Letter from the Editor

Fellow Wildcats and lovers of literature,

Welcome to our third Winter Web Issue! As Helicon enters its thirtieth year of publishing, we hasten to catch up with the galloping times. With our collective petticoat hitched up to our knees, the Helicon staff has thundered down the straight-away, bodily carrying the recalcitrant format of the literary magazine on its shoulders into the electronic age. To all our happy benefit, the digital format allows us to bring you creative work at Northwestern that would be impossible in a standard print issue and provides us with a wider latitude for exhibiting art in full color. With this issue, Helicon once again is home to Euterpe, that muse of music - we look forward to the apotheosis of the muses of eclectic formats who are welcome to make Helicon's digital roost their happy home (i.e. submit more multimedia! We want to publish video and games!) This year, we will be publishing our Spring issue in print with a digital supplement so that we can continue to represent the widest variety of creative output at Northwestern. Of course, it's still our privilege to present the best poetry and prose this campus has to offer.

As we prepare to unleash this mighty issue upon an unsuspecting internet, we are also calling for a new crop of submissions to be carefully weighed and measured for inclusion in our Spring issue. Please have a look at our submission guidelines for more information. To provide an art-hungry campus with succor between our publishing dates, we've also started a blog, updated twice weekly, where we hope to refine our taste and share the gems we uncover with the rest of campus.

This year has also seen a restructuring of the staff and our own internal organization. Gone are the archaic hazings based on Dante's Divine Comedy, commissars tasked with field executions of anyone who speaks ill of James Joyce, and the invocation of the Muses via the sacrifice of a disappointed goat twice per decade. Instead, we have streamlined the staff, swelled our ranks slightly to provide cannon fodder for the inevitable Northwestern Literary Magazine Death Match, and sought the sage counsel of the Fellows of Chapin Humanities College to recruit future editors. We also have an extremely strong group of new recruits ready to take the helm as my cohort prepares to ride off into the sunset at graduation.

A special thanks to our new advisor, Garth Fowler, who has provided clear leadership and guidance during our reorganization. We are as always indebted to the gracious support of the Director of the Residential College program, Nancy Anderson. Finally, Helicon is ultimately only possible because of the talented community at Northwestern and our readers. Thank you!

Yours in words,
Tommy Rousse, Editor in Chief, Helicon Literary Magazine

Staff 2009-2010

Executive Board:
Editor-in-Chief: Tommy Rousse
Managing Editor: Jennifer Sale
Operations Manager: Christine Byrne

Editorial Board:
Prose Editor: Declan Taintor
Poetry Editor: Meriwether Clarke
Art Editor: Alisha Varma
Chief Designer: Sisi Wei

Prose Staff:
MJ Scheer
Muindi Muindi
Simon Han
Ali Pechman
Francis D'hondt

Poetry Staff:
Brittany Jaekel
Alina Dunbar
Angad Chadha
Torey Akers
Kristine Lu

Art Staff:
Natalie Alexander
Catherine Mounger
Sean Yu
Minna Zhou
Mackenzie McCluer

Faculty Advisor:
Garth Fowler

About Helicon

HELICON was the brainchild of three students in Mary Kinzie's 1979 poetry sequence. Lisa Getter, Christina Calvit, and Michael Steele wanted to provide Northwestern with a regularly published literary magazine that could showcase the artistic work of the student body. Helicon began and still resides in Chapin, the Humanities Residential College, and is funded by the Residential College Program through the Office of the Provost. The first issue appeared in the Spring of 1980, and included contributions from Northwestern faculty including Joseph Epstein and Mary Kinzie.

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The works published herein are the sole property of the writers and artists who created them. No work may be used without the explicit permission of the author or artist.

Shampahgna

by Caleb Melby

San Miguel doesn’t have too many liquor stores. I know this because I am underage in the United States, but not in Mexico. In as much, I spent a good portion of my time there frolicking from bar to bar like a toddler racing around Lego Land.

I went into these liquor stores on a mission, to collect a bottle of champagne for an (of age) champagne enthusiast who I had terribly wronged back in the states. Her birthday was also passing in my absence.

