Search Results

to stand still and yearn to go you sit in silence, ground moving beneath the soles of your shoes, beneath the tracks; cities rushing by, a blink of an eye– and you're gone again somewhere else, somewhere new, pink trees and white skies and the smell of sunscreen in the air; take a picture, but the moment's already gone and now you're driving through the night, a different kind of calm, except you're still here – slowly realizing the magic of standing still and yearning to go. good for you I’m not good for you– you, who crave to love and be loved falling asleep in the arms of hope free of tomorrow’s nightmares I’m not good for you– me, daughter of dying stars and useless daydreams words slipping through my fingers and crumbling like fallen leaves I’m not good for you– a man with the universe in his eyes and comfort in his touch a gentle eventide after a harsh day I’m not good for you– a woman gone mad from trying to find galaxies and painting the sky red with starfire but your turn of phrase, moonlight spilling out of your every word, a soft brush of midnight, somehow feel like an eclipse in reverse so maybe these stellar explosions I can’t help but desire should make way for the quietude of dusk an unhurried, restful slumber; I’m not good for you– but I want to be. sunlight incarnate He sits on the edge of the world, turning a pair of sunstruck eyes toward the skyline something about the sight is startling but really, it should be no surprise that he’s brighter than sunshine and so hours pass in this silent calm– he looks on as another day dies, Helios climbing back into the divine; still, he stays golden, defying the dark, and in that moment, I realize I’d give anything to make him mine.

Poem for People Who Say They Don’t Pray This is a poem for those who say they don’t pray. Poem is a prayer. If you write, you pray. I write to the light of the candle. I walk with the moon at the end of the day. Walking is a prayer. I write with the devotion of a nun to her god. I walk with the devotion of a monk to his vow. I repeat: anaphora. I chant: Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ. I say: Santa María, Madre de Dios. I write. I walk. I pray. I burn incense for you. Frankincense. Violet. Rose. Myrrh. I pray. I drink wine. Prisoner Red Zin and Rombauer Chardonnay. I pray. I write. I walk. I say your name. You don’t answer. I write. I walk. I drink. I burn. I chant. I pray. Poem for Sylvia Plath TOO DARK told me I couldn’t speak to you through my Ouija Board, so I’m going to try to reach you through this poem. I want you to know how famous you are now and how many people adore you. My favorite poem of yours is “Tulips” and I also really love “Edge,” which is credited as the last known poem you wrote, but that’s debatable because Ted burned your last journal. That’s also debatable. I also want you to know that there’s a 1,154-page biography about you called Red Comet and that your tarot deck recently sold on Sotheby’s for $200,000. Can you believe that? Can you believe that some of your fans take a trip to Indiana just to see your braid? Others go to your grave in Heptonstall to deface the Hughes name from your headstone. You also have a bot that is quite active on Twitter. You probably don’t know what that means, but I think you may have liked Twitter and would have had a lot of followers. Ok, you probably wouldn’t have liked Twitter, but you definitely would have had a lot of followers. I would have loved to follow you. I follow Frieda for you on Instagram. You probably don’t know what that means either, but it’s a place where she posts photos of a menagerie of pets (including 14 owls!), paintings, cooking, nature walks, motorbikes, and flowers. I learned from Instagram that she had a big art exhibit in London recently. Frieda looks a lot like you. She has also published several children’s books and several poetry books. I want you to know that she seems to be doing well—in spite of it all. She still has your laundry box seat from the 1950s. She says she painted her feelings onto it. Poem for Gianni Versace For my birthday in 2020, I booked a room at Casa Casuarina to celebrate not being dead. I swam in your pool at night after everyone went to bed. I also ran up to the observatory to see if I could reach you through the red. You didn’t take my call, so I left you a heady trail of roses there instead. A word from the author: These three poems are part of my Poems for People series. Others have been published in HAD (Poem for People Who Don't Like Poems and Poem for People Who Are Tired), Maudlin House (Poem for People Who Take Public Transit), and Marvelous Verses (Love Poem for Fire-Star), and one is forthcoming next week in The Daily Drunk (Poem for Paris Hilton). Nicole Tallman is the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. She is the author of Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience Press), and her full-length debut collection is forthcoming in the summer. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.

CW: mentions/light description of sexual violence, murder, and cannibalism. Defendant name: Andrew F Moore (A.M.) Age: 36 Court: Leeds Crown Court Judge: Judge Henry Stevens QC (J.S.) Country: England & Wales Date: 20-10-2008 Offence: Murder Sentence: Custodial Immediate Length: 30 Years - Life Defence Chambers: Furnival Chambers Defence Barrister: Ron Smithers QC (R.S.) Prosecuting Chambers: St. Paul’s Chambers Prosecuting Barrister: Oliver Sullivan QC (O.S.) REPORTER’S PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS O.S.: What is it that made you want to become a chef, Andrew? A.M.: I was always good at it. I’d been meaning to go for it further, you know, before I was scouted. O.S.: And what changed, again, in the last several years? A.M.: I turned thirty. O.H.: How did turning thirty affect you, specifically? A.M.: The gigs dried up fast. O.H.: Of course. I see. Is that also why you decided to kill Daniel? Was it a resentment stemming from that? A.M.: No. I still don’t remember. O.H.: Is it no, or is it that you don’t remember? A.M.: I don’t remember. O.H.: Do you remember declaring yourself heterosexual in several of your personal emails? A.M.: How is that relevant? O.H.: You probably also recall admitting that you only ever entered these competitions because you succeeded in them. . A.M. Yes. And? O.H.: It was easy for you to win them, what with your face and your physique. I saw the sashes hanging in your apartment. It’s all quite impressive, really. I watched some of the clips, those bar crowds endlessly praising you and calling out your name. You were not only the first Mr. Gay UK, but possibly the most highly decorated one to date. I’m sure it’s been quite lucrative. Is that correct? A.M.: Sure. O.H.: Explain to me then why you invited Daniel Littlefield in for a romantic evening on the night of the 23rd? Why hid you invite him into your home if you are indeed confidently heterosexual? A.M.: Yeah, well, I’m not always confident, you know. O.H.: That’s a rather convenient thing for you to express here and now—don’t you agree? It is noted that you’d told Daniel in your texts that you wanted to take things slow; to me, that doesn’t sound like the request of a man genuinely interested in his date. A.M.: I said that because I was nervous. I only wanted to make him dinner, watch a movie, and just see how I felt about it. How I felt about him. O.H.: And you felt that you had an influence on him. The fact that he’d been an audience member on your episode of God’s Gift… he was one of many screaming for your attention, hoping to be picked by you for the prized date. Wasn’t he? So you knew that you had power over him, still, for that reason. A.M.: That was a long time ago. It was just a coincidence. I didn’t intentionally target him or anything. O.H.: I see. Was it also just a coincidence, then, when you stabbed him thirty-six times, on the night of the 23rd? A.M.: No. I mean, I don’t know. O.H.: How about when you slashed his throat? Or when you cut out sections of his thigh and his chest? A.M.: I just don’t remember. O.H.: You know what seems the most intentional about what you did, Andrew? You seasoned all of the meat you cooked! You seasoned it. With herbs; with garlic! You were so precise in the way you prepared and served Daniel’s flesh to yourself. The officers said that your apartment smelled quite lovely. A.M.: I’m not trying to pretend that I didn’t do all of it. I know that I did. O.H.: Sure, but I’ve been a prosecutor for a long time now, and I have never seen any act of violence—certainly not one as precise and adept as yours—be a result of the state that you’re so claiming for yourself. A.M.: Well, I already told you that cooking is what I’ve always known best. So I’m not so much surprised that it’s what I would go back to, in that sort of extreme panic. O.H.: What would you be panicking about? A.M.: Like I said, the last thing I remember is still just waking up to his head between my legs. And like I told you, all I remember after that is just me screaming. O.H.: Okay. And nothing, afterwards? A.M.: That’s it. I have no clue. O.H.: But you remember it setting something off in you, don’t you? When you started to scream? A.M.: Meaning? O.H.: The feeling you had in that moment—it must have been memorable to you. Now, and also then, too. Has there been another incident like that that could have made you vulnerable to such blinding anger? A.M.: Such as? O.H.: For instance, has any person forced oral sex upon you in the past? Perhaps, such an incident was so upsetting that you lost control when it happened again? A.M.: Oh. Well… I think that depends. O.H.: Hm? It depends on what? A.M.: You said you watched the clips, didn’t you? End Appendix Some creative liberties taken, this piece is based on the 2008 killing of Damien Oldfield by former model Anthony Morley.

