Press 53 Award-Winning Books for 2020/2021

Anthony (Tony) S. Abbott ( January 7, 1935-October 3, 2020) was recipient of the 2015 NC Award for Literature from the State of North Carolina, and is the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, and four books of literary criticism. Tony died on October 3, 2020, one week before his induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Dark Side of North is his last collection of poems, published by on January 7, 2021, and was awarded the 2021 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry.

Effluctress

Today my daughter made up a word…“Effluctress,”
she says, are things
that can only be seen by 4-year-olds.
—Scott Owens

Four-year-olds, darling, yes I agree,
completely—it’s only the only
I have a problem with. Poets,

sweetheart, and lovers, lovers
especially, can see all sorts of things.
So give us a break, my dear,

because we love what you can see
and you’d love what we can see,
too. The other day I was walking

home from church, and all of a
sudden, I said out loud: “Even
the streets are holy.” That’s right,

out loud, and I looked down
and there in the cracks between
the sections of the sidewalk

I could see I was right. God was
there, in the pieces of the sidewalk.
He told me so. He did, my love,

not in so many words, but you
know how effluctress works.
things don’t just come in words.

And then, in the trees over the street
—there was Mary, the mother of God,
in her blue dress with gold embroidered

hem and sleeves. She had very dark
hair and smiled at me as if to say,
“It’s all right, don’t worry.” She stayed

with me for days, kind of floating
along in the trees all over town
just smiling and saying to me

“Don’t worry. Let it be.” I know,
that’s not original, but I couldn’t
resist it. And if she’s not

effluctress I don’t know what is.
I love your rainbow bird outside
the window very much, but this

—this is Mary, the mother of God,
in her blue dress and gold embroidered
hem and sleeves. I’m sure of that.

I know I’m not four anymore
but I sure want to be effluctress
and I just wanted to know, well,

how am I doing?

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood is the author of A Small Thing to Want, winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards Bronze Medal for Short Stories; a poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press), which won the 2019 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry; and two nonfiction books, The Going and Goodbye: A Memoir (Platypus Press, 2017) and 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17 (Cimarron Books, 2018). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Brevity, The Rumpus, Cider Press Review, and others. You can find Shuly online almost every Tuesday for her popular prompt-writing workshop series, Let’s Write Together!, offered through Press 53’s High Road Festival Online.

FOUND & LOST

Matilde was nowhere in the apartment, not curled atop the television, not crouched below the bed. Eleanor checked every kitchen cabinet and even the broken dryer, calling Matilde’s name.

The last time Eleanor had seen the white cat was last night when Matilde had scampered under the couch while Eleanor and Solomon argued about Arnie.

“Have you seen Matilde?” she asked Solomon now, standing in the bathroom doorway as he brushed his teeth.

He shook his head at her in the mirror.

He had gone to bed three hours after Eleanor. “You were the last one up,” she said. He had slept on the edge of their double bed that until three months ago had been only his.

Solomon spit in the sink. “So?”

“Did you let her out by accident? Will you help me look for her?”

“I’m meeting Jared in a minute.”

“For what?”

“You’re not the only one who likes to go out for breakfast.”

“Can’t you be late?” Eleanor asked. “Jared’s never on time.”

Solomon pushed past her. “She’ll come back. She always does.”

~ ~ ~

Eleanor thought of places where Matilde might be. She hoped the cat was not cold. It was so easy to get lost here.

Even though Eleanor had lived in the city for almost two years, she rarely drove and had to take out a map to get anywhere. Arnie’s conference was across town, and he had suggested a diner near his hotel that claimed to serve the city’s best waffles. Eleanor made three wrong turns and finally pulled over and asked for directions.

This never would have happened if Solomon had driven. He was of the city: He knew which deli made the best Reuben, which taqueria served homemade salsa, which club was just enough on the good side of seedy to be hip. He knew the store that sold roasted, salted pistachios in the back, in hot paper bags. He knew what car mechanic to trust, and where to get the best coffee, at Wide-Eyed.

“Don’t drink it with sugar,” Solomon said the first time, taking the two packets from Eleanor’s hand.

“It’s too bitter.”

“Bitterness isn’t bad,” he said. “You’ve got to enjoy what things really are, not doctor them into something different.”

Eleanor took a sip and then set the mug down and slid it away on the table. “I can’t do this.”

He pushed the mug back. “I have complete faith in you.”