San Miguel has three liquor stores, says the guidebook we bought when we entered the city. But one is closed and the second has a woeful selection of champagnes. My Hairy Friend and I make our way to the third and final liquor store listed in the guide. This was the same guide that had sent us across the city on a failed quest a few nights before. We found that nearly all the clubs listed had since been closed. El Greco was now an insurance agency and Chocolat was now a bar designed to attract 40-plus-ers. Cougar fantasies aside, we couldn’t bring ourselves to hang out there. As far as we can tell, the guide was last edited in 1996.

I ask for champagne in Spanish. This is not impressive. “Champagne” is one of those fortunate Spanish words which is exactly like the English one, except you pronounce all silent letters, and add an “a” at the end. Sham-pahg-na. Shampahgna.

A silky young buck points us in the right direction, and I begin an elaborate charade that suggests I know what I’m doing. I read the descriptions provided on the sides of the bottles, picking out key words – fruity, dry, full-flavored, etc. But even if I could translate the bottle in its entirety, I would be at a loss, for I know nothing of champagne.

My Hairy Friend speaks no Spanish, but is not entirely useless. He is a walking Exchange Teller, converting all prices in pesos to American Dollars. I pick up and consider a bottle of champagne, nodding in a way I feel conveys total understanding.

“Christ. Are you really going to spend that much money on champagne?” My Hairy Friend asks. My Hairy Friend is not a romantic. He also is capable of spending amounts equal to the price of that bottle on margaritas in a single night. During happy hour.

I ponder and squint for a few more minutes until I notice The Silky Fellow leaning on a table behind us. I engage him in a conversation about champagne in minced Spanish. I conclude that there is a gap in my education. In Spanish, I can tell you how I got ready for the day, what my favorite foods are, what my least favorite foods are, what sports I like, what sports I don’t, and what clothes I am wearing. I can give and receive directions, mention that I find you attractive, make my way though airports, tell you what classes I’m taking, and have an intellectual discussion about the role of religion in modern society.

I can’t talk champagne though.

I add this to the long list of things I wish I knew how to talk about in Spanish: the nuances of coke addictions, the slight variations in behavior patterns of seemingly identical dogs, the divergent uses of garlic powder and garlic salt, and the importance of letting rice soak for a bit before boiling it.

This list is kept right next to the list of things I’m glad I don’t know how to talk about in Spanish: Why I don’t want a deck of pro-wrestler themed playing cards, why raw red onions set off my gag reflex, and why I really don’t think a gallon-hat would look all that great on me. No hablo espaňol. Lo siento.

The Silky Man proceeds to tell me what the bottles told me already. I settle for the one he describes as fruity about ocho veces. I mean, who doesn’t like fruity things?

The Silky Man takes me to the register, where he silently rings me up.

“Will that be all for you today?” he asks in perfect English.

I’m stunned. And embarrassed. Not just because I could have avoided the entire language barrier debacle, but also because this means he probably heard My Hairy Friend suggest that “a bottle of Bailey’s would be just as good. And cheaper.”

“Yea.” I manage.

“Do you mind this size bag?” He holds one up, “We seem to be out of the smaller sizes.”

“No problem. And thanks,” I say as we leave the shop.

As we make our way back to the central plaza, My Hairy Friend continues to lament that I spent money on anything but hard liquor, comparing the champagne to a bottle of vodka in terms of how many “drunks” each is worth.

“Do you think it’s still happy hour down at that bar?” My Hairy Friend asks.

It’s three in the afternoon.

Warmth

by Chloe Cole

She was a warm body. That was how the woman described the job to Kate on the phone. The heat her body naturally released mattered. The agency workers repeated that over the phone throughout the application process.

“You are there to make the baby.” The woman paused mid-sentence, Kate suspecting the woman’s limited English was failing her. “Make the baby whole.”

She thought about that, about making the baby whole, as she heard the flight attendants tell the passengers to prepare for take off. The flight attendant sounded as if she were from Texas. Unusual. On these international flights, the flight attendants were typically American because the airline itself was, but she never heard a Southern accent before.

She stretched her arm up and turned off the light above her. She didn’t bring a book to read. The baby seemed to sigh. Kate felt the engine vibrating beneath her feet. She liked to sit in a seat above the engine because that was the closest she could get to flying. The baby jerked its left foot, nudging Kate’s pinky.

