Hunger Mountain Review – VCFA Journal of the Arts

Issues / / Hybrid

“I see what you mean,” the plastic surgeon says. “It is a big nose.” He sits, legs wide, on a swivel stool. He leans closer to me to get a better look. Without taking his eyes off my face, a painting he wants badly to get right, he reaches for a box of tissues. I hold it in my lap like a stuffed animal my mom used to buy me after dentist appointments. I am fourteen.

Certain the bone is already exposed, my flesh oozing out, I look down—but he tips my face back up to him by pushing up on my chin. Like he’s offering me the gift of truth, he says, “When I look at you,” a little beat between each word, “the first thing I see is your nose.”

“Shh,” he says, the tears embarrassing. “Can I suggest something else?... If we put a small chin implant right here…” and he squeezes my chin so tenderly, like I am his own daughter. He places one hand on the top of my head, cups my jaw. He turns my head so my mom can see the outline he imagines. “Look at how beautiful her profile would be. Just imagine it.”

Out of the corner of my eye, my mother is playing with the cross at her neck; the tiny blur of gold flickers. “I see,” she says. There is shame, maybe regret, in her voice. Anger at the doctor, her skin flaring red, itchy. But she can’t bear it, how many times she caught me staring at my reflection with those big, scrutinizing eyes—then there was the school night when I came to her, finally, told her what I felt: ugly. These moments catch and burn inside of her; she clears her throat.

And I asked to come here. And this doctor was highly recommended. My sister’s best friend—now an American beauty with a thin, upturned nose—her mother brought her here. More than anything, my mother wants to comfort—to help, to fix. To give us anything we want. My sadness is her worst nightmare.

When the doctor releases my face, I curl down into myself.

He wipes his hands on his white coat, slipping them into his pockets, and swivels toward her. “I know this is scary, mom,” he says.

Before we leave, he says he’ll be sure to get us the photoshopped images of my face—the before and afters. One with just the rhinoplasty, another with both the rhinoplasty and the chin implant. Those might help us have a better idea of the possibilities. “Okay?” he says, like I’m about to start chemo, something crucial, unavoidable.

“Just remember,” he says to my mom, one adult to another—when she begins second-guessing: “I don’t know…She’s only fourteen…”—“You don’t want her to feel this way forever.” I’m not sure if I’m meant to listen in on their conversation, but the room is so small, so dark; I stare at a corner of it, where the lines meet. “Do you?”

To keep his attention, I quickly take off my shirt, crawl over him. I’ve watched MTV’s Undressed on my white box tv after my mom is asleep; I know what to do. I wear strawberry Lipsmackers lip gloss. Pink blush that smells like baby powder. We—the boy and I—are in my cousin’s bedroom. He is my cousin’s boyfriend’s friend; he is almost two feet taller than me and seventeen. I swallow my bubble gum, his tongue forcing it back and down. I lose myself inside of the one mouth that our two become, drown inside of it. The boy’s friend calls his name, and he peels himself away from me like I am not even there. It is my first kiss. Over AIM weeks later, after school, I message him. Ugly, he calls me, before signing off. My screen name blinks on the screen: DREAMER3406.

After the surgery, I hide in our basement for weeks. I eat through a straw, watch Moulin Rouge on the big screen where our family used to do karaoke, sing “Pretty Woman” and “California Girls.” I can only breathe through my dry mouth; my nose is stuffed with cotton, baking inside a cakey white cast; the air tastes like mothballs. A few months later at my cousin’s Sweet 16, the swelling almost gone, I anticipate the way he’ll regret what he said. How I’ll be the one to reject him. But he pretends like he doesn’t know me, like he didn’t see my half-naked ninety-pound body, hadn’t climbed into my mouth, lodged himself there.

For a moment, after the swelling heals, it is like I’m given another chance. My father grieves that I no longer look like him.

I am hesitantly welcomed by the popular crowd. We dance to Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Grunting, rolling. By our pool, I listen as they make a list of everyone in the group, discuss who won’t make the cut this new school year. The Korean girls are named first: not hot enough. If I weren’t sat beside them, my friends, I know I’d hear my own name; I pretend not to know. At the “Hoes and Bros” party, I wear a corset and a short jean skirt. I drink too much and straddle a boy I am too nervous to talk to in school. He is drunk, too. His eyes elsewhere. The next day, I hear—from a friend of a friend—that he is telling everyone: he didn’t want to kiss me, but I took advantage of him.

A tent turns our tennis court in our backyard into a circus, a wooden dance floor pressed down over the clay, nailed in place. I wear a pink dress, layers of polyester sheer as water. It is strapless; in the center, just beneath my throat, the material bunches and curls into a rose. My face shines with glitter. I dance with my father to “Sixteen Candles,” feel myself slipping away, through his grasp. That night the boy I took advantage of leads the rest of them into the basement, to my father’s bar; they drink everything they can find. But at the time I simply don’t know where all my friends are.

Sometimes, I look out my bedroom window at my father raking leaves and sing to myself, “How Deep Is Your Love” by the Bee Gees: Cause we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down…

In the shower, I look down, watch little pinpricks of blood appear where I’ve hacked off each and every pubic hair. The black hair looks like seaweed, tangled in the drain stopper. My skin burns, pulsing with heat, but my friends have warned I should “always be prepared.” I step out onto the white matt, careful to look for dots of red my mom might ask about. In the mirror, I look like a raw chicken. It is an art I’ve mastered. I was twelve when my older sister showed me how to run the blade along the slopes of my muscles, how to avoid the elbows, the sharp angles of my wrists.

Senior year. In Cancun, a boy—no, a man—slides his hand up my skirt on the dancefloor; I gasp. I want more than anything to be filled, for the empty part of me to be corked closed. I walk back alone from the foam party to the hotel room—at some point, my friends left for a different club—one shoe lost in the bubbles. I am proud of myself—but, more than ever, I am aware of my hunger, its endlessness.

Like a martyr, I lay back. He’s a red-head, another freshman—I look at him pitifully as he tries with his fingers until my body cries out, and I pull away. Another boy shares my love for Billy Joel—this comes up because his name is “Billy”—and the next day my parents come to visit, but I don’t remember how I lost the necklace. Did I take it off? Did he? I panic—the baby pink ribbon with a cross at the center, the one I wore at my Sweet Sixteen; what I remember is waking up next to him—cold, shivering—is that I can’t find it as I throw my clothes on and run out. The loss of the necklace hangs inside my chest, hooked onto my rib cage. While my parents watch the football game, I throw up behind the field.

In a new school now, in the back of a maroon van, he looks like Elvis, eyes sad at the corners. Something about his sad face—maybe he’d see it in me, too. Maybe he’d understand. Later, I slip off my padded bra and tuck it between the wall and the dorm room bed, quick so he won’t notice that it is all fake. I don’t remember anything about that night besides that: the fear of being found out.

Sometime later a different boy asks, “Are you sure?” and I nod. He is a nice boy—kinder to me than any other boy. He is my first boyfriend. I think I love him. But I am a wall he can’t break through, and he doesn’t want to hurt me. “C’mon,” I say. “Please.” My heavy brown eyes hold onto his blue eyes, light as balloons. I can almost taste it, the pain—I anticipate the moment when I’ll be fixed, finally—a rising wave with the power to pull me under.

Years and years later when my husband and I have sex, I close my eyes, imagining the hole in me filling with new life. “I love you very much,” he says, hope in his eyes. When I stand to get cleaned up, the cold silk slides down my leg—the feeling startles me every time. He is at his desk by the time I come out of the bathroom; a law student, he works through the night. I lie back down. With my eyes closed, I feel my body with my hands. I am a mountain, holes upon holes upon holes upon holes.

