ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Five Things Big Girls Can’t Do" by Tai Farnsworth

October 6, 2017

Five Things Big Girls Can’t Do

By Tai Farnsworth

1: Imagine you’re at a BJ’s Brewery. If you’re unfamiliar with this particularly fabulous chain of mediocrity, you can substitute any place that blasts early 2000 rock (think Linkin Park or Uncle Kracker) while serving middling food and cheap drinks – ie: Chili’s, Applebee’s, anything with an apostrophe.
            While your dining companions chat away about pizza, the Beatles, and the disconcerting shade of maroon that occupies fifty percent of the restaurant’s color palette, you realize you need to go to the bathroom. The best part of the bathroom experience at this brand of restaurants is your increased ability to hear all the nostalgic rock. At this point you’re hoping for something from the Spiderman soundtrack. The original Spiderman, none of this Andrew Garfield nonsense they peddle to the youths these days. You push open the door; three rowdy girls in Technicolor leggings and barely anything else brush past you. Nickleback fills the marbled room as you head toward the back, toward the handicap stall, toward the toilet with the most room.
            You can tell the stall is empty. But when you get closer, you realize – something has happened here. It’s impossible to say what, but the potential situations run the gamut from a rambunctious toddler let loose to some kind of satanic cult ritual. Regardless, it’s not great. And you certainly can’t pee in here. With a quick weighing of the pros and cons, you decide to just use another stall. You could hold it, but who knows how long your friends will be hypnotized by the low-lights and scuffed pleather of the dining room. It’s a risk you can’t take. Your hand has been forced.
            Of course, headlining the con list is the lack of space in the standard stall. What the hell is standard about putting your size twenty body in a size fourteen space? Sure, you physically fit inside, but at a cost. The door swings in, so you’re forced to squish around it to become properly situated. You turn carefully, doing your best not to disrupt the toilet paper or the seat covers and as you do so the inevitable happens – your leg lightly brushes the porcelain of a toilet seat that has held countless butts. And not just butts. Given the typical clientele of such establishments, there has certainly been excessive imbibing and the associated puking. Frankly, any matter of bodily fluid could have made its way into and around this space. And now it’s all on your legs.
            The rest of your bathroom experience is haunted by what you’re sure are pukey poop germs making their way down your legs and into your shoes. With a herculean effort you relax your body enough to allow the actual peeing, but as you do so your elbows bump the ice cold and obviously confrontational sides of the stall. Since the toilet paper dispenser is kissing your thigh, you have to lean hard left to access the full roll causing another body/stall run in. You start to feel like the space is getting smaller and smaller around you, crushing your big girl body. It’s all so emotional. You curse the toddler performing satanic rituals in the big beautiful stall for the moms, the handicapped, and the ladies of above average size.
            While washing your hands you glance in the mirror and the face that stares back at you isn’t your own. You’re changed. You’re scarred. This could have been avoided if the public restroom architect gods didn’t allow Victoria’s Secret models to designate the stall dimensions for you everyday folks. Without the assistance of real-life Photoshop, standard bathroom stalls are a bit of a reach for you. But that’s fine – it’s just something big girls can’t do.

2: Imagine it’s your birthday. Recently, the famous amusement park near you opened a couple rides based on your most favorite wizard-centric book series. What better way to spend your special day than by jumping into the pages of the novels that raised you? If you like, you can substitute any roller coaster adventure land for this part, no wizards or reading required.
            Your friends and you arrive early; the whole day awaits. Before the crowds swell, you rush to the most popular roller coaster, the main attraction. You can see there’s barely a line, a mere trickle of people head toward the maw of the castle. Only paces separate you from child-like joy. But suddenly you hear something: Ma’am, ma’am.
            A cherubic looking man is walking toward you wearing a dimply expression and pitying eyes. His nametag says “I’m Pablo. Let’s make your day!” Ma’am. Hello ma’am. Have you tried our test chairs today, ma’am? He gestures to replicas of the ride’s chairs sitting in a little cubby to the side of the line. He smiles, he gestures, and you know what this is. He can call them “test chairs” all he wants. Hell, he can call them heavenly ride samples, for how much it matters to you. Okay Pablo, okay, it’s the big people purgatory. Pablo, keep your pity eyes.
            You get in the seats and you pull the bar toward you. Pull tighter, Ma’am, Pablo says. You pull tighter. Just a little more, Pablo says. You pull tighter and tighter and you feel the rush of relief as you hear the latch take. You pass! You’re out of purgatory! You’re fat but not “too” fat! Pablo smiles wide and his dimples tell you this is his favorite part of the day. All he wants is for fat people to be happy.
            It’s not until later that day, as you slurp your way through your second non-alcoholic caramel-root beer nonsense, that you notice the purple and blue constellations on your arms, the bruises from the bar slamming against your skin over and over, something you missed in your exhilaration. Your friends sip their drinks and chatter. They are ebullient, oblivious to the tiny injustices you must constantly face, the ways in which the world judges you. Is it so absurd to ride a ride without being abused? But that’s fine – it’s just something big girls can’t do.

3: Imagine you’re in an airport. In your hasty last-minute packing job you somehow left your book on top of the cat bed. You can see it there now, cradling that dumb cat butt. Not much good to you, crammed into the stiff terminal seats, thigh-to-thigh with the kindly older lady embroidering “eff off” onto a dish towel, waiting on your delayed flight to Chicago. With hours to kill you decide a coffee and a tour of the limited, best-seller heavy airport bookstore is in order. Triple caramel macchiato in hand, you scour the racks for anything that isn’t John Grisham or James Patterson. These shelves are old white dude heaven, huh, you whisper conspiratorially to the young Latina behind the counter. She pops a gummy bear into her mouth and shrugs.
            Desperate to free yourself from this awkward encounter you’ve created, you grab at random for a few items, pay, and exit the store quickly. This is how you come to be in possession of the most recent “Super Famous Lady Magazine” (and also one bag of Fritos, a giant Evian bottle, and three Milky Ways). Panic does not wise decisions make.
            After you squish yourself back into the terminal seat and check on the embroidering lady’s progress, you peruse the magazine. On the front is the super famous lady dressed head-to-toe in flowers. “Spring into Spring!” is situated around her knees in a font upsettingly similar to comic sans. You feel very confident there wasn’t a magazine on that shelf you’d like less, but know there’s no way you’re braving that too-bright store again. You lean in to the disaster, sip your coffee, and find a decent amount of enjoyment in an article detailing the different organizational methods to employ in your bedroom depending on your zodiac sign. You’ve read your way through articles on baby and me yoga, the nuances of every kind of cooking oil, and professional tips for perfect eyeliner in one swipe, when you reach the reader letters.
            One of the letters is directed at the in-house fashion expert and can be summarized as such – “I don’t have a completely flat stomach. Can I still wear a crop top?” The in-house fashion expert’s answer is succinct and leaves no room for interpretation – “Nope.” Suddenly, in your mind’s eye, your most recent purchase from the popular teenager-geared clothing store looms. A tribal print crop top with thick, crisscrossing straps. Though you hadn’t worn a crop top since high school, there was something so wonderful about the feeling of a breeze on your bare stomach. You loved the way your stretch marks peeked over the top of your jeans, showing your body’s strength, the way it’s grown and evolved to take care of you. Sure, you’d been a little self-conscious at first, but the truth was, except one lone (and probably miserable) bitch who lived down the hall from you, no one seemed to mind. The more you’d thought about it, the more you’d understood, there’s no reason to mind you wearing a crop top. It’s a crop top for fuck’s sake. It’s not like you’re clubbing baby seals.
            And yet, here it is, no sugar-coating, no padding of any sort, stripped to its mean core – “no.” Maybe it wasn’t just the bitch down the hall. Maybe it really was everyone. Maybe they all looked at you with scorn and thought no crop tops for anyone but the super fit. No breeze on your stomach, no power in your body, no way to love your stretch marks. No. But, I guess, that’s fine – it’s just something big girls can’t do.

4: Imagine you’re online dating. It’s fun and surprising and you like answering the quiz questions and watching your compatibility ratings change. It’s been a long time since you dated anyone (save your ex), but you’re ready to jump right in to that very salty and tumultuous sea.
            Not one to mince words, you choose “curvy” on the body type descriptors and follow that up with some straight-forward prose on how you’re a “big bi girl who’s looking for someone as exciting as a book” or whatever cheesy self-promoting catch phrase you’d like to insert here. You upload five different pictures to fit into many different moods. While the main profile pic is from last year when you toured the street art of San Francisco, it’s still a decently accurate full body representation. There’s also the goofy paper mustache picture, the fancy gown and hair for your friend’s wedding picture (with others cropped out to avoid confusion), the shocked face of you petting a goat while on vacation in Cambria picture, and the cake picture (you know which one). All in all, you feel like you’re online profile is fairly spot-on. Sure, the pictures are from the upper echelon of what your collection offers, but come on, of course they are.
            A couple months later, at lunch, a friend asks you for an update on the online dating shenanigans. You give her all the details; you spare no juicy tidbit. First you tell her about the heavily tatted Laundromat tycoon who was very boring and very into the underground punk scene, two things that seem mutually exclusive but apparently are not. Though the tacos you ate for dinner were fabulous.
            Then there’s the South African transplant working on an undergraduate degree in veterinary sciences. He took you to a Himalayan restaurant and rubbed your leg under the eggplant strewn table while wooing you with an absurd amount of data on cats. Aside from some frottering by the door of your building, that wasn’t worth much. You’ve stopped returning his texts. After that you moved on to a photographer who took you to the observatory and kissed you under the stars. You saw her a few times, ate spaghetti, and drank far too much bourbon. On three or four occasions you hazarded an hour drive up the coast for a not super smart redhead who made up for his dopiness with his enthusiasm and his desire to slow dance to folk music in his living room.
            Some other highlights include the comedian who took you to a book store and then home to her apartment where you spent the evening laying in her lap and watching slam poetry, the actor who asked you to his play and then bought you a veggie burger at a shitty chain diner, the baby-faced math major who looked like a B-list celebrity and skinny dipped with you in your pool, the insanely self-absorbed guitar craftsman who answered the phone when things were getting heavy, and the sound engineer who wanted to take you hunting.
            Your friend listens intently, nodding and oohing and aahing in all the right places. Lunch flies by, you order drinks (margaritas are totally reasonable afternoon beverages), and you laugh at this bizarre and wondrous place that is the internet dating world. And then your friend leans in conspiratorially and whispers but do they know you’re fat before the date? And you remember.
            Big girls can’t get dates. Big girls can’t slow dance to folk music or kiss under the stars. They can’t lay their head in their date’s lap or skinny dip. And they certainly can’t fuck or love or be desired. Certainly not. So what the hell ever – it’s just something big girls can’t do.

5: Imagine you’re not on a diet. You’re not restricting calories or cutting carbs or ditching fat. You’re not counting points or following fads. You’re living your life and enjoying the foods you want to enjoy. Sometimes you want roasted veggies in a barley bowl with hummus. Sometimes you want pizza and ice cream with caramel sauce. But it doesn’t much matter to you.
            Until it does. Until a client at your work offers to buy you a gift card for her doctor who she promises can freeze that fat right off. Until a literal stranger passes you in the street and asks if you’ve heard of the Southern Massachusetts Diet or the Madagascar Diet or the McConaughey Movie Diet. Have you heard of the new trick, the new way to make you a better/more worthwhile person? Everyone thinks this isn’t something you experience in your very core, that the fat isn’t actually some part of who you are. You ignore them, you smile, you wave, you walk on, but it doesn’t go away.
            Imagine it picks at the fabric of your being. Imagine it makes you feel small even though you’re big. How it makes you feel less than. In some isolated part of the back of your brain you wonder if they’re right, if you would be better, your thoughts more interesting, your smile wider, if you weren’t so big. So you work out a little, cut back on the pizza, and shed some pounds. You look great! Have you lost weight? You smile, you wave, you’ve done it. Your jokes will pack a harder punch and everyone will love your ideas at the staff meetings. You’re worthwhile now.
            But then, imagine you notice some cellulite. Or maybe a tiny roll on your back. Or you get sick and have to miss a few gym days. You gain a little weight and people stop complimenting you. Their talk turns to whispers when you enter the room. You feel small, again, but not in the way you’d hoped. More diet advice. Articles from your family show up in your inbox. You’re flooded with tips and tricks, all of it designed to tear you down and not build you up. All of it designed to punish you for being a big girl. And that’s just it, isn’t it? You can’t be big. You can’t exist. You can’t hold worth. You can’t be strong, or valued, or smart while also being big. Of fucking course not – it’s just something big girls can’t do.

About the Author:
Tai Farnsworth is a queer writer making a living as a high school administrator and teacher in Los Angeles. She graduated with her MFA from Antioch University in 2015. You can find more of her work in The Quotable, as well as in the literary journal Lunch Ticket. When she’s not reading, stuck in traffic, or snuggling her cat, she’s shopping around her young adult novel about a girl discovering her bisexuality.

You can find Tai on Facebook and as taionthefly on Twitter or Instagram

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions open May 18th and run through June 19th. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: New works from John Emil Vincent

October 5, 2017

The playfulness of skeletons, the sadness of bones

The Canary Islands were named after dogs. There is talk that maybe the dogs were actually seals, monk seals do look like melting dogs, but the population did regardless have a thing for actual dogs as well. The original inhabitants, Pliny the Elder reports, worshipped them, even mummified them, and called themselves The Dog-Headed Ones.

The bird came later and was named for its habitat; though somehow now it seems named for them—the Fuerteventura Island is after all delicately bird shaped—and everything there must one suspects be brightly colored in molten volcano yellows.

Once a year the rich bring their dogs together to the archipelago’s lone stadium and award them new souls. Rich people as you may know typically struggle to relate to friends, family, and acquaintances. For these hours of barking bliss, however, their beloved canines are bequeathed the souls of last year’s dead relatives, dead neighbors, and even dead maids and dead doormen, and smothered, simply smothered, with kisses. With adoration. Then they bring new, living doormen, neighbors, and children; they butcher them for the dogs. Next year is another year, they chant. Sometimes slipping on this or that ruptured spleen or half-devoured lung. But having a real time of it.

Next year is another year.

Realist theme park

My friend Noah says it should have a roller coaster. I’m not sure. He says it should start really steep and keep on really steep and grind up and you can hear the chains pulling and slapping in that slack-because-they-need-such-serious-chain-to-pull way.

