Cerro Glow

Before and After

by Gary Feuerman

Before the fire

there was a glow

from the silken sun

as I stood in water

dreaming of love

After

I looked west

and beat the rugs

like old enemies

breathing time

Wild Fire

by Johanna DeBiase

When the dogs start barking and the magpies make a nuisance with their clucking, I know the red fog is coming in. Out the western window, I see the smoke collide with thunder and hope the slate clouds win. But the wind is fast, wild and fierce – La Niña, a wrathful goddess. By the time I am done shampooing my dog who rolled in dung to cool off, the air is charred and stuffy. The animals are silenced and the sun is red. We hurry inside.

Yesterday, I rolled in mud at a spa due west, recessed in red canyon walls. The smoke appeared suddenly, with limited visibility and my throat became dry and scratchy. We raced home blasting the A/C, the smoke chasing us while we sped across the mesa. Plump gray and welcoming clouds hovered over town, our fortress of mountains, and as we entered Taos's perimeters, it began to rain. Oh, the cleansing scent of steaming hot tar and wet sand.

A sign of things to come, I hope, as the red plumes of smoke and toxins – the dust of old growth pines or the carcinogenic particles of plutonium – settle around us encased in closed summer houses.

Cerro

by Robin Powlesland

the fireworks display stands empty

and Jeff N. stalks Paseo

with his angry yet honest

yet certain words

today is the first day

I am truly weary of the smoke

and how insular it is to say that

how unfair

it all seems too big really

to know

and also still fairly far away

we dream about rain

flying bullets hit young men

in the face in Taos this weekend

and we watched each other

talk about our creative processes

as if they happen alone

I want to be around Flora

my friends’ three year old

red-headed whimsical daughter

because I do not understand

what her life will look like

it doesn’t look like this

I am bruised from last night’s dancing

and keep seeing a stranger’s dimples

but still New Mexico is burning

we are struggling to breathe

our way through this

Los Alamos on the hill

and we can’t look away

the fireworks stand displays empty

and I know now what the Mayor drinks

what we all drink

we are all always drinking

the future is paralyzing

and yet the events are stacking up

on facebook

as if everyone needs one more

party

as if the bacchanal rights

could fix everything that is going wrong

all over this earth

as if mother nature could be placated

by placating ourselves

as if we had another chance

or a chance at all

my flowers continue to bloom on my plants

and music comes from the plaza

it feels humid as the smoke condenses our moisture around us

I do not want to drink anymore or feel tired or overwhelmed

I want the future to open up like these red flowers in front of me

propel us into something more

but I am just small I am just insular

and the comets will come and the flame and the rain

the plutonium is inches from my face

a bullet in my throat

Space

(575)
By Eric Mack

River cracks the Earth,
Seven syllables this line,
The bridge to Haiku.


North
by Gary Feuerman

I like the volcanoes

on the Mesa

near where my house is

invisible from space

There’s a tributary of the Rio

that runs from the mountains

still covered in snow

like healing powder

sprinkled to cool the pain

My body

on looking into the valley

wants first to run west

into the flatness

of desert

but below the skin

my soul dreams north

space

by Robin Powlesland

the space between teeth

changes

throughout the day

and it’s hard to know

what I make

and what is real

where do we go from here

too the mistake

voiced and distinguished

I brought my tarot cards

to tell the future

but no one wants to hear it

the voices have been

told and loud

I have very much liked

yesterday

and the day before

but today and tomorrow

are like my tooth

missing and what’s left

is a little swollen

empty

where do we go from here

but wave our magic

wands and hands

purses and matchsticks

work our way through

all the stuff

just so much stuff

Rift

by Charles Clayton

700 miles

Colorado to Chihuahua

“New Mexico” gets wider:

one mile every million years

Fault block mountains rise

valley basement drops

buried seashells exposed

glaciers come and go

rain wind rivers snow

tear everything to pieces

grains of sand

carried to the Gulf

Magma probes the crust

earth skin pulled taut and thin

volcanoes burst through

low spots fill with molten lava

become high spots

basalt mesa rimrock

cinder cones shields

back to black dust

blowing in spring winds

River follows rift

no valley of its own

no branching watershed

long lonely line of life

carving out canyons

digging deeper

straight south to El Paso

and suddenly

east

and

out

leave the rift behind.