It's always been my choice, I know, but I close my eyes when the doctor—who assures me that my name, the misspelling of it, will finally be addressed—releases saline into my uterus. He’s trying to see if anything is blocked. He’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. This puts my body into shock; I know I am crying but no sound is coming out until I hear myself say, “I don’t—” and then, “—know—if I can—this feels—wrong—” I try to sit up, but the nurse rubs my hand like my mother and reminds me why I’m doing this, that it will all be worth it in the end. “You want a baby,” she assures, but I don’t believe her. “Right?” But it’s not really a question. First the one hormone treatment, then another, then years later, a capsule I push up into my vagina until I’m sure my body will swallow it—and I come to resent these doctors, the male ones especially, who say, “Sit still,” push their hands into my mouth, who say, “You could be beautiful if—,” who say, “You’ve got so many eggs,” who say, “Unfortunately,…,” who say, “I really wanted to give you a baby.” I wrap “infertile” around me, a blanket after the dentist appointment. “Don’t give up,” people tell me. Sometimes, in between, after a while, it even feels like armor, this failure, like a gift. I have nothing to offer. Give up, someone whispers in my ear, seductive. Give up. It’s not coming from a mouth but from a belly, a woman’s belly, from some hole with no ending; it sounds like a moan, like a song, a memory, a dream, and, ravenous, I reach, deep down, for it all.

Kris Brunelli

Author

Kris Brunelli has an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Fiction; received the Swan fellowship for an interdisciplinary artist from the Vermont Studio Center; and her writing has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, On Being, Guernica, and most recently Sojourners. She lives in NYC.

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple

Author

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Passages North, Redivider, Arts & Letters, Best Microfiction, and The Writer's Chronicle, among others. She was a 2022 runner-up for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and one of her stories received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Alyson teaches and edits in New Jersey, where she is a 2024 recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the State Council on the Arts. Find her @swellspoken and at alysondutemple.com

Dream Sequence 1: Today, I am digging a hole. Tomorrow, I will fill it. I am young and lean, a good son. Dry red clay from my shovel flies up and over the edge. It has taken me all day to get the dimensions right. The size of a body, as if he’d really do that. It’s just to scare me, but I feel the fear inside my belly like a clenched fist. The digging is hard but it makes me feel alive. I chose it, this digging, rather than face the belt. Again. Sober now, but intoxicated with meanness, he comes out every hour to check my progress. The screen door slaps, gives me a moment to register his shadow, see his red-faced scowl, familiar.

Anthony: I’m hot, so hot. Pajamas drenched. Crusts of orange clay fall from my scalp into the sink, spread like blood in the drops of water there. A blister on the inside of my right thumb threatens to burst. A blister? From pipetting yesterday? That would be a first. We’re down several lab workers, so much to do, inoculations, overnight timelines with short turnaround, big deadline. Spotty sleep on the lab cot. Sometimes, in the stress of it, I forget my posture. Shoulder sore. Elbow too, more than usual. This dream, recurrent, was different. My father bore the eyes, the scowl of Candace. His body but her posture, her hands on hips, her cocked head, powerful and sexy. What is she doing in my dream, merged with my father, their thoughts the same.

Candace: During the pandemic, the whole world was needy. I couldn’t listen to one more person, one more whine. I myself, needed extra support. To be able to leave my clients at the end of the day, fall apart. Anthony was still going into the lab, he dove into his work. So, yes, I drank a bit, smoked weed, but just to take the edge off. He began to push back, so unlike him. Called me High Maintenance. Unsatisfiable, like his father.

All my life, I felt a divine connection, but it was then G-d began speaking, at night, in my dreams. At first, only symbols. Angels and demons, typical fare, to get my attention, but then more directive. Church of Dreams, the website, neon like Vegas. Told me what to say, how to speak with the elders. My years of spiritual direction, they were impressed. A well of money and power, more than a mega-church, a self-governing entity, politically protected. Arizona.

How could I explain this to Anthony when it was ordained by G-d. When even I didn’t understand the depth of it?

Dream sequence 2: The gnawing is punctuated with squeaks and chirps and the vibrations of them twitching my bones. Scritching, chomping, chewing. It comes in waves, but there’s no silence. At least one of them is steady filing their teeth. I open my eyes to a hoard of rodents, squirrels, rats, chipmunks, many species and sizes, thirty or forty of them. Their eyes boggle as they chew, masseters driving them bug-eyed, so they look rabid, crazy. My mind knows this, rats and masseters, from my lab, but I’m aware I’m not in the lab. These ferocious teethers have my hikers, my belt, my watchband, even my glasses, and I am tied helpless like Gulliver, unable to swat at the ones closest to my hand, my wrist. I watch one brown chipmunk whittle it’s incisors, rest, and when it opens to gnaw some more, they have regrown to their original length.

Anthony: I wake up in a sweat. It was definitely a dream. But, the stench of rodent urine is still in my nostrils like it was real. I dash to the toilet to pee. First glance in the mirror, I notice a notch missing at the upper right part of the black frame of my glasses, the corner edge. On closer look, a tiny section of parallel ridges, the gnawing pattern I know so well from my lab rats. Must have left this pair at work. I have been a bit distracted lately, since the thought of divorce. Therapist says it’s stress.

Wait, just now, I remember the brown one, with the regrown incisors, a cartoon avatar of Candace, same dark eyes and smirky smile, the one I fell for.

Candace: Trying to conceive, it was all on me. I needed even more. Anthony was not enough. The miscarriages, the hormones, my moods were all over the place. The pot, pills, they helped but nothing worked. I’ll admit, I was spiraling. After we lost the last pregnancy, he went AWOL, practically lived at the lab.

Things are different now. I don’t need a baby or even a husband. I have a Special Purpose. It arose out of the pandemic, when we found our public health system working against our best interests. Now G-d is in control and I am His servant. How can I make Anthony understand?

Dream sequence 3: When I try to brush them off, they’re stuck, latched right into my skin, wriggling there, feeding, on me. I am covered, my thighs, calves, even my back. Inches-long black, slimy leeches, like in the movies. They sway in the cold creek water like thick black hairs on my legs. They don’t budge when I try to flick them off with my fingers, even when I stomp my feet hard on the banks of the stony creekbed.

I am a young teen with friends, all guys and one girl who looks like a version of Candace, different, older somehow. They have goaded me into going first, down a slick moss-covered boulder to land in a frigid pool below. They look down at me, point and laugh. Shit. How do I get them off?!

Anthony: The dream setting is familiar, Sliding Creek, in the Blue Ridge. The feeling also familiar, one I get at work, like the last symposium. Even my colleagues think I’m over the top, a doomsdayer. We’re a small minority, the extinction group. The data speaks for itself, I say, and I can’t make it lie. It’s the only way. Humans have to voluntarily cease breeding so Gaia can restore balance.

Candace: It started with ayahuasca. Let’s just call it DMT, less new-agey. It makes me feel, how can I say... normal, more balanced, and also more in touch with G-d. Makes that channel so much clearer, like having a super-power. Direct access. I am more powerful, a direct line, a new neural pathway, divine power charging through my veins, even when I’m not dosing. Direction comes through dream.

Anthony wanted an explanation, the science. I sent him the Lancet article, Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, to increase my skill set. All the rage out here. He isn’t giving me a chance. I need some connection, some closure with him. But, Anthony has shut me out. Why won’t he at least talk to me? I will find a way.

