Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Colin FlemingColin Fleming is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Texas Review, Slice Magazine and The Iowa Review, among other publications. Mushroom Wine

• Daniel SchwarzDaniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books and has published poems in journals throughout the world. Closure: 1986
• klipschutzklipschutz is a poet living in San Francisco. His poems have appeared in venues ranging from Poetry (of Chicago) to FUCK! (Tucson), along with many anthologies. His books include Twilight of the Male Ego and The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (o.p.). In 2006, through Luddite Kingdom Press, he issued the collectible All Roads. . .But This One. Upon Reading About Frank Lloyd Wright in a Rented Basement Room
• The Alpha Beta Male
• Dennis MahaginDennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in magazines such as 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Night Train, Juked, Stirring, 3 A.M. and The Nervous Breakdown, among other journals. His chapbook, entitled Fare, is forthcoming in 2012 from Redneck Press.Fence Fragment
• Luke HollisLuke Hollis has studied at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and currently is a student at the University of Oregon Master of Fine Arts program. He has received the Miriam Starlin Award and Irby F. Wood Prize for his poetry. The Co-op in Fairmont, NE
• Ron AntonucciRon Antonucci is a librarian and book critic whose reviews and articles have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers. He has had poems published in Whiskey Island Magazine, The Vincent Brothers Review, Pudding, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002). He was fiction editor at Artful Dodge and currently serves as a contributing editor for The Journal. Supplicant
• A Picasso Blue

• Akos MajorAkos Major is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Vienna, Austria. Minus & White
• Maurizio AnzeriMaurizio Anzeri is an Italian artist living and working in London. Embroidery on Photographic Prints
• Michael ZimmererMichael Zimmerer is a fine art and commercial photographer who graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. He currently resides in Orlando, FL. White Horizon

• Win Peter WintersWin Peter Winters is a chamber folk band from Upstate New York and led by Chris Bell.Self-titled
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Bruce SniderBruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review and Ninth Letter, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has been writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT as well as at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University. discusses his prize-winning collection “Paradise, Indiana”

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews the poetry of Steve Fellner

Hints of Southern Gothic tradition and beautiful instrumentation make this debut album well worth a listen.

~ Launch Pop-out Player ~

“Mama!” her baby cries as she begins readying them both for the bus ride. “Shhh, Wendy, princess,” she soothes the baby with coos and talk. “It’s cold out. We must dress warm. So the snake won’t bite!” With a yellow blanket, the mother swaddles the little form into an almost unrecognizable rigid mass, then covers herself with her own coat, picks up her baby and throws a top blanket over them both, bonding them as one. “I love you!” the baby says with a clearer voice than you’d expect from one so small. So special. The mother smiles at her child and says, “I love you, too, my Wendy. Little Cinderella.”

***

Right away they notice as she steps up. People in the front seats of the city bus sight the woman with the dangling cloth obscuring the bundle she so watchfully carries. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look heavy. They observe her intently looking for a seat in the front among them. If you see something say something go the signs and announcements all around the public transportation system. The citizens on the bus are seeing something, but aren’t sure if that something needs saying.

And the woman with the bundle sees something right away, too. The eyes cast upon her. She suspects they want to know, as usual, what’s wrapped in the blanket clutched to her chest. A seat second from the first is made available to her, a center seat that causes the woman to have to wriggle her bottom between an obese lady with big bags and an elderly man packed in a puffy down coat. The bus begins to move. The woman holds her load securely so as not to drop it as she splays her legs for support. People still look as she adjusts the blanket at the top, gently folding back the edges. A peek of the side of a baby’s head. The passengers appear to collectively relax. A mother with her baby. Making sure to nestle its blanket around the infant’s head, folks witness a mother protecting her child’s ears and neck from any draft. Conversation in the crowded space livens up, talk about the frigid record-breaking February weather, and pieces of one-sided cell phone chatter erupt as the bus drives on to the next stop.

Still curious, some people keep watching, for after all it is a baby, and the sight of a baby has a habit of breaking deadpan dazes, seems to revive worn out New Yorkers, bringing smiles, or at least some small interest that awakens them from their otherwise ticking-time lives. Sometimes the mother sees other looks, though. Looks of remembrance perhaps. Sometimes mystified expressions. Maybe even jealousy. As if they long for a baby of their own.

At each bus stop bodies get off and new bodies board with brand new glances at the woman, as if they’ve never seen a mother and child before. The looks do make her feel a bit embarrassed, but in a way, also special. Without the baby she more than likely would go unnoticed, could be just anyone on a bus. But with the baby in her arms they know who she is: A good mother. Though after a certain length of constant ogling, she feels uncomfortable. They stare, seem to scrutinize her every move. The gawking, the gawking always makes her self-conscious, and even, well yes, a little angry. Is she doing something wrong? Have they figured it out? It’s not the first time anyone has done this, what are they all glaring at? She knows who she is, what she’s doing. They always do this, this glaring and eyeballing and then someone will whisper, “It looks like…like a doll,” or a comment like that. And then someone else will whisper back a thing like, “Doesn’t it? I think maybe, too. A little baby doll.”

She gets that a lot. She always gets that about her baby. And she knows why.

***

Little babies. Lined up behind glass, each nearly identical. Each little baby swaddled the same, in the same but separate, plastic cradle. On the maternity ward she’d learned how to swaddle them good and secure, to make them feel as if they were still in the womb.

“Nurse,” she heard, and saw the other faces that peered and longed to touch what they’d made, as they called for her through the glass partition. “Where’s my baby? Which one is mine? Can you hold my baby up so I can see him?” Only she could touch the babies. For now, they were hers. Brand new, unformed, who would have known which was which? Who would have known who they belonged to? She did, though. Nurse Florence.

At this point in their unlived lives, she knew them better than anyone. Their individual sounds became recognizable to her within hours of being born. Nurse Florence knew their needs. And she’d tend to her babies’ needs.

And then they were gone.

Little babies. She saw them everywhere. Saw them behind her eyes in her sleep at night.

***

For most of those years living with her mother she’d always thought that if she were to die, if her mother got sick or had a heart attack and died, or even had a stroke that left her so bad that she couldn’t speak or think and just lay there like a rotting potato, Florence would never be able to make a decision on her own. She knew in her heart that if Mama were to go she couldn’t possibly go on without her.

Someone had said to her once, “It’s not natural. Not natural to live with your mother at that age, when you’ve been a grownup for so many years.” This someone she thought had maybe taken those words right out of one of those self-help psychology books, or maybe heard a doctor on TV say, “It’s not natural for an adult to live with their parents.” This someone, she also thought, had never known alone.

But still, it wasn’t smooth satin this living together business. She often felt like her mother had no respect for her. None at all. Like her mother owned her, as if Florence were just a piece of property, her own thing she could use as she pleased. And as if that owner, like owners are entitled to do with their own stuff, could handle the merchandise at their own whim.

“Slut,” her mother would call out the second floor window, while Florence tended to the small garden of gladiolas, tomatoes, and herbs in front of their tiny townhouse. “You going out again to that bar to find a man? You’ll never get a man,” her mother would say, and Florence would hope as she bent over the basil and thyme, that none of the neighbors heard, “Who would want you? Why you going there?” But when Florence stood at the gate trimming the hedge, she could see plainly that people passing by looked up at her mother with her head craning on her neck out the window, yelling, “You’re too old,” and she knew they’d never heard their own Mama saying a thing like, “Too old for a man. Too old for having a baby. Nothing but a slut.”

After a long time, Florence’s thoughts changed. She thought now she’d made a mistake. She’d rather have a man upstairs to kiss than her mother, that snake. But for the relief of the burden of cursing love every day, for that reason alone, Florence begged death on, not caring what would become of her without her mother. And now since it happened, since Mama had passed, from that day on Florence could, and does, make every decision on her own. And they are hers, and hers alone.

***

Everywhere. Little babies. She sees them inside and outside and hidden behind eyes. On crowded streets eyes darting taking in new sights, faces in parks and crying on buses, and peering from car windows that stop and start again at green lights, and she thinks they want out, those unhappy eyes from behind glass, saying to her, take me home with you. And so if she doesn’t take them, take care of her babies, their needs, they’ll be gone— “Maam, why are you running? Oh my God! Is that your baby? Stop! Stop running. Stop that woman! Oh God! She’s got a baby. Stop her now, she’s almost out of the building.” She keeps running, and her mind races…. It’s not like it’s never been done before, it’s not like nobody else has never done this. I have a voice, I can speak. They think I’m out of my mind, but I know what’s happening, and why I’m doing it. I remember the lived pieces….Layers of living, layer upon layer cascade and crash into each other—“Mama!”—moments that have been lived are in moments now forming— Cinderella dressed in yella— all that collected living—kissed a fella— of moments, sights sounds smells tastes tactile touch thoughts ferment—made a mistake—and then fertilize moments of the future…little babies. Wendy— People knock to walls and doors and down side hallways in the hospital, security guards rush to apprehend the woman, and then as they pin the woman to a wall, her head knocks up against a glass case with shelves displaying get-well cards, hospital-logoed coffee mugs, stuffed bears and bunnies, all available in the gift shop in the lobby, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” someone else says, “it’s just a goddamn doll.”— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8— She missed, OUT.

