Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Winter 2010 - Bestiary
Marcy finished picking up after the dogs and tied the plastic grocery bag with two simple knots. The three greyhounds barked when they saw she was done because they wanted treats.
“Hush dogs,” she said. She crossed the yard and opened the side gate that led to the front of the house—and the two late Thursday afternoon trashcans that would be emptied on Friday morning garbage day. She swung the gate behind her as she usually did and proceeded forward across St. Augustine grass of the front yard.
When she did so the purebred, silvery dogs raised their heads like chickens around a cock. They were waiting for the click of the gate. This was the sign to stay put, though the opposite had been true during their racing days. The starting cages would snap open, and nothing would have been better than to finally sink their teeth into the fake white rabbit that was always just out of reach. Men would have bad days because of them, and some lucky men would name their own kids after their winning bets. Now, standing around in the yard with ears pinned back, the dogs can’t quite remember how the track and rabbit would, without fail, be replaced by wire cages and rough human hands, but they remember other things.
Before they could really understand what they heard, they were running—the three of them— streaking across the yard. There had been no click, and the first dog to hit the gate and force it open yelped. Marcy hadn’t even reached the trashcans when they ran past. In all her years of rescuing dogs, she had never once yelled after the ones who got out. They would come back.
Blocks away, an old man was trimming stray branches off of a tree in his front yard. The look in his eyes was that of a meticulous man, but his dry, cracked hands made him clumsy. His white undershirt was a good fit, and the wrinkled dimples of his forehead overflowed their narrow banks with sweat. The sunlight coming through the branches and leaves made it look like he was underwater. Occasionally he would stop his work and look toward his house, perhaps in anticipation that his wife might bring him some water or lemonade.
Across the street, a boy passed by his living room window and saw the old man cutting the trees. He doesn’t know the man’s name, but he doesn’t remember many people’s names. His mother says that he should be starting high school now, but the high school said no, so now he doesn’t go to school “for the time being,” his mother said. His own name is Peter, and it helps him understand the man cutting trees better if he imagines his name is Peter too.
Moving away from the window, Peter picked up a pen from his mother’s desk and went into the kitchen to draw on the newspaper at the kitchen table. He would add details to the pictures. Not mustaches and missing teeth, but instead birds and other people, standing in the background. His principal once told his mother that he was troubled, but Peter hardly ever got in trouble. His hands got dark with newsprint, and Peter started thinking about the other Peter, who could still be heard rummaging in the yard.
When he was younger, Peter would play in his front yard or in the street, and once, the old man came and talked to him. The old man reminded Peter of a horse riding character from a movie, and his voice was like a bassoon. He didn’t introduce himself as is the way of most old gentlemen, but his name is, in fact, not Peter, but Sergei. Sergei asked Peter questions he didn’t understand about his father, and then he said he was sorry. Peter was still thinking about the Western he had seen and finally asked Sergei what he knew about horses.
Instead of answering the question directly, Sergei began telling a story, as is the way of most old men. He said that when his parents first arrived in America with him when he was very young, they had had a very rough time. His father had been a skilled taxidermist, which Sergei explained is when you stuff an animal, and Peter nodded in understanding.
“He could make no money doing this in the cities, though, so he answered a letter from his older brother, telling him we would join him in his new home in Kentucky. He lived in a small town outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and he worked in the only ambulance. My father was able to start stuffing the animals that the hunters wanted as trophies, and we were soon able to live in our own small house, and my mother worked in a restaurant.”
His uncle had always told his father that they should all go see a horse race in Louisville. Sergei’s father would sit amongst stuffed ducks and cardinals and think about the horses gliding over the mud and all of the rich men cheering their favorites. Sergei’s father had never gambled outside of poker games with friends, but the thought of hugging a horse with a collar or roses lifted him beyond the musty seclusion of bird feathers. He began setting aside money for his first bet.
“Then one day, my father took my mother and I to Louisville for a horse race. He asked us to dress in our church clothes, and he wore a fancy tie he had made for himself out of the colorful feathers of ducks. In the car, we passed horse farms that went on forever, and I could see the horses playing games and asking their owners for food along the fences.”
The track was exactly how Sergei’s father had envisioned it, and he kept his hand in his pocket, feeling the greasy dollars and lint inside. Sergei watched as his father placed a $50 bet on a horse called “Sea Wolf,” and when his father finished, he turned and winked at his son. Because they couldn’t afford seats in the grandstand, they stood along the fourth turn railing.