Dream Sequence #4: Hot fetid breath comes at me in waves, foul enough to make a man, even a big man like me, give in. My face is inches from massive incisors, yellowed and hung with filthy vicious slaver. It smells of roadkill and raw sewage. I worry my arms and shoulders will fail, tendons taut and rigid. Will they distend beyond their limit? My hands are pressed against the massive body, heavy, suffocating. The texture is fibrous, rough hair, bristled with burrs that prick my bare hands. I feel a tearing sensation of tissue separating, my own, like fabric ripping, though there is no pain, as I hold off the matted beast hovering over my collapsed body. What is it, this monster? On the verge of giving in, letting the giant just take me, sunlight glints off something tangled in the pelt.

Anthony: Twisted in bedsheets, I wake up sweaty, panting heavily. Shoulder sore from clenching the bolster I use for side-sleeping, it takes me a minute to recognize my bedroom. As I untangle the thin sheet from around my torso, I notice a section ripped from the threadbare hem. It all seems so real, especially the smell. Wait, is that blood on the pillow? I rise quickly to check my face and neck in the bathroom mirror. There’s nothing, no open wound. Not even a scratch. Weird. Wait, just now, a recollection of something odd, an image of a tiny gold cross on the beast, delicate chain, familiar, like one I gave Candace so long ago. Strange this dream. Coffee, I need caffeine. And to get to work, deadline, too much to finish.

Candace: I am consulting with a Christian shaman, lucid dreaming. In a daytime visitation, G-d told me exactly what to do. Came in the form of an Ursa, the symbol of the ultimate spiritual battle, the struggle between good and evil, fought on our behalf. If you are open, G-d said, I will guide you. The work is elevating me, giving me capacities, like needing less sleep. I don’t know how it works, but it’s amazing. I’m amazing.

At first, I was guided. Now it’s me doing the guiding. Beta clients, at first. To hone my dream skills. So much opportunity and wealth here. Plus hiking, golfing, hunting, skiing, even ballooning, a 24-7 playground. And, did I mention wealth? Incredibly wealthy clients. They’re bored. They’ll pay anything to find their Special Purpose.

I was planning to ask Anthony to join me here in this high country playground. But now we’re getting divorced. Divorced! To have and to hold, 25 years! I wish I could speak to him, make him understand. I DM’d my latest post, hoping he would see the new me, why I had to leave.

Tired of traditional Sunday Church?

Seeking an accelerated holistic experience?

The merging of your Spiritual Self with your Political Self?

Join me in a curated personal soul journey.

With nature as our guide, aided by powerful Indigenous medicines,

Together, we will break the binds of traditional spiritual direction

To move more efficiently beyond personal obstacles and limiting beliefs.

Life is winking and nodding in your direction.

Learn to pay attention to the signs.

Come follow me.

Together, let us do His Holy Work.

Dream Sequence #5: Fighting to stay upright, I am trying to keep the creature from decapitating me. Our upper bodies are locked in a tense embrace, sumo-like, a match of strength and resolve. I am holding the beast back from slashing or chomping me, like bench-pressing two hundred pounds. In a rage at not making faster work of me, it has violently throttled my upper body, shaken me by the shoulders, my head on its scrawny pedestal. My eardrums are ringing and a fogginess threatens the edges of my vision. Unbidden, outrage comes roaring from deep in my belly. ‘WHAT-DO-YOU-WANT- FROM -ME-WHAT-DO-YOU-WANT-FROM-ME!-WHAT-DO-YOU-WANT-FROM-ME!’ It’s all I have left. The monster pauses, blinks several times, then leans in even harder as if irked.

Anthony: I wake up before dawn to an empty room and my throat is dry and scratchy. Was I really shouting? Maybe pollen. My head... it’s killing me, pounding, dizziness, and some nausea too. Lay back, close my eyes. It’s the same creature. An Ursa, definitely female. Wait, how do I know that? Coffee, I need caffeine. The data set, still running, need to check.

Candace: Anthony is fallen. He worships at the altar of science. His colleagues, his data, his projections. False gods all. Calls himself an extinctionist. Voluntary extinction in order to save the earth. Humans should stop reproducing. Talk about going off the deep end. It’s crazy!

Me? I’ve gone the other way. Based on Direct Teachings and of course my own reproductive trauma, I am now pursuing the protection of life, its incarnation in all manifest forms. It came in a special dream, one in which the shaman was a witness. Shut them down.

This was my Special Purpose. Not for me to have a child but to discover my real power. I’ve qualified for the State Office of Health and Wellness. I’m on my way. Anthony will see. It is never explicit, our Divine Plan. We must remain open, to pray, to give ourselves over. I am losing patience with Anthony. I must find a way to talk to him. To make him see.

Dream Sequence #6: I am torn...rescuing Perch or run. He’s barking, jumping circles, now nipping at the beast on top of me. Loyal Perch. He knows I’m in trouble, bad trouble. No, Perch. No!! But it’s working, she’s off me and now annoyed, is after him, lurching, swiping her giant paws, chasing after him... he’s slipped into the woods, but it has given me a window, a chance to make a break...I can hear him now, barking, in the distance, he’s alive, safe...the car, keys inside...my eyes are stinging...I can’t see...but I stumble, fumble with the door, throw myself inside and pull...but wait, something’s blocking. Is it stuck? Something’s in the way. Too weak or injured, it won’t latch...the car engine starts up. I’m not aware how I’m doing this... holding the door closed while the car jerks into reverse...that smell, raw sewage, stronger now, close. WACK-- a thud on the roof -- WACK--the windshield.

The dark snout of the Ursa presses against the thick glass, beaming a mouthful of yellowed rodent teeth, two short ones on top, and the longer bottom ones curve upward and overlap slightly. The lips are pulled back like it’s smiling, and the air wafting in through the vents reeks of rot with just a hint of blackberry. Strings of saliva speckled with large black ant bodies stretch between the spongy tongue and the windshield, quiver as a mournful howl fills the interior of the car.

Driving now, slowly, peering with my one good eye, the bent wipers smear the dark slime across the glass. The door is closed and locked. Downhill, no cars on the Parkway.

Anthony: I barely make it to the ER. I know they don’t believe me. I can’t believe it myself. Perch is home in his crate in my room. Safe, no scratches, not missing. No witnesses and my recall is foggy. The bite wounds are dangerously close to my eye, so I have to take the rabies shots, tetanus. Bedrest for 6 weeks, upright because of the shoulder tear. Can’t sleep for the pain. Vertigo....the head shaking, unrelenting. No medication for that.

I woke up in my bed. Hiked the day before. Exit 39, the Parkway. No reports of an attack by a bear or any other predator, no erratic animal behavior. The ranger is thorough, takes my report seriously, collects DNA, hair, traces of saliva from my body and clothing, but also from the car, inside and out. Interior passenger side is deeply gouged. Inside! The windshield cracked and heavily contaminated. Protective of the park, the ranger says incidents like these impact tourism.

My project is shut down. Non-renewable grant. Insufficient data.

Candace: At first, mine was a personal quest, for closure, because Anthony shut me out. But, they caught wind of it, someone high up at the Church and they issued an assignment, my very first. He’s a top tier scientist and stopping him could make a difference to the movement.

These woods feel familiar, the air damp and fetid. Like home, in a weird way. I smell a rotting log and follow the scent, amazing. Long flakes of wood darkened in the center, where I know, how do I know, what’s hidden there. The urge overpowers me, to rip it apart, attack the rotted trunk. Ants. I see them now. My tongue is long and sticky, like flypaper. One flick to coat the surface, then into my mouth, white globules of fat, round and crunchy, ant pupae, creamy and salty like butter slide down my gullet, except the ones that burst on the way down. Delicious. Addicting. Also good fun. I must move quickly before the nurse ants excrete their bitter spray. How do I know this?

