anmly_mpusod – Page 61

Derek Berry

black out

Not for the first time, limbs loosen into slingshot. Meaning blurs becomes reckless hum disguised as courage. Too much champagne sparkle, glitterglitzed like jeweled bits of a bottle broken last night while dancing, spilled in the afternoon. Later, I trace the dirt abacus + a boy unstitches the drunk regret buried in my spine. I mimic the pastoral aubade, sob for morning’s sharp sudden light. I am nothing but animal sounds, desperate whetstone scrape + joltblue praisesong. Birdchild crumpled in the grass. Body an archive for the small broken + alive. Soft touch becomes electric when boozebleared, like a dark bedroom bled of lust. A mouse scurries across the floor, finds refuge in the trampling feet of dancing boys, who still each other’s quaking with touch, nostalgic for the next moment alive. In a small house, I cannot feel anything, like my spine’s become a snake’s coil, like my wretched mouth has finally emptied of words.

Not for the first time, limbs loosen into slingshot. Meaning blurs becomes reckless hum disguised as courage. Too much champagne sparkle, glitter-glitzed like jeweled bits of a bottle broken last night while dancing, spilled in the afternoon. Later, I trace the dirt abacus + a boy unstitches the drunk regret buried in my spine. I mimic the pastoral aubade, sob for morning’s sharp sudden light. I am nothing but animal sounds, desperate whetstone scrape + joltblue praisesong. Bird-child crumpled in the grass. Body an archive for the small broken + alive. Soft touch becomes electric when booze-bleared, like a dark bedroom bled of lust. A mouse scurries across the floor, finds refuge in the trampling feet of dancing boys, who still each other’s quaking with touch, nostalgic for the next moment alive. In a small house, I cannot feel anything, like my spine’s become a snake’s coil, like my wretched mouth has finally emptied of words.

aubade in omelas

a bee lands on the windowsill,
lazy stumbles into the bedroom where we sleep.
i allow the bee to land on my nose
as if i have never heard of stingers.

i flip over, grasp the cell phone resting
on the desk with someone else’s
severed hand. my mouth slobbers honey & you
wake with a throat swarming
with wasps.

it is possible, yes, the minerals in the cell phone
were harvested from a starved earth
by hands scarred by conflict.
& yet when i wake to tweet
a photo of a dog dressed as a lobster,
i do not think about this.
every day you mourn
tame as a forgotten anarchy
the sin gargled tequila-pungent.

it is possible, yes,
every joy is honey & blood.

i pick up the phone, thumbs-up
a meme. laugh react without laughing.
& a mother collapses at the border of town, her child
plucked from her hands.
the child, in a basement,
loses his first tooth.

the dirt will crack & swallow us
but only through small violences,
like slapping a mosquito mid-bloodsnack
leaving behind the messy remnant smear on your bare thigh.
what an inconvenience to consider its minor life,
to scrape its guts from skin, to return
to mundanity & forget.

i trace the warmth of you,
happy to live here, here
where honey is abundant.
this is a hard grace,
how we forget so easily the origin of salt in the human body,
how the sun rises quick & brings with it a red, red sky,
the horizon splitting open gorgeous like a knifed neck.

grief habit

there’s a brief barter with each bottle,
a simple equation tilting toward vice.
choose joy, the unwarm neck
begging for a mouth. choose
tonight, tomorrow a slot machine promising
only uncertainty. it is good to feel good,
indulge in a moment’s mercurial luminescence.

even the cancer ward does not ruin
your taste for cigarettes.
even your father’s surgery does not discourage
your sugar feast.
as your body pulses in revolt, you push
another pill past cobblestone teeth.

at your aunt’s funeral, her mother
buries the body in the backyard.
her brother-in-law has crafted
the casket himself.
red faces hover, a grief mob
carrying torches wicked with whiskey.

the drink killed her, they whisper,
this woman who bloomed alive
when blood-monstered,
wedding dance dust storm,
loud-laughed patron saint of pleasure.

graveside, you teeter
tipsy.
flask holstered to hip.
wear a habit. pray
to what cannot save you.
learn first booze-loosed lucidity.
here, see clearly how joy
frays, how an overflowing cup can drown.

behind the barn, choose yourself again.
let the gutwarm lick your brainstem.
call this self care, how you barter
for another moment underwater, then
join the mourners.
take turns tossing handfuls of dirt.