“When the race started, Sea Wolf was in the middle of the pack, and we were all yelling. The leader started slowing down though, and Sea Wolf took the lead! My father’s voice broke when he screamed with excitement, and our horse sprinted toward our turn, leaving the others in his dust. My father was watching his $50 become $500, and my mother couldn’t contain herself.”
Sea Wolf started making the fourth turn, and as Sergei clutched the white railing, something began to happen. Sea Wolf’s leg buckled in the mud, snapping her femur. The jockey was thrown as the horse fell and lay motionless and unconscious. The other horses just barely avoided the two as they flew toward the finish line. The horse made horrible sounds as it lay there in the mud, looking wildly around in pain.
“The horse looked at me, and I yelled at it to keep running. It was sad, but I didn’t understand. Three men came out and restrained the horse while a fourth inspected Sea Wolf’s leg. With his back still turned to us and the grandstand, he brought out a needle. The horse kept screaming, and then that was it, and it was silent.”
Sergei’s father lost his bet, and a man in a nice suit and hat made fun of his tie as they exited through the turnstiles. The story made Peter upset, but he didn’t say so, and he began playing again as a sign for Sergei to return to his yard.
Peter kept scribbling in the newspaper, only stopping momentarily to drink a glass of orange juice. His mother called, and he explained to her what he was doing. She said she would pick up dinner on her way home.
Sergei opened his garage door and brought a trashcan out to the curb for trash pick up. His white shirt somehow seemed even whiter now as it soaked through and sparkled with sweat. Very few cars were on the road. Sergei started working in the flowerbed nearest the front door. He wasn’t wearing gloves for this, and as he pulled dollar weeds from the flowers, black soil would get stuck in the cracks in his hands.
From the kitchen table, Peter first heard dogs barking and then the shouts of a man and then something closer to screams. He went again to the living room window. Sergei lay on his back in his yard, and the three greyhounds were sinking their teeth into him and scratching at him with their paws. Peter could see some of Sergei’s blood on his white undershirt, and it scared him. Peter thought about the other Peter being attacked by the dogs, he thought about Kentucky, and he remembered what his mother had always told him about being a gentleman.
Peter walked out of his front door, and he crossed his yard. As he crossed the street, the largest kitchen knife his mother owned reflected the sunlight like a playground slide. Without hesitation and with the methodical movements of a livestock farmer, Peter brought the knife into the dog nearest himself, and he thought of butter. The dog reeled on Peter with its jaws but too slowly. Sergei was so badly torn that he wasn’t fighting as much anymore. Peter moved to the second dog with equally passionless movements. A butcher might have had more misgivings than Peter. The third dog, now without the advantage of his pack, lifted his blood-filled jowls and growled. Peter stepped over Sergei and lifted the knife. This time, though, it was the dog that was quicker, and it ran back down the sidewalk in the direction it had come from.
Peter turned from Sergei and the two dead dogs, and he started walking back toward his house with the dripping knife at his side. A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk, and they quickly rushed to Sergei after letting Peter pass. Peter cleaned his mother’s knife off, and sat back down at the kitchen table. He wished his father was there, but he quickly forgot about everything as he returned to the newspaper.
Marcy opened her front door. It was a prospective adoptee, who was there to see her greyhounds. Marcy was about to explain that her dogs had just gotten out and hadn’t come back yet, the third dog wandered up the sidewalk to her front porch. It smelled the other woman before nuzzling against Marcy’s outstretched hands. Marcy sighed and said, “Yes, of course, these are great family pets.” The dog had already licked its jowls clean on the walk home.
Fiction • Summer 2017
Interview with a rock-star, a celebrity icon. The mischievous and bashful expression of someone who seems like a fun guy who all the same distrusts strangers, other people, the ager publicus, someone who lives enclosed in his own world of references and connections, his own clichés. He showed up to the televised interview in pajamas, a sample of what I heard:
Features • Commencement 2010
By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages—first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg—had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions.
But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy.
Roman Kacew was born in 1914, perhaps in Moscow but just as likely in Kursk, a small city near modern-day Turkey. His mother was poor and Jewish, an outcast in the Russian Empire. He never knew his father; the name Kacew came from a second marriage. From a young age, the boy began inventing stories about his heritage. He decided before the age of ten that he came from greatness: his father was really the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom he shared a fierce stare.
Kurksk didn’t last long. Next came Vilnius, then Warsaw, then Nice in southern France. Moving was tough for Kacew, who was scrawny and had to learn new languages fast. It was worse for his mother, a former actress who worked as a maid to support her son. She was driven to prove her son’s greatness. In each new town, she pushed the young boy to find his passion—dance, music, theater—always leaving open the possibility that he might write.