Today was cold but bright, the October sun low on the horizon and bouncing rainbows from the car windscreens. The children were laughing as they scuffed their toes through stray piles. Watch for dog poo, she mouthed silently at a lone dad amidst the gaggle of mothers, but he was harassed, clearing snot from a toddler in a pushchair. No time for a drab old lady, especially with that blinding sun blurring the outlines of her face. She was used to the adults’ blankness, but occasionally one of the toddlers would gaze at her and break into a smile. “I see you, you see me,” she would whisper. Small happinesses shared, even if she was soon forgotten in the hurly burly of the school run and the shrieks of friends meeting at the crossroads. The hill made her puff a little and she was glad to wait amongst the chatter for Charlie the lollipop man. She thought he looked tired. Not surprising, he’s been here forever. “Shall I high five his lollipop like the children? No. Dignity as befits my age. How old am I anyway? Don’t the years drift by?” At the sports centre she had to wait for the doors to open at 9am. She took the time to lean against a pillar out of the wind and close her eyes into the sunlight. There was no warmth in it for her but it was nice to pretend, plus it shielded her from the effort of trying to make small talk with others in the queue. There were a few like her waiting amongst the fitness freaks who might have been amenable to a vague mumble about the weather if she had the energy. Him, what was his name? He started coming about the same time as her although she never saw him around town, just at the sporty. Maybe it was the clothes, he was always in a baggy t-shirt and old tracksuit bottoms. Who knows how he would look on the high street “Could I ever change my clothes?” she wondered. “I’ve had this old thing for so long. It’s what I’m used to, it’s practically part of me. And the costume underneath, oh I’m a canny one. Quick in and zoom, barely seconds and I’m changed and into the freedom of the water. Three more minutes until she opens. Never a second early. You’d think we’d learn and come a bit later”. Tracksuit bottom man turned his head and waved at another woman turning the corner towards them. "Here we are again. How are you? "Doing away. Aqua Zumba is it?" He laughed. "Not for me, like. Catch me in there dancing like a hippo. I only ever go to the gym now." "Do you not mind the smell?" "I’ve been so long about it I don’t notice, I just run. Well it’s something to do. Not like I’ll ever lose weight." They laughed, then saw her looking and gave her a quick chin nod of acknowledgement. "Oh, here they come, to the second. You’d think they’d let us in a wee bit early out of pity." She lost them in the jumble of bodies heading through the entrance and nipped past the receptionist into the changing area of the pool without bothering to show her pass. No need after all these years. It was such a habitual routine that her brain didn’t bother to record the hows and wherefores and as she hit the water she thought muzzily, “What locker was it again? I never have a pound coin anyway, I’ll just try all the open doors I suppose and then it was all lost in the shock of the cold and the bliss of the movement. I can feel myself,” she thought rapturously. The sting of chemicals in her nose made her sneeze and she wiped her nose surreptitiously with her arm as she glided on the downstroke, but the lifeguard wasn’t looking anyway and she let her head duck the water and sneezed again, defiantly this time. “I can feel, dammit, I am queen of the water! Bloody dolphin that’s me. No dancing hippo on this side of the barrier.” She had twenty minutes before Zumba started. If you swim during the school holidays the pool is awash (hah) with people and there are so many more swimmers than lanes that it becomes a non issue, one just swims where one can. No one notices if you swerve out of their way, or indeed, under their feet in the hubbub. In quiet times the pool has more lanes than swimmers and one just drifts up and down in solitary territorial splendour. Today was an in between time, just too many swimmers for the number of lanes. So she tucked right into the wall of the pool and concentrated on her side stroke, a nice old fashioned swim that let her face away from trouble and just gaze through the plate glass into the cafe. She could sense another swimmer in her lane but ignored them. There was a young mum at a table with a crying baby in a high chair. “Looks like it’s teething,” she thought as she edged past, peering through glazing. Dried apple rings, that’s what she should use. Remember Lily and her apple rings? She gummed them to mush and wore them like a slimey beard, she loved them so much. Such a beautiful baby. Such a beautiful girl. Starting back down the pool, she could see the instructor setting out floats against the wall. “How can I remember every moment of her childhood? Lily with a face like a painting, what was the one? Ophelia floating in the water with eyes like pansies, so deep and almost violet. Who had violet eyes? Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t it. She wasn’t a patch on Lily. So fragile and yet a will of iron. I can only remember her as a child. What happened to her? Still my child but so far away from me now. We can’t talk. I can’t reach out but I try, God knows I try.” Another length and the crying baby has been given a banana. “Well it’ll soon demolish that,” the thought satisfied. A slight swell behind her as the lane sharer passed by, and she risked a quick glance. “Oh it’s only him,” she realised, relieved. Another one of the gang. The Zumba instructor turned on his boombox and a frantic electric drumroll ricocheted off the walls while the instructor fiddled with the volume, then he switched it off again and the silence was almost as jarring in its suddenness. “That’s the one with the Madonna remix,” she thought, “Time to get out.” The only hot tub was unreliable, off for weeks on end waiting for a plumber, muffled forlornly in its cover with a rope across the steps. Not out of order today though, she smiled. She had heard the WHOOM of its jets starting up as she arrived, and she snuffed the hot chemical fug like ambrosia. A young couple of lads were swithering between the tub and the steam room, and she nipped up the steps smartly to get ahead of them. "Steam first, get the next one as it’s already going?" said the hairier of the boys and she cheered them off silently as she plonked onto the bench near the best nozzle. One of her lot was already ensconced and moved over companiably when he saw her notice his feet bobbing above the bubbles. "Can you hear me?" he shouted and she nodded and laughed. "The jets are a bit loud today, do you think it’s going to pack in again?" she said. "Oh probably. You can never tell." They settled into the thrum and swirl and eyed each other. "Come here often?" he asked. "Oh yes," she replied. "All the time in fact. Not normally on a Tuesday though. Not keen on the Zumba music." "It’s quieter on a Wednesday but then they have the schools in later on. Doesn’t affect us in here but plays merry hell with that poor bugger." He nodded out at the elderly man who had shared her lane, and she gazed out at him, still gently paddling up and down. "He’s always here then, fascinating.” "Oh aye. Always. Never stops." "Now that you mention it, he is always in that lane when I swim. I like it there myself. You can see the cafe." She stopped and remembered. "Yes, he is always there." He seemed small, distorted through the glass tiles that made up the wall of the health suite. Up and down. The Zumba class had assembled in the shallow pool and were gazing expectantly at the instructor. The boombox leapt into cacophony and the instructor fiddled with his bluetooth head mic. "Let’s get this party started!" he roared, and the quivering masses of swimsuited flesh jumped obediently to attention. She saw the lady from the outside queue tucked discreetly into a corner waving a leg out of time. The little swimmer kept his steady pace, resistant to the rhythm of the music.” I wouldn’t be able to do that,” she thought.” I would fit my stroke to the beat. He has his own beat. “ “For how long do you suppose?" she asked. "Since they closed the outside pool at the harbour. When that went he came up here, he likes to swim in straight lines. I don’t think he likes the sea. Keep swimming out there, you'll end up in Edinburgh." "Or Denmark," she said absently. "Oh aye I suppose. I don’t know what the rules are for that sort of thing. Whether there are international boundaries and suchlike. Or you just make them yourself. He’s a local lad. Born here. Died here. I don’t think he’d understand people from Denmark. Or Edinburgh for that matter," he laughed. "So just up and down here then. Why?" "It’s what he’s used to. What he used to do. Every day, he swam at the lido. It makes him happy, if he can feel happy anymore. It’s been so long I don’t know. He used to stop for a chat. I think he got out, went home even. But he’s lost that now." "His home?" "Oh I mean that went years ago, they turned it into flats. But wherever it is you go when you’re not…" he gestured. "You have a habit then you become the habit. You have a routine then you become the routine. I’m out of the game, on the sidelines if you like. I still like a chat with those that can. But you know. It’s soothing here. Find the right jet, you can get it right up your... back." The whine of the motor eased and the bubbles slowed. They sat in the ripples and then in the stillness. The Zumba music throbbed gently around them. "So he just swims?" "They turn the lights out, he still swims." "I’m surprised he hasn’t dissolved," she laughed, uncertain. "He might yet. I think he’s losing his, what you call, constructional integrity." "Structural integrity." "Aye. Corporeal fuzziness." "Is that what happens then?" She was puzzled. "Not to me. But I'm, what you'd call, community outreach." He hesitated. "But if you’re here then dammit you might as well have some enjoyment.” He changed his focus. Look at her out there." He pointed to the lady in the Zumba, just visible still through the glass tiles, wading waist deep as the other class members flailed foam floaties. "She always liked to feel part of things. You go down the High Street you get walked