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Recent Submissions
Behind dingy cellophane,
the photograph in the family album
encases me, where I grimace like I’m behind bars—
lips stretched taut across gritted teeth,
eyes plaintive, fixing my father, the resident cameraman,
asking any witness not to believe
the bottom half of my face.
My age, ten,
my hair, mostly brushed, my pantsuit, floral,
a K-Mart layaway acquisition,
my hands, clutching a certificate reading
“Honorable Mention.”
A bone thrown by the school district arts committee,
a pack of energetic, under-employed moms who
anoint the preteen illuminati each spring.
You do not have my consent to label me
I have not so much as muttered the words required for you to put me in the boxes which shape your reality.
If you seek clarity about my identity,
you may ask me an open-ended question.
You may invite me into conversation where you will expose your mental limits, and I will expose mine.
I will hope for the lines of my limits to intersect with the lines of yours,
that we might co-create escape routes to different dimensions
and we will dance and play in dialogue and nuance.
My dearest perceptive one,
how do you know that I am not truly here?
I can be,
or could be,
but this body is exhausting, so
I am coasting in a space
just above and behind my eyeballs
where I don’t have to deal with full body chills
and the feeling there’s a hoard of termites
chewing into my cervical vertebrae at the base of my skull.
...
It is the age of cyclopean eldritch, of dreams vast and grand
Angels and demons spawn and die, and their bodies fertilize the land
From such wondrous turmoil chaotic empires are born
Their sharp spires rise ever higher until sanity’s curtain is torn
And in the sybarite’s palace whores laugh on parquet floors
While in the narcissist’s castle hags brood behind worm eaten doors
Astral caravans with silken sails make eons long trips
And the wine dark sea embraces all of the Motherland’s ships
The jesters burn the royal library, living in a joke
Their idiot grins cleave their face as they inhale the sage smoke
In the arena the mad monarch’s games subdue the restless crowds
As the girl captures faces with her mirror and reflects them onto the clouds
The spy on their cryptic mission, dutiful agent of dread
...
April 17, 2075
Wapato Hills Park
When Edison Elementary lets out, Zephyr Tan’s second grade class bursts from the school building like water breaking through a beaver dam, and he’s at the front of the wave. First, second, and third grade are in the new building and share the new playground that extends from the first floor gym into a multi-story playspace with moving tunnels and ladders and a soccer pitch on the roof, which the second graders can look down on from the windows of their classroom.
Last year, Zephyr and his best friend Carmen had turned the tower on the third story of the playground into their own little fort, and always gone up there after school. The playground referees keep the covered playgrounds open for five hours after school ends, so kids can get exercise and have fun. There are also three other soccer fields and two baseball diamonds but mostly kids like the climbing nets and the team swings. The playgrounds get crowded.
I’m scared of aviator glasses
and the glinting glare in their silver rims,
the wide frames carrying their long, jabby arms
that loop over your ears,
Milan is burning, a smudge of black smoke on the horizon. Cannon fire thunders over thehills, the apprentices have fled, and yet the master remains in his workshop. Chisel and awl lieforgotten beside heaps of sawdust on a long table. He releases the clamps from the hollow bodyof what will one day be a violin. Steady hands riddled with spots and blue veins turn theinstrument, inspecting every angle. He closes his eyes as he runs a fingertip over the grain of thewood, tracing the ribs and soundboard. In the master’s hands, the wood seems to sing.
The master lays the body down gently, as he would a sleeping child, and turns hisattention to the scroll and neck, lovingly and meticulously carved. He does not know that thebuyer of this violin—the governor of Milan—is at this moment being driven out of the city,retreating, bloodied and beaten, and will soon return to France. It is of no importance, so long asthe instrument is appreciated and played. That is the purpose of a violin, after all. He shouldknow—he’s made almost 900 of them.
A stray musket ball sails over the low stone wall, shatters a window in the house. A voicecries out “Antonio!” This is the only voice that can cut through his focus, the only person heloves more than his work. He sets down the neck of the violin. It is time to leave.
On the beach, I gather clam shells with cousins
discarding cracked remnants.
Dad calls for the swimming lesson,
I dread, dig my feet in sand, covered, stuck
Waves wash over my excuse,
leaving no trace.
I lie shivering stiff in salty warm
shallow waters of Birch Bay, Dad’s hand
under my back assuring me I can float.
“Freddie, it’s time to go. Get in.”
Ballard. July 1967. There’s nothing better than Seattle in July. You’ve been liberated from Monroe Junior High School for the summer. The clock means nothing. You could go anywhere on your bike. You even know how to take the bus downtown. If life were fair, you and your friend Ben would be sneaking into one of those seedy theaters by the Market to watch The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. You’d be back by dinner, and no one would be the wiser.
But life isn’t fair.
