Month: June 2014

Inteview with OUTSpoken Performer, Molly Kessler

ImageRehearsing the piece “Singing Blue/Straight Girls”, (from left to right) Sean Madison Kelley, Amber Autry, and Molly Kessler, with dir. Adam Crandall in the background.

OUTSpoken (a one-night event) will be going up next Saturday, the 28th at 7PM at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church. Molly Kessler will be one of seven performers lending their talents to the pieces showcased in the production. Having been an actor since her freshmen year, she wrote her first play “I See London, I See France” in 2013. She will be performing the poetry piece “Singing Blue” as well as playing a supporting role in the prose piece “Steel”.

ES: How did you get involved with OUTSpoken?

MK: Well, I was contacted by Adam [Crandall, director] who organized the event.

ES: OUTspoken presents a series of separate written pieces, along with poetry readings, by local LGBT and ally writers. Can you tell us more about the pieces that you are a part of?

MK: The piece is a poem called “Singing Blue” and Adam’s joined it together with another poem called “Straight Girls”, and it’s sort of a back-and-forth: both pieces are about gay women pining after straight girls, and realizing that it’s an unattainable or unrequited love. So, Sean Kelly, who’s performing “Straight Girls”, and I are doing this back and forth.

ES: One of the themes common to both “Singing Blue/ Straight Girls” as well as the other piece you are involved in, “Steel”, are people dealing with relationships, or potential relationships, that aren`t working out. Do you have any personal connection to the type of issue these pieces are exploring?

MK: Yeah, I think we all do. It doesn`t necessarily have to be romantic but just, trying to be friends with somebody or trying to work with somebody when you have incompatible personalities. It doesn`t even have to be romantic. I can think of dozens of situations like that, sexual preference aside.

ES: What do you, speaking of both the pieces you’re in, hope to achieve? Do you come in with a specific goal in my mind, with these projects?.

MK: I just come into it hoping to tell the story. Because that’s what I assume part of the goal in writing it was, to convey some sort of emotion or tell a story, and I hope it comes across and does the story-teller justice.

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Director Adam Crandall (left) directs Taylor Jackson (right) in OUTSpoken piece “Banging”.


ES: Of course, OUTSpoken is more than just a night of story-telling. There’s also a wider social issue being promoted. What kind of role do you think a production like this plays in the big picture of giving voice to LGBT people in our community?

MK: I think that the kinds of stories we’ve told for a long time don`t really show that side of human experience. But we’re showing those who may not know a lot about LGBT issues, that they’re real people, showing them go through things that everyone can relate to. It helps you understand that it is a human experience, and that we are all the same.

ES: So, would you say that the performing arts, like theatre and film have a special role to play in promoting that kind of understanding?

MK: Well, yeah, because it’s entertaining. And when people are entertained, they listen. Even something like the difference between news programs and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert-people get their news from shows like that now, because it’s entertaining and they retain it. And in our production… the pieces are so beautiful, and you can`t help but listen.

ES: So we’ve talked about performance- what about writing? Do you have a lot of experience with, say, writing poetry?

MK: Well, I’ve written poetry, but I don`t show it to anyone because it’s just goofy and stupid. It all rhymes, and it’s all Seussy and not about anything real. I have written a play, which was not fiction but based on my experience studying abroad in France.

ES: Having both performed and worked in a written form, would you say you have a preference?

MK: I much prefer writing, myself. The difference for me… I don`t know, it’s not that I feel more connected to my words… I feel more connected to someone else saying my words than I do when it is myself saying somebody else’s words- if that makes sense. I feel more comfortable with someone else saying my words, than me saying someone else’s. Because I feel like I don`t do them justice.

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ES: How about your future plans? We were talking earlier about how you were planning on moving to Chicago. What do you plan to do once you get up there?