through by tourists, nobody catches your eye they’re all into the arty craft shops or trying to park their fancy four wheel drives. It’s a bloody nightmare if you’re local. Here everyone is concentrating on the same thing, you’re all looking straight ahead at the pretty boy there in his lycra. She actually died doing Zumba to a video but those with a bit of gumption, they can adapt to circumstances. She’ll be like “swimmerboy” eventually but not yet, not for years yet. He spat into the hot tub. "Pardon my manners but it’s diluted enough by bumcrack sweat from the steam room anyway. Speaking of which, shift up." The door to the steam room opened and the two boys came out and hit the on button. There was a whoom and whoosh and they plunged into the resurgent jets. She found herself side by side with the youngest, and he twitched uncomfortably as if it was her hand slithering across his thigh rather than the wake of bubbles.” It probably might as well be,” she thought mischievously, but she restrained herself. "She’s still got something about her,'' he said, ignoring the boys, "I have, we’ve had enough going on to keep our marbles for a few years yet. It’s what you’ve done all your life that makes this," his waved largely, "What it is. Him," he pointed back to the swimmer, "I remember him, his wife went first and then he did nothing but swim. It was in his head. It’s what kept him going." He grinned sourly. "And now it’s what keeps him from going. Until he’s gone. But he’s just a habit himself now I’m thinking. Like old faithful out there. He was lollipop man when I was a boy. Always will be. Don’t think he even noticed dying. Bloody world will be a volcano again, he’ll still be lollipopping. And the kids still love him. They don’t notice him but they still tap on that bloody lollipop because he’s there and the love is still there. Parents don’t have a bloody clue, too busy with their phones." She thought about her own life. The sad little life after Lily left home, and the rows and the drugs, and the scenes and the bruises left on her arms as she clutched and called after her, “don’t leave me, I never meant it.” “There’s NOTHING for me here,” Lily had shouted. “Nothing. Why the fuck should I stay, what is there? It’s all old women and the druggies behind the rec and the fucking rich kids with their mum’s valium getting screwed against the trees in the park and you want me to stay here? Get a fucking life Mum, God’s sake. “ Heading to the big city and bright lights with more than the small town niceness with the bruises like a stain leaching under her skin, and the people walking through you with their nice empty smiles. And she never had really, never had got a life after that. She walked up the road to the pool and swam, but never on a Tuesday since the Zumba except today, things were odd today. Up the road and down the road, and up the road, and swim, and never noticed the dead man. Well you wouldn't would you? All those small drab people with their small drab habits. Who’s to know the dead from the living? So unlike Lily. Lily, so vibrant and angry; who left her? Why did she leave? She stared at the man sitting in the hot tub, his feet bobbing in the bubbles again, and frowned. "Are you always here?" she asked inanely. The two boys were chatting freely now, laughing at something she had missed. "Well, no. I get called in when there's a bit of an issue." Up the road, swim fifty lengths, sit in the hot tub, down the road, up the road, swim fifty lengths, sit in the hot tub, down the road. Stare at the walls. Wait for the pool to open. Up the road, smile at the children, the parents never glancing her way, small person with her drab habits, who’s to know? “Lily, oh Lily,” she thought. “Where are you? Small drab habits, who’s to know who’s dead and who’s -“ "Sorry?" she asked, "I missed that." The man sighed and leant over the hairier young lad. "I said, they asked me to tell you, you missed out a bit." "I missed? I missed what you said, I said." "Yes but you missed out the…" The boys paused. The hot tub jets seemed somehow whiny, she could hear a vague hum from under her feet. "Can you not remember?" he asked. He was looking at her kindly, but she was suddenly nervous. "It’s what you’ve done all your life that makes you this?” she said, “ Is this what I am?" "Yes my lovely. But you never died. Lily died." "I died,'' she said. "We thought you were like one of those psychics,"' he said, watching her, "but then…" He looked toward the boys, who muttered and waded out of the water. "Fucking broken again," sighed one. She looked down at the water, stray hairs caught on the surface by the meniscus. “I do hope those are from his chest,” she thought absently. “Then how did I die? It's good to have a routine, gives you something to live for.” Then, frantically, “I died, how did I die? Like a small bird battering helpless against the glass tiles I can't remember how. They don’t, they can’t see me!” "I DIED," she screamed, and beat at the water with her fists and smashed at the mosaic, "I DIED I DIED." And the last small ripples stilled and the man stood up. "Might want to change your days up a bit more,'' he said, not unkindly. And was gone. Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. Her chapbook, Push, is published by Erbacce Press.

My cousin, the know-it-all procrastinator, Would rather host barbecues in his backyard Than sit at the shop his father bleeds his pension for. My uncle, tomorrow-man’s father, Plays cards with his gang in the alley all day For there’s no social distancing at the office. The socially distanced animal’s brother, l’homme de la littérature, Has canceled his gym membership (one must not work out masked!) And has long unmasked dinner chats With the pretty lady down the street. The immunity conscious pretty lady, Doctor’s wife and too good for our town, Nibbles on sushi and stuffs her enamoured husband With last night’s leftover seekh kebabs. The French littérateur’s woman, President of Gossipers Anonymous, Holds the weight-watcher’s witch trials at her place To avoid the evening rush at the vegetable market. The diabetic doctor, husband of the alleged witch, Sermons at-risk gluttons on weekdays And on weekends attacks the crowded corner bakery Armed with insulin jabs. The baker’s wife who’d rather keep Her twelve children out of school than risk infection, Crams them in the lorry headed for the market For she needs no less than The baker’s dozen to carry her ingredients. The lorry driver who won’t wear a mask for how-on-earth-would-he-chew-tobacco-in-one, Forbids his wife from visiting Gossipers Anonymous hotspots. The lorry driver’s wife, Sulking at her overanxious tobacco-chewer, Vents out by inviting her aunts and sisters from across town For risk-free lunch at her home. One of her sisters, Nurse and my mother’s friend, Gladly accepts mother’s invitation To bring her kin over for dinner at our place. My mother, furious at my precautionist father Who didn’t take her out shopping And went to play cards himself, Insists that I bring my band For an acoustic set at the ladies’ dinner. I, fully aware that gatherings Must be avoided for the good of all, Am slipping out at dusk To have my poem peer-reviewed At my know-it-all cousin’s barbecue. Ankit Raj is a former software engineer, rock band frontman and assistant professor from Chapra, Bihar, India. He teaches English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal and is a PhD candidate at IIT Roorkee. He has poems published/forthcoming in Trouvaille Review, Roi Fainéant Press, Seafront Press, Brave Voices Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Discretionary Love and Bullshit Lit, and has a short story forthcoming in The Broadkill Review. Ankit's research articles have appeared in Routledge journals and he is guest editor of the upcoming "Myths, Archetypes and the Literary Arts" special issue of Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies. He tweets @ankit_raj01

The ice-cream soda comes in brown bottles, sometimes with a packet of crisps, as we play under the table, under everyone’s feet, in the dark bar, the sun blazing down outside, while dad and his mates tell loud-laughing stories, and the older kids are allowed off to the beach. My striving tongue seeks out the delicate flavour, drinking too fast in elusive capture, nothing left to savour but empty time that could have been spent digging damp sand and being salt-licked by waves, the stated purpose of the day that I could only dream of, on the gritty, butt-strewn floor.

CW: vomiting The seat on window view was left empty by a man, coeval as me, moved to the middle row and kissed a woman who sat alone. I was slightly tipsy— thanks to cheap wine— unconsciously spoke out loud, Never thought I’d witness people falling in love on a plane. The woman— I swore, she looked like a descendant of a Greek deity— chirpily replied, We were a couple actually, we fought days before but now we miss each other. I laughed boisterously as I took last bite of a dull chocolate croissant while nodding my head, hoping they caught my congratulatory gesture and shifted my back, away from the couple, avoiding the potentially teeth-rotting sweetness of the scene. Forty thousand feet above the sea, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I gazed out the window— tried to digest the aftermath of this first solo trip— and also the stupid chocolate croissant— thought of how I could’ve had the same sick-to-the-stomach kind of love story, identical to the couple right beside me. Last Tuesday, as I pushed a luggage trolley with a jammed wheel, I wondered: which shoes you’d rock in wintertime, which colour of hairpins you’d show off to me, how opaque your walnut irises, taste of cherry Chapstick on your lips. Not once did I think of my actual itinerary for a conference I got an invitation from. Fuck all of that as long as I have you, I thought. The last day, the day we were supposed to meet, I chose the table spot where moonlight glowed on the dainty rusted wood. Then a waiter came with your note. I have something to do. Sorry. And the moment I went back to my hotel, you blocked my phone number. I laughed boisterously, just like tonight, hunched my back over the toilet bowl. We are(?) a couple, we did fight, but do you miss me like I miss you? Fuck, I need to throw up the damn chocolate croissant.