Looking back on his childhood in his semi-autobiographical novel Promise at Dawn, the writer would later paint this search for a passion as a search for a public identity. The question of a pseudonym runs through the novel. Even as his mother exhorts her son to impress his French peers, she asks that he tailor his work to their expectations. “‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ [my mother] said sternly. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name. If you were a virtuoso violinist, it would be great, but, for a titan of French literature, it just won’t do.’”
The name Romain Gary came to him while he was defending the country in the air force. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs. “Gari, gari… burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name. Gary Cooper was a popular figure in wartime France.
After the war, Gary became French secretary to the United Nations, then General Consul in Los Angeles. He was well-polished and a good public speaker. Pictures from the period show him hand-feeding elephants or looking thoughtfully through a mansion window. One has him signing books, dressed in a navy military uniform.
It was in Los Angeles that he met Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. He had just turned forty-five and was getting bored with his marriage to Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. They were a public item—the pair dined with the Kennedys and with General Charles de Gaulle. She entertained as the beautiful actress, while he, acting the part of the expatriate intellectual, always showcased his refinement.
A reporter eating dinner with the couple described Gary as the Pygmalion to Miss Seberg’s Galatea. “‘You should see what I gave her to read,’ Gary began. “‘Pushkin, Dostoevski, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert...’” “‘Madame Bovary!’” Jean sang out. “‘That could have been me if I had stayed in Marshalltown one day longer.’” Gary may have seemed a little eccentric. But still he was a talented diplomat: he could make any young American see her life reflected in the French canon.
Gary was slowly infiltrating this canon. His novels, published under the official name, met with instant success. A European Education was acclaimed by its 1945 audience; Jean-Paul Sartre speculated that it might be the first great novel about the Second World War. By 1956, Gary had achieved France’s highest literary honor. His novel, The Roots of Heaven, won the Prix Goncourt, an award given annually to the best novel written in French.
As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panther group and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed; she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. It’s said that he first challenged the actor to a duel.
Emile Ajar was a ruse. Romain Gary had been “classified, catalogued, taken for granted” by the critics, which, to the author, precluded them from taking his work seriously. Emile Ajar, however, was relevant and fresh. He was a Franco-Algerian medical student living in Brazil in order to avoid charges of terrorism. And Ajar’s first novel seemed to offer the novelty it promised. Loosely translated as Cuddles in English, Gros-Calin tells the story of a statistician who falls in love with his pet python. It is a touching, humorous book, and only a few critics discerned that certain lines echoed Gary novels.
Ajar’s next was even better, said the critics. Madame Rosa (Life Before Us) seemed to seamlessly bring together all of France’s post-war worries. The earnest account of an Arab boy living with his Jewish foster mother, an obese Holocaust survivor, touched on guilt, immigration, and French identity. To the discerning reader, The Life Before Us might have seemed a rewrite of Gary’s Promise at Dawn, with the attention now shifted to another boy-mother pair. To France’s literary elite, it was worthy of its own Goncourt. Ajar’s own ambiguous identity made the prize all the more important. The name was neither definitely Jewish nor definitely Arab, which, to critics, tinged the political narrative with an uncertainty. By uncovering the author’s true identity, France might earn insight into the book’s meaning.
Emile Ajar was carefully planned. Gary would send manuscripts to his son Diego, who, like the supposed Emile Ajar, was living in Brazil. Diego would then send them to the publishers in Paris. Only Seberg, Diego, and a couple of close friends could claim to know Ajar. But the Goncourt prize made the scheme difficult to hold up. The recipient of France’s highest literary honor can’t just hide out across the Atlantic—the secret had to be divulged. Before the ceremony, a revelation was released to the press: Paul Pawlovitch, Romain Gary’s distant cousin, had written the books. As a decoy for the writer, Pawlovitch accepted the prize and moved into Gary’s apartment building, where he and Gary continued forging papers and preparing speeches for Emile Ajar.
They were successful—even when Gary revealed himself to be Ajar in his suicide note, several critics refused to believe it. After all, they had made a place for Ajar in their own pantheon. “Ajar marks the revolt against the literature of our daddies; Ajar is the anti-cliché combatant,” wrote one critic. In France, The Life Before Us is the highest selling novel of the twentieth century.
When the ten members of the Academy Goncourt come together to discuss books, they’re self-consciously making history. On the second Monday of each month, some of France’s foremost writers and critics meet in a private room on the second floor of an elegant restaurant. There, they talk about the state of French writing and survey the country’s talent. The search for the best novel of the year pauses in August, when the group splits for vacation. Academy rules are strict—one book a year, and the award can be given to any author only one time. It’s been that way since 1902, when Jules and Edmond Goncourt founded a prize to celebrate French prose.