MK: Yes. Some friends and I, including Amber Autry, who is also in the show, are planning on moving there sometime in September. I want to take some classes with Second City and Improv Olympic. I’m not sure quite where that will go, I’m really interested in writing more than performing, but life takes you places, and you don`t know where it will go. And that’s exciting, and also terrifying.

ES: One more question. Do you have a favorite LGBT pop icon?

MK: It’s gotta be Ellen. Without a doubt Ellen. It will always be Ellen.

 

Buy your tickets for OUTSpoken today!

—

Erik Schiller is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, where he received his BA in Anthropology and English, with a minor in Theatre. He has been performing in live stage and film productions in Knoxville since 2009, working with local companies that include the Clarence Brown Theatre, Yellow Rose Productions, and Badland Pictures. In addition, he has served as Secretary for All Campus Theatre at UTK, is a founding member of the guerilla theatre troop Shakespeare Unauthorized, and has had poetry published in the Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is part of the story “My American Father”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

If I look up my name in a baby book, it lists the meaning of

Sumrah as reward. The actual definition is a little different—gift

for a good deed. For my mother, a compensation. But this is the

first thing I’m going to tell my father when I meet him, that I am

a gift.

Mom tells the story differently depending on when I ask, so I

don’t know which parts are true. Sometimes she uses words like

insisted and coerced. She wants whoever’s listening to read between

and nod sympathetically, to understand why she had to leave,

that she had no choice, but I’m pretty sure there’s more than what

she says. That’s the way Mom is about things. Why else would

she still keep that photograph and the folded Ginsberg poem he

once copied for her hidden underneath the silk nightgowns in

her dresser?

In the picture, this young version of my father is twenty-one,

just two years older than I am now. His brown hair is cut close

to his scalp and he has the cocksure, unsmiling face most soldiers

wear in photographs. He’s dressed in his fatigues, but my beautiful

mother had asked him to set down his gun when she held up

her camera.

When I ask Mom to tell me about him, she talks around

him instead. She explains about Kuwait University’s College for

Women, her year of study toward becoming a language therapist,

her own father’s disappearance shortly after the occupation. She

reminds me that Iraq owed Kuwait billions of dollars after the war

with Iran, that Saddam was a liar. Sometimes I pretend it’s the

first time I’ve heard this part of the story, and other times I let my

breath out in an exasperated puff and remind her she’s told me at

least a hundred times before.

When I get like that, frustrated by what she won’t say, she slips

me little details. She tells me that the attractive American soldier

was named Timothy Arlington, that he told good jokes even

during a time of war, that he was convincing. In March of 1991,

when the U.S. troops began to move out of the Persian Gulf, she

said goodbye. But two months later she was on an airplane headed

to the United States herself, her stomach still flat and girlish,

Timothy’s phone number and address printed carefully in the first

page of her journal.

She was one of the lucky ones—this is what she says. She had

an uncle working for the American Embassy, and when I press

her further, when I ask what would have happened if she hadn’t,

she always begins, “Otherwise,” and then shrugs her shoulders, as

if there is nothing left to discuss.

I want to know why she never called him, why she chose to

stay with a distant cousin in Pittsburgh—someone she had never

even met—until she was finally able to support the both of us on

her own, why she didn’t even want to let him know she was in

America. She explains, “Our lives were too different. It never

would have worked here.” I want to stop being angry with her for

that choice, but I can’t.

My mother knows that I don’t agree, that I don’t find our

lives to be all that different. But what she does not know is that

Timothy Arlington has been easy to look up and track down on

the Internet. That after he got out of the Army, he went to college

for mechanical engineering in New York. That now he lives in

New Jersey where he owns his own company working as a safety

consultant for commercial construction projects. That right now,

I have borrowed her car to drive there.