She took another sip, imagining what it would be like if she had no comparison. In the end, he was right. Everyone could learn to live with bitterness. It just depended on changing the notion of sweet, or forgetting it.

~ ~ ~

Last night, before the argument, Eleanor’s mother had called. “When are you coming home? Your father wants to know.”

“Does Dad need me to come home?”

“You know him. He doesn’t ask for much.”

“Mom, it’s hard for me to take days off,” Eleanor said. “I’m trying to save them for vacation next year.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“So you’re not coming home?”

“I’ll be home at Christmas. That’s just two months. Is that okay?”

“If going on a trip with your new boyfriend makes you happy, then of course that’s what we want,” her mother said. “Did I tell you I saw Arnie the other day?”

~ ~ ~

The first time Eleanor saw Arnie was at the public pool, when they were both sixteen. A towel was flung over his legs, another over his shoulders, another over his head. He was reading a book. She had teased him about it endlessly.

Now, as Arnie emerged from the elevator in the hotel lobby, he opened his arms upon seeing Eleanor. He was so tall her face became buried in his sweater, which smelled, as always, of chamomile. She closed her eyes and held on.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

Eleanor stepped back. “You smell like home.”

He laughed. “I hope that’s a good thing.”

Arnie had two hours before his conference started again. They chose a booth, ordered waffles with raspberries and extra butter.

“I see your parents all the time,” he said. “Sometimes they stop by the office to ask a legal question.”

“I’m sorry—I’ll ask them to stop.”

“Don’t do that,” he said. “It used to be hard, you know, at first, but now I like seeing them.”

They talked for the next hour, and the room embraced them with light and warmth. Then he signaled for the check. “Hey,” he said. “I have news. No, it’s good. I wanted to tell you before your mom found out and told you first.”

Eleanor squeezed her napkin with both her hands.

~ ~ ~

When Eleanor walked into the apartment, she called out for Matilde, who sauntered from the kitchen.

“I told you,” Solomon said, splayed out across the couch, holding the remote, the television silenced.

“Where was she?” Eleanor rubbed her face against the cat’s.

“I was thinking.” Solomon sat up and motioned Eleanor to sit down, but she remained. “How about we go someplace special for Christmas.”

“I’m going home. You said you had to work.”

“What if I told you I talked my boss into letting me off, and I found tickets to a place you’ll want to go.”

“Where?”

“Vancouver. Paris. Guadalajara. One of those.”

“My mom would kill me.”

“You’ll be far away. She won’t be able to kill you.”

“Solly . . .”

“You don’t have to decide now. Just think about it. Please? It’ll be our first real Christmas. I want us to remember it.”

Christmas seemed easier than so many other things he had asked.

“By the way,” he said, “she came home because of me.”

“What?”

“I canceled with Jared, and I walked around with a damn can of tuna. When that didn’t work, I put the can on the front steps and sat there and waited.”

“How long?”

“Until she came back.”

“Solly, you didn’t have to.”

“It doesn’t matter who gave her to you,” he said. “She’s ours now.”

Meg Eden's father has worked in Japan for more than half her life, so she considers Japan her second home. Drowning in the Floating World (winner of the 2021 Towson University Prize for Literature) immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what to make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.

Baptism

Fukuoka, Summer 2011

Our suited pastor,
standing in the ocean,

water dark up to his thighs.
From the shore, he looks

like a lone oyster buoy,
returning from a storm.

Kaylee beside him,
an American skyscraper.

Behind them, a still horizon, blue.
Strange, this water: the same

that buried five cities, now
over Kaylee’s shoulders,

a celebration. From the shore,
we, the church, stand holding

our shoes, feet bare
in the sand, waiting. Out east,

new cities will be built.
Inside Kaylee, a renovated

city is filling.
She rises from the water.

• “Baptism” was first published in Cresset Magazine

Anna Elkins is a traveling poet and painter. She earned a BA in English and art and an MFA and Fulbright Fellowship in poetry. She has written, painted, and taught on six continents, publishing her writing and exhibiting her art along the way. Hope of Stones, (winner of the 2021 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards) invites you into a cross-century conversation among The Nun, The Architect, and The Poet that explores the desire to create and connect across time and other unseen things.

The Nun’s Castle

To a young novitiate

It came to me that the soul is like a castle made
exclusively of diamond or some other very clear crystal. In
this castle are a multitude of dwellings, just as in heaven
there are many mansions.