It goes on and on a bit more. And I think at this point we have to move beyond the genre, maybe, space-mountain-like, try some external threats which are overcome simply by staying in your seat: that’s realistic: or maybe: vistas that open up unexpectedly and then go dark suddenly. And then open up to become other vistas. And this is what we in reality call: geography. Or: patience. That’s cool.

But he’s twenty-two so what does he know and hell it’s honest to god just about now I wonder about the inner resources of our young people, and he says, no no I know! it needs to go on flat for a long time. A long flat bit followed by another one with a sudden stop. And the seat guards fly up unexpectedly before it quite stops. And everyone is shocked not by what went on but that nothing did and now it’s over. That’s pretty good I think. But I’m not quite ready to go all Beckett on realism, so I think it’s important we handcuff a murderer to his victim and send them off into the neighboring sodium-light-lit desert. We can watch them escaping as we get off the ride.

It just feels right.

About the Author:
John Emil Vincent lives in Montreal. His first book of poems, Excitement Tax, will be published by DC Books later this Fall.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions open May 18th and run through June 19th. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Divine Prose from Bronwyn Mauldin

October 4, 2017

NOTES FOR A PORNO SET IN THE VATICAN

ACT 1

            A sunny spring day in Rome, and a beautiful Italian young woman, ELENA, is out walking her beloved little pug, BRUNO. Elena wears a silky pale blue blouse and linen pants sheer enough to give us hints of her long legs. She stops at a gelateria and orders a scoop of cherry. She licks gelato from a small spoon in delicate circles. The young gelato vendor follows the movement of her tongue with his head, as if imagining he were the ice cream.
            At the edge of the scene, a ghostly figure in white flickers, then disappears. Elena and the venditore don’t see it, intent as they both are on her cherry gelato. Bruno spots the figure though. With a sharp bark, he takes off in pursuit. He escapes his leash, leaving the long black, leather lead empty in Elena’s hands.
            “My Bruno!” Elena calls out. She drops her gelato and runs after the dog. As the camera follows Elena, we catch sight of the venditore down on his hands and knees, licking up the remnants of her ice cream in ecstasy.
            Bruno turns a corner and runs along a high stone wall lined with a multitude of people from all over the world. Elena follows half a block behind, calling out in English and Italian, “Bruno! Come back here now, you naughty dog. Cane cattivo!” We see the blurry white figure again – still we cannot quite make out what it is – as it enters a building. Bruno follows. Elena does too, in the door and up the stairs. Ticket takers and security guards part like the Red Sea as she passes. Bruno scampers between a pair of guards in uniform and under a red-and-white striped gate. As Elena approaches at a run, the younger of the two guards simply raises the gate to let her through. The distinguished-looking older guard drops his chin into his hand, elbow on the desk in front of him, and sighs, “Che bella.”
            Elena anxiously wraps the leash around her left hand as she follows Bruno into an art gallery. She is brought to an abrupt halt by a large group of overheated pink tourists in shorts, t-shirts and tennis shoes. A dumpy woman in a navy suit is explaining the golden panels of Giotto di Bondone’s Stefaneschi Triptych to the tourists in Italian-accented English. Elena pushes her way into the group, scanning the floor for Bruno and asking, “Have you seen my dog? Hai visto il mio cane?”
            At the same time, both we and a very handsome, tanned tourist catch a flash of Bruno running through the gallery. “There he is!” he says. Elena and the tourist chase after Bruno. As they step into the next gallery, they simultaneously catch sight of Filippo Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin and come to a standstill. “It’s so beautiful!” Elena exclaims.
            “Not as beautiful as you,” the tourist says shyly. They throw their arms around each other and engage in an act of traditional, missionary-style sex on the padded bench in the center of the room, conveniently placed for viewing Lippi’s Virgin.
            Just as Elena is climaxing, Bruno barks at a fleeting glimpse of the mysterious figure in white that is exiting the room. “Caro Bruno!” Elena exclaims as she leaps up from the bench and runs after Bruno, leash still wrapped around her left hand, but leaving her shoes behind.

ACT 2

            Elena continues her journey through the Vatican galleries, searching for Bruno. She is periodically stopped in her tracks by a magnificent piece of art. Staring in awe at Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno, Elena is approached by a guard with a ragged mustache and unkempt hair. “Oh, signore, you look just like Giovanni Battista,” she chirps, pointing to the painting. He removes his uniform to expose a hair shirt that looks not unlike the Baptist’s wooly garb. Elena lowers her trousers and bends down with her hands on her knees for the guard to enter her from behind.
In the Immaculate Conception room, a beam of light streams from the upper corner of the fresco. It illuminates a bible and continues down to the upturned hand of a nineteenth century pope surrounded by his cardinals. As Elena approaches the painting, the light spreads until it illuminates her, leaving the crowds around her in shadow. Elena glows brighter, and she begins to touch herself, eventually bringing herself to a husky, full-throated climax.
            Chasing Bruno through an octagonal courtyard she pauses to admire the statue of Laocoön and His Sons. The men and serpents turn to gaze back at her. Antiphantes comes fully to life. Elena approaches him, kisses his nipples, works her way down his body and performs fellatio as the snake entwines itself around both of their bodies.
            During each sex act, just as Elena is climaxing, Bruno barks and at the same time we catch another glimpse of the figure in white passing at the edge of the scene. Each time we see the figure it becomes a little bit clearer. Eventually, we begin to recognize it as a high-level church official in formal robes.
            Each time, when Bruno barks, Elena leaps up and chases after him, but leaves another piece of clothing behind. First her blouse, then her pants, and so on.
            By the time they enter the Galleria Delle Carte Geografiche, Elena is only wearing a pair of delicate lace panties. She follows Bruno down the center of the room. The figure in white passes a window, briefly hovering outside. Bruno leaps toward it, but instead of going through the window, the little pug splashes into the Tyrrhenian Sea in one of the frescoed maps.
            Without hesitation, Elena dives in after the pug, hardly making a splash as her lithe body breaks the water. She swims like a mermaid, arms tight along her side, undulating in rhythm with the kicks of her long, strong legs. No matter how quickly she cuts through the water, though, she can’t quite catch up with Bruno. Shimmering schools of red, blue, and bright yellow fish turn and cartwheel in her wake. Soon, a naked bearded man is swimming beside her. He has wide shoulders, and his upper arms and thighs are thick with muscle. His abs ripple as he matches Elena kick for kick through the sea. They come up for air together.
            “I am Neptune, god of the sea, and you will be mine!” Elena wraps both legs around him as he enters her, and they float together as one in the salty blue brine.
            A muffled yip, and from our view underwater we see the mysterious figure in white robes walking along the shore. Bruno bounds out of the sea, emerging from the Laguna Veneta to land at the far end of the map hall. He shakes himself, splashing water over a gaggle of sweaty tourists, who twist with pleasure in the cooling spray. Elena emerges from the water still in pursuit of her pug, completely naked except for the leash still wrapped around her left hand. She chases Bruno into the crowds that grow ever thicker as they approach the Sistine Chapel.
            Once in the chapel, Bruno disappears into a forest of gawking tourists who stand in stupefaction, oblivious to anything but the ceiling overhead. Elena pushes and squirms her way through the crowd, calling for “Bruno, mio caro Bruno.” A voice comes over the intercom, “Shhh. Silence. Shhh.” The din of awestruck tourists dissipates.
            A balding fat man with a turquoise fanny pack tucked between belly and groin grabs Elena’s arm, points up, and says something in a Slavic language she does not understand. Elena follows his arm to gaze up at the image of a naked Noah drunk before his sons. The Slavic gentleman glances over, about to say something more, then realizes he has grabbed the wrong arm. His equally rotund wife is scowling beside him, arms crossed over an ample bosom wrapped tight in a purple tank top. The man lets go of Elena’s arm as if it were on fire and laughs nervously, saying something in his language that sounds apologetic. The wife takes him by the ear and drags him out of the Sistine Chapel.
            Meanwhile, Elena is transfixed, staring at the naked men above her until Japheth comes to life, penis first. He stretches his arms down from the ceiling toward her as she reaches upward toward him, but they cannot reach each other. Elena unwinds the leash, keeping one end looped around her wrist, and throws the clasp end toward him. He catches it and pulls her up into the painting. Japheth and Elena find a narrow corner in the painting where they have sex standing up against the shed. As the sound of their lovemaking grows, so does the sound of hundreds of tourists coming face-to-face with the sublime, both rising together to their natural crescendo.
            “Silence!” a voice commands over the intercom. “This is a holy place!”
            Bruno yips, and we see the mysterious figure in white exit the chapel through a side door. The pug scurries after the figure, followed by Elena who is now returned entirely to the state in which Eve met Adam.

ACT 3

            The story of Elena and her dog reaches its climax in St. Peter’s Basilica. Bruno trots into the church and comes to a halt, barking. Up ahead the figure in white robes comes into focus as it walks up the nave. Reaching the altar, below Bernini’s great four-poster baldacchino, the figure turns to face us, and we can finally see it is (as we likely expected) the Holy Father.
            Bruno goes silent, lifting one paw in reverence. Elena, standing naked behind her dog on a red-purple circle of porphyry stone, crosses herself and falls to her knees. The Holy Father lifts his arms in benediction, and with that movement, his robes fall away from him. We see now that the Holy Father is not a man but a woman, rubenesque, with long, wavy red-blonde hair, looking not unlike Venus in Botticelli’s painting of her birth. Unlike Venus, however, she does not cover herself, as she is not ashamed to be seen and admired.
            “Rise, Elena,” she says, gesturing with her arms.
            Elena slowly approaches. Sunlight from the open doorway behind her sparkles on her skin. A faint shadow of the obelisk in the square behind her appears, then fades away. “Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned,” says Elena.
            “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” says the Holy Mother, with a beatific smile full of love and acceptance. “We are called to keep fervent in our love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins.”
            The Holy Mother opens her arms and Elena falls into them. Their embrace turns to caresses and kisses, and soon they are rolling on the floor in ecstatic lovemaking. As Elena climaxes, Bruno comes running. He dances circles around Elena and her lover, yipping with joy. The three of them share a joyous moment, laughing, petting the dog.
            Elena and the Holy Mother turn together again and make mad, passionate love one more time under the statue of St. Peter, who looks down upon them with a smile and finally completes the blessing his two upraised fingers have promised for centuries.

FINE

About the Author:
Bronwyn Mauldin is the author of the novel Love Songs of the Revolution, and the short story collection The Streetwise Cycle. She is a past winner of The Coffin Factory (now Tweed’s) magazine’s very short story contest. Her work has appeared at Akashic Books, Literature for Life, Necessary Fiction, and other places. She is also creator of The Democracy Series zine collection. In September 2016, she was Artist in Residence at Mesa Verde National Park. More at bronwynmauldin.com .
You can also find Bronwyn on Twitter and Instagram as @guerrillareads, and on her FB author page at https://www.facebook.com/bronwynmauldin .

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: The Poetry of Chekwube O. Danladi

October 3, 2017

JI HAUSHI

I was hammered
the first night of
Ramadan guilty
as if Allah believed
it me even if not so many
other outlets for discord:
coitus purple urkle acupuncture
such practicality in things
I could have showered and had
war sung out of me
My other name Husseina pressed
like a razor to my temple
and I thought to lean into it
knowing for my people
the many uses of the
cow: milk butter meat rug
Against the tiles where I arrived
I shouted slaughter are you
looking to marry?
Why else come home?
Mene ne mutum?
If not someone to praise-name
the thing my gut miscarried
months earlier?
I’ll want that ache again
a hunger to walk the evening with

I was at my mother’s
ear while she killed
anything the cock’s
neck in her hand
at 86’s Eid the flesh sacrifice
mutual so many pleasures
guaranteed so nothing beautiful
ends her largesse brought prone
me an oracle awaiting questions
elsewhere afflicted to hurt nothing
but myself She too withstood love’s
accretion by holding fingers
to flame yet did make-up her
face that dusk wearing her body
like sin only soothed by eating
nono munshanu nama
Most of her is since covered
her kneeling pious
a soul belated in exchange
for ascent and clean firmament
What is a man? One coming
soon to hold night against her
It was too early
that low blown wind a worm
up her skirt but alone in the kitchen
she broke the fast anyway

TUMBAO

(for A.P.)

Our sun this morning          inflicted and teems
sore, moving against           time or a pustule
we may cure herba ceously. We ride its
filtered light unclean           ly our physiques a
-nointed like pealing           down a pike way. Your
embers are MANHOOD      obliged, encumbered
to bad behavior,       the labored way I’ve come
to know your body, the season of guilt.

I teach your eye the trick of humming, con
-tact a commitment of pleasure, yours. If
I let this hand a        -gainst my back, you’ll claim
to know me empir    -ically, black goes
beyond the optic:      a roar of fluid,
an appellation           for vertebrae, slap
-core of my disso      -nance. The other hand
at my black estrus,   scented and tasted.
I am a mean thing. We are not within
love but this want is             what you love, our morph
-ology one of slacken things: cum, scattered
waist beads, warm air re     -couped. Light sieves past the

gossamer curtains I toss my titties
like a pair of con       -gas, generous timber
of slap-tone, your cock        a would-be proving
ground for my girlhood,      if I were a girl
at all. What binds us,           our genealogies
a distinction of         the sheathe versus the

weapon within. The realm of our conjunc
-tion, a dead Black wo         -man buried in
Cienfuegos barbs me,          bending the pitch for
all unending gifts.    She is sliding side

to side coming to      suture this pleasure
of ancestry, re           -mind the origin
of your mouth, name me    nothing vacuous
so I may go some     -where, part that ordered
rare speculation       wracked through with affect.