Untitled

Untitled

by Charles Clayton

100 million years ago

Shifting dunes blowing sands

"New Mexico" south of the equator

Dinosaurs humping and laying eggs

1000 years ago

Images pecked on a sandstone wall

Flecks of obsidian sharpened arrows

Bighorn sheep boiled in the clay pot

100 years ago

Mormon cowboys red dust

Pause and look at pictures on the rocks

Cattle chomp on golden grasses

10 years ago

Powerlines buzzing overhead

Plastic grocery\bag stuck in the sagebrush

Graduate students ponder the hunter

1 day ago

Sunshine warm rock

Arrowheads in the soil

Cowboys in the grave

Professors explain the Anasazi

Then There Were Three
by Eric Mack

It was easier in two dimensions. Without depth there was no need for deep thoughts, and somehow everyone seemed a little less smug, little less full of shit. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Height, width, nothing more complicated than geometry--that's the life though, right? Something's in the way, you better jump over it, get under it or go right through it; no goin' round, circumventing or sneaky tricks.

There's been improvements since we upgraded though, to be sure. Flat cuisine, for one--ain't missed it for a second, and anyone who says different's lying through their fleshy fibhole. By my reckonin' the steaks and the sex are just about the only reasons we don't just upload ourselves onto some hard drive to be spit out an inkjet back where we came from. And the mountains, too, I guess. I mean, damn. We just had those all wrong before.

But I still miss it - they didn't tell us we'd be trading one dimension for another; got a wider world but seemed to lose the time to check it out. Forward progress always kicks the shit out of nostalgia I guess.

(--sent from my iPad2)


Shooting Sheep in the Sky
by Gary Feuerman

Her sister was visiting. It was still early in the relationship, maybe 3 months in. We still made love at least twice a day, and whispered to each other in the corners of parties and bars about the things we wanted to try. It all smelled like fresh raspberries. You know when you look close at a newly picked berry? The round, trembling buds filled with soft flesh and juice. A little hairy, but always ready to burst. That was us. I could do no wrong, although I often thought that what we had couldn't be real, not really. It had to burst and disappear at some point. I had to eventually stumble, break the bubble and watch the mist of love float into nothing.

So Sis was coming and I was the Taos Guy. What to do? She was a fierce intellectual, Sis, with eyes that ate and doubted everything said, but also wanted to just play and grapple. One night on the toilet, tucked safely in the back of the house, I spied a local tourist mag on top of a pile of paperback novels I hadn't read, but figured I'd at least get snippets of if they were piled in the bathroom. I reached for it and brought it to my lap. On the cover was the picture of a petroglyph - a pregnant woman praying next to a set of 4 concentric circles. Like a sign from God, I knew that this, this was the thing to do. A friend had told me the week before that there was a path off of Ranchitos Rd. along the Rio Pueblo where the petroglyphs were etched into the rocks along a little limestone ridge on the mesa.

We went there the next day, a scorching one with endless blue sky. We parked near a house, but off the road and set off into the cottonwoods along the tumbling little river. Sis pulled a joint from her shorts and we smoked it. Stoned, but with purposes, I led us up into the rocks beyond the trees. A cliff about 30' high ran north-south parallel with the river. When I got to the rocks, I pressed my face against them to feel the heat. T and Sis followed suit without words. All was quiet. No cars. No wind. No other people. I moved south along the wall dragging my fingertips along the rough sandstone. After 20 yards I came upon an etching of a vibrant sun over two sets of concentric circles with 4 and 5 rings painted in a rusty red. Petroglyphs. I could hear T and Sis breathing. We stood still and each in turn touched the indentations in the rock. T kissed me on my nose, and Sis then hugged me and whispered, "You are part of my clan."

