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CASTAWAY skies bristle to midnight to sleep in the shadow of the barn with homesick dreams and pourquoi tales lost among the furious trees to settle for the shelter of the velvet owl to live in the land of castaway lamps and the bare moon rustle of the windy barn DUST an uncommon day of light and air a poet with swallowtail eyes a lonely rabbit with bigger dreams we clamor for boulders in the dry dust wind a mooring, a strand a shimmer in the roaming shade but the lonely rabbit with the dry dust eyes will sleep by the brambled grave IRONCLAD a crackling train night indigo lurches along mudshack outposts wrestling the cargo of the lonely blacksmith the emptiness of the last trampled plain time’s merciful silhouette with nothing more to lose burns its love letters in the coal fires of a treeless dusk and vanishes into the dusty threads of history’s folktale Regine is a teacher and writer in the American Southwest. Her work has been published in numerous magazines including Black Bough Poems, Consilience, Loft Books, Cerasus Magazine, Spellbinder and others. She writes about the great Sonoran Desert, love and loss.

Stories I Cannot Tell Here’s the story I want to tell—each morning I got up before dawn to make the fire and cook rice, and while the water boiled, I hung on a strong branch of the pomelo tree because I thought it would make me taller I’ll explain the way I fastened on a headlamp at four am to cut and drain the rubber trees before class; it’s how I paid for college because after my parents paid my sister’s ransom there wasn’t any money left for me But I cannot tell those stories; they belong to my neighbor My stories are bland and white like milk As for heritage? My father’s Dutch last name, and my mother’s Irish hair, no other language spoken but English, unless you count the way we used words like laceration and dehiscence when describing our wounds Once, my family left a Halloween party and noticed police cars and an ambulance racing into the parking lot of a bar, and although he was dressed like a farmer, my dad followed the sirens and rushed in to find a man with a gun- shot to the chest; he started compressions, rode with him to the hospital and came home later with blood spattered on his straw hat and overalls My mother was frightened of water and held her breath when we drove over bridges When I was older, I found out that when she was six, her brother drowned and she couldn’t forget the way my grandmother fell to the ground when given the news I screamed in fourth grade when a boy named Andrew pushed me against the school’s brick wall and kicked me in the groin he pinched my arms and thighs I did not know that my cousin Andrew forced my younger sister to do shameful things; I thought the hidden bruises on my thighs were the worst thing a boy named Andrew could do As I write them down, these stories seem too meager to compose a childhood so you’ll forgive me if I mention the time I left the rice unattended, which allowed the dog to steal my family’s breakfast and fearing my mother’s wrath, I ran away into the woods, and when I became hungry, I ate the fruit that grows along the forest floor The Complication The baby is still feeding when I’m rushed back to the operating room. My legs are numb so I do not feel the clots which soak the sheets. He scrubs my abdomen and prepares to open the incision so recently closed. I need some help he shouts as I plunge into brilliant darkness. Here, there is nothing but time. My oldest son sprints ahead of me on a beach in Malibu. I round the bend and do not see him, and now the waves turn violent. I fall to my knees and scream his name—Nathan! He laughs. I look up and see him conducting the ocean as he stands atop a small bluff. The sons who haven’t arrived hover in the shadows and whisper. It is dark and I cannot see the color of their eyes. But I already know their names. Unexpectedly, the sky lightens. My fussy newborn is placed upon my chest and quiets. Oh Luke— you of copper hair and warrior eyes. So new I cannot bring myself to say your given name aloud. Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. She writes poetry in her spare time. She is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press). Her recent work can be found or forthcoming in Haunted Waters Press, Nelle, Entropy, Tribes, Dialogist, Rattle and elsewhere.