The room has hardly changed. I ate there once, on my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The “Salon Goncourt” is shaped like an egg and lined with pictures of momentous gatherings. When you close the large wooden doors, you can’t hear a noise above the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates.
This was the institution against which Gary was writing. It was insular and back-scratching and he hated it. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power,” he wrote. So as he conformed to French standards, he was also chipping away at them. He had integrated himself into the country’s cultural monolith only to gnaw at it.
Romain Gary spent much of his existence inventing secrets, but at the end of his life he was very clear. As he prepared to kill himself in 1980, he wrote in an essay:
“And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar…
I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”
Features • Winter 2010 - Bestiary
Myrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Although some say he is merely a figure of legend, it may be less than prudent to concur with the doubters. After all, they were the men who dismissed the story of Myrddin’s magicking of Stonehenge from across the seas and we know now that the monument’s stone came from a quarry that is indeed across a sea, across the Cardigan Bay, on the southern coast of Wales. Such disbelief, however, is not uncommon in the treatment of this man of the woods. His life, to this point, has not been one of ease, but has been marked, yes, by madness but also by a never-ending struggle against those who would sleight his essential nature, even going so far as to attempt to kill him for it.
His nature is as his name indicates, Wild, or Of the Woods. Once a prince in the world of men, he rules over the forest as king. He speaks the tongues of animals and they listen to him as they listened to Adam, Noah, and the early men of this earth. The society of his animal companions, sometimes the pig, sometimes the wolf, is the only society that Myrddin can withstand for the world of men has driven him to despair and madness. Much has been made of his madness, which unmoored his mind’s eye so that rather than experience the world in the present, as the mass of men do, he sees the future relentlessly unfolding before him. To hear him speak of the future is to put oneself in peril, for, as it is commonly known, foreknowledge is a grave danger to all sane men who encounter it.
Myrddin was, before prophecy struck him, a great lord of the Welsh people, the bearer of a golden torque. He was terrible to meet in battle and his prowess inspired awe from his enemies and friends alike. He had a wife whom he loved dearly and who was deeply enamored of him and his powerful figure. He was, from all accounts, well spoken and well spoken of at court, though he harbored great hostility toward the Christian missionaries who had taken to trumpeting their new faith throughout the land. It might have been because of this animosity that he went mad, though the accounts all differ as to how it happened. What is certain is that he was never the same after the Battle of Arfderydd.
The Battle of Arfderydd was fought on the plains of Scotland before Scotland was known by such a name, between the rivers of Liddel and Esk. Assembled on the field that day were the hosts of the Welsh’s two most mighty warlords, Rhydderch Hael, a Christian ruler, and Gwenddolau, a devotee to the old Gods and Myrddin’s liege lord. It is during this clash of titans that the Gods touched Myrddin. According to some records, he was cursed by one of Rhydderch’s Christian clerics. Others say that it was his discovery that he had slain his sister’s children in the fight that plunged him into turmoil. Some warriors bearing scars from the battle tell of celestial figures that howled Myrddin’s name and chased him from the field of combat, while an equal contingent claim that the champion simply laid down his weapons and walked away from the bloodshed.
Oh blissful dam
if you saw
the sheer violence
that I saw,
you wouldn’t sleep in the morning,
you wouldn’t dig the hillside
you wouldn’t make for the wild
by a desolate lake.
—“The Ohs of Myrddin,” *The Black Book of Carmarthen*
Away from the moans of the dying and injured, away from the grunts of the soldiers exhausting themselves in the attempt to kill their enemy, in the attempt to stay alive themselves, away from the horrible accusatory silence of the corpses, of the cloven heads that bobbed in estuaries of blood, away from that silence, that silence! and into the woods went Myrddin. Off into the wild he flew “like any bird of the air,” if the Gaelic record *The Frenzy of Suibhne* is to be believed. He landed in an apple-tree in the Forest of Celyddon and was to stay there for many years. In that forest, the forest where the madmen searched for their sanity, he lived with the animals. He slept in the boughs of the oak trees and lived on a diet of nuts and vegetables. It was among the animals that he hid as he sought protection from King Rhydderch who he was certain was trying to kill him. It was to the animals that he foretold the coming of Cadwaladyr, the great King who would unite the Britons and bring peace. It was to the animals that he spoke as he attempted to find peace with the violence of his kind.