Cavernas del Viejo Volcan

by Johanna DeBiase

I dig my heels into hard dust and stare out at a photograph in a magazine from someone else's vacation – white mountains holding hands around a splatter of lake blue. The wind blows hard, bellowing my hood up around my face. I climb the mountain, I enter the cave.

A ramble of meaningless words float around me and I will not look at him lest he think I understand. He spills water on the wall to make visible the fine red lines of some ancient sketching. His fingers trace the jagged lines. “Tall people,” he says in English, horizontal hand held high above his head.

“But how do they know that?” I ask my translator, my crouching husband.

“The last one died not too long ago.”

The. Last. One. He was a tall man.

My hip bones barely scrape through the damp tunnel, my head bumping up against jutting rocks. One knee in front of the other, one hand, then the other, one crawl closer to blind. Something falls into water somewhere. Someone whoops when they trip. A mother whispers comforting words to her child. Shh, the owls are sleeping. I commit the darkness to memory. Turning back toward a single point of light, I imagine that I am alone, for one moment, the last one in the world.

Lunar Eclipse

Made Visible

by Johanna DeBiase

My dog's barks became loud and incessant. I was worried she'd wake the kids. I rolled out of my sack on the bottom bunk and tried to quiet the creak of the door as I stepped outside the yurt in my long underwear into the cool night air. Five feet deep of snow rolled out like a blanket, across the meadow between the pine and spruce to the creek below and beyond atop the higher peaks further in the distance.

The full moon made the snow meadow glow like a fresh water pearl and accounted for my inability to sleep – super moon, vernal equinox. I unfastened my dog's leash and beckoned her to join me by the fire inside. Instead, she stared intently to the south along the side of the yurt, her snout pointed forward, her chest engaged and ready to leap into action.

I leaned over her to look. My heart startled. A black silhouette contrasted sharply against the iridescent snow – an animal, sitting upright, bigger than a cat, smaller than a dog, pointy ears and a bushy tail, which it waved across its body affectionately. It was staring back at me. I grabbed my dog's collar and pulled her quickly inside. My heart thumping out of my chest. Out the window, the fox continued to walk across the field and into the trees beyond.

Foxes live in between – night and day, meadow and forest; because of this, they are known for their ability to camouflage. Tribal people across the world revere fox medicine for its power of invisibility. Yet, this fox, this fox wanted to be seen.

Spring.

Moon.

Fox.

the fullness of it came closer

by Robin Powlesland

I can layer these names
into the texture between
morning and its due
possibly see the shadow cast
in midnights from before

I was young then and younger now
knowing that you have left
nothing behind you other than this
layering of camel buts
shorn and tossed about
my patio

I can see in the glare
of this moon
how this place has made
me what I wasn't before

Untitled

by Charles Clayton

Archetype of emotion

born of violent collision.

Reflecting pool reveals chunks of stardust

rejected by Sun's gravity embrace.

Far from the light, elliptical roaming,

then plunge towards a terrestrial speck

seething spinning coalescing cooling.

COLLISION.

Man on the moon a chunk of

Mother Earth, a chip off the old block.

Gray dust settles.

Mountains cast long lonely shadows.

Wax wane.

Tug at the sea.

Soak up gamma rays.

Eat meteors.

Light up the primordial night as

the blue orb below manifests bacterial

(r)evolutions from sea to slimy sea.

Billions of trips around the Sun.

Silver beams shine upon

trilobite backs

jellyfish glow

triceratop horns

mastadon woes

flecks of chipped stone

firepits and charred bones.

Every so often:

“Wolves are eating the moon!”

Eye of Horus, stolen.

Cough it up, sky dragon,

Shaman’s going to yank that arrow out

And make it all right again.

Untitled

by Eric Mack

During what would be my last year, I spent much of it traveling to the surrounding villages, recording oral histories from Native elders for the radio station. One old man in his late seventies from a northern village that sits just below the Arctic Circle shared a simple anecdote about how he used to monitor the extreme cold temperatures that had since become less frequent occurrences due to climate change. Sixty below is still common in Fairbanks, but the nights of minus ninety are long gone. In the 1940s, it seems, thermometers were a luxury not readily available in the villages, so the old man had developed his own scale for taking temperature when traveling overnight by sleddog team.

