NOR: Embrace Your Conjunctions
Featuring stories by Barbara Ganley, Kate Wisel, Laura Jok, and Alan Sincic: an essay by Kay Gram; poems by Francesca Bell, Dan Clark, Janice N. Harrington, Matt Prater, James McKee, Kathryn Jordan, Adam Tavel, Jacqueline Balderrama, Katie Pynotek, Maria Nazos, and Kerry James Evans. With art by Madara Mason and others.
By Barbara Ganley
Featured Art: “Holy Holy Holy” by Yan Sun
Because it’s Thursday, nearing five o’clock, Lucie is well into a doozie of a headache. Every week at this time little Jenny Baker hands her one as they sit side by side in the dining room and Jenny busily tortures the piano. She’s a narrow slip of a thing with a distracting, gum-baring smile made stranger today by a drift of tiny metallic stars sweeping across her cheeks like cosmic freckles.
Her orange high tops smack the stool’s taloned feet bapbap as she bludgeons the keys in an apparent heavy-metal version of “Long Long Ago.”
The piano, old and patient, takes it. Lucie, who is neither of those things, says, “A bit slower and softer now. See if you can find the melancholy.”
She uses her hands to play a phantom keyboard floating in the air. She must look ridiculous. “Sing the words if you like. I find that helps.” She is ridiculous.
Jenny, clearly having the same thought, grins at the keys, speeds up and hammers away. She doesn’t sing. She never sings.
What ten-year-old doesn’t sing?
But of course Lucie is confusing children with birds, Jenny with Bacchus, her grandfather’s sidekick and belter of sea shanty and Broadway schmaltz. Since moving back home, she has learned far more about thirty-year-old African grey parrots than about ten-year-old humans. Prefers them, too, if truth be told, even if they do bite. Lucie understands that people would find that small of her. But this ten-year-old human next to her couldn’t care less. A look of near madness flashes across the girl’s starry face. Her thin hair switches about her neck like an agitated tail. She’s seeing herself onstage, adoring fans at her feet. Next she’ll be peeling the stars from her face and tossing them to the crowd.
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By Francesca Bell
Featured Art: “The Sea of Memory and Forgetfulness” by Madara Mason
I always knew
a man waited for me somewhere
with hands that fit the particular curves
of my treacherous body.
Whether I watched for him or not.
Whether I believed.
Sometimes, in dreams, he entered me from above,
like a coffin lowered slowly into a grave.
Sometimes he held me hard from behind.
The hills scorched golden each summer.
My hair was streaked the color of dried-dead grass.
People said I was lucky to have it.
Every year, moths fluttered
against the trees’ dark trunks as I passed,
like scraps of parchment.
An infestation that maybe would, maybe would not, kill the oaks.
I dared myself to wonder
around which bend
would he find me.
Wherever I looked were signs.
The steep ridge, a gray fox hunting
at the slough’s edge, V of geese going over.
World of enchantment,
and I wandered precarious,
my steps disturbing the air,
their small sound like beads
counting out prayers.
By Dan Clark
Featured Art: “Basa de Maya” by Madara Mason
The priest swings a thurible. Incense,
swirling and nebulous, encircles the cremation urn.
A few feet away, a husband weeps.
He’s not thinking how Oregon came to fill the ocean
of itself, how island arcs docked like icebergs
against the Idaho shore, where Mesohippus,
diminutive proto-horse, grazed beneath the juniper.
He’s not considering how Oregon drifted through
several versions of itself—savanna, jungle, desert—
then settled for a time as a placid, inland lake.
Instead, he’s remembering forty years ago,
a dance floor, a promise emerging,
all red-haired and smile, in the same way Da Vinci
painted Ginevra, young woman in three-quarter view,
whose eyes engaged like none before,
the part of her braided hair revealing noble forehead,
the background a green halo of juniper.
And he’s not considering how the continent
has yet to finish arranging itself—Pacific plate
subducting from the west, Sierras
pressing north, rotating Oregon like a cogged wheel.