EVENING HOLLER

(for Stokely)

With the ease with which you widen the berth
my words like sequester
risk being too understood
                                    we watch the alley cats
                                    from the kitchen window
                                    over our end-of-day coffees
afraid not just of stellar recall
but cognizance         its why
I’m sitting still though I’m not
yet tired         yet the frame
captures the kindest rendition
                                    of that secret game we play with strangers
                                    lobbing off their heads and seeing
                                    if they still know where to go
We trace something serene
as the ambulance whirs down Kingsessing
                                    imagining also taking what isn’t ours
                                    a boy smiles up from the trolley
                                    his mouth a vortex of potato chips
we come to no such satisfaction
our bellies as empty as they’d been that morning
except on your bedside table
there’d been a plate of cashews
                                    and I’d wanted to put them
                                    in your mouth for you
                                    as you slept after I’d licked
                                    off the salt
you let me rest all day as if I didn’t
pick the hard terrain
my eyes running bloodless when I stationed
                                    we make our space for another
                                    because in another world that boy is our son
                                    and I love him enough        I stand in
                                    the doorway to call his name across the alley
as the streetlights shudder on
You are the woman he’ll call daddy
when the city isn’t close
            He’ll sleep in our bed until he’s eight
                                    As if he can’t slip away
in your hand he’ll drop a peach
                                    in mine the pit                      safety becoming a word
                                    he’ll know the meaning of
After his eyes close we open ours
We make a racket of our longing
We refuse the day to end

ERE IBEJI

(for my sister)

Neither breathed nor held,
those forgotten gods now
proffer poverty,

since no legacy
but ours to tend,
for you to die and cast me

your keeper – to wash you,
to dress you –
be it a casual hunger

or an anthem of erotics
sing it loud and disturb my
sleep, all of time fading – then

rubbing, then darkening –
what you call confession
we’ve consorted: born two,

the damage brilliant; is it a myth
the Igbo buried their abominations
in pots? Long time provender
for the wicked.

Unlikely how generous the
gesture. All ghosts suffer
equally so clutch me through

each parable,
the assemblage of
your trespass:

in the forest,
yes, tender, asking earth
some confidence, idling,
your calm regrets even
that country.

HAGIOGRAPHY

-Rose and Taylor’s,
Champaign, Illinois

Came the some-days boyhood was due

my efforts needing tending

I went round the way to 1st Street

for pussy-talk and bets on the bracket.

Audacities razor in my palm’s clutch, waiting

so I sit with my shit all opened up too

the room like Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy

though all these angels be Black, and calling out the god-head

my pulse speaks up all the ways I’ll want

them to hurt me and wade through it.

Someone orders chicken wings

my savior assuring my fit around the swill, my affirmation to know a place.

That harangued confession before I die

possessed by sweet oil wrought in his hard-skinned reaping.

I bit my thickest lip through the good feeling

rollicked my neck against the slick of Luster’s Pink Sheen Spray

and in the mist I saw my name become mnemonic.

I held the vessel as I entered, kissed across his face the sign of the cross.

OLD ADDRESSES

Sloppily shorn nappy hairs
A half full bed

Stirring above
the seizure of the
washing machine
A junkie for neglect rending

the half empty bed
Finger paint art
pretending to gesture
Chasing your face in a dream
where I'm sitting on it

You as a girl when you
used to be
dancing with a black boy prom date

Three parallel scars
fighting to be reinvested
A maelstrom of Derrida
almost resonating

Donna Summers’ sexy squeal
something like I want to do
A luminous half-light

The Devil's array of scores
Him two God zero

There are days we run
naked through wishing
we knew each other as teenagers

The shit-smell of new diagnoses inherited
polarities pealed into lamplight
Cockroaches giving birth beneath
my pillow

banal weight gain
enthused weight loss
a frosted donut
A chest binder, black

N-body physics
embodied in the swirling of prairie grass

Dirty rain in the cistern
Apartment number five
The darkness of my eyes

About the Author:
Chekwube O. Danladi's poetry chapbook, Take Me Back, was recently published as part of the New-Generation African Poets Series: Nne, edited by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes. They are currently working on a novel about queers living in Abuja, Nigeria. They live in Urbana, Illinois.
Follow Chekwube on Twitter at: @codanladi.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Punk Prayer" by Barbara Haas

October 2, 2017

Punk Prayer

My wife and I sat in a restaurant on the Arbat, a pedestrian promenade that had existed since the 15th Century, and while waiting for our entrees we wrote postcards to friends in the States. Numerous flat panel TVs hung from the dining room walls, all of them tuned to a Russian CNN-style news station. A crawl at the bottom of each screen unspooled a continuous ribbon of Cyrillic—swift, delirious, like a roller coaster I’d love to ride. Soft Slavic syllables had swaddled me all week, the “sh”, “ch” and “zh” of a well-cushioned language. From St. Petersburg to Moscow, I had grown used to the way “H” was “N” and “p” was really “r” and “Я” sounded like “ya.” Certain words now stood out, especially those involving coffee (кофе), restaurants (Рестораны), bars (бары) and the bank (Банк)—but nothing on these TV’s was familiar. Then “Pussy Riot” zipped past. I blinked at the Arabic letters. Knowing the words did not make them make sense.
My wife was jotting a few comments on the back of a postcard that depicted the Red October Chocolate Factory on an island in the Moscow River. When the phrase flashed by again, I pointed to the TV. “Check it out.”
She giggled.
Ever since our vodka picnic in the park the other day we had both been giggling a lot. There we sat in the grass, sipping a fine Beluga from water glasses we’d taken out of the hotel room. In Moscow, drinking in public was well tolerated.
We had had no major incidents while traveling. Lesbianka weren’t persecuted in Russia, but Kathy and I knew to play it safe. If asked by hotel personnel, we would claim to be sisters. If pressed more specifically, we would say that in our country it was customary for sisters to sleep in the same bed. Kathy and I had rehearsed this. We knew the strategy for successful lesbianka. Which, of course, was pretty deflating in itself.
Like kissing your sister.
So we had had no major incidents. When we first arrived in Moscow, a man tried to attach himself to Kathy. We came up out of the Metro and paused for a minute to consult a street map, all of which made him think we were two ladies from Kazakhstan who needed his help.
This was our honeymoon. We would not be needing his help.
Kathy and I shook him off and left the Sukharevskaya Station, not sure at that point exactly where our hotel was. Rush-hour Moscow hustled brusquely past. Traffic shrieked. A broad boulevard stretched just south of the station, suitable for a military-parade. Fleets of office workers on foot charged down the sidewalk, surge after surge, a steady mechanized flow headed toward slab-like high rises. Under Stalin, the days of the week were renamed so that Monday through Friday followed Monday through Friday with no Saturday and no Sunday in between. The weekend disappeared altogether—and production went on unabated. Forced labor became a cultural norm here. Employment was neither innocent nor simple. Probably more people had died while working in Russia than anywhere on earth.
   Cobblestone lanes fanned out just north of the Metro. Dragging our wheeled luggage behind us, Kathy and I bumped along single-file, like geese. Moscow had been built on low marshy land. It was humid. We were sweating. We looked less like ladies from Kazakhstan than hapless refugees. The neighborhood was a shabby collection of cracked and crumbling stucco buildings and numerous sushi restaurants. The side streets were as narrow as alleys, and when I glanced to the right or left down a couple of them, I saw faded onion-dome churches in the distance, their weathered hues bleached out in the muted afternoon light. All at once Kathy stopped before a grimy brick building and declared that she had found our hotel.
I looked at the doorbell we would have to buzz to gain entry to the lobby and then the two flights of steep steps we’d have to schlep our stuff up to get to “our” hotel—and I had my doubts. But Kathy was adamant.
So up we schlepped.
The stairwell reeked of cigarette smoke. Littering the landing was a handful of spent lottery tickets. We pushed through a smudged glass door, and Kathy rushed over to a woman behind the desk to let her know that we had a reservation. The woman took one look at us and said, no, we did not have a reservation. Her smile possessed a meaning I was not equipped to translate. As it turned out this was a rent-by-the-hour hot pillow hotel. It had a strip club one flight up. The woman was kind enough, however, to unfold a map of the neighborhood and show us where our hotel actually was.
Only funny mishaps for me and Kathy in Russia, in other words—no major incidents. We could sit in a techno-trendy restaurant on the Arbat, happily writing these postcards, and know that Survivalist Cyrillic was coming through for us.
Our waitress spoke a little English. When she brought the wine, I asked her about Pussy Riot. The expression on her face turned solemn, and she took a moment, as if choosing her response with care. It was a feminist band, she told us.
“Poonk rh-rrrock,” she trilled deeply, like a growl. She set the wine carafe down on the table and air-guitared an angry stab-like chord. Members of the feminist band had shocked the public, she said. She glanced at both of us and shrugged, then poured the wine into our goblets. The feminist band had stormed the altar in Christ Our Savior Church, she said. They beseeched the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin.
   “A poonk prrrrrrayer,” the waitress said. She seemed less offended by these antics than perplexed, but her cornflower blue eyes nonetheless darted from my face to Kathy’s, gauging the effect this information had on the Americans. The members of the band—three young women—were in jail, she told us, awaiting trial.
   “Political prisoners in Russia,” Kathy breathed when the waitress had gone.
I nodded. Some of Kathy’s relatives on her mother’s side—Ma’s people—still lived in Warsaw. They had known Communist oppression well into the 1980’s. My in-law’s now. “Pretty grim,” I said.
   Westerners like us visiting Russia for the first time brought a certain biased awareness. It was difficult not to see things through the prism of preconception. Although the trappings of a free society were everywhere—the haute couture on the Arbat, the Coca-Cola in the bodegas, the high-spirited young people with their smartphones and iPads, the opulence—these things could not transform an appalling social history. Appropriately, the word “pogrom” was Russian. Also “gulag.”
That morning we had ridden the Metro just to look at all the propaganda art devoted to Soviet triumphalism—the mosaics and exotic marble panels in the Mayakovsky Station, the elaborate stained glass displays and chandeliers in the Novoslobodskaya Station. When transferring from the 5 line to the 7, we had walked past the bronze bust of Karl Marx on its stone plinth. Later, a vendor in Red Square had held up a t-shirt that showed a cartoonish, stylized Lenin flipping the bird. “Foo King Revo-loo-zhan,” she had said. Sporting 3-inch heels but with a traditional headscarf knotted under her chin, this vendor was a total babushka babe: a middle-age woman with a warm smile, sapphire eyes and deep creases bracketing her mouth. She nudged me. She knew I would laugh. It was a sunny afternoon, about 25 Celsius, and the sky was a vivid silk blue above the Kremlin’s red brick walls. She knew tourists got a kick out of edgy post-Soviet Era souvenirs.
   People like me who had been children during the Cold War felt a little thrill when someone lifted the Iron Curtain a bit to reveal a cryptic Stalin or a hilarious Lenin. It was like a cultural joke. Every afternoon on summer days, not far from where this vendor sold her t-shirts, the impersonators set up shop outside the hulking Russian Historical Society building and made themselves available for photos: a Trotsky lookalike, Brezhnev, Uncle Joe. These affable pretenders smiled a lot more than the real hardliners probably ever did, which both underscored the irony and also obliterated the illusion, an effect that allowed everyone to interrogate past horrors from a public place in the clear light of day.
   Sitting here on the Arbat, I looked down at the postcard before me—a winter scene of St. Basil’s, its colorful onion domes lightly dusted with pristine snow. I thought of the punk feminists being held in the Moscow jail. Our Occupy Movement in the U.S. came to mind, as did civil disobedience. Thoreau. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. New Hampshire’s motto: Live Free, or Die. I thought, uncomfortably, of Joan of Arc. Then Patrick Henry. Because I was born into a tradition of rugged individualists, when I thought of stirring cries like “Give me liberty or give me death!,” I visualized something swift and honorable—a fast patriotic death, devoid of atrocity: firing squad, guillotine, the gallows. I didn’t see nails being driven into a person’s shoulders. I didn’t see a man digging his own grave and then being buried alive in it.
The restaurant had filled with young Muscovites, all of them fashionably coiffed, some wearing True Religion jeans or Vera Wang or Michael Kors. They were fun. They were forward-looking. They were spontaneous and optimistic.
   Yet their land had known the ceaseless, ongoing martyrdom of ordinary citizens everyday. People had been killed like martyrs here without ever even having a cause, or knowing with what desperation they needed one.
   I looked across the table at Kathy “We are a pussy riot.”
She scoffed and kept writing a postcard.
   “Seriously. We’re married. Two women. I mean, come on. No one would look at us and think ‘pussy riot’, but….”
   “Good,” she interjected.
“But here we are.”
   Kathy laid her pen down and took a sip of wine. “We can’t even reach across this table right now and hold hands.” She shook her head. “No. We are not a pussy riot.”
   I gazed upon my adorable bride.
Our ‘punk prayer’ back home had been fraught with its own aggravating and irritating features. In our own country. Although two women could get legally married in Iowa, not everybody embraced this state law. When we made plans for our post-wedding dinner, a traditional, family-run Italian restaurant came to mind, one whose dishes we really liked. Then we started thinking...
   “Italian,” Kathy had said. “As in Catholic Italian?”
   “Family-run,” I had intoned, “and with family-values?”
We were profiling like mad, but it was hard not to.
Would the restaurant figure out that lesbianka had reserved a table for 12 in order to celebrate their marriage and somehow disapprove? Burn our entrees? Be inattentive? What if Ben, Kathy’s 14-year old son, began clinking a spoon against his water glass, the traditional “request” for a newly married couple to kiss? Would we feel free to do that--? Would something untoward happen on our special day just because we were lesbianka?
   Seated across from me right now, Kathy had set her wine glass down and begun writing another postcard. Bent to the task, she tipped her head to one side, and the flickering light of the many TV screens in this restaurant played in her hair. She was right: we were not a pussy riot.
   Ours had been rather paltry concerns when you stacked them up against purges, deportation and execution. I picked up my own glass and drank.
   In St. Petersburg a few days ago, we had visited the ornate onion-dome Church on the Spilled Blood, a glorious cathedral built to enshrine the very spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Why this blood and not that? came the small and pragmatic but non-monarchist voice within me. It wasn’t the first time in Russia I had had a reflexively egalitarian thought. The more we walked around Peter the Great’s picturesque city the more insistent such thoughts became. The area had been swampy and low-lying—a coastal marshland—but slaves and war prisoners had been forced to move boulders and rubble into place for the city’s foundation and also to construct the canals. It was grueling work under extreme hardship. Ten thousand workers perished each month. My heart skipped a beat.
   Every step you took in Russia was on spilled blood.
People had been ground down and used up here--liquidated. The land was a catacombs.
   The young men and women sipping frosty cocktails in this restaurant were dressed for the evening with a carefree eye for fashion and style, as if they themselves were ornate onion-dome churches. They had a happy brightness about them. Their joy was heartening but also heartbreaking. Each and every one of them probably had a relative two generations back who had been starved by the State or whose village had been machine-gunned from the sky by low-flying government aircraft. It would take more than high-spirited 21st Century prosperity to cleanse that away. One generation, no matter how buoyant, was not enough. Russia traced its sovereignty back more than 1000 years. The place had known countless massacres across many regimes—killing as relentless and unremitting as clockwork—the tally staggeringly industrial in scope. No matter how remote the historical past, no matter how distant it was or to what extent it might seem to lack a present day pulse, these sophisticated young people nonetheless bore a legacy. A cool shirt didn’t change that.
Our waitress slid a bowl of borsch before me and sliced some bread on a plate. I watched, a little mesmerized, this offering of bread timeless and customary—a ritual all its own in a wheat-rich land like this. Her grandmother in a head scarf and her great grandmother had tilted the knife like that, had held the loaf just so, their aprons dusty with flour and their hands powdered white, while a toddler with rolled up shirt sleeves banged a measuring cup against the floorboards at their feet.
   Someone like me might feel tired or hungry in Russia, but the fact was simply this: I would never be tired like people in Russia had been tired. I would never be hungry.
In a couple weeks our friends back home would receive our postcards. By then the rest of the world would be mixed up in the plight of the feminist punk band. Madonna would weigh in, Paul McCartney, Sting. After the young women were found guilty of hooliganism and sacrilege, they were sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Even Fox News carried the story. I was sitting in Ma’s kitchen in rural northern Michigan when the report came on. She and Kathy were over at the stove, fussing with the kielbasa and pierogis amid a clatter of pots and pans and the occasional exclamation in Polish. They didn’t hear the verdict announced on TV. Ma’s refrigerator was a collage of photos—the grandkids and great-grandkids; the Detroit Tigers and John Paul II, the first Polish pope. A devout woman in her 90’s, she kept the schedule for Mass at St. Casimir’s Church on her refrigerator, too.
   The whole time we were in Russia, Ma had confessed to us that morning, she prayed for us. “Each and everyday!” she said. We were sitting under an apple tree on her farm. Kathy and I had bought a honey cake for her in the Arbat right before we left Moscow, and we were dunking thick pieces of it in coffee. Ma said she worried that we would get rounded up and be locked away. She said she burned a candle every night.
   Northern Michigan has some of the darkest skies in the U.S. I imagined the small flame glowing in her pitch-black dining room, its soft flicker bathing the icon of the Dark Virgin in golden light. Ma’s household altar. To Christ her Savior.
   She hated Putin.
   She loved the Church.
   She had a punk prayer, too.