Once, the agency put her on a Korean airline flight. It was her third job. She didn’t understand what the flight attendants said to her, even when they spoke in English, so they ended up pushing her aside and adjusting the baby seat for her, although she knew by then how to do that herself. Then, the flight attendants continually stopped at her seat during the flight and cooed in Korean to the baby, as if Kate didn’t know how to comfort him. Babies don’t speak a language, Kate thought. She wondered if she should explain this to the flight attendants, but she figured it wasn’t worth the effort.

She placed her hand on the baby’s leg. The little boy readjusted slightly, his eyes stuck on the fabric patterns of the seat in front of him. He was a quiet one. Most of them were. The plane’s humming soothed them, she reasoned. Some of them made so little noise she didn’t realize, without looking at them, whether they were asleep or awake. Her first couple were like this; she remained rigid those first flights, fear twitching her stomach. She called her mother as soon as she reached her apartment, blurting questions.

“They probably don’t see the use in crying,” her mother said. It was late in New York. Kate recognized that she shouldn’t have called.

“Babies cry. It’s instinct.”

“They stop doing it so often if they don’t get attention where they lived before.” Her mother’s voice was firm, which Kate knew meant she was upset. She didn’t want to push her mother any further so she pressed her lips together. The silence made Kate tired, although she wouldn’t go to bed for a few hours.

Then, her mother would ask the question, the question she asked Kate after every one of her flights from South Korea.

“Don’t you remember your own first flight and your escort?”

Kate didn’t.

The babies would not remember her either - even when they grew up to the age (whenever exactly it was, Kate herself couldn’t remember) when they were old enough to be considered knowledgeable about their early years. Oliver used to ask her the same questions, like her mother, again and again, as though the answer was stuck inside her and could be removed with a lot of work.

The plane jerked forward, picking up speed. She pressed her head into the back of her seat. The baby lifted a hand to his ear. Kate told herself not read too much into this. She felt the front of the plane peel off the ground, then the back. She pressed her feet into the floor. She sat very still as she imagined strange air pressures rearranging themselves around her body. When she looked over again at the baby, she saw he was asleep.

She couldn’t sleep on airplanes. Or rather, she didn’t try. It took her a strict, comfortable ritual of brushing her hair, reading a certain number of pages in a magazine or book and taking off her thick socks to lure herself into sleep at home. She knew shut-eye on the plane was impossible.

Her mother used to cure Kate’s insomnia when she was little by turning off all the lights in the house to ensure the bedroom was pitch black and gently placing a warm hand on Kate’s forehead or shoulder.

Kate was religious about her nightlight. The darkness, which Oliver sometimes tried to argue for, as if he were trying to test how much Kate could stand, choked her. The first few minutes in the black were calm, but then she never knew whether her eyes were open or closed, whether or not she was dreaming that a hand was closing over her mouth and nostrils.

“That has to mean something,” Oliver repeated. He would bring it up over dinner, sometimes, any time, perhaps after she had been discussing a movie or an old room mate. “The darkness, it definitely relates to something that happened to you at the orphanage.”

That’s what she liked about him at first: no shame. How he liked to tell her he bragged that he was dating an adopted Korean girl. How politically correct, he beamed. She truly thought, though she would never tell him, he had a beautiful smile. But then that, too, closed in around her. He was surrounding her, invading her apartment. Sometimes, when she was alone, she experienced the distinct feeling that Oliver was nesting in her pores; she smelled him, smelled of him.

The flight attendant pushed the cart into Kate’s elbow. She removed it quickly from the aisle, nodding at the woman’s apology. She ordered a Diet Coke. The flight attendant leaned over Kate to look at the baby, but she didn’t touch.

“That’s a beautiful baby you have there.” The flight attendant smiled. Kate noted that the woman’s coral lipstick was smudged on her teeth. Kate grimaced.

“I’m just escorting him to his new family,” Kate said. She knew she couldn’t get upset. She was Korean. The baby was Korean. She looked old enough to have a baby. After all, she thought, she was old enough to have a baby. Still, she knew how impolite her voice sounded.

“Oh, well,” the flight attendant shrugged, apparently unable to remove her eyes from the sleeping baby, “he’s adorable.”