I want to lie with you on a hotel mattress and listen to a turntable play Sweetheart of the Rodeo. You should hear this country music, and find like I have, desire’s poverty in slow, drawled lines. Midnight weeps like a steel guitar. The mountain you want moved keeps its radio tuned to night. I can burn its brush and vines, and everyone will know what dayrise means. Just watch me on the television bolted to the wall. Leave your sandals on the green rug by the door, and come near as water on sleepless banks of a lake. We were meant to open eyes on the horizon, why not on each other? Kyle Vaughn’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Shore (2021 Pushcart Prize nomination), A-Minor Magazine, Adbusters, The Boiler, Drunken Boat, Poetry East, Vinyl, and Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions). He is the author of Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises and the co-author/co-photographer of A New Light in Kalighat. www.kylevaughn.org / twitter: @krv75 / insta: @kylev75 / email: kylev75@gmail.com

ACT I The preamble. INT. ME - ALWAYS - UP UNTIL NOW I don’t call my mother’s father ’grandpa’. In English or Cantonese, it is a title that refuses to stay in the back of my mind, one accompanied by a feeling of wrongness. My mother’s father died when she was four. She recalls him in pieces, in glowing recollections. One of these was his fish tank situated on a creaky cabinet, flush with tropical colour. He collected exotic creatures from around the world, as he did with stamps. He hoarded an abundance of stamps, each inked and weathered with history, that I now keep tucked in a box in my closet. My favourites stuck on the pages of a square notebook with their countries inscribed below. Like him, I prefer to collect—memories of a grandfather I never knew. INT. HER BEDROOM - KAUFU’s APARTMENT - ONE OF THOSE VISITS THAT STEEP DEEP INTO THE NIGHT My maternal grandmother moved to Canada five years ago. She lived with my uncle, her oldest son. In Kaufu’s small apartment, my grandmother’s presence was nearly inconsequential. Upon one of the first visits to the new home, with its minute alterations, I sat on her bed, irked by the scratchy polyester topside. When she urged me to nap to relieve my headache, the discomfort was reason enough not to. Instead, there were the pictures on the windowsill to examine. Curiosity can keep any person awake, alive and ignorant of pain. I wondered which way Paopao faced as she slept—whether it was towards the grainy pictures, or up at the blank ceiling, away from the watching eyes. Which ones did she pick up the most? Which ones did she leave to dust? There were smiling snapshots of unknown relatives or lost friends; I couldn’t tell the difference. And there was a wedding photo—mute, devoid of colour and modern gloss. Up until five years ago, I had never seen the face of my mother’s father. INT. RED CHAIRED DINING ROOM - THE OLD HOUSE - FAMILY GATHERING Paopao’s arrival changed things. I started to think, as I usually am in the habit of doing, and he itched at the back of my mind. I grew up with my paternal grandparents always in tow, cracking open my bedroom door to give me soup, checking if I was warm enough at any given moment, and urging me to sleep earlier with a routine jo-tao, goodnight. My Mamaa, whose hand I love to hold, and my Yeye, whose shoulder I love to lean upon, formed the crux of many childhood memories. Their influence in my life meant I was raised on affection, crowded with family. Along with their love, they gifted me with cousins, aunts, uncles, and those in between, with a title for each relative in the round vowels of Cantonese. (Paopao has an accent, you see, remnants of her village dialect cling to the voice she Hong-Kong-ified for decades. She uses formal words, doesn’t understand the pieces of English I sneak into sentences when I struggle to communicate, as I do with Mamaa and Yeye. Paopao speaks like a song—I know it is Cantonese but I know nothing of its meaning.) While my mother seamlessly fit into every reunion, the scales were tipped: I didn’t know any of her people, none of the cousins she grew up playing with, or any distant relatives that coddled her with snacks. I could count into the fifties for all the people I knew through my father’s blood. My mother gave me scraps—‘There’s an uncle in Mississauga, the rest in Hong Kong, spread through China’. Even my Kaufu got invited to the Chan reunions. It was like the branches of Cheung were sawed off at the shoulder, the rings of its flat stump getting smaller, smaller, further. Gone. There, but invisible, inconsequential—yet ironically, monstrous in size. It was a hole, essentially. Where my mother’s father stood. A dark smudge of forget, forget, forget. INT. BED - A MOMENT BETWEEN AMAA AND I - INCOMING CONSOLATION We were already heated by something serious. I sat with my mother on the sheets, as we always do—her bed, a failsafe comforter, a life net that never breaks. Here, we have had many good moments together, laughing, crying in solidarity. This was not a good moment. Years later, in revisiting my darkest and most emotionally vibrant moments, the only thing I tend to remember is the fatal, cutting line. AMAA: No. I sank against the pillow, staining it with tears. I drew up my arms to ask for her, and my mother gave herself to me in silence that I had to accept. She held me, it was the opposite of hurt—but the hurt was still there. I only asked if I could ask Paopao about him. I just want to know. Never once in my life had I felt so desperate, so weak. Even in just asking, even before the no. LOK KWAN: I just want to know. You see, after my mother’s father died, leaving my grandmother with three children and a dye factory to run, there has been an unspeakable stitch of pain threaded through this family. It is a thin, fraying line, barely visible most days—but it is one that pulls. It tugs and tugs and is taut in moments like these, when his name comes up—straightening like a dog on a horizon. The healed skin tenses and there—it tears with a small rip. AMAA: You can’t do this. Don’t bring up things that could make her sad. I was twelve. But it happened again and again within the confines of my mind. The hollowing no with its eternal, trembling echo. Soaked in tears and tears, this no was something I learned to handle carefully, like a hot stone at the beach that I knew I had to take home. So I dropped this no into my plastic bucket of cold sorrows, salty water, slippery kelp; rough with the sandy coarseness of Chinese confidentiality. And like a child, I constantly carried it with me, swinging the miniature ocean back and forth, shaking the foundation of its long-untouched, unexplored depths. ACT II The moments in which he makes sudden, brief appearances: faux-resuscitations. INT. CORNER - PARENTS’ BEDROOM - A DARK BUT WARM MOMENT A gift came for me. Indirectly from the donor. A jade necklace, heart-shaped, topped with a coronet clasp and chain. White gold. Heavy with expense. I liked my Paopao a lot, but we didn’t have much to say to each other, so this was communication enough. My mother handed the necklace to me, the open drawer of her old, dark cherry desk pressed to her gut. AMAA: Here. PaoPao wanted to give this to you. I have one too. She did. She never wore it, but it’s not like I do either. I used to. I wore it every day for three years. I wore it like a sigil. I had never gotten anything like this before, that’s why. I’m not sure if that reason was strengthened after I was told its history: upon my mother’s near arrival, my grandfather went to the betting tables and was perfectly lucky. Two authentic jade necklaces for his first daughter and his wife. Both rounded to a point so they looked like hearts. This is the closest thing I have to physical proof of him, even if it was just once an object he had touched. To think that PaoPao, my mother, her siblings, were living, moving surfaces he had touched too. INT. WINDOW BOOTH - RESTAURANT - LATE AFTERNOON WITH WHITE SUN One afternoon, we sat eating at a Malaysian restaurant. We were speaking of something, something lost to insignificance compared to what came next, when my mother suddenly popped up with realization, remembrance. AMAA: Your Paopao told me my father was born in Venezuela! He had a Venezuelan mother! My father was surprised. In all the years of their marriage, her father rarely came up in conversation. I—well, I was also surprised. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I told a few people; it became my new ‘so-this-happened-a-while-ago’. Still—I couldn’t shake the question directed towards my mother: how could you fail to mention something like this? She barely spoke about her father, information came like a backed-up fountain that babbled once a year, and not for long. You could tug at its spout, kick at the base—it would answer once it remembered it could—but whenever I asked my mother for more, she’d shrug and say— AMAA: What? There’s nothing else. After, the Venezuelan thing began to matter more. My mother’s face would change, grow a bit sheepish, wide-eyed, childish in her musings. It was like she dug out a long-lost favourite book, only the pages were unstuck from the spine, messy in order and faded ink. AMAA: What do you think of me doing a DNA test? There’s one on sale now, I could do it! Though it is still expensive. Ah, I don’t know. She never did get that test. AMAA: Paopao told me he wasn’t happy when he came to Hong Kong. He couldn’t speak the language and knew no one. His father had immigrated to Venezuela for work. He found a woman, had a few children, ones that looked white—mother said so, their noses said so. She too, with her light eyes and bumped bridge—that quarter of her shone like moonlight, setting her apart from the rest of our family. When death left my mother’s great-grandfather without sons in Hong Kong, he asked to be sent a replacement, a boy to raise once more in a mix of mourning and healing. His eldest grandson—my mother’s father—would do. When I opened my mouth to ask my mother how her parents met, how long it would’ve been after her father arrived in Hong Kong, I remembered her no. I closed my mouth around a spoonful of curry, and listened to the din of the restaurant instead. INT. AUDITORIUM 10 - THEATRE - A CHORUS OF CHINESE VOICES OR LAUGHTER I watched The Farewell alone. I sat in the middle row, to the left, right by the dark alley of the walkway. The blue glow of the screen flashed like pre-dawn. I don’t watch movies alone very often, but I love to. I expected good things from Lulu Wang and her autobiographical treatise on grief. Then the scene came on: dim red light, open window. Billi imagines her dead grandfather clouded in a plume of smoke. A death, in that moment, was dragged through the decades and