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Prism international 43:3 / Spring 2005
Prism international
84 Pages
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PRISM international THE CANSEX ISSUE PRISM international PRISM international Fiction Editor Catharine Chen Poetry Editor Amanda Lamarche Executive Editor Brenda Leifso Associate Editors Amber Dawn Benjamin Wood Business Managers Zoya Harris Robert Weston Advisory Editor Andreas Schroeder Production Manager Jennifer Herbison Editorial Board Amy Dennis Barry Grenon Janey Lew Nancy Mauro Clea Young Readers Brad Duncan Cameron Gilley Kathryn Hepburn Harmony Ho Kimberly Mancini Erin McShane Susan Olding PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times a year by the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, Buchanan E-462, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T IZl. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, NY. The magazine is listed by the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index. E-mail: prism(§)interchange.ubc.ca Website: prism.arts.ubc.ca Contents Copyright © 2005 PRISM international for the authors. Cover illustration: Stay Gold, by The Clayton Brothers. Canadian Subscription Rates (please include 7% G.S.T.): one-year individual $22.00; two-year individual $35.00; library and institution one-year $32.00; two-year $45.00. International Subscription Rates (please pay in US dollars): One-year individual $18.00; two-year individual $27.00; library and institution one-year $27.00; two-year $40.00. Sample copy: CDN$9.95. Please note that all money orders must be in Canadian Funds Only. Submission Guidelines: PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights for $40.00 per page for poetry and $20.00 per page for other genres. Contributors receive a one-year subscription. PRISM also purchases limited digital rights for selected work, for which it pays an additional $10.00 per page. All manuscripts should be sent to the editors at the above address. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with Canadian stamps or International Reply Coupons. Manuscripts with insufficient return postage will be held for six months and then discarded. Translations should be accompanied by a copy of the work(s) in the original language. The advisory editors are not responsible for individual selections, but for the magazine's overall mandate including continuity, quality, and budgetary obligations. For details on how to place an advertisement in PRISM international, please contact our executive editor. PRISM occasionally exchanges subscriber lists with other literary magazines. Please contact us if you wish to be excluded from such exchanges. Our gratitude to Dean Nancy Gallini and the Dean of Arts Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. Publications Mail Registration No. 08867. April 2005. ISSN 0032.8790 Conseil des Arts Canada Council JK\. BRITISH <£)P) du Canada for the Arts 1AU COLUMBIA ARTS COUNCIL Supported by the Province of British Columbia A Contents Volume 43, Number 3 Spring 2005 The CanSex Issue Editors' Note Catharine Chen & Amanda Lamarche Even Educated Fleas Do It / 7 Fiction Pasha Malla Pulling Oceans In and Pushing Oceans Out / 12 Julie Booker The Tree Man / 26 Saleema Nawaz Mother Superior / 29 Kevin Chong Ten Albums I Love About Her / 36 Joonseong Park The Broken Umbrella / 43 Craig Boyko The Problem of Pleasure / 61 Poetry Nancy Lee Dog Love / 8 / Walk You / 9 warren heiti agriope to persephone / 10 Sharon McCartney Pa's Penis / 24 Roger Nash On the Proper Pruning of Husbands / 25 Sioux Browning Dreams Usually Unkind / 28 Joelene Heathcote Nothing Says Love Like a Needle / 34 Say None of This / 35 Steven Price Houdini Considers his Wife / 40 C.B. Burgess How to Change from a "Woman" into a "Man" in Eight (Not So) Easy Steps / 55 David Maelzer Thanksgiving, 1989 /58 Mark Cochrane Open Letter / 59 Utah / 60 Brian Swann Watch Yourself / 79 Catch / 81 Contributors /82 Catharine Chen & Amanda Lamarche Editors' Note: Even Educated Fleas Do It Sex is the drive behind every human interaction. It can be base or sublime, unpacking its little suitcases and leaving us pleasure, longing, guilt, loathing, fear, contentment, and occasionally love. In CanSex, Canadian and international writers explore this beast with many backs. Response for the CanSex call for submissions was enormous. We received over three hundred pieces, easily enough to put together this broad spectrum of sexuality. Hopefully, it'll be as good for you as it was for us. Sexily yours, Catharine Chen & Amanda Lamarche Nancy Lee Dog Love Remember the night we drank wine out of water glasses in that stinking club and tried to seduce the same woman? You, so eager and complimentary, your chair sniffing hers, wet nose to the question mark of her brown ear. Your eyebrows humped with surprise when you caught me across the table, a polite smile, the burrs of my teeth chafing your collar. In the parking lot, opening the car door, you declared, "I'm half in love with that girl," as if no one had noticed. "I think she likes me better," I tried, sulking back in my seat. Your laugh between a bark and yowl. Later, parked outside my parents' house: you, panting, snarling, eyes closed, foot quaking on the brake pedal, shuddering a warning signal into the night. The car, ripe with your scent; your cloudy drool in my mouth, I stared at the flat metal seatbelt buckle and waited for you to wake from that twitchy dream, the one about chasing a bird around a lake. I Walk You forjaine Growling with the street cleaner and other brave nocturnals, shoulders rolling, head dipped, short legs stalking ahead, the pad-click of paws as I stumble to follow, feet slapping sandals, tears slapping asphalt, dizzy, soppy, dragged by your brawny pull. Ears perked, huffy breath, you haul us to prickly hedges, smears of wet Kleenex, skunk trails, lost bones to be snapped up, ground for marrow. Heedless, you glance back, eyes like varnished stones, tongue puffed with friendly spittle, the fleeced corners of your mouth turned up, smiling. Across town at an emptying office party, your master sweetens some girl's drink with his words, does tricks, shows how he can sit, beg, roll over, but you are content to know he brings his straying lips home to your muzzle, shares the bed and rests his anxious hands on your ribs, his furry beloved, his constant, never a doubt whose life he would save first, whose departure he would mourn. You trot, impervious to night, to dark thoughts. Curious for cats and bells, our man's returning scent, you scour sidewalks, alleyways, legs cantering, nose down, slim hips teasing, muscled flanks parading. A confident, love-sure bitch. warren heiti agriope to persephone from the metamorphosis of agriope October thrake, Ontario herakleitos says, water's death generates earth, red leaves falling through the lead bars on the window, igniting the floor, ants sparking around a honeyed spoon, a smashed cup, bones of bone china shining around the ants, i have not touched the piano since i met orpheus. last night, a blackout in this hall, built from stone in 1913, choked by the quartz- barked climbing vines, i am writing to ask about petrifaction. he argued, monogamy is anathema to him. his axiom is many and mine is one. i need not to need him. he said a word and watched the world contract like an iris around it: her. my body does not argue, but it burns, i heard my voice arguing with itself, arguing about a fever which he has never felt, i felt the rain throbbing hotter at my throat and wrist, he kissed me, quickly—wind skinning stone. this afternoon i woke and couldn't move, the sky bruised my eyes with rain's azure weight and my body was a held breath, my nerves tore through his fingerprints, stripped themselves like copper wire, stretched into the room and scraped against things, a notebook, a thread, the ragged edge of a letter—every thing ten thousand amps. and this evening my nerves flick electricity into the sheets, i force myself to the bathroom where i bathe the nerves burning at my wrist, the tapwater hits them and turns to steam, in the mirror, i see the glint of silica on my lips, my ghost goes for refuge in the sarcophagus of my skull, the body does not argue. 10 last night, a blackout in this hall, he is here with me. he touches fast, thirst in his fingers, his saliva scalding my throat, my shoulder, there is never enough time, he turns away from me and i move my hand over his side, slow, thinking hard about what i am touching, how i love each rib and the breath bending each rib. but these bone ribs are the lead ribs on the window, his flesh is as smooth as the stone wall, his saliva is as hot as the hatred of rain, the rain cooling to the temperature of the lead, the world becoming one. the piano, lock-jawed, the violin scarved in silks, its case shoved under my bed. i can hear the slack strings slackening, the wood getting hard in the humid dark, every day i wake inside the knowledge that i am wrong, and that knowledge is the geology of this body, its fossils of frayed copper wire. herakleitos says, out of earth originates water, my friend, you have lived through this: is he lying? 11 Pasha Malla Pulling Oceans In and Pushing Oceans Out It's April and the world is opening up like a hand with something secret in it. The world is all, Hey I've got something to show you, so you lean in and go, What? You go, Show me! And you look and the fingers peel back and then whammo there it is, green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain. The world is melting but it's almost all water, anyway. The world is like seventy-five per cent water. It's a ball made of water and some mountains and other stuff, some trees and hills and deserts. Buildings and roads. People walk around on it and we're like seventy-five per cent water too. My dad Greg is two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which makes him one hundred and seventy-seven pounds of water, like a hundred thousand glasses of water, maybe more. He's a bathtub full of water—bigger than a bathtub; a kiddie pool—enough water to drown a baby or sail a little boat. Anyway, my dad Greg is a whole lot of water. You learn all this water stuff in Grade Five Science. The units are called The Earth and The Human Body. And in The Human Body we learned about vaginas and wangs. Big whoop, though, right? Vaginas and wangs, big whoop. *** It's springtime and you've got to make sure that Brian wears his rubber boots because of all the mud. Like Granny says Brian's slow and only seven and my dad Greg'll forget if I don't do it. But my dad Greg calls me Big Gal or BG for short because I'm responsible and mature for my age (nine). Brian crapped his pants four times in class already this year so one of his teachers called home to see if maybe he needs diapers and my dad Greg said no so they said well okay make sure he wears pants with elastics around the ankles. Get it? But one time he came home with a diaper on anyway and my dad lost it. He called them up at Brian's school and said fuck and everything, I heard 12 him. He said, Are you telling me how to raise my fucking kid? And then after he went and sat on his bike in the garage for like thirty hours or something. Today's Wednesday, April 8, 1988. That's the first thing you do when you get to school, write the date in your workbook at the top of the page. You're supposed to do cursive but I print because cursive looks messy and in my printing all the letters are the same size. It looks like a typewriter if I do say so myself. Then I sit for a bit and start to pinch my eyelashes and pull away, and sometimes you get a few little curls of eyelash and you sprinkle those down onto your book. You keep doing that and eventually you have a little pile of black eyelashes, and you organize that into a perfect square on the empty page. But I hide it with my hand when Mrs. Mills comes walking by. There are some things you just have to keep secret. Like for my birthday last year my dad Greg bought me a diary with a lock and everything, and he told me I could write whatever I wanted in it, about my day or if I was mad or whatever, and I could lock it up and they would be my secrets. But you write things down and they can get found. People can read it and know everything. It's better to keep your thoughts in your own head; you have them there for a second and then they're gone and you're the only person who will ever know what they were. You think things to yourself and they're safe. So anyway it's the last day before Easter weekend. Because it's the last day I haven't done too much work, just wrote the date in each of my workbooks (le 8 Avril, 1988 enfrancais) and did the eyelash stuff and then didn't do anything else because this year I'm going to help and hide the eggs. I've been planning all day where I'm going to hide them—places that are easy for Brian but not too easy. This year it's me in charge of the egg hunt because last year SOMEBODY forgot where he put them and then like a month later all this chocolate melted into our TV. Easter's about Jesus or something? We don't do religion at my school. Oh—anyone calls Brian a retard, I'll kick their ass. Another thing we learned in The Human Body was about periods. Girls get their period and blood comes out of their vagina. Not me though, even though it can happen as young as ten. I've been making sure to keep my legs tight together or cross them so nothing's getting out. If I have to pee I hold it to make the muscles stronger so my vagina will never let out any 13 blood. It'll be the toughest one in town, not like all those other wimpy ones, dripping all over the place like one of Jared Wein's nosebleeds. You get your period and you also get boobs. Some of the girls in Grade Six have boobs. Like Kelly Sanchez (she's already twelve, though). They stick out of her shirt. She looks like she's hiding Easter eggs, ha ha ha. What I remember most about Mom was when she came back from the hospital and only had one boob. They cut off the other one and gave her a special bra to make it look like she had two boobs but sometimes around the house she didn't wear it and her shirt just sagged and went all limp on the one side like it was a sail with no wind in it or something. But that's just what I remember, I was only four. She was tired and they'd shaved her hair off. She just lay in bed and my dad Greg made me be quiet around the house, all the time, right until she went back to the hospital and then it was the end. FINALLY at 3:15 the bell rings. Everyone goes running out into the hall and it's Easter. I get my bag at the rack and I'm putting on my jacket and Jared Wein comes up and goes, Wanna walk home? Because we're neighbours. Jared's okay, he wears glasses that are always falling down his face and he has to scrunch his nose to move them back up. I go, Yeah. Also he usually gets a nosebleed. On the way home from school Jared and I go down to our fort in the woods to check if it's okay. There's a path with trees that grow over from either side and make a tunnel. The branches bend in and touch overtop and you have to duck when you're walking along. Then it opens up and that's where our fort is. We call it The Inner Sanctum and it always needs fixing because teenagers come down and drink beer and light fires and mess everything up. It's been raining so today The Inner Sanctum is wet and sort of cool, and dark, and it smells like worms. There's a log to sit on so Jared goes and sits there and he pats the log beside him like he wants me to sit down too, but I get a stick and I start whacking the ground until it breaks. It breaks into a smaller piece, and then I whack that on the log, and it breaks even smaller, and I throw that piece into the woods. There's a beer cap on the ground so I pick it up and sniff it: pennies and sugar. If we stayed late enough it'd get dark and we could lie back and look up at the sky and see the moon up there through the space in the treetops, white as a bone, full or half or waxing or waning (part of The Earth was to learn about the moon) and we'd lie back and I'd maybe let Jared put his head on my stomach and we'd both look up at the moon and I might tell him, That's my Mom, Jared, that's Mom looking down. Then I'd wave at 14 the moon: hello, goodnight! But I wouldn't cry. I wouldn't cry, or anything. But we can't stay that late because I have to get home for Brian. Besides, if Jared Wein gets a nosebleed we don't have any Kleenex. We fix up The Inner Sanctum and Jared goes to his house and I come home but Brian's not there yet. My dad Greg usually gets in at 5:30 from his job. If he's not home for dinner you've got to make hot dogs, one for you and one for Brian. Sometimes my dad Greg'll leave you a note and sometimes he won't. Ingredients to Make Hot Dogs for Dinner: 2 hot dog wieners (in freezer) 2 pieces of Wonderbread 2 Kraft Singles slices French's mustard Heinz ketchup 2 paper towels 1 microwave Okay. You take the hot dog wieners out of the freezer. You take a paper towel. You put one of the hot dogs on the paper towel and you put it in the microwave and you microwave it for 1:10. You take the other hot dog and other paper towel: repeat. Then you put the hot dogs in the bread and a piece of cheese on the wieners and you can even do them together at the same time, and you microwave them on a paper towel for forty-five seconds. I put mustard on mine, and ketchup, in two straight, even lines. Brian has them plain. If they're too hot, make Brian wait because if not he'll just stuff them in his mouth and burn himself and he'll cry and then you have to hug him and rub his hair and stuff. Oh, I forgot to say to WASH YOUR HANDS. Before and after making hot dogs, with hot water and soap. There are germs everywhere and if you get them in your mouth you could maybe get, I don't know, cancer or leukemia? Not really, I'm not an idiot. But kids get leukemia all the time and then they have to get bones from their brothers or sisters. I'd have to get bones from Brian. Or give him some of mine. It's 4:06 and I'm washing my hands when the bus pulls up outside. It's always the same: it sounds like Granny when she gets all wheezy, then the doors open and you can hear all the kids screaming inside the bus, and then the doors close and it roars and goes away, and then it's quiet. Brian comes in the front door with his backpack and he sees me and yells, Hi! 15 and he gives me this big hug and yells Hi! again, and then I tell him to wash his hands. Sometimes Granny comes by to see if we're okay before my dad Greg gets home. She's his mom and smells like cigarettes and old people. He doesn't have a dad. But today it's just me and Brian. We play Trouble. We eat Fruit Roll- Ups—me, grape; Brian, orange. Sometimes I let Brian win Trouble, sometimes I don't. I have to help him move his men. He's always red. I'm always blue. Today though he wins by himself. I let Brian watch TV at 5:00, but only for half an hour. After last Easter when the TV got ruined my dad Greg bought a new