When you’re 12, no one thinks you’re more than just a pee-pants baby who isn’t allowed to stay at home by himself while the adults drive out to La Push in a car that’s probably going to overheat halfway there. Your older brother Bobby has been recruited as a driver because your Old Man and all of your uncles got lit in the basement last night. None of the women have a license. Bobby just got his last month, and he looks subtly irritated when he’s pulled out of his black-lit bedroom with its hand-painted mural of Lyndon Johnson and Hitler congratulating each other. Great job, Lyndon. Hey, thanks, Adolf! Bobby’s eyes are blood-shot and he reeks of pot. None of the grown-ups recognize the smell and they keep asking each other quietly if he’s been eating too much garlic.
From: An Ode to the Trees of Tacoma
Roots against the cosmic churn
Forming here a hallowed ground
Tethered to tierra’s perpetual turn
Roble Madre’s essence is firmly bound
Stalwart in both the rain and gales
She sips deep from a sunken river
In between each sweet taste she tells
Her tales to those who’ll outlive her […}
Thud. Thud.Thudthudthud.
"For God’s sake!" Al squeezed the volume button on the remote as loud as the TV would go. But it was still not enough. It wasn’t just the noise; Al could deal with that. It was more the vibration, the throbbing, random jolts to his chest—Thudthud.Thud.
“Damn it!” Al sprung up in his recliner. He hurled the remote, his pupils blossoming when plastic and batteries smashed against the wall. His feet hit the cold hardwoods and shuffled to the window, snagging his ratty sock on a loose floor nail. He slid open the window a few inches and squinted toward the street. They were already at it, on a goddamn Saturday morning at that. Must be five or six of them. Al’s stomach burned at the sight.
Touch the water, and taste your hand.
Touch my sea and feel its bile.
Tend the surface of this holy water
that I wrecked before I burned.
His salt and mine, his last command
I could not stride to follow.
A condiment of his rage, I drowned my sorrow
before he could throw me in the fire.
I bought my daughters kaleidoscopes
From a toy shop in Seattle.
An Indigenous totem pole stands in Pioneer Square
Among the trees and buildings.
I saw you speaking with blue in your mouth
I wanted to kiss it out. To take that blue and […]
Mother’s backyard was groomed,
except for the fenceless perimeter
where wild blackberries loomed
seven feet tall.
Every year she would cut them back.
Every year they grew back, with a
vengeance, calling to mind science
fiction tales – carnivorous plants
who devoured their humans, slowly.
Why, I wondered, didn’t she call in
the experts to kill them? […]
On March 1, 2024, Tacoma turned out at the Ground 2 Sound Festival to show the impact and intersections of art and activism, and to focus on the crucial importance of clean waters in our Puget Sound Region. Read the selected pieces and honorable mentions from our themed call!
My phone chirped, coming to life. Don't forget: yogurt and bananas for your smoothie. Followed by three heart emojis. A text from my wife who had been dead for a year and two months. I felt a stab of rage. Definitely not the “warm fuzzy feeling” described in the promotional sales claptrap. When Diane passed, I wanted the simplest, most straightforward process. Take the body to the industrial oven and turn it to dust. Give me the dust in a cardboard box. Done.
It wasn’t until I left my town that I began to learn its secrets. Winter break after my first semester in university, I drove home the back way and fell in love for the first time with the turns in the roads, the bareness of the deciduous trees on either side, river birch peeling and turning to slush in the canoes of the highway shoulder. I left my home behind and arrived at my house. I hadn’t started calling it “my parent’s house” yet. I wasn’t sure what to call it.
In Tacoma's winter, bright and rainy grace,
A tale unfolds in each raindrop's embrace.
Tacoma Elf Storage, a festive sight,
The mystery continues to fervent delight […]
Not for man's conventions but
For the peace with the wild,
I practice sitting still–
For mornings on my back deck
To watch the soft rabbit in the grass
And the yearling buck who steps slow
Out of wood's edge to curl
Into a bed of clover he nibbles […]
the world is a dangerous
place to love a child
I am reckless
to want their future
above water
to not write
their identification
on their backs
in permanent ink […]
There are memories of my life that, no matter how many times I recall them, they only play in slow motion. Though I know they happened at the speed of life, my memory willfully recalls them in seconds, stretched out to emphasize the fleeting moments, in an attempt to squeeze out every bit of reminiscence.
Mike comes right over. Middle of the night. Three in the goddamn morning on a Thursday. I call and say I need him to come over and he acts like it ain’t even a thing. He don’t even ask why. There are friends; there are good friends; and there are best friends. Mike’s my best friend. Some friends would help you move. Some would help you move a body.
I will arise now and go to Henderson Bay,
to the old, shingled cabin with sun-worn decking,
and mice that run through sunbeams, across the top of the couch.
A sleeping porch will I have there, windowed with sheets
of plastic, where the music of the creek underneath
and the sound of waves lapping on the beach float in.
And I shall have the peace of lazy summer days spent
with my younger sisters and brother, urging, “Jump! Jump!”
Swinging out from the bulkhead, on the knotted rope,
I will drop into the frigid salt water at high tide.