About the Author:
Barbara Haas is a repeat contributor of fiction and nonfiction to The Hudson Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and The North American Review. Her MFA is from UC-Irvine, and she teaches in the Creative Writing & Environment MFA program at Iowa State University.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Three Poems by Brian Czyzyk

October 1, 2017

Her Florida Water

for Lucille Ball

If there was some vernal flash of sunset on Beverly Boulevard,
it was caught in the window as the henna-rinsed reflection
of her hair. When asked what she'd like, Lucy says My Florida Water.

Stuff to swill the nights she spent alone, with two kids
in cribs, and the stink of cigars bound to his pillow. Something to sluice
the tang of the other woman—the one who liked to rumba,

whose kiss stained his lips with burgundy. A drink
to fill the pits his teeth left on her chin, to kill
the smell of ink in the court and his ashes under her fingernails.

No, not booze. Nothing to contort her death mask
into a famous ugh. Not the turquoise sparkle of Biscayne either.
Lucy would never face Death with an eyeful of saltwater.

What she wants is her last breath to spin orange and clove
from her neck. She wants to greet Saint Peter with her signature scent.
Wants to give back the tropic blood that made her heart burst.

Scarlet

Randy dances almost every night.
He goes to clubs, downs
rum and Diet, wipes wet
hands on his thighs, then jerks
and grinds. His red bolt

of hair catches glances
from tattooed guys in tank tops.
Randy will take two
in the back room.

Fridays he always heads
to a new guy’s home, buzzed
and horny. The next morning
he wakes without a headache,
leaves without a note,
splits without snatching money
from the guy’s wallet.

Randy never stays. Never invites
anyone back to his place. He tried
that once, woke wrapped
in the arms of a silver
fox. But Silver booked it
from Randy’s bed, slapped him—

backhand—diamond ring
carving a gash in Randy’s left
cheek. Randy knows it’s better
to dance and forget.
It’s better to do it in the dark,
where no one can see the little scar.

Drive the Buck Home

Everything we eat is flesh. I know
the taste of flayed squirrel. I know your teeth.
We share bites of deer heart. We fletch arrows
with goose feathers. We fuck
on beaver skins. If we had
cash for corn, or a need to breathe

the smog of the city, I don’t
think we’d love each other.
It’s one thing to watch two bucks
rut. It’s another to see you slow
at the trigger, silent
as you plug one down.

About the Author:
Brian Czyzyk is a bisexual poet from Northern Lower Michigan who recently earned his bachelor's degree from Northern Michigan University. He is the winner of the 2017 Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets from Atlanta Review, and was a finalist for The Gateway Review's 2016 Fabulist Flash Fiction Contest. He has work published in or forthcoming from Indiana Review Online, Assaracus, Crab Orchard Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Harpur Palate, among others. He wishes you the best.
Brian is on Twitter: @bczyzykwrites (https://twitter.com/bczyzykwrites)

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose from Emma Atkinson

September 30, 2017

Let’s Talk About the Forest

            When I go out with women, I like to wear clean denim and a shirt with buttons. That’s what I feel confident in, especially once I’ve laced up my boots. I have to be prepared to talk and be witty - that’s what women are really after, the wit - and I personally can’t do that if I’m teetering around in heels or worried about my mascara smudging.
            When I go out with men, everything is reversed. Those are the evenings I find myself zipping into a tight dress and dabbing liquid blush onto my cheekbones. It’s all uncomfortable, but that’s more or less what I’m looking for with a man. The uneasiness makes me feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability gives me the same sensation as catching my breath at the edge of a rooftop.
            Tonight I’m squashing my feet into a pair of high heeled sandals. The man is someone I met online, a kind of blandly handsome guy who works at the university. He reached out to me, and I responded because he was the first person in weeks to open with a full sentence instead of just the word “Hey.” We’ve spent the last few days messaging back and forth about Indian food and Patton Oswalt. He seems okay.
            I try on a new shade of lipstick, but it makes me look like a sad clown so I scrub it off and apply an old favorite instead. While I delicately draw my eyeliner on, I run through a list of potential conversation topics. It starts off in earnest, with stuff like the new superhero movie and a writer we both like, but quickly devolves into random junk that makes me laugh. Let’s talk about purgatory. Let’s talk about which part of the brain you would rather get a tumor in, if you had to get a brain tumor. Tell me about your favorite bug you ever met.

            I stop between my car and the restaurant for a cigarette. I prefer not to let people see me smoke on the first date until I’ve ascertained how they feel about that. I once went on five dates with a woman before she found out I’m a smoker. We saw each other three or four more times after that before we just kind of meandered away from each other.
            I’m almost to the restaurant, about halfway through my cigarette and scouting around for a trashcan or an ashtray, when I hear someone call my name. I’m so surprised to see the internet guy before I expected him that I shout my own name back at him. He gives me a quizzical look.
            “David,” I correct myself. “I meant to say David.”
            “Sorry to startle you,” he says. “Do you want to finish that before we go in?”
            “Yes, please.”
            We didn’t have any kind of “I’ll be wearing a red tie and you’ll be carrying a yellow flower” conversation before we met up. I guess no one really does that anymore, yet it always surprises me when my internet people recognize me in person. I always see someone different, depending on whether I’m looking in my bathroom mirror, my hallway mirror, or a store window. I probably wouldn’t have recognized David if he hadn’t approached me first, truth be told.

            The restaurant is Persian. I have lamb and David has an elaborate looking stew. So far we’ve discussed our jobs and our pets, and lightly danced around the topic of the upcoming election. He smiles a lot in a nervous way. I look to the side a lot in what I hope is a demure way.
            I don’t go on dates because I want sex, per se. I don’t mind the sex at all when it happens. I just don’t care much if it happens or not. I think it eventually does happen with about thirty to forty percent of the people I meet online. I haven’t done any charts or anything. That’s just my guess. I’m not a prude. There is just a certain percentage of single dates with no follow up in my recent history.
            “So how’s online dating treating you?” David asks.
            I know damn well I should answer with something flirty, like “Tonight it’s treating me great.” I rest my chin on my hand and take a moment to reflect on the question instead. I set up my dating profile when I got out of the hospital about six months ago. To me every date has been a natural progression stemming from the afternoon I turned my purse and cell phone over to the intake nurse, but it’s hard to tease out exactly what the pattern is or where it’s taking me.
            “It’s definitely been interesting,” I say.
            David laughs, and I realize I must have come across as world weary or “You know how strange people can be.” That’s not what I meant, but I’m willing to play along.
            I also don’t go on dates because I want companionship, exactly. It’s true that I don’t have many friends in town, and that’s almost certainly a factor in my decision to do this. But lately my state of mind, my whatever is at the center of me, doesn’t feel any different whether I’m with someone else or not. It’s a blessing, really, compared to the days when the sound of another person’s voice would set my guts boiling every time.
            David is telling me about a weird date he went on last month. I want to tell him about my cat Lois, how she climbs onto my shoulder when I’m sitting at my desk. It seems like the most honest direction I could take our discussion in, since Lois is the most important person in my life these days. I want to tell him about the window in the hospital. It was at the end of a long hallway, and you could watch tree tops shake and shimmer in the wind. It was more soothing than any of the breathing exercises or thought experiments they taught us.
            The check comes and we both hand over our credit cards. David invites me to get a drink at a bar around the corner.
            “It’s a little dive-y, but not gross,” he says. “And they have an amazing backyard.”
            “That sounds great,” I say.
            I give him my best cute little smile. I hope I do, anyway. Tonight, for whatever reason, I’m feeling especially disconnected from my body. It feels like I’m locked in a control center in my chest, pushing buttons and pulling levers. David puts an arm around my waist when we step into the street. I let him steer me like a tugboat or a puppy.

            I light another cigarette once we’re settled on a bench in the bar’s backyard. There’s a wrought iron coffee table in front of us with our cans of beer and an ashtray. Above us the moon is fighting valiantly to push through the clouds. We’re surrounded by people louder than us, apparently having much more enthralling conversations.
            David is resting his arm on the back on the bench, leaning towards me. I have to bend my neck a bit awkwardly to avoid blowing smoke in his face. My left thumb begins tapping each of my fingertips like it does when I’m nervous.
            “Do you like it here?” David asks.
            “I do,” I assure him. “It’s cozy.”
            I’m wearing my black dress with the short skirt and the bell sleeves. It’s slightly hippy and slightly goth at the same time, which is why I bought it. I like clothes that can’t quite be pigeonholed. I realize my lipstick is probably gone by this point and my mascara is likely smudged, if it’s behaving like it always does. I feel no urge to excuse myself to the bathroom to fix it. David saw my makeup when it looked right, and that’s all I needed it for: the first impression.
            “I’m having a really nice time,” David says.
            His gaze drops down my body like a trickle, a lazy waterfall. We both look at my thighs at the same time, peeking out from the edge of my dress. My scars have been there for so long that they’re just part of my body now. I don’t notice them any more than I notice my eyelashes or the lines on my palms. I don’t think about them at all until someone else sees them.
            “What happened there?” David asks.
            Some of my scars are in neat rows. Some of them jag out in starburst patterns. Some are white and some are pink. There is no plausible cover story here. There is no way these injuries were created by a dog or a car crash or a surgeon.
            “Oh, those are really old.”
            That’s what I always say. It’s my way of offering reassurance that this sticky, scary problem is in the distant past. There’s no way to escape the fact that it happened, not with the remnants embedded in my skin. All I have control over is the way I talk about it now.
            “Okay,” David says.
            His eyes climb back up until they meet mine. I resist the urge to scan his face for clues to his reaction. My assignment right now is to change the topic. Let’s talk about piglets. Let’s talk about imaginary spy gear. Let’s talk about the most frightening creature in the ocean.
            “The weather is so nice tonight,” I say.
            I put out my cigarette in the ashtray right as he leans over to kiss me. I let him do it, but I’m watching the moon.

About the Author:
Emma Atkinson lives in Houston, TX. Her writing has been published online in Sixfold, A Lonely Riot, and The Mighty.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: A Poem by Conor Scruton

September 29, 2017

STONE TAPE THEORY

We were surprised to find
the door to my old building
unlocked, so of course
we went in — to see
what wasn't different, or was.
The lights had burned out
a long time ago,
but the halls were the same
and didn't feel empty
as they should have,
the handprints not yet gone
from the wall.
When I was younger
I fell in love
with an abandoned house
on the way out of town
— imagined a specter
into being there,
disrupting the dust
with a white cloak,
a skeletal set of knuckles,
walking the staircase each night
in the last witch-infested
instants before sunrise.
Relativity tells us
time doesn’t necessarily
follow an easy line,
but it takes world-moving
to make it slow or bend
or curve until two points touch
— almost-warp speeds,
the heavy comfort
of a planet’s gravity.
In the middle
of energy and matter
it’s not always simple
to explain what we’ve observed,
or exactly why
we return to ourselves
like radio-static dreams
— a little bolt of electricity
cached in wood,
a soft slab of limestone.

About the Author:
Conor Scruton is a poet and translator living in Milwaukee, where he teaches English and does research on ghost stories. His work has appeared in Salamander, Whiskey Island, Superstition Review, and other journals.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose from David Meischen

September 28, 2017

Conversations with Paul

Austin, Texas, 1992 and 93

I. Once There Was a Way (1970)

Summer stupefies us, a dream we can’t rise out of—bombs falling, snakes coiled, gravity growing in us until our lungs have no room left to breathe. We slog through each heat-thick day and at night we toke, buzzed and sinking, immersed in side two of Abbey Road (the bathroom window riddle, the sun king’s twisting aphorisms). The trumpet refrain will save us—eighteen bursts of brass tempered at the edges, like dark coffee sugared and creamed (I never give you my pillow; I only send you my invitation). Slow and easy, a graveled lullaby (and in the middle of the celebration, I break down). Almost too late, the trumpet unleashes a perfect G, three quick beats pulsing in the space it opens up and we are back inside ourselves again, drifting to separate rooms.

Except for one night at the lake.

Slipping out of our clothes, we shiver wading stoned. Air warm, water cool, waves glisten and darken, inner tube flickering between us suspended, wrapped in water, fading—until your thigh brushes mine, our blood beating bright (I-want, I-want, I-want). Our fluids mingled in the cool dark water.