big-screen one and put a satellite dish on the roof. There are lots of satellite channels that are inappropriate for kids. We're only allowed to watch Channel 2—my dad Greg's rule. He watches TV a lot, now. Not me. TV rots your brain! (TV rots your BRIAN, ha ha ha). I clean up. I make sure the games are all square on the shelf. The edges have to be even and matched up equally, which is called symmetry. We learned it in math. And then I wash my hands. Sometimes I wash them too long and they get all pink and sore, but that just means they're clean. Hey, I almost forgot: it's Easter, almost. Moron! At 5:34 the garage goes up and the bike comes growling inside like always, and then my dad Greg is in the kitchen in his security guard uniform and he picks me up under one arm and Brian under the other and spins us around. I sometimes forget how big my dad Greg is—he's like four of me, maybe more. We sit at the table in the kitchen while he makes beans and toast and eggs for dinner. He sings, Beans, beans, the musical fruit, and makes fart noises and stomps around like he's crazy, and the whole house shakes. Brian laughs but then he does that thing where he starts rubbing his face with his knuckles, so my dad Greg has to come over and put Brian on his lap and hold his hands for a bit. Wanna stir the beans, BG? he says to me, so I go over and do it. When everything's ready my dad Greg puts the beans out on plates with the toast and eggs. He puts mine down and he points at it to show me the toast is cut in triangles and there's an egg on one side and the beans in a little neat pile on the other, how I like it. Symmetry. After dinner he tells me to go do my homework while he gets Brian ready for bed, but I don't have any homework (because it's Easter) so I go up and clean my room, make sure everything's straight and lined up and there's no dust anywhere. I have my own Handyvac but I'm only allowed 16 to use it once a week and I already used it last Sunday. Then it's almost bedtime. I put on my pyjamas and go brush my teeth and wash my hands. After, I go into Brian's room to say goodnight, but he's already asleep with this big smile on his face, so I lean over the railing and whisper-yell, Goodnight Greg! to my dad Greg who's watching TV and he turns down the volume and whisper-yells, Goodnight BG! and I go into my room and wait until it's exacdy 9:00 so I can get in bed. For a bit I lie there thinking about Easter andJared's egg hunt and I run my hand over the pillow, feeling for feathers sticking out. I pull them out with my fingernails and drop them behind the bed. One time my dad Greg moved my bed to put up a shelf for my books and he found a big pile of feathers and asked me, Are you taking feathers out of your pillow? I said no. It felt weird, but my dad Greg just smiled and said okay. Lying in bed, through the window I can see the moon. Almost full, only a sliver missing, almost perfect. All around the world Mom the moon is busy pulling oceans in and pushing oceans out. Tides. And all us people are basically water too and at night the moon sings us lullabies and pushes us into sleep. 11:38. I've been lying staring at the moon and planning the egg hunt for like three hours. I'm going to have to make a list, write it down so I don't forget, so nothing happens like chocolate getting into the TV again. I keep imagining Brian going around with his little basket and finding eggs, all smiles and laughing and happy. But maybe I have insomnia? Insomnia is when you can't sleep. My dad Greg has it, sometimes. You just stay awake forever. You can die from not sleeping. Yeah, I think I have insomnia. I should count sheep. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty- three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six thirty- seven thirty-eight thirty-nine forty forty-one forty-two forty-three forty-four forty- five forty-six forty-seven forty-eight forty-nine fifty fifty-one fifty-two fifty-three fifty-four fifty-five fifty-six fifty-seven fifty-eight fifty-nine sixty. Nothing. Sixty seconds is a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour times sixty seconds equals three thousand, six hundred seconds. Twenty-four hours in a day equals? Hold on, I need to write this down. I just have to turn on the light and find a paper and pen. Twenty-four hours in a day equals one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes, equals eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds. And that makes.. .six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds in a week. 17 How many seconds in a year? Whoa, hold on. Thirty-one million, three hundred and thirty-nine thousand, six hundred seconds. The other thing you can do if you can't sleep is have some warm milk. So I wait until exactly 12:00 midnight and get up to go to the kitchen. I stop on the stairs. My dad Greg is still up. I can hear the TV. I lean over the banister and look into the living room, all quiet. Like a spy. The TV's on. There's a lady moaning, like she's being hurt or something. My dad Greg has the sound way down, but I can hear it. He's sitting on the couch, I can see him, just his lap and his feet sticking out from under a blanket. He's sort of twitching or something and the couch is going CREAK CREAK, and the lady on the TV is going UH! UH! and he's making noises too, like grunting. Creak creak, uh uh, grunt grunt. And so I take another step down on the stairs and lean even more over the banister so I can see the TV and there's a lady with her boobs shaking and flopping around, like slapping up against herself, and the blanket on the couch is shaking in time with the boobs and I can see my dad's face and his face is different, it's like a secret side of him, mean and hungry and weird, and the couch goes creak creak and the lady with the floppy boobs goes uh uh and my dad Greg goes grunt grunt. But then something in my tummy goes gloop and I have to pull away from the banister because my head is all funny, and I turn away and run upstairs to the bathroom. And then I'm washing my hands. I didn't even turn the lights on so now I'm washing my hands in the dark, hard, with hot water and lots of soap. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty- three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine— The door opens but I don't look. I hear my dad Greg go, BG. He leaves the lights off and comes over, so he's right behind me. I still don't look. —thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six thirty- seven— He reaches over and turns off the tap. My hands are sore, my stomach still feels weird and like gurgly. BG, he says again. I don't turn around. We stand there in the dark. Then he reaches out to put his arms around me but he sort of stops, and even though he's not touching me, from the way I can feel his body shaking, the way his breath comes short and sort of gasping, I can tell he's crying. The next morning I wake up at 7:47 but it's not really waking up because I didn't sleep very much, obviously. I have to wait until exactly 8:00 to get 18 out of bed, so I just lie there for thirteen minutes thinking. The curtains are closed now. My dad Greg must have come in during the night and closed them. Through the curtains the light comes in grey and I can hear the rain hissing outside. It'll be an indoor day. At 8:00 I get out of bed and go into Brian's room and he's just lying there. He looks at me and smiles and goes, Hi! I lift the covers and crawl under with him. He hugs me and he's warm. Brian it's almost Easter, I go. Are you excited for the Easter Bunny? He kicks his legs and goes, Yes! Yes! That's cute, how he still believes in the Easter Bunny. I put my arm around his chest and I can feel his heart beating. Bub bub, bub bub, says his heart. I rub my hand on his chest and he kind of purrs like a cat. And then I slap him on the tummy and he laughs, so I do it again. I leave my hand on his tummy and it's like round and I can feel the dent where his belly button is. And then, sort of quick, I move my hand down a bit and touch his wang, just to see: it's small and weird, a little rubber tube. Brian's gone all still. I smack him again on the belly. Wanna get up? I say, and he goes, Yes! Yes! and nods his head so hard he nearly shakes me out of the bed. Top Secret List Of Easter Egg Hiding Places! (so far): 1. Kitchen - between the Wheaties and Sugar Crisp boxes 2. Kitchen - in the handle of the silverware drawer 3. Kitchen - on top of the breadbox 4. Kitchen - in the fruit bowl 5. Kitchen - under the kitchen table (stuck with tape!) 6. Den - between the couch cushions 7. Den - on top of the VCR 8. Den - under the lampshade 9. Hallway - on the frame of the picture of me and Brian 10. Stairs - one egg on every stair, in the corners My dad Greg spends the whole day in the garage working on his bike, which is good, because at lunch (1:20) when he comes in to heat up some Chunky for me and Brian he's weird and doesn't look at me really. He puts our bowls of soup down and coughs and just stands there for a minute before grabbing an apple and going back into the garage. Then at 4:09 he sticks his head into the kitchen where me and Brian are playing Trouble (I'm winning—two men in my Home versus Brian's none) and says, Hey, stopped raining, taking the bike for a spin. I just nod okay. He's quiet for a bit, then he goes, You okay holding down the fort? So I nod again. 19 Granny's coming tomorrow to make us Easter dinner. At 5:45 when I'm setting the table (my dad Greg is still out) she calls and says, Happy Easter! and tells me about the great ham she got. Ham? Grody. But I don't say that. I say, Yum. I say, Sounds good Granny. She asks if we're okay. I say, Sure. Then she wants to talk to Brian. He gets all excited and takes the phone and yells, Hi! and Yes! and then just laughs a lot. When Brian hangs up I notice something sort of smells so I get down and sniff his bum. Yup. He crapped himself. This is one thing I can't handle: crap. So I tell him to just stand in the middle of the kitchen until our dad Greg gets home, not to touch anything. I open the window and sit there watching him. I'm glad he's wearing pants with elastic ankles. My dad Greg gets home at 5:58 and smells Brian right away and goes, Woo-wee Buddy! He picks Brian up over one shoulder like a fireman and carries him upstairs. The tub goes on. From my spot at the kitchen table I can hear them both laughing, and the water splashing around while my dad Greg washes the crap off my brother. After dinner (fried baloney, Tater Tots, hot V8) we watch a movie on satellite. My dad Greg tries to get us to all sit on the couch together like usual, with a blanket overtop, but I tell him I'm okay and sit on the floor. The opening credits come on and I can feel someone like nudging me in the back with their toe, but I just stare at the TV as if I don't notice. The movie we watch is The Parent Trap. My dad Greg is all excited because it's a movie that was out when he was a kid. At dinner he told me, It's more for girls than boys—you'll like it, BG. When he said the name I thought, cool, a parent trap, what an awesome idea. You'd dig like a hole and cover it with sticks and leaves, maybe put a case of beer on the other side for dads. Something else for moms? Then dads would come along and be like, Oh great, beer! and when they went for it they'd fall through and into the hole. A parent trap. Then you could study them and stuff, poke them with sticks, do experiments and tests. But it turns out to be Disney and sort of gay. There's this girl and she's got a twin sister but she doesn't know, or something, and then they try to get their parents married. There's no trap, really, just a plan, and not even a good one. I squirm around on the floor a lot and my dad Greg keeps going, You want to come up here with us? But I don't say anything to that. The movie gets done at 8:58, kind of late, so my dad Greg hustles us off to bed. And then he goes back downstairs, so I'm left lying there wide awake, thinking about what he's maybe doing down there under the blanket with the groaning ladies on the TV. But I guess I'm tired from the night before so after not too long I forget about my dad Greg and start to get really sleepy and before I can even check out the window to see the moon, 20 I fall asleep. I wake up and I feel like swampy and slow but I have this idea there's something I should be doing. It's—4:17 a.m. There's something, but everything feels cloudy and my brain is only just winding up, still maybe half- asleep. I roll over and then I'm drifting off to sleep again, before it hits me. Easter. The egg hunt. In like three hours Brian is going to get up and go hunting for eggs and I forgot to even finish my list let alone hide any eggs. I wait until 4:20 (which isn't perfect but this is an emergency) and get out of bed, swing my legs over the side and it's like slow-motion, all heavy and weird, and in the dark my room is sort of blue from the moonlight through the window. I move out into the hall, still feeling sort of underwater, swimming, looking around, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. Wait. There's an egg on the floor outside Brian's room, a little dark lump against the carpet. I lean down and it's like I can't believe it, and for a second I think maybe the Easter Bunny really did come. But then I realize who would have put it there, who knew it was my job and went and did it anyway. I pick up the egg. The foil around the chocolate is starting to peel so I smooth it down and put it in the pocket of my pyjamas. I look around, at my dad Greg's bedroom door which is closed, with only black showing from the crack underneath, and then I start to tiptoe down the stairs, real slow. Guess what? There are eggs lined up in the corners of each stair JUST LIKE I WROTE ON MY SECRET LIST. The eggs go into my pockets, and it's like I'm doing a weird kind of front crawl or something, down one step and reaching, then the next, eggs into my pockets, but I'm maybe sinking, maybe drowning, and the house is dark and still, with only the hum of the fridge from the kitchen to prove the world is even alive. I move around the house, silent, leaving the lights off, looking in all the spots I wrote down, taking the eggs and loading up. Between the cereal boxes: check. On top of the VCR: check. Etc, all of them. He's put them in other places too, stupid places like lined up on the kitchen counter. Way too easy. But even finding eggs in places I didn't have on my list makes me feel weird—my hands go prickly for a second, I feel my face hot. Once the egg disappears into my pocket the feeling goes away. Around 4:50 my pockets start to get heavy—they're sagging and bulging with eggs. I look around one more time, but I'm pretty sure I've got all of them. So I go to the back door and put on my shoes. Outside it's still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds 21 left over from yesterday's rain. There's no stars. Only the moon, glowing big and round behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pyjamas, and it's hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides, and I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain—it soaks the bottoms of my pants and is cold on my ankles—and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap, my runners on the pavement. You can see the streetlights reflected in puddles everywhere, yellow and shimmering. I walk past Jared Wein's house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no, this is something I have to do on my own. Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. It's dark but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. And there's just enough light from the moon to guide me. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. From way up above Mom the moon is looking down. She's faint and like out of focus, and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past her face like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big, murky sea, but she shines out of it—faraway, but silver and watching, up there. I haven't brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There's a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet, too, and my hands—dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and feel the earth cool and wet through my pyjamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I'm sweating even though it's cold out and I'm shivering and digging and covered in muck. As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter, and once I'm a ways down there's water at the bottom, collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second. Maybe it's from the ocean—this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world, and I've tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet. So I guess I'm deep enough now. I take the eggs in my hands and open my fingers so they plop one by one into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. Like: release, plop, release, plop. So after a while they're all down there, all the eggs, my pockets are empty, and I sit back. Right then—I swear—the clouds break up a bit and Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting that little puddle up silver, the dull blobs of the eggs bobbing around. In The Human Body we learned a little bit about all the tubes you've got inside you—fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals 22 and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang— depending what you've got. So now I've put my own eggs into the tubes of the world, ha ha ha, and I'm sitting here in my pyjamas in the mud, kind of cold, and it's Easter. But maybe if the world is like a person and these underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it's like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. Like the world getting ready in private to make something new and Mom the moon leaning in and saying, No. Mom the moon saying, Not this time. And then just smiling down and washing all the world's secrets away with waves. 23 Sharon McCartney Pa's Penis from The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer, each night under the nine-patch, I explore the territories, seek out the gap, the mountain pass that opens with a sigh to green coastal waters, salt dunes and pine. Like burying my head in umber, wrapping a blanket of mist around my shoulders. By day, I loaf, lie abed, keep to myself. Too shy to speak, ordinarily; to step out, vulnerable. But in darkness, close quarters, I make myself known, a feral growl, the urge to go west, to penetrate, ungovernable. On occasion, however, I am denied. A barricade. Timbers blocking the trail. Does anything hurt more than that? To be willing, radiant, fresh and dandy, and, then, to be stymied, impeded, unhitched, turned away. A deflating anger, draining, at myself for my lack of control. At the other, for what? Anything? To say never again would be a lie; my tendency is perennial, reseeding, bound to reoccur. A buffoon, perhaps, wagging, overeager, but my heart in the right place, on my sleeve, incapable of disguise, concealment. Desire made manifest, destiny. 