I imagine my father as an inverse of my mother, an explanation

for the ways that she and I are not alike. When I envision him, I see

a man who talks a lot, the kind of person who laughs every time

there’s a pause in conversation—not because he’s nervous, but

because he’s happy, and it’s hard to contain that kind of happiness

inside of a body. I imagine that when he was with my mother, he

spoke to fill in her silences, and that this made both of them feel

more comfortable.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

SAFTA Reading Series: TA Noonan and Marcel Brouwers

KNOXVILLE, TN – Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), a branch of Sundress Publications, is pleased to announce an upcoming reading from writers TA Noonan and Marcel Brouwers. Part of the SAFTA Reading Series, both writers will be reading from their collections, which will be for sale after the event during a meet and greet with the authors.

 The event is free and will be held at The Birdhouse, at 800 N 4th Ave in Knoxville on Sunday, June 22, at 3:00PM.

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently four sparks fall: a novella (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, 2013) and, with Erin Elizabeth Smith, Skate or Die (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review, West Wind Review, Hobart, Ninth Letter, and Phoebe, among others. A weightlifter, crafter, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she serves as the Associate Editor of Sundress Publications, Founding Editor of Flaming Giblet Press, and Literary Arts Director for the Sundress Academy of the Arts.

Marcel Brouwers is the author of the chapbook, The Rose Industrial Complex (Finishing Line Press, 2009). He lives in Knoxville, TN, with his wife, LA Hoffer, and works at the University of Tennessee. A lecturer in the English Department, he is currently the Acting Director of the Writing Center and teaches creative writing, literature, and composition classes. His first full-length poetry collection, The Old Cities, was released by Sundress Publications in 2012.

 

* * *

 

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ colony on a 29-acre farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All events are guided by professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in Eastern Tennessee.

 

Web: http://www.sundresspublications.com       Twitter: SundressPub

Email: safta@sundresspublications.com               Facebook: SundressPublications

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “Where Will I Go in Search of Your Safety?” in Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

 

When he calls, Daniel tells me he’s still having that dream almost

every night, that we’re down at Otter Creek, skipping rocks on the

grassy bank that backed up against his family farm’s property line

in Terre Haute, where he grew up. He says it with a bit of wonder

edging into his voice, as if throughout these four months of his first

deployment I’ve had something to do with where his subconscious

mind takes him.

As he talks, his faint, uneasy laughter is swallowed by the

crackling static, and I’m reminded that what’s binding us together

in this moment is fragile—an electromagnetic transmission

carrying our voices through a distant satellite to cover the six

thousand miles between us—and the science of this feels so unreal

that it’s like magic. I try to picture that old farmhouse and the

creek from my husband’s childhood, but it’s too much like an

Edward Hopper painting no one remembers the name of, too

easy and idyllic for him to really dream us there night after night;

and I, ungrateful little ass that I am, feel sure that he’s lying, that

something so tender must be untrue.

But as he goes on, I hear the pitch of something dangerous start to

creep in, a flicker that hints at how close he might be to falling apart.

He won’t really talk to me about losing Carter last week in a firefight

outside of Mosul, or about how, only a few days after his company

first arrived at FOB Marez, while going through a checkpoint at

Kisik with his platoon, three PFCs in the armored Humvee in front

of his own suddenly disappeared, the instantaneous shattering of

bones accompanied by the loud explosion of an RPG, the twisted,

smoking shell of their split-apart vehicle coming to rest just outside

of the crater made by mortar fire.

“They were there, and then they weren’t,” he had said to me,

days later, when he could finally call. “There was nothing to even

look for.” His voice sounded lost somewhere inside his own body,

and that was the last time he spoke of it.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Meet our new editorial intern, Jane Huffman!

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I was born and raised from the suburbs of Detroit, and strayed a few hundred miles West to attend college. I am currently a junior at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI, (which despite its silly name, is a place that does in fact exist and has a pretty thriving literary community.) I am a theatre arts and creative writing double major, and find that my academic work is dominated by a profound and ever-growing love for language, be in on the stage or on the page.