into my chest. I started crying. I think I was the only one. Everyone else was done with their sobbing, Billi had just finished her teary monologue a few minutes ago, about how ravaging it was to be confined by stifling no she had in her own life. I saw my own no reflected through the screen. It echoed in every image: the wistful smoke, the bloody neon light, the shadowed face I could not see. It was him. I knew it was. He died the same way. Cancer took him, coaxed him away with cigarette after cigarette. I thought to myself, How could empty space feel so suffocating? This was not the first time I cried because of him, but it was the first I cried for him. Someone stolen by grief. What greater crime is there than that? EXT. THE STREETS - KOWLOON - HONG KONG - A MOMENT IN HISTORY A scuffle. A glistening knife. No—perhaps a rusted, dull blade. Money. Lost. Pick an amount, choose the range of valuable items. The facts are not clear. But without a doubt—two men crowd another in a Hong Kong robbery in an exchange of violence. He went home to his wife, cradling a bloodied hand. PAOPAO: What happened? HIM: It’s fine. She wrapped up his hand, staining white linen with red. A story to tell for the ages, blooming through bandages. A scar that will form and stay forever imprinted on this Earth, in its record of happenings. POLICE: What did those men look like? I like to think that he smiled in that moment. A grinning man still smattered with blood and bruises. HIM: I’ll draw them. There is a fifty-fifty chance here that his drawing hand is cut and the wound strains with each stroke he puts on paper. Whichever one it was, it was a hand that created two sentences. They caught the robbers with that sketch. When my mother tells me this story, I look at all the drawings I have churned out, embellished with the praises my parents gave me when they came into my room and saw me drawing. ABAA: Did Ms. Lau teach you how to draw like this? I didn’t, I never drew like this under guidance. I am older now, or something sprung out of me one day. My secret inheritance. INT. A FACE WITHIN - A FACE WITHIN - A FACE It wasn’t just me that had pieces of him hidden within. It took me forever to see it. It should have been obvious. Trespassing into my parents’ bedroom, receiving no answer when I called for my mother, I stopped by her collection of memories. In the right corner, atop the drawer surface, encased in a thick red wood frame, he stood there. Holding his wife in white. A second look was all I needed. Another hard stare at a wedding picture I didn’t even realize occupied a place in my home. One more glance to tell me I should’ve noticed it earlier, any time before now. My mother opened her washroom door, brushing past me to leave the room. LOK KWAN: Mom? She stopped in place. AMAA: Yes? LOK KWAN: LOK KWAN: Nothing. She turned her face from mine and started down the stairs. The face I had loved this entire time, the first face I must’ve seen, moments after being born, the face I’ve always wanted to see, superimposed on mine in any reflection. It was his. My mother, his mirror image. He has been with me this entire time. INT. ON THE SCREEN - AT THE COMPUTER - INTO THE BUCKET I told my mother— LOK KWAN: I’m going to write a story about him. AMAA: But there’s barely anything we know about him. LOK KWAN: Well—I mean. Me. It’s about me. Then him. What I have created of him. All these thoughts. And to think that this is all I have of him; two thousand and seven hundred words, enough to fit on twelve pages. I don’t think of him as mine. I know there is much more to him, secrets hidden under my grandmother’s tongue, hazy with disuse. AMAA: Why don’t you write about Paopao? She’s lived such an interesting life. I think you’d have more to say. She’s right. Sometimes I look at my grandmother and she feels all too far away. As if he is pulling her a step back each time I come near. I don’t blame anyone. After all, you can’t convict ghosts of meddling. But it feels like mine, my fault, because guilt slops down on my head like a reverse anointing. I look at her and make her nothing more than a remnant of him. Despite everything and the longing, I do not think I love him as much or at all, in comparison to Paopao. I do not need to. ACT III The end. The now. EXT. GARDEN - THE SETTLED WATERS In some small, thin moments of my time, very infrequently, very quickly—I allow myself a dream. Not one that comes in my sleep, but one I choose to have. In this dream, I sit beside him and we talk. Everything is perfect here, so I understand him—I can speak perfect Cantonese. I know every little thing about him, but that is not what we discuss. What we speak of is everything we share in luck, in love, in life. Here, we are friends, here, we are so similar it makes my Paopao laugh and my brothers jealous. In this dream, he tells me he loves me. I look at him and see my grandfather. My Gunggung. But dreams are only dreams. You let go. A word from the author: UNTITLED is a personal essay written half as a script, half as the broody monologue an acquaintance trauma dumps onto you during your second meeting. It is a deeply personal rationalization on how grief can become an inheritance, and how the cultural notions of mourning can suffocate a childhood in the most quiet of ways. Lois L. K. Chan (she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian writer from Ontario, currently in her first year at the University of British Columbia, and also—a huge Star Wars fan. Her work has previously appeared in Juxtapost Magazine.

A note from the publisher: our web server is terrible, and the formatting of Beth's first poem, "Inadequacy". is very important. It displays beautifully on the desktop and tablet versions of the website, but the mobile site got all smooshed. So, to see this poem in all of its glory, please view this page on a desktop/tablet, or click below to download a PDF version. Thank you! Inadequacy My old friend, it’s good to see you again, in spite of it all. Will you sit down? There’s something I need to say, so this drink, it’s on me. Hearts break all the time, I know, but there’s this little cup of inadequacy that fills up a little more each time, so one has to pour it out before it overflows and completely floods out any belief in oneself. Al those heartbreakers, they were wrong, you see. I couldn’t see it before but I can see it now: it was not I who wasn’t enough in some way or too much in another - the lacking was theirs. In all those times my heart was broken, my failing sense of self was abundantly revealed anew, in every possible way, in all the reasons why it just wasn’t going to work. For the ones with political aspirations, I was too unconventional and for the free spirits, much too normal, and for the artists, well I just didn’t get it; I was far too needy for the independent, too fickle for the loyal, too restless for the settled, too distracted for the devoted, and for the musicians, my mind was not open enough, but for the philosophers, so open that it was closed, and for the predator my body was ok but not compared to the model he was with before, and for the brains, I was just not smart enough, for those wallowing in their own drowning, I was not messed up enough to really understand, even if I wanted to and for the up and coming, I was too unstable, for the cheerful, far too moody, for the glass half empties, too optimistic and too flaky for the irritable, too responsible for hippies, too driven for the old fashioned and insufficiently ambitious for overachievers and on and on the drips of doubt filled up my cup of inadequacy but now I’m pouring it into yours so drink up, old friend and you will see it really was you and not me. Attic Alcove august crickets fill this silence sticker stars fill the darkness generated breezes break stale heat hunger pains pierce my numb solitude voids danger and I wonder when your voice will melt this heart again Beth Mulcahy lives in Ohio with her husband, two kids and loyal Havanese dog sidekick. Beth works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. She writes poetry, fiction, memoir, and dreams about visiting Scotland. Her work has appeared in various journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Check out her latest publications at https://linktr.ee/mulcahea

Rippling refers to the fact that each of us creates—often without our conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations. That is, the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they're no longer visible but continuing at a nano level. The idea that we can leave something of ourselves, even beyond our knowing, offers a potent answer to those who claim that meaninglessness inevitably flows from one's finiteness and transiency. –Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun. The cold, sharp edges of one revolver press against my skull. Another is aimed at my mother’s heart. Time ticks quickly from all that came before to what happens next. ~ “Kris,” my mother, Elaine, yells from the adjoining study. “Can you get the door? On the phone.” Mitzi, the dirty white lap dog belonging mostly to my mother and sister, is barking the high-pitched yip she uses to grow herself big. I sigh with that impatient, eye-rolling breath I often use with my mother. Do this, do that, I think to myself. Just leave me alone. ~ I wanted to be anything other than what I was that year of 1984—a missionary kid of a missionary kid—and, in Israel of all places. My parents had not taken my own social standing into consideration when they became people doing God’s work. To be fair, they told me when I complained about the wrongness of it all, that they didn’t like the word missionary either. They weren’t there to start a church. My father, a conscientious objector, spent two years in alternate service in the West Bank at an orphanage. After marrying, he and my mother returned to the same work. The nuances of why and how they came to be American Christians in Israel and Palestine were inconsequential to my teenage self who wanted to belong and didn’t. ~ We live in the middle of a citrus grove, by day a fragrant contrast in colors, by night a silent sentinel, accompanied by an orchestra of insects and the occasional coyote. This is Israel in the 1980s before its upward and outward takeover of stony fields dotted with aged and contorted olive trees and crimson anemones that could be seen from afar. Our windows are always uncovered and at night we could pick out Orion, Taurus, and Canis Major with ease. The moon grows large in the dark. I run in the cool of the night, daytime heat melting as the sun lowered. I know the paths around my home well enough to move comfortably in the dark. It's Wednesday evening and my father has taken my sister, Kim, to her cello lesson in Tel-Aviv. It’s also soup night