24 Roger Nash On the Proper Pruning of Husbands At the end of each winter, my wife unfurls the spring, in impetuously unbuttoned green eyes and dress, and takes scissors to my snowbound beard and head. With an insight born of over thirty years of marriage, her shears correctly assign me to the category of greying human privet hedge. She attacks her spousal topiary with zest, clipping my beard into a bedraggled rooster, only recently saved from something like drowning, but not rescued from veering asymmetrically and eerily to the left. I try to appreciate her political acumen, mainly to avoid adjusting my head and having an eyebrow trimmed to within the shadow of a shrivelled leech. Next, she sculpts the thick maze of my head, shaping it to a single, nearly vertical, spiralling corkscrew shape; which I find not unattractive, though I'm puzzled by the flowerbed I see spreading beneath it, in the corner of the mirror. Until I realize she's sitting solicitously in my lap, arms around the neatly mown lawn that was my neck, asking, "Shall I cut it even shorter, or plant a row of peonies instead?" Beyond the Elizabethan stately home and gardens of my landscaped self, a lion roars from his ancient, unalterable thicket. A unicorn raises her undeniable head. 25 Julie Booker The Tree Man I met the Tree Man at a party in Auckland—his long curly hair, worn checkered shirt, thick leather vest. I liked his face, its many lines to read. We were drunk. We kissed and danced and when I asked him to call me at the end of the night, he gave me his Tree Care pamphlet. He was a surgeon specializing in thinning, reshaping, formative pruning. "Give your saplings a head start for the future." Available twenty-four hours. Our first date was sober. He picked me up in the truck. I spoke of trees metaphorically. The symbiosis of woodlands. The strange fig parasite killing its host. The discovery of skewed rings in a trunk that's spent its life fighting the wind. And although he had a genuine love of nature, he failed the test. Said he didn't write poetry but there was "definitely no shortage of concept, man," a line I jotted down in my mind. In his warehouse apartment in Ponsonby, he chopped some wood, turned out the lights, lit a huge fire, switched the upstairs stereo on—soft jazz settled down on two armchairs by the fire. It was right out of a magazine. As I was about to give in to the temptation to ask him for a photo, he jumped up, grinning. Hooked himself into a tree harness like a diaper, climbed a rope fixed to the ceiling, and ab-sailed from his upper loft bedroom back down to the living room where I stood speechless. No one had ever rappelled for me before. So we went to bed. Kissing, his lips were dry and his hands scratched and coarse. He put his arm around my shoulder as if he'd just read the manual: "Place hand here." He stripped down to his boxers, even slipped them off, then thought better of it when he saw me not removing anything. He climbed under a million blankets and pillows, pulling me into him. His arms and thighs wrapped around me as if braced for a fall. My face trapped in his armpit, the smell of wood and sweat, I kept pushing the covers back to get air and he kept re-wrapping me. His gangly limbs clutching the soft sanctuary. Death by smothering, I thought. In the morning, I woke to stiff kisses, hands on my breasts and the line, "I wish you'd lose some layers 'cuz I'm feeling really randy." Where was the poetry, the words painstakingly carved into chunks of wood by the fireplace while I had slept? He drove me home in the truck after a quick stop at the dump. Standing in my heels and long black dress from the night before, I watched the Tree 26 Man toss his collection. Branches, stumps, deadwood flying from the back of the truck. In the act of removal, his body finally and absolutely alive. Catherine Wong 27 Sioux Browning Dreams Usually Unkind So I had a dream about elephants and they were kind to one another which is strange because my dreams are usually unkind. For example, I dream my father dead, drowned in a boat in warm bluewater or I make my friend kneel before me and I shoot him with a pistol, execution-style. Or I dream of a girl overdosing; as she dies I put my mouth on her mouth and it moves me so much that in kissing her I come and in coming I wake. But my father lives and my friend is still living and I never met that girl and no one around me is dying and my days are becalmed with hesitation and now elephants pass sweetly through my sleep. 28 Saleema Nawaz Mother Superior Joan won't get an abortion. She says she is a slut but a slut for Jesus. She doesn't go to church but chugs cases of Baby Duck and calls it communion wine. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, says it won't hurt the baby. At worst, she says, it might make it slow—the kind of kid who could never leave you. A little less likely to see the evil in the world is how she finally puts it. Joan used to think that I would go to hell for being a lesbian, but now she thinks I'll make it to purgatory because I'm practically a nun anyway. This makes me think that our house is like a home for unwed mothers. Joan is a wayward girl, I'm Mother Superior, and when it's ready to come out someone will take it away forever. Then it will be just the two of us. Gerard, the seed of the miracle, is in Thompson. He has no idea of Joan's last name or of what has sprouted up in this southern city since his sudden departure. Joan says she thinks Gerard is a miner, toiling in the belly of the north. Blasting riches from the dirt with his strong arms and shoulders. But I think of him as a pirate, working the shaft only to conceal his treasure, planting jewels in the walls of the earth. I think Joan must be marked with an X in a spot I can't see, and every day I find myself watching for Gerard, expecting him to return to claim his cache. It is spring and she walks to meet me every day after work, bored by then of the soap operas she watches during the day. It is the first time in her life since junior high that she has stopped working, and she claims it agrees with her. She says people don't want to see a pregnant waitress while they're eating, as though the gentle bulge on her slight frame might put them off their coleslaw. By the time we get inside, Joan is tired from the spurt of exercise, her body being fuelled only by cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food. I try to picture the baby in her belly, twisting on its cord, stunted by the poisons in her system. It's hard for me to believe in something I can't see, which is maybe whyjoan believes in God and I don't. But even she doesn't seem to believe in this yet, the tiny thief without a face living off her blood. She kicks off her flip-flops. The space between her first two toes is split, 29 oozing wet and pink. I look for Band-Aids as she lowers herself onto the corduroy couch. "Why do you wear them if they hurt your feet?" I ask. The medicine cabinet is a test pattern of drugstore advertisements. Scooby-Doo Band- Aids nestled between Imodium tablets and Revlon shimmer powder. Joan stares at the ceiling. "Why do women have babies if it feels like their insides are being ripped out?" Before I can reply she adds, "None of my other shoes will fit around my ankles anymore." She is blaring the stereo as loud as it will go, the framed Spanish devotional cards vibrating in mute dissent. The saints hold their tongues, and so do I, thinking about the instincts of animals, the laws of nature that force us all to make our own mistakes. Cradling her belly, Joan bangs her head to the rhythm, pressing her stomach up against the black of the speaker. Her face lost in the grease and tangle of her hair. "I want to blow its fucking ears out," she screams over the music. "I don't ever want to hear it whining it wants to go to Disneyworld." It turns out that babies can hear in the womb, their tiny fishbone ears as sensitive as telephone wires. Joan says she'll teach it sign language and their house will be silent and peaceful as a church. There will be only coughing and the drawing of breaths. The almost inaudible noises of waiting and growing. It is summer and she is huge and dating a man named Larry, a thin, tenuous man with pleated pants. He keeps one hand on Joan's arm as she introduces him. I notice his bony wrists, the darkened bags under his eyes. I see Joan push back her shoulders, touch one finger to the gloss on her bottom lip. She's wearing perfume again. The scent of jasmine and oranges reminds me of Gerard. Larry is explaining how they met. Her leaving the video store, green and yellow cotton stretched over her basketball stomach, beads of sweat on her forehead and between her bare shoulder blades. Him walking down Portage, alive to beauty, seeing only the freshness of youthful bodies and the Saturday high heels. Him saying no to all the people asking for change, and following her into Tim Horton's, because he is impulsive and believes in taking control of his own destiny. His bottom lip juts out, pulls to the right as he says the word, and I think of asking him to say fate, kismet, providence to see if it is a congenital tic or a revelation of his own skepticism. Larry believes in the purity of the sexual impulse. He tells me when he started followingjoan he knew that she would not be wearing a wedding 30 band. "Sometimes, it's true, they're not wearing them because their fingers have become too swollen, but more often than not, married women will give off a different vibe. They have this kind of insular aura of self-satisfaction, which is in itself very sexy. But Joanie was giving off this intense current of almost primordial vigour. I could tell that she felt powerful and that her sense of power was making her aroused." Joan smiles, stirs her chamomile tea with a chopstick. Behind Larry's back, she winks at me, grabbing her own breast. My spine relaxes and I grin back. Larry is a brownish blur as I focus on her face. I wish for this to really be a convent after all, with Larry outside the door, begging for sanctuary. At first Larry thinks I'm interesting. He asks what I know about dildos, clit rings, and fisting. I ask him what he knows about print pornography and little boys. A frown wrinkles Larry's forehead. He pushes his hair behind his ears. "I am not a pedophile or any kind of pervert. I am a connoisseur of a rare beauty." He calls me a prudish dyke, then a dykish prude because he says I am more uptight than anything else. It isjoan's birthday, and I give her a feather boa: pink flecked with threads of gold. Larry nods, licks his lips in approval. He says it is traditional to give a striptease when presented with the gift of a boa. I tell him he is full of shit and Joan laughs, her muscular face suddenly belying the soft pliancy of her body at rest. She struggles off the couch, puts James Taylor on the stereo. The boa droops from her neck, falling to either side of her breasts. Joan steps onto the hooked rug in front of the couch and plants herself in the centre, the dark, bloated surfaces of her feet criss-crossed with sharp tan lines. Eyes closing, Joan pulls at the sides of her flowered sundress. I see her calves, the hair rubbed away on the insides of her legs. "I love a woman who doesn't shave," Larry confides. His mouth is straight and serious. I look at him watching her, at the hollow of his eyes under his brow bone. My goal is to be as selfless as a surrogate, to love and to claim nothing. Even Joan's absent father of a deity, with his admirable parental technique of non-interference, requires more. Joan giggles, dropping to her knees. Her fingers find her hair, twisting out the tangles that have grown in the dark, matted at the back of her skull during long hours on the couch. I bring myself to the floor, and thrusting my hand in, feel the stickiness of her hair, the feverish warmth of her scalp. 31 I coax out the snarls. "Let me wash your hair." I twist open the taps, pouring in capfuls of raspberry bubble bath. She asks me to light eight of the nine Our Lady of Guadeloupe and St. Francis of Assisi candles that line the window ledge above and I do, using the long wooden matches from the jar beside them. With one hand on her stomach, Joan tests the running water, her knees pressing against the wide, curving edge of the claw-footed tub. She tells me that temperatures over thirty- eight degrees have been linked to birth defects, and stooping, she adds more cold water. She catches me looking at her, her face a bemused mirror of my own surprise and relief. And I grin back, blinking too rapidly, my cheeks hot and twitching. Joan's robe falls from her shoulders and I hold her hand as she steps into the tub. Millions of tiny blue spider-veins blossom across her stretched skin. Below the trailing edge of her hair, her breasts are now heavy and large, twice the size they were in the winter. I feel my nipples harden as I look at hers, the dark pink buds that make smacking sounds in Larry's mouth when he sucks on them. And then she is in, wet beneath the frothy blanket of bubbles. I bring down the showerhead to wash her hair, and when I am done, she turns it on me, soaking my baggy clothes with the spray until they cling, until I peel them off and leap into the water. Toe to shoulder, shoulder to toe, we prune ourselves in the tub until the bubbles have all disappeared. It is September and we are hanging the photo above the fireplace: Joan nude and fully pregnant, a three-quarter profile in a golden glow. Larry is more modest than I expect and I compliment him on his work. "It doesn't take any talent to make that look beautiful," he says, and Joan smiles. I look from her open face and loose hair to Larry's patterned purple shirt and scuffed loafers. "I bet you have a big photo collection on your computer, eh, Larry?" He looks at me, scratches in a vague way at the hair on his chest. "Yes I do. Almost three thousand. Only a small percentage is my own work, however." There is nothing for me to say then, for Joan's water breaks and Larry's face falls as he begins to weep. It is dark as the taxi weaves towards the hospital. The taxi driver explains he is taking his time because he used to be a doctor in his own country. Joan tells him that she needs drugs, that otherwise she would be happy to 32 have him deliver her baby. The taxi driver nods, looking back at us in his rear-view mirror. Larry sits on his right, his eyes fixed ahead, on the road. Joan's cries of pain remind me of the sounds of her sex with Larry, the small yelps I always imagined to be coming from the baby within. At the entrance to the hospital, I find a wheelchair and help Joan from the taxi, my hands shaking in time to her heavy breathing. Larry is tender, regretful. He bends to kiss Joan's belly, his fingers running down towards her crotch. His hand planted between her legs, he fixes his eyes on her flushed, contorted face. "You are so hot," he says, and leaves. He gets into the backseat that we have just vacated, waving aside the confusions of the driver. I telljoan that he is probably sniffing the upholstery for one last kick, and she grabs my hand, her face masked in either a smile or a grimace. 33 Joelene Heathcote Nothing Says Love Like a Needle All evening a thin woman I thought was a man explained the ecstasy of sewing her breasts with fishing line, of hooking the flesh between her shoulder blades and being lifted to a high place like an angel on stage. Hard nipples, she said were ideal for the threading and suggested teasing as though I considered making tracks of my own small endowment. I dressed another cracker with a bacon-wrapped oyster and pulling the toothpick from the belly said, Why stop there? meaning, make a stickpin ladder of the body, a sort of acupuncturist's wet dream. And then I said, If you will? to show my willingness to consider art. She said sure she gave seminars on stitching labia as a way of building couple trust, destroying the politics of power that often choke love out. I uncrossed my legs to breathe. Oh, let my lover make my twat a trampoline! I sat on my friend's lap, stuffing my mouth with the sort of bite-size stuffed pastry that tends to explode on your chin and chest and I was trying to remember at what point I might've considered an option like this, when it was I'd have asked my love to rise and make a stairway of my body to the heavens, lace a tiny hammock with the hands, a smaller version of a cat's cradle, a net so fine it catches in its strings the simple drops of dew in love's divide. 34 Say None of This What if underneath all this there is nothing very sharp at all, no poison-tipped exit. Say none of this is happening. The dishes piled in your sink owe everything to love, the floating shells of pink shrimp, the white of ginger whose hard skin is all that's left of everything you've devoured. You will not come home and find a woman in your kitchen touching herself through a dress that clings just so to the insides of her thighs. Witness her fingering honey and red chillies into a hot pan; though you pull a kitchen chair up to watch, nothing will ever unravel you. So say it isn't later, though it is, when you press your palm across her mouth to stop the words that sometimes rise around your name, the very movement of your body lifting red birds from the damp mangroves of her hair. It takes a different kind of man to stop at this, to whittle from your heart that word you make a weapon—what you sharpen with your teeth so you might go on living and killing between land and water and not be taken in by either. 35 Kevin Chong Ten Albums I Love About Her 10. Zen Arcade Once, late at night, she ran across the street to return a video. I waited, tapping the wheel of the idling car to the double-time beat of an old punk rock CD she liked. This was when she had another boyfriend. She stood next to the front entrance and pointed to a sign that said "Quik Drop" before she collapsed to the ground. "The things I'll do to entertain you," she said, as she returned to me, dusting the seat of her slacks with a look of self-satisfaction. 9. Pink Moon She had small, imperfect teeth the shape of rice puffs and skin like cinnamon butter. The back of her canary yellow tank top was damp with humidity, her breasts jutting out absent-mindedly. This was back when we were undergrads. She was not exactiy luminescent, it wasn't a glow that came from her; it was as though she were teetering between lust and outrage. There was a gaggle of men spiralling around her. Boyish men who wore tight, kitschy t-shirts. Burly, hairy guys in hockey jerseys. Sophisticated, sneering men. Forceful, foul-tempered men. Men old enough to be graduate students. Boys like me who listened to vinyl records with the lights off. She treated us equally, like comic foils, each one a potential punch line. Throwing her darts, one foot off the floor, she would stumble forward. 