I will sputter at the cold. My sisters and brother will applaud.
My best friend, Michelle Ledbetter, will caution me,
“Careful of the spikes.” I will climb with Michelle,
up onto the old, wrecked barge, washed up down the way.
If I had been born a cisgender boy, I would have been named Walter, after my father and grandfather. My cousin once removed, cousin twice removed, and my father’s cousin twice removed are also named Walter. It had always been peculiar to me that the whitest white name, and often the moniker of movie villains—something you notice when half of your relatives have it—was a family name for a bunch of brown Peruvians.
I asked my grandfather from the other side of the equator, using the modern wonders of WhatsApp and Google Translate, where the family name came from. According to him, the name came from his father, Alberto, who worked at a German company as a naval mechanic. While he was there, he became friends with a German man named Walter. He liked the name and gave it to his son, who then gave it to his son. Other men in the family liked and passed the name down to their sons. Maybe God did know what he was doing when he made me trans.
It is June. We are staying at your parents’ house on your two-week leave before you deploy again. I always love coming here. Not just because we are surrounded by family, and your mom is the best cook on the West Coast, but we have so much history here. Our relationship took root in this valley, it bloomed and grew and became a stepping-stone to the rest of our story. Our first apartment was in this valley town and the memories are saturated in these streets like the hot summer sun.
We are in your parents’ pool. Little Man is inside playing with Grandma, and we are enjoying the momentary break from being parents. We’re both floating on ridiculous pool toys. We’re darker than when we first got here. My tan, round belly is sticking up out of the water. I am almost four months pregnant with our twins. Our baby girls will join us later this year. I look over at you. You are tanned and relaxed as you float and look up at the cloudless sky. I am so in love with you.
I should’ve drank more in college.
That knowledge sobered me, ironically,
acknowledging the only thing standing
between me and making brothers or lovers
was losing the prudish delusion that if I just kept soda in my Solo
and shortcuts to short stories on my desktop,
I could thumb my French nose at those vapid upchucker-class prats
and emerge the right-brained victor.
I always had more to say, anyway,
with a carefully planned paragraph
than a flip cup-adjacent conversation
or morning-after, mid-network handshake.
Soon after my family moved to Federal Way, my mom told me that the SeaTac Mall had the first ever Cinnabon. The flagship. In my seven-year-old mind, this meant importance, gravitas. We tried it out one day, the gloopy mess of dough and icing practically heaving atop our paper plates. Even as a typically greedy child, I knew that there was something excessive about a Cinnabon, that it could be the gateway to some very bad things. Judiciously, my mothersliced mine into quarters with the flimsy plastic knife. Soon after gobbling up a few bites, I went droopy and lethargic for the rest of the afternoon.
That day, I learned that Cinnabon was a luxury that would make you pay in the end. But it was one of the few claims to fame that Federal Way had, other than being a place where the Green River Killer would go hot-tubbing or where apartments were cheap. I’d felt part of something important when we lived in Seattle, where you could travel 600 feet up the Space Needle or watch people throw fish in the Market. Down in the suburbs, I felt beige andinsubstantial. Even at a young age, I noticed this difference in how a place could make you feel.
The staccato of Nadine’s shoes on the rocks and the rising panic in her breathing created a jarringcombination of sounds. She hadn’t quite broken the tree line yet when the sky faded from a paleblue to a deepening violet. The only thing worse to her than being outside after sunset was being inthe woods after sunset. That was unthinkable.
She took a moment to steady her breath appreciate the silhouettes of the house and trees against theartistry in the sky. Her chest burned and her heart felt as though it would leap out toward thehorizon. Nadine started when a muted rustling caught her attention. She couldn’t place its source, soshe turned her head this way and that to try to pick it out. Quickly, she gave up looking and strodetoward the house. She noticed as she got closer to the ornate wooden door, the sound intensified. Itwent from a soft rustle to the rush of static in her very soul like that of a record that spun long afterthe orchestra had packed up and gone home.
Every time I stand beneath a Coastal Redwood my mouth hangs open as a thousand words try to escape from my chest all at once.
Every time, the only one that makes it through is a confounded “How?”
How can something grow so titanic?
I know the short answer: it’s a plant, a genetic byproduct of water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. Redwoods just get a little overzealous about it.
I even know the long answer; a seed the size of a grain of sand falls hundreds of feet to the soil. With enough sunlight, water, luck, and time, a sentient monolith the width of a Boeing 747 soars into the sky, spreading out branches the size of tree trunks with twigs the size of saplings, tall enough to shade the Statue of Liberty’s torch.
And still, “How?”
What other word fits when witnessing a miracle?
We left in a hurry so there’s nothing left for you in the housebut if you look out the window you can see the encroaching flamesgutting the town along their warpathsave the only church still standing on Ash Street
At noon you count the bulbous heads of the dandelionsat 3pm the sparrows line up on the telephone wires across the street