Yet he finds himself in the second pew, rearranging:
how that red-haired promise faded into
the drinking, the stolen meds, the swerving
between fallen arms of railroad crossings,
this version of her unrecognizable
like Willem de Kooning’s Woman I,
full-frontal view: terrible, Paleolithic,
brandishing eyes of knives, breasts challenging,
margin of her body dissolving into background.
The priest swings incense, swirling and nebulous.
Twenty miles above Earth, Hubble steadies its gaze
the way he studies the pink of his thumbnail.
He watches himself in the pew,
feels himself disappearing—
he cannot hold the red-shifts steady, cannot keep
the margins from dissolving to ground.
By Janice N. Harrington
Featured Art: “Squall” by Madara Mason
My skin, my confessor, my cubicle,
scrivener, touch screen, touch-collector.
Frame and shawl and portmanteau. Wait,
wait, don’t go. The sun’s too high,
too hot. You’ll burn for sure.
On my face, this scattered Braille.
Read what my cheek says; all those
cuts on my hands, read those too.
And that vowel in the small of my back,
say it, repeat after me.
A door for out, a door for in,
I’m in my skin, within, within. Without?
You mean without your skin?
The skin against my thigh says
warm, dry, soft, weight of, knows
silken and kerseymere, says here.
Says, yes. Says, no.
It whispers with its electric tongue, release
and absence. But absence is always worse.
It’s the one that leaves the scar.
Skin-clock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
A scar, a scurry, I wouldn’t worry.
We’re only skin scenes, skin-scapes,
little dioramas with clever apes,
a skin, akin, pretense, pretend.
Let me ask again, your skin or mine?
By Matt Prater
Featured Art: “Bull and Bird” by Madara Mason
There was a roaming troubadour in the years of maille & sword
who lunched on wild strawberries,
communing with the Lord.
But his creed was not dogmatic, & he didn’t bow the knee;
so found himself impaled by a roaming soldier, eventually,
when he would not sing the praises
of the ravenous Crusades. He held G-d
was the father of Muhammad & the Moors,
so went to Heaven softly, whispering amor.
There was a normal generation, for a while, between the wars–
chicken paprika & the Bauhaus & the post-impressionists.
None of life is automatic. France was big and France was grand
& France could claim Picasso. But France still didn’t stand.
But France survived, I can hear France say.
(J’ai vu le cinema verité, mais j’ai aussi vu que J’accuse!)
And that may be. But from what I know,
I am searching for Charles de Gaulles.
You can see it as I can see it. Something old was about to fall.
There is an awkward silence every time we talk.
The pattern seems half-broken. The thread is gone.
We tiptoe around each other. We are raw. We might come to blows
if we said what the other was thinking, or half
of what we know. There’s a cat on my warm porch,
sleeping so soundly I thought it had died. de Saint-Exupery,
perhaps, wrote his book Le Petit Prince, in the calm before
the end of things, during a summer slow as this.
By Kate Wisel
Featured Art: “Neurons, No. 3” by Madara Mason
What I did was held my hand out like a gun and sprayed. I was supposed to be wiping down tables. But there was something about walking through the pink mist, I can’t tell you the feeling. That clinical smell that clung to my neck like antiseptic perfume. At that time and that time only, I liked doing the opposite of what I was told.
I was breathing in the rinsed air when this guy wandered in and crouched down at the end of the bar. He was in a white blouse with one of those dog-chain gang-rape necklaces gleaming down his neck. I watched him, a bold move that made him turn to me as he tapped his combat boot on the leg of the stool.
“What are you doing?” he said. I set the cleaner down.
“What are you wearing?” I came back with. I contemplated his soft-spoken British accent, his inflection so authentic I thought I could hear it in a voiceover. He just sat there looking like someone from the past, like Steven Tyler, the pouty-lipped version from my mom’s old and broken records. I started wiping beer puddles with a stiff rag across the laminate, afraid I might actually get in trouble this time.
“Tell me, who’s in charge here?” the guy said.