8. Sweetheart of the Rodeo She had separated, but not filed for divorce. She was out of work, house- sitting for friends of her parents. We walked upstairs, the sound of the CD I brought over growing faint. The windows of the bedroom allowed a view of the water, oily and thick as yoghurt. The night sky was veined with streaks of blue. The room felt airless; its objects, while conscientiously dusted, unmoved and in their places for months. On the nightstand was a wedding photo of the couple she had been house-sitting for: they were nubile, hearty, and two-dimensional. The bed frame was made of black wrought iron, as if it had been fabricated from recycled prison bars. 36 "I usually sleep in the guest room," she pointed upstairs. "A single bed. I need to wake up early tomorrow." "Okay." "I really do." "Sure," I said. "What are you thinking?" She shrugged. Standing on a Persian rug at the edge of the bed, her mouth pursed anxiously as I cruised toward her. She let her jacket drop to her floor. With a gentle shove, she was on the bed. I helped her out of the fire engine red leather skirt, peeled off her fishnet stockings, and pulled her beige cotton underwear to her ankles, which were awkwardly crossed. Her knees were raised and bent, and I ran my hand along her calves: they were soft, but goose-pimpled. I lowered my head until I caught the smell of crotch. It was dark, but I could see a fleck of toilet paper. I lifted one of her legs, so that her knee was in the air and her foot on my shoulder. As her breathing grew heavy, she dug the heel of her foot against my neck. 7. Anti-Love I would show up at her door and wait for her to drop her keys from her window. We would drink decaffeinated English Breakfast tea and listen to the funk records I lent her, and then we would fuck on the couch. I was still tense around her. Even when I don't know it, I'm tense. Sometimes she would turn off the light, sometimes she'd draw shut the curtains, but occasionally she didn't and I'd worry about who might be watching us. On those occasions, I would go soft as soon as I penetrated her. I would get dressed and leave. "I have this fear," I said once afterwards, "that I'll come and go in your life; I'll be someone interesting in your life, someone amusing from the past that you never have a falling out with, but whose calls you fail to return." "Don't be stupid. It's cruel of you to say that." "I don't have that sort of effect on women. They take an interest in me for a while, but they move on long before I do. I choose women who are too cosmopolitan for me. They take up with more exciting men, they get grants to study architecture in countries with dry and rainy seasons. They have too many options to choose from." "You must think I'm so shallow." Yes, I was whiny and shrill, but she belonged to Lawyers Without Borders. 37 6. Some Girls Tasting my own kiss on her skin, I was reminded of some prior intimacy, her bottom lip in my mouth like a sliver of organ meat. It was like different versions of the same song: should I file them alphabetically, chronologically, or by order of preference? She groaned and then I politely turned her on her back and pinned her against the sheets, propping my elbows above her as I entered her. She held her breath. I demanded her attention. When she looked away, up to the ceiling, I stopped, waiting for the corner of her eye to return to me before I continued. She reached up and cradled my face in her hands, before turning her head away from me another time. Something passed. What was she thinking? Maybe she was thinking about the number seven, how you could make change of it with a five- dollar bill and two dollar bills or five singles and eight quarters, how there were four sevens in her phone number, how her birthday was in July; then she thought about another number, then another number, until she arrived where she arrived. 5. The Idiot This is my last, best memory of her, before she decided she needed to grow up and marry a man twenty-three years older than me. We were in her condo, lying on her single bed, fully clothed in the afternoon. I had spent the morning there flipping through her fashion magazines and a copy of The Sheltering Sky and watching her snore until just an hour before when she reached across to swat her clock radio. A spider crawled across her floor in the candlelight and I sat up. "What's wrong with you?" She thought about this and said: "I think I'm shy." "What have you been smoking?" I said with a friendly sneer. "You don't act shy. Not at all." "Oh, you know," she said, considering, "I overcompensate." 4. All Shook Down In the months after we stopped speaking, I felt as though I could recite every word she'd uttered to me from the loop playing in my head. This was the summer before I moved east, between degrees, when I was allergic to any other kind of concentrated thinking. In a high school science class, we were given an experiment that tested blind spots, involving a piece of blank paper and two dots. We were supposed to cover one eye, and concentrate on one dot. Moving the paper 38 from our faces, the other dot would disappear. Some circuitry in our brain would fill in the blank area with white. I felt as though my recollection had its blind spots filled in the same way. My daydreams for her felt like a class project in itself, a pointless exercise undertaken for the purpose of instruction and not worth repeating. 3. After the Gold Rush In the morning, she ate cross-eyed, with her eyes fixed on her nose. She had a fabulously insatiable appetite, and liked cereal, crispy bacon, and various flat breads. We argued about what to call the top halves of muffins. "Crowns," I said. "Caps," she said. This was before she became the music critic at the free weekly. Three of her ten favourite singles from 2003 were mine as well, four I disliked, and the rest I had never heard of. 2. Tennessee Fire Lying in bed, she took out her journal and wrote down her list of secrets. I would read them over the next day. Her roommate had stayed over at her girlfriend's, and I brought her journal into the kitchen, where I stood naked, drinking orange juice. I could hear the shuffling rhythm of the couple next door. She was still in the shower. 7. / wish people would pay attention to me as they do other people. 2. I wish my parents would pay attention to me as they do my brother. 3. I'm worried I'll lose my hair like my mom. Seeing me read her list of secrets, full of embarrassment, she considered throwing it in the trash, she considered burning it, but ultimately she tore it up into little squares, which she ate to punish herself. 1. Anodyne Our mouths have become dry. The room grows quiet as CDs change. The plastic buckling of the changers, the whine of the disc before it plays. She wraps a red silk robe around her and disappears for a drink of water as I lie on her single bed. When she returns, she climbs on top of me and pins my shoulders down and puts her wet mouth, cool as an ice cube, on mine. 39 Steven Price Houdini Considers his Wife The last hand to hold my father held him here. Machpelah Cemetery. Ma lurked, a soft box of skin, as Bess shied gravelside, solemn, that he might know her. Hands hooked steady as a kedge and holding fast. Or held fast. With its grizzled brick, its clanking pipes and felt-and-dye stink, that grim basement hat-shop became a kind of cabinet she could billow or draggle in close around her; all gust-tangled hair, scrub-palmed, shabbily she'd lurk there, a stranger to herself, drawn in to bare the puck or play of fat-flowered brims that hat by hat she yet might take the line of, might drape and slant and tock and fidget at a looking-glass until what looked back was not what looked in but an apparition of the almost, the unworn, of the anything-goes-and-to-come drathing her last, too-lucid days of girlhood. Now I come to this with her beside me, shining salt on her thighs, crushed wet leaf between them, I come to this with her: old, she will open like a book, dry or soft, each fold a warm papery fug of ink; old, I will rest my face like this, an ear pressed to her rib, listening. For she is finer to me than a thousand thousand clocks, more striking than sickled cuffs, this letter I write is a sack unfilled, these lines without her just air, golden burlap, aridity. In August the streets rain, she is the exact shade of a bruise or winter plum; 40 all autumn she is white as peeled bark; brilliant grains of sand tack the boardwalk at her feet, a small sifting of the earth. I come to this with her: I have loved warmth, blackness, husks of sex, golden Beatrice, Beatrice my Budapest. The jellied give of locks, greased in, shuddering, the tightening of pins sliding home: all of it fingered, lubricious, enterable and entered into like language. Salt-thick. A loose vaginal groove of pick and key. How she'd stub or shamble into trunks, ladders, chests, awkward before a crowd yet glide with the careful verity of monks when alone, when her curved wasp-slender hips flowed with the relied-upon and regular-as-rust assurance some goodness must come next; or her hard-knuckled, washtub hands at dusk flexing that stiff grace all hurt flesh collects, a sort of bruised largesse which steadied her words like one long jeered at; I loved her for such things. And her unsullied, generous laugh that cured street-grime, stall-grit, the awful grag of things. Thin and thrush-eyed and strange. Listing awkward with life, as with a bad leg. 41 Bess naked naked naked. Shy and lightly dimpled. Her thighs freckled like a long-moist leather held in their golden hairs astonishment and the furred inelegant calligraphies of the ordinary. Mud-filled ruts in streets; soft shrouds rotted like sailcloth; the wood-bent, rent, forty-seven nails of my father's sleep— 0 I admit a seam-split, bulging, abundant love, a drawn-up, drenched-off, brimful, dripping-with-it love that sated all and overspilled our sleep; 1 admit to sodden joy, laughter, and our odd lack of wonder, as if it were enough to live blessed in it, blind; one does not ask who gives. Holy holy holy. Even the seraphim cover their faces from God. And all at once all burst in ripeness and in light— pressed close, luminous, I did not know and knew, this must, her, Beatrice, blazed hurt and heartening, be wayfarer, be water in this life. 42 Joonseong Park The Broken Umbrella There had been a farewell party for Lee, an old acquaintance from Kei's undergraduate alma mater—Lee was leaving Aggieland with a PhD in Poultry Science; he had been offered a post-doc position at a college in Louisiana. At the party, Kei had been talking about an aspiring writer who came to Korea after graduating from a Creative Writing program in the US. He taught English at Ewha Women's University in Seoul. "I knew this guy Jeff O'Brien. I was drinking soju with him at a pojangmacha, and he was pretty drunk. This guy said he's going to stay in Korea one more year because of the women; he's so popular with these Korean college girls that a couple of them want marriage. He already slept with a few girls at Ewha. Do you know what I said? I said 'Man, keep up the good work.'" Kei noticed Lee frowning when he was finished. He didn't know that Lee's wife went to Ewha, the most prestigious women's college in Korea. "Do you know what Newsweek magazine called Ewha girls? Slaves to money!" Kei said. There was an article in Newsweek several years ago about the Korean economic boom in the 90's and its effect on younger generations of college students. The article stated that Ewha girls' only reason to go to college was to meet and get married to future physicians and lawyers. It had caused controversy, and three Ewha undergraduates whose photographs were used to illustrate the story sued the magazine and won their case. "Aren't you Korean, Kei?" Lee exploded. "You can't talk like that if you're Korean. You're not going back to Korea, are you?" It led to a heated argument. Other people stepped in and tried to change the subject. Their pregnant wives joined in to talk about their pregnancies: what kind of food they should avoid, what kind of music they listened to for their babies, what baby shower gifts they received from their American friends, what foods they craved. "My mother told me once she desperately wanted to eat black shoe polish during her pregnancy," Kei said. They all went silent, looking at one another nervously, not sure whether they should laugh or if Kei was trying to start an argument again. "Shoe polish?" one of the wives said with an awkward smile, and then they went 43 on with their conversation. Another wife said that she wanted to eat Chajangmyon, a Koreanized Chinese dish, so much that she and her husband drove all the way to a Korean-Chinese restaurant in Killeen, Texas, where there was a small community of Korean military wives. Kei had just sat there, nodding and trying to laugh when other people laughed, but soon he was tired of all the talk about babies and pregnancies, so he kept drinking, staring at their bulging bellies. It was breeding season, he thought. They waited until they came to the States to have babies. As salmon migrate up the streams to spawn, a huge number of married couples from foreign countries came to the States on student or tourist visas or illegally, just to give birth, so that they could gain citizenship for their children. After he left the party, Kei cruised around town. He didn't want to go back to his apartment. There were no cars on the streets. He headed into downtown Bryan. Huge trash dumpsters stood along the side of a two- storey brick building. The road began to curve as it went over the railroad tracks. Traffic signals hung precariously with span wires over the intersections, and the old Western-style awnings and storefronts made him think that time had stood still for centuries in this town. The pregnant wives' bulging bellies still lingered in Kei's mind. They reminded him of his literature teacher in the seventh grade. She had been pregnant with her first baby. One day, she lifted her eyes from the textbook and leaned back in her chair. She removed her thick glasses and swung them by the earpiece as she glanced at Kei, stuck the earpiece in her mouth, then said, "Do you know who the cutest boy in this class is?" The entire room went silent. "It's Kei." Students booed and slapped the desks with hands and books, drummed their feet on the wooden floor. Kei blushed and looked down, wanting to hide under the desk. Kei drove out of the historic district, heading to campus in College Station. He passed the Korean church which he used to visit to eat Korean food, but had stopped going to after a few months. Several times he had arrived late during the sermons. One Sunday morning, as Pastor Kim was preaching about Noah's Ark, the forty days and nights of raining and the flooding, Kei came late again. At lunch, the pastor had asked Kei to pray in front of all the church members before they started eating the beef stir- fry, Bulgogi. Kei, who had never prayed in his life, didn't know what to say. He closed his eyes and babbled about the food and the good weather, even though it was over one hundred degrees outside. He finished his prayer by thanking the Lord. When he opened his eyes, he felt ashamed of his poor Korean. The church members looked at him with awkward smiles that told him he didn't belong there. 44 Kei arrived home and drew a bath. He dozed for a while, lying in the tub of hot water. He remembered going to the public bathhouse with his brother and his father. For years after his father's funeral, Kei didn't believe he was really dead. Nobody told him how his father had died. He was fine the last time Kei had visited him with his mother at the hospital. Kei thought it was just a game. It was not his father who had been laid under the ground. He expected his father to show up one day at the front door with Christmas presents, like a magician in a cape and top hat. He thought his father had gone to America to study at a graduate school In freezing cold winter, Kei and his brother started to go to the public bathhouse alone. They practiced swimming in the large, communal bathtub. Kei showed off by diving underwater and holding his breath. They jumped back and forth from the cold water to the hot water tub, and then went into the sauna, betting who could stay inside longer. "You're just playing in the bathhouse, not washing your body," Kei's mother said one day. "You have to come to the bathhouse with me." "Mom, I'm a man now. I can't go to the women's bathhouse." "Yes, you can. You're just a kid," his mother said. The next time Kei went with his mother, while his brother went to the men's bathhouse with their uncle. When Kei and his mother tried to pay at the entrance, the woman inside the ticket booth asked Kei's mother how old he was. She said he looked too big to get in. His mother said he was just five years old, grabbed his hand and pulled him inside. In the locker room, naked women walked around with towels wrapped around their necks, some drying their bodies, some putting on brassieres and panties. Kei looked into the bathhouse through the steamed window. It was the same as the men's: a large public bathing room with a pool of hot water. The bathers squatted around the pool and used small buckets to splash water over themselves. Kei and his mother undressed and put their winter clothes into the locker. They slid the glass door open and stepped into the bathhouse. Hot steam wafted up. Kei sat next to his mother. Women of all ages lounged in twos and threes, chattering in low voices and assisting each other in the intimate activities of washing, towelling, and drying. Kei knew many of the women from the neighbourhood. He glared at their bushy pubic hair. They slouched around like overfed cats, confident and nonchalant: pot bellies, jiggly thighs, taut stomachs, wide hips, bulky calves—he saw every size and shape imaginable. "Kei, what are you doing out there? Get into the pool," his mother shouted from the water. The women were relaxed, sitting in the steaming water, some with their eyes closed, heads resting against the edge of the pool. 45 "Mommy, it's too hot," Kei said, standing at the rim of the pool. The water poured out of a large faucet, sending spumes of steam up into the air. All the women in the pool, with only their heads out of the water, watched Kei dip his one foot in and pull it out quickly. "Once you're in, it's not that hot. Look at the little girl sitting here," his mother said. Kei knew the girl. They went to the same kindergarten. A fat hand slapped Kei's rear when he still hesitated. It was the butcher's heavyset wife. All the women in the pool laughed as Kei blushed and covered his private parts. "Hey, he's a man now," the butcher's wife said, eyeballing Kei from head to toe, and she laughed loud, her arms resting along the rim of the pool, fingers trailing absently. When she laughed, her body jiggled, and water ebbed and flowed across her large breasts. Kei wanted to hide himself from these large women, and the only place was underwater. He slipped in silently. Kei grew too tall to enter the women's