Category: Uncategorized

Fabrice Poussin

Natalie Tankersley

I have a confession. I think I might have loved you, and I never said a word.
I shouldn’t be writing this. We both know better than to put information of this nature down on paper. We both sacrificed our ability to be honest with each other on the altar of reputation long ago. Honesty is a luxury that neither of us can afford these days. And yet, I’m writing this anyway. I’m handing you a loaded gun in the form of a letter, and I’m trusting that whatever your feelings about me are, you won’t shoot me in the back. There’s no turning back for either of us now.
I hated you when we first met. Both third graders with puffed-up chests and an inflated sense of self-importance. Your brown hair chopped into a bowl cut. My blonde bangs pinned back with flower clips while they grew out. You, the youngest in your family, who could make the whole world quake with a single word. Me, the oldest in my family, who had a tongue sharp enough to split people open. Your obsession with politics and rockets. My obsession with books and words. In hindsight, it was inevitable that we clashed. We were both too much, too enthusiastic, too articulate, and too mature for our age. We were sparks in a world of darkness. Two stars in one school might have managed to avoid one another. But two in one class? We were doomed right from the start.
We hated each other with a burning intensity, but we couldn’t leave each other alone. Isn’t it funny how thin the line between hatred and obsession is? We glared, hissed, and fought with brutal words and barely concealed insults.
We threw our hands into the air like it was a competition, adrenaline pumping. I remember wishing I could just ignore you, but you shone so brightly. It was impossible to look away. Was it the same for you? Did I consume your thoughts to the point of distraction? Did your success even matter if I wasn’t failing? I never asked. At the time, it didn’t seem important. Now, it feels like it might have been the only thing that ever mattered.
You remember the collision? Our teacher announced a group project, her eyes narrowing at our little faces. We both groaned, and I caught your eye from across the classroom. We never played well with others, you and me. Neither one of us liked to share the spotlight, share the workload, share the glory, and share the A we knew was in our future. Maybe that’s why, when our teacher said we could choose our own partners, we met in the middle, and our worlds imploded on themselves.
No more attempts to outshine the other. We made far better partners than we ever did enemies. Your pride and my glory mixed together until no one could even look at us, much less come close to our combined talents. We were the best of the best. Untouchable by anyone. We were infinite, a galaxy stretching a thousand stars.
And then we grew up. You finally got rid of that awful bowl cut you sported all through elementary school. My blonde hair melted into brown, and I learned how to hold a curling iron and use makeup. We changed. As loudly as we came together, we fell apart with nothing but a sigh. You held court in the lunchroom, surrounded by guys, and I faded into obscurity, taking in strays until they crowned me queen.
But even in a high school with hundreds of students, we found one another. The brightest stars in any room although others came close. We pulled the best into our orbits, friends instead of dictators for the first time. Your ego softened. My arrogance dulled. And when we collided again, there was no implosion, no earth shattering moment, no noise at all. Our worlds seemed to merge as if they had never parted at all.
It’s your fault. How was I not supposed to fall in love when you were backing up every idea I ever had, when you lit up every room you walked into? You’re the only person I have ever met who could match me step for step, who could read my mind. How could I stop myself from falling when you played me symphonies in empty classrooms, smiling up at me, hands flying across the keys? Maybe that’s when I knew. I was totally and completely, utterly irreversibly, in love with you.
Did you ever suspect? Sometimes I wonder if you knew all along and turned a blind eye to keep our friendship safe. How could you not have known? I can see it in my eyes when I go back through the old photos. I tried so hard to keep it from you, to bury it inside me, six feet under. I valued you too much to risk you over something as silly as emotions.
Maybe you really never knew. Maybe I should have taken it to the grave. You probably would have preferred it that way. Still, the longing sits in my stomach like a ball of lead, keeping my feet firmly on the ground like an anchor. I can’t move on, and I cannot go back. I have to do something before I lose myself here. Do you understand? The person I used to know wouldn’t have. Maybe I don’t want you to understand. Maybe I just want to burden you with everything I’ve ever carried on my own shoulders before it’s too late.
I close my eyes and all I can see are your fingers dancing across piano keys. All I can hear is the edge in your voice as you speak in front of the class and your laughter as I take our classmates apart with a single sentence. I find you in every word I say, every word I write, like somewhere along the line, you nestled yourself in the hollow parts of me. You’re haunting me, a living ghost, in every waking moment.
Still, in my fantasies, I can see what we could have been. I can see myself spilling my guts to you in the quiet of the public library, you pouring over a book about the space time continuum, me reading a novel. I’d whisper it aloud and you’d look up from your book, eyes widening. My breath would catch, heart hammering in my chest. You’d take my hand, and I’d watch admiration turn to fondness turn to love. And we’d change the world together, because we would have never been able to do anything else.
We were never satisfied with anything, but we could have been satisfied with each other.
I see you in my dreams. We’re older now, and we run into each other at a stuffy charity gala. A common acquaintance tries to introduce us, but we know more about each other than anybody else in the world. Still, we humor them, and I blush when you kiss the back of my hand. You’ll pretend not to know every speech I’ve ever given by heart, and I’ll pretend I haven’t kept every newspaper article ever written about you. You’ll pretend that you don’t own every book I’ve ever written, and I’ll pretend every dedication wasn’t about you. We’ll both smile, and you’ll ask if I want to dance. And just like we did that first time, we collide all over again.
We take the world by storm, and they never see us coming. We’re too much, too young, too passionate, too idealistic, too intense. We’re us again, partners, teammates, masterminds. I charm everyone we meet with a sweet smile and let you spin me around the dance floor. You shake hands and press kisses to my hands when you think no one is looking. We spend our evenings in a library, and you watch with that fond expression as I pace back and forth on top of the table. We write books, speeches, articles, and more with both of our names tangled together on the covers. One day, we’re photographed with wedding bands on our hands, but we never announce anything. Some things belong to us and not to our careers. We’re good together. Better than that, we’re happy together. Best of all, we love each other.
I’m being unfair, and I know it. You’ve always said I was too good with words for my own good. I’m not asking for anything real. I’m not offering you anything real. Just fantasize with me for a moment, and tell me what might have been.
There it is. I’m handing you my heart with both hands. Isn’t it funny I still trust you more than I trust myself? Maybe we can burn the altar of reputation. Maybe one day we’ll throw it all away. Or maybe not. It’s in your hands now, love.