I glanced at my boss, the manager of Bukowski Tavern, this nice kid named Larry who sat on a bar stool by the door. Not to check ID’s but strictly just to stare out the window like a lapdog. His hair was going prematurely wispy and he kept one leg on the floor with the visible outline of his penis through his gray sweatpants. I grimaced.
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By James McKee
Featured Art by Courtney Bennett
You know how it is: going in to work,
Who looks at anything? You’re late, it’s cold,
hot, raining, no buses again, whatever.
You’re long past fighting this fast-forward blur,
pure A-to-B time, better numbed than bored.
But then the street-views you sluice through slow and lock:
some old warehouse abutting a blacktop lot.
high up this soot-caked chainlink fence
that nets, for no one else, blank swaths of sky,
there juts forth a sawn-off sumac branch,
em dash black and cocked at ten-to-three.
See it first, since you must, as a quenched torch,
a club hanging half-swung,
or someone’s bony forearm thrust through the mesh,
lopped at wrist and elbow, and left as a warning.
Fine. But you’re not one to confuse
fancied-up musings with the truth:
one hapless stick is all the chainsaw left
the day someone decided
this tree—a weed that wedged upwards from
the cracks its seed happened among,
that rose against the traffic-ravaged air,
that pierced that fence and knuckled this pavement up—
had to come down.
Rough cobblestones plug the square yard
where its raw stump once weathered anvil-hard;
no doubt the sheared-off roots still grip
deep undertiers of pipe and stone.
A passing siren’s wave-crest flushes you
back in the churning surf of city noise,
but by now it’s too late:
you’ve gone and glimpsed that voided silhouette,
you’ve heard, in its tousling leaves’ soundless hiss,
another of those random sidewalk elegies
work alone can dismiss
And not because it isn’t true,
because it is.
By Kay Gram
Featured Art: “Cradle of Kleptocracy” by Madara Mason
[arms & legs]
Be my arms and legs. You’re strong. You can do it! Mom would say. Mom’s body was small, fragile, needed time to move, moved differently than other bodies. I always thought she was beautiful. She was—blonde, blue eyed, narrow nose, all symmetrical. Mom had a determined presence that demanded respect and she had mastered the performance of a Eurocentric female beauty. Outfits were planned, makeup was worn, perfume was sprayed. We were late to everything. Sometimes she fell down.
* * *
Mom was diagnosed with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, a rare and incurable neuromuscular disease, when she was thirty and pregnant with me. In our life together, she wasn’t able to lift heavy objects, things like pots or pans or dog food bags, her own body. She couldn’t run or dance or move very fast. She used a brown wooden cane, shiny wood, golden handle. When walking was too much, a wheelchair. I was her arms and legs. Elle was her arms and legs. We were good at being Mom’s limbs. Sometimes she held onto us when she walked and we took turns pushing her wheelchair. When she fell, we helped her back up. We loved Mom, her body, went to her for comfort, to cry, to laugh, for attention. Who could listen better? Care more about our days, our lives, our futures. Of course I miss her. She haunts me. Or her pain does.
* * *
By Kathryn Jordan
Featured Art: “Bird Notes” by Madara Mason
It hits the window like a woman being thrown
against a wall. “Must have been an owl,”
I say to my grown girl emerging
from her part of the house. “An owl?
Could that happen?” she asks. She takes
a torch into the dark alley while I remain
in my well-lit living room, protesting,
“I don’t want to know if it is or not:
I mean, how could I save an owl?”
Because of course it would come down to me.
The next day, a beautiful bird lies dead—
a Northern Flicker, red spot at its throat, white
and black speckled breast, wings limned in gold
rust—a color I can see when the creature
rests limp and quiet in my two cupped hands.
We bury its loveliness under a glass dome
in the garden to keep it from being torn apart
by ravening crows. She offers prayers and
suddenly I’m looking down the wrong end
of binoculars at my daughter, who announced
when she was six, “There’s no way to leave
this world until we die.” “Yes, I think you’re right,”
I agreed, trying to calibrate words to her age.
“It’s like a trap,” she said, then.