bathhouse anymore. In the fourth grade he stopped touching his mother's breasts and sleeping in her bed. "Kei, do you remember your father?" his mother asked him. "You're exactly like your father." After his father's death, Kei had sought escape in the comic world. He had a huge collection of comic books. His favourites were Xena: Warrior Princess and Wonder Woman. He had a domed metal lunch box that showed Wonder Woman surrounded by the Stars and Stripes on the front and in her invisible airplane on the back. Kei gravitated towards tall women since childhood. In his first year in college, he volunteered to work as a water boy for the women's collegiate volleyball team. He was close to one of the players, the tallest girl on the team and on campus: she was six foot five inches tall. Jina was in her final year but she didn't have much playing time. She was too slow to compete with the other girls on the court; she couldn't jump quickly at the net. Most of the time she sat next to Kei on the bench, watching the others play. Kei wrestledjina every night they were together. He tried to choke her from behind, and she would ask, "Is this real?" It always ended with Jina restraining him, sitting on his chest, pinning his arms with her legs, asking, "Give up? No more wrestling, okay?" She ballooned to over two hundred and forty pounds. She had probably realized she would never be able to play professional volleyball. Kei went with Jina to watch the women's volleyball game between the United States and Korea at the Seoul Olympic Games. He was amazed by how tall and agile the American players were. He was mesmerized by their acrobatic diving digs, high jump serves, powerful dunks and shields. They dominated the Korean team and silenced the crowd throughout the 46 game. When the game was over, Kei got out of his seat and went to the side aisle of the stands. He leaned over the guardrails and watched the girls leave the court, walk down the back hallway under the stands, and down the tunnel leading to the locker rooms. Kei had admired those American girls with their long legs and big asses. Kei heard the apartment maintenance man talking outside his window. He got up, washed, got dressed, cut his lip while shaving, slipped and fell down while taking a shower. He ate breakfast and took a large vitamin pill on which he almost choked, then he biked to school. At his office, he went to his desk in the corner and started to read. Brian, Kei's office-mate, came into the room with his friend with the long sideburns. The friend's shirtsleeves were rolled up over his hairy arms. He stood behind Kei and glanced at the books on the shelves, then sat down on the edge of Brian's desk. They talked for half an hour about the Aggies' upcoming football game with the Long Horns. As they left the office, Brian clicked off the lights and slammed the door shut, leaving Kei alone in the dark. It was the second time this semester that Brian had turned off the lights when Kei was still in the office. Kei heard voices from outside. People in the room next door were speaking loudly. He stood slowly and walked toward the switch. He groped for it. "How are you, Mr. Kei? Is everything all right?" Dr. Diana Ballaster came into the department mailroom. She never called Kei by his first name, Cheongryul. He understood how difficult it must be to pronounce his foreign name. Dr. Ballaster was a stout, middle- aged lady with blonde hair puffed into a faintly absurd bouffant. Her husband was Director of Undergraduate Studies in English. They were getting a divorce; he had cheated on her with a student in his undergraduate seminar, "Sexuality, Aestheticism and Decadence in Victorian Literature." He was leaving Aggieland and was going to teach in South Carolina the next year. When Kei had first met Dr. Ballaster in her office at the beginning of the semester, he sized her up, scanning her from bottom to top. Dr. Ballaster towered over Kei. She stood over six feet and three inches tall, on long, powerful legs. She had reached over, put her large hand on his, and smiled. Kei blushed. His heart sped up its pumping, his arteries throbbing as waves of blood rushed through his body. She was beautiful, Kei thought, with her high clean forehead and blue eyes. She reminded him of Julie Andrews as the governess in The Sound of Music. Kei was a grader for her undergraduate class, "American Literature from the Civil War to the Present." There were about a hundred and forty 47 students. He took attendance and graded exams. Dr. Ballaster, as the tallest woman in the department, had grabbed Kei's attention even before he became her grader. From a distance, Kei would watch her going to the main office, to the bathroom, or talking to her colleagues in the main hall; his heart started beating fast whenever he ran into her in the building. She always said "Howdy" with a big smile on her round face. "I need to give you a quiz for next class, and some make-up exams. Let's go to my office," Dr. Ballaster said, picking up her mail. Kei walked behind her, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on her large buttocks. She turned to Kei and said, "You should walk next to me, not a few steps behind. This is America, not Asia," lowering the tone of her voice. She grinned at him and wagged her finger in his face. On the bookshelf in her office, there was a framed photo of a tall, blonde girl with a volleyball in her hand, standing on the court, waiting to serve. Dr. Ballaster had played at a small college in Arkansas. She sat in her swivel chair, and her buttocks bulged out over the sides. Kei wondered whether he could put his arms around them. "When's the second midterm?" Dr. Ballaster asked. "It's two weeks from now." She took out her PDA and stared hard at the tiny screen in her palm. Dr. Ballaster was always interested in new gadgets. Kei remembered her saying that she had been the first person in the department to use a cell phone. She was also the only one in the entire department who had been to the Great Wall of China. It was funny to watch such a large woman with broad shoulders hunched, typing on the miniature keyboard with the tip of her pen. Dr. Ballaster handed the quiz and exams to Kei. On one of the students' test sheets, Kei saw a drawing of a heart with a Cupid's arrow shot through it. He imagined the Cupid popping out of the exam paper, flapping his angel wings, his yellow bow in hand. He drew an arrow from the quiver on his back and loaded his bow, aimed it at Kei's throbbing heart. After giving Kei a wink, the Cupid released the arrow. Boink. It shot through his heart, and Kei fell backwards. "Kei," Dr. Ballaster said. "What are you doing? You can go now." "See you later then," Kei said, walking out of the office, still grabbing at the arrow. At the start of the lecture, Kei gazed down at Dr. Ballaster, his chin resting on his hand. He felt so tired after having slept only a few hours the night before that he dozed on and off. Suddenly, the half-dozen strategically placed speakers in the auditorium emitted an alert tone, startling him out of sleep. "May I have your attention please. A tornado watch has been issued by the Brazos County Emergency Management System for our city 48 and surrounding areas. Please exit your classroom or work area immediately and leave the campus." The students packed up their books and began to file out of the auditorium. The room emptied out quickly until only school newspapers and plastic soda bottles lay strewn on the floor. "Do they come often?" Kei said, walking next to Dr. Ballaster. "What?" "Tornadoes." "Oh, they come and go." Outside it was raining hard. The rain hit the pavement with a resounding slap. Lighming flashed and thunder rumbled in the distance. Kei watched streams of water in the street flowing into the gutters. He whipped out his umbrella and looked at Dr. Ballaster next to him. "You didn't bring your umbrella?" he asked. "I left it at my office." Kei's umbrella was too small for two people to share, and Dr. Ballaster was a large woman. When he walked behind her, his small frame disappeared entirely behind her body. "Then we'll have to share my umbrella." "Okay," Dr. Ballaster said, with an awkward smile. She wrapped her arm around Kei's shoulders, her other hand covering his as they clutched the handle of the umbrella. She aimed it against the wind, leaning down, and they stepped out. The wind howled, whipping the rain against the umbrella canopy. They bent their upper bodies further forward, but it was difficult to walk straight. The rain came at them horizontally, quickly wetting Kei's pants and sneakers. As they neared the parking garage, a gust of wind caught the umbrella from underneath, breaking its spines, flapping its torn fabric. Dr. Ballaster folded it quickly and tried frantically to push it open, but it wouldn't. The wind blew into Kei, pushing straight through his windbreaker and his shirt; he felt as if he were flying. He lost his balance and fell. Dr. Ballaster took his hand, helped him to his feet and led him forward to the garage. He admired her strong legs for holding the ground. He thought he could survive any tornado if he could hold onto one of her legs. Dr. Ballaster snapped up the collar on her jacket and gestured for him to do the same. He did, smiling, scrubbing the rain from his face with the back of his hand. They took refuge inside the parking garage. Kei glanced at their hands entwined together. Dr. Ballaster blushed and released his hand. She breathed hard and said, "I'm sorry about the umbrella," covering the naked spokes with the ripped fabric and handing it back to him. In his wet clothes, Kei suddenly felt cold. "Where did you park your car?" she asked. "I didn't bring my car. I bike to school," he said, his teeth chattering. "I'll give you a ride home." 49 They set off down the road. Kei could barely see through the windshield as the wipers desperately flung water off its surface. "This is a big car," Kei said, glancing at Dr. Ballaster's wet dress. It clung to her skin, showing every curve underneath. He sat up, stretching his arms and folding them behind his head. "Everything is big here. Burgers, cars, people," he said. He laid his arm along the back of her seat, tapped it with his hand, then slowly slipped his arm down to rest around her shoulder. "Yeah, Texas is big too," she said, slapping Kei's hand away. He quickly stretched his arms upwards again, faking a yawn, and then placed his hands on his lap. "Kei, buckle up." Kei sat up straight in his seat, holding his hands out on an imaginary steering wheel. "What're you doing?" "I'm driving too." Kei used his foot to throttle an imaginary gas pedal, complete with sound effects. "Kei, behave yourself. Don't distract me. It's hard to see outside." "Yes, ma'am." Kei stopped manipulating his imaginary wheel and said, "I wonder why they have the steering wheel on the right side in Europe and Japan." A number of cars had pulled over to the side of the road, but Dr. Ballaster pressed on with much caution, driving slowly eastward. "Congratulations on winning the writing award!" she said. "Thanks for your help." "You're talented. I've never read a story like that." Dr. Ballaster was the first person ever to read an English story written by Kei. He had asked her to proofread it before he submitted it to the contest. "I'd never written a story before. I was a philosophy major." "What kind of philosophy?" "Continental. I wrote my bachelor's thesis on Heidegger's 'Being-unto- Death.'" " 'Being-unto-Death'? Oh, I know his Time and Being.'" When they arrived at the apartment, sheets of rain were beating down. There was rolling thunder and lightning. It was raining so hard they just sat there with the heater on for a few minutes, getting more and more nervous. "Get ready to run to the building!" Dr. Ballaster said. "I'm already wet." "You live alone? Do you have a roommate?" she asked, looking at herself in the rear-view mirror. 50 "No, I live in a small studio. Where do you live?" he asked. "Navasota." "You shouldn't take the highway in this downpour." "Well, I don't know...." "You have to wait until the rain slows down," Kei insisted. The wipers were still moving frantically. Dr. Ballaster turned them off. "Kei, I forgot to go to the bathroom after class." "Oh." Kei turned his head. Their eyes locked. "I need to go now," she said, turning off the engine and taking the key out of the ignition. "All right," said Kei. They got out and fought their way to his apartment. Kei's clothes and books were scattered over the floor. His convertible bed was set up in front of the window. He had a TV, a beat-up armchair, a scratched dining table and an eight-foot wooden bookcase. Kei felt uncomfortable having a visitor in the apartment. He quickly picked his socks and pants up off the floor and threw them in the closet. He heard the toilet flush, and Dr. Ballaster came out of the bathroom, tousling her hair with a towel. "You have a creepy picture up there," she said. On the wall, there was a framed picture of Vincent van Gogh with his bandaged ear. Van Gogh had painted himself after he sliced off one of his ears with a razor and gave it to a prostitute. "Van Gogh is a true artist. I have a book of his paintings. Do you want to see them?" "Later, maybe." Kei changed into dry clothes in the bathroom. "You can take off your wet clothes, too, if you want." "What do I put on, then?" "I can give you a sweatshirt and pants." Kei retrieved some spare clothes from his closet. "Aren't these too small for me?" she asked, hesitantly picking up the pants and holding them in front of her. "They stretch." "I don't want to stretch out your pants." "Don't worry. It's fine." Dr. Ballaster went into the bathroom again. When she got out, Kei muffled his laughter with his hand. The legs of the sweatpants were so short that the elastic cuffs dug into her calves, and the pants were so tight on her lower body that she could barely move. The sweatshirt was also too small for her; it rode up her forearms and her waist, revealing her belly. She tried to pull it down to cover her belly button. "I look silly," Dr. Ballaster said, smiling. "Today is a really strange day." 51 She stood at the window, opened the blinds and looked out, touching the window as raindrops bounced off the other side. Kei came up behind her, admiring her broad shoulders, her wide flaring lats, her full and meaty thighs. He put his hands on her shoulders and hopped onto her back, wrapping his arms around her neck. "Uh.. .what're you doing?" Dr. Ballaster leaned forward. "Am I heavy?" "No," she said. "Then can I stay like this for a while?" Kei rested his head comfortably on her shoulder, and breathed in her scent. She was silent for a moment. After a long sigh, she spoke in a low voice. "Okay." "Diana, walk around the room a little bit." "What for?" "Oh please, carry me around the room." She started pacing back and forth with Kei straddled on her hips, and Kei remembered his mother carrying him around the house—swaying back and forth, crooning a lullaby, Kei bound securely to her back with a quilt—as she waited for his father to come home. "You're very strong, stronger than Jina." "Xena, the Warrior Princess?" "No, my ex-girlfriend, Ji-na," Kei said, tightening his grip around her neck and wrapping his legs around her waist. Kei got off her back and flopped down on the bed. He looked out the window. Dr. Ballaster slowly sat on the edge of the bed next to him. She peered into the corners of the room, cracking her knuckles nervously. Then she yawned, stretched, reached her long arm over Kei, and fell back on the bed. Her arm hit his chest, pulling him down with her. Kei lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up straight and Dr. Ballaster did too. Gradually, the thunder and lightning outside subsided. Soon the rain slowed down. The wind calmed; it quickly became nothing more than a breeze. Dr. Ballaster peered sideways at Kei and coughed into her hand. "I'd better get going before it starts pouring again." Outside, she ran for the car. Kei followed her and stood in the rain. She waved her hand, motioning for him to go inside. Instead, Kei bowed slowly from the waist, his face and hair wet, then watched her old-model Mercedes Benz move out of the parking space and disappear into the night. The next morning, Kei drove to campus to pick up his bike. He took it to the bike shop to replace the flat tire. Then he came home, ate breakfast, and took a large vitamin pill. He biked back to school for a morning class 52 on Victorian Poetry. After class he went to Dr. Ballaster's office again. Kei looked out the window. A beautiful rainbow appeared in the distance. The sky was painted with every colour in the spectrum. It lasted only a moment and when Kei rubbed his eyes, it vanished. The sky was clear blue with thin, scattered clouds above, thicker and whiter along the horizon. The sun touched his cheeks with warm light. Kei turned to Dr. Ballaster. She looked upset. "Sometimes I doubt you even read the texts for class," she said, looking at the questions Kei had made for the final exam. He had only skimmed some of the texts, and he was always concerned that Dr. Ballaster would someday learn about it. "Is there something wrong?" "I don't like some of the questions. They're too similar to the ones I used last semester." "I can make new questions," Kei said. "I'm concerned there'll be too many As and B's in this class. You have to grade harder this time." "I know," Kei said, but he knew he would grade the same way. "And you shouldn't put the article here." She circled his errors with her red pen. Kei still had problems with the articles "the" and "a": when to use them and when not to. "Sorry. I thought the word needed an indefinite article." "Why can't you pronounce V and T correctly? Repeat after me. It's the word, not the world." "The word." "I know it's difficult, but you have to work hard. Repeat after me. Rock, lock." "Rock, lock." "Lock, rock." "Lock, rock." "Light, right." "Light, right." Dr. Ballaster drilled Kei with other words while he stood next to her, his hands gathered in front of him, his face getting red. Kei felt exhausted and powerless; he wanted to sit down but he just stood there, waiting for another word to practice. Then she said, "Kei, would you recite 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?' " Dr. Ballaster always admired his ability to memorize long poems. Kei was glad that the word drills were over. He rubbed his palms on his jeans and started reciting. Dr. Ballaster's eyes grew teary, watching Kei. She stared into his dark eyes and touched his straight hair, stroking it back from his forehead. She reached for his hand. They placed their hands together, palm-to-palm. She took him into her arms and kissed him. Kei found himself sitting on her 53 lap, placing his arm around her neck, stroking her hair softly as she wrapped her arm around his waist. "If you worked on your pronunciation and accent, you could pass for a native-English speaker. Are you sending your stories out?" "Yes." "You're going to be a hell of a writer." "Am I?" "I'll help you." Kei looked into Dr. Ballaster's wide blue eyes. A boyish smile crossed his face as his fingers traced the opening of her dress. He slipped his hand inside and closed it over her large breast. A moan escaped her lips as his fingers gently twisted her nipple. Kei leaned his head against her shoulder. He wished he could stay like that forever. 