Perhaps it is this preference of the world of animals to the world of men, the possibility that Myrddin harbors deep reservations about humankind, that spurs some chroniclers to deny him his madness, to deny him his time in the forest. Believe it if you wish, but there certainly seems to be a coterie dedicated to extirpating him, or at least Myrddin as he truly is, from the records. Geoffrey of Monmouth not only Latinized the Welsh, changing Myrddin to Merlinus (lore has it that he chose this name because Merdinus—the logical Latinization—would have been too closely associated with the Anglo-Norman word for shit, merde) but he also expunged Myrddin’s madness and his sylvan life completely in his *Historia Regum Britanniae*. In fact, this “Merlin” was prescient from his earliest days, always able to divine the future’s truth, and is brought to the court of King Vortigern when yet a child. Geoffrey did try to amend his factual errors with his later work, Vita Merlini, in which he does recognize Myrddin’s time in the forest and the horrific genesis of his foresight, but the process of recasting Myrddin as Merlin, of siphoning away the man’s spirit to feed a fantasy was begun.
In one account of his madness from the Gaelic tradition, Myrddin brings his madness upon himself by trying to spear a cleric after the cleric sprinkles him with holy water. It seems that the Welshman had found the ritual to be insulting. Close to six hundred years after this event, Robert de Boron, a deeply Christian French poet of the late 12th century, completed the cleric’s work—or at least did so in writing. Through his Merlin, he began to convince Europe that the man was a Christian. The unknown father in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account becomes a demon and Myrddin’s otherwise troublesome paganistic aspects could be neatly explained away as the result of his devilish heritage. But his demonic blood, manifested in his full head of hair—a sign of his bestial associations—and his perfect knowledge of the past, which could be no other than a full acquaintance with pagan lore, is counteracted by his acceptance of the Christian faith. His mother has him baptized, neutralizing the threat of ungodliness and transforming the troubled antichrist into a leader of the Christian world. Gifted by God with knowledge of the future (for Christianity’s God is the future as Boron takes pains to make evident), Merlin spends his life as the courtly adviser to King Arthur and his knights. By Boron’s book, Merlin’s prophecies and magical powers are useful tools in creating the most perfect Christian world possible. Discounting a brief time masquerading as a shepherd so that he can usher Arthur into the world, the woods, the wilderness, the outdoors, seem to have been successfully exorcised from his person. De Boron’s account presents as self-evident the obviously false idea that Merlin was a man of the courts rather than of the woods.
In fact, when Myrddin is removed from his arboreal kingdom, it is known that he becomes terribly depressed and is prone to retaliate against his captors with awful pronouncements. Geoffrey of Monmouth, referencing earlier records, tells of Myrddin being captured by his sister, Queen Ganieda, and being brought back to court. There, he refuses to speak a word about his experiences and suffers civilization in silence. That is, until one day, when he sees the King Rodarcus, his sister’s husband, remove a leaf from his sister’s hair. He laughs and there is a quality to the laugh that like the fury of a waterfall about to crash against the rocks, excites and frightens the King so that he must know why the madman is laughing. The King will give him anything to know, to know, from whence this secret mirth bubbles, finally promising to allow Myrddin to return to the woods. The response though, could not have brought joy to Rodarcus for Myrddin tells him that the leaf became entangled in her locks when she lay in the woods with her lover. Myrddin tells the King that his great love for his wife is unrequited. She loves the man with whom she lay that morning under the trees of Myrddin’s forest. And then Myrddin laughs because he shall be free.
The records of other men exposed to Myrddin’s prophetical voice are equally joyless. In one account, Myrddin orders his wife to remarry—his love for nature leaves no room for any other—on one condition: that he never lay eyes on her husband. On the day of her marriage, he comes riding to her, astride a great stag, shepherding herds of animals that he desires to give to her. However, as she comes out to meet him, her husband catches sight of Myrddin and laughs at the man riding a deer. Like thunder is to lightning so is laughter the warning that Myrddin is about to strike. If you hear the sound in his presence, it is best to leave as quickly as possible. Myrddin, hearing the laughter, knows exactly who makes such noise and, turning to look at the man, flies into a rage in which he tears the horns from his stag and assaults the bridegroom with them. And then he disappears back into the shadows of the forest.