Enoch Jacobus

Thomas Dillard

Flying around aimlessly
unintentionally buzzing
until I find someone I know.

Buzzing along after them
trying to make a friend
only to soon after be politely shooed off
either verbally or nonverbally.

Returning to aimlessly flying
until I find someone else I know. T
hen again being politely shooed off
with or without words.

Over and over
with wings drooping
after each attempt
while wondering when my attempted friends
will snap

Will it be kindly telling me to never speak to them again
or will it be harsh?

Will they grab a fly swatter
and swat me out of the air?

Will they stomp me into the ground
while smearing me into nothingness?

Will I be able to recover to fly again?

Enoch Jacobus

Natalie Tankersley

Writers are born,
shaking, squealing, and struggling to describe the world
they’ve been thrust into, sitting
on their grandfather’s knee, babbling, bumbling, and bouncing as stories pile up
in their heads, collecting
dust before they learn to
turn thoughts into ink

Writers are created,
whispering, waiting, and wondering about the things that
live in their heads, emerging
from the depths of nights alone, escaping, envying, and editing
their thoughts until
their hearts bleed, spilling
aching and raw onto
a blank page

Writers are forged,
hunching, hallucinating, and haunting over their desk with
hands on keyboards, begging
the words to come,
dragging, demanding, and daring writer’s block to stand
in their way, knocking
the walls to their creative
wellspring down

Cathy Ulrich

i.

We all go to the Grand Canyon at once. Everybody does. We go in cars, in buses, on the backs of our boyfriend’s sputtering motorcycles.

Someone has champagne, someone else has wine.

Kampai! we toast, and wait for the end.

ii.

A small man presses a large button.

iii.

A small man insults another small man. The second small man insults the first. Cities get involved, then countries. Everyone chooses sides. Someone presses a button.

iv.

Meteors fall from the sky. We all step out on our porches to watch.

Grandpa puffs on one of his darn (Grandma used to call them, before she died) cigars.

We had a good run while it lasted, he says, eyes skyward.

v.

Meteors fall from the sky. Someone has invented a laser grid to shoot them down. It isn’t as effective as we had hoped.

vi.

A small man shoots some people with a big gun. More and more small men do this until all that is left is two small men and two big guns.

vii.

Someone opens a portal to a wormhole. We stretch and churn into the vacuum of space.

viii.

Aliens. They’re angry about something.

ix.

Aliens. They have come to save us, they say, except they actually mean the sea turtles, whose old man faces they adore. The vaporize the rest of us with their fancy alien weapons.

x.

The ice caps melt. We all drown. Our corpses poison the water. The last thing left is one sad-eyed sea turtle.

xi.

The wrath of god takes us as we deserve. Our religious aunties clutch their bibles to their chests.

At last, they say, and their faces are aglow with death and faith.

xii.

There is one bird feather in the grass. The wind ripples through it in the quiet now.

Elsewhere, there are only bones.

Fabrice Poussin

Enoch Jacobus

Caroline Lewis

I have long ago learned to fear
that when everything is sunny,
and I feel an unnatural calm,
a storm is brewing somewhere in the center,
so far away and so enormous
that I will not see it until it is upon me.
I have learned to walk in the rain for hours,
until the downpour forces me to flee
into the nearest house.

I have long ago learned
that the only safe house is mine.
That the only place that I truly know in those times is my mind.
That even when it is dark, I know the way around,
and I can feel the furniture,
and when the wind blows in,
at least the cracks in the walls are familiar.

But you—you contradict what I have learned,
when I thought I could not have
the beauty of the sea without the storm,
the fire of the sunset without the dark soon following.
You are like a warm day with sun and sky and breeze,
and true peace, for I know you will not
bring a storm, I know that we will not
create a tempest.
I know you are the fine line that I have been searching for,
wondering about, for years,
hope versus history.
I fear no storm brewing on the horizon,
and when I think of the unexpected squalls that will arise one day,
I know that we together
can walk, nay, dance through the rain.

And I know because you, everything with you, feels like a house I know well—
a home.
A house I have never set foot in,
yet when the lights are out,
I know my way in the dark,
and when the wind blows in, the cracks don’t matter—
you are here.