—Saint Teresa from The Interior Castle

Imagine yourself as a castle.
See, here—
the library of longing,
so stacked with fulfilled love,
you need a ladder
to reach hope.
& here,
the open windows of vision—
infinity mirrors bending you
to distant bliss.
Feel the woven carpet
beneath your feet—
no low magic,
it lifts you to beauty.
Step into the garden
& fill with fountain sound.
Remember splendor
& how you are
its ever-dwelling.
Everything here is a
metaphor for heaven.
You can spend the rest
of your life
entering
& entering
& entering in.

The Architect Disbelieves

Beneath Rue d’Enfer, Paris

Paris has another Paris under herself, which has its streets,
its intersections, its squares, its dead ends, its arteries
and its circulation.
—Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

There is no weather down here. It’s old & warm,
always. The lantern light soaks into stone,
the underworld eating it whole. Every day, I descend
into this second city to save the one built above it.
The heaving & hefting. We turn cloches of fallen
rubble into stalagmites of stonework. One worker said
it’s as if we’re building a cathedral upside down.
For each right-side-up cathedral on the surface,
we mark its spot here below with a fleur-de-lis. We
match the tunnels to the streets above & give them
the same names. We leave the spaces beneath houses
to their owners—who own their bit of Paris to the center
of the earth. If they wished, they could dig cellars
to hell. Priests talk about the end of time—how
all this will burn. I can’t say why, but I do not
believe them. Meanwhile, people gather in daylight,
in stained-glass masses of stones & hope.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently A Sun Inside My Chest, winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has received multiple honors, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Atlanta Review International Publication Award, Gold Medal in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, and many others.

New Bathing Suit

My friend is wearing her new black bathing suit.
It came with the proper cups, made to fill
with one breast and the memory
of another—which is not to say emptiness—
but the fullness that comes to us, with sacrifice.
There is no one more alive than she is now,
floating like a lotus or swimming, lap after lap,
parting the turquoise, chlorine-scented water,
her arms as sturdy as wooden paddles.
And when she pulls herself from the pool,
her new suit dripping—the pulse is so strong
in her wrists and throat, a little bird
outside the window will hear it, begin to flap
its wings to the beat of her heart.

• “New Bathing Suit” first appeared by Turtle Island Quarterly and was selected for “American Life in Poetry” by Kwame Dawes

Jen Fawkes won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for Tales the Devil Told Me. Her debut book, Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press) won two 2020 Foreword INDIE Awards (Gold in Short Stories/Honorable Mention in Literary Fiction), was nominated for a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award, and was named one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020. Jen was recipient of the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize and her work has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, Crazyhorse, storySouth, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and many other venues. Her fiction has won numerous prizes, from The Pinch, Salamander, Washington Square Review, and others.

As You Can Imagine,
This Makes Dating Difficult

 The burlap sack wasn’t the first thing he noticed. It covered her head completely, but she stood in the shadows, and he’d had a few before he came in. He settled on a stool with his back to the bar, his eyes skimming the dance floor. Music pounded the brick walls, the low-slung ceiling, but her voice sliced through the din like piano wire through a windpipe.

“How may I serve you?”

It wasn’t the words but the way her tongue cradled them and thrust them through her teeth. Though she stood on the business side of the bar—though they were separated by three feet of battered teak—he could have sworn she’d spoken directly into his ear.

“Beer,” he said. “Whatever’s on tap.”

He didn’t bring up the writhing burlap sack, and neither did she. He sat on the stool until night was washed away by dawn, until the overheads blazed and the barback finished mopping. By then, he knew she’d grown up far away, a place she described as the edge of the world. She had two sisters, both younger. Her parents were monsters. She’d been in town less than a year. “My band is performing tonight,” she said, scrubbing pint glasses in the metal bar sink. “Perhaps you would like to come?”

He smiled. That sounded like fun.

She stooped over the sink, and the sack’s surface twitched and bubbled. He wondered what had happened to her face. Car accident? Jealous boyfriend? Acid or box cutter or lye? What he could see of her body—draped in fabric tied over one shoulder and cinched with rope at the waist—was extraordinary. Slender arms, angular shoulders, pearly expanse of skin interrupted by wing-shaped clavicle. He studied the perfectly formed breasts nestled beneath cream-colored cloth, tried to discern which of his colleagues might have done them. Dr. Lovejoy, he decided, or possibly Dr. Rubenstein.

“That is that,” she said, emerging from behind the bar with a messenger bag and a bottle of water. He saw now that her garment fell to the floor, covering her feet entirely. As she moved toward him, seeming to glide rather than step, he finally noticed that the burlap sack had no eyeholes. “Let us go.”