The Myrddin that rides off in a burst of speed, astride his bloody steed, slicked with sweat from the exertion of ripping the antlers from his mount, lost in the exhilaration of dramatic action, is a far cry from contemporary depictions. The man who crushes his wife’s betrothed with a blow of the antlers is a virile, albeit chaste, being. He is strong and powerful, a warrior who simply chooses not to fight, a noble savage, not the doddering octogenarian in which his spirit—whatever is left of it at least—has been incarnated. Sir Thomas de Malory introduces this misconception in his romance, *La Morte D’Arthur*, as he writes that Merlin, after being ignored by Arthur when appearing as “a child of fourteen year of age,” “came again in the likeness of an old man of four-score years of age, whereof the king was right glad, for he seemed to be right wise.” After Malory, the choice that Merlin makes to assume “the likeness” of an old man is forgotten. The association between age and wisdom becomes primary. He becomes an old man because he is the wise councilor. Age, rather than the touch of madness, becomes the font of wisdom and Myrddin Wilt finds himself further effaced.
Becoming thirsty, Merlin leaned down to the stream and drank freely and bathed his temples in its waves, so that the water passed through the passages of bowels and stomach, settling the vapours within him, and at once he regained his reason and knew himself, and all his madness departed and the sense which had long remained torpid in him revived, and he remained what he had once been—sane and intact with his reason restored.
—*Vita Merlini*, Geoffrey of Monmout
It is recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, even if the surviving Welsh poems do not acknowledge it, that Myrddin does eventually recover his sanity by drinking from a newly born stream. Restored to his senses, though still empowered with the vision that his madness had wakened, it is said that his first action was to praise nature. For Myrddin, there is nothing that can compare with the world of the forest. The forest is Myrddin’s home. There he lives and there he one day shall die.
Thomas Malory’s *La Morte D’Arthur* tells of how the lady of the lake refuses Merlin’s love because she was “aferde of [Myrddin] for cause he was a devyls son.” This sentiment seems to characterize Merlin’s later “chroniclers” as well. They are afraid of Myrddin’s true nature. They age him, remove him from his natural habitat, and create a force to tame him—Vivien’s seductive charms. However, even in such stories as that of Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” they cannot deny his sylvan roots. Even if they remove him from his life’s rightful realm, they allow him to return there for his eternal sleep. Even if they cloud his reason with lust for the lady of the lake, they are unable to do away with all of his aboriginal tendencies. Malory tells of how Merlin returns to the earth, how he goes “under the stone to let [the lady of the lake] wit of the marvels there, but she wrought it so that for him he never came out.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, while reducing dignified Myrddin to lecherous Merlin, an old man allowing the needs of his “dying flesh” to lead him into doom, depicts the final moments of Merlin’s life as occurring among “the ravaged woodland” and ends the poem with Merlin sleeping forever not simply within the forest, but within a tree: “in the hollow oak he lay as dead, / And lost to life and use and name and fame.”
So Merlin, Myrddin, is sentenced to sleep. The fantasists—Monmouth, de Boron, Malory, Tennyson—are unable to destroy his presence. His animal magnetism is too robust, too vibrant, too wild, to be fully washed away by the waters of baptism nor predictable enough to be channeled properly in the world of the court. And so they invent the myth of his lust to draw him out of the court, back into his wild world of the forest and there sentence him to sleep, not death—they do not have that power of the pen—and they proceed with the stories that they are interested in telling. They chained him to their purposes, forced him to usher Arthur into the world and to his throne, all the while denying Myrddin his own true history. And then they cast him off, back into the forest from whence he came. But, Myrddin, even in his sleep, even as they have imagined him, laid to rest in a tomb encased by earth or oak, remains their nightmare, the specter of the natural world, not yet bent over by Christ or civilization. He haunts them like wolves circling just beyond the light of a campfire; they cannot distinguish the forms but they can feel the presences. In response, they crowd closer around the fire. On the outskirts of their minds, hidden in the caves that they have long since run from, they know he, Myrddin, is waiting with the knowledge that primeval nature is not something to be afraid of—simply to respect—and that terrifies them even more.
When I remain under the green leaves the riches of Calidon delight me more than the gems that India produces, or the gold that Tagus is aid to have on its shore, more than the crops of Sicily or the grapes of pleasant Methis, more than lofty turrets or cities girded with high walls or robes fragrant with Tyrian perfumes. Nothing pleases me enough to tear me away from my Calidon which in my opinion is always pleasant. Here shall I remain while I live, content with apples and grasses, and I shall purify my body with pious fastings that I may be worthy to partake of the life everlasting.