Derek Berry is the author of the novel “Heathens & Liars of Lickskillet County” & the forthcoming poetry chapbook “Glitter Husk.” They are the recipient of the Emrys Poetry Prize & Broad River Prize for Prose, among other honors. Their recent work has appeared in Yemassee, Beloit Poetry Journal, Raleigh Review, Gigantic Sequins, Taco Bell Quarterly, & elsewhere. They live in Aiken, South Carolina, where they teach creative writing to children & work in Cold War historic archives. Their work can be found at derekberrywriter.com

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Hussain Ahmed

Satellite Phone Call to Girls that were Once Sand Miners

Without having to lose their tongues to gravity
in a pond of brown water, I see them wash mounds of earth

until they found Coltan. In the beginning was a pond,
shallow—but it would be enough for baptism.

their legs ankle-deep in mud,
this is how they build a dam to keep their homes from burning,

but end up breeding mosquitoes in the water.
our homes are rings of minerals,

we become what we walk upon. so everything ends where it begins,
mama had been sick for months,

but she complains the flowers in her body are dying without the sun.
anytime she sleeps with the lights on, she wakes up with smiles on her lips.

I am my mother with no flower to remediate the pains of losing her lovers to the war.
mama begged that I don’t dig deeper than my knee,

she tells me stories about her childhood,
when the only time she dug the ground was to bury kernelled seeds of sunflowers.

Satellite Phone Call to the Tourists in the Train Station

there are a thousand ways to make fire, because the sea is receding
back into its skeleton—each day, it becomes farther from us.

how often do you dream of home when it begins to burn?
we supplicate to the sun to dry out our skin until it turns fireproof.

the branches of what grows on the train tracks when it rains
are curved arrowheads—shaped like cactuses. it colors are the remains

of the blood that stains the ground before the rains.
I was born few days before a giant fire in Kaduna,

it is safe to say I was bred for falconry; we are always ready for flight.
in the direction of gabas, we journeyed until we find other tourists.

the train station is a purgatory of hope, we come here often
to tell ourselves of what we missed about our countries.

the cemetery and the train station have this in common; both have the incisions of the past
that refused our memory a flicker of solitude.

we left home in search of a name and became tourists of borders,
no matter how unsafe home is, I won’t identify as an alien.

Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian writer and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

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Abbigail Baldys

[1115]

from this bed the city
waits                on me half-awake                       (human suit!)                             watching
                                                                                                                                       the window washers saddle up high
                                                                                                                                       above river’s magenta
awnings
wavy    heat
melodramatic vista                          straight buildings stand far out

                                                                                                              of the water held
                                                                                                              in my hand

                                                                                                              every view’s a hospital

                                                                                                              i have been too

                                                                                                              honest about looking
he can’t find my veins

i was certain these clanking machines

the antiseptic
the sutures
the cytosine

[1128]

exhausted paradigms work, etc.

government takes it loans, etc.

                                                                                                 have not showered
                                                                                                 one tall wall      etches Monday caffeine
                                                                                                 a glass house (re-upped)

watching earlier: gravitational waves?
dark matter?

going to be late if i continue lifting my skin with the safety pin i recognize this i continue
lifting the safety

centifolia

in the garden i tell you
the old
roses were made
to gather
scent until scent
spat back wire.

the carnivorous pitcher
plant sways around
its prism. a green
frog clings
to the lip.
we both wonder.

noon’s target twitches on
our chins then
a host of cool
smoke. we see
ourselves tired of
bodies, warm shells—

we are cruel to the succulent
who grows as
a rock
performs
(safer than
itself).
outside the fence
a leaf tings
its cymbal. we
read the lines but still
can’t keep
the trail.
we know we won’t
be like other
makers, going far
in their borders
with nothing
sharp to say.

Abbigail Baldys is an interdisciplinary artist. She earned her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work has appeared in 491 Magazine, Reality Beach, Three Rivers Review, Collision, and elsewhere. You can find her ignoring contact cement in South Williamsport, PA.

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Rebekah Morris

Life Expectancies

We all consist of genes trekking through our provisional carcasses like cars rambling along a freeway. The genes are like coded directions; they are the words written inside us. They are branded into us like a ranch owner brands his cattle. We live with these genes ruling us everyday, but remain blind to their jurisdiction.

Chromosome seven is inverted: you have a lobster claw-hand where a normal hand could have been, and a cleft where your ghost middle finger isn’t. Chromosome eight is rearranged: you have excessive hair on the shoulders, face, and ears. The “Werewolf Disease” has come out to play. The LMNA (Lamin AC) gene mutates, and your body grows at an alarming rate. It is called Progeria. You have about thirteen birthdays ahead of you.

In college I observed a fly lab in the biology floor of the science building, where I had never been before as an English major. The room and floor were both white, the room was smaller than I assumed it would be, and the twenty students crammed in and acted like flies themselves as they roamed from microscope to notebook to sink to cabinet to table. The fly lab’s purpose was to generate mutations through breeding. The students were supposed to find the dominant gene and multiply it. I thought the smell would dissipate after my nose inhaled the sterile formaldehyde, but every time I walked into the room my nose told me to walk back out. Every breath in was a gust of sterilization, or the maggot food necessary for amplifying genes.