II. Carry That Weight (1972)

You knocked at midnight, a season gone since your escape to the wind-rushing flatness of a panhandle farm, stubbled gray in February’s stingy light, two days since you walked out on a card game with your mother, driving until you found yourself in Tulsa, where you thought of me and reversed yourself, south down Interstate 35 to my door on the alley behind San Gabriel.

You looked like a Russian peasant, stubble-jawed, wild thatch of hair over deep-set snow-lost eyes—with brief moments of clarity when your gaze snagged mine. Panic flickered between us like the hiss of lightning, the moment quickly frosting over, as slick and unforgiving as black ice in a high plains winter.

You didn’t have a change of clothes. When morning came, I stripped you down and made for the laundromat. Your odor lingered at armpits, abdomen, fly. Ripe. Bitter.

Hard to imagine you nights at the bars, the Trailways bus station, urinals at Pease Park. That’s not what you wanted. You wanted me to let go, to freefall with you wherever you were falling. I turned you down.

I don’t remember the look of you leaving, the feel of you missing when you were gone. I went back to work. You went back to Amarillo and electroshock.

III. Tuesday’s on the Phone to Me (1992)

At five you watched your mother scrubbing your father’s back in a panhandle farmhouse kitchen, your eyes fixed on your father’s bare flesh. At seventeen you told me about the bath, about silent sessions with your brother that fed your hunger later. At twenty-six, you put yourself to sleep for good.

Fifteen years. I did not try to save you.

Nights I wander a maze of truck-stop restrooms where the toilets overflow, backwash rippling dusky light into the eyes of roughnecks who grab me where it hurts. They slip away as I wake.

We cannot escape ourselves. You tried to tell me. Sandpaper kisses and hairy bellies, creek-bottom memories that burned in me: I knew your hunger. It pulses in me now, a heartbeat that will not be stilled.

IV. Coda (1993)

December gray this afternoon—the kind of Texas winter day that lights and shadows everything with haze, that opens up sunless distances. I see the same bleak sky above the high plains farm you left behind, the grave they put you in when you refused the weight of breathing. I see you walking the Shoal Creek trail in this fading light, as if somehow you have survived yourself and eased into midlife, essentially but comfortably alone, rounding the last bend before the river, hands in the pockets of the coat that warms you, shoulders hunched against the wet embracing chill.

About the Author:
David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for his autobiographical essay, “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” forthcoming in Pushcart Prize XLII. Recipient of the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, Meischen has recent fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in Borderlands, Bosque, The Gettysburg Review, The Ocotillo Review, San Pedro River Review, Southern Poetry Review, Talking Writing, and elsewhere. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, he lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.
(Visit David on Facebook.)

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Benjamin Goodney

September 27, 2017

Dear Desire

Emergency-orange survival blanket don’t feel like gem sleeves
         except in case of acceptance or alchemical chain. Dear desire
                   to stay awake I am acute acceleration of the strobe strobe strobe strobe
         through gel pigmented strata. No fierce pain but paisley
aches all down the tongue-pink inside of my dress. Lantern head sway
         trace a smile wide as dopamine, perverse joy of falling back
                   (the bubble in a perfectly inverted aluminum level).

Face down, new moon bed taut as nurse’s lipstick
         finger cramps a countercyclic twist round this aortic
                   pencilbound lost articles diary. Burn and dodge, trace opioid
         receptors heavy as Jupiter. Heatstroke hours of fallenness; became
sappy for tomorrow — rag paper day preening as though chlorophyl,
         serotonin hillside overwarm like a wasp-hive in the sun. No proscription,
                   you canoe unheard-of channels in this active caldera.

Prescription silver ribbons wound like stockings: me,
         footbound under the A/C vent, my ocean veins, my vital husk.
                   Now lick my blood and fuck me like a blowtorch. Always
         then I’m sleep sealed in freon; already acetylene, I
infix a shade of byzantium. A shade of the silk road. Your shadow any shade
         but gone. Oxytocin, please. Let that first press happen to me —
            heavy, bright, embraced in dazed and aching panes of cave ice.

Lean Tracks

I chop daikon and carrots and leeks in the dark.
My face in the shower’s a welcome distraction.

With chirring cicadas obscuring the target
I’m walking at night and the streetlamps are missing.

He’s twelve minutes late. I’m pretending to smoke.
The wind blows in gusts, except on the porch;

I pull down my sweater and don’t push the doorbell.
A ghost sends a text from a box the next morning.

I buy up her jewels from pawnshops on Lake.
I shut off the lights just to see what will happen.

The songs on the radio run up a tally
along with the taxis and women in furs.

A ship in the clouds flies a flag made for rain.
I turn to the laundry and sort out the colors.

Buffalo Sauce

Everything is terrible forever
Every thing amazing & no one is happy
Any bad brainstorm now molded in plastic
Consumers like us home in like amoebae

Thieves like us
It's a thrill

& carrion birds know by logo
Which paper bags hide burger slag,
which mangled wings
It's best to decide elections in reality
Television style, don't you think?

So put the transistor on trial
Internet majority-void
Hive mind for oneironauts
On magic beans of transitory pleasure —
For instance here is the moon underfoot,
Here is a clone of your childhood pet

Dropper of glutamate,
Please and thank you

We find uses for the meat of the overlords
More tender than government butter
But always someone is snapping us candid
On manic nights dancing in neon-
Hung paradise, glossed by transocean flight

Getaway, the zeitgeist &
Con trails signal unnatural weather
Sky writing This is the future

Paranoid Style in American Social Media Content

1. I Am Coming Home Again Unless It Hails Inside Again

You’re asking a question. My mouth is a liar.
I don’t have a hand that can write like a wing.

I can’t put this bone-mask beneath my face down.
Wording the truth is a rough science, and
someone has dialed all the facts down to zero.

Memory is reënactment, absurdist
drama produced by rats, performed in the round.
These keyholes are journals in visible ink

on invisible paper shaped like a femme.
Video lenses record only swarms
of pixilized phantasms equal to no one.

Most of our fucking has not yet existed.
You read each biography folded in half,
then fold them again into featherless cranes.

We hear ten words that my larynx ensorcels.
You read upside down. I hid all the passwords.

2. It Is a Code That All the Roof Beams Howl

I’m coming inside. Her mouth is a lyre.
I don’t have an ear that can catch like a kite.

Checking the story at quarter to midnight
I worry I’m sleepwalking into tomorrow—
memories flailing, cranes in a funnel cloud.

Her knuckles are skinned from fisting the walls,
as I taste when I find a warm absence again.
This page is take two and it writes like a rat

gnawing the histories pulping the facts.
Lately those mysteries are written on milk, but
what she believes in is the end of her life.

Her exes have moved to an addressless house
of jealous mosaics the color of keyholes.
A note from her friend says she isn’t her friend.

She speaks ten words that could hide in a doorframe.
The street is still wet. It listens for footsteps.

About the Author:
Benjamin Goodney's work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Best New Poets, Hotel Amerika, Pacifica Literary Journal, Guernica, and elsewhere. He is co-founder of the literary magazine Storm Cellar. He took two degrees in philosophy from Illinois and resides along the Minneapolis–Orlando corridor.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Pascale Jarvis

July 25, 2016

Composure

You are inescapable;

give me a moment to
[de]compose
myself.

Artificiality

She hid a safety blanket made of
five razor blades
in her medicine cabinet,
where I stow my
chemical castaways
and the floorplans to a
prepackaged death.

The city lives in a perpetual daylight
composed of artificial sun,

and perhaps, so do we.

I cloud my depress and exhaust
behind habitual manic excitement

(name me Happiness)

and your ache to harm
illusions
itself into displacement

(name me Happiness)

As I write, the
sun has long since set itself to bed behind
a steel horizon,
yet the nightlined street is still bright enough
to pen this outside.
Every speck of nature here is
a testament
to man’s inability to shed the
delusion
of control,

and yet,

there is life here still.

We are still alive,
despite [to spite]
every instinct that wills us to
self-extinguish.

Perhaps the trees, the flowers, the grass,
even the daylight,
are Artificial,
but they are
endlessly
desperately
fighting to push back the cold winter night.

And so are we.

About the Author:
Pascale Jarvis is a second-year student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they study creative writing. When they aren’t huddled in a chair, scribbling in a notebook, they enjoy painting murals, climbing trees, and kick boxing. One day, Pascale hopes to pulverize the gender binaries of society armed with pencil and paintbrush, and maybe a cup of coffee as motivation.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Cassie Pruyn

July 24, 2016

Talk

For Lena, 1987-2014

In the blue light of late-afternoon,
we take turns trying

to consume,
be consumed.

We’ve lost by now the power
of language, our phrases a series of

cliched stutterings—
forever—I love you—mine—

mine—like ramming
against opposite sides of the same wall.

But this afternoon, I say what I mean,

inching my mouth along her soap-
scented skin,

down to that delicate,
earthy place, the threshold of which

I tongue again
and again.

A Week Before Christmas,

approaching dusk,

Lena and I in her dorm room,
draped over the bed, fully dressed,

our hands groping for openings.

She’s supposed to be waiting outside for her brother.
They’re going to a family party down River Road.

Through the picture window, the dorm’s shadow
stretches like a castle across the snow.
Lena’s sapphire studs glitter.
Her neck smells like Europe.
I know exactly where to go,
how to make a tent of her still-buttoned
jeans with the back of my wrist—

Her brother’s fists

pound against the locked common room door.
Lena leaps up

like reverse lightning, smooths her hair,
kisses me fast and runs out to him laughing.
I don’t mind it yet, the door slamming,

the room watching to see what I’ll do.
Back then I knew

how to hold on,
how to let the cord between us spool out:

Lena’s body racing
through the fresh-spread dark.

The Last Time I Saw Her

Her hand, a cold wing, palm-to-palm
with mine, and her question I couldn’t—

Our love spun in
that first day
planetary
as if it had swung through a million times
already:

we were what was new.

Mellifluous breeze. Curtains astir.
Both of us holding our breath.

Thank you, I finally said
before continuing,

but it rang like Fuck you.

About the Author:
Cassie Pruyn is a New Orleans-based poet born and raised in Portland, Maine. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, The Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, and others.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Heather Rick

July 23, 2016

Al-Zalzālah

by Heather Rick

Nadezhda kept candles burning before an icon in her kitchen and offered a prayer when we came in from the rain. Jesus dreamed atop the fridge in a wooded frame, high cheekbones and oblong almond eyes bleeding mercy into her dirty little Bucktown walk-up. I imagined the smell of peasant vodka on his breath, the black etch of Soviet prison tattoos on his prayer-folded hands. We would dry off with her old threadbare towels and sip our liquor under his gaze, in the cool root cellar gloom of the little kitchen. Nadezhda would cross herself before it, in the Orthodox way, counter-clockwise from the way my Catholic great-aunts did it. I thought of those mustached Acadian women who brought me milk chocolate bunnies and plastic eggs with little gold crucifixes in them on Easter, who crossed themselves and intoned “He has risen” as ham and green bean casserole and carrot cake were passed around on wobbly paper plates. Their Jesus was a crude working man like their husbands, men with missing teeth and criminal tendencies. Men without mercy or softness. Nadezhda’s Jesus was different, but I still couldn’t pray to him. I refused to press my lips to the wood to where the paint of his face was rubbed thin by generations of lips. He was simply an emissary from a world I’d left behind, the Poles and Indians and Acadians of my family who’d folded their work-worn hands in prayer on two continents.

“It does not matter, he watches you, even if you do not return the favor,” Nadezhda said, gesturing to the icon with her glass. “That’s God’s job, to just be there.”

“That’s nice,” I said, “but for Catholics, it’s all guilt and obligation. God’s an awful duty, like visiting old relatives in a nursing home or getting up in the morning and going to work for minimum wage.”

“Well then,” Nadezhda said, throwing back the last of her vodka and putting one of her thick wheat-smelling arms around my neck, “it is a good thing you are not a Catholic.”

Any knowledge of ancestral religion had been translated through the sticky filter of America, where everything is cheap and big. Bright packaging, flashy advertising, a quick rush, a surfeit, and a hollow experience devoid of nutrition. In our arrogance, we have decided that God too must be an American, that surely he speaks in the bombastic language of thunder-crowned mountains and the flooding of holy rivers, that divine retribution manifests in hurricanes and mass shootings and planes flying into buildings, grace blooms in holy images appearing in fast food burgers and broken windows. Just like God was some outrageous character in the TV show that is America.

That summer I was reading a Qur’an from the library, one that felt too much like a Bible with its leather-bound weight and King James-style translation. But the chapters had titles like “The Spider,” “The Star,” “The Sun,” “The Moon,” “The Dawn,” “The Cow,” and “The Ant,” which seemed a reminder that God speaks more often in small quiet ways, in the language of birds and trees, the laughter of drunks, in qualities of light and shadow and water. There was “The Calamity” too. The Arabic word was “al-zalzālah” which could also mean earthquake or convulsion. I liked the way the word felt on my tongue, those z’s that were like tectonic plates splitting apart, the l’s that lilted stinging as drunken kisses. It spoke of a day when “the earth throws up her burdens from within,” which is what it felt like, all of it – sex and conversion and depression and immigration, this outpouring of inner tensions, convulsions that destroy and create. God was in that too.

But I am, after all, merely an American, rhapsodic and overdramatic, weaving eschatologies out of library copies of sacred texts and drunken hook-ups beneath the painted eyes of an icon. Perhaps I too may be forgiven.

“Tell me about Russia,” I’d ask the dark, as we sunk into her couch, listening to the rain outside and feeling the heat and the alcohol melting our bodies together. It wasn’t her stories, so much as the melancholy romance of the Slavic world which I asked her to invoke. This romance spread like a nuclear fog across the landscape of my imagination, the Russia and Poland I absorbed from the gestures and accents of my father’s family, the books by Bugalkov and Miłosz that I read on the El. There it was always a January of grey winter-wheat fields, of brooding ashy skies, a land of winter so like Chicago. Maybe it was the fog of ancestral memory, enveloping the entire Slavic world, everything east of the Danube, the land that gave me my thick muscular peasant-woman legs, my predilection to alcoholism and cynicism, my taste for cabbage and vodka and revolution.