Twenty years later, at home for her own protection,
she says it again. “Choosing safety over my dreams;
it’s like a trap.” I recorded my child’s words back then
because they hit my heart just as a woodpecker
might, if, flying fast, it couldn’t see, didn’t know,
it was being pulled into its own reflection.
By Laura Jok
Featured Art: “Untitled” by Elizabeth Boch
You are twenty-six. Donald Trump is running for president. The company that you consider your current employer sees you as more of a friend. The insurance plan that you bought for yourself is hilarious. There is a hole in your back molar about which you are not thinking, which is growing, about which you are not thinking, and you are in love with a stranger who can always be replaced, should he turn out to be a disappointment. You teach other people how to do their jobs like you are some kind of expert.
A lowly contractor, you design employee training programs for companies too apathetic to do it themselves. You produce modules: scripted lesson plans, slides. You shoot instructional videos, for which you lure desperate actors. When resources are scarce, you narrate the training, play it back and edit. It does not sound like you: more like someone who knows what to do. You fall into this habit of talking to yourself.
The name of your company is an acronym that no longer stands for anything. In India, where the parent company is based, it is illegal to call anything unaffiliated with the government “national.” About this point in particular, the Indian government is exceptionally litigious. The closet between the green room and your cubicle is filled with worn-out fatigues left over from the last contract with the U.S. Army. When the bigwigs are on a call with Mumbai, you rub the fabric between your fingers. It is not synthetic. It is the real thing.
You used to be a promising costume designer: made it to Off-Broadway, became too disaffected to continue. It isn’t that you weren’t as good as you hoped. It is that no one is as good as you imagined.
The subject matter experts provided by the clients dodge your calls and lie to you. One is in the hospital recovering from a massive coronary and is under no circumstances to be disturbed. Another asks that you arrange your content acquisition calls around his daily psychotherapy sessions. A third prefers to communicate by copying and pasting chunks of text from Wikipedia into the bodies of emails. Every SME wants only one thing: to retire. To get rid of you, they need only pretend that what you are asking for does not exist.
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By Alan Sincic
Featured Art: “My Blue Garden” by Madara Mason
“Look at you, boy.” Cochrane gave his junk another shake, stuffed it back into his Levi’s. “You trying to tell me you could lift—we’re not even talking carry here—lift a quarter ton of bacon?”
“I been training,” said Barnett. The pudgy frame, the warble in the voice, the baby-fat of the face all pocked with rivets: we nobody believed he was old as he said he was. Fifteen? Sixteen maybe?
“Training?” said Cochrane.
“Dynamic Tension,” said Barnett, parsing out the syllables in the verberant tones of a preacher.
We laughed. We pictured the ads in the back pages of Gun Molls and Flying Aces and Popular Mechanics. Charles Atlas. The guy in the skivvies with the strapping chest and the husky, solid fighting muscles that every man should have.
“You mean bacon in a barrel,” said Joe from behind a tree, “so you could roll it.”
No sirree. No,” said Barnett. He rocked from side to side, careful not to back-splash off the azalea and onto his bare feet. “We’re not talking about a barrel. Like I said. We’re talking about bacon. Bacon by the slab. Four hundred pounds.”
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By Adam Tavel
Featured Art: “Noise in the System” by Madara Mason
for my sons
This one has concentric frames
that on close inspection are
pink strips of floss. This one
swims inside itself, three shades
of blue. This one’s stripes
are dead calligraphy: R.I.P. Abuela,
R.I.P. Cousin Juan. This one grows
bored and morphs into a sketch
of a cartoon baseball twirling
its handlebar mustache.
This one begs God Bless. This one
has sticker pistols saying BANG.
This one’s wrists wear broken chains.
This one is lost inside the glitz
of caked-on glitter gold. This one
is impasto red on red that bled
on everything it touched. This one
has forty macaroni stars
and this one has the husk
of a dragonfly where stars
should be, its glue-gobbed wings
unstitching from the corpse.
By Jacqueline Balderrama
Featured Art by Courtney Bennett
the migratory patterns of sheartail and warbler continue back and forth
and on foot—the grey wolf,
the armadillo,
the coyote.