The cart moved on. Kate opened the Diet Coke, pausing to listen to the bubbles hiss to the surface. The baby’s leg nudged her arm. Then, she heard a yawn. She glanced over to see the baby’s eyes blinking; he was emerging from sleep. She hesitated before taking a first sip of her drink. She wasn’t sure whether her body’s warmth was needed at this time. He stared again at the seat’s patterns before him.

She watched images of waterfalls projected onto the cabin screen, wondered whether they were taken in Korea. The baby shifted in his seat and seemed to let out what Kate discerned was a grunt. She held a hand before his forehead, but stopped herself. There were boundaries, she thought. He looked up at her approaching hand, his foot pressing against her knee.

She let her hand rest softly on his forehead. She was sure that she could feel the warm blood pumping through his veins. His skin was so warm. She removed her hand quickly, realizing that it was damp from holding her can of Coke.

She cupped her hands together and blew forcefully into them. Then, she rubbed them quickly together. She learned this from Oliver.

He would take her hands in his and do the process again and again, whispering: “You won’t be so cold. You won’t be so cold.” He sounded like the women who interviewed her while she was applying to be an escort, the women who didn’t seem to care if she were listening, who seemed to believe those wires and their chiseled words reached her and that meant something.



The flights to Korea, the ones she took by herself, were the worst. Especially after Oliver left.

Yes, Oliver was gone. She sometimes repeated this to herself.

There was a fight, of course, because things can never die in silence, though every man, Kate noticed, claims he wants them to. Kate expected Oliver to slam the door because he was angry. His face was flushed, his fingers spread out. He never made a fist, she realized, when he was angry. No, she corrected herself, he was frustrated. She was frustrated. They grew tired of how each of their faces looked in the single low-hanging light above her kitchen table.

But he didn’t slam the door. Instead, she walked to the front door to make sure he really left because she only heard a neat click after his footsteps stopped. Then, she returned to the kitchen table. She made herself a turkey sandwich, neatly smearing the Dijon mustard on both slices of bread. Splitting it down the center into two pieces, she placed it lightly on one of the new glass plates she bought the day before.

She sat at the table, putting the sandwich in front of her, before she realized she wasn’t hungry. She slid the sandwich into the fridge, thinking about how hungry she would be soon. Probably.

She woke up the next day and, almost as though there were no distinction between sleeping and waking, she showered, packed and left, locking carefully the door to her apartment.

After she boarded her flight to Korea, pulled a magazine out of the pocket of the seat in front her, she remembered the sandwich in the fridge. She imagined how the smell of wilting lettuce would freeze to the white, clean sides of the fridge, how she would open the door to the faint, watery scent, how she would be met by the face of the sandwich, its crust as lips and its turkey slices as a whispering, hissing tongue.



The flight attendant returned to Kate’s seat after the pilot announced they were halfway back to the United States. She paused in the aisle, but she didn’t look at Kate at first. Instead, she looked down the aisle to the end of the plane and then over her shoulder. Kate caught her watching them out of the corner of her blue eye shadow covered eyes. Finally, the flight attendant kneeled down.

“Sorry,” the flight attendant said. “I just love babies.”

Kate gave a smile that must have looked more like a grimace. The flight attendant wrinkled her forehead into a more apologetic look.

“My children are full grown,” the woman said as though this were an explanation. Her face was only inches from Kate’s. Kate wondered if the woman had rubbed the coral lipstick off her teeth because she couldn’t see it there anymore. She smelled of cold coffee and honey cough drops.

“What’s his name?” The flight attendant persisted. Kate glanced back at the boy. He was still slumbering, a little drool dripping from his mouth. She took the napkin from under her drink and wiped it off.

“It’s complicated. He - ” Kate started.

“No, no, that was wrong of me to ask,” the woman interrupted her. “My name is Mary, by the way.” She held out a hand. Kate shook it, wondering if she were dreaming this. Of course, her name would be Mary, Kate suppressed a smirk.