Smell. So much at once. I snuffle, like a sneeze, involuntary. The tang of blackberry, deerberry, huckleberry, mulberry, elderberry, wild strawberry, service berry, and persimmon. How do I know them? Honeycomb, goldenrod, carrion vine, galax. How can I tell them apart? Scat, my own, human too plus urine, even stronger. Coyote, fox, and also wild turkey. Cigarette, faint, coming from somewhere far off, also weed.

Oh Lord, I smell him now too, Anthony. Fusty. Sweaty crotch, sweet. Laundry soap, ours. He must be close. Wait something else. Perch, our dog, the stink I’ve tolerated all these years. Sulking yellow lab, now nipping, yipping. He knows me. I can smell his confusion too, like Anthony’s. Yet I do as I am bidden without question. Stop Him. The female voice in my head, not mine, is harsh. That damn dog. Anthony! He’s getting away. No Anthony No. You cannot escape me.

Dream Sequence 7: We are wrestling, Candace and I, in a hole I dug, the size of a large bear. Our clothing is orange with clay. White lab coat, pastel pantsuit, stains that will never wash out. Perch is barking ballistic at the edge of the hole. Confused, he wants us to stop. We are well-matched, she and I, and we roll around and around, neither of us gaining advantage. Finally, exhausted, we lay down in the hole. It is big enough for two adults to lay side by side without touching. There is no winning this fight. We humans, may we live long and die out.

Terri Leonard

Author

Terri Leonard is an emerging Pushcart-nominated writer with recent publications in Litmosphere, Stone Canoe, The Madison Review, and other literary journals. She is currently at work on a novel of historical speculative fiction about a group of teens growing up queer in the rural South in the 1980's during the emergence of HIV. She lives in the metro Atlanta area, has a prior career as a medical anthropologist and currently works as a yoga therapist.

Katie Olson Afshar

Author

Katie Olson Afshar grew up in Southern California but prefers the fog, redwoods and feral beaches of Northern California where she has lived for the past 14 years. She is a healthcare worker with a deep love for the human body but conflicted feelings about modern medicine. Her work has appeared in the Sun, Catamaran and Cagibi among other journals.

When they finally get me to the camp, it is through camouflaged chain-link gates and guards. They hurry me out of the big car and into a canvas army tent that sits nestled at the base of two big redwoods. Behind me they are throwing nets over the car to hide it from above.

Inside the tent I meet Paul and Julia and Roberto and a few others who constitute the leadership of this cell. I don’t trust them, but they have rescued me from the thug’s jail, so.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” Paul says. He has a doughy face with little dark eyes set back into it, and a square jaw with a cleft chin and blue-black stubble that looks like he could sprout a full beard at any second. Someone thinks this man is handsome, I’m sure. Like someone from the twentieth century. Julia is pretty and has long red-brown wavy hair that comes down over her shoulders. Roberto has terrible teeth and hair coming out of his nose and ears. These people seem to be well-to-do. Not kids like I thought. These are older and more established people who are fighting the man because it makes them seem cool to their fucking children.

They are talking at me and telling me that in the short time I’ve been in jail, I’ve become a hero of the uprising, the rebellion, the revolution. They’re not sure yet still what to call it – that’s how fresh it is – but it’s finally happening.

Apparently, the holos of that crazy set with Funkfrolicious and Kirk and those guys from Durt Farmer where I got arrested and pulled offstage were all over the Mind, fan-shot and pro-shot, and some spinner put together a master synth of all of them, hi-res, lo-res, full-color, black-and-white, filtered, and it is super surreal and intense and visceral and millions of avatars have been in there and people are crazy about it.

Apparently, that same day, they broke up all the protest camps with trucks and men with guns and tanks – and the kids dissipated and melted back into the cities and re-formed into cells like this one. They hid themselves away and started arming up and preparing for the next action.

Apparently, the asshole has been vilifying me in his AgitProps as if I am the leader of this Revolución, and he has declared me an Enemy of The People, which of course makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Oh—and apparently Teen Rabbit is going to tour without me.

They are talking to me like they are in awe of me and my bullshit fame, and also like I am a child who doesn’t know anything about the world. They don’t know who they’re talking to. I just sit and listen and I let them reveal themselves to me. That is useful information that I will have later. They envision me having some kind of leadership role. What that will be, Paul says, they can’t yet say.

They call in someone named Paco – a guard who has been standing outside so you know his place in the hierarchy. So much for socialismo.

Julia says to him: “Paco, please show Ms. Hernandez to her quarters.” I guess everyone already knows what my quarters are. “Make sure she has everything she needs, and stay on watch overnight.”

Julia is doing a show here, making sure I am fully aware that she is taking care of me. That she is giving orders. She is the kind of woman who would put on a strap-on dick and fuck you from behind.

Paco nods.

He is handsome and Mexican. I can see immediately that he’s a poet. He’s got a poet’s soul. He has big, rich, brown eyes and a gentle manner.

He points out the tent they’ve set up for me, just a regular nylon camping tent, red-brown like the rest to match the forest floor. Inside are some clothes, clean and folded. Fatigue pants in digital forest camouflage. A brown t-shirt. A thin wool pullover. I take the clothes and tell him to take me to the shower.

I swear I see him blush. He’s already thinking about fucking me.

It’s not exactly a shower, he says.

The “wash tent” is an old-fashioned army tent pitched over a bunch of wooden pallets, and some sort of drainage ditches that lead out and down toward the creek. Inside it smells of bay laurel and eucalyptus and decaying redwood needles and mildew and ammonia. The vague cat piss scent of the redwood forest.

I sit on a wooden stool and clean my body with a washcloth and camping soap in a bucket of hot water that a girl brings in to me and that smells of eucalyptus. I would prefer a real hot shower, and though I scrub and scrub I can not get the stink of the jail out of my skin and my hair and my nose and my mouth. But this is the cleanest I have felt in weeks. It will do. I can hear a crow and a Steller’s jay arguing outside. I am desperate to shave. Maybe tomorrow after I tell Julia how impressed I will be with her fucking power if she can get me a fresh razor. Or maybe I will go natural, get furry. Become a real fucking wild girl of the forest rebellion.

When I am freshly washed or at least sponged, and feeling clean and almost like a fucking human being, Paco shows me where the basic things of camp are. The mess tent, the latrines, the supply tent. A few people stop me or at least come up to meet me, blah blah blah. They don’t always introduce themselves. They just Ms. Hernandez like I am a senator or a bank customer or something, or if they are fans they call me Alejandra or even Alex, like we’re old friends. You get the feeling they would bow down and kiss your toes, and you almost want them to.

Hi Alex, this one young girl says. She’s darker brown than me, and her hair is blacker and her skin is silkier and quietly I already hate her for this, and I understand vampires all of a sudden, how they stay alive forever by drinking the blood of the young. She says can I hug you the way the kids of this younger generation do, like they need permission to love, to be human. Like to hug someone without first asking permission is like a rape.

It’s not like a rape.

But these kids, so. I say yes it’s OK.

She hugs me and she tells me about a Teen Rabbit show she’d been to, her first one, at the old Cal Expo in Sacramento. That it changed her life. Etcetera.

I am not comfortable about getting these compliments, but I drink them in. Keep going, I want to say. Tell me more about how beautiful I am, how amazing my voice is, how you have all my records, how my songs saved your life. I need this. I need anything but this. I don’t know what to say. I never do. How to do this without diminishing myself in their eyes like it’s their fucking admiration that makes me real. So I nod and smile and say thank you, honey, you’re so sweet, and you’re so beautiful, and I hear myself laughing from outside myself, and I feel like a deer pinned against a guardrail.

“I’m definitely Team Alex,” she says, and she laughs knowingly and I laugh with her, but the bottom has dropped out below me because this stranger is inserting herself into my war with my fucking sister and she doesn’t know me, this child, and she doesn’t know my asshole sister and she has no fucking business.