***

Little babies. Everywhere she saw little babies. Behind plastic windows in boxes all lined up, identical, which one would she choose? There were infant ones. Toddler ones. Which one?

Maybe she would just take the one right here in front of her.

“No, no,” her mother said, “Take it out from under your sweater.” And the girl did, pulling the doll out from under her yellow, two-sizes-too-big, hand-me-down sweater, putting the doll back on the shelf. “You mustn’t steal. It’s not right, Florence. I’ll buy you one. Which one do you want?” But they all looked the same. The ones on this shelf at least. “Here, take this one,” her mother said, reaching to the shelf above where there was one single box. She pulled it down and put it in Florence’s hands. “You’ll have this one.”

The writing on the box declared that Wetting Wendy, not only could wet, but she could speak. A special little doll inside. Florence turned the box over and saw a hole there in the cardboard back and poking out was a plastic ring that begged her to pull. When she drew the plastic ring toward her a long string came out, and then took its time slipping back as Wetting Wendy said, “Mama!” She could speak! Wendy could talk! and she spoke directly to Florence right here and now.

The little girl pulled the string again. “Hold me,” Wendy said, and so Florence put her arms around the box with the little baby inside. She longed to take Wendy out, save her from her isolation and hold her for real. She pulled the string until Wendy told the girl, “I love you!” and Florence whispered close to the cardboard side, “I love you, too, Wendy.” Again she pulled the string and Wendy insisted, “I’m your baby girl! Take me home with you!” And then Florence knew this was her baby. This baby had always been waiting just for Florence to come along so she could take good care of Wendy forever. “This one, Mama. I want this baby. I want Wendy.”

***

The big girls in the schoolyard had the jump rope going round at a good, fast, rhythmic pace, so that each girl could take their turn hopping in to show off their jump-roping skills. Florence just watched the big girls, always with her mouth hanging open, just watched. And listened. Heard every word the same as she’d mouth them, the words she used to lull herself to sleep at night. Just watched them hop and skip and sing:

Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
Made a mistake
And kissed a snake
How many doctors
Did it take?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8—you missed, OUT!

This exclusive studio session is nothing short of lush, and is perhaps one of the most skillfully orchestrated we’ve featured.

It was not that Tanyon Shotter was absolutely certain that he would not see his wife Keara again, but that did seem to be the unspoken agreement between them as she gave him a cold peck on the cheek in the early Holy Saturday sunshine of her parents’ Wellesley driveway.

He knew, of course, that he’d see her again in some capacity. Probably in a legal one, which worried him. But he was fairly certain that they would never come together in the manner of a husband and wife reuniting after a long day, with any of a number of pet names lining themselves up at the front of Tanyon’s mind, waiting to see what positive effect they might have on his wife. The creation and dissemination of these stockpiled names had become a sort of hobby for Tanyon. As he pulled Keara’s bags from the trunk of his still-idling Ford Mustang—a mid-life crisis car purchased a half dozen or so years before a mid-life crisis normally sets in—he reflected on some of his attempts to come up with a core group of honorifics that were supposed to become part of their daily back-and-forth. These names, he felt, need not have been all that serious, and they might even work better the more embarrassing they were. Playful names, he thought, were ideal—names that any one person only ever said to any other in private, beyond the hearing of a third party. Like a secret word that let you into a club made up of two members.

“Let’s see…there were the early stalwarts—Love, Sweets, Sugar. Very awkward, that Sugar one.” He looked up from his work to see Keara’s parents frozen in their familiar, judgmental American Gothic-style pose behind their dining room window, as though they had taken their places in the standing-room-only section at some kind of athletic contest.

“Ugh. Bad time. Bad time all around. Maybe I should wave to them?”

He started to raise his right hand, and then let it fall.

“That might make them enjoy themselves more,” he thought.

***

“I had tried to spice it up. It was a concerted effort. Legitimately. At the therapist’s suggestion. ‘Be as dirty as you can, be a cave man. Be cave lovers.’ Right. What a disaster that was. I guess that is why we are here now. But these things are rarely the result of a single moment. Even if everything does seem to crystallize in that moment.”

He had come home from the office early, having made some vague excuse to cancel his only post-noon consultation. Mrs. Faraguana was a hypochondriac anyway, she’d simply return the following weekday afternoon, like she normally did.

He picked up two dozen snapdragons at his regular Beacon Hill florist’s, a shop he visited often enough in his amends-making efforts that all the clerks knew his name, and would greet him as soon as he walked through the door wearing his normal look of apprehension as to what arrangement might work best.

“It’s getting to the point that I’m like Norm on Cheers,” he thought one night, after exchanging greetings with a newly hired clerk, who nonetheless knew him at first sight. He liked the idea of snapdragons, not only because Keara had once stated, back in college, that they were among her favorites—and because he’d get points for remembering that—but also because he appreciated the floral irony, and was confident that his wife would not pick up on it.

“I deserve a little joke. She does snap at me a lot. True, she doesn’t exactly breathe fire, but there are times when I wonder if she might.”

After the florist’s, it was on to a Charles Street market where he secured several cuts of filet mignon, three twice baked potatoes, and an assortment of asparagus glazes so that he could make his trademark roasted spears. He spent an unduly amount of time in the wine section trying to find a Cabernet that was both zesty and mellow, and then returned to his Rowes Wharf apartment. Years before it had been selected as one of Boston’s fifty best homes by Architectural Digest, a citation that he thought would please his wife, but only made her cry instead.

Still, he felt that his Cabernet selection would go over well. Keara had commented on a couple reviews in Wine Spectator a few weeks ago, post-coitus—“my once-a-month trip to the farmer’s market,” as Tanyon thought of it. He poured two glasses of wine and set one on his nightstand, and one on hers. He felt his courage growing. “Perhaps tonight—if all goes as planned—I’ll kick it up a notch. Maybe that therapist is on to something after all.”

He vacuumed the apartment, did the laundry, cleaned all the sinks, and even de-limed the shower head, which gave him a satisfaction akin to completing an extra credit assignment. And then he readied the bedroom DVD player with one of their favorite discs, and made a path, of sorts, with the snapdragons, placing one after another, from the front door to the bedroom. He felt a little silly doing this, and it reminded him of that episode of The Brady Bunch where the boys leave a trail of popcorn so that they don’t get lost in a Hawaiian forest, only to end up meeting Vincent Price in a cave.

“Ha. I wonder what that therapist of ours would make of that imagery. Maybe she’d just say sometimes a man in a cave is just a man in a cave. I don’t think I’ll tell her all the same though.”

As a final preparation he rounded up the dozen or so rusticated brown-copper votive holders that they kept in an antique midshipman’s chest, and equipped each with a squat candle, placing them at paced-off intervals alongside his snapdragon path. With the family room aglow, and his work complete, he went to the window and savored the dusk as the day’s last rays of sun spangled the harbor.

Keara arrived and set out on her husband’s path. She found Tanyon in the bedroom in his lightest, most sheer dressing gown. He moved to kiss her, but she had already bent down to remove her shoes, and his lips deflected off of her shoulder. He pressed play on the DVD player, and the pleasing voice of Rod Serling filled the room. They had watched a Twilight Zone marathon at the end of their first date in college, back when it was the three of them more often than it was just the two of them. But it was only the two of them now, plus Rod Serling, and Burgess Meredith, who had emerged from the vault beneath the bank where he worked, to find that he was the only man left on earth.

“I think this “Time Enough at Last” episode is my favorite,” Tanyon said as Keara swirled some of the Cabernet around her mouth.

“You would.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the Burgess Meredith character is bookish, like you. And his wife—who dies, of course—is cold. As you like to imagine that I am.”

“That’s not true. Not at all. It’s just not true.” He paused and considered his options. Was this the right time to premiere his latest honorific? Could there be a better time? A worse time? Was the best and worst time one and the same? If so, should he just go for it?

He stood up from the bed and cupped his hands inside the lapels of his lightly-cinched dressing gown. He took a deep intake of breath, and separated himself from his robe, with a little shimmy of his left foot. He stood there naked before her—like a cave man—but this was not his great surprise.

“Why, that’s not true at all,” he resumed. “That’s just not true. Angel Tits.”

After making up the couch in the living room, he stood once more by the window. He pressed his head against it and felt a draft coming through, but it didn’t really bother him now that he had his heavier robe on. He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.

***

He wasn’t sure what to do next as he pulled out of the driveway of his in-laws, fighting the urge to flip them off.

“Well, I’m a free man now. With the whole weekend in front of me. What does a Boston bachelor do with two full days at his disposal?”

He could already feel his forced enthusiasm starting to wane. The last place he wanted to be was at home. He was shocked though at his own impetuousness as he found himself on I-95 South, bound for Manhattan to hit up some of his favorite Greenwich Village record shops. It would kill the day, and provide a nice surge of nostalgia harkening back to those times when he would pester his father to put off their yard work so that they could leave Ridgefield, Connecticut behind for the amped-up pace and pulse of New York.

Some of his fondest memories involved listening to old vinyl records by Illinois Jacquet, Don Byas, and Ben Webster—the great, stomping tenor men—in closet-sized record shops on MacDougal Street, as his father flipped through the racks of bebop and stride pianists, turning to his son and holding up his latest, greatest find whenever he came upon an Art Tatum or Earl Hines LP that he didn’t already own.