Their eyes are white. The students expose the flies to X-ray machines to create this white-eye mutation. Once the students succeeded, the next assignment was to create as many white eyes as possible.

There are more than four hundred breeds of dogs in the world. It’s not enough though. We breed dogs to create mixes that will benefit just as we have evolved the iPhone from three to X. Do you want a non-shedding labrador? Maybe you want a smaller version of a Saint Bernard? Or the loyalty of a German shepherd mixed with the cuteness of a golden retriever?

We craft fashionable dogs, but at a cost. Dogs that are susceptible to eye problems are bred with dogs that are inclined to have hip dysplasia. The puppies are prone to have both. Bigger dogs are bred to be even bigger, and they lose years off their life expectancy. Golden retrievers on average live twelve years, same as the poodle. But goldendoodles live ten years.

Hybrid animals are the result of interbreeding between two animals of a different unit or taxa. Ligers are built from tigers and lions. Zorses are generated from horses and zebras. Zeedonks are fabricated from zebras and donkeys. While these animals captivate, and are even more exotic than the normal tigers, lions, and zebras, most of them don’t survive past adolescence. In the rare case that they do transcend puberty and reach adulthood, they often can’t produce their own babies.

You find out you are a carrier for cystic fibrosis, and so is your spouse. Cystic fibrosis is a hereditary disease where thick mucus forms and affects the lungs and digestive system. There is no cure, and while many learn to live with it, the average life span is shorter than a normal human.

A dream of yours is to have a child. A cute, bundled-up, fat baby boy wearing blue to match his blue eyes, perhaps. But you and your spouse are both carriers of a hereditary disease. Are you willing to pass that gene along?

Science is used for discovery, to find developments that will benefit us. We experiment to find for x, whatever x may be. We found out bats use echolocation to navigate after cutting their eyeballs out and deafening their ears. An arthritis drug was safe for monkeys but harmful for humans. Mice, rats, bird, and reptiles are exempted from the minimal protection law under the animal welfare act. They go uncounted.

On the last day of my fly lab observation I glanced across the room and saw a lone surviving fly make its way toward the window, trying to escape to freedom. Someone walked in front of me, the fly was out of sight, and my eyes strained but I couldn’t find the buzzing black dot.

A fruit fly in the wild lives forty to fifty days. In that white room, the flies faced death on day sixteen.

Rebekah Morris lives in the midwest. She is currently pursuing her MFA in nonfiction at Goucher College, and works for a propane company to feed her cats and sustain her library. Her work has been featured in Make MN.

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Elizabeth Morton

How to Tame a Bleeder

The blood made a smile—an impudent rictus of parabola set on the Formica. The blood was a Thursday. The blood said Let’s go to the leisure centre or How about we see the latest Mamma Mia film. The blood preferred apples over nectarines. The blood liked a good clean murder mystery, would rather dog-ear a book than split a spine. The blood would like two sugars in her coffee, thank you kindly. The blood likes chop suey over chow mein, and would rather you didn’t stack the dishwasher, because the blood will do it later. Go and watch the telly, said the blood. Change the channel if you like.

I guess that’s why I was watching Jeremy Kyle when the Council drainage consultant knocked at the door. The blood and I stayed very quiet. We put the telly on mute, and watched vexed Mancunians gesticulate at each other. The drainage consultant stood at the door for a while, adjusting his name brooch and clicking his biro. He would be subpoenaed, later, by a Crown Prosecutor. Was the television on or off, he would be asked, but, for the time being, the blood grinned, and I watched the panel van reverse back up the driveway, apprehended by my external camera. In court, they would play nine hours of the spooling footage. The jurors would consider each frame earnestly, their rectums nearing prolapse with the sheer solemnity. The blood had gone to lurk on swabs and transport tubes and drying boxes. It was a lonely feeling.

The blood was blood group O-. The blood was a philanthropist. The blood baked lolly cake for school fundraisers, and made lamingtons for the Hospice’s “Last Supper” programme. The blood was a serial giver. The prosecution would ask me why I waited —all that while, bunked down with the blood, overdue library books, and an axolotl in a green-rimmed tank. Why did I wait with the blood under my fingernails, the blood on the lanyard I wore over my dressing-gown, the blood worked into the crook of my elbow? I guess it was love, I’d say. I guess it was my turn to give back. My blood group is AB+. I’m a barnacle, a lamprey, a deep sea sponge. Suck-it-up, buttercup, folks would say, and yes yes I did.