—*Vita Merlini*, Geoffrey of Monmouth
Myrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Perhaps he is singing, for he is, they say, as gifted in voice as the famed Taliesin of the golden brow. But, if he has died in the centuries since he was last beheld by mortal mind, if the word-sorcerers de Boron and Malory have succeeded in stealing his soul to animate their fantastical courtier-counselor, Merlin the magician, and Myrddin Wilt has sunk into slumber, then, it is said, wait for the time of the great King Cadwaladyr’s return, when the steel cages shall crash to the ground, the black tar shall be uprooted, the endless fires shall be extinguished, the silver dragons that belch smoke into the sky slain, and Myrddin Wilt shall once again walk with the lonely wolf, ride the crownless stag, and speak prophecy to the pig.
Fiction • Commencement 2012
When I was little the way the shine on the hood of a cool car blinded me made me feel like something was on its way. All I had to do was be ready. And I tried. For a long time I held fast, tightened my fists in my pockets and walked on when someone called my name.
But then I thought I was the shine and the moving toward who knows what and my blood felt like water.
I was a power chord.
I knew the names of birds.
I had the book.
So while Ronnie-Ann watched porn I’d sit with her and figure out what was flying around out there.
“I’m the one told you about them birds, Buster,” she said, folded so deep in the cushions of the couch I couldn’t tell what was her arm and what was her leg.
“You told me about birds?”
And we’d start in.
What it got down to is she blamed me for not being able to see meaning in things like birds and books about birds any more. She blamed me she was watching porn.
*
At first she’d comment on the story and how sex might affect things.
Then she stopped bringing home movies with any story, just sex scenes piled up one after another.
Before long she said, “This shit’s wearing off, too,” and I hoped it would take something different instead of something more.
*
It was true she told me about birds.
“You can learn a lot from them,” she said the first time I found the book she’d won in a school raffle. “I wanted to win a bike,” she said.
“Can you learn to fly?” I asked and she didn’t get pissed in any part of her I could tell.
“There’s lots of ways to watch things,” she said.
I told her a robin’s a robin, a wren, wren, hawk, hawk, and all. I didn’t need to know the sub-species and whatnot, didn’t need to know where they winter.
“It’s nice,” she said.
So I figured birds, and what they say about birds in a book might as well mean something to me. I couldn’t think of anything else she’d use the word “nice” about like she meant it.
So I told her how it didn’t seem like the kind of thing she’d be into, how she used “nice” when she was talking about the birds and the book about the birds.
And that didn’t go over.
“You can fuck up anything. Know that, Buster?”
Of course I knew that. She did too. “That helps a lot,” I told her.
Outside an Oriole was dropping down the little leftover cactus from when the landlord redid the front to what he said was sustainable.
Ronnie-Ann said, “I can be talking about how you’re fucking up this bird thing, just this bird thing, and mean right now, not be talking about anything in the world to do with fucking up our lives or whatever you think you’re fucking up this time.”
When we first got together (one time I called it dating and Ronnie-Ann said, “We didn’t date,” and an- other time I called it going out and Ronnie-Ann said, “We didn’t go out,”) she’d say things like, “taking it too fast,” or, “too serious,” or,”personal,” even.
Sometimes she’d say you never know what tomorrow brings and I couldn’t help thinking she meant tomorrow might bring somebody she liked more than me.
Never did though and one day she didn’t talk like that.
And it felt like we were together.
The Oriole flew away when the mail lady with her big calves and chewing gum came smiling up with a handful of nothing we wanted to open.
That felt a little normal, junk mail, and I wondered who was normal and what made them that way.
I put the bird book back on the shelf between her sixth-grade scrapbook and eighth-grade yearbook and went outside.
The Oriole flew off. I worked that word around my mouth. Oriole.
Made me think of the cookie and eating the middles and putting them back together a different thing. When I was a kid Mom’d eat burgers that way, the patty first then try and put everything back together. Once, at Tommy’s Café, Dad said why don’t she just get the hamburger steak special.
She didn’t answer. They’d been through this before and that wasn’t what it was about.
Even I knew that.
“Your mama does a lot of fucked up shit, boy,” he said, his fork loud on his plate.
There was something my dad had in his voice when he made those jokes one day I figured out Ronnie-
Ann had, a sad sound when they think they’re happy but can’t help certain things they do or say and the way they do and say them.
After I started the book it wasn’t long I was telling her stuff about feather markings and nests and flying patterns and not long after that she got tired of it. Not the birds but me having something to say about them.
“That all you think about?” She asked.
I told her she sounded like my dad and she stared at me until her phone started ringing then looked at me and said, “Well there,” and that was that.
So I talked less about birds but kept watching for something until one day I tried telling Ronnie-Ann, “It gets harder to believe,” I said, nodding out the window at the Oriole.
“Birds flying ain’t hard to believe, Buster. Been doing it all my life. It’s what birds do. Makes them birds matter of fact.”