“50 below, that’s easy… you seen that before – just take a cup of hot water off the pot on the fire, throw it up in the air. If nothing comes down, you hit minus 50,” he explained, referring to a phenomenon that’s now widely demonstrated by awe-struck college students in Fairbanks on numerous Internet videos. “Now, 70 below… don’t see that much anymore these days, but back then, when your kerosene turned to jelly, you knew you hit 70.”

The old man paused, took a sip of watery coffee from a styrofoam cup, moved the microphone on the table in front of him back a few inches, then continued:

“Then, at 90 below, my dogs’ tails just fell off.”

He stood up, grabbed the cup and headed for the coffee pot in the other room.

“But, wait… what happened to the dogs?” I called after him, completely missing the point of the story and no longer concerned about his proximity to the microphone.

“Oh, they was fine… Sometimes maybe one of ‘em would quit, usually the older or sick ones… just lay down and die. Nothin’ you could do for ‘em. But most of ‘ems would be just fine, you just hook ‘em up to the sled, and they’d just run, they just leave them tails behind and just keep movin’… gotta keep movin’ to survive.”

Untitled

by Gary Feuerman

It was something that had not happened in hundreds of years. Before Shakespeare, the telescope, the Mona Lisa; just after the dark ages. 1378. Man was still relatively few and dealing with plagues. America did not exist and the United Kingdom was not so united. Venice thrived, and my lineage was lost somewhere between Crusades-scarred southern realms and forested hills in the mid north of Europe where wild boar and wolves killed some of my nervous ancestors. And here I was with friends, on a couch sitting on a dirt driveway in northern New Mexico, sipping vodka, craning my neck to see the orange moon, like a pill in the sky, like a globular glass of Lipton tea. December 21, 2010. A gathering of writers, wild souls watching ravens in the high tree branches, meteors streaking in green-white glitter, and the moon-sun dance, choreographed and timed to the minute, organization and deliberation among chaos. It was mild for December 21st. No snow on the ground, sweaters enough at midnight and later. The slow shading and unshading of the moon gave us patience. We sipped slower than usual. Not since 1378 had anyone witnessed this. Who saw it then? A shepherd? A monk on a mountain top in Tibet? A writer at her table scribbling by candlelight. An executioner with insomnia feeling vaguely guilty about the next head? Did anyone write about it? The printing press had yet to be invented. Did the Anasazi view it from the sacred circle of stones? Did they know it was coming? Most of the people went inside soon after the moon was covered. A friend and I waited it out. Full light returned near 3am. I was not sure what it meant or will mean to me, but it felt like the completion of a cycle.

Great White Northern New Mexico

Wild-on-End
by Johanna DeBiase

“I could do without all this sagebrush,” the Kansas man makes small-talk. He does not see the open sky, the rising mesas, the stretching rolls of hill persuading mountain peaks, the deep water gashes and bubbling springs. He will always be a tourist. I am grateful I broke down so close to home.“Los Colonias,” I direct him, “you can drop me at this corner.”

“I’ll take you all the way,” he offers with a soft twang, “it’s no problem.” I glimpse into the truck bed at broken elk limbs. “I went hunting with my son last week,” he explains.

“I’m a newcomer too,” I tell him. I think of where I came from, the sub-arctic snow prairies and glacier embedded ridge lines, time moving only as fast as the river would take it. But this is not Alaska. Now I walk in tumbleweeds with sandals on, snack on pinon, explore the back roads and only bring a coat if I’ll be out after dark. “This is good,” I point to my road head,“That’s my house over there.”

Warmed by thoughts of my highway solar adobe I think, I am generated by the sun, but do not say it out loud; there are enough hippies on this mesa to create the illusion of crazy without my help. Yet, he’s told me already(only takes a few miles for a man to open up to a strange woman) he misses Kansas, that’s his true home. I close the heavy door to his truck and run the dirt road back to my house past pueblo land where the sagebrush goes on for miles and think, There could never be too much.