Tanyon liked that his father was a piano aficionado, and he was more of a tenor buff. It was as though they’d be able to harmonize with each other in some imaginary band—were either of them able to play their favorite instrument—rather than compete for the same spot. Sometimes he thought of the happier days of his marriage as Coltrane in his mid-fifties Prestige years, where everything was soulful and rhythmic; now, it was like mid-sixties Coltrane, when everything went atonal.

Many of the shops that he used to visit with his father were still in business, which both relaxed and excited him. “This is a pretty fine day after all,” he thought, pleased that the present had not completely dislodged the past. He bought enough records and CDs to fill the cloth bag in the trunk which he usually used when he went off on one of his wine buying excursions to his favorite shop on the Cape, and resumed his journey.

***

It was typical of him to think that the disassembling of his marriage had more to do with him than with his wife. There had been a period of heavy drinking—“guilt fallout,” as he put it, while Keara was away for a couple weeks in Milan. These temporary separations usually served to rejuvenate them, but in this instance, the reason for Keara’s trip was more in line of a meditative mission—specifically, some time apart to give some final thoughts to starting a family, an issue they had gone back and forth on, given Keara’s unhappy girlhood and an uncle who may or may not have—well, they weren’t exactly sure what he may or may not have done. Spotty details would sometimes be dragged to the surface—thanks to the same therapist who had hit upon the less-than-brilliant “be a cave man” strategy—but neither Tanyon nor Keara knew what to think, or what they should do.
“What if it’s a girl and I’m overly possessive? And too protective, and I don’t let her live her own life? And beyond messing up a child’s life, I’ll make you resent me too, Tanyon. And sometimes I already feel like it’s so hard to connect, to be part of something that’s more than just myself. I can’t even get the myself part right.”

He’d try to be agreeable. “I feel the same way. Like it’s impossible, sometimes, for me to be a part of something else either.”

This technique was among his least successful, and he never understood why lines of this nature would cause his wife to immediately race from his presence, like the sight of him was about to cause her to combust.

He wondered what each of them would have done if they had not ended up with the other. Keara was intelligent and attractive enough that he would have expected that she would have eventually met someone, the issues from her past notwithstanding. As for himself—there was Sindy back in Connecticut, but there was also the matter of what he believed that he and Keara had done to her. But back in college, he bounced back and forth between the two women, unsure who he ought to commit to. Not that he ever thought of himself as a philanderer. It was, simply, he believed, how young people lived at the time.

“No harm, no foul. So long as you’re honest with everyone.”

And he had been.

***

While Keara was in Italy, Tanyon took several trips of his own to Falmouth and his favorite wine shop, intent on stocking up the wine cellar he had had custom-built in the basement. On his way back on the day before Keara came home, he stopped at a forest preserve near Sandwich. It hadn’t been his intention to do so, but when he saw the ivy and the creepers that encrusted the edges of a sign heralding one of the Cape’s most idyllic spots, the bucolic temptation proved too great to resist.

As the car rolled to a stop atop a bed of nettles and auburn-tinged moss that served as the unofficial parking lot, Tanyon looked at his watch and saw that the sun would soon be setting. He decided to take one of his bottles of newly purchased ‘89 Bordeaux and trudge out to the coast and see the day off in style.

The shoreline proved to be further away than he had expected, but he could hear the sound of waves meeting rocks somewhere off in the distance as he padded along in the forest. He liked that there was sand amidst the carpet of pine needles, like he was at the very spot where two ecosystems came together. But he could no more find the shore than he could refrain from tucking into the wine as he walked, and eventually he had to retreat back to the car before he ran out of light or fell over.

He didn’t like admitting that he was drunk any more than he liked thinking about his upcoming discussion with his wife about the children they were going to or not going to have. The only thing of which he was sure was that it would feel cathartic to turn his car around in this darkened forest of a parking lot and gun it back towards the main road.

Which is exactly what he did—hitting a deer in the process, and knocking himself unconscious when the head of the animal penetrated the windshield. A state cop told him the next morning that he was lucky it wasn’t a buck.

“This time of year, with those antlers of theirs, they can impale you in a car like this. What were you doing up here anyway?”

He had made sure to get rid of the empty wine bottle by throwing it in the hollow beneath an overturned tree.

“I was thinking about a girl,” he answered.

“Ha. Aren’t we all, buddy…”

***

He figured that if anyone should be blamed, it was probably Duke Ellington, who had a way of making him feel braver than he knew he really was. His official reason to head further south and stop off in Fairfield County was to visit his father, and share his new bounty of jazz albums. The old man would get a kick out of some fresh sounds. But he knew he wouldn’t be going by the house, because he understood that an unannounced visit would tip off his father that something was wrong. And when his father knew that something was wrong, Tanyon only ever felt guilty, because he knew how much his father would worry.

He originally supposed, as he drove through Harlem, that he would simply return to the apartment at Rowes Wharf, worn out from his long day and tired enough that he’d be able to fall asleep without hours’ worth of effort. He called himself an idiot—out loud, even—when his thoughts turned to hoping that Keara might have changed her mind, and was now at the apartment, waiting for him, worried. But it was Duke Ellington—and, more specifically, Paul Gonsalves—that settled it.

There was always something about Ellington’s performance from the 1956 Newport Festival that pumped him up. He had found a remastered CD set in one of the Greenwich Village shops, which was now cranking on the stereo. Usually he hated taking the Merritt Parkway, because he couldn’t stand the rhythmic clicks that would emanate from beneath the car when the tires passed over each segment of the road—it was like driving over a bunch of LEGOs that had been stuck together.

But now, he noticed that the clicks seemed timed to fall between the beats of Sam Woodyard’s drums on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” like an extra accent. As tenor man Paul Gonsalves began to blow his eighth chorus of his famous twenty-seven bar solo, Tanyon knew that he was going not to Ridgefield but to nearby Wilton to see Sindy, and offer something in the way of an apology for cutting her out of a business plan—however unintentionally—that had set Tanyon and Keara up for life—a life they were no longer to share together.

He never questioned how much he owed Sindy, and the good times with Keara were always undercut by a concern that someone else had helped put them in their particular situation. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly sure that the truffle idea was not mostly his own. He knew it was not Keara’s, although it was her father—and a few investment group friends—who put up a lot of the money to get them started.

Tanyon’s own father had a degree in agricultural engineering, a passion which—like jazz—he passed along to his son. He was also one of those knockabout inventors—the kind that legitimate inventors sometimes branded as a “quack”—who spent endless hours tinkering with formulas in hopes of coming up with some radical new food source or beverage that would yield amazing benefits for the human race, and give him something to shoot the bull about with his friends at one of his clubs.

At Tufts, Tanyon continued on in his father’s tradition, and thought, after joining an amateur inventor workshop, that maybe he could surprise the old man with a patent of his own—some wrinkle on a new way to make wine, maybe. He spent a lot of long afternoons in Bray Laboratory, where he eventually met Sindy, a gifted biomedical student who had actually been a neighbor of sorts in their pre-college days, although neither of them knew it at the time. She had more know-how than he did, and understood what he meant when he discussed his rather crude ideas about making wine out of something besides grapes. Like out of mushrooms, something that would offer health benefits beyond those normally associated with wine. He remembered reading that fungi can be a deterrent to breast cancer, which had claimed his mother halfway through high school, and turned his father into a perpetual tinkerer, wisher, dreamer—anything that might take his thoughts away from his pain.

“I’m sure I can help you come up with something,” she had said. “Although I wouldn’t exactly be sweating if I were Ernest or Julio Gallo.”

***

They worked on the idea over the next several years, while Tanyon wondered if he was meant to be with Keara or Sindy. He was prone to thinking in fatalistic terms, as though some things were simply going to happen, whether he wished them to or not. Sindy was the less guarded of the pair. She had a nonchalance to her that Tanyon envied, like she could just pick up and leave anything behind, if it no longer suited her or no longer brought her pleasure, or meaning. Keara was more rigid, but she committed more deeply, even when it hurt her, and Tanyon thought that he was probably the kind of person whom other people had an easy time leaving, so maybe Keara was best for him. But then he’d pick up in the lab again with Sindy, and he’d find some counter-argument to move him back in the other direction, a thought process he later blamed on the caprices of youth.

A few overly bored TAs became involved in hammering out a formula that might work, and finally hit on one that went off to a testing lab. It looked like a small success had been achieved, and the project, seemingly, came to an end. But months later, reports came back from the lab that they might really have something here. And then 60 Minutes just happened to run a piece on the salutary effects of black truffles—glorified mushrooms, of a sort—and Tanyon was able to find some investors in a small black truffle farm, led by Keara’s father, and the formula was pressed into service.

Six years later, Tanyon and Keara had a cash windfall on their hands, having introduced a new fad in wine circles that was the source of a number of feature pieces in the leading magazines, garnering further investments from different sectors of the health, wine, and biomedical industries. Sindy, meanwhile, was working as a real estate agent in her hometown of Wilton.

Whenever Tanyon would ask Keara about cutting Sindy in, his wife would say that she had already tried, but to no avail. And then she would often begin to cry, which confused Tanyon greatly, so he would let the matter drop and try to find something less upsetting to talk about. Perhaps he could make it right by Sindy at some point in the future, when he and Keara were in a better position as husband and wife. Or afterwards.