Kate couldn’t remember the last time she shook somebody’s hand. Besides Oliver. When he approached her at the friend’s party, an awkward post-college party where the hosts still served with red plastic cups and where the lack of deafening hip hop music made the conversations dull and the participants sleepy, he held out his hand when he said his name. She was caught off guard at first. Although she looked at it, stunned for a few moments, he didn’t falter.

“Like Oliver the orphan?” she asked.

“No,” he said. She liked his tone. Even when he told her his hobbies included pottery, she didn’t abort the conversation.

Later, he imitated her face, wrinkling his brow, biting his lip. He called it her “Are you worth my time?” face. She knew her face wasn’t attractive that first meeting with Oliver. Her mother was always telling her to fix her face when she interacted with strangers, when she talked to shopkeepers.

But Oliver stayed with the conversation. That was enough; she stayed, too.

“I keep begging my son to have a baby.” The woman began a story. Kate breathed out of her nose, trying to get more comfortable in her seat. “He talks about financial stability. So cautious nowadays.”

The woman paused. Kate cocked her head.

“My husband and I, all we thought about was giving enough love,” the woman said. She laughed. Kate nodded. “My son’s a lawyer. He really likes his job. It’s good to love what you do.”

“A lawyer?” Kate clenched her teeth. She looked at her lap. “My friend is a lawyer. Studying to be one.”

It was Mary’s turn to nod. Kate was talking about Oliver – always a surreal experience. In person, he was relevant, his presence almost scalding others’ skin. His memory tickled the back of her throat, barely warming her fingertips.

She remembered when she gave him an olive green sweater for his birthday. It matched his eyes. That’s why she picked it out, but she didn’t feel like telling him this. When he opened it, he grabbed her hands, thanking her, looking into her eyes. She found his sincerity painful and couldn’t stand to maintain the eye contact for more than a few seconds. After she nodded, he released her. As if nothing happened, he collapsed on her couch, watching “Scooby Doo” reruns for the rest of the day. She hid in the kitchen, holding a cold glass in her hands, pressing it to her forehead, trying to be as quiet as she could so she could hear him breathing and chuckling in the next room.



Besides whimpering during landing, the boy didn’t make a sound. He grabbed onto her finger when she held it out after the pilot announced they were beginning their final descent. The sensation of the plane easing into a diagonal path was her favorite. She closed her eyes. His fingers tightened around the top of her pointer finger. She peeked at him sideways. He was looking at her fingernail.

The plane landed without any turbulence. She waited until the plane emptied. The flight attendant, seeming to misinterpret Kate’s waiting, stopped in the aisle beside Kate. Kate removed the baby seat by herself, without a word to the flight attendant, keeping her back towards her, and began to walk down the aisle.

“Ma’am?” Mary called after her. Kate felt her knees lock as she stopped. She looked over her shoulder. These mothers could never leave her alone.

“Is this your bag?” Mary approached her, holding up Kate’s lavender backpack. Kate nodded, managing to give the woman a smile as she reached behind and shouldered the bag. She quickened her pace as she exited the plane.

The parents were supposed to be at the baggage claim. This was routine. She gripped the seat so as not to rock it as her hips swiveled as she walked. Strangers smiled at her. Strangers always smile, Kate learned, at young women holding babies. To respond to the grins with anything but pursed lips, Kate thought, would be dishonest.

When she explained to her mother about the job, this temporary endeavor she had embarked on, this post-college return-to-reality job (that’s how she phrased it), her mother grew unexpectedly silent.

“Why would you want that job? Holding and then letting go of babies?” her mother asked. Kate was momentarily speechless.

Then, she burst into words. She explained the good money, the convenient hours, the travel experience, listing the qualities the company identified as advantages in the brochure. Her mother cleared her throat before Kate could finish.

“My roots, Mom,” she whispered into the phone. Her mother did not respond. Her last few words were suspended. She imagined them drifting in the air, through miles and miles of wires, to New York, resting at last in her mother’s ear. She could still taste their waxy taste on her tongue.



Returning from her last trip, she found a note Oliver left on the front door. She saw it as she walked down the hallway, blood rushing into her hands. Before she could read it, she tore it off and slipped inside into the darkness of her apartment. At least, she grimaced, he remembered to turn off the lights when he left. She could only assume he had entered the apartment. He still had his keys.