Slavic women had a tough beauty like Chicago itself—lipsticked and scarred, immigrant grit ground into their makeup. If the French-Indian women on my mother’s side were mustached behemoths, those Catholic aunts whose mouths were perpetually pinched into beaks from the cans of beer they were always greedily slurping down, poverty and obesity rendering them callused and unfeminine, then the Polish ladies of my father’s family were like an assortment of hard candies wrapped in bright foils. Sweet and tooth-breaking tough, adorned in the plastic-cheap, foil-bright fashions of the lower-class Eastern European émigré – knock-off designer purses from Chinatown, teenage-tight blue jeans, eyebrows plucked and crayoned in, second-hand fur coats reeking of thrift stores, animal-print dresses, leather heeled boots, lipstick-smeared cigarettes, hair bleached nicotine yellow or dyed smoky industrial dark as my image of Poland. And underneath those gaudy foil wrappers you never knew what flavor you’d get – dumb and sweet as a cherry Coke like Auntie Claudia or harsh and tough as sardines and beer like Mumsie, my dad’s mom.

“You’re not really listening,” Nadezhda would laugh eventually. “You are off in your own head.” And she would bring me back to America and the rain and our bodies. Her mouth tasted like vodka and her hands always felt soft and supple with prayers, no matter what they were doing.

There came a week at the end of July, as summer roared towards its apex, when the rain and thunder shattered like a calamity over the city. The great iron heart of the Midwest just broke and the skies convulsed over us for days. Skyscrapers bent their heads in mourning while the streets swam salty as if with blood or tears. The city quaked, whether with the passage of El trains or the wrath of God, I could not tell. I started wrapping a scarf around my hair before I left the house, to protect my hair from the rain, but I knew that I would not remove it once the skies cleared. It also protected my soul from the grit and sadness that sifted down onto my skin whenever I stepped out into the city.

“I like it,” Nadezhda said. She reminded me that women in Poland and Russia covered their hair, too, when they were very old or very pious.

My depression was both eschatological and meteorological. Depression in a foreign city is always something like a vacation. In the newness of Chicago, the shapes of buildings and bridges took on the gentle geometry of sorrow, the faces on the train inhabited by my mysterious grief. Street signs and traffic lights leaned like neighborhood matriarchs on the porch of my discontent. Any city can become foreign in a moment—strangers shove the lances of their eyes into your flesh on the street, a stop missed on the train and suddenly you’re in a part of the city you’ve never seen, sun or snow piling the cruelty of weather onto your shoulders, and your thoughts turn to suicide and martyrdom.

But the city is also full of hidden saints and prophets. Riding the train home from Nadezhda’s, I painted these faces on the El: the mean-eyed visage of the dirty-jacketed homeless man slouched on a mid-morning blue line train, the lonesome vulnerability of thin girls in tight pants and tall boots, the beautiful waste-scape of the city sprawling and tumbling outside the windows. In the faces of the sad bums crawling into the subway to escape the rain, I saw Nadezhda’s Slavic Christ. I wept for the world along with Christ. No calamity can last forever. Soon the rain would break, the sun and heat would resume, Nadezhda and I would drift apart and forget one another, I would forget my depression, forget the Polish women whom I was too American to ever truly emulate, forget the weeping Christ.

The rain was clearing as I got off the train and the air outside the mouth of the subway was floating with hazy golden specks. An atom’s weight of good, an atom’s weight of evil.

About the Author:
Heather Rick is a New England-based writer and former student of the Fiction Writing Workshop at Columbia College Chicago. She holds a B.A. in religion from Smith College and will be pursuing her masters at Harvard Divinity School this fall. Her work has appeared in over a dozen publications including Steam Ticket, Fourteen Hills, Slipstream, and The Cape Rock.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Katie McClendon

July 22, 2016

They will call me reckless, and maybe they’re right—

my heart shifts like a loose tooth even now.
Remember the summer I woke with my body vibrating,
like thin glass tapped with tuning fork,

that particular whine of a beautiful thing struck
and singing? Days grew dull, silence draped, clinging
to things unfilled. Refilling my drinks,
I’m murdering time until the dark night

offers itself up bruised. Here in Indiana,
my skin is clean, markedly untouched. Remember
the summer I swaggered through town, unashamed,
the scent of rough mermaids spilling

from between my legs, how fighting was all just play,
and you kissed me so good I bled through my tights,
period off schedule, startling us both? I don’t offer myself up
as easy now, but still it is easy, the offering.

If I stood by the window, you might see me, pressing
tongue to unmoving tooth, trying for the pain
of something near to lost. Here, they tell me
I’m pretty, as if beauty has ever made anyone stay.

Here, my body is quiet,
humming at a low frequency
no one detects.

Progress

All the young kids are tying knots—like sailors with identical maps,
duplicate treasure marked spots on sand. How they will swarm the continents;

how the babies will overgrow and slip into the seas for them.

Once, I fell in love and was lost for decades,
stuck in the dream of shark slick rubber, cutting teeth,
the widening darkness of a throat open, devouring romance.

All the endless map making, all the parchment.
I fear the whale, the waiting and cavernous gut,
the kind of dim that mimics my desire for charting a way in.

I slip easy into seclusion, swear allegiance to the wide blue.
Birds crowd my shoulders squawking: marriage, matrimony, nuptials.

But for you, I fear I would limit my measure to island space,
rope off the edges, cut out the sea. This is not what I should want but it tides in me.

Let us discard our white flags, sway the wild ocean.

Let us stay slick, childless, all our fingers uncovered.

For you, I want to make my way through the waters,
take to the deep despite my fear

of the way the sea goes
down and down.

Turning Back

She secured my hands to the bedposts,
as if I might consider leaving.

Wrists contradicting the headboard,
I pulled against the leather belt and stayed.

We talk about Jesus, sometimes,
but mostly there is a kind of self worship here.

Later, we slant the lip of the windowsill,
bow out, watch cars sprint the Interstate.

I count each band:
space, three cars, space.

We root to her mattress, twine tangle
of skin and sheets.

We twist away from each other.

At daybreak, rain suffers the sidewalk,
pounding.

A string of cars secures the highway,
a still shot of reverent motion.

She says I can be selfish,
this isn’t always about love.

I investigate my wrists, search for shadows
of rotten grapes, find only the wistful branches
of my veins.

The daffodils below, sweet from rain,
turn their backs to me,
lower their heads.

About the Author:
Katie McClendon is gay, glittery, glamorous, & gritty, rough, tender, fabulous, & pretty. She currently lives in Austin, TX and her work has been published in Crab Fat Magazine, CutBank, Juked, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Scott Broker

July 21, 2016

On Caracas, and Driving
Through There One Last Time

by Scott Broker

My mother first tells me to play dead on a beach near Caracas. I am crying, or have worried her by crawling off toward the surf while she napped, and she is leaning close so the words make an impression. “Play dead,” she says.

Or maybe we are in La Palma, Panama. I am crying, or have accidentally scratched her face with a poorly-cut fingernail, and she is leaning over and saying, “Play dead” with a voice stripped of inflection. Who knows if I register the command; I am not yet walking, let alone converting her intonation, gesture, and language into a singular message. Who knows if we are even in La Palma, Panama.

We might be in Ventura, California, or Sausalito, or maybe even Florence, which is up north in Oregon. This is the first year of my life: a listless drift up the Americas, nights spent on beaches or near beaches, my mother calling me barnacle baby for the way that I cling to her. In photo albums, we are sunburnt, occasionally smiling, and wrapped in the arms of various men and women. When I see them—often tattooed, muscled, and beaming—I wonder if my mother told them she loved them, that she would choose this beach over any other for the rest of her life, that they could be a new family: the mother, the seafarer, the barnacle baby. How often did they say I love you, too? And how frequently was I in the room while they made love?

I am crying. I am worrying my mother. I am scratching her face with a nail that she herself cut poorly. I am soiling my diaper, reminding her of my father, waking up too early, or interrupting her sandy and salted sex with tears. I am too small, too needy, too vulnerable in a world that spins with so much flying shrapnel.

She is saying, Play dead, barnacle baby. You’re clinging too hard right now. I need a minute, or ten, to let myself believe that I don’t need to be here for you.

My mother is a good person. She commands me to play dead with love. I know that it begins somewhere in her coastal movement, though, because her mind turns on her when it is too warm, too loud, or too crowded. In the first year, I am crying, the beaches are pulsing with sunlight, and the locals are flocking around her, wrapping their arms around her shoulders and asking for pictures. She is saying “Play dead” to me at least once, but possibly more. It might be a weekly plea, a daily one.

I do not resent her for this.

By the time we settle in West Seattle, I know the command and I know it well. When I am seven, she is dating Richie and telling me to play dead whenever they want a night out and can’t find a sitter.

“He can just play dead,” she says, pulling Richie toward the door. “He’s king of the house. Right, honey? Now go play dead.”

My mother tucks against Richie’s neck whenever he laughs. He laughs, now, and she moves her way in, glancing at me beneath narrowed lids.

“A night in is just as fun,” he says, throwing himself against the denim couch. “Be revived!” he shouts to me. I am standing in the corner, goggles still strapped to my forehead from our afternoon at the pool.

“Yes, yes,” my mother says, jumping over the couch and standing on its cushions. “Let the boy live!” she yells, lifting her arms from her sides and up toward the ceiling. Her voice is tuned to an unfamiliar pitch and she rubs her hand against her neck when she settles beside Richie. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

My body sways above stationed feet. I am not sure if I should be laughing, playing dead despite Richie’s resurrection, or doing something else entirely.

“It’s bedtime,” my mother says, pointing a skinny finger at me.

The two tuck me in together and then have sex in the living room. My mother pounds her fists against the couch. When Richie shushes her, she pretends to restrain gasps and moans but manages to let them escape like unwieldy phantoms. She is doing this for me, casting her shouts like small rocks. She knows that there are multiple ways to break down a door, to let me know that I do not have the power to take away her life.

“Come on, Sarah,” Richie whispers.

“Why is everything always about him?” she says, locking herself in the bathroom while he speaks from the other side of the door.

We are here for years. Richie moves in. The denim couch is replaced by a leather one, which stays cooler in the summer. My mother buys a sunhat, then cries when Richie makes a joke about Seattle’s weather. We cover the refrigerator with drawings I’ve done in art class. Richie says I have potential and frames one of them for my 8th birthday. We spend weekends sitting on the beach. The way that the sound is divided up by land makes for relatively calm water. My mother says she loves this. Other times she says she hates this.

When Richie leaves her, my mother sleeps in my room for almost six months. She says that she can’t sleep without hearing someone else’s breath, that Richie stained her walls grey with his smoking and his bad energy. I am in the 5th grade. I lie still every night while she cries or wraps her arms around my stomach, asking what she would possibly do without me, without my love. For those months, I don’t have friends over and don’t ask to stay elsewhere. I want to be simple and non-burdening. I lie still. I play dead.

Then, it’s April. My mother is drinking tequila in the kitchen with Sally, who she has been sleeping with most nights of the week. Sally works at Swedish Medical Center, which is near the university where my mother is an administrative assistant. Though she is an RN, Sally says that the patients have been depressing her lately. A new job might be on the horizon. Sally does not shush my mother when they have sex in the living room, shower, or bedroom.

“You’ve got a special sort of lady here,” she says, handing me a bowl of cowboy chili.

My mother moves behind me and hugs my head. “He already knows that,” she says, kissing the top of my head. “And I’ve got a special sort of boy.”

During dinner, my mother tells Sally that we haven’t eaten anything but Hamburger Helper since Richie left. This chili reminds her of home, of California, of times that were better than then. My mother is lying, of course—she has made her way through two cookbooks with skill and innovation—but I assume that this is one of her soft lies.

When they are drunk, later, Sally says, “Fuck that Richie guy.”

My mother stands, meeting their foreheads above the coffee table. “Yeah, fuck him.”

I am supposed to be scooping us bowls of ice cream but am unable to move. When my arm relaxes, the bowl drops from my hand.

“What are you doing?” my mother yells, running into the kitchen and kneeling beside the bits of porcelain. “Out of the kitchen,” she says. “Out, out, out.”

“I can clean it.”

“Just go to your room. I don’t want to see you right now.”

I lie still. I try to sleep. My mother and Sally have sex in the kitchen. Sally yells, “Fuck that Richie guy” again. It is late. My mother bursts into my room and pulls the framed drawing from my wall. (Tomorrow, I will find it cast off into the backyard, the drawings from the refrigerator pressed down in the trash and covered in ground beef. My mother will say, “I’m sorry, baby. He had to go, though. He’s been dragging us down all year. Now get me some soda at the store. My stomach is in shambles.”) The drawing is of a shark swimming toward a pair of unsuspecting legs. Around both, scrawls of blue.

Spring passes damply. I try playing soccer in the yard but it is too sodden, soaking my shoes and socks. I go to the beach, chasing the ball across the pebbled expanse, but the sand kicks up and clings to my body. I try to shake it from my pants until my face is overwhelmed by heat, made red and tearful. A girl who lives down the street comes over and asks why I am crying. I tell her that I don’t know. I don’t. These days, I am surprised by what makes me cry. Sand, sandwiches wrapped in newspaper scraps, movie nights with my mother. It does not help that the sky is a mess of grey, unbroken by sunlight for weeks at a time. Sally says that there is a correlation between sun deprivation and emergencies in the hospital. I think of this often.

Sally is gone by summer. My mother says we’re better off without her, that she was fattening us up with all of her carb-heavy meals. She doesn’t sleep in my room, doesn’t say she’d be nowhere without me or my love. We are swimming in Lake Washington daily, even though there are rumors of sewage runoff and long-dead bodies recently surfaced. My mother says that swimming reminds her of Venezuela, Panama, or California, depending on the day. When she starts a conversation with the lifeguard—a younger black man with yellow sunglasses and perfect teeth—she shoos me off with a hand. I go to our towel and imagine starting my own conversation with someone on this beach. I could tell my mother to shoo, too. I could tell her that it’s about time that she play dead.

My life is not replete, but then it isn’t destitute either. I play soccer. I play basketball. I have friends who I call best friends. I know my way around Seattle’s downtown, am able to go there alone if I am willing to ferry over in the morning so I’m back before dark. In class, I get good grades. I like to read, but not as much as some of the other students. I don’t have a bike or an Xbox but I do have a skateboard and a PS2. My mother trusts me. My mother cries at my 6th grade graduation because she is proud. I am not embarrassed by this. Other parents are crying, too.