***

He drove through the center of Wilton on the lookout for the agency where he had read online that Sindy worked. “I wonder if it’s very depressing,” he thought, “showing houses to strangers that your friends used to live in.”

He was also hard at work on his opening line. Naturally, he didn’t want to come across as a stalker; nor did he want to use anything as trite as saying that he had been home to visit his father, and now, after all of these years, he had decided it was prime time for a visit with his old chum—to say nothing of the money she must have known she had a right to, and his wife’s confusing claims that she had tried to make things right.

He parked a little ways down the road so that he could sit in the car for a few minutes and gather himself. The agency was about thirty yards up the street. But just as he had finalized his opening line and was starting to get out of the car, there was a knock on the passenger side window. It was Sindy, who opened the door and sat down as though he had explicitly come to pick her up.

“I think we should probably talk.”

“What on earth…I mean…”

“I was at the diner down the street picking up lunch for the office. Keara had phoned and said you might be stopping by. You look good by the way.”

“Um…okay. That’s just odd. The thing about my wife. Not the looks thing. Same to you, I mean.”

“Let me just drop this off inside and tell them that I’m going to be out for a little while.”

“Okay.”

He thought about backing out and making a break for Boston—or maybe his father’s—but he figured that he probably deserved whatever he had coming to him.

***

She had him drive to Weir Farm, a spot he knew from childhood field trips. It was a home for several generations of artists, as well as a working farm. The entire notion of a farm—given the whole truffle business—made him even more ill at ease.

“You’re fidgeting something awful, Tan. I’m the one who ought to be anxious.”

“Um…alright. If you say so. I feel like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, in a manner of speaking. I don’t know what you know. More than I would have ever guessed, apparently. So maybe this is redundant. My wife left me today—formally, that is. And I don’t know what the hell I’m doing driving all over the Northeast Corridor. And now I’m walking around with a bunch of goats and geese by my side with a former girlfriend of sorts, and my wife’s erstwhile best friend, whom I basically screwed in more ways than one and I’m just so sorry…And you appear disturbingly clued in. I tried to talk about you with Keara, but…”

“But I wouldn’t take anything. Financially.”

“Yes. But if you ever change your mind…God. I sound like an idiot. Even with the divorce. I’m sure we can work out something. But I’m glad that at least one friendship was saved. It’s just like Keara not to have told me though. We don’t really talk anymore. I don’t expect that we ever will again, in any real sense. There will be lawyers, of course. They’ll talk.”

“Your wife loves you very much, Tan…”

Her voice began to trail off as his eyes scanned over a nearby pond, where several painted turtles clustered on a thick branch that jutted out of the water. He looked back at her, unsure whether she had stopped talking or whether her words had been scattered by the breeze that had him reaching deeper into his pockets.

“I’m not sure what you’d call it. I started thinking that not having kids was a way to leave herself an exit, if you will. From us. From whatever we were.”

“Or maybe it was a way to keep your relationship with her different from your relationship with me.”

“Ha. That’s just odd. Because not having a kid—“

“A daughter.”

“Fine, a daughter. Or a son. Either one. You can’t have a combo.”

He didn’t know why he had said something so boorish and immediately lowered his voice.

“Sorry. Bad joke.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. Please don’t hate Keara for this.”

She grabbed his forearm and he could feel her nails through his coat. She was shaking and trying not to cry, with some degree of success. This made Tanyon panic all the more. Her pain was obvious, but she had some dominion over it, so it must have been a pain she had lived with for a long time, something she had worked at mastering.

“I didn’t tell you. I came here. Keara knew. But I didn’t want to complicate things. I was in my own head and I couldn’t get out. And you two were starting out. And I felt…betrayed. Not because of the money or anything like that. But because I knew you had made up your mind. And then Keara got in touch a few months back, and just started crying into the phone about how you were growing apart, and about having kids, and about…”

“About what?”

“About the daughter you already had.”

“I have a daughter?”

“You…had a daughter.”

He turned to vomit into the pond, and succeeded in merely retching instead—having not eaten all day—dispatching the turtles back into the water.

***

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to my wife.”

“Tanyon…it’s the middle of the night. Sleep it off. I’ll ask her to call you tomorrow.”

He was not surprised that his mother-in-law sounded as alert as she did, never mind that it was quarter-of-three in the morning. She was always alert, like some sentinel looking over her daughter so that he could not cause her harm.

“Look…if she doesn’t want to talk now…just tell her I’m on the road. Back from Connecticut. Promise me you’ll tell her that. Tonight.”

“I don’t think she needs to know that you’re on your way home from visiting your father.”

He could tell that he only had a sentence or two left in him.

“I was not visiting my father. Please. Tell her.”

He hung up and tried to concentrate on the road. He didn’t know when he would be home. Probably after daybreak. It didn’t matter.

He wondered if he was being overdramatic by crying for someone he never knew, or if the very concept of a stillborn child mitigated against full-blown tragedy. It wasn’t like he had some three-year-old daughter die on him, one whom he—or someone—had gotten to know. And then he worried if he was in some kind of violation of morality by trying not to cry. His head felt heavy, and he considered that maybe nodding off wouldn’t be so bad after all. He went long stretches without seeing another car.

The Ellington CD was still in the player. When Tanyon turned it on, Paul Gonsalves resumed his solo. Tanyon knew it by heart. Gonsalves was halfway through. Thirteen and a half bars to go. Tanyon kept the volume down low, simmering the music. When Gonsalves wrapped up bar number twenty-seven, he cued up the beginning of the track once more. Again and again and again—he didn’t think he’d be able to get home any other way.

It was near five when he stumbled into his apartment. Darkness. He put his cell phone down on the living room table and saw a small piece of paper, which he gently collected and turned around in his fingers, as though he were filtering out any potential bad contents. He went towards the window, where there was a vague stream of light. A draft was coming through again, but it felt good against his forehead as he looked down at the missive that was probably some long-forgotten grocery list or one of the occasional notes he wrote to himself.

It was in Keara’s hand: Come to bed. Angel dick.

He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.

“Blind Date With Cavafy” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007, $12.50

“The Weary World Rejoices” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2011, $15.00

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title.

From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach… which fulminates in that appropriate title (snipped from a French Christmas carol, later translated by John Sullivan Dwight, an American): “The Weary World Rejoices.”

In “Miss La La” Fellner passes over a 1879 French circus aerialist memorialized visually by Dega:

Another of Fellner’s poem titles is “The Aesthetics of the Damned.” The title alone evokes the trope of a ship of fools or a set of the ludicrously dressed damned. One of Fellner’s speakers drinks straight from the bottle, another pretends to believe “fanged anorexic midget space aliens want to rape our pets,”–– the catalogue of speakers goes on from there: receiver of a suicide note, people waiting in line for God’s judgment, Satan “dressed in well-ironed khakis/and a pink Polo shirt.” It also comes up that we are one of the species “that has the capacity to fall in love with humans who look just like us yet strangely never love us back… that there may not be enough love in the world to write about.” Popcorn, Socrates, Li Po, Cliff’s Notes, Joice Heth, and Catullus get stirred into the mix.

Fellner likes epic scale. Consider these two sentiments from two separate poems which appear in different places of the book:

The Weary World Rejoices continues with Fellner’s highly terraced blend of pathos, cynicism, and romanticism. His songs of innocence and experience capture the homeliness of Birkenstocks. His poems – a kind of “Notes from Hell” ––include an uninspired childhood, the mall, hypochondria, and a styleless wardrobe and decor. There are poems that evoke a passed-around photograph of a deceased lover reduced to Internet bait, the U.S. mosque protestors, and oily birds. He is not one to subtlety evoke the muse and have her demurely pull back the veil of revelation. Rather, he has her throw aside the curtain like the Wizard of Oz dressed as a burlesque figure, hoist a tacky disco ball, and shout out across the heads of the audience, “One last round!” Of course it sounds more like ammunition than drinks. That statement is not condemnation –– but praise as ruthless as Steve Fellner’s poetics. In The Weary World Rejoices, Fellner braids together Walt Whitman, crystal meth, exclamation marks, Ritalin, car trouble, Matthew Shepard (half saint), Matthew Shepard (half lottery ticket).

Fellner is not sloppy. Nor is he a muddy writer, he separates the Absurd from the Surreal. The intentionally transgressive nature of his poetics is in-line with those of Jan Richman or Denise Duhamel. Not a racy as Tim Lui; not as romantic as Erin Belieu, Richard Howard, or Caravaggio. Though, in many ways alike, Fellner’s enterprise is less romantic than Caravaggio’s. One has a feeling he might refuse the final rise to metaphor and see, not the holy virgin, but—only the street whore-model; not the saint, but the untransformed sinner dolled up and posed. Fellner is oddly both Catholic and pagan – a bit like Blake with his songs of Innocence and Experience. One can also draw parallels to other poets: James Wright, Dereck Walcott, Alfred Corn, J.D. McClatchy, even Philip Larkin might be offered up. Fellner’s poems are a read for anyone with a heart, a creative eye, and a pang of sourness when faced with the broken things of the world.

In Fellner’s quest for merging the homily and the holy, I give him the last word:

The winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and former Stegner Fellow discusses his latest collection, Paradise, Indiana.

Below can be found a seamless three-song studio session from Chris Bell of Win Peter Winters.

photo: Jonathan Fin

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

Lead musician Chris Bell envisioned this lyrically cohesive, classically-tinged concept album, the first ever released by his his band Win Peter Winters.