The day the blood arrived was humid as Cambodia. What do you remember, the prosecution would say. I could see the Norfolk pine trees tussling on the beachfront. I could see a grunge of dogs. Salt teeth. Grit eyes. I remember it was the day Prince carked it. I remember the elevator at the local mall malfunctioned, and we thumped up the stairwell swinging supermarket bags. I remember it was we, and not me and the blood. We, in the kitchen. We, carrying laundry baskets. We, mopping the patio mosaic like it was okay. There was no gore in the grouting, no erythrocytes bunging up the fine spaces between one tile and the next. What do you remember, said the prosecution, and I said All of it.

I sat with the blood for eight days. I became a couch, a chair, the stoop of a table. The axolotl moved so slowly, in its tankweed. Locusts amassed on windowsills. The Norfolk pine treetops played out Punch and Judy, through the panes. Coupon brochures and lawn mowing flyers clogged the letterbox. The blood browned on the Formica. I picked at it with my thumbnail—so close to requited love.

When the sixth juror picked at his left nostril I could feel my blood boil. When the prosecution leaned over his pew and asked Did you not have better things to do on that 21 April 2016? my blood ran cold; my heart thumped in the cleft my tonsils made. I rolled up my shirt sleeves, my armskin a shock of red grooves, like weatherboard. It was a happy home, I said. We had a magnolia tree in the yard, an axolotl, and red cedar cladding. I held my arms over my head. A juror unfurled a toffee from its wrapping, and sucked. The blood was Exhibit E. The blood tightened on the synthetic swabs, like a fist. The blood was premeditated, and knew how to swing a breadknife. The blood loved me the way I loved myself. The blood had insight, and when the blood was read the Miranda Rights, the blood smiled patiently like a small god.

This is like getting plasma from a stone, said the lawyer, looking out the courthouse window at the yellow afternoon light falling on a park rotunda. He would buy sushi with pickled ginger on his route home; he would take his old lady a bushel of oranges; he would walk the dog in small circles about the carpark. The moon would rise, the alley cats would mewl for metalwire, rodents and everything that bleeds.

Auckland writer Elizabeth Morton is published in places like Rattle, The Moth, Narrative, Poetry New Zealand, and PRISM International. Her poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She twice came second in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition, and was included in Best Small Fictions 2016. When she thinks nobody is watching, she writes bad rap, and lip-syncs to The Talking Heads.

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Levis Keltner

Kill Yr Idols

“What will your parents say?”

I’m eighteen, writing in a notebook about hackers in a queer love triangle overthrowing an oppressive oligarchy. The story is fiction.

My best friend strokes my thigh with the backs of his fingers to comfort me or himself. We’re supposed to dorm in the fall. I won’t, and our relationship will splinter.

“I need to write,” I say. It seems simple. My life will be fiction.

I write stories about white women, unconvincingly. I’m masking myself, someone who’s queer and polyamorous and recently married to someone who’s not. She is careful never to ask how much a story is about me.

The closest I come is about a boy fascinated by a rock star in drag. The boy buys a wig off the internet. It’s slick and black, very Pulp Fiction. For a week, he takes the wig out of the box for a laugh. He then wears it while Dad is passed out and Mom works nights. He looks homely and lumpy headed in the bathroom mirror. At one point, he paces for twenty minutes outside a FOREVER 21, debating to buy a black dress in the window and lie that it’s for a girlfriend.

A girl enrolls at school with a face out of a dream. Months later, she doesn’t know he exists, though they have mutual friends. She’s goth-y and bold, sent to the Principal for wearing spiked collars and T-shirts with slogans like KILL YR IDOLS. Rumors say her parents do drugs, another suspension and she’s expelled. The boy mentions her to a buddy at lunch. “Mannish-looking weirdo, eh?” the kid says.

Before winter break, the boy decides to hang himself. Or to slip a note into her locker. He can’t remember what he wrote except: You’re just so real and I’m not. Folded on his chemistry book the next morning is a reply: Midnight at the lake.

That evening, hunting beer money, Dad discovers the wig. The man rages in tears. Is his boy a sissy? He slaps his son for an answer. The boy runs without a jacket. He wanders town, a ghost. He’ll freeze. He goes to the lake.

The girl isn’t at the benches. She’s a shadow on the ice. More afraid of never knowing, he steps out to meet her. The wind blows across the lake. He can’t feel his body, his burning face. There’s a long whistle of a passing train before he hears her speak.

I don’t have the guts to share the story but can’t delete it.

I’m 178, up from 125 from weightlifting. I cut my hair short. I shop at Banana Republic. I learn how to shave with a straight razor, how to make craft cocktails, how to respond assertively, how to talk about Infinite Jest without reading it, how to talk dirty.

I take fiction workshop at the community college and write stories about boys becoming monsters:

We’re kids, picking teams. A boy teases, and little brother cries. I run for help. Dad sticks a whiffle bat in my hands. “Never let anyone talk about your brother like that.” I wave my yellow warning on the playground. The bully cries, and little brother is smiling. I’ve helped.