and Mom has made a vegetarian chili chocked full of carrots and peppers. Her chili is more soup than stew. Vinegar sits in a small carafe, ready to be poured by the teaspoon into waiting bowls. She has set the table with five placemats and purple cotton napkins rolled into napkins rings. Water glasses are filled. We wait for dinner until we can all sit together. It’s like this every Wednesday. Something they clearly knew. I am restless, edgy—at home on a school night, counting the days till graduation. A pile of art books teeters next to me as I sit on the corduroy-covered couch, comfy in the concave impressions left by hours of use. I have spent many evening hours here imitating, with my pencil, the drawings of Da Vinci’s women, passing time and imagining myself in art school. Dreams niggle the confines of what I’ve decided to do—follow a boyfriend to college. Something’s off. I can barely tolerate sitting still and my skin tingles, vibrates. The sensations have amplified in the last weeks. I chalk it up to boredom, to wanting the next part of my life to start. Waiting. I hated waiting. ~ I set aside my drawing pad and slump towards the front door. I look through the upper half and see my own face reflected back against the dark of the summer night. I turn the handle and pull open the door. Two men rush the door. Their eyes, dark and darting beneath balaclavas, glance at me and then shoot about the room. They are dressed in army fatigues the colors of sand and shrub. I fold, as though a marionette dropped from above. From what seems a great distance, I hear a whimper. Me? The dog barks—sharp, staccato, piercing. A base-key groan, “No. No. No.” My words, repeated. My chest rises and falls as I try and catch my breath but the room feels empty of oxygen. Static, like a television without a station, grows louder in my ears. One grabs my upper arm—his presence imprints my skin with purple bruises I find the next day. His shoulder wedges itself between my shoulder blades. My legs no longer work and I am jerked upright. I am caught in a vice of revolver and a hard male body. Molten fear runs down my face from temple to chin. My legs grow warm and wet. “Dollars,” one says, the r stuck in his throat. “We want dollars.” Each word loudly exaggerated, “What? You want money?” Mom says, as though in slow-motion. My mother remains planted on her chair next to the old pine desk in the study. I see her sit up taller than I’ve ever seen her sit before. Her shoulders are thrown back. Defiant. The two of us are facing each other through the door connecting the kitchen and study but I can’t see her expression, the look on her face erased in the glare of the fluorescent lights. ~ It’s April of 2021 and I’ve had a terrible case of writer’s block for the past month. I pull out of my files, the latest draft of a piece, “Finding Her Voice.” Maybe a revision will quiet my inner critic. New doubts arise. I talk with my therapist, describing my resistance to writing this piece. “I don’t think it matters,” I say. “Not with what’s going on in this country.” She doesn’t give me a line like, “All stories matter.” What she does say is that there are little t’s and big T’s—small, repeated traumas that reinforce somatic and psychological states of fear and huge, devastating moments of horror and trauma. An unheeded call for healing and resolution, even for seemingly minor trauma, adds one more story to the collective grief of humanity. Minimizing my own experiences of unsafety and terror render others’ experiences unimportant as well. I carry on. ~ “Dollars. We want dollars,” one of them repeats. I can’t place his accent. The phone dangles, taut, as she rises from her chair. “What?” she says loudly. “What? You want money?” I hear her again, her voice unnaturally loud, abrasive. I want to throw my hands over my ears but I can’t. My arms and legs are unresponsive to my brain’s plea—do something. Language abandons me. I am eighteen and stronger physically than my mother but in these moments, the lines are all hers. At vision’s edge, movement. One man charges my mother. She drops the phone. It clatters on the tiled floor. He pushes her but she resists. He uses his shoulder to push harder. “Leave her alone,” I hear her say. “We have money.” I see her clearly as though I could draw her. She had grown larger. She is all I see. ~ Her hair, thick and russet red, is pulled back, looped into a bun. She covers it with a scarf tied in the back, just under. She stands beside the dusty bus, arm outstretched towards something in the sky. A bird, perhaps? She is beautiful, my mother, like Iris, goddess of the rainbow. Such possession. I pull plastic off the album page and pry the photograph into my hand. I want to remember her as strong and powerful. ~ “Punishment, A Story” At the boarding school, matrons roamed the hallways, listening, looking for aberrant children speaking or laughing during rest time. Carol, my mother’s closest friend and confidant, is caught by the head matron. “Go into your dirty laundry and grab your knickers. Sit here and smell them.” A row of chairs, students walking by, shame. By age seven, my mother has learned to not make a sound, to curl up, arms hugging herself. “Inspection” She stands at the foot of her bed every morning after the bell has woken them. Hands out, palms down and then up. Lift that face up! Face down and a hand slides down beneath the clothing on her back. Grime. Elbows? Dirt. Go scrub with a brush. Brown and white children scour their skin until sink water runs pink. My little-girl mother is silent. ~ They drag us back to the kitchen from the bedroom where my mother has led them to the box, high on a shelf, filled with money, dollars. The men slash at air with guns like swashbucklers swiping with swords. “Down,” the guns say. We fall on the linoleum, bellies to the floor. I see a dried clump of dirt and want to touch it. My eyes take in the kitchen—steam from bubbling soup, the table covered in a white, needlepointed cloth, a blood-red flower in a vase. It looked like the kitchen always looked only brighter. Strands of my mother’s hair touch mine. “It’s not real,” my mother says as they grab a toy gun my parents, the pacifists, gave to my brother for his birthday. They take it, anyways. A final wild wave of guns and they run out into the trees hidden in the dark. ~ “A Mother” If she could go back there would be no toy guns as birthday gifts for her Black boy. Not because of that night but because of now—her Black boy now a Black man in America. I see bones beneath her silky pants. She has dressed up, pulled out her fancy clothes. Her arms are translucent, skin layered like crumpled fine paper pressed flat. Regret burns my throat, scorches my chest. I had never asked for her stories. I kept her quiet all these years. Now, I welcome their reiterations and practice telling my own. ~ My father and sister turn onto the sandy lane. Flashing police lights pierce the rural darkness. Dad steps on the gas, wheels spinning as the car gains momentum. Kim grabs the door to balance herself, the bouncing making her queasy. Something is wrong. My father has visions of what he might find, images born from war and his care of its orphans. My sister counts the police cars. “Five, Dad,” she says. No one stops them at the door. A good sign, Dad thinks. They find Mom, my brother, Matt, and me, seated on the loveseat that had borne witness to it all. “Dad, they took my .44 Magnum,” Matt yells over my parents’ embrace. “I told the police all about it.” I’m told I was interviewed by the Petah Tikva Chief of Police. That police combed the grounds around the outside of the house, measuring boot prints, looking for any other clues. I have no memory of the neighbor, on the other end of my mother’s call, finding us still on the floor. He had heard her, “What? You want money?” and had taken off running across the fields between our houses. Around the edges of memory, I see myself, arms wrapped around my knees, shaking in a dry bathtub. I spent the night there, cocooned in blankets, cradled. I imagine I slept. I don’t know. Trying to bring logic to the choice, I confirm, many years later, that the bathroom had no windows. I was no longer on stage. The curtain had fallen for my audience of two. ~ I struggled for decades to tell this story. Thirty years passes before I am diagnosed with chronic PTSD, this night one more in a series of childhood violations. Unresolved trauma can linger in the body. Or, not. It did in mine. I begin trauma work with a therapist who is trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). I’d been in talk therapy on and off for my entire adulthood, long enough to have been fired by three therapists. “We aren’t getting anywhere” led me from one to the next. I had a number of “Aha” moments but they were correct—I was stuck. I approach EMDR therapy with skepticism but after a few weeks of using the bilateral stimulation while recalling distressing memories, I notice a shift. I feel stronger and carry a new belief about each trauma. I go from telling Alev, “I am not safe,” to “I can take care of myself.” There’s something simple and beautiful in replacing the negative with something different. The ringing in my ears, flash of heat in my chest, the shaky voice were danger signs from my primal brain. Do not enter here. And so, I didn’t and the story laid dormant until the fifth decade of my life. In the shadow of a devastating pandemic, murderous racism, hunger and grief, I feel uncomfortable with telling my story. I compare and I almost decide to stay quiet. Humans want to belong and storytelling connects us to one another. Telling my story brought you to me and me to you. Putting this tale out into the world has brought me back to my mother. I asked her at a post-COVID vaccination dinner what she remembered of the evening, my myopic rendering of childhood still surprising to me. Her brow creased. I could see the effort it took to return to memory—they are growing opaque and dusty with the passing days. “Oh, I remember,” she says, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “I was so scared. They had you with a gun on your head.” “Yes,” I say. “But, I told them we had money.” “Yes,” I say. “My girl.” She pauses, looks at me across the table. “Oh, I remember. I told them we had money and to let you go.” “Yes, Mom,” I say. “You stood right up to them.” I reach across the table for her hand and write my story into ours. Kris Haines-Sharp is an educator and writer living in the Finger Lakes Region of New York. She is a 2020-21 Craigardan writer-in-residence where she was selected to study with Kate Moses in the Bookgardan writing program. Her work has appeared in Entropy Magazine and Adelaide Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in Academy of the Heart and Mind.