By the way: where the fuck is my fucking sister? Where the fuck was she when I was in jail? She never came to see me, never tried to get me out. Didn’t do shit. I vaguely remember I am trying not to remember the last time at rehearsal screaming at her for trying to control me and calling her a fucking cunt I am trying to remember can’t remember to retrace what happened step by step how we got there I don’t want to and I make a noise out loud to squeeze it into a tiny black sphere so i don’t have to look at myself. i can see her sitting behind her white fucking grand piano in Mill Valley chuckling that finally i will learn my lesson and making plans, making plans to replace me, the same way she was there and Papá was gone and the way she looks just like him, the way our mother always says that she is just like him, she has his face, his eyes, his coloring. She is like a shadow of him standing in front of him so that i can never see him, i only see Angél and i feel the sirens start to go off in me and i try to quiet them and come back to the moment i am in.

The girl is waiting for me to acknowledge her loyalty to me or something.

I bite my tongue and I smile, and I ask Paco to take me to my tent.

He is going to stand guard, he promises me, and that is good. I trust him implicitly. We have some kind of connection already. Already, he would do anything for me including die for me, right here in the forest. He has a pistol on his hip. I fucking like it. He’s not some racist shit white fucker with a gun. He’s something much more interesting than that.

I climb in and I zip up the zippers behind me. It’s just a regular camping tent but inside it feels plush and dry and clean. The floor is covered with thin air mattresses, and those are covered with unfurled sleeping bags zipped together to make a luxurious camp bed. They must have read an article here that I am a fucking primadonna or some bullshit and I am glad for it because really? I’ve been in jail. I don’t need to sleep in the fucking dirt with the bugs.

So I lay on my back and I look up into the ceiling of the tent, and I can hear Paco sighing and turning the pages of a book. It sounds like he’s writing.

I stare up into the ceiling of the tent, through the mesh and into the rainfly. It’s like a cathedral or a concert hall or an arena, the way the fabric stretches to crest above me. The Teen Rabbit tour is about to begin or has begun. My fucking sister is going on tour without me like that is a real thing, that there is a Teen Rabbit without me, and she is still calling it Teen Rabbit. And who is going to sing? Fucking Sami Reyes. A fucking joke. That little fucking teenybopper is going to sing my shit. Fuck you, Angélica, fuck you. Like she is mocking me. You know? When you lose a band member, like when Meliza quit or when I fired Gabriela, you replace her. But not the lead singer, the front woman, the face and soul of the fucking band, without which there is no fucking band because the band is me.

Especially not when I am in exile because I was arrested by a fucking dictator for trying to save people’s lives. Fuck.

I look up into the nylon ceiling of the arena and I imagine that I am a giant, laid out on the floor like a mountain and the 25,000 little people are standing all around me and crawling on top of me and at my feet is the stage and Teen Rabbit is on it and Sami Reyes is singing and everybody is dancing and I am trying to scream I AM HERE but no one can hear me. No one can hear me.

* * *

I am relieved when the forest lightens into deep blue and I hear the gas jets of camp stoves. When I smell coffee I get dressed and come out of the tent. Paco is still there. I make him give me some of his coffee. It’s strong and rich. He brings me to the mess tent – a camouflaged sun shade like you would have in a parking lot, with food set out and coffee urns. I take a mug of coffee, thank god, and we go and sit on a fallen chunk of redwood and look over the creek. There’s still a morning fog – it’s early. Everything is covered in lichens and moss and ferns. The forest smells good, familiar, like the breath of someone you haven’t kissed for a very long time.

When I was a little girl, Papá used to take me on hikes to places like this, carrying me on his shoulders through the redwoods. We would drive in his sea-green Mustang, me on the bench seat right next to him, no rules, he would say, except the ones that we make for ourselves. The Mustang that my little sister stole from me after I crashed it drunk and that hasn’t been driven in fucking twenty years and I want to disappear into this forest, just dissipate into vapor and suffuse my molecules into everything else, into thin air, just disappear into the ferns and the soft furry bark and the gentle flat needles like a frozen fog.

I ask Paco what his deal is and he tells me not much. He shrugs. Just a guard, he says. Don’t give me that no comprendo bullshit, I say. I can see right through him, like I see through most people. It is my secret power and my secret weakness. You know more than you let on, I say. I can see that. I see that you are not un perro ignorante. He shrugs. It’s easier this way, he says, and I know what he means. When people think you are stupid or of no use to them, you become invisible. I have not been invisible like that for a very long time. Not since Teen Rabbit.

I braid my hair up in a crown with fiddleheads and yarrow and across the day I wander around camp and talk to people, small talk. Chit-chat. They know who I am. So I wash dishes with them after everyone has eaten breakfast and I wash clothes with them in the creek and I sweep the camp and do the shit work that I don’t ever do and pretend like I don’t know how to do it and pretend that I do it all the time. I play the part they need me to play, the star woman come down from the heavens to be among the little people for them to focus their love on.

And that is what I need too.

They have assigned Paco to be my guard and protector and I am happy for that. Something about him is grounding to me. They want me to make propaganda holos. They are preparing to liberate one of the detention camps. And they want me to do AgitProps to sway public opinion, like I’m a fucking politician. I’m a musician, I tell them. I will do something to get the people on our side, and they will listen. I know that. But it’s not going to be talking to a screen and telling people what to do. I’ve seen musicians do that, and actors. They look like jackasses. People should do what they do well.

What I do well is I reach down people’s ears into their cunts and their assholes and I grab their balls and make them dance and love and sing and fuck and scream and spit and puke and even hate. Hate injustice, hate the asshole and his fucking camps, hate Angélica, hate me.

That night there is a bonfire and the camp is there around the fire, some sitting in a ring right around the fire, others laying about in the chaff of soft, flat redwood needles just outside the ring, or in their tents with flashlights on. Some are on blankets on the ground making out or watching the smoke and the sparks float up through the canopy and into the sky. Almost like it is normal life and not the middle of a Revolución against a dictator where we have spent half the day crawling on the dirt with guns and a man barking to keep our asses down. Or maybe that is what real romance has always been. Making love when war is all around you. There’s an old woman here with a guitar, and she starts playing one of those old protest songs about which side you are on. And everybody sings on the choruses. I jump in and I start making up verses and I can feel the crowd switch on to me and I can feel their adoration on me, and I feel suddenly alive.

The thug and his policemen
They’re ringing at the bell
When they come up our mountain, girls,
We’ll send them back to hell, oh!

I can feel that they know that this is a remarkable experience for them, having me sing for them, that they can’t believe that this is happening, that they had hoped for it as soon as they had heard that I was coming.

I see Paco and his face is half lit by the flame and he is watching me with a bemused expression on his face, which I realize is actually quite handsome with his trim beard and his sleepy brown eyes and I sing the chorus right to him like a cabaret singer or a stripper and I touch his face and neck and then I move on to the next person so it doesn’t seem to anyone like I am favoring him and around and around the circle I go, stealing their life force, trying to put some pieces of their light down into my empty jar.

* * *

That night I am in my tent and I am exhausted and also feeling like my jar is full enough to chase away the terror of being no one.

All is quiet and I know that Paco is right outside, because I hear him sighing, and I hear him turning the pages of his book – and now I hear him writing, his pen striking and scratching, the beef of his hand shuffling across the page. I listen to hear what he is writing. Troop movements. A letter to his mother. Description of a raccoon he saw, a jackrabbit, a scorpion. His darkest fear. Maybe he is writing nothing but squiggly lines, over and over and over like some other crazy people do.

I come out of the tent and he is still writing, writing, in a little notebook, furiously trying to get to the end of whatever his thought is.