Bastard

by Charles Clayton

It never was very good, not even in California where it was warm. Well, it was good there for awhile, before the drinking got bad. A house, a son, a baby daughter, a used but solid Buick in the driveway, palm trees in the front yard, oranges in the back, steady work at the track.

Then he hit her one too many times and she left. Took the kids and fled for Colorado, for the shelter of family and mountains. He sobered up, tied up some loose ends, and made his way towards that icebox of a town, swearing to her and himself that things had changed. Worked for her brother, rented from her father, started drinking with her cousins and before too long the walls were closing in again. Only now it was 50 below. Too cold for hope.

He got his wages and left town with the clothes on his back and a twelve pack of Budweiser in the passenger seat, headed south to New Mexico, Arizona, anywhere but this frozen valley. No need for goodbyes. It won't take her long to figure out what happened. Crack open a beer. Hit the gas. The edge of town. Keep going. Don't look. Keep your eye on the road. GODDAMN IT, DON'T LOOK!

Slow down for one last look at that godforsaken tin trailer. And there's the kid in his blue snowsuit, up on a snowbank. Waving. At his dad. For the last time.

The Tragic Packing List of Two Alaskan Teenagers on Their First Roadtrip to the Lower 48 (Fairbanks to Santa Fe in January)

by Eric Mack

* Flashlight
* Beef Jerky
* Turkey Jurkey
* Fritos
* iPod
* Alascom Cell Phone (unusable in the lower 48)
* Fleece / Parkas / gloves / hats (to be ditched somewhere south of San Francisco)
* Billy Joel CD (for ironic purposes)
* Red Bull
* Maker's Mark
* Beef Jerky
* Ramen noodles
* Empty 2-liter of Mountain Dew (water bottle)
* Empty 2-liter of DIET Mountain Dew (pee bottle)
* Empty 2-liter of Coke (after the MT. Dew bottles got mixed up)
* 5 gallon gas can (leaking)
* Leatherman utility tool
* Sunscreen (60 SPF)
* Carhartt pants
* Carhartt button shirt
* Pilot Bread
* Smoked salmon jerky
* Rand McNally Atlas (1992 edition)
* 1 Bag containing 4 McDonalds hamburgers purchased day before trip (phone numbers of all friends in Lower 48 written on outside)

Omnibot

Tin Man
by Eric Mack

"He's totally one of us, Robie! For all you know he could be your grandpappy," Model QR-7600 droned at its full decibel capacity, and without any variation in tone.

"I don't know bro, they left him out in the rain, like, for years, and all it took was a couple shots of oil to bring him back up to operational. I don't buy it, dog. You know that would fry the shit out your operating system if you tried it."

Robie lowered his right plastic caliper on to the volume up button on the remote. Judy Garland's adolescent whine permeated the room - something about some sort of distant municipality constructed primarily of precious gems. Humans of European descent love to waste their lives devising dumbass, irrational fantasies, Robie processed to himself.

"Look at the way he moves though," QR-7 shot back. "That nigga's doin' the muthafuckin' robot straight up! You know when this shit was made? Muthafuckin' 1939! Oh, shit, man - I got it, I got it."

The LED lights mounted on QR's upper dome for nighttime illumination and entertainment purposes began to cycle through the full spectrum of hues on the CMYK gradient. A digitized rendition of "Funkytown" emitted from a single speaker on his back.

"Pullman porters, dog! Muthafuckin' Pullman porters. Tin man, my ass. Pullman porters must have had ROBOT porters of their own, man! Metal dude here is trying to send us a message about Robot Civil Rights, my man!"

Just then the vertical hold on the old VHS/TV combo began to go haywire. Robie slapped the console with his left caliper. He removed the 120v plug from his external electrical dock to check for corrosion. What an illogical troubleshooting protocol... you are a dumb robot muthafucka like QR vocalizes after all...

