Previous Issues
"Despite what is happening in the United States, there is a way to remake an American identity. There is potential here, and an energy here. We are still a young nation, if you look at the trajectory of history – it is always four steps forward, three steps back. We are now in a backward stage."
"Why does a life matter? A literary work? Beyond these inquiries that push at the edges of my own identity, I’m interested in the boundary between environment and self. What of self is essential, irrepressible through a change in circumstances?"
Poetry
He loved me when no one would
He brought me wild fruit in a wooden plate
He squeezed the teats of the mother cow
whilst I opened my mouth under its bulging udder
I’ve been listening to good voices
floating across prairie nights.
Tuning in and turning my heart
catching just a few words.
I’ve been lying beneath a star blanket
thinking about the stars I can’t see.
This is my yum
made by my
mother’s best friend
who was
murdered. In English
this yum is called
a string or net bag.
Orphan Lights
Two Fathers packed us shivering
into the rectory’s station wagon
where our stuttered breaths fogged
windows spider-webbed with frost.
I rubbed circles with my sleeve
to see the cemetery angel glisten
Neap Tidings
The day I fell into the Moon
the storm left scents of rosemary
curling up the door frame. Cupping
cracking palms to the billows;
I swallowed what vapors she let
me. She fought for
me with the Sun. She told
me I could learn to be
weightless
with her if I could bind
her in quarters –
tie her with ivy.
Leaning out of the open window to feel
the chill of night air breathing on your skin.
Your chest is heavy, & the stars are being buried
under cover of cloud as we speak. The distant sky
is humming with oncoming rain. How soon
this sky will break open with light, leaving you
breathless once again. Hold onto this feeling
as you remember the field of hibiscus flowers
at the edge of Tutu’s corner of this island.
Can you see them? & among them, can you see her?
Tutu, sitting in the company of these flowers,
her long greying hair floating down her back gently. Tutu,
dancing around the small green kitchen as she boiled taro root,
& when Kupuna came home from the sugar cane
fields do you remember how they would dance together?
Kupuna's hands resting smoothly on the small of her back,
Tutu’s face bright & shiny & laughing, always laughing.
& can you still hear her? Humming those old songs whose words
you used to know so well, as she moved about that old house,
falling apart; as she braided those blossoms of yellow & pink & orange
into your hair on special occasions & Tuesdays. She is waiting there
in the night sky for you, in between Orion’s belt & the Na-hiku.
Pectus excavatum
I found my self this morning, deep sea diving
near the seafloor: coral-conquered, shipwrecked,
covered in barnacles, sea cucumber oil, writhing
around the neck of the merman on the prow: a locket?
I took it into my whale-mouth, swam to the surface.
On shore, huge human again, I took it out, looked
inside: myself, kindergartenized, non-Adonis
in miniature. The locket hung on golden chain,
the clasp cold and tough on blubberbutt hands.
I washed it off with seawater, watched it line
my fingernails with rust. I put it on anyway. But then,
beach-combing, exposed by the weight of real men's eyes,
I tripped over the long chain—
how did it grow so long?—and watched the lifelines
the chain had traced in the sand dance like paper shriveling
in the fire. Mesmerized, I sat until the wind blew the sand soft,
then swam for horizon. For home. The chain, of course,
tugged to shore. And at that slightest resistance,
I ducked my whale-head free from the chain
and watched my small self sway. The sun fell.
I glinted once, a stuttering candle,
and
we
sunk.
___________________
Stephen Reaugh | grew up in western Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of the Allegheny National Forest. In 2016, he obtained an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. his creative work has appeared in Pomona Valley Review, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. Currently, he is an M.A. student in English Literature at Villanova University.
Creative Nonfiction
I left Naʹnízhoozhi (Gallup, New Mexico), my hometown, eight months after I graduated from high school. The train tracks, the fields of scattered broken glass, the summer ditches filled with sunflowers and thistles, and all the people there.
I moved to Albuquerque for school at the University of New Mexico. Like 6 a.m. light in my eyes, the next two years were all reading, studying and part time work. I didn’t have close friends, but was visited constantly by my lesbian friend from high school, Mia and every other weekend by my family.
I was twenty the first time I got drunk, which for growing up in Gallup was considerably late. There was me, three lesbians (including Mia), and one woman of questionable sexuality in the Howard Johnson’s off of I-25. I had 12 shots of tequila. The next day I went to class at 9:30 a.m. and took judicious notes, perfectly sober.
Two years later, May of 1995, I received a big envelope with the word “congratulations” on the back flap. It was just a week earlier I had been accepted as a transfer student to Cornell University. This envelope was my transfer acceptance into Stanford University. I was un-phased and immediately thought of months of blowing snow, as I mailed the acceptance postcard back to Stanford admissions.
Four months later, September of 1995, my mother prayed over me in Jicarilla Apache, as she, crying, left me and my few belongings in my dorm room. Save for a one-month high school writing program, I hadn’t lived away from Gallup for any significant time before. And even though I was poor, brown, Native, and backward, I felt proud, I felt I belonged.