My mother is quiet for a few years. She does not date, does not sit in the living room crying or suggesting that we just up and leave, visit all of the national parks or make a reverse trip down the coast. At meals, she asks about my days and then nods. If I ask about hers, she keeps nodding. I spend more time with my friends because her quiet makes me anxious. My mother is not usually so resigned. She likes to shout and sing and dance when certain songs come on our radio. On weekends, now, she stays in bed most of the day. Occasionally, I catch her in there during the week, too, having skipped out on work.

“Did you work today?” I ask.

“Can you get me some soda?”

In the summer before high school, she begins to stand more often.

“I miss being young,” she says, putting her hands on her hips and scowling at me. “You’ve got a lot of luck right now. You can sneak out, drink, smoke pot, and no one will bat an eye because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Do you realize how good you’ve got it?”

She begins to sneak out, to drink and smoke pot as though there were anyone trying to prevent it. One night, someone knocks on the door at 2 AM. When I open it, a bearded man has my mother caught in his arms as though he has just saved her from some catastrophe.

“You know this lady?” he asks. “This your mom?”

I let him into the house, showing him where he can put her down.

“What happened?”

“She was dancing on the pool table down at Frank’s,” the man says, running his hands through his beard. “Fell off, but should be fine. It took her half an hour to tell me your address. Didn’t even say that she had a kid here.”

My mother stretches her limbs outward and blinks slowly at both of us. “Oh, sweetie,” she says, “I just wanted some fun. You know how I’ve been missing fun. You have all the luck.”

The man looks at me with a face that bleeds apology. He will go to his friends later and say that this lady took 30 minutes to remember her own home, that she forgot that she even had a kid there at all. I want to break the expression from his face. He gives a weak smile and then turns toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he says.

When he gets down to the driveway and into his car, I almost chase after him. I want to tell him about my mother’s soft lies. Didn’t he know that someone could say something and mean something else? Wasn’t he aware that she could say that she was childless and still have me here? That you could be contradictory without being a hypocrite?

My mother sleeps on the couch. I sleep on the floor beside her. In the morning, she helps me register for my 9th grade classes and asks if I’d like to take a drive down the coast.

We no longer cling together like we used to. I know that the barnacle baby is the one she wants to leave behind, the one that she likes to pretend never came at all. I lay low, driving only when she wants me to drive. She sings loud, dons a cowboy hat that she picked up in Redding, and tells me about how each place we go has changed over the last 14 years. She tries not to bring up Richie or Sally but their words still emerge, drifting through the car before pulling out the open windows. The other lovers hang around, too, joining in the backseat and telling stories through my mother’s mouth, stories that try to push me away or bring me in.

I am no longer crying. I do not need my mother like I once did. She still worries about me but is less strained by her own concern. She does not mind that I wander Little Italy while she sits at the wharf, nor is she bothered when I come back. In motels, we speak during commercial breaks and when the light is switched off but we aren’t yet sleeping.

When we reach Ventura, my mother sprawls out on the beach and says she wishes we had more time. “Imagine if we could make it all the way to Caracas. You could see the place that you were born.” She grabs handfuls of sand and lets it loose across her forehead. “Imagine how strange it would be, you seeing where your whole life began.”

I am wrapped around myself, trying to keep the evening’s cool from infiltrating my light jacket. She wants me to speak, to indicate that my life has been worth her journey from there to here. I say nothing, though, watching the sunlight spread like broken yolk across the riptide. We do not need to reach Caracas to ask ourselves these questions.

My mother yawns and then grabs my hand. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here. You know that, right? You know that I wouldn’t give you up for the world? You’re my best friend—the best friend I’ve ever had.”

Seagulls sweep across the sky. People build bonfires and uncork wine bottles just north of us. I take my shoes off and pour the accumulated sand from them. Had it been so long since we’d last been here? Was this not the same sand reshaped? the same water stirred?

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t. My mother means it and she doesn’t. She is telling a soft lie to keep from breaking our hearts.

I lie back, shading my eyes against the sun. My mother starts to speak but doesn’t. Then she lets my hand drop back into the sand.

“I’m going to dip my feet,” she says, standing and running toward the water. She could stay out there for hours, kicking at the waves and letting her legs go numb against the Pacific. She could wander toward the others and tell them that she had been here once, childless and happy. They might be laughing, drinking, glancing occasionally to where I am. My mother might confess my presence, or she might keep me tucked away, if only through sunset. Play dead, barnacle baby. This is my life without you.

But then she will come back. We will go to the boardwalk for fried pickles and ice cream. She will say she’s forgotten so much and nothing, too. The garbage in the sand, the color of the sunset. When we pass by other people, we will both imagine how we could vanish ourselves to them, to one another. It will be a twilight reverie, a daydream both feared and desired. When we return to the car, tired and together, we will be reminded that there is more than one way to say I love you. Night will come quickly—a wave that fails to break, spilling outward instead—and we will drive north again.

About the Author:
Scott Broker is a writer originally from Colorado living now in Seattle, WA. His work has appeared or is soon forthcoming in Sonora Review, Entropy, American Chordata, Barrelhouse Blog, and Driftwood Press, among others. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Seattle University, where he edited the annual journal, Fragments. He can be found at http://www.scottjbroker.com

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Max Oliver Delsohn

July 20, 2016

Blessed in His Deed

Nonfiction by Max Oliver Delsohn

PART I

I am sitting in the bath when I receive my name. With palms upturned I raise and lower my hips, up and down, letting the water move over me in waves. I mouth it to myself, a silent chant. Max. Max.

This feels better than the lazy derivatives of Emma I thought I’d have to use when I was younger. I’d secretly post poems online as the mysterious and potentially British Edward Foxworthy, until Twilight ruined the name for all of us. After that, I tried Emmet, only to discover later that he is also a character in Twilight. I decided a name that invokes images of Mormon vampires is not going to aid me in living my truth.

Still, somehow, it struck me. Max, a name to stretch from boy to girl. A name for someone in a suit, in a dress, with body hair or a clean shave, with boobs, with a beard, with a vagina that feels more like a dick. A label to defend against all labels. Max.

After some time I get out of the bath and look at myself in the mirror. My body is delicate. I’ve been an A cup since seventh grade, I’ve broken each wrist twice, and I have never successfully completed more than one push-up. To make up for my tiny stature, I have a thick mass of curly brown hair at least twice the size of my head. I drench it in detangler as water drips down my back. I take all of it in, my angular face, my curves, my dark body hair. I regard it with a vague affection, a distant curiosity.

My roommates aren’t home, so I walk naked across the living room and through my bedroom door, slipping under the covers and opening my laptop. With no underwear to fumble with, all I have to do is type ‘porn hub gay’ into the search bar and I am good to go. As an old favorite involving a gardener with a leafblower loads on screen, I reach my hand under the covers. My mind is blank except for Max, repeating steadily and reaching everywhere. It is a meditation. Max. Max.

The gardener has only just turned on his leaf blower when I notice I have three missed calls from my youngest sister, Maddie. She’s calling to say my grandmother has died. The service is in two weeks.

PART II

The only time to tell them was the funeral. Two weeks later I am on a plane home with my other sister, Hannah, discussing strategies for how to break the new name to my parents. I would be in California for three days-- getting in on Monday afternoon, and leaving Thursday morning. Hannah and I agree I should tell them both on Wednesday, the day after the service, once everyone has had a night to process.

“Mom wants to ride those four-person bikes in Santa Barbara,” Hannah tells me. “Do something as a family.”

“Yeah…” I mutter back, unfolding my tray table so I can rest my face in my hands. I think of our traditional Santa Barbara daycation, the surrey bike’s slow meander on the concrete track along the beach, shouting at each other to pull our respective weight, in pursuit of the tiny ice cream shop at the far end of the dock. I imagine my mother stuttering as she calls out for her daughter Emma, only to remember, Max. I cringe.

“Do you think she’s gonna freak out?” I ask half-heartedly.

Hannah thinks before she answers. “No. No, I don’t think she’s gonna freak out. It’s not like you’re going full FTM.”

“But I MIGHT go full FTM.”

“Don’t bring that up now,” Hannah warns, with a seriously alarmed look.

“I know,” I sigh. “I wouldn’t,”

“You may need to explain it for a while, like. She isn’t going to get it.”

“I don’t need her to get it,” I tell Hannah as I fold my tray table back up and press myself moodily back into my chair. “I just need her to know.”

PART III

My father picks Hannah and I up from the airport. He fills us in on the death of my grandma, the state of my mother. It was sudden. My grandmother died in the hospital after a seemingly-successful surgery, as my mother raced down the interstate as soon as the doctor called to report the complications. She was one hour into the three hour drive when the doctor called again.

We’ve been warned to expect anything between a chaste sadness and total hysteria, so my sister and I step cautiouslyinto the kitchen of our childhood home. My mother sits at the table, composed, but wobbles as she rises to greet us, her face stained with tears, the skin around her eyes dark with exhaustion. We hug stiffly, our custom. The brim of my baseball cap nearly collides with her forehead, but I weave just in time.

“How’s it going?” I ask tentatively, softening my tone.

“Okay, you know? Okay,” my mother says. She smiles at me, eyes wet.

My father excuses himself to pick up Maddie from school, as Hannah and I settle in around the table. The first time in over a year. The ghost of how I used to move, the rise and fall of our voices together, it scares me. Is this my body? How did I do this before?

My mother begins listing all confirmed attendees to the funeral. My mother is one of eight children. She names her cousins, my cousins, the children of my cousins. I recognize almost none of them. My mother is thrilled they’re all making a point to be there.

“Joyce and Sheryl are flying in,” she continues, eyeing me expectantly. In an attempt to placate her lesbian daughter, my mother used to temper unintended expressions of disgust towards my sexuality with the quick name-dropping of two delightful older lesbians she grew up with, friends of my grandmother named Joyce and Sheryl. My mother always made a point to tell me how my grandmother ‘never had a problem’ with Joyce and Sheryl, and she didn’t, either.

“Oh, cool. I’ve never met Joyce and Sheryl,” I remind her, trying not to engage.

“Sheryl’s a sweetheart. And you’ll love Joyce-- Oh, shoot, I mean Josh. Josh and Sheryl. Right.”

My eyes narrow as Hannah’s widen.

“Joyce is Josh now,” my mother says simply. I look over at Hannah, who is laughing.

“Well THAT’S ironic,” Hannah blurts out, before immediately throwing her hand over her mouth.

“What are you talking about?” my mother asks. It’s the voice that she uses when someone’s about to be grounded. Neither of us respond. I scratch the back of my neck even though there is no itch.

“What, are you changing your name now, too?”

She stares at me, incredulous. “Thanks Hannah,” I mutter.

“I am so, so sorry dude.”

I did not actually come out as a lesbian to my mother. Instead, I was caught violently kissing my best friend in ninth grade. We were surrounded by textbooks and tried to plead studying, but the door was shut and the lights were off and dry-humping isn’t subtle. So, any conversation of this kind had never happened before. My scalp feels hot beneath the hat. Beneath it, I can feel my hair bunching. Is this a woman’s hair?

“I was going to tell you after the funeral…” I start, but am abruptly cut off.

“I support you,” she responds immediately, leaning in on her elbows like a teenage girl, listening for a secret. “So what’s the name?”

“What?”

“You do what makes you happy. Now tell me what’s the name!”

“Max…” the name falls out of my mouth, limp and ugly. “I just want to be called Max.”

“I support you, Max,” my mother says, eyes wet again. She seems… sincere. I glance over at Hannah, who shrugs.

“Now we HAVE to go shopping for the funeral,” my mother says, apparently satisfied with my twenty second explanation for abandoning the name she gave me at birth. “A simple black dress should be fine.”

PART IV

Once Maddie gets home we all pile into the car, my mother, sisters and I, on our way to Pegasus, a clothing store in a strip mall just five minutes from our house. It is one small room of suburban pre-teen chic, with cheap dangling jewelry on a revolving rack, amidst neat stacks of overpriced skinny jeans and flowing sheer blouses. We could be in my 7th grade crush’s closet. I furrow my eyebrows and attempt to focus on the task at hand. Hannah and Maddie are in their element, darting in different directions, grabbing several dresses at once off the shelves.

Though aggressively grossed out by them as a child, I grew to appreciate dresses in my adult life. I wore them on dates, to college parties, the occasional foray into the mystical, confusing world of femininity. Sometimes, the dresses felt like a costume, and I was just a drag queen with a deeply unfair advantage. Other times, I felt pretty, and I felt like me.

And then, for no specific reason at all, I quit shaving my legs. I started exclusively wearing boxy shirts, and bought myself a binder; the countless Victoria’s Secret thongs I had accumulated over the years were replaced by novelty boxers I purchased in bulk over the Internet. Whether my feminine side was authentic or a two-decade long, private joke, the sparkle had faded.

Regardless, the point was I had worn dresses before, and I had liked it.

Right?

I locate the Pegasus sale section and grab the blandest black dress I can find. Shuffling off to a changing room, I throw the thing over my body without removing my jeans. I’ve stopped wearing bras, too, so I stare at myself in the dress and try to imagine what it will look like once I squeeze into that old push-up bra buried deep in the garage.

As far as dresses go, this one is modest, this should be manageable, this would have been acceptable funeral attire a year ago. But now I cannot recognize my reflection. I can’t tell if my skin is burning. I cannot shake the nausea, the thought that I am fundamentally mismatched, a collection of all the wrong clothes and body parts.

Maddie peeks in to look at the dress. “It looks so good, Emma.”

“Does that work?” I hear my mother yell from the opposite side of Pegasus.

I look myself over once again, and swallow hard. “Tell her this will work,” I whisper back to Maddie.

On the car ride home, I briefly explain to Maddie that I’m now going by Max. ‘So are you a boy?’ No. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m genderfluid. ‘What is genderfluid?” It’s supposed to be everything, boy and girl. It’s both and neither at once.

“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Maddie decides.

"Emma? I mean Max?" my mom interrupts as she checks her rearview mirror. She is wearing her sunglasses, so I cannot see her eyes.

"Will you shave your legs tomorrow?"

Nobody speaks. My mother clears her throat. Then, after a moment, “It’s what grandma would have wanted.”

PART V

As my father and I approach the massive Spanish Renaissance style church towering above the thick morning fog, the goosebumps on my bare limbs rise. I stare down at my cold and furry knees. I had agreed to the dress, but couldn’t erase all the hard work I had done for the past six months growing some legitimate leg hair. I try not to think about the gawking from my devoutly Catholic extended family. For the first time since I was 11, I wish that I were blonde.