“Yeah, but ever try it?”
“No, Buster, I ain’t no motherfucking bird.”
“I think it takes more than we think.”
“I don’t think about it. For all I know they barely make it, but they do. Never seen a bird couldn’t make
it.”
“And that don’t seem like a miracle?”
“Sure, Buster. That’s what it seems like, a miracle birds fly. And know what else, that dogs bark and fucking fish swim. Ever think about that? How a fish holds its breath. Goddamn secret of life right there swimming around a fucking pond.”
I was a million miles away and she looked at me that way then walked out flapping her arms.
I told her from the other room about how I hit a Robin with a rock when I was nine. I couldn’t tell if she was listening but I told her how I didn’t think it possible I could do anything that meant so much in the world, but did, and I could tell the bird sensed the rock and made a move to fly right before it hit her and the whole world stopped. She wouldn’t move. I ran inside for Mom who got so mad I couldn’t look and said bury it in the back yard but I couldn’t stand the thought so I took the shovel and threw her little body in the woods.
Everything I did back then already seemed like a memory I told Ronnie-Ann and she came back in with me, standing there, looking at me for who I could’ve been.
“You ever wish you could go back in time?” I asked.
She stood there a minute, then said, “I did.”
I waited for her to tell me about that but she walked off again like she thought of something else. I got the bird book but left it closed.
*
That night we started partying and the television was on whatever and she was playing dj with her CDs and dancing like crazy people in old movies and laughing like that until she saw the bird book on the table.
At first she flipped through looking at me and smiling like I ought to know about what but she suddenly stopped at some page.
She turned the book in her hands.
She said, “Know how people say their whole life flashed by? I did that. Watched my whole life go by. I was there again.”
“When?” Was all I knew to say.
“I mean I wasn’t watching what I’d done I was doing those things again.”
“Were you drowning or something?”
“Do I look drowned to you?”
I started to answer and she said, “Don’t be a smart ass, Buster.”
“What’s the picture?” I asked her.
She let the book down slowly until it hung there from one hand but I still couldn’t make it out. “When I was eleven my dad tried to kill us.”
“What do you mean baby?”
“I never told you.”
“What happened?”
“He got me out of bed one night and carried me to the garage. I didn’t know if we were going somewhere or I was dreaming.”
“Where was your mom?”
“Sleeping. She was always sleeping. He ran the hose from the exhaust into the window and we sat there.
He put on music that must’ve meant something to him and at some point I started living everything again.” “Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah. But he fucked that up too. The hose come off and we woke up the next morning, me on the couch, him sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and watching the smoke like one more thing getting away from him.”
“Your mom never knew?”
“She’s the one told me what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“It felt more like I had to live through things too many times though. Before we got in the car, while we were in there, then everything after, so I don’t much want to go back in time again. You don’t get to change anything anyhow.”
“If you could go back and none of it happened?”
“How would we know?”
“I guess we wouldn’t,” I said, and, “Maybe that’s all we ever do. Keep going back.”
“Feels that way huh.”
And somehow we had moved to talking about us and how it takes us getting fucked up because we are
so fucked up.
I looked at the picture there about to fall from her hand. A robin.
“I can’t go back now,” she said.
“Maybe later,” I told her and I knew we do it all the time, come back to a now that ain’t nothing but a now and another now and another.
Poetry • Winter 2017 - Cell
from above he focuses the lens on the spots under
the rim of her brow. Kisses to the skin. Those you cannot take. She tells him
that which makes up this world is the beautification of our mistakes. The
error, the error preceded by the other, an error, and Jacqueline
is so beautiful, even the painter, even the young man turned old, will marry her,
and draw her, and remember her shape, every day, as though he were missing from it…
So that when the sun sets the orchids mellow.
Who is left to make a picture of these creatures.
When the clouds quiet down over the rooms in the house.
These floors, to walk them, is beautiful,
though they were made for Jacqueline. He leaves the lights on,
the plants dried, sometimes even the paint
hardens overnight. The cheekbones of
a woman will lift the more her mother misses her…
In one year he paints her one hundred
and sixty times. To count the days that belong
still to the sky.
How beautiful she was.
She tells him.
When even the film dries out
he paints her neck as long as he can make it. He leaves her
all his sculptures. Were she here, he would not find her. Were she
a desert bird and not a Parisian queen she would have imprinted on
this wall long ago, and wakened the shadows that run amok it, and tried,
blooming flower from blooming flower, to summon
the small air that makes the ground lift one step closer to its firmament.
2026