What are you writing? I say, and he holds the book away from me for me to not see it, but still with his page open and I reach to grab it from him. He holds it away from me with his opposite arm stretched out so that I have to reach across him and we are now suddenly half wrestling for the little notebook, and my body is pressed against his as I reach for the book and an electric charge passes between us through our chests, and I smell his body like sweat and dirt and spice, like man, and I have the book now in my hand and I pull away from him my electrons suddenly magnetized and I hold the book open to the page he is working on and I see that it is poetry.

“You are a poet!” I say. “I knew it.”

“Not me, señorita. I am only un perro ignorante.”

I start to read the poem out loud and it is hot and passionate and beautiful and I am reading and still laughing and teasing and then I stop reading

because I realize that it’s about me.

* * *

I resist the nearly irresistable urge to pull him into my tent and fuck him all night until the lights come back on. Any other time, any other man, many other women, that is what I would do. But this man I am going to make wait a minute. Keep him aching. See what happens. Let the flower bloom in its time. I am full enough with light, my jar just full enough that I don’t, not right now, I don’t need him in me to fill me up, to plug the leak, to keep the inky blackness of oblivion from spilling through the cracks.

* * *

So they want me to make a propaganda holo, but I am not going to do that. I want to make a corrido. I don’t know that much about it, about its form and its structure. But Paco knows. Of course Paco knows.

We go for a walk up the mountain, up to the fire tower. First we climb through redwoods and firs, then bays with their cat piss smell, then blackberries and madrones and manzanita and poison oak. The forest opens into a clearing, riddled with scotch broom, an invasive species, an alien that the conservation clubs try to pull out to no avail, its stiff planty stems dark green, its flowers yellow popcorn.

Paco finally tells me a little bit about his story. He is from Jalisco, from a small town at the base of the mountains where it was getting harder and harder to grow because of the heat waves and the drought, and the narcos were taking people’s farms for their water – and the government was doing nothing, and secretly supporting the narcos. They were basically the same people.

So his mother left when he was four and his little sister only two, and came to el Norté with his sister to work and send money back. And so he was raised by his father until his father could save up enough to make the passage north, when Paco was eight. They walked the whole way, for months. And up through the saguaro in the winter into Arizona, following trails of plastic water bottles and little piles of human shit. He didn’t see his mother or his sister in all that time.

This was in the early days of the dictator when the climate for immigrants was already not so good in Arizona, so they moved to Southern California and his father worked as a picker, moving from town to town depending on the season and what was being harvested, from the Imperial Valley all the way up to Skagit County in Washington. And then, when Paco was seventeen, ICE goons came and took him from school and brought him to one of the detention camps, which had the name of a white man, but which the detainees called Campo De, De for Desesperación. He has not seen his parents or his sister since. He has no idea if they are alive, though he has tried to find them. The guards used to taunt and torture him – and all of them – by telling them their parents were dead, or that they or their friends or someone, someone from a criminal gang, had raped and killed their mothers and sisters, that the dictator had given their mothers and sisters this to punish them for crossing the border. Paco knew that probably wasn’t true, that it was just a power game, a game of cruelty. But the images stayed in his mind, and he tells me they are still there. That they will not go away because there is no reality to erase them.

We end up on a bend of the fire road, a truck-wide band of ploughed red clay and gravel, and we take it up, ever up.

Why are you so worried about the form? Paco says. Just do what you do.

I want it to be authentic, I say.

He says how could it not be? and I feel seen. Seen and unseen, like he can see the parts of me that are real, that he can not or chooses not to see the parts of me that are only dark smoke.

What else do you remember? I say. About the camps?

We walk up and up and we are sweating and panting and he talks and I listen and ask questions and I realize he should be the one to write this corrido, not me. I don’t have this experience.

But he is happy to share it with me. He wants me to have what I need, and I don’t trust it.

I can see the tension in him as he walks, the certainty of being a man walking up a mountain with a beautiful woman, the uncertainty because maybe he sees me as a star, as beyond his reach. It feels like we are rising up out of the world, and then the ocean comes into view over the next ridge, and it is suddenly easy to imagine that everything is peace, that there is not a brimming civil war down there, that we are not fighters in a redoubt, that we are on an adventure somewhere as lovers.

In the distance we get a glimpse of the fire tower and as it draws closer Paco wonders aloud who is controlling it. The sheriffs, he says, are mostly with the dictator, who has buttered them with flattery for years for this purpose. The rangers are with us, Paco says, because they know we are on the side of the living, breathing earth. We see the glint off their black rifles. Paco looks through binoculars that he has kept slung across his chest. The tower is still ours, he says.

As we approach the lookout, the two rangers nod and wave. I shout up to them like they are guys on my road crew: What’s goin’ on, fellas?

Not much, miss, they say. Nothin’ comin’ up the mountain ‘cept turkey vultures and lovebirds.

I laugh, ha ha, and Paco smiles tightly, and the men go back to their watch, scanning for fire.

Paco says keep in mind that you might not want to be recognized, and I am immediately ashamed of my error, which could endanger us all, and as I imagine the repercussions the earth begins to fall out beneath me and I start to spiral off.

But Paco puts his hand on my upper arm; It’s okay, he says, and all my charge goes through him to ground. I breathe in the heat off the grasses and the poppies and the red-brown earth and my molecules align. I am hot and sweating and aware of my corpse breath and I ask him for some water. The Rangers thunk above us on their octagon of metal decking. Metal scrapes against metal as Paco unscrews the plug.

I swig on the bottle and I back into the shade of the tower and lean up against the cool concrete. He steps to me and I press my back into the wall’s roundness, stretch myself out to him without thinking. Our fingers meet around the silver bottle’s neck. I look up and our eyes lock together. Then his other hand is on my hip and he slides it around to where my spine opens into my hips and he presses down and I pull him in to me, our skeletons a single curve. Our faces come close, my neck bends my mouth to him, his mouth he tastes of campfire kissing me his hungry tongue, I kiss him gently like a lamb and he responds, he is paying attention, and now his lips taste mine delicately, we are like two deer. I touch his face his neck my hands on his chest, push into him, my hip into his antler and close my eyes and we are falling, falling through light into me.

That night when it is dark he unzips my tent and he crawls in to me and he tucks his rifle into the tentfold’s silken corner. We lay around on sleeping bags and we work together on the corrido, talking quietly and whispering and laughing and I imagine us both again giants in the arena, the little people crawling all over us watching as we make history, the famous singer and the revolutionary poet and we are bigger than life and as we write and talk and kiss and discover the contours of each other’s bodies and listen for who is coming outside, this giddy, antsy, anxious, excited feeling that this moment, the two of us together in this tent, will be written about, studied, that movies will be made to re-create it, that millions will dream of a love like this. It ripples through my body, contractions coursing in waves across my abdomen, that feeling when you penetrate the eternal, when the eternal penetrates you through the dissipating walls that bind time.

Guitar chords. Acoustic guitar. Classical guitar. Spanish guitar.

The progression descending, E minor, D, C, B.

An Afrocuban feel, not that accordion shit.

That’s very American, Paco says. Mexicans love the accordion. The accordion is breath, the breath of life.

It’s the breath of a fucking machine, I say.

I want the meat of the song to be wooden and organic. Like this forest.

I take a deep breath of redwood and bay laurel and moss and fern, of nylon silk and campfire smoke, of spice and sweat and this man.

Good evening, darlings—please listen

I sing and strum the guitar

and I will tell you a story
of a little girl named Juana
of a pretty little Niña

Of a little girl named Juana or of a pretty little Niña?

What do you want them to see? he says.

Their own little girl, I say into the camera.

So what is the answer for that?