All of us at Fogged Clarity wish you a happy holiday season.

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Ethel RohanEthel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say (PANK, 2011), and Cut Through the Bone (Dark Sky Books, 2010), the latter was named a 2010 Notable Story Collection by The Story Prize. Her work has or will appear in BULL Fiction, The Chattahoochee Review, The Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review Online, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, California. Raised in Ireland, she now lives in San Francisco. Fire

• Howie GoodHowie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks. Intimations of Flight
• Falling Backwards
• Assassination Tango
• Gary MetrasGary Metras‘ poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Alembic, American Life in Poetry, Boston Review of Books, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, Hurricane Review, The Pedestal, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Small Press Review, Snake Nation Review, Tears in the Fence (UK), etc. His newest chapbooks are Two Bloods (Split Oak Press, 2010) and Francis d’Assisi 2008 (Finishing Line Press, 2008) with a poetry book, Captive in the Here, due from Cervena Barva Press in 2012. So Many Bones
• Changming YuanChangming Yuan is the author of Chansons of a Chinaman. A three-time Pushcart nominee, he currently teaches English in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and RHINO, among many other journals.S.W.E.N.
• My Crow

• Mario Corea AielloMario Corea Aiello is an Argentinian artist and architect with a long-spanning and prolific career. His most recent honors include being designated an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture in 2010, a nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture; and a XIII Biennale Donna career achievement award in 2011. He is currently developing both his professional practice (Mario Corea Architecture Studio), as well his academic career, giving lectures, workshops and seminars in Europe, Asia, USA and Argentina. 35th Street Series
• NY, Always NY
• Barcelona, Color & Collage
• John WestmarkJohn Westmark is an American artist, with a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Florida. His paintings have recently been bought by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles, CA. Double Bind Series
• Folklore Series

• Daniel KnoxDaniel Knox is a pianist and vocalist living and composing in Chicago. To date, he has released the first two albums–Disaster and Evryman For Himself–of his planned trilogy. Knox has performed alongside Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap and Jarvis Cocker, among many other acts.Evryman For Himself
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Bob HicokBob Hicok is the author of six collections of poetry, including his most recent, Words For Empty And Words For Full. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review, along with seven editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives and teaches in Virginia. reads and discusses his poetry

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews Jonathan Wells’ collection, Train Dance

There never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

-Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore.  The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books.  “Is there a poem in here somewhere?” he’s saying aloud.  “Where will I find it?”  This sort of thing.  And then he’s among us, those of us sitting patiently in folding chairs—most attempting to look away to avoid eye contact.   Some poor man with an aisle seat gets the brunt of it:  “Is there a you and an I or are we one?” he asks an unsuspecting sheepish looking fellow, who is no doubt focused only on summoning enough courage to read his own poem when the open reading starts.   I’m focusing on the spines of books now, reading their titles, comparing fonts, hoping my friend sitting next to me doesn’t catch my eye or, worse, nudge my leg.   I don’t want to discourage anyone, after all.  When he gets to the podium everyone seems a bit more relaxed.  We’re waiting for the poems now, wondering if he’s found them, but what we get is a ten minute definition of the difference between the soul and the spirit—how our culture has the whole thing muddled, how one is reaching down and the other up.

***

I started writing poetry because at the age of nineteen the outside world no longer vibrated at the same frequency as my insides, which, in their seemingly fragile and unceasing trembling, rendered me a fixture on my parent’s couch for a stretch of about two months.  I had finished my first year of college with a growing since of Otherness, a feeling I had kept at a safe enough distance with a concoction of recreational chemicals for most of my adolescence.  The formulas weren’t working anymore, however; I was running out of combinations of self-medication and growing more afraid of what waited beyond the haze.  I still have the journals I was writing at the time.  I was pushing at the limits of language I had come to accept as part of life’s incompleteness; I wanted to write what was happening to me.  The words flap wildly like spasmodic wings on the page, like an injured bird trapped in a shoebox.  I love their energy still:  “I’m tired of my mind and the silence of stones.  I want to chew the world to pebbles,” I write on August 5, 1988. The mixed metaphors howl and snap at an unknown foe.  I don’t know whom I was reading at the time or if I was even capable of reading.  That would come later.

***

I want to write this carefully.  How after the spirit/soul guy finished his definition, which I realized then was a poem, a woman rose to begin the open reading.  She looked uncertain as she made her way to the front.  She took a folded piece of paper from her purse and carefully pressed it smooth on the podium, a gesture that seemed to calm her for a moment.  “I’m a bit nervous,” she said.  “I’ve never read a poem in public before.  You see, I started writing poetry because something terrible happened to me.”  It was clear now that if I were to laugh involuntarily it would be unforgivable.  I even thought about stepping outside to avoid such a social disaster, but I didn’t want to her to take my departure personally, especially after the words that followed.  “I was sexually assaulted two years ago.”

One is always hesitant to paraphrase the contents of a poem, and considering the context here, the stakes seem even more dangerous.  And yet I suspect that I will never forget the image of a “turd” swirling around the bowl while being coaxed by a speaking toilet to “take the flush”(the poem’s title).  This metaphor is, of course, hilarious, if only for its scatological innovation.  But to laugh?  I was not alone among the hunched figures attempting to ascertain the poem’s intent.  Her face, too, was hard to read; she seemed earnest, yet capable of ironic self-defense.  What if she meant to be funny and we didn’t laugh?  What if she was attempting to heal herself through humor?

***

I can almost remember the fever with which I would search out a phrase I had come across in my reading that I needed to find again as a way of making some sense of my own body in the world.  I knew, for instance, that the line “Worm be with me, this is my hard time” came from a Theodore Roethke poem, but, pie-eyed, I would pour over the pages of his collected just to find somewhere in the middle of “The Lost Son” the actual inked letters that corresponded to the shape in the middle of my chest.

“Train Dance” Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2011, 978-1-935536-14-7, $15.95

Train Dance may be a first book… but it is an inaugural collection by a seasoned imagination. With a touch of haunt, a pinch of surrealism, and heaps of good literary taste, Jonathan Wells’ poems pull out of the terminus: “An innocent scull rows, / sixteen knees and elbows, a fraction of a centipede going slow. / I wait there and the train plunges through me” (“The Dream Line”).

Train Dance is divided into four sections. The opening section is a haunted coast through “stations of the night when… the body still tingles with astonishment at what it has and hasn’t kept.” The poems have all of the urban haunt of Cavafy and the slight bitter-sweet melancholy of the well-adjusted immigrant. Two poems are actually comically based; one having to do with a GPS system which renders friendly voice prompts and is named “Ms. Magellan,” and the other having to do with Yoga… dog yoga.

The second section turns to more inhabited poems; the speaker of the poems laying claim to a ticket… a pass that turns out not to be just his ticket to ride the city’s train, but also his ticket in the lottery of the city. Couplets and a villanelle share the sun, city, and Hispanic and Hebrew rhythms of the streets. It is a city chorus of syncopated rhythms and intergenerational and international relationships:

My brother sleeps upstairs on an inflatable
mattress (that air was once my breath).

There won’t be time before he leaves at
dawn to recall the grapestand under

the stars near Kandahar, or our friend Joe,
emerald smuggler or Green Beret, seized at the border

with Iran, shouting, “I’m a Christian” as he was
led away by guards to the barbed wire enclosure.

… A summer squall leaves leaves few traces on the lake:
a little air still in the sails, an extra wrinkle in the waves.

(“A Visit”)

Section three moves further out into the geography of relationships. The transports are clear: father, son, grandson. The moonlit landscapes of boulevard trees, buildings, and urban fugues give way to nostalgic sunlight, trees, and Indian summers. The poems look backwards and forwards. The poet wrestling with time and oceans; is immersed in a consuming element:

Come to me. Say my name.
The sun made me ten stories tall
when I walked in the lines
of the labyrinth keeper’s rake. One story
made me wiser than I am and I could feel
the geese fly out of me although
they barely moved their wings.

(“Please, Hold”)

The final section of the collection moves in closer to the ineffable. Perhaps there is a dash of Yeats, a pinch of Heaney. Clearly, ceremony. There is a sonnet entitled “Speechless.” But what we are coming to is not the other terminus…but the caboose! Train Dance lets us disembark, graced and wanting more.

Inside her bedroom, Patsy depressed the hairspray’s nozzle until her finger ached and then touched the lighter’s flame to the flammable cloud. She stared into the airborne flames, transfixed.

Patsy’s latest lover pulled her down onto the bed and sounded his nasty chuckle. “You’re not the only one can set a fire.”

Patsy wondered how much longer she would keep him around. He’d only lasted this long, three weeks and counting, because she hadn’t yet found his replacement. She hated an empty house and setting fires just wasn’t the same when no one was watching. Even with company over, though, she always felt Anna’s absence in the house.

It was Anna’s weekend with her dad and his second wife, Lily. Patsy sometimes fantasized about setting fire to her ex-husband and his skinny, smug, replacement missus, saw them burning out like two straw dolls.

Her lover’s stubble tore at her chin and cheeks, like sandpaper on paint, and she pictured her outsides flaking away, chip by chip. She closed her eyes and conjured the fire of moments earlier, beating overhead like a golden eagle.