54 CB. Burgess How to Change from a "Woman" into a "Man" in Eight (Not So) Easy Steps Step 1: Bamboozle the Psychiatrist Aim for Johnny Cash with slapdash hair, ghost of a cigarette drooping from your fingertips. Don't smirk or titter. If your eyes skitter round the room, jig in their sockets like high-strung fillies, rein them in and sit them hard. Slug your ass in that chair and ride it, cowboy, knees splayed, ride it like you're not wearing fuchsia satin beneath your baggy-crotch jeans, sequins slung over your hips, a gunless belt of rebellion. You were hobbled by femininity, yessiree, and you're ready to trade those hobbles for manhood's bridle and bit. Don't say what you really want: silk scarves and a tux, muscled voice and breasts, vanilla oil and Old Spice. You want the hefted sex of wing tips and the thunk of bitch boots. You want to flutter your lashes and sling your legs wide, giggle and grunt, you want a cunt with a thirty calibre clit, and no, you don't want a dick, but by the goddess don't admit it. Step 2: Get the Low-Down from the Endocrinologist You're sure?she says. Mmm hmm, nod nod, oh yeah, gimme gimme that T, your whole body leaning forward off the chair into yes. She says maybe Sylvester Stallone, quite possibly a Reuben nude covered in peach fuzz, no guarantees. She says crack, pop, squeak, your voice, a rappeller with a fear of heights, will lurch and hiccup down pitch's slope, teeter on F-sharp's precipice, then plunge octaves down the cliff of sound. Might wind up dangling in mid air, neither here nor there, squeaking on its vocal cables. Your flab will take up mountain climbing and lug upward, cell over cell, your stomach's slope swelling into potbelly. Your clit will scrunch and scrunch and begin to bulge, a muscle doing reps. Like a weightlifter, it will develop a fat head and demand, incessantly, that you stroke its ego. 55 Step 3: Stickup the Pharmacy Try not to bump, shove, trample or otherwise bludgeon those ahead. Your heart ka thump ka thumps it's waited nine months it argues with your locked legs wants to bust out of your chest and barrel to the front of the line. Your turn come, sidle up and slide the script to the pharmacist. Just gimme the T and no one gets hurt. Plunk your butt on the bench and wait, cross uncross cross your legs, leap to your feet and pace, refrain from clambering over the neck-high counter. Don't use the Monistat shelf as a foothold. Lurch, grab the bag when it ghosts in her hand toward you, resist the urge to run. On the bus, slide the vial from the box repeatedly. Palm the cool plastic, hold it high so the sun glints through, be struck by the fluid's resemblance to oily urine. Look at the bill: realize you can finally tell your women's studies class the true cost of manhood—a dollar seventy per month. Step 4: Wait for the Needle Do not pass the time coining various onomatopoeic words to describe a needle's slide into flesh, such as schtick, thhuck, thhhap, thheet. Do not conduct your nerves as they tighten, fear-tuned, stiff as violin strings, in a symphony of wounded tweaks. I repeat, do not schting, schlip, schtike, the sounds saw saw sawing your synapses like stainless steel bows. Do not dwell on the needle's pause before it staccatos through the lower layer of epithelium, snags fibres and sinews fortissimo in a tumbling scale of eighth note twangs, then strikes BONG, not bone, one hopes, but the basso profundo of muscle. Step 5: Become Temporarily (?) Overheated and Stupid Post jab one, jitter like you've downed three shots of espresso double- double. Sleep like a sweaty corkscrew, wake with sheet looped around leg, covers on the rug. Ogle your dicklet in the hand mirror every ten minutes, haul back the hood, poke, twang, slide the shaft, feel it thicken, twine to sprung sponge overnight. Sing arpeggios to see if your voice has dropped—force it so low you sound like Kermit crossed with a kazoo. Be alarmed by the gap that gapes in your consciousness, as if you suddenly peer at the world across a chasm and through only one eye. Discover, as you essay on Deconstructing the Masculine Mystique, that you can no longer construct a brainy sentence. Watch your mind chase the phrase biological determinism around the page like a turtle trying to hump a gazelle. 56 Step 6: Discover the Ups and Downs of Sex as a Hormonal Male Though your crotch buzzes like a hive of bees, sparks like a Zippo lighter, twitches like an epileptic gecko, don't scratch. Jack off with ennui, twice a day, while you scrub your teeth. Mourn the wet fireflies that once flocked your flesh at the brush of a nipple, and which testosterone has blasted like a can of Raid. Troll a finger in your slot, twiddle your g-spot, jig the joint like a lure, get no nibbles: it's winter up the river and the fish are zonked. Feel your orgasms compact and crest, lose their mellifluous wash, gain the bunt and stub of pint-sized stegosauri. Discover the trouble with coming too fast: Buddy, you can only go one round now—don't blow it. Step 7: Confirm Some Stereotypes, Blast Some Sky High Start to punctuate your speech with pauses, maw gawping uhh uhh as you grasp for words, tongue a lead slab dropped loose from your brain's verbal centre. Stop head banging to the rasped cacophony and gunshot rage of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails; instead, groove and croon to the boppity bop and breathy falsetto of the Backstreet Boys. Become zooper- buoyant, grin like a gonzo and greet everybody howdy-doody for seventy- two hours after each jab. Miss the swell and hitch of saltsweet sorrow that no longer swamps you when you hear of heroism. Ride the roid rage seesaw with a startling twist: as testosterone drops, aggression skyrockets. Step 8: Get Called "Sir" for the First Time by a Zitty Supermarket Checkout Boy Good evening sir, his vowels swoop and screech. Squeak Yes! Yes very good indeed, as your soybean salami and buckwheat bagels beep through. Beam, shimmy your tush and hop a one-foot jig to the cash register's crackle and zing. Stop when the beefcake behind glowers, arms crossed, bicep tattoos twitching as he flexes: meet Hegemonic Masculinity's bouncer, who'd like to boot your faggy butt. Settle down and look around: cleavage glares from the glossy rack; sports magazines blare football, beer, belching and bonding through put-downs. Welcome to manhood, boi. 57 David Maelzer Thanksgiving, 1989 The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries -T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland My dears, you mourn me tardily—I died four years ago on a Seattle dance floor at a quarter to three, higher than God on crystal and boogieing fit to die when the Angel of Death smelled my moth scent heard my moth plea and came onto the dance floor to answer me. Boyish, lithe, curly-haired, grey-eyed with a gap-toothed smile, nipples like pink Rice Krispies, navel like a satin thimble cup, he chose his guise well for one such as me— a body purloined from some wet dream and the Dick of Death withal. And when it seemed the crystal had unmanned me what could I do but offer him some alternate joy—the lovely boy. Ah my dears, know this for truth, a part of me gave thanks. I'd never planned old bones. 58 Mark Cochrane Open Letter Ending what never started, you shuffled photographs of your mother, topless on the beach at White Rock. Gee—quel semaphore was that? After the martini party you scaled the tool shed & blubbered from the window ledge: We'd lost every key. From a tractor among the blackberries, in creosote breeze, I saw Grandmother hobble across the gumbo of barnyard ruts. Blue-rinse thunderheads. Grave-worms crawling in the folds— Your egg-wide hips, foreskin, your mah-jong-tile teeth. Navel stud—with a mole, brown as a burrowing tick, just beneath. The scar on your chin: same as mine! (see the e-mail.) Burn on your thigh that none dare touch. Stretch marks: a belly squid. Old-skool tattoo on the left triceps: how the dagger pierces the rose. And a green Celtic ring in your hipwell, & whorls that woodgrain under beltloops to the coccyx. Moustache; inoculation oval; Hobbit-toe pec tufts; off-kilter breast. Your yellow blouse stained with sangria & the firehose outside your door. How you lied about that. Balls, one thrice the other's heft. Scapula stubble from shoulder shaving. A copula of skull. Beneath the velvet rope we ducked upstairs at Graceland, summer of '87, & pressed cool against the warehouse window glass. I just want your extra Hme—lk. a trois-et-demi on the Plateau: espresso machine gleaming like the mothership. Lip blistering. Dr. F—loves you, each salty one, to pieces: Me, sailing forward into bath-warm light, billowing red. In my head composing a last perfect thing to see or say.. .or to remember seeing.. .or to be remembered having said. Brain a sad monster now, sutured: yellowing rot, septic with fresh sorrows, teenage. Wishing you all something seasonal. Tapped out. Things happen, you know you should feel lucky & grateful, blessed in memory by pixel flashes that last. Twenty-two days one autumn: booty runes in the datebook. But instead all you value is the wound, because the wound itches, because ripe as a papaya it neither closes nor bleeds. 59 Utah: (Prophylactic Verse) I love them both sometimes the same day. A man should never get to choose because he won't. Stony Warner Bros, arch on the state plate. Beep beep. Does Acme ship soluble lube? My Willie e- conditional: If you are a woman, then I'm lying. [Send.] Remember the opalescent bead of pre-come? They swarm there. No poison sponge can kill them. Latex an apotrope: my back-up plan has a back-up plan. Here be blues: Had a blow-out with my girlfriend but lord knows that I don't care / Had a blow-out with my girlfriend but I keep rollin' with my spare. (There should be a law.) 60 Craig Boyko The Problem of Pleasure The first night, they unpacked the stereo and the coffeemaker. Their plan was to stay up all night and watch the sun come up over the slums where the little people lived. They played tic-tac-toe on the window with their saliva until she was convinced that two winning strategies inevitably resulted in a tie. They cleaned the glass with yellowing newspapers they found beneath the sink. She took a shower and emerged with one towel draped around her body and another coiled in her hair. She had to look in the mirror to show him how it was done. He took a shower and put his dirty clothes back on. They smoked the remainder of a rumpled joint that someone had shared with her at an audition for a chewing gum commercial. She stood on the sofa and delivered her one line with ecstatic glee, with slack-jawed forget- fulness, with shock and revulsion, with Shakespearean gusto: What's that taste?She hadn't gotten the part. He turned off the lights, crouched next to her on the sofa, and traced his index fingers down the ridge of her spine. How many? he asked. Two, she said. No, one. I don't know. I have a stomachache, she mumbled, making it one word. Too much coffee. My head hurts, he said, as though by way of consolation. Your head hearts? My head hearts, he agreed. He brought out his camera. She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead histrionically, like an ingenue. When she reached for him, he stepped away, raised the camera to his eye, and said, Click. She fell asleep soon after the sky began to turn blue. He didn't wake her. Instead he made more coffee, turned off the stereo, and unpacked his computer from a box she'd labelled FRAGILE. They had a rule. They were not allowed to say "I love you too." He'd said it once, and she'd said, Ah—no. Not allowed. What do you mean, not allowed? Empty and/or automatic reciprocation not allowed. Okay. I love you. 61 Maybe. Maybe so. But how do I know you're not just saying it because it's what I want to hear? Wait a few minutes and try again. A few minutes later he said, Oh, by the way. It just so happens that I love you. Sorry. Too soon. I saw it coming. You need to surprise me. Her sister liked him. Her brother liked him. Her father liked him. Her mother loved him. Jen liked him. Marco liked him. Helene said he was cute. Roger thought he was intelligent. Elle said he seemed a little shy— but charming, definitely charming. Nan claimed he had "nerd chic. "Janice liked him. Wynne liked him. Heather liked him. Caryn liked him, or said she liked him. She teased him, jabbed him with her knuckles, mussed his hair, called him the Hemogoblin—all playfully, of course, all in good fun. Or was it? Caryn had liked Anthony better. Anthony had been wild. But it didn't matter. Riding home in the crowded, creaking subway train, he made lists. The colour of her hair when it's drying. The loose, wrinkly skin that appears at her elbows when she straightens her arms. The way she intentionally bruises her apples before eating them, tap tap tapping them on the counter or tabletop. The way she doesn't turn around, like most people, to glare incredulously at the crack in the sidewalk she's just stumbled over, but walks on, seemingly unaware of having stumbled at all. Her fuzzy earlobes. Her face. She taught him how to cook, cut his own hair, buy pants, and play guitar. He taught her how to get free cable, make mix CDs, register her own domain name, and operate Unix, which she referred to as Eunuchs. Because she always wanted to come along, and because he could not refuse, sometimes he stayed late at work so that he could take his after-dark walks alone, before going home. He heard her say, on the phone to her sister, No, I am still looking. It's just 62 that you have no idea how much time auditioning takes. Of course I don't, you know how independent I am. But it's not like he begrudges me the occasional...you know, there's such a thing as going so far in the opposite direction that you end up with a new kind of conventionalism. You get to a point where the new old-fashioned is just an inversion, you know, just the knee-jerk reaction to the old old-fashioned, so nothing's really changed. It has nothingto do with feminism, Laura.... And then she softly closed the bedroom door. Would you still love me if I was fat? Yes, he said, after a pause. Would you still love me if I was ugly? Of course. Would you still love me if I was a hundred years old? No question. Would you still love me if I was five? Would you still love me if I was a man? If I couldn't speak any English? If I didn't have any arms or legs? If I was just a disembodied head? If I was made out of cheese? Absolutely. All of the above? You mean, would I still love you if you were an ugly fat boy's head, made out of cheese? Who couldn't speak English. He pretended to consider it. Then: Yes, he said bravely. Yes, I think I would. All of the above. Would you still love me if I didn't love you? Sometimes Caryn came over to watch the Sunday Night Sex Show. He hated the clinical, cheerfully candid way that the old woman reduced sex to a game of skill, or an intellectual problem, the sort of puzzle that you could not fail to solve with the latest playbook and a little earnest application. The girls thought it was hilarious—though he noticed they didn't laugh half as loudly when he was not in the room. It's not that bad, she said quickly, to conceal her annoyance. I don't mind as much as I maybe used to. He just has a different outlook than I do. 63 Different experiences. I'm only his second girlfriend, you know. It probably just takes time. But I'm not complaining. It's not a big deal. It's not the most important thing in the world. What? What are you smirking at? I just wish the you of two years ago could hear the you of today, said Caryn. Or vice versa. Okay, well, with Anthony maybe it was the most important thing in the world, because that was the extent of our world. He had nothing else going for him, I mean at all. He was an asshole. I hated his guts, really. Which was precisely why the sex was so good. I love you, he said. She looked up from her cross-stitch and smiled gratefully. I'm very pleased to hear it, sir. One night he walked home. Children shouted "Fag!" at him from passing cars, laughing groups bound for downtown bars edged him off the sidewalk, men with their dates stared him down, then magnanimously challenged him to a fight. He wondered if there was something particular about him. Did he look like a dog asking to be kicked? It never happened when he was with her. Something about her elicited people's respect, almost reverence. He hurried home. Riding home late one night on the subway, three young men sat down next to her, though the car was almost empty. They were drunk. They talked about her loudly and appraisingly, like shrewd consumers. She stared fixedly at the reflection of a Clairol ad in the window. She had pepper spray in her bag but didn't dare make a move to reach for it. She focused on the sound of her clanging heartbeat and pretended she was deaf. Eventually they lost interest in her, and offered only a few parting gestures and perfunctory self-gropings when their stop came. Was there something about her that invited this treatment, she wondered, or was it simply that she was alone, and therefore vulnerable? Vulnerable and therefore contemptible? She hurried home, her keys clutched in her fist, her eyes stinging. He was already asleep. At night, when he walked, so many of the windows were bright, unob- 64 structed and inviting, lit up like the grid of flickering television screens in an electronics store. Well, how do I look? she asked. He stepped back, crossed his arms, and looked her up and down. You look great. Good, she said, and kissed the corner of his mouth. Then let's get going. Why is there a password on your computer? she asked. Don't you trust me? Of course not, he said. What have you got on there, porn? Yes. Kiddie porn. Gigabytes of kiddie porn. Hmm, she said. Can't say I approve of that. I love you, she said. He transferred the receiver to his other ear and looked over his shoulder. Yes, that is most definitely good news, he said. At first he assumed it was a joke. But the mischievous solemnity with which she made popcorn and turned down the lights told him otherwise. She giggled and kept looking at him sidelong to gauge his reaction. He pretended not to notice. I don't understand humans at all, he said, at the end of the first scene. Well, it is kind of silly, she admitted. It's disgusting. Watch some more? I have to piss. Should I pause it? No. I'll be right back. Later, she joined him in the bedroom. Can I turn on the light? If you must. Wordlessly she joined him between the sheets. You don't have to do that, he said, half a minute later. I don't mind, she said. He said