Though I consider myself a poet, I have found joy and success in a variety of genres and styles of writing. Recently, I’ve had a play I wrote produced at a festival, seen my fiction in the pages of an international literary journal, and attended a national conference for theatre journalism and advocacy that allowed me to test my criticism chops. But whether I’m working in verse or in prose, in fiction, drama, or journalism, directing, acting, or dramaturgy, it seems what keeps me writing is my desire to be a storyteller. My plans for after undergrad are fuzzy, but I hope to pursue creative writing professionally. I love teaching, sharing my love for poetry with others, and combining my love for performance. I hope that in my career, as I continue to develop and hone my own creative voice, I can also continue to be an advocate for the written word and those who love it as much as I do.

I am so glad to have joined the team at Sundress Publications as the editorial intern. I hope I can continue to grow as well as give. I believe that the strongest communities are composed of people who celebrate one another. Although I am a newbie at Sundress Publications, I have already been inspired by the commitment to community. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

—

Jane Huffman is a poet and playwright who reads and writes from a variety of bedrooms in the Midwest. She is currently studying poetry with Diane Seuss at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI, which is a small town with a big literary scene. This week, her favorite poets are Salvador Plascencia, who is actually a novelist, John Darnielle, who is actually a songwriter, and Eduardo Corral, who sometimes answers her Facebook messages. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals in print and online, most recently RHINO, theNewerYork, Galavant, and A Bad Penny Review.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

 

III. Routines

I sit on Kendra’s bed while she French-braids my hair. She does

it over and over, gets to the bottom and then unthreads the strands

to begin again. She always needs to be doing something—she has

a nervous energy; this is what her mom sometimes says to me.

Kendra’s fingernails against my scalp are a comfort, and I close my

eyes and let that touch be the only thing.

I hate that I cannot French-braid hair. I hate the moments

that I have to admit this at sleepover birthday parties or during

homeroom when Mr. Jackson isn’t paying attention to the girls

sitting in the back row. I hate that there are so many things my dad

has taught me—not to wear black shoes with a navy-blue dress,

how to stop a run in tights with clear nail polish, how cold water

best removes a bloodstain from underwear—but that he is unable

to teach me this one thing.

Kendra is my oldest friend, my only friend who met my mother

before she got sick, who ever even knew my mom at all. I don’t

like to talk about this with anyone, but Kendra somehow knows

without me ever telling her, and she says the words about it that

I cannot. “You must miss her,” or “Tell me something else about

her,” or “My mom is basically in love with you, so we can share,”

but today she does not say any of these things; today she just braids

and unbraids, braids and unbraids.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s chapbook, Casualties.

 

II. Welcome Home

When Kendra’s brother comes home on leave, her parents

tie three balloons to the mailbox—one red, one white, one blue.

He’s been back for almost a week now, and the balloons are

mostly deflated, hanging limply on their strings. Today they look

especially sad, a reminder that something fun happened here

recently but is now over. Kendra and I walk into her kitchen when

we get home from school, and Gavin is standing at the counter

with a bag of chips, drinking a beer. He nods at us but doesn’t say

hello. He’s tan and his hair is short, and a part of me wishes he

were still wearing his fatigues—I like the way he looks when he’s

dressed up in his army outfit.

Kendra takes two beers from the box in the fridge and passes one

to me from the other side of the counter. Gavin lifts hers from her

hand and says, “Not old enough,” and Kendra snorts. “Neither are

you,” she says as she opens the refrigerator door and takes another.

“I’m fighting in a war, I can drink if I want,” he tells us, and the

way he says it makes me think he’s been practicing that line in his

head for a while now, waiting for a chance to use it.

Kendra squints until the sharp blue of her eyes dulls. “You’ve

been in Nevada for the last ten months. Shut up.”

The noise of her can cracking open in the still, warm air of the

kitchen makes me jump, and Gavin laughs, and this is a good thing

because somehow it eases the tension between the two of them.