It the last input Robie processed before the compactor snapped his central processing unit, save for a quick flash on the television screen of an image that looked like, but it couldn't be... J. Edgar Hoover? Robie was never able to compute the likelihood that the vision had been real or a manifestation of crossed wires and snapping silicon.

When They Came for Us

by Johanna DeBiase

When they came for us, we were sitting

in downtown corner cafes sipping skinny

lattes while we trivialized politics and the

local recession. Tourists passed with bags

full of turquoise and leather, but we did

not see them, we only saw each other and

the words spilling from our mouths like poems.

When they came for us, we were boot-deep

in soil, rolling it over to expose troubled

worms and patting it down with hope

that biology might do our simple bidding.

We were singing then, to the plants, I guess, so

they would know that we needed them, that we

would eat them soon with the utmost care.

When they came for us, vigilance over children

was all-encompassing. We could not take our eyes

from their little limbs, the malleable bones and skin

kept in our care. We openly admitted our rancor,

the retirement of our social life, but we

would not stop watching; how precious,

how sweet, how long ago and how fast.

When they came for us, we could not hear

the clashing of metal against mountains, the

crumble of clay and splash of wide shallow

rivers, as their giant golem boots met with

the land. We were not listening for the chants

of ancient tribal warnings or new age prophesies;

we were busy then, with other things, when

they came for us.

Untitled

by Robin Powlesland

short lines spread like butter

on dark bread

they stick to the roof

of my mouth

there is a metallic embrace

in how you talk to me

and the months make it warmer

or more alive

Untitled
by Charles Clayton

I want the robot. The Omnibot.

The robot? How about the cowboy cap pistols in the red holsters instead?

No, I want the robot.

You can get a robot anywhere. You can get a robot at the mall when we get back to Amarillo. Look at this cute Indian spear with the feathers and beads. You won't find that in Amarillo.

I don't want the spear. I want the Omnibot.

I'm not getting you the robot. Your aunt Betsy got you that remote controlled robot for your birthday last year and you haven't played with it for months.

It wasn't an Omnibot. I want the Omnibot.

What about this t-shirt with the howling coyote and the chili peppers? It matches your soccer shorts. Or this jackalope. The jackalope would look good next to your spelling bee trophies.

I want the robot. The Omnibot.

No.

Please.

No.

Untitled

Untitled
-Charles Clayton

Cortez married the

daughter of Montezuma.

Their descendents manage

Dairy Queens and

rebuild transmissions

alongside the King’s Highway.

Iberia. Tenochtitlan.

Civilizations collide.

Cosmologies clash.

Utterly different

except for the need

to drink the blood

of non-believers.

She appears to the faithful.

Up on the mountain.

Down in the valley,

Behind the church,

In the hardware aisle at Walmart.

Jewels glimmering gold lust.

Eagle crying glory lost.

Bare brown Goddess flesh

tempting us with rites of passage,

whispering in a strange tongue...

Tear your own heart out.

Feed it to the Jaguar.

Mojito Madness

-Eric Mack

There must be the soul of a chronically lonely, and (by extension) perpetually horny old dude trapped in the rum. Maybe an old hand on a pirate ship all those centuries ago who got mixed up in some East Indies voodoo curse just as cannon balls started raining down on he and those big barrels of sweet relief below deck. One part each of a little pirate blood, voodoo curse and Caribbean Rum, all mixed together in a cosmic shaker - that's the only explanation I can come up with for why a few shots of Bacardi has a biological impact parallel to ingesting a couple little blue Viagra pills and a line of cocaine.

The graphic details will eventually be illustrated in a Jon Waters film, but suffice it to say that the men and women who profess the longevity benefits of "whiskey dick" have yet to experience that condition's Caribbean cousin.