nothing. Correction: I like to, she said. It just seems a bit silly, he said, and half the syllables came out as 65 whisper. He cleared his throat and added: Now that we're living together, I mean. It was her turn to say nothing. So it's okay, he said. Don't worry about it. What do you mean, now that we're living together? Just that you don't have to...try to impress me anymore. You don't like it? I don't dislike it. You don't like it. I just don't feel like you should have to, that's all. If you don't want to. And if I do want to? I'd just prefer you didn't. If I'm doing it wrong you just have to tell me what to do differently. That's not it. Then what is it? He sighed and flopped onto his side. You don't find it a little demeaning? What? For who? It looks silly, he said slowly. It makes you look dumb. She allowed a few seconds for this to sink in, but it would not. The light is off, she said at last. It's just not necessary. And what about me? What if I want you to? Should we just go to sleep? So she let him roll on top of her the way he'd done all the other nights. Afterwards she whispered, I guess you wouldn't want to try anything we saw in the video? He wrapped his arms around her tightly, as though she were a waif he'd pulled from a river, and said sternly: Listen. I would never—I foryou. Get it? I love you too, she said automatically. That's not— Ah—no, he said. Not allowed. And he kissed her forehead brusquely. And you? she said. How's the new stud treating you? Oh God, said Caryn. He's wearing me out. That's good, isn't it? I guess. The problem is he won't go down. His idea of pleasuring me orally is to tell a knock-knock joke. There were two girls he watched. One lived, seemingly alone, in a spartan apartment on the fifth floor of a condo on Eighteenth Avenue. She moved around a lot, from room to room, tidying or rearranging, pausing occa- 66 sionally to think, with arms akimbo or the fingers of one hand lightly cupping her chin. The other lived in a cramped, colourful garret in a rickety house on Seventh Street, which she shared with at least three roommates, two of them male. She spent most of her time reading, sitting in a deep chair beside the window with a book propped against her knees. Every few minutes she would turn and look unseeingly out the window, as though mentally measuring the discrepancy between what she had read on the page and what she knew, from experience, was really out there. They were both lonely and beautiful. They both seemed to be waiting for something. Why do we do this? she asked Caryn. Oh, sorry doll, your lips are too thin. Oh, sorry babe, your lips are too puffy. You should probably lose about four pounds. You're just a little too malnourished. Your eyes are too wide—I actually had someone say that to me the other day. Not too far apart, but too wide, whatever that means. Or your eyes stick out too much. Or your eyes show too much white. Or not enough iris. What would you look like with green contacts? Or red hair? Or a C-cup? Or a different head? Why do we do it? Why do we put ourselves through it? Because we want all the world to love us, presumably. Not me. Not anymore. After two years of this I'd settle for loving myself. If I ever get back to that point, I'll quit. And do what with yourself? Raise babies? Little hemogoblins? Maybe it's not that we want to be famous or recognized or loved or whatever by other people. Maybe it's more about making it easier to recognize and understand and maybe even like yourself, you know? Maybe if you saw your own face splashed across bus shelters, if you saw yourself on television or in magazines once in a while, maybe then you could finally figure something out. Self-analysis as opposed to self-promotion? Yes. Right. What's the difference? One is about looking for the other in the self, maybe. Searching for the outside inside. The other is trying to put the self in the other, the inside outside. And what's making babies? Putting the other in the self? I know I'm attractive, she said defiantly. Directors don't know anything. Agencies don't know anything. I'm always getting compliments. They don't count if they're from your boyfriend. No, from all kinds of people. From photographers, hairdressers, even strangers in the street, on the bus.... 67 You're gorgeous, said Caryn, crushing her cigarette beneath the heel of her boot. I was just teasing. I know. Let's go back in. Maybe they're almost ready for one of us. He said his back hurt, so she asked him about work. I'm sorry, he said guiltily. It's just been pretty hectic lately. No, I mean tell me about it. Tell me what you're doing right now. Details. Inundate me with technical jargon. The only project that interested him at the moment was the new video compression codec. He'd always been intrigued by the possibility of shrinking data, making something large small. In high school he'd spent a feverish cola-fuelled weekend in front of his C compiler, reluctantly coming to terms with the logical impossibility of recursive compression—compressing an already compressed file. But the disappointment was only temporary, and the challenge eternal: how to express the greatest amount of information in the most concise way. At first glance it looked easy. Create a new representational language, one where single bits stood in for megabytes, individual letters took the place of libraries. But you couldn't just define some symbol or variable, some x, as the entire contents of the universe, because that would require your decompression key to be as large as the universe. You had to be able to explode as well as implode. What it came down to was patterns, the recognition of recurrent patterns in a set of data. If some string, some phrase, appeared three times—"I love you I love you I love you," for instance—you could store it once and recall it twice—"I love you (repeat 2x)." The tricky part was that repetitions rarely came sequentially, so you could be searching the entire world for another instance of "I love you," wasting valuable time, and it might never reappear. The breadth of your pattern search always had to be weighed against the time required to perform it. Speed came at the cost of quality compression, quality at the cost of speed. You're yawning, he said. I don't blame you. I wasn't. I'm listening. I can yawn and pay attention at the same time. But I wasn't yawning. Well, the codec we're working on is for live web cam feeds. With those, the picture doesn't usually change very much. Often as not it's just some guy's empty dorm room. So there might be shortcuts. We might be able to cheat and—never mind. Sorry. That was a yawn. I confess. Not because it's boring. Go on. No, you go on. Tell me about the photo shoot. Was it a photo shoot? Ah—no. Not allowed. Still you. There's nothing else to tell. 68 What about that gadget you brought home? Is that one of these camera deals? Yeah. Prototype from the client. I thought maybe I'd point it out the window, down at the street or something. Just to get some different data to work with. I've got hard drives filled with the back of Nathan's head and the inside of the server room. So you'll, what, be able to watch it from work? Well, yeah, if I leave my computer on. Will anyone else? Not without my password, no. Then why don't you just, I don't know, put this one in the corner over there or something? Why? So I can spy on you? I don't know. I kind of like the idea of you watching. Even if you're not watching. It'll be like having you here, maybe, a little bit. At first she was guarded and self-conscious. Her awareness of the camera seemed to permeate all her movements, taint them ever so slightly with an air of deliberateness and calculation. But soon enough she grew accustomed to the device. Soon the self- consciousness faded. Soon she forgot that she was (at least potentially) being watched. And soon he found her every motion, her every gesture, her every pose, her every facial expression fascinating, endlessly gripping. Do you have a picture of me on your desk? she asked. No. But I have three in my wallet, he said, as though it were only a joke. Well, she said, now you do. For her birthday, Caryn bought her a toy. For when you're out of town, Caryn told him. But neither of them found it funny. So Caryn gave him one for his birthday, too. For when she's out of town. He threw his away. She kept hers, hidden beneath shoes and books in her closet. I love you, he said. She rolled over and blinked at him with pink eyes. 69 What time is it? she asked. Colin told them about an implausible liaison with a policewoman who had, earlier in the evening, almost written him a speeding ticket. Geoff related an MDMA-fuelled night spent with a cute green-haired girl he'd met at a rave in San Francisco. Nathan recounted in great detail the predilections and perversions of a high school chemistry teacher who'd approached him—"practically tackled" him—in a bar. He was surprised that in each of their stories the girl had been a complete stranger. Their best experiences were one-night stands. Then it was his turn. I don't know, he said. I guess it would have to be with my girlfriend, but— They all groaned. Well, okay, but there was this one time that was pretty..exceptional. We were both sick. We both had the flu. Fever, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, the whole thing. Mountains of used Kleenex all over the floor. You get the idea. Anyway...I don't know. There's not much to tell, actually. It was just memorable. She was so hot. And the whole time I was having these hot flushes and cold flushes, alternating one after the other. Gooseflesh appearing and disappearing in waves across her skin. Both of us just dripping with sweat. The sheets were soaked. And the whole time we were coughing and laughing and our noses were running all over each other.... Jesus Christ, said Nathan. But no, it was nice. I don't know how to explain it. Like huddling around the fire when the wind's howling outside. Only the wind and the fire were both inside us at the same time. They stared at him incredulously. Something like that, he muttered, and lifted his beer. The way she punches only multiples of eleven when operating the microwave. The way she fidgets in her sleep. And when she's not tossing or turning, when she's completely still, the way she seems to be biding her time, planning the next move. Her habit of quoting herself. Not elaborately or pompously, but reflexively, almost apologetically. As though she doesn't want anyone, even herself, to be able to accuse her ofunoriginality. As though her biggest fear is that someone might roll their eyes at her. Her propensity to weep. Her use of the word "whatever." Her tendency to exaggerate, not for effect, but automatically, unthinkingly. The bloody floss she leaves floating in the toilet. 70 Jackie liked him. Susan liked him. Rachael liked him. Fiona liked him. Elisabetta liked him. Penny liked him. Casey liked him. Quinn liked him. Paula liked him. He didn't like her friends. He thought most of them were obnoxious egomaniacs. He didn't understand why she surrounded herself with such people, or indeed why she wanted to be an actress. She was too intelligent to wholeheartedly dedicate herself to the glorification of wine coolers or luxury sedans or athlete's foot powder, and too modest to mythologize herself, to cultivate the necessary facade, to construct, in her own person, a lasting monument to her own greatness. He never said any of this, of course. But he didn't have to. He often stayed late at work to watch her. One night his heart plastered itself against his chest when he saw her suddenly look up from her magazine, turn to the camera, and plaintively mouth the words, Where are you? One night he watched her until she fell asleep. He had been waiting for her to grow anxious and alarmed. Waiting for her to call him, to ask if he was all right and would he be home soon? Waiting for her to begin waiting. Use your hands a little more, she whispered. How? Here. And here. Good. Only not so...mechanically. It's hard not to act mechanically when you're giving me instructions. I'll shut up then. Do whatever you like. I thought I was doing that. And your mouth too. They had made a kind of game of it, he realized. They blurted the three words not like an endearment but an incantation or a hex, one that would only take effect if the victim had let his or her guard down. But the game had spoiled the sentiment. Instead of "I love you," all he heard now was "Sorry, not fast enough," or "Tag, you're it." On her bedside table he found a piece of paper on which she'd been experimenting with her signature. Just once, as though by accident, she'd scrawled his last name instead of her own. 71 On his desk she found a piece of paper on which he'd written: The problem of EVIL. Never the problem of GOOD? The problem of PAIN. Never the problem ofPLEASURE??? Sometimes I think I can tell when you're watching. T-E-L-E-P-A-T-H-Y? he spelled out with his finger on her belly. No. I don't know. It's just that sometimes I'm aware of it and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I suddenly become aware of it. Like eyes on the back of my head. O-N-E-E -Y-E, he spelled. Is it always on? Is it on right now? N-O, he spelled, then said: Well, not exactly. It only sends when someone—when / log in to the server. So it's on, but it's not going anywhere. It's not recording or anything. This wasn't precisely true. In fact, his computer at work saved everything, but he often deleted the previous day's footage without watching it. Could you? she said after a minute. W-H-A-T, he spelled. Could you turn it on? So that it was recording? W-H-Y? She looked at him. I don't know, she said knowingly. F-I-L-T-H-Y-S-L-U-T, he spelled quickly. What? L-O-V-E-Y-O-U. Oh. Thanks, she said, and fell silent. I'm surprised your boyfriend doesn't do this. Well, he does do that, she said, laughing metallically. In fact, he's usua— He's the only one who does. The photographer pursed his lips in a little moue of playful disappointment and removed his hands from the front of her dress. Not for lack of offers, I hope. I wouldn't know, really. Lack of interest, rather. On my part. I find that almost equally difficult to believe, he said through a leer. Before she could object, he went on: Of course, I was referring to the headshots in which your delicious visage is about to be immortalized. She blinked at him. She was starting to feel dizzy. What? she said. He put one hand on his hip. You said he was a photographer, didn't you? Oh. No. Did I? Well, he's not really. I mean he is, he does, but only as a 72 sort of hobby. Not professionally. I see, he murmured, retreating as far as the nearest spot lamp, which he began fiddling with to no obvious purpose. And what does this tyro hobbyist of yours shoot? What? Oh. I don't know, really. Landscapes and objects, I guess. And do you fall under one of those headings? Do I—what? Surely no man could resist the temptation to map out that exquisite geography? He fixed his eyes on her. She couldn't find her voice. Suddenly he laughed, a low booming laugh that belied the preciosity of his speaking voice. But why so pale and wan, fond lover? You know I'm only playing with you. You must be familiar with the method by now. A little flirtation, a little insincere badinage. It puts some colour in your cheeks. There are certain effects you can't simulate, you know. It's why men dominate this industry, I'm afraid. Heterosexual men, I might add. We have our tricks. She caught a sigh and stretched it into a normal, nonchalant exhalation. So, she said dryly, you weren't trying to seduce me? It beggars belief, does it not? I think...well, perhaps not. I was about to say that you'd know with absolute certainty if I were attempting to seduce you. But? But I'm not sure it's true. I'm not even sure, in your case, whether I'd know myself. Would you mind putting this strand of hair here behind your ear, I think? Like so. Almost. May I? She cleared her throat, trying to make it sound like an expression of dubiety. In my case? she said. He stepped back, crossed his arms, and looked her up and down. You're very much my type, you see, he said distractedly. Very much indeed. Naughty in all the right places. Now that, she said hoarsely, that's the method again, right? Putting a little colour in the old cheeks, is that it? Of course, he said blandly, almost impatiently. He retreated behind his camera and sighed, I don't suppose you'll ever reconsider vis-a-vis the nudes? How do I know they wouldn't end up on the Internet? My dear, he said, you should be so lucky. The girl in the garret had disappeared. Someone else was living there now. He felt responsible. He felt he had stayed away too long. At least he had pictures. 73 He caught her looking in the mirror one day, evaluating herself methodically from every angle, for nearly three quarters of an hour. What's that? said Nathan, suddenly behind him. Porno? Nothing, he said, and quickly closed the video window. Live nude girls? Barely legal co-eds? Just data, he said. Just collecting some new data. Nathan slapped him on both shoulders. This is a great job we have, isn't it? Say, you coming with us to the Grove tonight? I don't know. I don't think so. Nathan peered at him, as though at some rare insect. He straightened his posture and said, It's just that my girlfriend is dragging me to a goddamn play or something. That's right. I keep forgetting. You've got pussy at home. Why eat out? They threw a party to celebrate the airing of her first commercial. Thirty of her friends crammed themselves into their two-bedroom apartment. They all hooted and cheered when at last her face appeared on the tiny television screen, smiling archly yet admiringly at a computer-generated anthropomorphized cereal bar that was showing her, and half a dozen other young on-the-go professionals, how to slam-dunk a basketball. When it was over, she took a solemn bow. Someone called for a speech. Others began tapping the rims of their wine glasses with their fingernails. Six hundred dollars, she said slowly, with drunken fastidiousness, six hundred dollars...for two seconds...of screen-time. That's on par with Meg Ryan, you know. Second by second. Well, Naomi Watts, maybe. Rebecca Pidgeon, anyway. Kirstie Alley, at least. Just imagine what you'll make for your first feature film. Or solo commercial, for that matter. Caryn climbed onto a chair and launched unsteadily into what was apparently an elaborate toast, one which for some reason began with a not much abbreviated account of her own childhood. Later she cornered him on his way into the washroom and asked him what he really thought. You were good, he said. Real convincing. And what is that supposed to mean? I don't know. You looked like you were, you know, really there. Breathing. Conscious. It's just a commercial. It's not supposed to be a great work of art. Hey, no argument here. 74 She poked him in the chest with an index finger, sloshing white wine onto his shirt. You know what you are? she said affably. You're jealous. Yes. And you're drunk. Not envious, mind you. But jealous. There's a dicstinct—a distict—dis- tinc-tion. You're possessive. You want to own me. You don't want anyone else to...own me. That's right, he sighed. That's exactly the truth. He kissed her quickly at the corner of her mouth and ducked into the washroom. And why aren't you drinking? she muttered. Yes, said someone behind her, bathroom doors are notorious teetotallers. Anthony! She flung her arms around his neck. When did you get here? Just moments ago. I gather I missed the big event. Will there be an encore? Supposedly it's going into regular rotation. But it doesn't matter. It's dumb. It's nothing. And I know how you feel about TV and all that. Maybe I've mellowed in my old age. You look great, by the way. So do you. As always. Ah—no. Reflexive reciprocation not allowed. Do me a favour and tell me I look great in twenty minutes or so. You look great in twenty minutes or so. Can I find you something to drink? After the tongue-lashing that door received, I don't dare say no. The next day, he fast-forwarded through most of the evening. The guests had generally stayed out of the darkened bedroom. They stood silhouetted in the doorway, their heads bobbing and hands fluttering at triple-speed, then they drifted away. Occasionally, individually or in pairs, they ventured a rapid reconnaissance of the room, glancing critically at the books on her shelves and the software on his, peering cautiously into the tangled junglescape of her closet or the cluttered drawer where he kept his "valuables": diplomas and certifications, expired prescriptions, the journal he had kept for six weeks while he was in Montreal four years ago, every letter and note that she had written him and most of the ones he'd written her. But one pair who entered the bedroom lingered longer than the others. These two displayed little curiosity about the room or its furnishings, and their uneasiness was somehow different than the guilt of the interloper. This was no doubt due, at least in part, to the fact that one of them lived there. She stretched out supine on the bed while the other one paced languorously. They talked for a few minutes, animatedly but without eye contact. 