He asks me like he is a teacher, coaxing me. But he is not condescending. He is provoking me, not telling me what to do. It is like he is coaxing me up so that I can stand on my own, that I can be strong. Like a partner. A real partner. Not like my fucking little sister who is always just telling me what to do. Ordering me around. Like I am the child and she is the parent.

I think it’s Juana, I say.

How about Juanita? he says and I realize we could do this. I could do this. Without her. Without my sister. My whole life I have been pinned to her because of fucking Teen Rabbit. But for the first time I realize, it really hits me, that I can do this without her.

It’s better, I say. Better for the meter.

Good evening darlings, please listen
and I will tell you a story
of a little girl Juanita
her papa brought her to America

And I vamp and repeat the last line.

her papa brought her to America

The meter is uneven, he says.

It’s a song, I say. It doesn’t matter.

Qué? he says, and he is teasing me. You were worried about form.

Lyrics are different from poetry, I tell him, and again I hear the ears of the historians perk up, the filmmakers, the painters, the lovers looking on over their glasses and taking notes. In a poem, the verse has to do everything. But in lyrics, the music is doing some of the work. You’re chained to the time the band is keeping, but you are freed from having to keep time with the meter of the lyrics.

He nods.

Although it makes it easier for them to sing along if you do, until they know the recording really fucking well. But we can leave that for the chorus.

I can sing it so it fits, I say and I strum it again, and I sing

Good evening darlings, please listen
and I will tell you a story
of a little girl Juanita
her papa brought her to America
her papa wanted her to grow up in America

How about Rosalita? I say. Like the Bruce Springsteen song.

I don’t know it, he says, and I roll my eyes to tease him.

I sing a little bit of it for him. He doesn’t recognize it.

Rosalita, I say. Rosa. Rosy. Rose. Everybody loves that girl.

You have to apologize, he says.

For what? I say.

For breaking their hearts, he says. That’s nothing new for you, I’m sure.

That’s true, I say. Except I never apologize.

I strum it with Mexican drama, the chords in descending progression, E minor, D, C, B, sing it like a vamp from the nineteen forties.

I’m so sorry, darling, I’m going to break your heart
and tell you of sweet little Rose
her Papa brought her to America
that’s where her tragedy unfolds

A corrido rhythm is like brrrm pa pa, brrrm pa pa, brrrm pa pa, brrrm pa pa, Paco says, but it’s up to you, and I realize I have been strumming it like a western, like a fucking vaquero on horseback. He is telling me it should be a waltz.

I play it that way and all of a sudden it makes sense. It is sweet and dark and rich. The melody is more Afrocuban than Mexican. It sounds like something much older, from a hundred years ago, a hundred fifty. It feels like the great-great grandmother of a contemporary corrido, from before there were electric bass guitars, and electronic drums and keyboards and valves.

Although I would like a trumpet right here.

* * *

We are on a truck full of young people of all colors of all genders and we are barreling across back country road in a convoy of trucks and cars and military machines and we are full of guns and weapons and tools that the cell’s advance team has been storing in the barns of friendly farms and ranchos, in windbreaks and caches hidden in the ground and under rocks. It is deep in the night when night animals are awake.

Rosalita was four years old only
she loved to sing for her Mami
she made up her little stories
and painted the desert stars
and painted the desert stars

This rhyme scheme is better.

The first teams will cut the fences and then we will follow and free the children and the mothers and, the leadership presumes, the journalists and dissidents who are being held here.

My hand is on Paco’s leg and I can feel him trying to ignore me, like in some old-fashioned code where you can not bring your love into battle because love makes women strong and men weak. Maybe he is only keeping himself focused. He had not wanted me to come. He has become even more protective of me. But I need to be here. My hair is back in a ponytail and I have no makeup and I am shorn of all pretense.

Then one night the gunmen came for Papá
Mami fled north across the border
they left Rosalita with her abuela
and our Rosalita was all alone
Little Rosy was all alone

Then an instrumental part here, a guitar lead. Like the sound of this little girl playing, but also sad.

Profoundly sad, Paco says.

And profoundly alone, I say. Maybe the Papá comes back.

And a chorus?

Rosalita, don’t cry darling
we’re going to el Norté to be with Mami
Come up darling on my shoulders
When we get to el Norté we will be free
And we can play and laugh again
you and Mami and me

We set back while the first teams go ahead to cut the fence. Then they must get the radio signal up at the head of the convoy, because we start moving and I am filled with anxiety and adrenaline.

Papa took her to the border
in coyote’s box van truck
past the yucca through the saguaro
when they crossed el Rio the river tried to drown them
when they crossed el Rio the river tried to drown them

Maybe it should be an ice cream truck, I say and Paco laughs.

Why?

To emphasize that feeling of innocence.

I’m not sure it sounds so innocent, coyote’s ice cream truck, he says.

Well, yes, I say, that’s the thing about coyote.

Ahhh, he says. A metaphor. Ice cream and sharp teeth, dark and light, hope and despair, through the whole poem.

It’s not a poem, guapo, I say. It’s a song.

Papa picked in California
Mami sewed in Arizona
Into school went Rosalita
Life was sweet in America
Little Rose loved America
She was back in her Mami's arms

In the arena, they are cheering, and here the song turns. I look back at the band.

Everybody ready?

We are sitting on the siderails of the pickup bed and we rush through the fence where our people have cut it and then we are inside and we hear shooting and gun muzzles flare.

Then one night the ICE men came for Papá
and the bottle came for Mami
Then one night the ICE men took Rosalita
to the dictator’s detention camp
to the dictator’s detention camp

This repeated line vamped with flourish and menace.

And everything gets intense.

Whoa the camp guards tortured the children
They told Rosalita Papá had died
The guards laughed while they tormented the children
They told Rosalita Mami had died
But she was too little to know
that the cruel guards were lying
And our little Rose cried and cried
And our little Rose cried and cried
Til there was nothing left inside

We cross the bridge.

And we have sledgehammers and guns and we are going to smash open the doors of the barracks where they are keeping the children.

Stand up free people you must stand up now
don’t let this happen in our time
Cut the fences and smash the walls
Stand up free people! Stand up free people!

Paco has run off with his rifle and I run to the first white-painted barracks I see. The detention blocks are long half-cylinders cupped in rows over the desert just like my father’s workshop in the shipyards in Sausalito and in the chaos I take the sledgehammer I smash at the lock and I smash at the knob and I smash down the fucking door.

Stand up, free people! Stand up free people!
Stand up free people, freedom for all!
Stand up, free people! Stand up free people!
Stand up free people, freedom for all!

We are in full voice, full band harmony and the crowd is roaring to their feet and clapping in time and I know if I say the word they will tear it to the fucking ground. The mariachis spill onstage, an army of them, and we sing and clap doubletime and the mariachis sing counterpoint up high.

Rosalita don’t cry darling
we’re going to el Norté to be with Mami
Come up darling on my shoulders
When we get to el Norté we will be free

And it repeats and repeats and the crowd is in a frenzy and the horns are blaring and I enter the barracks and the children are terrified to behold me in my white hot wings.

I am in the tent with Paco and we hear a car coming up the dirt road and lights cut across the trees, across the tent’s silk, and I feel the dark matter within me stir, gravity about to collapse on itself.

I hear the guards talking to someone over the sound of a motor whose deep sputtering idle I recognize.

My hand is on Paco’s naked chest and the children are peeking at me out of the shadows where they have been hiding behind the bunks and the air is stagnant and rank and the hot, dry desert air is mixing in and their sweet little eyes are peeking at me as I coax them out the door. And the older kids start to tell the younger ones it’s ok, vamos, vamos and I crawl out through the tent’s fly and I stand up so that I can see the guards step aside, and the gates swing wide open, and ancient golden headlights swing across the forest, incandescent and hot, through the cloud of red dust the smell of needles and clay and creek, and in through the hot glowing cloud of dust swings my father’s sea-green Mustang.