Outside, a yellow rim of sun glanced over the horizon. He hailed a cab and helped her inside. He pressed a crumpled wad of bills into the driver’s hand and instructed the man to take her wherever she wanted to go.

“I hope to see you tonight,” she said, thrusting the sack through the open window. “It is next to impossible to meet someone in this town.”

Strengthening light poured across streets, spilled over grass, splashed up buildings, soaked filthy sidewalks, pooled on corners. In the cloudless blue sky, he saw the wing-shaped clavicle nestled between her throat and chest, imagined it taking flight.

~ ~ ~

That morning, he did a brow lift and a tummy tuck. He vacuumed belly and thigh fat out of three different women. In the afternoon, he sat on the brown couch of Dr. Lana Radcliff, who perched opposite him on a blue chair. Her office was located three floors below his, and he’d been seeing her weekly for almost a year.

“Are you sleeping?”

He shook his head.

She turned, reaching across the desk behind her for a prescription pad. “I know you don’t like pills, but sometimes knowing they’re there can help.” She tore the paper free and passed it across the void. She blinked. She smiled. “How’s the other thing?”

The other thing was the reason he’d started seeing Lana—his compulsion to critique every woman he encountered and, with a mental scalpel, modify the parts of her he deemed less than ideal. Though this made him very good at his job, his inability to turn it off bothered him. Faces and bodies were weighed and dissected. Dotted lines only he could see materialized on skin, marks indicating what should be tucked, sucked, or lifted. The woman behind the deli counter. The woman who delivered his mail. Dr. Lana Radcliff.

“Things haven’t really improved,” he said.

“Have you been doing the exercise?”

The exercise involved looking in the mirror nightly and telling himself that people were just as the divine power of the universe made them, that he was merely a man, that he had no right to judge others. In time, Lana believed this recitation would open his chakras and unblock his qi flow, freeing him from negative obsessions.

“I have,” he said, and dotted lines appeared on Lana’s face. His mind made the incisions: thinned her cheeks, built up her chin, streamlined her nose, plumped her lips. Her long, graying hair was colored and styled, her breasts inflated, her glasses replaced by contacts, the shapeless sweater and slacks that wrapped her thin figure torn away. He wondered if, as they sat chatting on Thursday afternoons, she ever considered the ways in which he amended her. “But it doesn’t seem to be helping.”

Lana nodded. “Keep trying, Mitchell. Transformation takes time. And effort. You have to really want to change.”

He studied his long, tapered fingers. “I met someone.”

Lana blinked. She smiled.

“I told her I’d come see her band tonight.”

“Good!”

“I also told her I sell insurance.”

Lana propped her chin on a fist. “Why lie?”

“She was wearing a burlap sack over her head. I thought my profession might bother her.”

“Why was she wearing the sack?”

“I assume something happened to her face.”

Lana leaned forward. “What’s the attraction?”

“She’s got a great voice. And a great body. She’s easy to talk to.”

Lana blinked. She smiled.

“And there’s the sack.”

“Eventually you’ll have to come to terms with what’s under the sack, Mitchell.”

~ ~ ~

They were called The Gorgons, and when he walked into the cramped, dingy club, they’d just taken the stage. She wore the same draping garment she’d had on when he met her, or maybe she had one for every day of the week. He ordered a beer and stood at the back of the room. Studying the kids who packed the place, he wondered about her age. The night before, he’d gotten the strange sense that she’d been around since long before his birth. Ridiculous, of course.

She still wore the burlap sack, and shifting, multicolored lights played over it, exaggerating its movement. Two backup singers wearing similar sacks and dresses flanked her, and when he realized the sack was a gimmick—part of the show—he felt slightly crushed. The rest of the band stood in shadow toward the back of the stage. The droning, weaving music that spilled from their instruments seemed to project patterns into the smoky air. Her voice—ethereal, otherworldly—slid between notes. It twined around chords. The audience stood body to body, but he thought she sang for him alone. When the set ended, she left the stage and snaked through the crowd.

“Mitchell.” She was out of breath. “I am so glad you came.”

The backup singers turned out to be her sisters, and after introducing them, she led him to a booth across the room from the stage. They settled opposite one another on cracked turquoise vinyl. “So,” she said, “what did you think?”

“It was great.” He reached across the table to touch her folded hands. “You were great.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

He studied the sack’s movements. Parts of it roiled like a storm-tossed sea. Others convulsed spasmodically.