100 Years of Modernity: Language, Point of View, and the Declining Role of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction —————— And so the smashing and the crashing began. —Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924 But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? —Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 1925 ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS In the early twenties of the new millennium, as we move towards and through the hundred year anniversary of these lines and the revolutionary literary movement they epitomized, it is fair to ask ourselves just how far have we gotten over the past century. Surveying the landscape of literary fiction, there is perhaps something to be desired, a hesitance in the approach to the novel as an art form that emanates, if not from convention, in that antiquated, Edwardian term, then from custom and from that most menacing word of our own age, marketability. It seems that there has been a death of the reader(1) at the base unit level of fiction. The scale of work, the division of labor between the writer and the reader, is a broad spectrum. An author can employ point of view and language in such a way that requires very little effort from her audience, on the one hand, to asking much of her, on the other. In modern publishing, at those fundamental levels, there has been a general decline in how much a reader has to do, how much work is required of her, in order to access and navigate a book and its central concerns. Instead of presenting a fictive world as it may be on the sentence level, messy and chaotic but with verisimilitude and reflective of its subject matter—consciousness, reality and the human experience—the writer is doing ever more of the labor. The scale has slid to the point where the author seems to be enjoined to come to the reader, to present a world that, no matter how complex and imposing it may be, must be rendered so that there is little risk of losing many readers along the way. ___________________ (1) From Roland Barthe’s The Death of the Author, 1967. While his ‘scriptor’ may be but a notetaker, for this essay it is the very reality being rendered that must not be given too helping a hand via interpretation. Where, we might ask, are the books that mount a direct and frontal assault towards its reader, towards that slippery byword readability, or its dark cousin accessibility? Where are those novels that declare themselves as technically complex works of art, requiring patience and practice to interpret and to decipher? To ask these questions is of course not to say that there are no works that demand careful thought and study to analyze on other levels besides those played out at the sentence—there innumerable such books, but the interpretation needed comes at broader realms, ones dealing with message, theme, content, and story, ones that challenge a reader to see new perspectives or voices, to consider underrepresented sides of issues or to hear from marginalized groups. This is, to be sure, an increasing and positive trend in the market. The readerly work that this essay speaks to is on that other stratum, a more minute and line-to-line world, where technical and mechanical difficulties and challenges have perhaps been overlooked. Thus, this article will discuss two elements of the novel in which the reader and her efforts seem to have fallen away—point of view and language. It is there that consciousness is best explored in fiction, the element that is most at risk in the novel today. These are the front lines of the fictive form, where there is less glamor and less discussion, but where the battle is won.(2) ___________________ (2) Although this essay will shy away from specific examples, two exceptions may be useful here. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, from 2019, and Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, from 2021 represent, with vociferous energy and skill, the type of technically challenging novel that is, by and large, not appearing on bookshelves today. Woolf, writing in the mid-1920s and at the single most defining and drastic revolutionary epoch in the history of the novel, was of course responding to an era and a society which allowed far less flexibility, individuality, inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility than that in which we live. She was responding to a far more ominous and established threat than anything faced today. However, there is wisdom to be gained, insight to be had, that stands as applicable to our own contemporary state of fictive affairs. The modern novel, for as wonderfully varied as it is in perspective and representation, form and structure, content and theme, nevertheless rarely takes risks at the sentence level. This essay will make the case that twenty-first century fiction has room for far more daring and inventiveness in language and point of view than is currently being done. It will do so by offering a few definitions, looking at what is lost, discussing potential solutions, and finally by asking what the essence of the novel as an art form may in fact be. First, however, an important and necessary caveat.(3) While the connective tissue between the modernist and today are of interest to scholar, practitioner, and enthusiast alike, it is important to not lose sight of the differences. The argument here is not that anything which is being written shouldn’t be; indeed, the plethora of voices and stories that are being told and are doing the telling, the greater accessibility—both literally, in a technological sense, and practically, in diversity in writing and publishing—and an increasing embrace of experimentation and unconventional elements of fiction are major, positive trends in the industry. ___________________ (3) A second caveat, rather more obvious but nonetheless worthy of elucidation: this is a discussion of and response to a general trend in current fiction, as perceived by one quite interested observer. Of course there are exceptions, both among books I have encountered—some of which will be explored below—and those I have not, but on the whole this seems to be, to this critic, the state of affairs. Furthermore, to make a slightly different point, nothing in this essay is to say that the type of fiction that is being written now does not have an important place. On the contrary, it is essential and often wonderfully done. To take one type of narrative that seems to be on the rise recently, the type of discursive first person fiction we are seeing more and more quite often results in funny, insightful, true-to-life voices taking us through engaging plots and engrossing worlds. There is much else being done today and which will not be discussed here other than to say, quite broadly, that it is not that which is being sought. To break the novel into three levels of consideration for a moment, there are the stories told and who tells them, the form and structure of a book, and movement at the sentence level—our focus. This essay, simply put, is to say that something has been neglected, that deep cracks begin to run in the foundation of the novel. To analogize, perhaps torturously, the state of literary fiction to a major-label rock band, if a guitarist is suddenly not pulling his weight, one does not suggest firing the drummer. As in life as in fiction (and, apparently, in rock n’ roll), harmony is needed. Both at the book and the industry level it seems that a key element has lately faded from view.(4) As a result, within the bedrock of that great artistic form that is the novel, the fissures begin to show, the ground begins to grow perilously uneven. OUTLINES AND DEFINITIONS Whatever the themes, questions, or central issues of a book may be, they can be handled with a number of technical-mechanical approaches. As noted above, while an ever-increasing amount of books are being written and published that take splendid risks in form, structure, voice, story, and perspective, the gamble seems to stop short when we reach the single line. The technical and mechanical realm—the domain of point of view and language—remains largely a sunny, well-lit upland for the reader to traverse This essay will differentiate between perspective, taken to mean the character that a narrative revolves around (also, as used above, describing the wider viewpoints or voices of an author or story), and which can be in first, third, or even second person, and point of view, which is a set of technical and mechanical approaches, techniques, and strategies to explore said perspectives, and which is largely done at the sentence level.(5) While the term stream of consciousness is often (mis)used as a catchall for point of view techniques there are in actuality a great many tools a novelist can employ to foreground consciousness. To investigate too thoroughly would be beyond the scope here (6), but the primary method would be free-indirect discourse used idiomatically and at a high frequency. ___________________ (4) Why is this? There are, perhaps, two factors largely responsible for this trend (or lack of a trend) in modern fiction, a blend of forces from outside the literary world and from with the community itself: first, a response to the threat posed to the industry in the twenty-first century by other forms of entertainment—it is too much, the argument might go, to asking an already-dwindling readership to work too hard. The second is possibly simple trends in tastes and culture; if one steps back to take a decade-wide view, a turn towards more “accessible” and plot-driven, externally focused fiction with discursive narrators and clean writing makes some sense as a response to the hysterical realism of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and the like. Much in the way the Modernists were reacting to Victorian and Edwardian rigid sensibilities, today’s market can be seen as a natural shifting of the wind, to some degree. Indeed, framing the past thirty years of publishing as an exhausted reply to Infinite Jest does have a certain appeal. (5) Two books may be written in third person perspectives and have wildly disparate points of view— from Ulysses to Anna Karenina. This essay is mostly concerned with point of view. (6) The interested reader may look to Dorrit Cohn’s peerless study: Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. While this technique is found in virtually every third person novel, an interior-focused book (see below) will use it liberally to blend together the thoughts of the narrative entity and the given character, bleeding the world views into each together across the page.(7) For simplicity if not for clarity, we may call these methods of point of view techniques branches off the stream of consciousness family tree. ___________________ (7) The range here is quite large; at the other end from the light use of free-indirect one might find autonomous monologue, in Cohn’s term, where grammar and punctuation takes its leave and we slide from third person into first person present tense—Molly Bloom’s triumphant closing of Ulysses. The second major fictive element examined here is language, or prose. This is taken to encompass diction, grammar, mechanics, idiosyncratic speech and sentence structure. Point of view is inexorably tied to the mechanical use of language; together they propel a book line-to-line. A novel can deal with an effectively infinite range of themes and stories in all manner of sentence-level rendering. The risk-taking that this essay sees as largely absent from contemporary fiction, then, occurs here amongst the weeds and wilds. Works that emphasize these two elements—prose and point of view—may be said to be internally focused, or concerned with characters’ inner life, as opposed to those that are externally focused, or interested in outside events and happenings. The former, the subject of this essay, place a greater emphasis on the quotidian, the minute, and the everyday, in an attempt to turn that material—that “stuff of life”, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase—into suitable narrative action; they do so by relying on language and technique. A novel that takes the daily workings of life, with an emphasis on and foregrounding of the consciousness, explicitly does not rely on eventful plots or major external happenings to which the characters then react. It should be noted that difficulty, challenges, or readerly endeavors at this level do not inherently mean ‘hard to read words’. One does not have to write Finnegans Wake in order to take chances—Woolf is just as fearless as Joyce. But the writing in which the reader is required to mine the text, to participate in the struggle in order to discover meaning—that is fiction that takes risks on the sentence level. It is the extraction of compelling art from ordinary events that distinguishes the interior-focused novel. In the absence or diminishment of rangy plots set across lit-up worlds and peopled by billowing characters, this type of book establishes momentum and progression with greater fluidity in point of view and prose, by building the novel from the sentence up, rather than the fictive world down, starting with individual thought as opposed to collective action. There are certainly challenges in writing and, at times, reading this type of book—challenges that are not “superior” or of a higher order than those involved with creating and consuming more externally-focused fiction, but that are simply of a different nature, and which are sorely lacking in the industry today. AT WHAT COST? The key “selling point”, to stumble over a bad pun, for interior-focused fiction is its flexibility and verisimilitude in depicting the events that comprise the mass of human experience. This is the central touchstone to the exploration and foregrounding of consciousness, and to the narrative approaches used to do so. Crucially, these ends are not able to be reached by other means. For all the important improvements made in recent years in unconventional structure and subject matter, an increase in diversity of perspectives and authors, and a greater willingness to blend elements of various genres and thematic concerns, when