My sister Angélica steps out and slams the door with a thunk. The gates close around her and she looks around in her serious clothes like what the fuck is she doing here. Big sunglasses still on top of her serious head like she’s been driving through the day and into the night. Like she’s been driving for hours and hours to find me.

Richard B. Simon

Contributor

Richard B. Simon is an American rock journalist and Creative Writing professor.

His novel manuscript The Dolphin Ambassador’s Daughter was honored as a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, his short story Girl, Folded a finalist for the American Literary Review Award for Short Fiction, and his story, Sisters, a semifinalist for the Halifax Ranch Prize.

Simon’s work in journalism and fiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, Juxtapoz, Relix (where he is a Contributing Editor), at Addicted to Noise, MTV and VH1.com, in Chicago Quarterly Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere, and he is coauthor of Teaching Big History (University of California Press).

An expatriated New Yorker and exiled San Franciscan, he is currently living as a climate refugee in the Pacific Northwest.

Artist Statement
Jenny Walton

The images herein hail from Match/Enemy, a series of over 200 watercolor “portraits” of men matched to the artist's profile by the online dating service OK Cupid. The numeric titles come from algorithmic calculations based on user responses to questions in the app, the first number indicating the percentage of compatibility (Match) and the second, incompatibility (Enemy). The Enemy algorithm was published to encourage oppositional attraction but has since been discontinued. In addition, Match/Enemy looks at a subset of men who have chosen to obscure, alter, or hide their physical facial features, a liberty no longer allowed on many such apps. By choosing these portraits the artist explores the ideas of altered and adopted personas within social media and contemporary portraiture.

The works on paper are 9 x 12”, approximately 4 times the size of the images as displayed on the artist’s iPhone screen where most “shopping” took place. On each painting, the artist spent two to three hours, about the time one might take on a first date.

* * *

Author Note
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth

This series looks into the mind of a woman looking at men. Also drawing from traditions of portraiture, in this case through the form of the sonnet, these poems swap the lyric I with a close third-person narrator, exploring questions of who is watching, describing, and assessing who. While the 200+ paintings of Match/ Enemy form a composite portrait of the artist, this scant representation, chosen by me, distorts that reflection. The woman whose eyes we look through is not intended to represent the artist. If anything, these poems reflect my own obsessions with gaze, performance, intimacy, and aversion, particularly the disconnects between what is performed and what might be seen.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth

Author

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include A Wake with Nine Shades (2019) and Her Read, A Graphic Poem (2021), recipient of Foreword Review’s bronze prize in poetry and Texas Institute of Letters’ Fred Whitehead Award for Design. She lectures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is a 2023-2024 Beinecke Fellow at Yale, conducting research for a biography of C.D. Wright. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, and TriQuarterly.

Jenny Walton

Artist

Jenny Walton holds a BFA from Central Washington University and an MFA from American University (D.C. and Italy). Walton has shown nationally in New York, Miami, Boston, and Seattle and internationally in Italy. She was awarded an Artistic Fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities among several other grants and residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and Hamilton Princess, Bermuda. She has been critically published in several catalogs and articles and her work is held in several distinguished private and public collections. She lives and works in the Washington D.C. Area.

Her work on a self-portrait titled "Match-Enemy" based on the visual algorithm of 200 "matches" of men obscuring themselves on the dating app OK Cupid from 2014-2016. After completing this massive work of delving into the world of men's self-representation through app first impressions, it led her to run away to Vermont Studio Center in January of 2017 and start painting about the environment, mostly clouds. Overall, Walton is a systems thinker and continues to think through big things like sociological and political shifts and climate change through explorations in painting, drawing, and printmaking in her studio.

Kailey Tedesco

Author

Kailey Tedesco has written four full-length collections of poetry, most recently including FOREVERHAUS (2020) & MOTHERDEVIL (coming this fall) with White Stag Publishing. She teaches courses pertaining to Gothic literature and the archetype of the witch at Moravian University. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association. You can find her work in Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, Black Warrior Review, Epiphany Lit, The Journal, Driftwood Press, Passages North, and more. For further information, please visit kaileytedesco.com or follow @kaileytedesco.

Once the scientists next door were out of imagination and called in Timothy Pond as a consulting poet. After wearying her with many forms about secrecy and itchy things which happen to those who reveal classified information, they brought her to a dull, bright room with a central table, and on it, a throbbing blob about the size of a chicken that hasn’t been killed.

After confirming the blob was an alien being, they asked Timothy Pond to consider a large patch of blue surface on the blob, circling horizontally, pausing to flash yellow every few seconds, then resuming the blue circling.

We don’t know what the blue field is. We’re stymied. Jenkins thinks it’s trying to mate with us, but no one else is getting that vibe… Frankly, Jenkins always goes there…

Timothy Pond shuffled around the blob-holding table at a wide line. When she got halfway around, she sat on the floor. After a minute, she pulled out her pocket notebook to write a rough couplet about how she once watched a chicken beheaded. She rose, offered the scientists the last of some vegan pork rinds from her other pocket, then she shared.

It’s a sensory organ of some kind.

An eye? Asked one scientist.

Well, as a being from an entirely different evolutionary line from us, it could be sensing anything. We sense light, heat, sound waves. We gather tactile information. I know nothing about what this—Are we calling it a name? What it needs to sense in its world. It could value a certain kind of radiation we don’t normally detect. Memories. Hopes and dreams. Vegetables which grow between breaths of some moon.

And the quick yellow light?

Blinking. Or swallowing. Maybe defecating some kind of energy we can’t detect. Timothy Pond held her hands out tentatively. What happens if you poke it, maybe there? She zeroed in on a hairy orange patch.

The scientists rushed to hide their faces with their lab coats, one easing her arm away. Best not, let’s leave it at that. Why do you think it’s a sensory organ? Why not a means of communication or defense?

Or body part for producing music or spewing paint, Timothy offered, just for conversation.

Paint… the scientists, muttered, emerging from their lapels.

Timothy Pond stepped closer to the throbbing blob, leaning in and watching the circling blue for several cycles. She planted her hands on her thighs and sighed. This organ is scanning for chairs. Yes. In this being’s world chairs are central to its survival and culture. It is seeking to locate any chair in its environment. It must have evolved to detect the unique vibrations—invitation waves put out by chairs. Timothy Pond straightened herself, detected the door, and moved toward it.

But Ms. Pond, why chairs? Why not… tables?

It has a table, she answered. And she exited the lab to return home next door for a cup of Earl Grey, her current book fling, and her recliner, Gabrielle.

Wren Tuatha

Author

Wren Tuatha is a queer, genderfluid, disabled poet who earned her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (FLP). Her poetry has appeared in Silk Road, The Lake, Kaleidoscope, Pirene’s Fountain, Inverted Syntax, Lavender Review, and others. She's founding editor at Califragile; formerly Artist-in-Residence at Heathcote Center. Wren and partner author/activist C.T. Butler herd rescue goats among the Finger Lakes of New York, where she is director of Ithaca Poetry Center. She first imagined Timothy Pond as a pen name to honor women when only masculine nom de plumes were published. Years later, Timothy Pond emerged to give Wren and the rest of us a surreal diversion (or survival plan). Timothy Pond is named after the grass Wren feeds her goats. She likes the Staten Island Ferry because it is orange and a free ride out of Manhattan.

Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade is the author of many collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/ New Michigan Press, 2023) and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize selected by Lia Purpura. Her forthcoming collection is The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.

Creative Nonfiction Masthead