“You are wondering about the sack.”

“No,” he said. “Not in the least.”

“Of course you are. And I cannot blame you.” 

Another band had taken the stage—a drum and guitar duo made up of twin girls with stringy white-blonde hair. Their melodies reminded him of amusement parks and surf movies.

“Years ago,” she said, “my beauty was transformed into something terrible. Now any man who gazes upon me forfeits his life.”

Hope glimmered within him. “It’s not a gimmick then.”

She shook the sack, which rustled softly. “If I did not cover my face, the members of our audience would turn to stone.”

He knew he should feel cheated, swindled, as though the world were diminishing. Instead, he sensed a thousand doors opening.

“I understand if you want to leave. This is the point at which most men do.”

The white-blonde twins were in the middle of a slow number. He stood and extended a hand. Later, when the tempo of the music increased, they continued dancing cheek to burlap. The churning and rippling of the rough sack against his face and neck felt like a hundred simultaneous caresses.

~ ~ ~

The sack made it easier for him to hack and slice through his day, to clip and tuck and suck, to scrape and abrade, to flatter and wheedle and assure. When he caught sight of her waiting outside his building after work, or standing in the doorframe of the apartment she shared with her sisters, or lying naked beside him on his king-sized bed or her futon in the light of dawn, he was confronted not with a chin or a cheek or an eyebrow but with the blank, unmarked surface of the sack, and this pleased him endlessly.

He missed three sessions with Dr. Lana Radcliff. He gave up the exercise; he stopped telling himself that people were as the divine power of the universe made them, that he had no right to judge others, that he was just a man. He took on new patients and packed his day with procedures. In the streets, in restaurants, he mentally rearranged women and handed them his card. Because she was waiting for him at the end of the day—featureless and obscure, impossible to correct—his compulsion no longer bothered him.

Then he saw her without the sack.

One morning after he’d left her apartment, he discovered that he’d forgotten his wallet. He found her standing naked and sackless in front of the cracked mirror over her dresser. In the glass, a slithering mass of serpents encircled her head. Some hissed and struck with lightning speed at empty air; others undulated slowly, forked tongues flicking. Scales glinted and sparked in the rays of the morning sun—a hypnotic melding of hues. He was no expert, but he felt certain that no two of the snakes were alike.

The serpentine cloud framed a face—one he never could have imagined. It was the most well-proportioned face he’d ever seen, and it projected shock and horror. The symmetry of its features convinced him that it had been measured and laid out by the divine power of the universe. Gazing upon it, he was flooded with the same giddy elation that had coursed through him as a boy when, after losing his mother in a crowded department store, he’d found himself back in her arms.

But in the mirror, the smooth forehead creased; the straight nose wrinkled; the plump lips pouted. Two pools of clear cerulean blinked in frustration. “I thought you had gone!” Her voice was anguished.

“You’re divine.”

He moved forward, and in the mirror, she lifted a hand. “You must not come closer!”

“Why not?”

“If I turn around, you will die.”

She plucked the burlap sack from the cluttered dresser and maneuvered it over the hissing serpents until the face in the mirror was veiled once more.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She pulled on a robe, sat on the bed, and sighed. “I did not tell you it is possible to gaze upon my reflection because I know what it has done to men in the past. You seemed content with the sack, and I hoped we could go on this way indefinitely. It was foolish, but I could not help myself. I like you very much.”

He studied the rough, swelling surface of the sack, once a canvas onto which he could paint any image or, as he preferred, no image at all. Now he saw only the face he’d glimpsed in the mirror.

“I must be honest with you, Mitchell. I am not proud of this, but for many years, I took my anger out on others. I did not cover my face; I directed its terrible power at people intentionally. In this way I hoped to take revenge for my cursed existence.”

Dazed, he sat down beside her, and she took his hand.

“Eventually I grew weary of that life. No matter what had been done to me, I did not have to live at the edge of the world. I did not have to hurt others because I’d been hurt. My sisters and I left our dark, dreary home, and I found music, the thing about which I am most passionate.”

He had a full day of procedures scheduled. Rhinoplasty, brow lift, cheek implants, mentoplasty, facelift. Now that he’d seen her face, however, he couldn’t go through with any of them. He could never approximate the beauty to which he’d borne witness.

“Is there a way to reverse what was done to you?”

She shook the sack, which swished and crinkled.   

“Have you consulted a cosmetic surgeon?”

“There is nothing wrong with the surface of my face. It is something deeper. One cannot access it with knives.”