My marriage fails. I regularly consider diving off a parking garage.

Like it happened to someone else, I hear myself saying to a close friend, “I’m not attracted to men anymore. Like at all.”

I workshop my stories. I collapse into me-ness. Repeat.

I meet a working-class Latinx swinger couple at a bar. The conversation is jerky. We go back to my apartment. I don’t have beer or wine but can fix old fashioneds.

“Your place is very clean,” the wife observes. “Such big books.”

“Are you sure you’re not gay?” the husband asks a second time.

Is he fearful or hoping?

“I’m very into women,” I say.

None of us are relieved.

The page is a mirror. There is a kid on the ice. There is the bully and the boy with the bat.

A snake chews its tail, vomits words sometimes.

My essay on Gabriel Conroy as cultural colonizer is rejected again. The editor comments: Your application of identity politics is a reach.

Crying makes following my first YouTube makeup tutorial pretty difficult.

My parents visit, and I mention applying to universities, as if this time writing will save me. They’re proud, relieved. I’m the son they wanted.

We’re out to breakfast on the eastside, and Dad pushes away his plate. He grimaces at a gay couple across the restaurant.

“I can’t eat and watch two men kissing,” he says.

Never let anyone talk about your brother like that.

“I’ve kissed a man like that,” I say. My words knock the wind out of him.

Levis Keltner is the editor-in-chief at Newfound and author of the novel Into That Good Night. His work has appeared in Entropy Magazine and Bull: Men’s Fiction. From Chicago, he lives in St. Louis. Find him on Instagram @leviskeltner.

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Phyllis Brotherton

Methods of Accounting

There’s something comforting about inventory,
futile as it may be, the act of assessment,
itself, a form of care.
⁠—Danusha Lameris, from The God of Numbers

Coat

My mother, who worked as a bookkeeper in a men’s clothing store during my teenage years, once knocked on the door of a ramshackle house. She needed to collect payment or repossess a suit coat purchased on credit for a son’s graduation the next night. The woman who answered the door said she had no money for the payment and retrieved the coat from a back closet, handing it over still wrapped in black plastic, stamped with the store’s logo in gold. After a long pause, mother handed the coat back to the woman and said, “I’ll come back on Monday.” This story became a lesson for me in heart and numbers.

Later in college I’d learn the Accrual method of accounting, which differs from the more common and simplistic Cash method, in that one must account for not only what’s paid or collected, but also incurred and earned, owed and due.

In this way, we look forward and back, assessing all that has been and what we know will be and write it down, account for it in the ledgers that span the years, kept in ink by the hands of my mother, and by me now with the ease of pushing a button on a computer keyboard. I can see my mother turning the thick light green pages of vertical columns and horizontal lines, carefully inking dates, descriptions, debits and credits, flipping back and forth through the ledger book, adding and subtracting, until she had reached the desired accounting state of balance.

Lesson from a high school Bookkeeping class: What you Own – What you Owe = What you’re Worth

Theatre

At fifteen, that same woman’s teenaged daughter went to work in Oklahoma City, the only seemingly viable alternative to the shunning by schoolmates after the Moore High School quarterback raped her. In her job at the Park Terrace Theater in the city many referred to as Big Town, she quickly moved from concessionaire at $.75/hour to cashier at $1.25/hour, removing the candy striper uniform in favor of street clothes she bought and paid for herself, several pieces of which one year came in the same blinding, popular shade of lime. As cashier, she became adept at rolling coins (the secret to which is first creating 5 to 10 short individual stacks for each coin type, then carefully picking up and sliding each stack down the paper tubes to a waiting inserted finger at the bottom), and binding paper money of various denominations with the Presidents’ heads all facing the same direction. She found a surprising inherited comfort and order in balancing the till. Balancing the concession stand cash drawer was complicated. Every cup, candy bar and box of frozen hot dogs had to be counted before opening (beginning inventory) and after closing (ending inventory), or at each shift change, to determine the number of each item presumably sold. Each inventory item count was then multiplied by the sale price to derive the total amount that should remain after deducting the starting till amount of say, $25.00. Any shortages had to be made up by the concession staff working that particular shift. This practice had a very strong affect in focusing the mind on charging the right amounts; adding, subtracting and multiplying accurately in your head, counting back the correct change. There were no cash registers or calculators; the only adding machine at the cashier’s desk in the manager’s office. Errors were rare.

After the last showing of first run hits like The Sound of Music and Cool Hand Luke, the soundtracks to which she had memorized every word, she drove downtown to drop off the night deposit. At midnight, accompanied by an usher in a red uniform with gold epaulets, and holding a bank bag containing upwards of $25,000 in cash, she would pull up to the curb in front of the First National Bank, jump out, cross the sidewalk of the empty, dark street, pull open the heavy silver-gray night deposit drawer and drop the fat bag in. This ritual errand, never a quiet or clandestine one, involved much laughter, open car windows, blaring music, and frequent loud singing. Nothing bad ever happened; nothing ever went wrong.