A word from the author: As a trauma therapist I was invited to Harlem Hospital to talk to the ER staff, ambulance crews, and doctors and nurses from the Pediatric Surgical departments, and staff from the Injury Prevention Program. What transpired there still haunts me. I looked up into the fifty or so faces of medical personnel in the old amphitheater who were looking back at me, waiting. I had been called to Harlem Hospital to address the effects of working closely with all that the streets could bring in, the pointless deaths, the suffering. How they couldn’t help taking home the daily anguish. I was to tell them how they could reach inside for strength to help them hurt less and deliver more. Yet what could I—privileged, white and cocooned—give them that they would find of any use? double street sign Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X locals still call it Lenox It was time for me to begin. I told them about how this outer mess could trigger their morass within, how they could reach inside for strength to help them hurt less and deliver more. And they told me a few things as well. About needless deaths, children sold, babies baked in ovens by their drug-addled parents, of street corner executions by burning tire necklacing. You couldn’t work at Harlem Hospital without living the images, sights and smells. seats stretched upward thousand-yard stares look back By noon we had explored the realities of their work, and in the afternoon we would practice new skills. This would be draining. I was already depleted. I picked up my lunch and withdrew to a private office to eat alone and try to find the energy I needed. I forced down a sandwich, ate half an apple, then pushed aside the plate and laid my head on the table. Falling into a half-sleep I watched the images swirl. Feeling despair at the task ahead, I longed for direction. I fell even deeper asleep. thick walls and doors street smells and sounds still carry inside Visions circled as I slept. I remember the psychic telling me that if she gave me details about my coming work, I’d lose my nerve to do it. I recall my visions of a fountain, a donkey carrying a brace, a race to a well with my father, an oil well geyser, meeting a stranger, being welcomed to battle, being given a black onyx spear with a golden tip. I remembered times in my clinic using the spear to heal, how energy flowed down the spear into pain. light tingles passing through into darkness In my mind, I find myself back in the amphitheater, looking up. The medics and therapists of Harlem Hospital wait expectantly. This time I reach up with the onyx spear, left to right, top row to bottom, gently touching each on the shoulder. I serve as a conduit, an instrument carrying a current I can feel but need not understand. As I come to each, I sense their need and feel each of them grow warm. As I finish touching the very last person, there is a knock at the office door. “It is time.” Kendall Johnson’s writing has appeared in such venues as Cultural Daily, Litro, Shark Reef, Ekphrastic Review, and Tears in the Fence. He is an artist as well as writer, and his books include Dear Vincent: A Psychologist and Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2019, Sasse Museum of Art), Chaos & Ash (2020, Pelekinesis), Black Box Poetics (2021, Bamboo Dart Press), Fireflies Against Darkness (2021, Arroyo Seco Press), and More Fireflies (forthcoming). A former trauma therapist and on-scene disaster consultant, Dr. Johnson writes and paints in Upland, California.

Mature Age Student The earth is crying like it’s lost a fake Rolex it believed was real based on the glistening multitude of assurances piled onto the Rolex by the passenger in the earth’s taxi who’d had no cash and used the watch to pay the earth in a time before digital transactions, in a time when the earth had a second job driving taxis at night to pay for night courses in psychology because education had stopped at 15 years of age in the earth’s small town but stayed for decades howling by the front door of the earth’s mind like a dog with abandonment issues. No One Says Terrific Anymore The earth is crying but in a slightly annoying way because it showed in its teens its hyphen-heavy poem to a friend and the friend said ‘hyphens are dead’, forgetting that the origin of bedroom is bed-room, which is at least the way it’s written in my edition of Bleak House, now being swabbed for traces of explosives at airport security, where I’m hoping I haven’t packed a blade and a friend just texted to say I should say hi to the Parthenon for them, which is dumb because I don’t speak ancient greek or even modern greek and besides my flight is bound for Dublin, where the sky on arrival is beauteous blue perfection. On a scale of beauteous perfection it’s potatoes au gratin in food blog photos, delicate golds and light browns glistening like a desert coated in margarine spray. Quite a good score but not the top, for consumer surveys show the sky rates best when it’s about to disappear. What if I Don’t Leave My Body? The earth is crying because it once cried simply from seeing a puppy at an airport lick its owner’s cheeks clean of feelings of inadequacy yet won’t visit the Mona Lisa because a stranger eating octopus at a bar in Barcelona said ‘it’s pretty underwhelming’. Same for the Taj Mahal, Niagara Falls, Rome (the