Yet the soul of that unfulfilled old pirate is insatiable. When chafing gives way to climax, and only seconds later to deep sleep, that ol' boy is just getting started... with post-coital rapid eye movements generating fleeting visions that tease even further; there is the woman in a sparkling sequined evening gown in the jungle, tropical heat coating her breasts with sweat that reflects the light of a fire in the background somewhere, not an actual bonfire or anything, just generic sexy flames for the purpose of pointing out the boobs a little better - the kind of lighting design a 17th-century horny pirate would use for the looping porno in his head; then there are the jungle animals, the jaguars, the gorillas, the eagles and several other species that have wandered out of their native climatic zones to make the scene a little more primal; and of course there is the snake, that metaphorical Charlie Sheen on the scene reminding the dreamer of the primacy of the phallus in all things.

And then it's done. Eyes open, sun up. And it's morning so that's not the only thing that's up. Add a headache and a full bladder and now we're shaking hands with the spirit in the spirits. The only antidote for the cursed? A little hair of the dog... or a new life as a beer drinker.

Gabriele

-Gary Feuerman

I wonder how it feels to be an angry raptor, a snake about to bite. When I was six, a leopard lived in my closet. He was old and I never saw him run. Shaneek was his name and his yellow eyes shone in the dark like mini Van Gogh glass paintings. We sat in the dark and talked about the Wild Things who didn’t show up. In the morning light I’d turn on the Sony transistor radio and listen to the casualty count in Vietnam on WINS news. It was always more them than us. It was always the coldest winter in memory. It was always the funeral of a great uncle who died of an embolism. There was always the chance to see a cardinal in my backyard, a blue jay, a robin. After Shaneek disappeared, I threw rocks at squirrels and did experiments on ants. Later, I saw Gabrielle in a one-piece black bathing suit in Lenny’s backyard swimming pool, and my heart raced. On the diving board a bumble bee stung me in the upper back and I fell into the pool as if shot. Gabrielle laughed, but it was before she saw me crying. It didn’t matter. Any reaction would have done. Her skin was the color of Ceylon tea and she walked on her toes. I was sad before I talked to her, seeing the end before the beginning. It took 4 more years, but we had a beginning, and when I graduated high school we had an end. It wasn’t as sad as it was when I was 12 thinking about the future. Maybe being with someone makes the ending less poetic; but maybe not because it’s poetic again now many years later. I heard she was killed by a tiger in India. She was a zoologist and I’m not sure I can find any irony in that. But I can say that as a kid I watched Daktari and always thought the lady in the show was pretty and alluring. I wanted to be around animals, too, if I could be around her. I’d say that the day I saw the budding Gabrielle in the black one-piece in Lenny’s backyard she looked like a gazelle or had the legs of antelope or had the eyes of a tiger, but I’d be projecting backward. She looked like someone I wanted to touch and smell and caress and say I love you to. The bee woke me up. When I climbed out of the pool, she came over and squeezed the stinger out as if she’d done it a thousand times. That’s what I remember more than anything else.

The Showdown

- Johanna DeBiase

Gretchen stamped her cigarette out in the souvenir ashtray, staining the picture of the cowboy with resin and rubbing ashes into the lasso letters. She rubbed her eyes hard and wiped the black residue of eyeliner from her palms to her pants. Carving her initials into his wood table, she waited to catch Jerry evacuating his room with whichever stellar tramp he took home that weekend. She spit into his mug with the picture of skinny Elvis swinging a microphone. (What's so great about Elvis anyway?) Jerry was late with his rent and she needed his share so she could go see the Raggs play at Benders tonight.

Three months ago, it seemed like a good idea to let an old guy who sold vintage collectibles at flea markets board with her. But that was summer and flea markets were over and he was broke. Apparently being old, (Was he nearly forty?), did not mean he was responsible, stable or abject to one-night-stands with atrociously trashy women. (Where did he find them?) The sound of banging against the wall was too much for her to handle. She tore the velor blanket of a sexy Native-American woman wearing a come-hither smile (Why did she think that was ironic?) from the wall and shoved it into the microwave oven that he insisted they keep in the apartment, along with a television set. Pulling a bobby pin out of her hair and placing it on top of the blanket, she set the timer for three-minutes, pressed start and laughed with sadistic joy as he climaxed in the next room.