I watch Kendra hold the aluminum to her lips, and I think about

the way the bitter liquid is splashing cool and bubbly into her

mouth, and then Gavin slams his hand down hard on the counter

and yells, “So, Natalie, how’s it going?”

“You know, fine,” I say, and then I open my can and raise it in

cheers because I can’t think of a single thing to say. I don’t want to

hear the sound of myself swallowing, so finally I ask Gavin, “What

were you doing in Nevada,” and sip my beer slowly as he replies.

“Military defense by satellite,” he tells me. “Some pretty intense

shit.” He takes a handful of chips out of the bag and adds, “Enough

to deserve this fucking beer, anyway.” Kendra rolls her eyes, and

I think of telling both of them that not everything has to be a

competition, but I let the words wash back down my throat. When

I finish my beer, I shake the empty until Kendra hands me another.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Sundress to Publish Three New Titles in 2015-2016

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Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the publication of the following books in the years 2015 and 2016. Ha Ha Ha Thump by Amorak Huey (due for release in 2015), What Will Keep Me Alive by Kristen LaTour (due for release in 2015) and Washed with Hymns and Singing by Donna Vorreyer (due for release in 2016).

Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. His poems appear in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry of Sex, and Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, as well as journals such as Rattle, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Menacing Hedge, and others. Ha Ha Ha Thump is his first full-length collection.

Kristin LaTour has three chapbooks: Agoraphobia, from Dancing Girl Press (2013), Blood (Naked Mannequin Press 2009) and Town Limits (Pudding House Press 2007). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press Review, Escape into Life, and Atticus Review. Her work appears in the anthology Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL with her writer husband, a lovebird, and two dogitos. What Will Keep Me Alive is her first full-length collection.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of chapbooks: Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press), Come Out, Virginia (Naked Mannekin Press), and Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press). She is a poetry editor for Mixed Fruit, and her work has appeared in many journals, recently in Sweet, Linebreak, Rhino, Cider Press Review, Stirring, and Wicked Alice. Donna lives in the Chicago area where she teaches middle school and therefore often acts like she is twelve years old. Her first full-length collection, A House of Many Windows was published by Sundress Publications in 2013. Washed with Hymns and Singing is her second collection.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s chapbook, Casualties. 

I. A Lesson for the Young Cartographer

After the final bell, Kendra and I walk the mile from Bloomington

High North to our neighborhood. Even with a breeze it’s too hot

for May, and underneath my backpack my tank top is damp and

sticks to my skin, a heaviness waiting to be peeled. Wind tangles

Kendra’s straight, blonde hair until she looks like one of the wolf

girls Miss Collington told us about this morning in world history.

I picture the grainy, black-and-white images she showed on the

overhead projector, of the little girl found in a forest in Ukraine,

running naked on all fours with a pack of wild dogs, growling and

clawing to protect her own—a girl and not a girl without even

I step over a crack in the sidewalk and tell Kendra, “You pretty

much look feral right now,” and she sweeps her messy hair behind

her shoulders and laughs a big laugh. I turn to watch her face and

see the pink of her tongue like a treasure.

She came in late to homeroom this morning with bruises

around her mouth like she’d been kissing too hard or back-talking

her dad or eating plums. I’ve wanted all day to ask, and when I do

she grabs my hand and squeezes my fingers hard together so I won’t

leave, but I’m not leaving, and I want to say that but I can’t find my

voice anywhere in the warm that rushes up from my stomach and

rises and rises until it blooms behind my ribs, stretching my body

from inside until I’m sure it will leave whispery lines of proof in

my skin. I want to lick the purpled marks from her mouth like a

stain. Kendra’s waiting or maybe not waiting for me to speak, but

instead I stay quiet and am careful to look down at nothing but

the pattern of triangles on my skirt, to keep everything as still as

possible. My fingers tingle against her palm and I don’t move them

and she doesn’t move them, and when the silence finally presses

too heavy between us, I trace my thumb slowly over and over the

pale-blue veins on the back of her hand like I’m reading our map

back home.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.