clad in nothing but swim trunks take a single tepid blow to the jaw and fall over, out cold. When my bout begins, my opponent doesn’t tap the glove I offer and charges me instead, hooking her elbow around my head and throwing me to the ground like we’re in an octagon instead of a smaller-than-regulation square. The ref gives her a warning. In the third round, I work her into the corner and punch her headgear-padded temples until she’s no longer defending herself, slack against the ropes but still standing, and the ref calls a technical knockout. The crowd goes wild. I had them on my side the whole time.

On my way out, men I’ve never seen before and never will again stop me to say things like Way to take that cunt out and You gave the bitch the beating she deserved. I shake their hands or dap their fists and say, Thank you.

Is it too much to want, to want to watch a very straight white woman in red lipstick and a tight black dress choke on my very real black cock?

I am always wanting too much, and wanting the wrong thing entirely.

About the Author:
Kat Williams is a trashsexual dog mom and writer of essays and short stories. They lived two years in Wyoming for the sake of art and lived to tell the tale.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Two New Poems from R. Flowers Rivera

October 7, 2017

Homeplace

Past tense: clear dusks I remember a feeling, an image, grit in the eye.
A place embedded like a splinter I can’t quite reach. Grove Hill, a voice
buried within that refuses to answer back. All my life, in any place,
for no reason, my grandfather’s 280 acres call out my name. Free and clear.
Sister Gary, Gay, Gaynette. But all those stale breaths have gone somewhere
else. Cool dirt, open graves. I have outlived them all. My recollections
remain imperfect as I tell and re-tell the tales. As they are—or were
—not necessarily as I would’ve chosen them. A people without luster,
napworn yet proud. Unlearned, but not ignorant. The Grove Hill of memory
has plum-flowered chinaberry trees festooning the fence-line, just off
Highway 43. It’s still blooming, it still holds last year’s ornaments. Birds
scatter the golden berries everywhere. I know I’m nearing home. Drought.
We endured difficult times, growing from that hard, red clay. I’m still here.
Just to be clear, being hot and humid ain’t suffering. All grief is not death.

Gulf of Mexico, 1969

after Hurricane Camille

Don’t
tell me
about rapidly forming
perfect storms,
about a kiss
that can transport you
through the blandness
of living. I am that
with him. But
I opened the egret
feathers he brought
as a gift. And I knew
they required
the wholesale destruction
of the nest.
I see now
how my date’s
idea of beauty,
of perfection
will require
nothing less than
my death. Only then
he won’t be satisfied
because I won’t be
here to comfort him
in his grief.

About the Author:
R. Flowers Rivera is a Mississippi native who now lives in McKinney, Texas. Her second collection of poetry, Heathen, was released in February 2015. It was selected as the winner of the 2015 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award as well as the 2016 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award. Rivera's debut collection of poetry, Troubling Accents), received a nomination from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and was selected by the Texas Association of Authors as its 2014 Poetry Book of the Year. It was published by Xavier Review Press in July 2013. Dr. Rivera has an Ph.D. from Binghamton University, an M.A. from Hollins University, an M.S. from Georgia State University, and a B.S. from The University of Georgia. She is a guest lecturer in creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The Namesake

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Shut Set

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Self-Portrait as Cedar Chest

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Medellín

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Vow

My Crimes

Ribbons and Elastic

Sensibilities

Flowerbed ♥ Boot

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What Happens Next

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Fragments for a Triptych

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Mermaiding

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Skepticism: Five Demonstrations

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Leave a Trace

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Before the Horses

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Places to Avoid at Dusk

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Pumpkineater(a fairytale in reverse)

My New Roommate

Violet

All Accounts & Mixture:A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers and Artists

Submit your best, and become a part of this new collection!

The Birth of Venus, c. 1486

Mirror || Man

Homeplace

Gulf of Mexico, 1969

Pumpkineater
(a fairytale in reverse)

All Accounts & Mixture:
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers and Artists