CutBank 95

2021

Contents

Peacocks
Fiction by Ellen Skirvin [Read an excerpt…]

How to Behead a Snake
Winner: Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry by Ben Kline

Insectgroup3-65
Fiction by Rich Ives [Read an excerpt…]

In the Occult
Poetry by Rebecca Lehmann

It’s Almost Tomato Season and You Know What that Means
Poetry by Catherine Ragsdale

Hair Ties
Nonfiction by Christie Tate [Read an excerpt…]

Fat Girl Terzanelle and Fat Girl Lira
Two Poems by Stephanie Rogers

Positive Vibes
Fiction by Paul Riker [Read an excerpt…]

Cows
Poetry by Gabrielle Grace Hogan

Poem for a Fieldmouse
Poetry by Chelsea Harlan

Of All the Fires that Ever Burned
Winner: Montana Prize in Fiction by Stephen Brophy [Read an excerpt…]

Fire Map: California, Oregon and Washington
Poetry by Hannah Dierdorff

Father as Natural Disaster
Winner: Montana Prize in Nonfiction by Lena Crown [Read an excerpt…]

Blessed are the Dead that the Rain Rains On
Poetry by Kelle Groom

Father to Son
Poetry by Theresa Monteiro

Five Millat Stories
Fiction by Ed Falco [Read an excerpt…]

Ellen Skirvin│Fiction

Peacocks

I drove to my mom’s house to pick up my brother Rich, who wanted to waste a weekend with me in my new apartment across town. Rich was seventeen, two years younger than me, and still lived with my mom. My roommate and best friend Gib sat in the passenger seat, drumming nonsense on the dash. He agreed to come with me since the last time I tried to take my brother out for a good time, my mom threatened to call the cops.

Gib agreed to everything. That’s why he had a bunch of shitty tattoos and eight fingers. We’d been friends all through grade school and got kicked out together for selling Adderall in the parking lot before the SATs. We had a talent for sniffing out a profit. Gib’s newest project was tattooing. He practiced on himself at home with a gun he bought online. I invested in breeding dogs and snakes.

Rich Ives│Fiction

Insectgroup3-65

Raphael has emptied out his violin heart. It wouldn’t stay in tune, and it was always crying. His priests are flimsy and approach conviction with obscure evidentiary rules. The friends of each evening that remains gather and do battle with fresh indifference. They have so many things to do that do not need to be done.

Everywhere Raphael goes, more and more improvisational musicians are given to the waves. They learn the salted patterns of survival and return with their tails rosined. Even the worst of bows can attract them like flies. And then they lift up and separate, each one a maestro of the accurately unexpected.

It’s not something you can die of, but life is, and this way of doing things is full of life. You only have to loosen its belt and let the melody fall. A flood of sensual sleep floods over you, and again and again. If you were awake, you’d drown.

Christie Tate│Nonfiction

Hair Ties

An hour before my eighth birthday party, Mom appeared in my bathroom doorway to “work on my hair.” I’d been doing my own hair since I was five, but for special occasions—Easter, Christmas, roller skating parties—Mom got involved.

I couldn’t find my brush, so I borrowed my brother’s, the one with extra-soft bristles. Mom tried to make it work, but the pliable bristles wouldn’t catch my hair. She decided a ponytail would be best. But then I couldn’t find a hair tie. We were running out of time. Mom’s yanks made my eyes water; her sighs shook the walls. Why couldn’t I keep track of the rubber bands? Why couldn’t I have beautiful hair? Why was it so hard for me to fit in the box labeled “girl”?

Dad retreated down the hall, away from the pink-tiled bathroom that trapped me and Mom.

When my hair wouldn’t lie flat, Mom threw the ineffective brush across the bathroom. It broke into two pieces. We both stared at it. Me in fear, her in anger hardening into shame. “I guess there was a lot of hairspray in the bristles.” That was why it broke. That was one of the family fictions we needed to be able to escape from the bathroom and smile wide at the rink when my guests arrived.

Paul Riker│Fiction

Positive Vibes

We’re driving to Chicago to see DuncanWithYou live and Dad stops because he says we have to get gas.

Mom says But Terry we’re full up.

Dad says I need to stop anyways.

Mom says I just wanna make sure we’re not late to this thing. You know, for Boops. She’s really excited for this.

That’s me.

Dad says Joanna don’t start anything please.

Duncan’s full name is Duncan Saint-John. Besides Trevor he’s the funniest person I know. He makes the best videos, does the best streams, and has the best podcast, too.

Stephen Brophy│Winner: Montana Prize in Fiction

Of All the Fires that Ever Burned

The city of Cork still smouldered two days after the last grenade was flung. Wind roused ash flakes from the mounds of blackened rubble and carried them like drifts of pale grey snow along the quays. The sky hunkered low, a shifting blanket of smoke, showing not so much as a rumour of sun. All around, people gathered to tally the damage to their stores, their city, their lives.

Lawrence found his boss, Bernie O’ Callaghan, standing with a scarf fixed over his mouth against the charred air, staring mournfully down the length of St. Patrick’s street. The city’s main thoroughfare had collapsed in on itself. Some husks of buildings remained, but many more had spilled into the road, crumbled into their own islands of ruin.

“I’ve been down there, Lawrence,” O’ Callaghan said, “There’s nothing left of it.”

He looked back toward the patch of empty sky where his butcher shop had stood for the past forty-three years, the ash heap still smoking. “Not a solitary brick.”

Lena Crown│Winner: Montana Prize in Nonfiction

Father as Natural Disaster

My father is flint. Short and solid, an inverted triangle, chest muscles like two boulders from swimming every day.

My father is gasoline, salt-and-pepper hair slicked back smooth and wet like Frank Sinatra, gold mezuzah glinting at his neck, the tank always full, and don’t you let it dip below the quarter tick, or else.

Growing up, my father taught me how to discern certain characteristics of a fire just by looking at it, details like the color and volume of smoke and flame, as well as its aftermath, its char patterns and heat shadows. He worked in fire, though he battled insurance companies, not flames. He used to bring me with him on his rounds to visit his clients, people who smiled at me with sad eyes as they stood before the scorched remains of their business or family home.

I struggled to explain my dad’s job to my friends. Or to anyone, for that matter. The official title, “public adjuster,” illuminated little. Finally, when I was ten, I found a shortcut in Pixar’s The Incredibles. “You know the nasty bossman who orders Mr. Incredible to deny the nice old lady’s insurance claim?” I’d say, waiting for the inevitable nod. “My dad fights those guys.”

Ed Falco│Fiction

Five Millat Stories

That afternoon, the afternoon of the autumn storm, it was still a couple of decades before the divorce, something that seemed impossible at the time, that they should ever break up, Millat and Maria, she from an old- fashioned Italian family and right in the middle, three older brothers, one younger brother, and two younger sisters. Not a divorce in the whole, huge extended family. She was the wild one, Maria, marrying out of her Catholic faith, but not so wild she didn’t insist Millat sign a prenuptial “declaration of promise,” agreeing to raise the girls as Catholics, which was necessary back then to be married in the church. And it was fine with Millat. Still in their twenties, they had both, Millat and Maria, come of age in the era of the Vietnam war, of protests and counter-culture, of pot-smoking and promiscuity in the name of a coming millennium of love and peace—which of course never came. What came was a resurgent militarism and the long, steady shift of wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer; from pacifism to militarism; from “power to the people” to a government of, by, and for the rich. But that wasn’t obvious then, when they were still young parents with two beautiful girls, Maria a stay-at-home mom, Millat a young man with a good job in the city, working in what was then called Personnel, before it became Human Resources.