I slide myself into the mass of people gathering outside the church entrance, hoping to avoid as many relatives as I can. My aunt Lily and her husband, Greg, an aging one-hit-wonder from the seventies, spot me from across the foyer and rush over to me with a box of yellow flowers. “Hi Emma,” they both say hastily with a quick hug. Lily puts one hand on my shoulder and pushes the box towards me with the other. “Give these to guests when they come in, sweetie.”

I am handing out daffodils to some teenaged cousins when my mom whirls by, beaming as if a celebrity has just walked into the funeral. My first thought is Josh and Sheryl. I feel myself blushing.

“Harry’s going to perform Amazing Grace after the Eucharist,” my mom tells me, then lightly jogs towards another aunt looking lost on her way to the bathroom. I don’t get a chance to ask if Josh and Sheryl have arrived, or if musical performances are typical of funerals-- and in that moment, I realize, I’ve never been to a funeral before. This is the first person I’ve truly known to have died.

My grandmother and I were not close. The peak of our relationship came in the form of an impromptu wine-drinking contest on Christmas Eve last year. It was my grandmother’s idea, so of course I accepted, only to learn later my mother had secretly been serving her non-alcoholic wine since 2011. Needless to say, I lost that drinking contest.

Aside from that, my time with my grandmother was made up of passing hellos and goodbyes, small talk at family gathering, and the occasional command for me to ‘brush my damn hair once in awhile.’ I couldn’t call her a mentor, but my grandmother was honest, blunt in the disarming, good-natured sort of way. I wanted to be like that, too. And that was something.

The door to the church finally opens. The organ begins to play as I follow my mother down the aisle. Eyes are on us and with each step something wooden inside is hacked up and splintering. An enlarged photograph of my grandmother’s face just a few years before she died sits in a large frame on the church stage. Some people in the pews turn to look as we walk by, but I recognize none as Josh and Sheryl, and I hate myself for looking, I hate all of us for looking. We stop to file into our pew, in the center of everyone, and suddenly I am crying, willing myself anywhere else and out of this dress, out of clothes and names and history. I try to redirect my thoughts to my grandmother, to mourning, but there is only shame, and then rage, a deafening rage at myself and at my mother and at the whole concept of a funeral, the way it mocks the specificity of pain.

And then I am really crying, sobs loud and unapologetic. My skin is burning and my dress is wrong and my body is wrong and they’re all making me selfish, this solemn audience, and in front of all these people it’s the only thing I can feel. No one expects this from me, and I sense more relatives ogling, fascinated with the depth of my grief. Aunt Lily pats me on the back when I sit down, but I keep crying throughout the ceremony, all the way until Greg finally gets up on stage to perform his rendition of the classic, Amazing Grace.

It is at this point I am getting myself together, and maybe about to laugh, when I notice my mother has made her way next to me in the pew, has rearranged with my sisters so she can hold my hand. Before pulling away from a long, stiff hug, my mother squeezes my arm and whispers, “I know, I know. I miss her, too.”

PART VI

On the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death I call my mother. She is driving home from the cemetery to meet with my father and Maddiefor breakfast. Her voice is slow and sad, but somehow peaceful, still full of love. Our conversation is brief, cordial and kind. She doesn’t stutter when she says my name. She hasn’t stuttered in months.

A year later, too, in the mirror. My hair’s gone. That glorious dragging of soft, dead weight. I loved it for being beautiful, to her, to her, toyou. I loved it because my mother and her mother told me to brush it out, to press my curls flat, but I refused. It was my first, sweet rebellion, with so little at stake.

Hair grows other places now. Legs, arms, and it’s still growing. The only skin I ever shave is my face, expectant with each new needle in my thigh, wondering how my body will interpret the testosterone this week. I regard each change with a vague affection, a distant curiosity.

Boy, girl, boy, girl. These lenses wash over me with each new mirror. Photographs, store windows, still water. Remember, imagine, remember... Emma, Max, Max.

And each time, the compulsion returns, desperate for meaning, for knowing: Is there truth in this body? Truth in this fat distribution, in this tone of voice, in this name? I come in the tradition of women, and I leave--

I leave.

About the Author:
Max Oliver Delsohn is a transgender writer living in Seattle, Washington. He has been published in Fragments Literary Magazine and has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Seattle University. He currently works at Hugo House, a Seattle non-profit for writers.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Remi Recchia

July 19, 2016

Your Dress Like Kerosene

I gave you the wrong directions
to my house,
my mouth.
I lay on the floor in the dark,
silencing the shutters.
Your headlights killed my
hydrangeas, melting
in the night,
and left my driveway to its peace.

The moon shuddered slowly
on its way to Zion,
sprouting tightropes from its roots
down to my chimney,
filling the soot with silver roses.
I laughed and my tongue
turned sour.
I laughed and my jaw unhinged,
became a beak,
became a hook.
It scooped up dried blood oaths
from your skin,
your lost corduroy pockets.

Strands of Hair, Tempest

I looked for feet I could breathe in
while you said you were running
on empty like your grandfather’s
lost car stuck on the road
outside of my left kitchen window.

I forgot to feed the birds,
I forgot to check the mail,

[there’s just nothing there]

I remembered to call you,
but didn’t.

Your suitcase packed itself
slowly, a defunct assembly line
bruising oranges and swallowing
hairclips.
Two door springs caught your perfume,
smoked, on the way out.

I hid your spare key on top of the roof
to tempt the moon back in for dinner.
She stood me up,
I sat down and wrote my own newspapers,
the print died under florescence,
the paper burned,
I laid down on the floor,
a yellow chalk outline.

About the Author:
Remi Recchia is an emerging poet concerned with the moon, authenticity, and breaking the rules. He has been published in The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Blotter, The Laureate, and The Poems That Ate Our Ears and has a forthcoming piece in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. He will begin his MFA in Creative Writing Program at Bowling Green State University in Fall 2016.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Taneum Bambrick

July 17, 2016

Biological Control Task

Jim & I were taking lunch, sharing a crumpled
bag of goldfish below the dam
when we met Bill & Mike.

They rolled down a window, pulled up
next to our truck & strained
their necks—looking over me
—to introduce themselves to Jim.

They have the same face when I remember them.
Two guns propped between seats,
smell from the old engine.

Tarp over a load in the bed.
What’ve you got? Jim asked.

They stepped out, undid a rope.
Something soft hit
dirt on the opposite side of the truck.

You might not wanna look. Bill glanced at me,
slid the tarp off. The mound there
was grey & white at first I thought
dirty laundry.

At least eighty seagulls just dead,
ropes of blood at the chests. Shot so
their shoulders folded apart
like wet book covers.

To protect salmon.

Doesn’t make sense, but it’s not bad
getting paid to hunt.

Mike motioned to a trash bag on the pile.
Show them our girl.

Bill drew it down, ripped the knot, lifted
an adult heron with a hole blown
out the chest.

He held both webbed feet.
You could look through her body.

We found her in the road. Hit
by a hatchery cannon.

The bird seemed frozen,
wrongly intact—gold eyes cranked
open, neck coiled tight over her slaty back.

When I cried it made them comfortable like I could be
a daughter, wife or something they knew how to see.
Hands on my back.

What’s the matter, Mike asked. Didn’t you care
about the gulls or were they too ugly?

About the Author:
Taneum Bambrick is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize. She recently interned at Copper Canyon Press, and currently serves as an Associate Editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work appears in The Nashville Review, New Delta Review, and Cloud Rodeo. She writes poems and essays on her experiences working around the reservoirs of two massive dams.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Andrew McKernan

July 16, 2016

Halloween. Trick --

Nate put a blow pop in my pocket.   I wasn’t looking.   Picture
the little piece of gum crystallized in its center, so pure, untouched
at least for months.    Tight.   Failed attempts to get the wrapper
off. He grimaces when I bite.   Says his bruises are from soccer.

More than our bodies between us, more girth and heft.   He was. Barely
fit, ego to match. Some guys know what they want.    Sleep later.   Or rest
legs on shoulders, scruff patterns against my body.   The beginning
such a careful time.   Score the cardboard first.   It folds cleaner.

Let Us Race to be the First to Discover Flaws in One Another

Our romantic comedies stretch through 15-second YouTube
commercials -- excuse me, sponsored content -- and I
have Actors Guild membership from starring
in so many. Here is my quick draw: not his voice, or his
face, or the small tuft of fat around his waist. Faster.
Not passivity, or alacrity, his unironic way of saying
“bitch,” his racist posters of the Chief. Veto. Not this one’s
lack of love, not those protestations of affection, not his
texts too much, texts too little (texts misusing your).
Not broken English. Not replies with rote answers
not hours of ellipsis over careful texts ending
in a verbiose “ha ha.” Nein. It only hurts when you think
Maybe this time. Just like Liza Minnelli. Maybe he’ll
e special. Maybe he’ll prove you have a soul. Maybe

About the Author:
Andrew McKernan holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire, where he was fiction editor of the literary journal, Barnstorm. His poetry and prose have appeared in Ninth Letter, Blunderbuss, Juked, Gabby, and other journals. He lives in Chicago and wants to be your friend; find him on Twitter @andrewmckernan.

About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

ALL ACCOUNTS & MIXTURE: Robin Wyatt Dunn

July 15, 2016

Anne Sippi

by Robin Wyatt Dunn

The Anne Sippi clinic is in El Sereno in east Los Angeles, a quiet middle class neighborhood, where crazy people can come to live.

Crazy is not the PC term, of course, but still appropriate, even more if we were Japanese, in their reverence for broken things. Crazy comes from Old Norse ‘to shatter,’ after all.

The Japanese put gold at the broken places; and so it is in Los Angeles, our golden sunlight the balm still sought by so many thousands year after year, a pyramid scheme and a hustle but still also a genuine shelter, from the world.

I have the only single room, because I am not staying long. Every day the other residents stop by to tell me that they have been looking at the room, and will soon get it.

Thompson observes in Fear and Loathing that 1970 or so was the high water mark in the social and drugs revolution, where the tide broke, leaving us detritus on the beach. Los Angeles serves a similar fate, this bastion of the American Dream sublimed into our lust for fame and madness, but tempered by the Spanish culture of the city, excluded for long enough by a racist America that its values have nothing much to do with Hollywood and its empire and so are immune to its diseases.

This is why Anne Sippi is a strong place, nestled in what some would term “a bad area” but which is just a family neighborhood, with a quiet corner store that doesn’t mind serving the crazies, come down for their cigarettes.

Unlike so many nuthouses in America, Anne Sippi has open doors: you can wander off whenever you feel like it. Get drunk, get high, come back, sober up, as you like. Though most of the residents stay on the grounds talking to themselves.

Like so many medical establishments, mental health was hit hard by the Reagan era and the following drive to get rich from medicine. So, one of the ways you can tell whether the quality of the care you will receive in a nuthouse is how run-down the place looks. If it looks bad, it’s a good place. If it looks polished, it will be a living hell.

Anne Sippi doesn’t look bad, just tired. Which is okay: we’re tired here.

I talk with the psychotherapist once a week there, and unlike other shrinks, whose chief concerns in my experience are either to a) sell more drugs or b) convince you that you’re sick, he only wants to listen, and to encourage me to get well, however I am able. A man with common sense, like Bernie Sanders, tragic because the personality type now seems so alien in the American landscape.

We line up quietly at night for our medicines but no one chases us down; no one, as I have seen happen elsewhere, is ejected to be homeless when they refuse to swallow.

Our doors are not locked.

I have had my car returned and am able to drive it on the freeways of Los Angeles, looking for work. I listen to the radio.

Most are “hard luck” cases, taken in here because no one else would have them. People too stubborn to quit, too much their own thing, too weird, too obstreperous, too loud, too creative, too ugly, old and poor, too happy, too jokey, too young, too everything, now rounded up in our few dozen bodies, and deposited with quiet ceremony to live as we like.

Most too are “lifers,” on disability, unlikely to live independently some would say, but many of them remain ambitious in that way, slowly winding their way through the corridors of the system, remaining interested in their treatment—that crucial ingredient which can only happen when you are free to choose your own health.

Force is anathema to healing.

This American legacy, of force, hovers over everything we do. I am glad there are still some places to escape it.

In many ways Anne Sippi epitomizes my experience of Los Angeles; the only city I have ever visited which withholds judgment.

Los Angeles is not sure about it yet. Not sure about you yet. You may be okay.

Yes, you will do crazy things. Run down the street naked if you like. I have. We are not surprised. Sometimes people do funny things. Los Angeles is prepared.

The heat too is crucial in the psychology of Los Angeles; often too hot to think, we can sit silently in meditation. There is no need to be angry; we can seek stillness in whatever form most pleases us: Buddhist meditation, beer and weed, a walk in the park, barbeques in the public parks, overflowing with bodies, calm and contained, mad inside, with some knowledge I am unable to capture.

Of course it is a sad place in a number of ways; these are hard luck cases. It is not easy to be hard luck. We can not blame each other for demanding why these afflictions came; we can only wait for the shouting to quiet, for them to come around to a state of mind where they can find their own answers.

Medicine is poorly understood. It is not chemical. It is social. It makes more sense to me than ever that “witch doctors” sang to the sick, especially the mad.

A song says: you are here, and so am I. This is a story I am telling you. I hope it makes you feel better.

About the Author:
Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in Los Angeles.

About the Series:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.

Five Things Big Girls Can’t Do

The playfulness of skeletons, the sadness of bones

Realist theme park

NOTES FOR A PORNO SET IN THE VATICAN

JI HAUSHI

TUMBAO

EVENING HOLLER

ERE IBEJI

HAGIOGRAPHY

OLD ADDRESSES

Punk Prayer

Her Florida Water

Scarlet

Drive the Buck Home

Let’s Talk About the Forest

STONE TAPE THEORY

Conversations with Paul

Dear Desire

Lean Tracks

Buffalo Sauce

Paranoid Style in American Social Media Content

Composure

Artificiality

Talk

A Week Before Christmas,

The Last Time I Saw Her

Al-Zalzālah

They will call me reckless, and maybe they’re right—

Progress

Turning Back

On Caracas, and DrivingThrough There One Last Time

Blessed in His Deed

Your Dress Like Kerosene

Strands of Hair, Tempest

Biological Control Task

Halloween. Trick --

Let Us Race to be the First to Discover Flaws in One Another

Anne Sippi

On Caracas, and Driving
Through There One Last Time