She walked into the kitchen, breathing in and out of her nose, trying to make as little noise as possible. She dropped her backpack onto the table. Without looking at the words, she placed the note beside the backpack.

Holding her breath, she opened the fridge. The jar of Dijon mustard stared blankly, un-accusatory and dumb, back at her. She left the door swinging open and snatched the note.

“Dear Kate,” she read aloud, hating how she phrased the words exactly as she knew he would if he were there. “I will drop off keys when you get back. Don’t want to take any chances. The sandwich was delicious. Strangely, still a little warm.”

Goosebumps crawling up her arms, she closed the fridge door. She stepped to the switch and flicked the light on. The fluorescent bulb seemed to sputter. Then, it hummed to life. She watched it illuminate her lavender backpack for a few moments.

She recognized the note’s purpose, recognized how Oliver purposefully worded it to initiate a phone call. She knew he believed in these conversations, these examples of decency between two people who no longer had anything to say to each other. He still was pushing her, shaking her a bit to see if anything might fall out of her pockets or her mouth. She turned off the lights.



She spotted the parents. The father was tall, his eyes scanning the crowd. He didn’t look as low as to see her. All the parents appeared to think their escort would carry the baby above her head and float above the crowd. This father was no different. His eyes wandered over only the top of the crowd.

The mother gripped the father’s sleeve with a white-knuckled hand. She was much shorter than her husband. With her other hand, she thumbed her marriage ring, spinning it around and around her fourth finger. She seemed to be muttering words to herself.

Kate slowed down, remembering her mother’s descriptions of this moment for her.

“This hush settles over everything,” her mother said. She would stand before Kate, forcing her sit down as she recounted the experience, her eyes staring right above Kate’s head. “And then, you’re done. You’re just set. You’re not even surprised by the baby and her sounds and everything that you say. You’re all good.”

Then, her mother would pause and laugh: “And a little terrified.” Kate’s mother would always shrug.

“But everyone is,” she ended.

Kate wanted to see this hush settle over the couple. The mother didn’t stop spinning the ring. The father glanced down once or twice at his wife, as though she might disappear if he didn’t check. The agency told Kate never to feel pressure in these situations.

“Parents,” said one woman, who spoke the best English of any of the employees, “are parents years before you give them baby.”

She took her time then, allowing businessmen to weave around her. She looked down at the baby. He was staring up at her. He was so quiet, she thought. Maybe the quietest she had ever escorted. An announcement over the loud speaker warned people not to leave their baggage unattended. She could smell cheap coffee from the stand she passed, wondering why airports made everything taste like plastic.

The father saw her. She walked to them. They exchanged greetings. Kate tried to remain as silent as possible. She flexed her arm muscles, raising the baby seat. The mother placed a hand underneath it, removing it from Kate’s arms, peering down into the baby’s face.

The father, watching the baby, asked about the flight, how long it was, struggling to appear as though this was something he and Kate wanted to talk about. Kate suspected the mother told him to be polite to her, the escort, because he stumbled over questions, filling pauses with jumbled words. She gave the shortest answers possible.

The mother looked up and thanked her. The father followed suit and thanked her. ‘What was with this obsession with eye contact?’ Kate wondered. She felt dizzy, trying to look at both the mother and the father. She wondered if she should buy some dinner before she went home, thinking she could call her mother, like she promised to before she left, if she made good time on the freeway.

“The agency said,” the mother started. She looked at her husband as though to ask for permission. He didn’t look away from the baby. “Well, they said that you yourself were adopted from Korea.”

Kate bit the inside of her lip.

“I was just wondering if there’s some advice you’d like us to give him,” the mother nodded her head towards the baby, “about what it’s like, anything that helped you.”

Kate opened her mouth. She didn’t have anything to say. She replayed her mother’s description of this day, thinking about the way her mother’s eyes looked when the light hit them, when the light seemed to stream through them. She thought about how her face looked in the airplane’s bathroom mirror, how her friends in high school brushed her hair and whined about their problems with frizz, about how Oliver asked her if she had a Korean name before her mother gave her an American one, about how her mother put extra blankets on her bed during the winter when she was little because she was always shivering all the time, her mother would tell friends over the phone, she’s so small, so small, and she shivers all the time. They had this day planned for months, years. How could they expect her to say something?