…

Patsy had never mastered pancakes. Her batter always turned out too thin or thick and she either burned the pancakes or they remained raw in the middle. Today, her Saturday with Anna, she tried her hardest.

Anna pushed her plate away. “They’re black.”

“They’re fine,” Patsy said.

“They’re yuck.”

Twelve-going-on-twenty, Anna’s chest, waist and hips were starting to fill out along with her attitude.

Patsy and Anna argued inside the gloom of the kitchen. The house faced the wrong way and the sun never entered the back rooms until afternoon.

Anna threatened to go live with her dad and Lily.

“Because of pancakes?” Patsy said.

“Because you don’t try. You don’t care.”

“Fine, go live with Tom and Lily, see how long they’d put up with you,” Patsy said.

Anna’s chin trembled and her cheeks burned red.

Patsy felt immediately sorry and suggested they go out for breakfast, to the IHOP.

Anna shook her head hard, as if she had spiders in her hair.

Patsy suggested they make S’mores. Anna had loved to make S’mores when she was younger, when they’d go camping, when they were still a family.

Anna lit up like a sparkler. “For breakfast? Seriously?”

They readied the marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate and Patsy reached for the gas lighter. The familiar feel of the lighter in her hand calmed and heartened her, much like an alcoholic’s first daily grip of the bottle.

They ate to full and laughed at each other’s chocolate teeth and marshmallow lips. Anna wore a black camisole and her hair caught-up in a bun, showing off her shoulders and long neck and shiny oval face. She looked like a dancer, like a beautiful girl on stage in the lead role. Patsy felt an ache in some part of herself she couldn’t name.

“How’d I get so lucky,” she said, “to get you?”

In the afternoon, three of Anna’s friends came over. Patsy liked to have the girls hang out at hers, enjoyed the full, happy feeling in the house. The girls disappeared up to Anna’s bedroom and soon the sounds of music and laughter and screeches touched every wall. Patsy locked herself inside her bedroom and sat on the edge of her plump duvet. She lit match after match and watched the sticks burn out. The smell of sulfur always catapulted her back to childhood and her father’s ritual with his matches, loose-leaf tobacco and pipe.

Patsy’s parents had raised her with a fear of fire. As a boy, her father had lost his two next-door-neighbors, seven-year-old twins, in a house fire. The boys were his best friends. He could smell their cooked corpses for months after the inferno and sometimes said he could still hear their screams.

Her father had never allowed candles in the house, or a deep fat fryer or Christmas lights. He also kept matches and lighters out of children’s reach and unplugged every electrical appliance in the house every night.

Patsy stared into the ball of fire atop the matchstick. Fire brought out a tenderness in her that not much else did anymore, aside from Anna. Fire made her feel like she was deep-kissing an angel.

…

Tom and Lily insisted on a meeting to discuss ‘Anna’s welfare.’ Patsy refused to meet with them, but they threatened her with Child Protective Services. As soon as Patsy heard the splutter of Tom’s car in her driveway, she raced upstairs to her bedroom and her aerosols and watched fire dance in the air. Anna called and called.

Tom and Lily remained standing inside the living room. Tom looked like he’d bulked up at the gym and his stance and new build made him appear more like a police officer than a technical writer. Lily, a yoga instructor, remained as skinny and attractive as ever, her chestnut hair pouring down her tiny back. Patsy inwardly talked down her panic and sniffed at the sulfur on her fingers. She wanted to be in her kitchen, not the living room. She’d feel better in her kitchen. She offered lemonade.

They sipped the lemonade with mechanical movements and suffered small talk. Patsy pressed her thumb to the scar on the inside of her left wrist. Years back, she’d burned herself on the face of an iron. Tom had pulled her over to the faucet and held her arm under cold, running water, and had fussed and worried. After that, she’d burned herself repeatedly. In the end, though, even hurting herself couldn’t make Tom care.

Tom started the ambush. “We need to talk about Anna.

“What about Anna?” Patsy said.

“We’re concerned about her well-being,” he said.

Patsy laughed into her glass. “Her what?”

In the back garden, Anna played hoops and repeatedly thumped the basketball against the backboard.

Tom returned his glass to the table, lining it up perfectly again with its ring of condensation on the pinewood. “Thing is, Patsy, Lily and I think it best Anna come live with us.”

Patsy’s glass slipped out of her hand and dropped to the floor. She looked up from the smashed glass and seep of lemonade over the tiles and glared at Tom through tears. “That will never happen. Never.”

“Please, Patsy,” Lily said, “we know this is hard, but we have to think about what’s best for Anna.”

Patsy imagined taking the red lighter to Lily’s hair, to her lips, to her hands and feet.

“You need to accept you’re not the best role model,” Tom continued.

Patsy ordered him and Lily out of her house.

“We’ve already filed paperwork,” Tom said.

Patsy shouted and chased Tom and Lily down the hall and out her front door.

Lily turned around at the front gate. “You’re crazy. You need help.”

“You better believe it,” Patsy said and slammed her front door.

She returned to the kitchen and pulled every tea towel from the drawer and heaped them onto the counter. Anna remained outside, the basketball still thudding. Patsy held the gas lighter to the mound of tea towels. The reflected flames shimmered in the window.

Anna shouted from the back garden. “Fire! Mom! Fire!”

Patsy remained motionless inside the kitchen, her face warmed by the flames.

Anna burst through the back door. “Mom?”

Patsy brushed the fabric bonfire into the sink, turned on the faucet and doused the flames.

“What happened?” Anna asked, her tone suspicious.

Patsy faced her daughter, that longstanding feeling of fuel in her veins gone. Calm, resolute, she made them both a promise. “It’s okay, sweetheart, Mommy’s got everything under control.”

Few artists in contemporary recording meld poetic narrative and musical accomplishment as well as songwriter and pianist Daniel Knox. This exclusive session recorded outside Chicago once again evidences the skill and haunting poignancy of a truly original musician.

1.”Yet Another One For You”
2.”Hahahospital”
3.”Untitled Waltz”

*This session was recorded by Garret Hammond at The Brill Basement Recording Studio in Downers Grove, IL.

photo: John Atwood

As an artist in residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Daniel Knox will complete a long-form piece of music based on the work of photographer John Atwood. The piece will premiere at the 92YTribeca in January 2012 along with the opening of an exhibition of Atwood’s photos. More info and tickets available at 92y.org

Original, haunting, and captivating, Evryman For Himself is the second album from songwriter and pianist Daniel Knox.

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

As an artist in residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Daniel Knox will complete a long-form piece of music based on the work of photographer John Atwood. The piece will premiere at the 92YTribeca in January 2012 along with the opening of an exhibition of Atwood’s photos. More info and tickets available at 92y.org

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Jascha KesslerJascha Kessler has published seven books of poetry and fiction, as well as six volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian, Serbian and Bulgarian, several of which have been awarded major prizes. The Seventh Veil

• Simon PerchikSimon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. Untitled, One
• Untitled, Two
• Lisa SewellLisa Sewell is the author of two books of poems, The Way Out (Alice James Books), Name Withheld (Four Way Books) and a chapbook, Long Corridor (Seven Kitchens Press), which won the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Award. She is also co-editor with Claudia Rankine of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan UP 2007) and Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century, forthcoming from Wesleyan in 2012. Her recent work has appeared in Colorado Review, Tampa Review, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, New Letters and The Journal. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University. Bufo periglenes (Golden Toad)
• Lara DolphinLara Dolphin is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications, including Pulse Literary Journal, River Poets Journal, The Foliate Oak Literary Journal and Calliope.Unholy Ordnance
• Dave MaloneDave Malone is the author of several books of poetry and a new ebook series, Seasons in Love(Trask Road Press), available at Smashwords and Kindle. His poems have appeared in Cave Region Review, decomP, Elder Mountain: Journal of Ozark Studies, Mid Rivers Review, San Pedro River Review, Spindrift, and Word Riot. Ceiling Corners of the Existential
• Sasha Debevec-McKenneySasha Debevec-McKenney was a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts youngARTS finalist. Her poems have appeared in Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight and Oregon Literary Review. In 2008, she was a featured reader at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival Night of Fresh Voices. The Feeling That Nobody Will Ever Like You

• Pablo GuzmanPablo Guzman is a painter living and working in Medellin, Colombia. Pintura – Espacios
• TwoOneTwoOne is a Japanese born artist now residing in Melbourne. Paint & Installation
• Fernando VicenteFernando Vicente is a Spanish artist and illustrator. He contributes regularly to the newspaper El Pai, and magazines such as Gentleman, Letras Libres and Cosmopolitan. Vanitas

• The StorylinesThe Storylines are an electronic folk quartet from Italy.June Leaves

• Ehud HavazeletEhud Havazelet is the author the story collections What is it then between us? and Like Never Before, as well as the novel, Bearing the Body. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. His short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, and his latest story, “Gurov in Manhattan,” was recently anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2011. discusses fiction and truth

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, Hightower lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain. His translations of a manuscript by the Spanish-Puerto Rican poet Aurora de Albornoz garnered Hightower a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. A bi-lingual book of Hightower’s poems — translated by Natalia Carbajosa — is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid, later this fall. Also, stateside, this fall, his fourth collection of poems is forthcoming from Barrow Street Books.reviews Ely Shipley’s “Boy with Flowers”

photo: Sigrid Estrada

In an intimate interview, the award-winning author discusses his process, growth, and the relationship between creation and mortality.