She had a crush on her boss, Lindy, the Syrian theater manager, and in her eyes a god. She did everything for him she possibly could, including offering to clean his bachelor apartment for extra money, remembering even today his lone, curly, black pubic hair on the toilet seat, which intrigued and repulsed her at the same time. As a surprise gesture of first love, she baked a pineapple upside down cake in his unused oven, leaving it for him, fragrant and warm on his kitchen counter. Lindy eased her out of her crush by thanking her, saying that he considered her feelings for him an extreme compliment; a lesson she remembered and used later in life.

She then switched the object of her affection to another older man who frequented the theatre. One night when buying a theater ticket, he laughed and said, “Call me Pork Chop.” Pork Chop, who turned out to be Conway Twitty’s drummer, was chubby and kind, teaching her arousal to the brink of something she did not yet know. In reflecting later, she realized he always generously encouraged her to leave his apartment in time to meet her parent’s curfew, taking home with her no other burden of conscience than trembling legs. Thus began her career in Accounting.

Beginning Inventory + Purchases – Ending Inventory = Cost of Goods Sold

Abattoir

She dreams of the kill floor. Remembers it as it actually was, bloody behind her eyelids, blood draining into a grate under a bovine body hanging by its hooves. It has ceased to have a hide by now, wooden plug bullet to the head. After 700 hundred head killed that day, a rubber-booted man hoses everything down.

Not just a slaughterhouse, but a feedlot of 15,000 fattening cattle, and a 6,000 acre farm of row crops in various stages of harvest and replanting. I arrive for the first time in the San Joaquin Valley with my son and his father, stateside again after three years in Iran, and stunned from my father’s sudden death in Oklahoma. We drive up Highway 99 from Los Angeles, observing the deep expanse of fields, orchards, groves and vineyards. Hired as the Assistant Controller, the meat packing plant and farming operation is my first job in California.

On her first tour of the ranches, the owner and vice-president, from the front seat of a Town Car, point out row crops of tomatoes and cotton, especially admiring the tall stand of safflower. The owner says, “The wetbacks get in there and hide.” She has never heard this term and pictures wild boar running from hunters. “Are they dangerous?” she asks. Through uproarious guffaws, they explain they mean the illegal Mexicans running from the INS. She never lives it down, but never forgets, a seed planted to fight back.

Here I expand my knowledge in counting and measuring: heads per day slaughtered, aerial photo counts of feedlot cattle, half-carcasses sliding on hooks through a freezer in the 4 a.m. dawn, tons of manure estimated through measurement and mathematical equations. Learning new methods of taking inventory leads me to calculate yield. An employee is found guilty of embezzlement for, on instruction from his supervisor, switching out cheap cuts for prime steaks. Devising a method to determine restitution, I calculate the expected yield for certain cuts of beef, compare those numbers with actual yields, price out the difference, estimating the actual value of Cost of Goods Sold. The supervisor is never charged with a crime. The underling, who simply took orders from his boss, will spend the rest of his life paying back the multi-millionaire owner.

Federal Inspectors stand by to resume grading. She counts, balances, reconciles. She discovers an obscure tax law by which revenue from the sale of hides can be deemed exempt. During the noon hour, she will drink two martinis with the foreman, her lover, then return to tallying the accumulation of fortune. Sometimes in a hotel bed they discuss efficiencies, how to improve yield, and decrease the cost per pound to reach kill weight.

At the corner of Fruit and Church, I am promoted to Chief Controller. I abandon any sense of self control, launching forward with another kind of abandon: a simple disposition of others’ feelings, primarily my son’s and his father’s, seeking new acquisitions and mergers, ignoring entire human ledgers, focusing only on balancing my own, convincing myself there is someone, or something else out there better; a “Cost of Goods Sold” equation out of whack.

The cattle cease knowing in an instant, will never know a thing. Strip the hide, move the carcass along to butchery, separating, trimming, sawed down the middle, sliding it along to the next frozen chamber.

Revenue – Expense = Surplus or (Deficit), Profit or (Loss)

Liquidation

Over-expansion, ill-advised investments, market forces, or any number of single factors or a combination thereof, can lead to deficits or losses sufficient to call into question an entity’s “going concern” status, sometimes leading to voluntary or forced liquidation, applying equally to business or relationships. In 1992, after two divorces from men and a failed relationship with a woman, I find myself facing major liquidation. Experienced with involuntary bankruptcy (both emotionally and in the courts), not at my own hands, but imposed by the actions of a second husband, I face the biggest professional challenge of my life to date: winding down a 75-year old olive processing plant and farming cooperative. The parallels between a company’s poor management decisions over many years and some of my own heretofore poor, personal decisions fly right past me then.