In my first English class, “17th Century Lyric Poetry,” I was the only person of color. This one girl made a joke in French to which the rest of the class chuckled, as I sat there completely unaware. Then a few moments later, this other girl was asked to read a poem aloud. Even though on the page it was written in English, she started reciting it in Latin, which the rest of the class followed perfectly. I felt like I was back at Jefferson Elementary in Gallup, when these white kids were calling this poor girl from Smith Lake dirty and stupid. I had sat there, hoping they wouldn’t look at me next.
At this time I had many white and Asian friends in my dorm. I felt like I didn’t need to make Native friends, because my few interactions with the Natives on campus weren’t very impressive. I felt like the theme song for the Native program should’ve been 70’s Cher in a black wig with lots of turquoise singing “Half-breed.”
Growing up in Gallup, most of the children of interracial parentage didn’t appreciate us “fullbloods” and mostly hung out with the white kids. They were usually the children of Navajo women who married “out,” or as everyone said in town, married “up,” which generally socio-economically was the case.
Then there were the Navajo orphans adopted by non-Navajos. Many changed their last names because they sounded too Navajo. From Blackgoat to Black, from Manychildren to Mitchell. And then there were those special cases.
One girl denied having a Native parent. Being one of the popular, wealthy, “dumb” girls in school I never suspected she was Navajo. It wasn’t until years after high school that I met her parents and realized she wasn’t Hispanic like she told us. Her father was Navajo. I never saw her hang out with any Navajos. Even though we had the same classes for four years, I think she talked to me once. My views on racially mixed people have been colored by my experiences in Gallup.
So I didn’t have any Native friends my first quarter at Stanford and I thought I was just a regular student, making friends with people in my dorm. Those few white and Asian friends I had made me feel welcome. So within the pseudo-liberal safety of Stanford and with my new friends support, I called my family, my parents and four primary siblings, chatted briefly with them before I told them I was gay. I was 20 years old.
Time
The shape of the universe
Nothing matters
Except perhaps the planting of a daffodil bulb. My daughter patting it into the earth. Its roots coil downward, birthing other bulbs. Ten of them, multiplied. Year on year.
It is said that if you plant a bulb in the ground and leave it there, next year you will have two. Leave them there – and the next year you will have four.
Twenty million, nine hundred and seventy one thousand, five hundred and twenty.
Since Grandpa gave those first ones to you.
But these are not daffodils. They are snow drops. Salvaged from my mother’s garden.
" I have been working on a theory: hypothesis; equation; proof. Counting houses. Correlating them with mailboxes. Considering placement of mailboxes in relationship to the front door. Measuring distance between front door and mailbox: A mere step outside and reach? A stroll to the end of pavement to the street? What does navigating that space mean to whoever is crossing it?"
Fiction
Melody threw her handbag into the back seat and sighed. This was the last day of her day duty and she had a full week of rest before she went on night duty. Ever since the hospital had resorted to cutting down the number of days nurses reported to work in order to cut on transport and lunch costs, life had become better for most of the nursing folk. She worked two days a week from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. On the days that she was off duty she would help her husband change money illegally on the streets. Dumo-- her husband-- was a National University of Science and Technology (NUST) graduate who had never used his engineering degree to earn a living. Soon after graduation his mother had introduced him to money changing.
His mother, Mrs Hadebe was a well-known money changer who ‘owned’ the whole of Herbert Chitepo street. She was still a beauty whose looks were slow to succumb to the ravages of time. She always spotted fancy bright coloured hairpieces. Her face was a perfect exhibition of art: painted eye lids, rogue cheeks, darkened eyebrows, bright red lips and glistening earrings. Her fingers also had numerous rings. At one time in the past before the year 2016 her head was always covered in a white doek but she had since renounced that faith. She was the queen of the territory and every illegal money changer reported to her at the close of business. The word ‘illegal’ there is debatable but, well, that's a topic for another day.
"The air hung cool but heavy at Kapālama in the early evening. The muted sound of a hundred and fifty voices lilted through the dense mist and over the waves to a hundred thousand radios. The campus sat, regally, on a mountainside, as a general surveying the common people on the plains below."
"We still do not understand most of it and we rely on your Uncle Benji to explain sometimes. He says there is nothing happening now that did not happen when he was there as a student. I cannot imagine what it feels like being so young and finding yourself in a place where you are suddenly black before anything else. Especially in a place where it is the worst thing you can be."
"It’s 9:57 at night and the highway, unpopulated, seems as though it will never end, but end it must—United Airlines is waiting for me. Two sleeping pills later it’s like this: I’m here and here is the city. Unlike home, there are bridges here, from Covent Garden to Waterloo, from St. Paul’s to Tate, from station to station, from she and I, between Anna and I—mind the gap."
Events & Book Reviews