Now paper, now papel—we learn to listen in different ways,
at night, hear the floor vents empty their chamber of words,
and again, they ask for the source of me
as if water could stop
or would.
Now the agents dress us in the terms of their casting calls—
anonymous beneath the sombrero, or fiery latina, or gardener, or alien, or drug lord.
Now Maria Montez, Katy Jurado, Rita Hayworth speak back to the funny mirror,
which reflects them only as cut tulips.
And my mother shakes her head for the childhood dog the neighbors took in
then abandoned in the desert.
Now the wildfires on the San Bernardino Mountains
when families at night set out lawn chairs to watch the flames.
And a man on the news electrifies his fences and shows the camera large photos
of bodies he’s found beneath his trees.
Now a prayer to Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants.
Now the radio is breathless . . .
The television like an escape portal streams color through undraped windows,
but inside we are still here
fumbling to turn on the light or floating down in our chairs,
wishing the room to unleash its plum, its marigold, the blue of our jeans, the white walls
covered with frames, wishing too that everyone had been there with us.
Now we separate monstrous shadows from the broomsticks, the coils of rope, the strangers,
assuring ourselves that somehow we can still have good days.
Somewhere prickly poppies are blooming and want to.
By Katie Pyontek
Featured Art by Courtney Bennett
Beauty depends on magnitude and order.
Hence a very small life cannot be beautiful,
for the view of it is confused.
— Aristotle
Not the green bellies of hummingbirds, not
one set of wired bones shown behind glass.
Not the plump folds of tardigrades, not quarks,
not marbles on carpet, not pinhole stars.
Not the improbable orderliness
of ants, not feverfew or curls of hair,
not quick love notes left out on the counter.
Not a dozen kumquats, not an average
of six minutes. Not the intricate coils
of a snail’s shell, inching down the sidewalk.
By Maria Nazos
Featured Art: “Illusion of My Studio” by Yan Sun
When I exited the stall, she was standing at the sink.
I knew her best from one night at the bar, when she’d said
my ex was handsome. Then asked whether I’d mind if she
called him later that night. I’d pressed my lips together
and said, go ahead, certain she held an unspoken malice
which young women carry into small towns. I’d moved
to the Cape to escape from my talent for tearing through
love, only to follow a trail of broken glass into every bar.
Only to find every fisherman with a penchant for failed
marriages and pot, and myself, again,
staying up too long and late.
As I stood beside her in the bathroom, washing my hands,
I thought of another night when she’d told me, as if casually
draping a dark blouse across a stool, that her father had just died.
I’d squeezed her hand. She pushed her blonde hair off her face,
said, that’s okay. But I’d seen her at the bar every night since,
drinking with a red-haired fisherman who’d tried to strangle
his ex. I shook my hands dry. Tear my shirt, she urged, interrupting
my reverie. Why? I asked. Did she want to show off
her seashell-curved cleavage or simply feel something
besides her heart splitting down the middle?
By Kerry James Evans
Featured Art: “Ursa Major” by Madara Mason
Summer, but not cantaloupe-ripe summer,
not tomato-ripe, not watermelon-ripe,
not making love with the windows open,
riding downtown at midnight
with the top down, radio blaring
another teenage pop sensation
too-bland-to-be-offensive summer.
No, it’s burnt sod, thunderstorm summer.
Don’t lie to me! It’s a World Cup summer.
Don’t lie to yourself, Son. Get up
and drink that Dr Pepper. Another
bullets in the street summer.
Another blood-hot, angry Apollo
chasing the ice cream truck with a buck
for a Popsicle kind of summer.
When the walk gives way to dandelions,
gives way to Charlie Chaplin,
then Charlie Murphy walks into Tick Tock Tavern,
and what? Want a punch line, Punk?
You’re only smiling because you’re scared.
The kind of summer that makes you
beg for winter kind of summer.
That fear-riddled mangy dog summer,
and don’t the butterfly weed
smell like petunias to a dirty-minded Monarch?
Go on and tip your crown into the lake.
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