Six months in Los Angeles, and I’m still alone in my place. But not too depressed. No longer mourning the loss. Ready for the present, perhaps, if not my future. Let well enough alone. If it’s well. If it’s enough. I sit at a good though monotonous job at Technetronics, Inc., assembling micro-components for the guidance system of what must be the latest model cruise missile.

We’ve all been cleared to work here, some forty men and women on this line. At 08:00, we file from the locker room into our places, wearing gauze surgical masks and caps, covered up by sterile white jumpsuits, our feet shod in canvas booties. The badges over our hearts show our names and our polaroid portraits, both profile and full mug. This room in the plant is sterile: sealed, air-conditioned, bathed in soft, gray-white fluorescence, and permeated by Muzak— cocktail-hour dance tunes, slowed-down old jazz standards— a flattened-out, tinkly noise played at the one low volume that wears away the day and fills the night and sleep with its tinny, discreet jangle. Nauseating. We sit at the long bench, working with tiny bits of gold wire and hundreds of minuscule chips under stereomicroscopes. This little brain we’re assembling will guide a stubby-winged missile a thousand miles— skimming over hill and dale, streaking along just above the surface of the earth, darting through valleys and touching treetops, up, down, up, winding in and out at a tall man’s eyelevel until it sees its target, plunges abruptly down to detonate a small, strategic mini-holocaust, and obliterates a city somewhere.

During lunchtime, we get to chatting, more or less. My coworkers are more or less like me: young to middle-aged, all from somewhere else, too. We talk movies, tv, the sports page— sex, religion, and politics are no-no’s. At 17:30 there is the slamming of car doors and the roaring of exhausts as we file out and head for the Freeway. And then the long evening— each in his or her own unit, alone for all you know. Turning the key confirms the solitude. But the pay’s very good, the job more or less assured— it’s a fresh subcontract and Technetronics, Inc., is in on the ground floor of this new development in weaponry. So not to complain, I adjure myself. Maybe someday soon I’ll return to the stud¬ies abandoned in despair after the breakdown. I know that this time I have got ahold of things. Damned if I ever let go again.

About 16:00 this afternoon the fellow to my left, Peter Fuerst, says to me, “Kingsley, how about coming to our party tonight. Most of our bench will be there.”

Well…, I say.

And Sally Johns, the girl to my right, with a pair of hips if ever I saw hips, even in her full, loose, white jumpsuit, says, “Come on, Kingsley, give it a try. You bring your wine, and I’ll bring mine.”

Her luminous blue eye winks at me above her white mask. I’m persuaded.

It’s Friday. April again. It’s even rained this week, Los Angeles is clear, washed, glistening— there’s snow on the peak of Mt. Baldy to the East, and the many different kinds of green foliage that fill this city are fresh and tender. Life may be possible, who knows? I do need something more for myself.

A shabby stucco cottage in Venice, gabled and low, with a Midwest sort of front porch and some splintery rattan furniture on it. A half-dozen cats prowl about or sprawl, lazily cleaning themselves. It’s on Rose Avenue, a few doors from the Pioneer Bakery. The street’s lined with decrepit houses just like it, all with fenced, hopeful patches of front lawn. Bougainvillea vines, rose and hibiscus bushes mask their peeling age, and the cool evening air is tainted with the night blooming jasmine— a sharp scent that mixes pleasantly with the delicate yeasty odors of bread baking in the nearby plant. A few blocks to the West, beyond the flat, broad beach, the Pacific lies calm and gray, not a boat or ship anywhere in sight. It’s nearly 22:00 when I open the front door, and the party’s underway. I straighten my tie and step in. The usual scene. Outside, the quiet of late evening; inside, hi-fi cramming the small rooms with thunder and screeching. I set my jug of mountain red on a side table with the rest of the booze offerings. People are dancing, or talking mouth to ear. I have the feeling I have come to the wrong party, not a soul in the place do I recognize.

Or else I’m not as well as I have believed myself to be. By 23:00 I’m slouched on a beanbag in a corner, an observer, sipping at my 7th glass of wine. Plenty of action, yes; but it baffles me. I’m sure I must know these folks from Technetronics, Inc., by name or face or form? Yet somehow they are all strangers now. One tells me he’s a movie director, up for an Oscar. Another is a State Senator down for the tax hearings next week. Another’s on the Gover¬nor’s Special Commission for Environmental Protection, Toxic Wastes Committee. That gal’s a well-known sculptor in epoxy resins, getting into advanced laser holography. Another, a little Chinese, is a minimal conceptualist— she shows me the razor marks on her wrists, a famous artwork she created the other year in the elevator of the County Museum. The tall black girl is a ceramist— lingams and yonis and omphaloids three meters high. I have spoken to a familiar-looking man from my own bench who tells me he’s a psychotherapist specializing in addicted call girls. There is a pair of Sufi dancers in orange pantaloons and gauze blouses, their heads in blue turbans, and a pale, married couple of Sikhs in white, wearing tall white headdresses and drinking only Perrier. I have poured my wine out to a woman who’s the bestselling author of Gothic romances in paperback, she’s just passed the ten-million mark. Peter Fuerst himself has red hair now, not mousy brown. Sally’s cropped black head is hidden in a long, silky, synthetic blonde mane, its tresses compressed by a band of sparkling rhinestones, hanging below her backside — I know those hips — and the rest of her full body hardly covered— shiny platinum patches on the large nipples of her heavy and free-swinging breasts…and she’s not Sally now either…she’s Salome Head, Coptic belly-dancer from Alexandria, Egypt. Mark, who assembles to the left of Peter Fuerst all day long, is introduced to me as a stockbroker— he’s offering me a new issue of preferred stock in a valve-factory— a steal now at seven dollars, shares bound to triple and split within the year…it’s all the new chemical pipeline-building, he says, and diversification too: chips, and more chips. And it is Mark, I think, behind the curly chestnut G.B.S. beard. Though it’s not Mark’s nose propping the heavy frames of his thick, clear glasses.

I have tried talking to these people over the buffet, in the kitchen, even while faking a hootch with Sally, who has pressed her quivering, naked abdomen and buttocks up against me more than once. Yet none of them seems to know me, and we have to get acquainted all over again. Hi there, it’s Kingsley! I’ve said, only to be met with blank looks: “Kingsley who?” It’s finally too much for me, and I have to sit down in my corner to nibble at hardtack and drink my wine in peace.

Towards 24:00, things start to get wild. Not rough, just a little wild. I can guess what is going down soon. Group swinging. Whatever. Sally — Salome Head — crouches in the center of the room, gyrating to the sounds of Ali Baba and his Middle East Assassins— a long album, with six endless, authentic ethnic tracks. The place has been darkened, the lighting undulating blue and purple around the walls and ceiling.

And I don’t feel at all well. I am holding a brimming glass of wine, staring at it as it runs over my cupped hands. I look up, and Sally’s standing over me, her long thick blonde hair brushing the top of my head. Her forehead’s sweat-beaded, the mascara’s sliding down her heavy cheeks, the lids of her big black eyes painted a cobalt blue and powdered with flecks of gold dust. I realize that she must be wearing black contacts. And when she unpins her muslin veil, all embroidered with hearts and roses, and smiles at me, a gold tooth glints in the front of her mouth. Maybe it’s not even Sally? No one here tonight has the same name, or same anything I remember from Technetronics, Inc.

“Come on now, John,” she whispers throatily. “Dance with me, okay, man?”

John? Kingsley here, I say.

She stares at me and replies brusquely, “Kingsley? Never heard of him.” And then she leans over above me, her pendulous breasts powdered white, sweat-streaked, rank, musk reeking from her deep armpits, her heavy, gold-glittered thighs trembling from her exer-tions on the dance floor. She thrusts her hands under my arms as though to lift me from my collapsed, beanbag seat. But I am too heavy, too firmly planted. The heat radiating from her hits me in the face, dizzying me. She grins, full of zany lust. There is a bright zircon-crusted star winking from her bellybutton. “Come on now, John, won’t you join the dance?”

Tell me one thing, I say.

“And what should that be, my darling lover?” she croons, panting.

Just tell me— what gives? That’s Peter over there, isn’t it; and that’s Mark; and this is our bunch from Technetronics, Inc., isn’t it? Silence. Well, isn’t it? I insist.

She lets go of me. Stands back erect, her plump belly, its hollow, starry gash of navel thrust at me, her bangled wrists planted firmly on those hips, their painted talons gripping her thighs in anger. She gazes down at my forehead, not at me. And she speaks in a new voice: acid, mocking. “Look, Kingsley, you better leave L.A.”

“But why?” I ask surprised, and anxious too.

“Because you just ain’t gonna make it here, man.”

Oh?

“No, man, you ain’t. Because you lack a persona, see?”

But Sally…!

My protest is cut short. She digs a sharp nail into my heart, and says, “Man, you got nothing but your own self!”

That’s all I want! I hear myself shout back at her.

Her other hand slices across my Adam’s apple, and she snorts, “That just ain’t enough, man. Never was. Never will be.”