carbonara wasn’t quite transcendental), same for most of the world whenever elation wasn’t slipped into his hand like the lost code of a juicy bitcoin account. Uplifting Comedown At dawn I watch the sun ooze onto communist era buildings like armpit sweat and all it brings to mind is all the diabolical ways I might steal fries from a stranger’s plate. You think I don’t love nature? I do love nature — but mostly for the picnics, and preferably in pictures where I for once am not Caspar-David-Friedrich-ing myself into the centre of vast ineffable landscapes that somehow manage to squeeze themselves like expert queue-jumpers at departure gates into stanzas of beautiful poetry. You think I don’t love poetry? O I do— it’s just that I’ve never read any with the same urgency as reading a text message over the head-rest of someone seated in front of me on a plane whose wheels are already spinning towards their imminent redundancy. Doorknob with Vital Signs In a recent tweet I read it said ‘the simile is dead’. Dead as dodecaphonic serialism. Dead as last year’s five-year plans. So dead that roadkill will be assessed with the phrase ‘That deer is as dead as simile’, a self-negating incantation which brings not only the simile back to life but also the deer, who wobbles onto its hooves and trots across the road and into the forest, ignoring the absence of signs indicating an area set aside for the safe crossing of deer. The Earth Thinks Rich The earth is crying like it’s just worked out that the coins buried in the sofa are worth more than the actual sofa and actually belong to the bank that provided the loan for the purchase of the sofa yet won’t make a dent in the monthly repayments. It’s dreaming of investing in a washer/dryer combo completing a few of its seventeen remaining tasks before settling down to a film starring Bradley Cooper. And just like that the earth wonders if Bradley Cooper is also dining in at a takeaway restaurant eating French fries dipped in melted cheese the yellow of nicotine stains on ceilings in apartments in East Berlin after the fall of the wall but before mass speculation on ruins and the attendant stripping of plaster. Small Wonders Sample Pack On earth I am no more or less alive than yeast and Olympic athletes but I remember I’m always finding new things to like. Like the way we agreed on stars as appropriate symbols with which to rate operas and seafood. Like the way a single star can receive a five star review. I like how no one I know gets older unless they’re absent, aging privately and suddenly like pears. I like the way that language can be briefly terrifying until you learn that the words ‘die American...’ ‘die Single...’‘die Quick...’ are only the fragmented beginnings of sentences in German. And I feel young. I feel young in the way I feel fluent in a foreign language when someone speaking it only says the only two words I know. Matthew McDonald is an Australian musician and poet living in Berlin, Germany, where he is employed as principal double bass of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the Open University, graduating with distinction.

Pissing in the Bushes I’ve just seen a man piss in the bushes Opposite my house. It’s the same place the school kids hide their cider. An awning of privets disguises it all. Catacombs are secreting receipts Of expensive dinners, New shoes, adulterer’s gifts. Aluminium wrappers are blowing in From the street. Old cat’s teeth are buried in the soil - Treasured dentistry. I watch it all, Everyday - Something different. This man pisses freely As if he is hosing the greenery. I imagine it ricocheting off leaves, My eardrums tingle for it. Just another Saturday afternoon. He turns, catches me peeping - I hide myself. I am the one exposed. My YouTube Viewing History Lately my YouTube viewing history has changed. It used to be pop songs, Old episodes of TV shows from the 90s. It's been a gradual happening. A long slide into addiction Like the way a teenager slowly acquires A thirst for vodka and tobacco. My friend showed me a video of popping spots. Big oozy boils of red and yellow Like a McDonald's about to burst open. I told her I was disgusted, Said I’m not looking at that But I typed it in when I got home Thousands of videos The thumbnails - mountainous tiles of Swelling pus under the skin - volcanic Like landmines. I sat and watched them for hours. 9 minutes, 3 minutes, 24 minutes It all added up. If I’d just watched the video in the car on the way home Maybe I wouldn’t have got myself to where I am now - Deleting history. Bad News The post hasn’t been, yet. The letterbox has never had so much attention. A noise. Birds on the roof coo and caw and converse together. They’re old fish wives. Hoisting up their chests, they don’t even realise They’re the neighbourhood watch. It’s bred into them. Any sight of the unfamiliar they’ll be gone. Inside the house, quieter, anticipatory, Waiting for the postman to turn the corner sharply all in red. Here he comes. The birds fly away, the letter is opened It begins. Charlotte Cosgrove is a Poet and Lecturer from Liverpool, England. She is the founding Editor of Rough Diamond Poetry Journal. Her work has been published in print and online in numerous anthologies and journals. Her first poetry book Silent Violence with Petals will be published later this year with Kelsay Books.