“You’re scared,” Kate blurted. She stuck her hands into her pockets. She looked at her feet and then back at the mother. She tried to smile reassuringly. “But so is everyone.”



Kate sat angrily on her bed. She left the bathroom light on while she was gone. In one of her college classes, she learned the amount of energy a light bulb used in a day. She couldn’t remember the exact number now, but she remembered that it infuriated her. She glanced at the phone on her bedside table. Just the memory of these feelings was enough, she thought.

The look on the mother’s face, after Kate gave her the advice she asked for, heated Kate’s cheeks. She pictured it the entire drive home. The mother leaned towards Kate for a moment before parting her lips into a grin. The parents didn’t really say anything else before they walked away. She wasn’t sure if her response was satisfactory, was even remotely what the mother expected.

Kate removed the phone from the receiver, thinking about how the baby’s fingers wrapped around her fingernail.

Her mother picked up on the second ring.

“How was this one?” her mother asked.

“A boy,” Kate said.

“Uh-huh.” Her mother breathed into the phone. Kate could hear the ring of a timer in the background. She knew her mother was cooking. Her mother still baked brownies for her friends’ children. Kate didn’t bake.

“The parents, though,” Kate said.

“Oh yeah?” Her mother chucked a little. Kate missed the sensation of opening an oven, the air blasting moisture off her face.

“How is Oliver?” Her mother asked.

It was inevitable. Kate knew her mother would bring him up at one point. She glanced down at her fingernails. Her mother liked Oliver when she visited for Christmas. Oliver told jokes that didn’t make sense and Kate’s mother laughed at them. Kate knew that what her mother liked most was that a boy like Oliver was with Kate. She recognized that her mother and Oliver came from the same place somehow; they were old souls, as her former Psychology professor said about some of her classmates.

“Good. I hope,” she said. Her mother cleared her throat. It was all understood. Clean and simple. “I have to get his keys.”

“I was just about say you should talk to him,” her mother said.

‘Of course, you were,’ Kate thought. She imagined her mother answering the door for children, leading them into the kitchen where they would feast on brownies, whispering and giggling with one another. They would be wrapped in scarves and mittens. Her mother would help them remove those, placing a heap on the kitchen counter.

“I should let you go,” her mother said after a long silence. They said good night and hung up. Kate looked at the clock beside the phone. The stores would still be open. She grabbed her coat off the hook and shoved it on. She left the door to the apartment unlocked as she rushed to the stairs, pounding down the three flights.

The store was nearby, but she still took the car. She turned the heat up, turning the vent toward her face. It was the coldest day in March that she could remember. But she always underdressed, she thought. Her mother chastised her about it until she lied over the phone about how many layers she wore.

The store was deserted. But open. She headed for the back aisle, the one she passed every week, ignoring. She stared at the colors. She hesitated above green. No, she told herself. She folded her arms, glancing over the options again.

She decided on mustard yellow and navy finally. The teenage boy behind the check out counter laughed at the sight of her items.

“No one’s ever bought these. Ever,” he said as he took her cash. She nodded, taking the bag and leaving without a reply. She expected that nobody would buy them, but she wasn’t sure what he was trying to say when he told her that.

She plopped onto her car seat, shutting the car door.

“Yes, I am rather pleased,” she said aloud. The car’s fake, heated air blew the words back into her ears.

She pulled the two bundles of yarn out of the bag and dropped them into her lap. Then, she removed the knitting needles. She held one in each hand as thought they were chopsticks. Then, she readjusted to hold them as though they were pencils. Then, a fork and knife. Then, finally, she held them as she imagined drumsticks might be held. She stretched her left pinky to stroke the blue yarn. Some of its fuzz stuck to her wool coat.

She pressed the back of her head against the car seat and imagined knitting. A friend in the dorm taught her freshman year. She could learn again. It would be easy to pick up, she reasoned. You can't forget these rituals.

With her eyes closed, she drifted into a vision of her dialing and hearing Oliver pick up. She wouldn't say the phrases she'd been practicing in her head, mouthing before the airplane mirror, sentences the made her tongue bleed sometimes: “You pity-flirt with older women at restaurants” or “You always look at my mouth when I speak.”