There’s a sudden silence in the room. They haven’t changed the cassette. I can hear the loud, low hum of the amplifier putting out its silent, roaring sound, like the white noise of nothingness. Salome hooks both hands into my belt and heaves me from my seat; she leads me through this congeries of pure strangers, not one of them resembling the disciplined, skilled workers I know during the week at Technetronics, Inc. From their invented vocations and surprising faces, they watch me being yanked along. They stare at me with pity, and contempt. As she thrusts me backwards out the front door into midnight on Rose Avenue, I see their turned heads. They have watched my expulsion and said nothing. She closes the door, slowly hooking up her yashmak again with one hand, leaving visible now only those black-stenciled brows arched over her great, black, blank eyes. The Sufi has already put the Assassins back in the machine and turned them loose. The drums erupt with a wallop, and the door is shut in my face. The Princes of the Earth go on partying without me.

I walk to the car. There’s a damp breeze flowing in from the Pacific a few blocks off. It’s salty and it’s sour. I am chilled in my light suit. I have nothing but myself now. And I am wondering what I can do with it.

The Storylines project was born in 2006 in a small, dusty room located in the 17-person town of Piancavallo, Italy. Melding electronic and artificial soundscapes with a folkish sensibility, their first album, “June Leaves,” boasts a dynamic tone both poignant and unique.

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

The Storylines

“Boy with Flowers” Ely Shipley
Barrow Street Press, 2008, 978-0-9728-302-6-3, $15.95

Poet Ely Shipley

Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers won the 2007 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. I remember enjoying it; reading it through the first time, thinking how if I had been asked to suggest art for its cover, I might have suggested one of the 1905 paintings of Picasso . . . either “Boy with a Pipe” (lanky, androgynous boy in blue with a crown of flowers) or the slightly more austere, red shirted “Boy with a Frilled Collar.”

Gender is not something we discover one day by looking down and seeing a protrusion of flesh. But rather by our looking back up and saying , “Oh, I am a girl” or “Oh, I am a boy.” Gender comes from a deeper catalog of possibilities of escape and expression. Gender identification begins more like a trembling root finding its way in a hazy dream-state. Something more along the lines of Mallarme’s sleepy faun in “Afternoon of a Faun.” In Shipley’s landscape, the dreamy faun sings while finding himself floating between two worlds.

Boy with Flowers embodies and disembodies with ease. The poems are clear and easily accessible. Images of masks and juvenile entrapments balance against a larger set of images — of stories inching forward: tattoos, scars, blood veins, underground rivers, wire, sutures, letters carved into a tree, the light from a car’s headlights washing over a wall, coils of smoke, fingertips and kisses stroking and brushing flesh, branches, roots, lightning, ice cracking, water falling, . . . even songs. Shipley also writes of being surrounded.

…I want
escape. My shirt opened…
and now when I close
my eyes, a music box stars up and my breath

is that lonely ballerina, spiraling
faster before her circular mirror. And she sees
nothing because it is dark
or because her eyes are only eyes
painted across a face. Yet for a moment
I swear I hear her sing
over the music, the city, my pulse—
but its only the high-pitched, slow churning
of her feet, that wood carved tightly
around a metal spring, the way
the whole world turns and folds
around its invisible axis.

(“Breath”)

In another of the poems, the meditation springs from an aunt having a scar… her neck previously sutured after a car accident:

…It is the map to a place
I will never enter but wish to
trail with my fingers, read the Braille of her, follow

this story as the needle that once
reassembled her dug deep – little silver
diver plunging into water, then

up for air, sewing itself between two
worlds, here and there, me
and her, to stitch

all that can only be
seamless in the dark.

(“Horizon Line”)

Shipley writes of the heart and lungs working magically away in the dark. Of the heart desiring to escape. The image of water freely lapping at the shore brings comfort.

Here, another poem, that is a meditation of entering and heard singing:

…The woman
in the movie falls
in love but still feels
trapped. I know because
one night she makes love in the choir
loft of an abandoned church. The roof

seems as though it is peeled
open and the camera
closes in so I can look

down on her. It begins to rain,
and when she comes
the noise she makes, breathing heavily

into the man’s hair, which is long and sways
like a curtain back and forth across his face,
sounds like singing.

(“In the Film”)

Shipley also writes of desiring to penetrate, of wanting to be inserted into another, of wanting to be surrounded, even engulfed, by another’s sensibility.

For Shipley, the oracular is related to the moment of letting go; where the ineffable gushes into the physical — making a sound:

…I’ve been
dreaming…
I wander from room to room and in one find
my mother’s heart…
My mother must have left it by mistake, here
on a shelf. I want to lift it to my ear and listen to its beating.
I’m afraid to touch it, afraid I’ll hear only silence,
and the silence will carry me into its sea. I could drown in this
love for my mother. Inside the garden, a stone
fountain floats, from which water pours endlessly
from the mouths of fish and gods.

(“Fountain”)

Shipley writes eloquently of the vastness of childhood… and of the “child just nearing the age of loneliness.” Beyond writing of the singularity of laying aside childhood and of slipping into instances of reverie, Shipley writes of the singularity of mortal being and needs:

…tonight, I only want to be
the mouth

of a guitar, hollowed out
and bodiless
except for the balloon
of sound resonating invisibly

through air, and go on
pressing my fingers deeper in
to the neck, as if I could find
a shape inside

its voice as I choke
out its notes, its high-pitched
scream, its pop.

Shipley’s Boy with Flowers is a keeper.

Have a great October,

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• J.S. SimmonsJ.S. Simmons is an author from Boston. He passed most of the ’90s in Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx, and now lives in Eugene Oregon, where he writes stories, and is working on a novel predicated upon an obsession with his blue-collar breeding. Little Miracles

• Carl SwartCarl Swart grew up on the Great Plains in the shadow of drilling rigs, machine shops, and feed mills. He earned his BA in English at the University of Oklahoma. He currently is an MFA candidate at the University of Oregon, where he also works as a professor of creative writing and English. Lament
• Nanette Rayman-RiveraNanette Rayman-Rivera is the author of the memoir, to live on the wind, which was winner of the first Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and a chapter of her memoir was published in DZANC Best of the Web 2010. She has been published in numerous literary journals, including Oranges & Sardines, MiPOEsias, Berkeley Fiction Review, Wicked Alice, Carve Magazine, The Worcester Review, Carousel, carte blanche and Pebble Lake Review, among many others. Stuck in Waco
• Jacob T. McCallJacob T. McCall is a graduate of Rutgers-Newark M.F.A. Program. His work has appeared in Future Earth Magazine and The Ampersand. He is currently researching and writing a chapbook, American Snapmare, on violence, mental illness and the African-American experience.Flipping (Bulimia) with Isaac Murphy
• Christopher KellerChristopher Keller is a poet and teacher living in Portland. His work has appeared in publications such as The Delinquent, Leveler and Poetry Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The James Dickey Review. Cider Garage
• Allison GrayhurstAllison Grayhurst is a poet living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Wascana Review, Poetry Nottingham International, The Cape Rock and White Wall Review, among other places. Her book, Somewhere Falling, was published by Beach Holme Publishers in Vancouver in 1995. Torn

• Erik OttoErik Otto has been working professionally in the arts for almost 10 years. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to painting, he has designed and constructed large-scale installations, theater sets, retail storefronts, and independent film sets. Otto recently completed the acclaimed Artist-in-Residence program at Recology San Francisco and is committed to working with reclaimed paint and materials to produce work that is both expressive and conceptual. Otto currently lives and works in San Francisco. Various Paintings
• Tran NguyenTran Nguyen is a freelance artist and illustrator living and working in Georgia, USA Illustration
• Chris FrielChris Friel is a color blind british painter who bought a camera in 2006 and has not painted since. He has been shortlisted for The Sunday Times Landscape Photographer of the Year for three years running. Land
• Justin MezzellJustin Mezzell is a designer and creative director currently based in New York, NY. Do You Remember When This World Was Ours?

• Katharine Whalen and her FascinatorsKatharine Whalen is a musician living and working in North Carolina. After a long stint with the band Squirrel Nut Zippers — which included appearances on A Prairie Home Companion, The Tonight Show, Late Night with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien — Whalen moved on to embark on several solo projects, the most recent of which is her album, Madly Love.Madly Love
• Katharine WhalenKatharine Whalen is a musician living and working in North Carolina. After a long stint with the band Squirrel Nut Zippers — which included appearances on A Prairie Home Companion, The Tonight Show, Late Night with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien — Whalen moved on to embark on several solo projects, the most recent of which is her album, Madly Love.The Fogged Clarity Session

• Jeffrey EugenidesJeffrey Eugenides is an American author born in Detroit and now teaching at Princeton. He is the author of three novels: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex, Eugenides is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. the Pulitzer Prize winner discusses process
• Katharine WhalenKatharine Whalen is a musician living and working in North Carolina. After a long stint with the band Squirrel Nut Zippers — which included appearances on A Prairie Home Companion, The Tonight Show, Late Night with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien — Whalen moved on to embark on several solo projects, the most recent of which is her album, Madly Love.talks about her latest album

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, Hightower lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain. His translations of a manuscript by the Spanish-Puerto Rican poet Aurora de Albornoz garnered Hightower a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. A bi-lingual book of Hightower’s poems — translated by Natalia Carbajosa — is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid, later this fall. Also, stateside, this fall, his fourth collection of poems is forthcoming from Barrow Street Books.reviews Manoel de Barros’ “Birds for a Demolition”