Better twenty in the seventies than seventy in the twenties He did her a favor, donating her fake-fur tiger-striped mini-dress to Goodwill. She tended to hang onto things like that, the scent of her memories still clinging to the fabric. The markings on the dress had faded, and the whole thing seemed to have withered in the back of the dark closet. Her husband pointed out, “You wore that dress fifty years ago─ you’ll never get into it now.” He was blunt that way, and she depended on him for objective truth, no matter how much it hurt. When a barista sashayed into Starbucks one day, wrapped in the tiger dress, he whistled at her. He was right again─ the dress was fierce as ever under the harsh light. Umwelt of a Fountain Pen It always crawled into his hand at the wrong time. He’d wrap his fist around it as if he was the only one enslaved. When the pen scratched the paper, it made a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard, a violin bow across cat-gut strings. A tickle, a twitch, a hiccup, an itch. To push the ravaging nib along the page stained everything─ fingers and thumb, paper, the grain of the desk─ with a fierce blue cruelty. When his work was finished, one of his muses said it was a revelation─ but of what she couldn’t say. The breath reconsiders death as it tumbles through these structures, past the lung-pinks and blood-reds, the vein-blues, bile-greens, and bone-beiges, knowing it may not make it; might not outrun the body’s disease. If it could speed up fast enough so time bends backward, the woman in the next bed would applaud and cheer. She’s always calling for her parents, as if they are not still dead, saying she wants her ticket home, too. Comfort comes from the idea we are skeletons made of stars, she whispers. When breath bursts from her mouth, it pops like champagne bubbles. We must always celebrate something, I tell her. Cheryl Snell is a poet, a fictionista, an aficionado of old music and new art, She is fluent in subtext, and is the author of several books, including the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. She has been published in five hundred literary journals and anthologies, including a Best of the Net. Look her up on Facebook. She'll keep a light on

I have cheated death, again and again; for punishment, I lose at love, again and again. we hike up New Hampshire’s Stinson Mountain on wooden snowshoes teardrop shape with curled lip open weave of lacquered deer hide lacing impress a waffle trail behind us we float on two feet of newly fallen soft snow foam of dream on waves of desire our assault on the granitic uplift wanders through the evergreen woods white pines red cedar Norway spruce around glacial boulders raising their muscular opposition through even deep drifts to our optimistic passage we seek possible route against gravity against the slope to the bald peak to view the forest panorama from the Timberland Owners fire lookout tower steel stilts thrusting caution into winter’s blanket of cloud waits unused for summer fire season the steps to the platform are chained off the stone railroad station squats waiting room empty closed cold boarded-up cracked windows debris and unplowed dirty snow, empty parking spaces, decommissioned aside Laconia’s once proud town center 6:00 in the January morning Boston and Maine’s final effort to provide rail service a single car self-propelled Budd liner engine running, untended, inside lights still off I have an hour to wait before departing I walk to the nearby railroad diner dimly lighted no welcome sign open exhaust aroma of unchanged cooking oil coffee frying bacon grease heated air unremoved garbage somewhere confront me the cook talks to the train engineer who sits on the counter stool farthest from the door I am the only other customer possibly the only passenger for the 7:00 departure I order coffee cook serves cream clotted toast cold conversation ends their silence verges on surrender the Budd car will run to Boston North Station’s grim hulk the postwar city worn out unrepaired at a dead end to visit you I want to be in Corfu I carry Durrell’s Black Book in my winter coat pocket not Catcher in the Rye before he escapes London his cold apartment the depressed friends rats foraging floors a skinny roommate with pimples staring into the small mirror with ripped black backing above the cold-water only sink Later I don’t understand his Quartet though engrossed by Alexandria’s culture of passion and cult but Justine teaches me love is onion-thick layers of deception and disappointment A yellow bulldozer with continuous cleated tracks heavy steel push-blade on hydraulic lifts tears a generation ago through the mountainside forest to carve out two logging skidways from ridge to hollow floor for century-old ash oak pine and locust logs to be dragged a half-mile to layup yard where a truck-mounted derrick with loading crane lifts them onto double-trailer trucks now are dedicated horse trails on our farm I trek on foot slowly with hand pruning shears removing clip by clip the overhanging veil of briars and willowy saplings and wind-torn branches already rotting from a wet winter of straggling snow drive our farm tractor using the bucket on the tilt-loader to push onto the slope of the creek below fallen trees with thick trunks and uptorn roots or mark work to be done by farm help identify deer tracks bear scat turkey hens and turkey toms that might startle horses you and your girlfriend’s ride trails to unfenced ridgetop hay fields across Cold Hollow Road to abandoned 150year-old farms with apple orchards gone to crab caved in houses out-building ruins fields reclaimed by thorny briars Bush Honeysuckles and Japanese Barberry then forest pines and poplars desolation is not fertile soil for reminiscence I am again at trailhead Poetry is about sadness for our mortality; we should rejoice we are not immortal. Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He and his wife live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. He is an imagist poet, grounding experiences and moods in concrete descriptions, including haiku, storytelling, recorded poetry, and in filmic interpretation. He occasionally uses the pseudonym, Turin Shroudedindoubt, for literary and artistic work. He has published in over 40 different digital and print literary magazines.