Four hundred and fifty employees, warehouses of inventory and equipment, and various properties throughout California are eventually reduced to one banker’s box in my bedroom closet. All along the way I strove to protect what remained, what I had come to think of as a carcass, from those who wanted a piece of what fleshy assets remained; creditors to whom amounts, either real or imagined, accurate or inaccurate, understated or grossly inflated, are owed. Then began the adjudication process, fighting it out through the courts, the sorting of the wheat from the chaff and in the end, negotiation and settlement.

Eventually, everything had been accounted for: anything not nailed down (and some that was) sold, raw ingredients turned into finished product, real estate offloaded, environmental contamination dealt with in a 70-year clean-up plan that will outlive everyone.

Eventually, you come to terms with liquidation, though some actions can never be explained or recanted, and some will never be made whole. One bright spot: preserving an employee pension plan from creditors, which many assume can never be touched, but the creditors try. Needless to say, among the battles and destruction are many professionally satisfying and rewarding moments, not unlike life. In the end, you write a final check to a local charity, in too de minimis an amount to be parsed further, destroy corporate seals, and begin again.

Assets – (Liabilities + Net Worth) = -0-

Intangibles

…cannot be counted, but instead must be assigned a value by means of a generally accepted accounting method or sometimes requiring mere estimation. Human resources can be counted in numbers of people, or measured in “full time equivalents,” calculated based on a forty-hour work week as a baseline, resulting in fractions of a person, such as in 1.5 FTE’s. The value of an intangible is greatly diminished in a distress situation, such as a forced sale, absent a willing buyer and willing seller. Collateral may become worthless. Collateral damage can result.

For example, what is the value of a man who, in order to earn more for his family, picks olives with a prohibited, but less heavy metal ladder, in a tree left too tall, because topping trees is expensive and decreases yield; is electrocuted when the ladder swings too near a power line?

And, when there is only one warehouse job left, what is the value of older Union Employee No. 1, with the most seniority, who in a layoff loses his job to Union Employee, say No. 43, in a work performance test requiring extreme stamina that pits the two against each other?

What is the value of a company President made richer by a pension settlement, when equated to hundreds of retired employees who lose their promised lifetime health insurance?

What is the value of a relationship with a son basically lost, due in no small part to your own actions or inactions, to judgments, misunderstanding, and the essential difficulty in letting go of the past and moving on?

What can be gained or lost, lessons learned or ignored, through experience and the passage of time—both intangibles?

Phyllis Brotherton, long-time financial executive, workout and crisis-management specialist, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fresno State University. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Shark Reef, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree, Entropy, and Brevity. Her essay “Ashes and File Cabinets” was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards by Jet Fuel Review. She is currently marketing her book manuscript of personal essays, tentatively titled, Creating Artifacts for publication.

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Brennan Bogert

Elegy for My Elegies to Trans Girls’ Bodies

I said knowing well it’s all I have left (like coins
in the hotel-room sofa child’s room sidewalk) I’d never write another

never feel those names—a sentence ending
in my body—

but here I am (dropping a notebook off at the community college where the welcome mat
faces the wrong way toward the street welcoming us out) and I miss it:

building another box to bundle her body in another newsprint wrapping for
pouring

the raw red meat of our organs into somebody else’s lap to say

look at this

Look who I miss

What a mess I made

What a violence left of lips and hair and the lovely ream of her spine
(swinging when we danced.)

I’m doing it again.

I can see her bodies laid out the width of a page
even thinner I can lose her on my finger but it gets people to listen

when we say her names our dedications

are dead. Our dedications are the songs we have left

in favor of the elegy.

But elegy it works. It keeps us going fed me through one summer jobless
except trading bodies

and elegy?     it helped me
                                                      to say I’m sorry
                                                                                  I’m here
                          still sorry he walked past me.

Building a box to bury her bodies in, my dedication
means I’m living somehow.

But I can live without this
displaying
the way I live without you.

I can live and sell
myself in other ways.
(I guess I still have to. (

Golden Sings While Her Sister Gives Up Her Tail

A crowd gathers          in the club she left          & I swallow each man          like a fish
filled with eggs             take them in      to my mouth         & structure
them on my tongue.    Men float the moans.               I amplify
the clean ending                                                                            the sea-foam sympathetic.

Call mine a body of electronic delay
Call it some kind of sea some current kind of body.

We found ourselves with body                  by the sea a body
washed up &     scented like a                    salt-skin fish
Gills tremored like crab         legs under sand        fighting the weight of delay.