75 Then the other one, the ex-boyfriend, nudged the door smoothly shut with his toe. He watched the next five minutes of the video very carefully. Then he watched it again. Then he watched it three more times. Before he left for home he logged on to his news server and uploaded the clip to the alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica group, inserting it amidst the garish promises and nauseating claims of "Amateur teen sucks off two guys at once," "World's biggest transsexual orgy," and "Cumswapping brunettes get DP'd." "My girlfriend," he typed, "caught cheating. I was in the other room. (5 minutes, 15.5 MB.) Comments welcome." You can either be famous, said Anthony, or the cause, in a small way, of everyone else's fame. You and I have made our choice. Sure, he went on, everyone is the star on his or her own stage. That's obvious. And every one of us is also a bit player in everyone else's show. But really this is an efficient arrangement. To paraphrase Freud, the one thing that everyone wants is, basically, to feel important. Other than sex, you mean, she said through a yawn. Well, yeah. Other than sex. Obviously. She remembered now why they had broken up. He was an obnoxious egomaniac and he bored her silly. Speaking of which, she said, how's Kimberlee with two E's, or whatever her name was? Kimberli with an 1.1 have no idea how she is. Can't say I care, either. I can't believe you left me for a Kimberli with an I. It's disgraceful. I didn't leaveyon. As I recall, you told me you never wanted to see me again. Yes, because of assorted shennanigans involving Kimberli with an 1.1 hope she was at least more fun in bed than I was. You know that no one was more fun than you, he said softly. Oh, don't, she sighed. You shouldn't say such things. Why shouldn't I? You'll make me believe it yet. Maybe you shouldn't lie there like that and not expect my mind to wander down certain avenues. She lifted her head and looked at him through narrowed eyelids. I can lie here any way I like. Thank you very much, she said slowly, with drunken fastidiousness. Is that so? said Anthony. And he nudged the door smoothly shut with his toe. 76 Attn: Vulcan. Re: My girlfriend, caught cheating. Picture quality rather poor, no? Way too dark & low contrast. Good clip otherwise. Your girlfriend's totally hot! More light next time please! Sound too! He walked for four hours. He took over a hundred pictures. Hey! someone shouted at him from the other side of the street. What do you think you're doing? She left the curtains open, he muttered. They all leave the curtains open. I love you, she said, with a slight rising inflection. Super, he said. You seem a little spacey tonight. Do I? Maybe a little. Just thinking, I guess. What about? He lifted his head from the pillow. That camera, he said. She propped her head up with one bent arm and looked at him. What about that camera? He lowered his head again. I don't know. Maybe we should use it sometime. Use it in what way, she said slowly. Maybe we should shoot ourselves. She was silent for a moment. He gave her a sour glance. You know what I mean. In flagrante delicto? she asked, beaming at him. He tossed a sheet over her naked body. What's that for? I don't know. You look.... Like I've just been ravished? Cold, he said. Should we watch it? she asked. What, right away? Sure. I want to see us. I guess. But put something on. It's not exactly summer. She hovered on the edge of the bed, wrapped in bedsheets. He sat on his 77 swivel chair, in boxers and T-shirt. On the computer screen, she was crouched on hands and knees upon the bed, wearing only her underwear. She twisted her head to one side and looked back in the direction of the camera. She said something and laughed. Then she lowered her head and pushed her backside into the air. You look good there, he murmured. I think you enjoyed this part the most, she said. Playing director. On the screen, she struck a few more poses. Then he stepped into the frame, gripped her throat delicately with both hands, and pulled her face towards his. They watched themselves—he with growing disgust, she with growing regret. 78 Brian Swann Watch Yourself My father was polite, always insisting, for instance, that women climb ahead of him up the ladder to the flat garage roof to see his prize tomatoes, or always insisting they sit in his new recliner where they were too polite to protest as it tipped back, raising legs and thighs. Even on his deathbed it was on his mind. I could see it in the way he watched his young Pakistani doctor, as if she were already a sloe-eyed houri he'd half-considered converting for— not that he was religious, though he was convinced there was life on other planets, and we had visitors. Tubes in arm and nose, he said if ever I wrote a novel to make it full of sex: "sex sells." Hankjansen was his favourite, with Lawrence and Henry Miller close behind, though only read in parts. Propped by pillows, he who spoke little couldn't stop talking about it, as if it could prevent the inevitable. There was the widow across the street, always burning leaves, a sister in Canada, another dead, women in foreign ports, at work, the rich foreign girls from local language schools mother took in to pay the bills after relatives he'd courted and counted on died and left him nothing and the machine he invented to sharpen razor blades was ready 79 just at the time disposables hit the market. As he talked, I remembered mother saying how those girls cried and carried on because she'd treated them so well and they couldn't bear to leave her. And on he went with weekly trips to London, dressed to kill, "to see the paintings at the Tate." In great gilt frames, his copies of Monet and Manet hung in living-room and dining room, and everywhere else the walls would bear them. "Olympia" and "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe" hung outside the bathroom door which had a hole drilled into a corner panel, blocked with a matchstick stub when not in use. "So," he took a breath, "what do you think of me now? More or less?" I lied, and left. He'd painted in the hot cramped airless attic, climbing up and pulling the ladder after on an elaborate system of ropes and pullies. After he died, I figured how it worked, climbed up, crawled in. Stooping, I groped along the wall and found a switch. A naked woman loomed out of the dark. I slipped on photographs and hit my head. The face was just sketched in, still incomplete, though the body gleamed like marble. Breasts came at you, but the bushy arrow pointing down drew in your eyes, and then, strangely, turned them round and made you watch yourself. 80 Catch I have never been inspired by sex... —Kenneth Koch They shine already, a labour to haul in, to catch their flames, great labour in beauty, strange to us, grown compact swallowed up in this dark world, its green margins, their eyes cloud, here's my mouth, fractured bones flung away, these strangers sing like dust, balanced like shadows, now they are tense, now lax where I cannot stay and if they cry I can't hear, they probably have little to say except how blind the scrutiny in this heavier world, its compulsions, its indifferent energies, its engines unfocused but with a thirst to catch and destroy, nothing escapes, so I am leaving while I can. I've tasted enough. I am not hungry. 81 Contributors Julie Booker is a Toronto writer whose work has appeared in Descant, The New Quarterly, The Windsor Review, Lichen, and in a Coach House Press Anthology. "The Tree Man" is part of a short story collection she is currently working on. Craig Boyko currently resides in Calgary, where he delivers groceries, composes electronic music, and occasionally volunteers as an ESL teacher. Sioux Browning earns her keep as a hired gun in film and television, buying herself time to dabble in erotic poetry. She lives in Vancouver with her sweetpea,John. C.B. Burgess was born in Ottawa. S/he currently studies creative writing and physics at the University of Victoria. Her poetry has also appeared in The Claremont Review, Grain, and The Malahat Review. Kevin Chong is a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of a novel, Baroque-a-Nova, and a narrative nonfiction book about Neil Young that is forthcoming in the fall of 2005. Rob Clayton & Christian Clayton grew up in Aurora, Colorado, and graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where they now serve on the faculty. They work as individual artists and in collaboration out of a storefront studio in La Crescenta, California. For more information about the artists, please visit www.claytonbrothers.com Mark Cochrane is a college instructor, occasional freelance writer, and law student. He is the author of Boy Am I (Wolsak & Wynn, 1995) and Change Room (Talonbooks, 2000). Recent poetry appeared in Capilano Review and New American Writing. Earlier work has appeared in PRISM 31:1 and 31:4. He lives in Vancouver. Joelene Heathcote has an MFA from UBC. She has received many awards, including ARC Magazine's Poem of the Year, THIS Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and most recently, The Florida Review Editor's Choice Award. Her book of poetry, What's Between Us Can't Be Heard (Ekstasis Editions, 2002), was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. She is working on a new collection, The Alienation Effect. 82 warren heiti was born in Sudbury, Ontario, and he is currently working on a master's in philosophy at the University of Victoria. Some of his poems were recently anthologized in Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood Editions, 2004). Nancy Lee is the author of Dead Girls (McClelland & Stewart, 2002) and the forthcoming novel Born Slippy (McClelland & Stewart). With the speed of a reluctant glacier, she continues to work on her poetry manuscript, The Most Girl Part of You. David Maelzer was born in Bombay in 1941. He moved from India to London, England, and in 1969, arrived in Canada where he received his BA in English Literature from Simon Fraser University. David joined Vancouver's gay community in 1971. He died in June 2000 of HlV-re- lated cancer, just before his 59th birthday. Sharon McCartney is the author of Karenin Sings the Blues and Under the Abdominal Wall. "Pa's Penis" is from a new manuscript, The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which uses voices from the children's books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Roger Nash is a past President of the League of Canadian Poets, and worked with Senator Grafstein to create the position of Canadian Poet Laureate. His most recent collecton of poems is Once I Was a Wheelbarrow (Bayeux Arts, 2000). Edgeways Press in the UK has just published a collection of his literary critical essays, called The Prayer that Poetry Makes (2004). He is Chair of Philosophy at Laurentian University. Saleema Nawaz moved from Ottawa to Winnipeg in order to pursue an MA in English at the University of Manitoba. Her short fiction has appeared in Grain. Joonseong Park lives in Coralville, Iowa, and attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "The Broken Umbrella" is a short story from The Land of Morning Calm, his novel-in-stories. He is now completing another novel, Hybrid. His fiction has appeared in Fiction, American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, and many other journals. He is also a translator of Korean fiction, and he has won the PEN Translation Award. 83 Steven Price's work has recently been published in Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood Editions, 2004). His first book of poems, Anatomy of Keys, will be published in Spring 2006 by Brick Books. He lives in Victoria. Brian Swann received his BA from Queen's College, Cambridge, and his PhD from Princeton. He has taught at Princeton and Rutgers, and is now Professor of English at the Cooper Union. He is the author of over thirty books, among them works of poetry, fiction, translation, literary criticism, and children's literature. He is a resident of New York City. Catherine Wong is an art director and visual artist in Toronto. She has a deep love for shoes, show tunes, and red meat. 84 Creative Writing B.P.A. at U.B.C. ',,e< The University of British Columbia offers a Bachelor of Bine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Students choose three genres to work in from a wide range of courses, including: Boetry, Novel/Novella, Short Fiction, Stage Play, Screen & TV Play, Badio Play Writing for Children, Non-fiction, Translation, and Song Lyrics & Libretto. All instruction is in small workshop format or tutorial. Lynne Bowen Meryn Cadell Keith Maillard Maureen Medved Faculty Andreas Schroeder Linda Svendsen Peggy Thompson Rhea Tregebov Bryan Wade For more information, please write: Creative Writing Program University of British Columbia Buchanan E462 - 1866 Main Mall Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T IZl Or check out our website: www.creativewriting.ubc.ca vallum contemporary poetry contemporary poetry journal featuring poets from across North America and abroad. eclectic and edgy with a focus on establis hed and emerging poets with something relevant to say—be it about the earth, the air, the polluted state of world affairs, poetry as magic, concrete poetry or various other rhythms. *0 8ox 48oCft.^ ,4 * QC, Can»d* SUBSCRIPTIONS: $16.30 (CAN), $14 (US) ORDERS FROM ABROAD IN US FUNDS "Vallum ... is witty, startling, sardonic, obscene, often (and I can't believe I'm using this word)—lovely." —LITERARY MAGAZINE REVIEW "This Canadian journal makes a bid to be international." -BLOOMSBURY REVIEW "Audacious and exciting ..." -NEW PAGES www.vallummag.com CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Horsefly Literary Magazine is seeking submissions of poetry and short stories for our 4th edition. Horsefly is a professional quality literary annual published by the Nelson Fine Arts Center and ElephanTome Press. We consider writing of literary merit from anywhere but are especially interested in work from writers living in the Kootenay region of BC. POETRY: Maximum 5 poems, single-spaced on standard letter bond. Name, address, number of pages & lines per poem noted on each page. SHORT STORIES: Maximum 2000 words, either a complete story or excerpt (indicate which), double-spaced on standard letter bond. Name, address, word count and no. of pages noted on each page. NOTE: Please attach a brief biography (200 words max.) with your submission and SASE if you wish your submission returned or to be notified of acceptance for publication. No e-mail submissions please. DEADLINE: April 30, 2005. All submissions received after this date will be considered for the next edition. Mail to: The Editors, Horsefly Literary Magazine 1103 W.Richards St. Nelson, BC V1L5T3 THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS FOUNDATION CONGRATULATES THIS YEAR'S SILVER AWARD WINNER FROM PRISM INTERNATIONAL. MARLENE GOOKSHAW POETRY National Magazine Awards Foundation Celebrating Excellence in Canadian Magazines www.magazine-awards.com PRISM international Creative Writing Program, UBC Buch. E462 -1866 Main Mall Vancouver, BC.V6T1Z1 Canada PRISM international Creative Writing Program, UBC Buch. E462-1866 Main Mall Vancouver, BC.V6T1Z1 Canada Subscribe to PRISM international and save! □ Two-year subscription (8 issues): $37.45 (GST included). □ One-year subscription (4 issues): $23.54 (GST included). Residents outside Canada please pay in U.S. funds: $27 for 2 years and $18 for 1 year. Make cheque/money order payable to: Prism international. U.S. money orders are no longer accepted. Name: Address: City: Province/State: Postal/Zip Code:. Email: □ Payment enclosed □ Bill me later VISA/MC: Exp. Date:. Signature: Subscribe to PRISM international and save! □ Two-year subscription (8 issues): $37.45 (GST included). □ One-year subscription (4 issues): $23.54 (GST included). Residents outside Canada please pay in US funds: $27 for 2 years and $18 for 1 year. Make cheque/money order payable to: Prism international. U.S. money orders are no longer accepted. Name: Address: City: Province/State: Postal/Zip Code: Email: □ Payment enclosed □ Bill me later VISA/MC: Exp. Date: Signature: r Fiction/Poetry/Drama/Translation/Creative Nonfiction 43:3 Twenty-two days one autumn: booty runes in the datebook. But instead all you value is the wound, because the wound itches, because ripe as a papaya it neither closes nor bleeds. The CanSex Issue Mark Cochrane, Page 59 Julie Booker Craig Boyko Sioux Browning C.B. Burgess Kevin Chong Mark Cochrane Joelene Heathcote warren heiti Nancy Lee David Maelzer Sharon McCartney Roger Nash Saleema Nawaz Joonseong Park Steven Price Brian Swann I Cover Art: Stay Gold by The Clayton Brothers '72DDL"Ab3bl' 03
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