The Patron He’s sitting in the corner, side-part falling to the left, white napkin fluttering on his breast, soft pink hands armed with cutlery. He spears the Schweinshaxe, skillfully separates meat from bone, and forks it up, divebombing the pinkish blob down his savage gullet. “How is everything?” the waitress asks. He nods toward his beer. “Refill?” she asks. The question’s redundant. He goes back to his Schweinshaxe, spears it, slices it, divebombs it. Then looks about with tiny rapacious eyes, eyes that are blind to Bruegel, sonnets, the blue- breasted fairywren. But when the waitress leans over the next table to pick up a plate, those same eyes wash over her backside, giving it a shrewd and rapid-fire appraisal. Then it’s back to his dish, sliding the Schweinshaxe over a little, scooping up a forkful of sauerkraut and jamming it home. Fear and Loathing although I don’t or can’t or won’t I’ve come so close to letting everything go I feel like a day-old newspaper with a crow standing on it to keep the wind from carrying it away. The Tempest An angelfaced twentynothing Polish girl sitting Indianstyle at the Hermannplatz U-Bahn station, a big black poodle piled in her arms, tin cup for donations sitting between her legs. That was five years ago. She has since lost her dog and undergone an unfathomable Ovidian metamorphosis, her gleaming mass of chestnutcolored locks sheared into a crooked mohawk, her mouth a collection of broken stones, clothes soiled and frumpy, black electrical tape keeping one sole from dragging her into the earth. She now looks more like Caliban than she does Ariel, that soft broken beauty of just five years ago, tin cup banking with fire. M.P. Powers lives with one foot in Berlin and one in South Florida. Recent publications include the Columbia Review, Wrongdoing Magazine, Glitchwords, Mayday Magazine, and others. His artwork can be found on Instagram @mppowers113

Acerbic Assertions by Arrogant Affluent Alcoholic Blustering Boris Blabbering about Bombs and Brexit: the same thing? Certainties Cancelled and Children Crying Caring Conservative? Please! Pramod Subbaraman is a poet from India who lives and works in the UK. He started writing during the first COVID19 lockdown and has since been published in the UK, the USA and South Africa. He favours fixed forms.

This evening the sky craned itself into an immense tower of clouds. Its peak arched over my head to the horizon and still there was just enough room for the sun’s final sermon. Standing there alone, a captive audience of exquisite smallness, I felt the thread of shame slip its knot. Each stitch around my lungs loosened and fell into an absence that grew like a flame from my chest until even the sky caught fire and burned to black cinder and diamonds. Jesse grew up in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but he is currently living in and exploring the woods of upstate New York. His work has been published or is forth coming in Hyacinth Review, the Montana Mouthful and the Field Guide Poetry Magazine. You can find him on twitter @suessjesse

This gift, bestowed to you in flashes of lightning upon brittle twigs. Your father’s fist in your mother’s womb, we gave you light for the first time. Children, you took this spark and ran with it. What started as two infants warming themselves beside the fire of Eden, erupted into a string of florescence that hide the heaven man once learned to count by. You drew a line between mother Earth and father Sky with a shield of stinging light, a golden fleece covering my body from his stare. And I haven’t seen the stars in years. I missed the way your father gazed at me, embedded me in a black comfort, even before I birthed you from my seas we haven’t touched in a millennium. But I still like to look to him once in a while, reflect his eye blue skies in crystal lakes you’ve yet to soil, count the stars he scattered into the letters of my name years ago. I never thought our children would push us so far apart. We never conceived as we cradled you from crib to crawl the tear that would come between our horizons. The first time we allowed you to stay up all night, reading by candlelight. You properly thanked us by charting nebula and plotting the position of planets. You wrote an ode to your mother, stung tinsel of gold around my belly, to radiate against the fall of opaque sky. but I am no longer the center of your universe. you grew past oedipal obsession. This gift, intended to shield you from the pitch, keep the monsters at bay, warm your feet, you manifested into a weapon. You tended a minor glow, fanned your flame into a storm across my body, unstoppable, until I can no longer be seen by father’s bedroom stare. Made an artificial day of my favorite midnight. Were you jealous of the way he touched me, the lightning jagged and curl that connected us for a split second? Or was it your fear of the darkness, of the unknown, of death, that made you wish away the night’s sky. That made you think you could battle it with 24-hour convenience stores and swing shifts and nightclubs. Distracted the view of Milky Way with glowing neon. You are destined for self-destruction, Now, I never sleep, and all my gentle warnings are wearing thin. I haven’t been able to see past you in years, you’ve seeped into every sky I’m ever known, infiltrated my blackest reserves. You are too damned bright. I thought you would fill the gap between us, I wasn’t expecting you to shield him from me completely. I search for him in deserted lands far from your touch, Africa, South America, Siberia, among the open plains and mountain tops, where the night still knows secrets. Where no synthetic light will keep me up or blind me from his constellations where I can still remember the name of the creatures he conjured for my entertainment. Children, there are good things that happen in the dark, and what this mother wouldn’t give to feel father’s embrace one more time. For one moment, stop pumping your fists against your father’s nocturnal mood. We all need some time in the away from the light once in a while. It is time to put these children to bed, so this mother earth can once again be enveloped in her father sky. Take a moment, slip into slumber and don’t turn to me when I slide into your room and turn off that light, reclaiming all I gave you.

Assistant Professor of Botany Dr. Sylvia Anderson woke me up at 2 AM and told me she had to get going. I lit a cigarette on my front step and only winced a little bit when she dinged my beat-up Civic with her truck. My mind was still too muddled up to care. Not because I was particularly drunk, but because I was confused and a bit surprised. A friend of mine once told me that the best sex of his life was a random encounter with the manager of a Cookout in Galax he had met driving back to Richmond. Said it was a complete surprise, but that man fucked like his life depended on it. I don’t know why I’m watching it snow in Laramie and thinking about two dumpy dudes getting their swerve on back in small-town Virginia. Not a whole lot in my life makes too much sense. I’ve got a busted top lip right now from a poorly-planned ice-climbing trip with some sketchy Alaskans in the Wind River range. A piece of ice hit me and banged up my grill. I was never too pretty to begin with, so this was just another one of those things. The Alaskans drove me to Riverton where the doctor stitched me up and told me I probably didn’t have any brain damage. I was just glad I didn’t break my front two fake teeth. They were the ones that Melissa, the girl I dated for a year in Philadelphia after I quit seminary, knocked out. I met her a week after I left, when I was living in a Motel 6 with only 20 bucks and the disapproval of the Blessed Mother to my name. I was charging the room to my brother’s Navy Federal card. She put me up in her house and got me a job at a record store and in the end almost broke my jaw. After that, I was too ashamed to go back to Roanoke, so I headed out west at age 21, scrawny and pale, with a job offer from the Bureau of Land Management and a vague plan that I was gonna live an interesting life. I met Lynn last season when she was hanging around the Lander office, doing research on sage ecosystems on a grant. I had just gotten back off a fire with the rest of the Rawlins helitack crew and I was sitting in the break room drinking a cup of instant coffee, half-asleep, wiping ash out of my nose, while this girl talked my ear off about bushes. Two of her undergrads eyed me nervously from the corner. One of them let off a little puff of air freshener. I liked her, but I really wished we could have run into each other about 18 hours later, when I didn’t feel like the living dead. “Where are you from, Hank?” “Southwest Virginia. Not south West Virginia, but the southwest part of regular Virginia.” “I haven't spent much time in Virginia, but I love the south. I really liked New Orleans.” “Most people do.” “The live oaks were my favorite part.” “They’re pretty neat.” “Do you do much plant identification when you’re out?” “Can’t say I do.” “That’s a shame.” “I’m just a caveman, I don't appreciate nature as much as I should.” “No, I meant maybe you could do some legwork for me. Save me some time.” She gave me her number later, when I was about to drive back and I saw her in the hallway. I kind of forgot about her, but I was living in Laramie for the winter, and I asked her if she wanted to grab a drink one day. I’m a good listener. It’s my saving grace because I’m pretty dumb. I listened to sermons growing up about the evils of the world. I listened to my priest who told all of us boys that if we really wanted to do God’s will we should forget about sex and the world and go to seminary. I listened to my roommate, who was from central Ohio, agonize about how he had kissed a boy and really liked it. I wanted to tell him that I had only kissed a girl a couple times in high school but I would pawn the chapel’s candlesticks to do it again, but I kept my mouth shut instead. I listened to Melissa kindly explain to me why I had the loss of my two teeth coming. I listen to briefings, the air attack channel, intra-crew, the division channel through the radio in my flight helmet or in the pickup. I scribble down the important parts in my Rite-In-The-Rain next to the dicks the rookies drew in there when I’ve been stupid enough to leave it lying around. I listen to waitresses bitch about work and drunk old men who want me to read them poetry at the bar. Lynn and I met at the Silver Dollar, a little dive, and she was a whole lot cooler than she had seemed in Lander. The product of sleep on both of our parts, maybe. She called me dude a lot. She was from Pennsylvania, but down in Pennsyltucky. I told her that I went to college there - a little liberal arts college around Philadelphia. I figured the whole seminary drop-out tale was a bit much for a first date. Plus, it all seemed like a life lived by another person. She told me she had just gotten out of a six-year relationship and wasn’t looking for anything serious, which bummed me out more than I expected it to. “Fighting with my fiance is really what I remember the most about New Orleans,” she said, after a couple beers. She told me I looked good with my lip split in half. She said that eventually she wanted to leave Wyoming and head somewhere less remote soon. California, maybe, or Texas. She heard Austin was cool. “I’m thinking of heading up north here sometime,” I said. “Where?” “Montana. Missoula, maybe. Got some buddies on a crew up there who want me. Better than Rawlins.” “Rawlins isn’t so bad.” “Spoken like someone who hasn’t spent much time in Rawlins.” “Montana’s cool. You ever read Lonesome Dove?” “Can’t say I have.” “It isn’t a happy book, anyway.” “I can deal with a sad book every now and then.” “Going to Montana doesn’t work out very well for them.” “Well, now you’ve ruined it.” “It’s been out for like 40 years. That’s on you.” “I meant going to Montana to escape my problems.” “Oh.” “The book, too. I’m slow on the uptake. I was a sheltered child.” “How sheltered?” “Like solidly-built double-wide sheltered.” She just laughed and we kept drinking and she started touching my leg under the bar and I knew we were getting on the road. We went back to my place. I remember her lying on my queen bed, the teenage-girl bed frame I had bought off my landlady with sheets I hadn’t changed in weeks and a dirty comforter. She looked like some sort of high plains orchid in the light filtering in from my neighbor’s house. Pale and naked with a bandana around her neck. I held her and slept until she woke me up and said she felt sober enough to drive, and then she left. I smoked my cigarette in the January cold. I went inside and felt the old loneliness, like it had never happened, except my sheets smelled like her and she left a pair of earrings on the dresser. I don’t go on many dates. I don’t talk to many people. As soon as she left I wanted her back, wanted her in the animal way that comes on too hot and too soon. Wanted to buy a house and settle down. Knew that she knew I would get too attached. Knew that this might be the last time I ever saw her. Knew that this wouldn’t work out. Knew it in my soul with the kind of fatalism that always comes over me when things go too well. Like the penultimate acts of old crime movies. That the money’s going to be gone and the cops’ll close in, or, as close as it gets, the main character is still going to bite it. But without the high stakes because this was just another white-trash hookup. But maybe the good things will actually happen. Maybe the next climbing trip won’t land me in the hospital. Maybe Missoula will make me feel less blue all the time. Maybe she won’t decide that she’s through with me in the morning. Who knows. Anything’s possible. But I doubt it. Sy Holmes is an author from western North Carolina. He lives in the mountain West with other people's dogs.