Something in our cells smelled the structure
of waves. But babe I am so sympathetic
to your loneliness. You choke & I I amplify

what you are gasping for.
                                                 I am amply
such an able body           two wholes     to embody
the waterlung &              legless voice.
                                                                     I used to think                          Pathetic
Me            a school-less friend             a freakish fish.

Even the whales had been to land pointed to the structures
left of their legs after a million year delay

& I confess                       I did     delay
my coming to land        ate more kelp than I cared             kept yelling just to amplify
the waves.         But then I thought of legs!                            How nice those structures
& walking would be!
                                          We had dancing to embody!

& I had had enough of fin & sonic squeaking at the eels & fearing fishermen
who just looked in yellow plastic nautically-knotted so pathetic!

But how could I claim to be better still wearing my mother’s scales? I am empathetic
to all the creatures of indecision digestion & delay

to the people who throw a hand in in an                     attempt to fish
out a future
                        to speak up &                    after a time           bravely amplify
the playful forked pianos of their teeth.
                                                                        Whose body
can keep the same structures                 the same strictures of their body?           I will bite

any body’s impositions              change the skin’s structures
the body’s breathy           sympathy
to itself
          the insane attachment to stay breathing.           I will let my body
be sand soothing the motion of waves        each a grain of delay.

I can lie lie down with you & be an ampoule
of sealed & sterile pleasure or the freshly netted fish

of joy swimming with blood. in the current I decorate this body
break shells & shards to pierce this structure.

I will make a hymn of fallow fishish
gurgles & gasps. I can be sympathetic

I can bridge         the habitat & habit of delay
& make a fluid                   language           make sound so fine
                                                                                                              —& yes—
                                                                                                                                       so amplified.

Brennan Bogert is a poet, freelance writer and editor, and collector of street-sounds. She regularly contributes LGBT Arts and Culture coverage for Go Magazine. Other places her work has appeared include Iowa’s Best Emerging Poets, Cathexis NW, The Paha Review, Little Village Magazine, and elsewhere. She graduated from The University of Iowa with B.A. in English and Creative Writing and is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. You can learn more about her at brynnbogert.com.

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Golden

Mullins Court

When Cam, Twin, & I flock home.
We a blistering bee hive at the tall glass
of spring, bumping and thumping

the sap of our gums, back and forth, like heat
tag in June. We boy loud, but gurl
hymns off our tongue like moon breaking

open dusk. We all the ratchet friend
when we lean in together, forget
to bite our twang & enjambed Black.

We proud we is what we is. Hey bitch
& wha’s poppin is how we knight each other
home. We defy the apple in our throats.

Adam ain’t Black enough to hold our kind
of love. Our throats hug, veins rip caskets
from each others capillaries, teeth shimmer

like CD cycles, Walkman strapped to
our bony hips. Doing circles ‘round
the cul-de-sac we learned this Black hood.

Trans Day of Remembrance

Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Their work deals with the intersections of blackness and gender within the construct of America. Golden is a 2017/2019 Pink Door Fellow, the 2018 House Slam Grand Slam Champion, the 2016 NYU Grand Slam Champion, & was apart of the 2017 & 2018 NYU CUPSI Championship winning team. Their work has been featured on/at the Shade Journal, the Offing, Button Poetry, i-D, Interview Magazine, & elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography from New York University. Website: mylessgolden.com. Instagram: mylesgolden. Twitter: mylessgolden.

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Jenny L. Davis

#21CENTURYINDIANPROBLEMS

1. If we don’t know our clan,
does that mean we can eat all of the animals—
or none of them?

2. If my partner and I are both
from matriarchal communities,
whose family do we move in with?
(and who provides the deer for the wedding?)

3. If being de-colonial means I should give up fry bread,
do I also have to give up my glasses? They’re the only
way I can see the beads to make my traditional regalia.

4. If I am deer clan on my Mom’s side
but the sorting hat put me in Ravenclaw,
Which animal do I put on my beaded medallion?
Can I put both?

JUST WHAT KIND OF TRICKSTER ARE YOU?

“Well, which are you—a finger or a thumb?”

I—

              I am a hand
                            an arm reaching
                            a body
                            a community across generations
              I am
                            the cosmos translucent.

“Ok…I’ll put you down for thumb, then”

SILENT PRAYER OF AN INDIAN ANTHROPOLOGIST BEFORE HEADING TO WORK

If I die tomorrow,

don’t let them put me in the department storage room,
(lord knows I came out of the closet decades ago)

wrap me in plastic,
(I, like my ancestors, prefer natural fabrics,
silk is best, but cashmere will also do)

or break off pieces of my teeth
(Instagram can tell them what my diet consisted of).

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous writer from Oklahoma who currently lives in Illinois where she is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her creative work has been featured in journals and anthologies including Transmotion, Santa Ana River Review, Broadsided, Yellow Medicine Review, As/Us, Raven Chronicles, and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance.