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The Heart, The Mind Often, these two will have tea together. Turning in the sun, devouring fields of bluegrass. I won’t lie sometimes you will be the bluegrass, plucked with brute force and poised at the mouth of a god. Often, you will be swallowed. And only in your unmaking will you be so sweet so light. Crates Each day, you will set out to collect grudges to hold against the world, then lug laboriously through dusk. You will think to protect yourself against every ailment besides silence, which will seep through the field of your mind like gasoline. You will label thousands of crates and tuck them under your synapses, thinking they are utterly whole. You will never be able to revel in a happiness infected with a tinge of melancholy, The dusted labels now reading more like prayers than testaments to the contents inside. You will long for anything truly even, rind and all. You will long for a longing truly even, rind and all. You will long for a haze so thick it could estrange you from your own hands. The words following “I am—” will hold your throat hostage. They will hold a timeless possibility That will be shattered by “—a pig,” or worse, nothing at all. We Shared Only This Earth They had been two forces present at the dawning of my life, so naturally, I took them to be extensions of my life, sentient beings that came simply with the house, always at arm’s length. In the later years, even as my arms grew gaunt, they could not equip the new space between the three of us. The first farewell posed the most detriment to the fickle heart squirming in the fickle body. Slowly, the apartness accumulated enough to barricade the tears, reduced to a shifting sheen in the eyes. The Going sipped the inevitability out of Staying‘s palms. The only thing we shared, the Earth, most literally. On a day deep in summer’s pit, I truly didn’t need them. The starkness of it hinted at a Before, but their rooms, indistinguishable from the others, hinted otherwise. Longing was a locket, long lost, vanished like the dead do. It was so odd, I’ll tell you. Her eyes surveilled mine, yes, and her mouth distorted into the shape of words, directed at me. Two metres away, too close to be a vision filling her absence- she was certainly there, though my mind took her to be half a world away, still. All My Selves— —coalesce to get a good night’s sleep. And how unfortunate, this brotherhood in the night, when everything looks one and uniform anyway. Ali Nasir is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan.

She heard the loud noise, moth-eaten words reaching her ears again this time. Sometimes she focuses on condensing her listening, other times she lets the chitchat find her unsuspectingly. Mithali accepts chatter that gives monotony a character. She had found herself telling someone, in the middle of a realization, that she does not recall the oddities of growing up, but she feels an ambivalent pull towards consistency, and that’s the most anyone can sum up the nature of home as. She hears it in the azaan at the crack of dawn and the one at six in the evening. It doesn’t matter what Mithali is doing at the time; if she is attentive, she can transport herself to the laxity of home as if she is waking up from her afternoon sleep at fourteen. That feeling grounds her, all the way here. Mithali’s father used to complain about toothaches that went all through the night. He refused painkillers till he had crossed the threshold of pain into a controlled bearableness. The hurdle to invincibility, he knew, was giving in. He must have carried these battles with nightly terrors to his mornings, they made him obstinate about his foresight in poverty. It didn’t let anyone find a better course of action than persistence. Had she been patient, she would have heard something more than repetition in his voice. In a cramped space of three people, Mithali marked one room as hers, though it contained nothing of significance that was really hers. She made small cuts on clothes out of frustration. She wrote with glitter on one of the walls, to keep that room as a young girl’s bedroom, but she couldn’t persuade her parents to buy anything of value to represent that room still. She was insistent on dividing that house into three rooms, but nobody else cared about personal space as much as her. In the end, Mithali devised a lie to hide that house altogether. She told everyone she knew that she lived in the house that theirs shared a wall with. It was bigger, had three floors, and didn’t look like it was tethering on its last legs. The lie gave her mind a secret, and she let it blend into her like second nature. She looks back at these trivial moments with uninterest. They don’t stand up to the weight of importance. They were relieved of their nostalgia when they were hidden for so long, they could have disappeared as some urban myths that she recalled till she moved away, and Mithali would not have cared about preserving them. When someone asks her how she feels these days, her answers seem like a sequel in the making of times gone by, temperate and loyal. She is careless about the influence of steering a conversation. As it happens with tawdry sequels, she too would not be able to carry anamnesis through the stages of life’s development with the same vigour. Most of her memories are not truthful, and for the sake of empirical record-keeping, one has to stick to what they have actually lived through. When they follow her around while she is busy, she tells herself, “These are just mild disturbances, they don’t make up the formula of what didn’t work.” Her mother did that a lot. She held onto things till all Mithali could associate with her relatives was the times they slipped up. That one time, he showed up to that birthday party drunk; this one time, he met with an accident because he felt like he could outsmart everyone else. Such was the ridiculous heights of the charges she pressed against them; Mithali didn’t think of relationships as normal. She stayed away from them and blamed it on her proclivity for aloofness. She doesn’t know how far you have to graze from the herd to call it a search for greener pastures. She lives only five hundred kilometres away, the least she can do is call them about their day. The thing with nostalgia is that it feels like it might help if it is so distinct. What were you up to last week? Where did it begin? Why do you think one thing leads to another? Mithali is at a place where she feels, life has come full circle, for everything. She listens to 90s music, looks up punk aesthetics, and tries to bring up the dead. She lacks determination and she is looking for some kind of attachment. She has admitted as much to her mother, but Mithali is wary of her mother telling her, “this one time, I had to overcome things in order to stay happy.” She doesn’t roll her eyes at her mother anymore. Moving around in a potpourri of emotions as she has, like a kid flirting with a bland bowl of soup that he has been instructed to drink, Mithali found a tolerance for people’s ways maybe. On the other hand, she could just be considering life an extraordinary feat. There have been times when she has seen people point out with evidence that encore fix lapses in judgement. If her parents had enough, her mother would not pry open those relatives, and so forth, until you reached the beginning and you could have a do-over in your imagination. Some of it could help fight the mediocrity that holds her back. These are just hopeful scenarios to combat what is over. --------------------------------- The final girl makes a comeback. She is writing unfinished plots. The killer is still running amok, twenty years later, and this is a viable opportunity to clear her name. She has no use whatsoever if the killer has been put to rest. Unlike other revisionist storylines, Mithali is still alive and refers to herself as a superficial person. There is no compulsion to accomplish. Mithali’s mother, surviving her father’s death, can demand a retelling of who she used to be. The haunting that plagues someone after a loved one dies enables them, but she is not able to find her mother inside that dilapidated house. She would have shared with her the times she lied about their family. They are both moving away from each other, and they need to own something specific to tie them together. —------------------------------ She swings her left leg over the balcony wall. She saw someone do that in a movie once, and it looked like they were being lifted with a buoyant force that prevented things from sinking. She relies on that image to digest the panic of sitting astride the boundaries of the fifth-floor building. She has other images helping her through. Mithali loves old westerns and anything that has to do with horses and ranches. She is swaddled by rodeo cowboys, reinforcing courage in her mind, and she becomes unconcerned about the dangers of falling. She sits there without breaking a sweat as the rest of the celebrations continue, in packets of four and five, mostly inebriated and shielded from interferences. Nobody is looking for her. Someone made a mess on the bathroom floor and they were handed a mop. She doesn’t want to clean up after herself, and the balcony felt like a safe option to vomit, in case, and watch it splatter on the roof of a fancy car. Mithali pendulates her weight and estimates the pivot of her balance. It's easy for anyone to let go. It also should be easy for someone to rebuke the readiness of such thoughts. She must have sat there long after her glass was empty. She was listening to the jaggedly flow of the music from the building, opposite the one she was sitting in while keeping one ear out for the mirth originating from behind her. Mithali has managed to divide her ears into two skilful bipennate leaves, sensitive and alert. She cannot pinpoint the moment this happened, but it could have been around the time she was ploughing old apothegms; the ones that we don’t sincerely remember unless absurdity presents itself and someone thinks a worn-out proverb, like “a drowning man will clutch at a straw” will help summarise it as frequent. She has not fully established herself in any kind of life; her coping abilities are paragon responses, that one should fight uncomfortable situations, valiantly. This was influenced by unresolved time; though I find that I will never find an answer to missing someone because there might not be any, especially when one seeks memories. I have been published in Muse India.

Greg Burton kicked an empty beer can up and down a freezing subway platform. His sister Carol complained about the noise he was making, but the noise didn’t bother her. She was too embarrassed to join him and that’s what really upset her. Greg looked like he was having so much fun. He didn’t even seem to care what the other people on the platform thought about the noise he was making. “Stop banging that can around, Greg,” said his mother. “The train’s coming. You can’t be late for school again.” Carol ran in front of her brother and gave the beer can a final kick. They both smiled as it scraped across the yellow line and dropped on to the train tracks. “Is Daddy going to die in the war,” asked Carol. Mother shook her head. “Your father’s an airplane mechanic, not a soldier. I doubt he’ll see much action.” As the subway doors were closing behind them, a dirty man in sunglasses, carrying a handmade cardboard sign, threw himself at the door. The sliding doors crushed his body like a pair of hungry teeth, but he managed to squeeze his way inside the crowded subway car. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” the man shouted as the train pulled out. “I am not a thief or a mugger. Could you please spare some change for a Vietnam Vet who’s hungry? Show your support for the boys over in Afghanistan by helping one of their brothers at home.” When the man held out his cup to Greg the boy grabbed Carol by her arm and mumbled something. “What’s that you say, son?” asked the beggar. “I said you smell,” answered Greg. Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York's Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center.

CW: BDSM and sexual content. Monsters Under the Bed How nervous I am to fall asleep and meet the roulette of nightmares. The only thing I am good for is running, a murderess of peace under the cloak of night. You say you will meet me in my dreams —firm and demanding— the true nature of a dominant. Eyelids flutter closed and for the first time in months, fears tuck away under the bed… afraid those hands will drag them away by the neck. Consequences of 50 Shades Women are orgasm factories in romance novels. Cuming with a filthy little glance. In real life, we work for the crown and we work hard. Playing teacher, hoping for students who wish to be our pet. To the left, not so hard, a little harder. I won’t break, you know. Please no, not another college fuck. No…I didn’t get off… Just lay there and play with my titties while I work— watch me, observe the master. Fan My Flames Tell me how delicious I am, dripping, like ice cream from the cone on a hot summer’s day. Be greedy, insatiable. A begging, wandering dog feasting upon a buffet spread across city streets. Lift my body to your mouth by the handful, and devour every morsel I have to offer. Business Casual Thong swishes between ass cheeks, down the hall I glide. Breasts exposed, just enough to tempt employee handbook guidelines. Fabric brushes ass begging your hand, just one good spank, and that low voice telling me what a naughty fucking girl I’ve been. Late Night Snacking Chocolate smears to stain sheets and I know it requires the wash/dry cycle. Too lazy to strip the bed I’ll sleep in my mess. It’s never blood, not from this body. This frozen state sits so nice. Bound, legs folded beneath. Good girl. Waiting for a command. Except there is never any command to give that can be followed. Aimee Nicole is a chronically ill, queer poet currently residing in Rhode Island. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Roger Williams University and has been published by various lit mags. Her first collection Daily Worship was published by Laughing Ronin Press early 2022 and her second collection Panoramic will be released in April by Curious Corvid Publishing. Feel free to follow her on Instagram @aimeenicole525 for awkward selfies and pictures of her cat.

Condensation convolutes my vision making it hard to see the fog-blooming tree. The crow flies up it (as the crow flies) and seeks a perch on its uppermost bough. The tree barren, surrounded by malignant ultramarine skies seems to be as isolated, as alone as I am. The corvid wings aflap rise to it as if to signal its demise under darkening thunder-dense skies. But it and I and I and it will fight to live and live to fight as long as we see fit.

The Widow Courage is a centrifuge, an open mouth, a subterranean subterfuge, a shoe untied. Where are his glasses? I ask no one. Alone is a trip made of symmetry, a crucible, a flattery of open books, a paused embrace. Just one apparition could send me spinning unbalanced by scarlet buttons or bad brakes, a simple distillation of elemental forces in solution, behind veils, eyes beneath coins. Does the dog know who will shovel the snow? I ask the pearls in the mirror around my neck. Monday is an alien destiny of disgust and fascination, both leaning on each other like bookends, a shiva, but altogether better than Sunday, a windowless room in a pine house. Tuesday is an earthquake, and the landfill cracks open to reveal a stratum of waste from 1970, all things suddenly out of season. Who can pull weeds from around the squash? Thursday is another day, as if the comet’s tail might sweep the kitchen floor. The archeologist arrives to explain the pain in shades of newsprint, nail polish, and guacamole, in which he uses a twisting logic to say it is indeed from Spain, and the lack of sunlight has preserved the color of my spleen, swollen with poison and a sort of sheen, like a Yiddish proverb. I am a banquet for the birds. Once around the block, please. Losing the Better Part of Us Because a flower turns around at night it needs the tears of hindsight to see the mind of infinity flare, blowing out in a flash of wit your life unabridged, and me shifting in that feral wind to meet every movement, all the passions like wildfire, tilted up to the sky to try and find you night after night, missing you, a twilit castaway— petals on a savage river, or the zest of your skin flying up inside the numbing starlight, answering yes, always yes, to the life we created becoming the pink upon the mist, never needing to look back because the tides have stopped, and the clouds have fled from the blue, until only the river stones beneath our bare feet, a Stellarum Fixarum, come together the same at the beginning as at the end. I reach through the swash to hold you again, in the midst, your phantom gaze bearing me thunderstruck, into being by the high of counting every follicle on our newborn child’s head, and then all the moments in between rush passed us in a blur of grief, but also wonder, and the stories of our passage, our arrival here without you on this plain of feathers, scales, hairs, and flowers, mix with fear, desire, rancor, and doubt, more than any tree might contain in root, leaf, or bark, or any church might burn in wax to loft the prayers and wishes of bringing you back, all of us wicks bending flame in the Harmattan breeze, to gently wipe clean your dour end with some new diluvial fever of birth, a pure poem of providence, of animal spirits and celestial virtue, a primeval brume rolling down my face in beads in another race to the strand to find the beach pebbles end again at the start. Our Poor Circulation Don’t wake the baby again by dredging my body of sleep, her polite icicle dream bits float barefoot in the pumping snow rolling under the door awake now gasping bold pleas for warm milk. My cold feet with distant kid fears closing the smallest pores— our refrigerator and television hum clear to preserve the eggs and stories, far-flung choices and memories pickled by simple human voices murmuring the echo of endless need. Her tiny hands reach out for cathedral air on pale lumps of skin, fleshy triggers that set hunger adrift. My breasts are under the Moon and full of godly ichor. A pair of half-frozen hosts as patient as stained glass, they suffer glacial hours of cell division swelling seesaw like weal and woe, thawing, eroding, blinking the distance of years away, recalling hairy faces beaming, empty with bald lust, the men who tried to love me like curling black smoke from old wiring, sparking clutters of wild fascination abruptly whipping tongues of flame into a bright Ferris wheel of abandon, who then left my bed of williwaw rushing out into the blizzard of brides and wives, as fathers must. Mikal Wix grew up in South Florida, of green-thumbed, hydrophilic parents. The place seeded insights into many outlooks, including the visions of a revenant from the closet. He studies literature and anthropology and has recent words in the Penumbra Literary Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Angel Rust Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Hyacinth Review, & works as a science editor.

Halfway Through Maybe it has to be this way. All these griefs passing through just to make a sharp left turn or even a sudden stop. We just keep on wheeling and pushing each other away just for it to come back again—now, a little closer—No one really wants to leave without packing or checking twice or to simply leave a tip just to make themselves feel good for moving. No one really knows how to close a passenger door and the driver’s door seems stuck. No one’s really driving. We’re just sitting several inches away each time it comes back hoping for a slight effortless movement; a sigh, maybe with a smile, and then it’s either leaving or holding, but things might not be the same again. And it has to be this way, where I’m only halfway through the trip, but always, cherish. I Am a Tree, I Am Not I just want to live / like speaking with trees / I just want to stand tall like a pine tree / I want people to admire me / use me / when they needed it so badly / I just want to be still / I just want to be here / I just want to bleed as I breathe / I just want it still / like don’t let it in with no intention to keep it / I just want silence / I know who I am when I’m alone / I just want softness / I want to drown in your hands / fill myself with waters / nourish myself / then embrace / Embrace it / And when somebody came to notice / I am a hundred years old pine tree / I want someone to cut me in half / count the rings inside the bark / name each of them as if naming their own child / like faking my own death / Everything seems beautiful in covers / but I don’t want to be speaking with trees / I don’t want to be faking my death / I just want to be here / every day / knowing I’ll make it / to midnight. Outside, Searching There is beauty in the little lights of bulbs when you finish gardening the garden and you walk home heavily, but all you see are the little lights— hanging across each tree leading you towards the exit. You can always go back. But always remember to come home, they said it’s not always safe to be outside. Although I doubt it. I have courage for the eternal. I want it, deeply. Anyone Can Hurt Anyone I am a woman born not knowing I was born. A woman who writes poetry, who speaks through complicated metaphors because I can’t seem to have everything wrapped up accordingly. I wanted it messy, it helps me feel like I’m more, like not alone, like something else, like I’m more than just a mess. I write about things, like how everyone just wanted to be everything they are not because society is space. They wanted everything, they wanted cupboard, clock, chairs, and window. They wanted a queen size bed, not anything lesser than that. They wanted all the blank spaces. They wanted to rule everything, fill every corner of this earth with space. This society isn’t my kind of space. Space can’t seem to fill itself with me, but I guess it's fine. Because I’ve learned to lay myself barefoot down in the grass and look up. I see myself, inherited by the moon and stars and the sun. You could not even imagine the rain I managed to carry without letting society know. Now you know why weather prediction is not always accurate, why space should stop predicting and expect something when they haven’t even learned how to stare at the sky. Because what is sky without a silhouette? What’s earth without the rain, the sun? What’s food without one to eat, and chair without one to sit? Let's just stop pretending to be anything. Let's just stop expecting it to happen. Because it hurts you, it hurts me. Anyone can hurt anyone.

Sometimes the urban coyotes would jump her fence and piss on the trunk of her Japanese Pine; sometimes they would rub their faces on the gnarled stems of the aloe yucca. It was common practice to alert the neighborhood on the Nextdoor app. Coyote sightings generated a certain amount of commotion. In a sense, they had transformed from residents to animal control officers, always keeping watch. She remembers reading a strange urban coyote story from “The Daily Dish” in The Atlantic many years ago. The writer had found dead house cats on her lawn; their bellies had been sliced down the middle, and all the organs were placed to the side. The carcass had been licked as clean as a bowl. Or an empty womb. It seems her friendships have been sliced, rearranged, and licked clean from the bowl of her life, small, feral sphere that it is. CANDICE KELSEY is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (2020) and won the Two Sisters Writing Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Prize.

70 chairs history hangs in this square it rests in the iron and bronze and loiters in between the memories of the abandoned furniture, suitcases, bodies of those deported and murdered. Now, 70 over - sized chairs hovering on wooden plinths seat 70000 souls. Immortalised. It is a silent place but you can hear their voices shouting you hear them shouting everywhere echoing through the mouths of the living. Those mothers, leaving push-chairs at the border the tram drivers who will charge nothing families opening their homes to those crossing the border driven from their own. The heroes of Heroes Square. sunflower seeds Take these seeds tear - shaped, tender put them in your pocket and when you lie down upon this earth the seeds will sprout - remember Clytie, though betrayed still she grew no need for food and water. These too will stand proud turning their faces to follow Helios’ chariot across the sky bright heliotropes each of your thousand florets is their own sun Each a bright hope A metamorphosis. how to fly a kite for Persephone Some vernal morn uproot your toes replant them one by one in viridescent fields pluck a poppy’s heart - pin it to a breeze and fly it in the blue to P e r s e p h o n e

I’m an eccentric oddball, not even my attire fits in. I dress in the dark in my wardrobe, doors shut and eyes closed. Groping in shadow, I put on whatever I touch. incongruous colors and patterns. Clothes on backwards. Or upside down. This is my solemn confession: I’m horribly shy. Now my secret is unveiled. Now I am out of the closet. Nolcha (she/her) has always written, starting with poop and crayons on the walls. Her poems were published in WyoPoets News, Duck Head Journal, Ancient Paths, Dark Entries, The Red Lemon Review, Agape Review, Bullshit Literary Magazine, Storyteller’s Refrain, Wilder Literature, Paddler Press, the 2022 WyoPoets chapbook Emergence, Gone Lawn, Levatio’s first issue Serenity, Spirit Fire Review, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. My Father’s Ghost Hates Cats: Poetry for Stumbling Through Life

Albatross And what came from all that we had / I stay cocooned in piano keys, waiting for someone to come and bring music to me, even though I have the tools / the keys remain untouched and so do I / the piano stays in the desolate part of the room in an even more desolate house / beyond this house is something in which I cannot comprehend / Please never let me get sentimental Keep all of my fundamentals confidential Store There is always an ebb and flow of being okay Yesterday I almost broke down— crying – on the way to the store And by night fall I was king of my bedroom The Devil Comes Around In The Winter 1. My robe rests in downtown cities; To attain full peace is deemed far away My robe rests in Brussels; Where chocolates are formulated to induce great pleasure in the people My robe rests in the plains of Alberta; Where I dream to travel to like it’s not a big deal My robe rests in cold fruit Where cold fruit replaces warm fruit; I don’t feel like throwing it back up My robe rests in government offices; Where I don’t have to be there to take a handout My robe rests in the Middle East; Where I can be sent back to see how traditional the work can be My robe rests in old tax forms; Where I am scared to move forward; it is easier to fall down than to stand up My robe rests in the disease of the left side of my body; I get palpations from thinking because I have too many speeding tickets 2. Should I choose to indulge, Would you stop me before it's too late? Should I choose to inject lead, Would you shove erasers down my throat? Should I choose to give it all up for that girl, Would you take me to the park to do something else? Should I choose to reach for hell, Would you grab my wrists and pull? Should I choose to lay in smoke, Would you throw water on me or gasoline? Would you leave me for something better, Should I promise not to cry about it? 3. It doesn't matter If I run out of mints now- I'll sleep good tonight But things won’t be fresh At all Rami Obeid is a writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His work has been published across multiple online and print publications. His chapbook “Marooned on the Shores of Malaise” is currently available from Whispering Wick Chapbook Press. You can follow him on twitter @obeid_ro

In the first place, I resented everyone and his neighbor commenting on or even seeming to concern himself with my soul or lack of one. And I didn’t like their terms, either. At the time, I didn’t know to ask myself if I was in a nest of Gnostics, if that’s what all academics really were, or not. Or whether that was bad or good; or indifferent? And even less did I like being accused of idolatry, which was a sin; my discomfort with this was mystifying, since, even though I knew what it was supposed to be, it shouldn’t have bothered me: I wasn’t a Catholic, and wasn’t really a Christian, though I’d been raised in a Protestant milquetoast version of Christianity. This sounds confused, doesn’t it? But even though Aidan and I had thought (or at least I had thought) that our affair was a secret, not only from his wife but from everyone else of note at the university, it seemed a little too coincidental to me that my professors (only the male ones) were putting their efforts in class into a kind of preaching, when it was a clearly non-religious school at least in academic terms; and when they preached about some texts, they repeatedly brought up the question of the “divine spark,” and whether or not particular people had one (and here they would meet my attentive glance in a pointed manner). Now, from the little I’ve learned since about the divine spark—from Googling, which is all my remaining sense of antagonism towards their unfairness has allowed—I know that it is supposed to reside in every human being, as the spark of God in them. That is apparently Gnostic teaching. But also, it seemed, it may be correctly awakened or may only lie dormant. They didn’t say this, however. Their disputes, which since neither I nor anyone else was contradicting them, were being carried on with themselves, strolling back and forth at the fronts of classrooms, were as to whether a person was one who had the divine spark or one who was only composed of clay. They were downright insulting. I mean, if everyone has a soul, then who were they to say I—or anyone—didn’t have one, or to imply it, just because I was screwing around with one of their colleagues’ married graduate students? And what about him, who had been the initiator, what was he, pure gold? Or clay? Were they likewise preaching at him, or since he was practicing to become one of them, were they extending him the professional courtesy of dark angels to one of their own kind? And if they were really angels of light, why not preach to him, too, or even mainly? I was eight years his junior, was under their jurisdiction in a moral sense in the in loco parentis manner; was that how proper parents acted, not taking up for and protecting their own young, but instead blaming them entirely for a scrape they’d gotten themselves into and letting the other party off scot-free? Because as Aidan had told me, his supervisor suspected something, but had simply told him to keep his nose as clean as possible. Of course, his supervisor also was a huge man who frequented the skinny-dipping reservoir where students of my age went, where I had gone several times either by myself or with a female friend; a supervisor who’d taken his own twelve-year-old son there with him in the sort of tolerance which in older sophisticated societies was usually accomplished by men taking their young or adolescent sons to a brothel or an “understanding” older woman for the night. Yeah, and so where was his spark? Was it hidden in his mound of clay? Where did tolerance for breaches of societal norms begin and end in such a place? And what were the norms? I can sketch out the terms of my own confusion regarding my adult role models in this manner now, but at the time all I knew was suffering over Aidan’s back and forth about whether he wanted to continue with me or not, his fine manipulations amounting to a sort of sadism emotionally. I was so attuned to his every movement that when he came down the stairs in the hallway outside my basement apartment, I knew from the first step whether it was he or someone else. Most of the time, I had intuitions, strange forebodings, ghastly shadows of apprehension which I now associate with the Brontë sisters’ fiction, if he wasn’t going to turn up for our mid-morning or later daytime rendezvous at all. It was a creative time, of course, because I was living in a true Romantic’s dream, bad and good both, and I had strange, prophetic dreams at night, drank more than was good for me, secretly despised him in my heart of hearts though I was faithful to a fault in external adherence, resisting every other married man who made for me in the illusion that what went for one went for all; all the Romantic contradictions were there. It was gut-wrenching, and I developed stomach issues, not Romantic except in the sense that such abuses of good sense and good health were truly part of the Romantic period, too. But it’s only now that we humorously and a little sympathetically discuss that Byron was getting portly and so lived on a diet for a while of potatoes with vinegar, believed at the time to be good for reducing. The most resounding defeat of common sense was my loyalty to my mistake when Aidan finally admitted that even though he’d been promising to leave his wife and come live with me after I graduated, he had played me false, too: because it turned out that they were simultaneously preparing for a baby. He had been impregnating her all at the same time as he had been making avowals to me. It wasn’t clear to me why I was taking his side against myself to that extent, but the weary thing dragged on until after I graduated. He even had me over to his house one summer day to meet his cat, and one night had me there for dinner, both times when his wife was away. When I thought about it logically, a new thing for me, though all the accusations about not having a soul had stung and caused damage to my sense of myself, of value for myself, one incident kept coming back to me that finally made me feel more like letting go. True, I didn’t let go willingly until he himself ended the affair, and I exacted full tribute of sympathy from my long-suffering friends who’d always colored within the lines and couldn’t understand my motives in the least. I wasn’t sure I could, except for the influence of certain old movies like Intermezzo and Casablanca. There was only one professor’s remarks, still, which touched me in a more coherent way. My female professors, of whom there were fewer in those days than there were of the men, had by and large kept their opinions to themselves and treated me with a kind of charitable distance, not even seeming to know what was going on, which indeed they might not have, as “the old boy network” was the one to refer to for information, and they too were outsiders to that. But one female professor, Lady Mary Beth Rostakovich, therefrom Oxford as a guest lecturer and one of whom the men seemed largely to be a bit afraid, knew or thought she knew something of me. And her attitude was not one of moral and preachy disapproval paired with the lust of someone after the Biblical Suzanne. She was, rather, satirically amused. That was much harder to bear. I often thought of her in the next fall after graduation, during my long, slow recovery from the extended period of emotional self-abuse. In the semester before I had graduated, the lecture class was studying Marvell and his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” the famous piece in which a poet says to his intended but reluctant lover all sorts of things ringing changes on the carpe diem theme—remarks that if she doesn’t respond more quickly, “then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,” and a passage which acknowledged that he wasn’t in the situation such that “My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and slower.” She called particular attention at the end of the class, when unexpectedly from her I got the usual professorial eyeroll of meaning, to the phrase “vegetable love.” She articulated that it was meant to convey something less than full animal and satisfying robustness, of love as of other things, and that there were even “back then” people who made fun of vegetarians as weak and watered-down. The more I thought about this, the harder it was to puzzle out: I mean, if she knew anything really about my situation, then she knew that I had been engaged in a concupiscent affair, fully physical. So, why was she advising me to get more fully involved, as the woman addressed in the poem? That woman was not my counterpart. It was only after I thought about it a little longer that I got the real point of that wry smile and the satirical but kind advice she was giving: I was in the position of the poet speaking (hadn’t I placed in a poetry contest just the year before?), and I was wasting my time with a humanly vegetal situation, whatever its carnal facts had been. She was a sudden burst of sunshine from a dark crevasse of rock to me then, as if the hillside towering above me had been split and rolled asunder and a new set of commandments given. And first and foremost was the one that I was later to find when, funnily enough, I read Dune, about not putting yourself into someone else’s power. It didn’t say “in another’s keeping,” as that was a matter more of real caring, but in someone else’s power. And I began to realize that feminism didn’t mean fucking around wherever you wanted to and expecting to get away with it just because men did too, but making self-consistent and well-reasoned decisions, however passionate or loving, about which people were fit to be in your life as trusted equals. Also, I learned that I could take my models for behavior from those positive ones of men or women either, and that just because someone wanted to make me the lump of sparkless clay didn’t mean I couldn’t, as a woman, be the Gnostic magician myself. Not that I wanted to be, but that I could be. Victoria Leigh Bennett, Resident Greater Boston, MA, born WV. Ph.D. Degrees: English & Theater. Website: creative-shadows.com, containing 8 novels & lots of articles/reviews. "Poems from the Northeast," @winningwriters, @press_roi, @thealienbuddha, @madrigalpress, @LovesDiscretion, @cultofclio. Also has 1 collection short stories. Current WIP: 9th Novel/CNF/Poetry/Fiction. Twitter: @vicklbennett, Facebook at Victoria Leigh Bennett.