the literary landscape as a whole lacks risk-taking at the sentence level, it loses the most efficacious and efficient vehicle to depict the quotidian travails of the human experience. There is a straightforward reason for this—the daily human experience is not simple and easily digestible. (8) A novel may have many other wonderful elements, elements which are just as important, to the community and world as a whole, as those discussed here, but without some portion of the emerging literary generation investigating those inward-facing approaches and techniques, a fundamental and unique ability currently possessed by the novel as a form is greatly diminished. ___________________ (8) As noted, I will avoid the discussion of specific works in a “negative” manner—this is not a book review, nor is it an indictment of anything being written today—but this point speaks to a general problem often encountered in reviewing. An unwillingness to take risks at the sentence level, as this essay has termed it, is what creates, from time to time, such a great disconnect between the ideas a novel attempts to explore and the actual effectiveness on the page. There is no substitute for formless language or the “stream of consciousness” family tree of point of view techniques. Oftentimes, one will encounter compelling characters and their intriguing journeys not being explored to their greatest possible depth because limiting the language and the point of view are limited—intentionally or otherwise—only to those styles which the general reader can easily and happily navigate. It may be asked why other methods can not fill the void, so to speak, why more reader-friendly (or less pretentious, depending, perhaps, on one’s, say, vantage point), styles cannot give us a healthy approximation of that which is offered by challenging language and point of view. The answer, quite simply, is that it does not work. Alas, much of life insists on the difficulties with the rewards. There is sometimes an attempt to get around this issue of establishing immediacy and interiority (9) via first person present tense, a movement which appears to be growing. While there are exciting and intriguing benefits of that form, it does not “solve the problem” with nearly the same completeness as does a drilled-down third person operating amongst the mind of the characters, for a few reasons. The first is an inability to explore inner life with the same flexibility, verisimilitude, or accuracy in first person as in third. The inherent bias in first person means that the direct line to consciousness—that which signifies modernism and its literary lineage and is the truest account of a moment in a mind—can never happen in first as it does in third. There will always be a filter, or a guardian, between the thoughts themselves and the narrating of them to the reader. While present tense, to be sure, cuts down on this (there is no elderly David Copperfield to pick and choose—and discriminate—which aspects of his life story to relate), it remains an incomplete solution. There is still a middleman, a failsafe, between the mental impressions and the act of the telling—the protagonist herself—that is not able to be circumvented. One cannot speak without making a decision to do so. ___________________ (9) That is not to say, necessarily, that books are being written in an explicit attempt to avoid employing techniques from the stream of consciousness tree—indeed that seems unlikely—simply that, as all art forms must and should do, the novel is evolving and writers are conceiving of and trying out fresh methods. The second main problem this method runs into vis-a-vis the exploration of consciousness is time itself. The passage of time is an essential, perhaps the essential, part of the human story, and central to the way our minds process and recreate key moments in our lives. The present tense undercuts this, and limits the way the character—and author, by necessary extension—can relate their experiences. There is no reflective ability in the present tense, that remembering and self-assessing quality that gives past tense first person so much of its power and depth. Finally, there is a sacrifice of verisimilitude in present tense, especially first person present, which may limit the effectiveness of any other elements at work. In a problem first identified well over a century ago by Joyce reflecting on Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont Coupés, there is a strong inverse correlation in first person present between external action and plausibility, limiting how much action can take place in a present tense monologue—no one walks down the street narrating every small happening. While modern writers are far more sophisticated in their approaches than was Dujardin in the 1880s, and the general suspension of disbelief works in the method’s favor, there is still, for many readers, a loud and incessant unreality to extended stretches of traditional narration in first person present tense. There is no replacing books that take risks with their language and point of view in the name of rendering consciousness. It is a necessary aspect of the larger literary world, one that, happily, is perhaps malnourished but in no way deceased. Here we may break our loose prohibition against the discussion of specific works to speak a moment about a modern writer who stands as both ultimate risk taker and innovator par excellence and, not quite coincidentally, the preeminent novelist of her generation. (10) Rachel Cusk’s career has demonstrated an ability to innovate and gamble at the sentence level while remaining largely accessible in the modern age, and extraordinarily effective at depicting the minute concerns of consciousness that are at the forefront of interior-driven fiction. In Arlington Park and the Outline series, in particular, Cusk has shown what bold risk-taking on the sentence level—she is especially focused on innovations in point of view, although her language can also be daring, especially in her use of idiomatic free-indirect speech—can look like in the contemporary, very much “accessible” novel. ___________________ In this reader’s opinion, at any rate. I have written more thoroughly about Cusk and her use of point of view elsewhere: https://www.westtradereview.com/westendcuskcriticalarticle.html Of course highlighting the work of a single author is not to say the problem is solved, or that interior-focused books are not in dire need of reinforcement, but simply to show that it can be done, at the highest levels, in critically and commercially viable work. And, of course, to underscore once more the fruits of the labor. What separates Cusk is, among other things, the vibrancy, the completeness, with which her characters exist on the page. Their interior lives, so well-drawn and immediate, enable them to carry novels in which the domestic and the ordinary are often foregrounded, and high-strung external action is at a minimum. It is the inner life that makes these characters real, makes them human. This essay’s focus is not merely aesthetic concern, then; fiction, like all art, should mirror in its renderings that which it purports to represent. And while much of life is indeed storytelling and the experiences we have—and thus externally focused, plot-oriented fiction has that important place in literature—the vast majority of human existence takes place within the mind. That great breakthrough, discovered by modernism and articulated by Woolf, is that life is a messy, incoherent series of moments, often occurring without rhyme or reason, interspersed and infiltrated by the continuous blasting chorus of the past, memory interrupting perception via the onslaught of sensation. The great genius, then, of interior-driven fiction, doing its work with uninhibited, occasionally grammarless prose, intrusive point of view, and manic, discordant freely associative thought, is that it renders, as near as possible, ordinary and brilliant lived experience on the fictive page. Wholly separate from the great writing that is being published, this cannot be replicated in any other way. By asking the reader to engage alongside in the struggle, to come to the work, as opposed to being a peripheral, largely passive bystander given only abridged reports from the front, the author allows for direct views of that vérité de la pensée that can only be found in the crucible of the consciousness. What is given up, then, by asking less and less of the reader is a fundamental aspect of the novel, creating an art form that reduces its own capacity to reflect life. ON THE NATURE OF THE NOVEL AS AN ART FORM Why, it might be asked, do the writer and the reader feel and respond to these limitations on the form, be they imposed or perceived? Why has the novel, as a form, shifted away from sentence-level risk-taking in the modern day? We noted above a few of the reasons for this change; chief perhaps among them is the notion that the novel, in a world of shortened attention spans and an endless stream of distractions, must amuse to be read, must be an easy, light form of diversion. To be sure, there are books that set out to, and do, just that. However, the literary novel of which we speak is not designed for such a thing. It is an exercise in futility to ask the novel to distort itself into competition against the ever-increasing plethora of entertainment options available to the twenty-first century public, as opposed to being allowed to exist as it is, an artistic expression of the human condition. The market-driven demand for efficiency and utility in fiction misses, indeed grotesquely warps, the mark. It would be possible, should one chose, to condense every novel ever written to a mere line or two, a neat paragraph on a single page—this is the story of a middle-age woman who hosts a party and remembers her youth, the end—but of course no one suggests doing so ridiculous a thing. But it is the logical extension of the provision that fiction never stray from the plot, that any scene, or portion thereof, which does not immodestly and without deviation drive towards the book’s conclusion be excised for the sake of the eternally over-taxed reader. Like a deviant schoolboy, novels are taught to never stray from their route home, to never pause, never wander, never stop a moment to breathe in the world around them and make rough, brilliant, flawed sense of it all. The young writer is enjoined to be ever more efficient, ever more self-denying and self-effacing, that there is no room in contemporary fiction for anything but that which directly, expressly, and accessibly brings us to the conclusion of a neatly ordered plot. This, of course, is nonsense. While there is something to be said for economy and sparsity in writing, these are decisions best left to the artist, and not an abstract amalgamation of the marketplace. The novel is an art form, and like all art forms there must be, and indeed is, room for artistic flourish, for the demonstration of the artist’s natural gift and acquired skill, for exuberance and boldness and daring and the brash movements of a rhetorical dance. The novel is not a mere utilitarian device used to relate a happening. It is an artistic endeavor which should and must be given room to communicate something about the human experience with that ebullience, that intimacy, that creative and artistic expression, which it alone can possess. These moments can, of course, be found in all manner of styles and books, not only the interior-focused fiction that has been the subject here. But it seems to be especially true that where the general reader must try a little harder, work a little more, pull herself from the sepulture in which she has been so long lying in repose, there is an especial enormity to the backlash against “artistic” fiction. Where the novel is hard, in other words, the willingness to read diminishes. Naturally, there are realities of consumerism, along with a great many other factors, which inform publishing trends—in many more ways than one, we have long ago left the age of Woolf, Mrs. Brown, and Modern Fiction. It is not for us here to do battle with western capitalism as it relates to the book-selling industry. Rather this essay is a call to writer and reader alike, to remember the fruits that can be had from interior-focused fiction, to have no fear of risk-taking on the sentence level. There will, of course, always be books that are ineffectual, including a great many that attempt to be indecipherable merely for the sake of being “high brow” or “intellectual” or some other such notion. This essay does not argue that every novel which merely runs its sentences together and eliminates a cogent plot should be adorned with the garlands of fine art. However, we must remain vigilant, not only in carving out space for novels of all sorts—across perspective, form, story, authorial identity, and narrative focus—to be written and published, but in remembering that the nature of art is not to entertain, it is to illuminate. There is work that comes with consuming art, an involvement by the audience in the artistic process that makes their experience all the richer and more significant. The novel is not beyond these artistic protections—indeed, it is the only medium that can explore the human condition in so immediate, so universal, so myriad and so poignant a manner. The reader, then, must remain involved in the labors of the novel, ensuring that the truest expression of the human condition—innovative, fearless, unrestrained fiction—retains its safeguarded place in the artistic pantheon. A word from the author: 100 Years of Modernity evaluates the landscape of contemporary fiction through the prism of the modernist movement and its literary ancestry a century after its birth D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University's BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he serves as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from Fatal Flaw, Twelve Winters Journal, Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Rupture, On The Seawall, and elsewhere. A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He can be found on Twitter @dwhitethewriter.