Rather, she would explain how she is knitting a scarf and she wouldn’t pause at his surprise. No, he wouldn’t be surprised, she smiled. The back of her neck began to sweat. The drops didn't turn cold enough yet to make this uncomfortable. He would ask, immediately, if it was for him. She wouldn’t answer directly, of course. Instead, she would describe the difficulty of working with two balls of yarn, the joining and intertwining of the colors, the pattern she chose. But this would pay off, she reasoned, this difficulty would pay off because scarves retain body heat; they replace a parent, the yarn furry like arm hair, wrapping around a neck or chin. This description, her forced comparisons, her stumbling voice, would pour out of his receiver and feel like her breath, curling, reddening his ears. She believed they would have to find enough comfort in that.

Pregnant

by Chloe Cole

A friend, Laura, told me she could never be a mother,
could never love anything more than money.
I lie, lie and lie with these girls.
Their shame swells my stomach.
They cannot remember where they spent the night,
when their tights tear,
and who held them. My nights
I buoy through dreams where I am the only mother,
yelling instructions on how to change a diaper,
baby powder clotting my saliva,
pushing a cart in the supermarket,
collecting wailing babies from the shelves.
Waking is a heartbeat in my stomach,
sagging at the space beside my bed where a crib might rest:
All of my daughters have Laura’s mouth.

Graft

by Laura Jok

I’d opt to snipe at love from vantage points
remote, to sleep and put my feet upon
a language cheaply-made with ugly poise—
verbose IKEA sofas built for one,
but your mosaic bone is poetry
the toes and shoulders grafted to your hand
which wound umbilical infinity,
the fleshy wool your mother knit. I stand—

—me, mute and gaping— like a well-worn phrase
which has forgotten what it meant to say,
inducted to the hall of new clichés—
for sacred words of true belief, I pray
to meaning sarcasm can not transcend
in spaces and ellipses of your hand.

Near Death

by Maria Provenzano

The recent rain leaves
Rumors of itself
Plastered to the insects
That hover above
The sidewalk. Their steady
Buzz drones its tones
Into the hanging moisture so
The sound is
The same as
The wetness, the wispy
Cloth of fog all full
Of buzz and hum,
Blanketing the air
Til I am absorbed and
Fluttering like flies—
But I don’t have such
Able wings as these,
And with my feet
I find the ground,
Welcoming the smallish sound
As, quietly, my
Footsteps fall like
Shadows on the
Sidewalk.

Splinter

by Chloe Cole

My mother goes gray. I am ten.
I am told things as though I listen. The first is the worst,
the teachers repeat.
She begs me with the brush. I begin to count.
This is new, they said,
the wood, if I fall, can split, enter my skin.
Her silver strands are beautiful here,
between my fingers. I want to tell her.
White sliver stings
in my palm, my cheek burnt against the floor.
I catch her before the mirror.
Don’t stop.
We cannot tell ourselves to rest now.
They are slid out from my thumb, one by one.
I do not care how slow they go.
This is still removal.

The look on her face is --
no, I won’t deny it --
it is gentle,
but it is pulling at what
I bury beneath my skin.

At the Grocery Store

by Sarah Hughes

The chicken’s panting thins her calcium
Carbonate shells in the deep heat. The weak
Eggs crack under her weight and fissures run
Along the white domes, spilling yellow beaks.

I hear the rolling engine when my mom
Talks about her motorcycle, the husband
that came with it. She murmurs, “It was wrong.”
She packs away the faded pictures and

I imagine her now, at the store, pinching
the rough eggs, and searching for cracks, escaped
membrane hardened to the grey carton. Rinsed,
split, we will add them raw to birthday cakes.

My mother was forty when I was born,
when her eggs were thin, the edges grey, worn.

Extended Metaphor

by Laura Jok

Dreams are middle-aged women in yoga class
thinking, “How far can you stretch the truth before it snaps,
like a brassiere’s underwire,
like a chicken’s neck,
like a manic gospel choir,
like a psychopath.”

Dreams are dressed in scuffed stretch pants with cellulite and
straining veins exposed beneath unforgiving spandex,
and only have to bend in an unfamiliar direction to
feel the burn.