“We could try.”

“We?”

He dropped to his knees before her. “I don’t sell insurance. I’m a plastic surgeon. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

“Why did you lie, Mitchell?” Anguish crept back into her voice.

“I thought you might be put off by my profession.”

She stood and walked to the window. When she turned, sunshine coursed around the twitching sack, edging it with light. “This is why I hoped you would never see my reflection. It changes things. You will always yearn to display my face. But I will wear the sack for as long as I live. I have come to terms with that.”

“Surely something can be done . . .”

This time, as she shook it, the sack trilled loudly. “There is no fixing me. In this situation, you are powerless.”

“But . . .”

“No.” She pointed to the door. “I think you should go.”

~ ~ ~

He shut down his practice and spent eight months backpacking through Brazil and Ecuador. With a group of native scientists and volunteers, he catalogued flora and fauna, studying mankind’s impact on the rainforests, surrounding himself with examples of rare beauty—macaws and emerald tree frogs and plants that produce a single, exquisite bloom only once in a human lifetime. Upon his return, he made an appointment with Dr. Lana Radcliff, and when he entered her office, he was dumbfounded by her metamorphosis. She’d had her nose, lips, cheeks, and chin done. She’d replaced her glasses with jade contact lenses. Her hair had been darkened and cut into flattering layers. She wore a short skirt, strappy heels, and a sweater that hugged her new breasts. “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

 He didn’t know how to respond. The sight of her—hacked and molded into one surgeon’s notion of beauty —brought everything back. The face he’d gone away to forget. The abject hopelessness that had swept over him after he’d glimpsed it, a feeling in which he’d very nearly drowned.

“I’ve been saving up for years.” Though her mouth was unfamiliar, though her eyes were all wrong, Lana still blinked. Still smiled. “It’s changed my life.”

“Good.” His gaze skipped around the office, alighting on things then winging away. The lamp, her nose, the desk, her chin, the framed portrait of galloping wild horses, her breasts. “I’m happy for you.”

“How was your trip? Were you able to get things into perspective?”

After he’d seen the face in the cracked mirror, Mitchell had lost his touch for cosmetic surgery. The guiding lines had vanished. Unable to determine what to tuck and what to lift, he’d had no idea where to make the first cut. He’d hoped his sojourn in the jungle would refresh him. That the beauty of the natural world would seep into him, giving him a new perspective on the modification of women. When he was confronted with the remodeled Lana Radcliff, however, he knew he would never perform another procedure.

“Mitchell?” Lana blinked. She smiled. “What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t think I can reopen my practice.”

She tented her manicured fingers. “Is this about what was under the sack?”

He nodded.

“What if I give you an exercise? Something to recite in the mirror each night? Something like, ‘Beauty is subjective. There is no ideal form. The face I saw was an illusion. Whether she’s as the divine power of the universe made her or surgically enhanced, every woman is beautiful in her own way’?”

“Maybe.” He let his eyes linger on Lana’s new face. “Do you believe that?”

She uncrossed her legs. She leaned forward and embraced her pert breasts. She smiled. She blinked. “It’s not about what I believe, Mitchell. It’s about what works for you.”

~ ~ ~

For nearly a month, he recited the words. When he woke in the night, he took long jaunts through empty streets—streets that bore no resemblance to their daytime counterparts. He chanted the words while walking and in the shower and at the gym. They became a mantra, one that flowed into and out of his consciousness steadily, and he achieved a state of mind in which he could almost believe them.

He was considering reopening his practice when he spied her on the street. Her cinched garment brushed the cement as she floated ahead of him. The back of the burlap sack swelled and trembled. He shut his eyes, but when he looked again, she was still there. Compelled to catch her, he quickened his pace. Once he was close enough to discern the rustling of the sack, he touched her shoulder.

“Mitchell!” She sounded genuinely pleased. “How are you?”

They sat at a sidewalk cafe drinking coffee. Sunlight spilled everywhere, drenching them, but he basked only in her presence. The undulations of the burlap sack cheered him; he was soothed by its swish and ripple. He didn’t mention his troubles, only that he’d gone to South America and was taking a break from cosmetic surgery. She said that an independent label had offered The Gorgons a contract and they were preparing to record their first album.

“We are playing a show tonight. Perhaps you would like to come?”

He smiled. That sounded like fun.

In a larger, cleaner club, The Gorgons’ music erected structures in the ether, hypnotizing the crowd. He stood at attention toward the back of the room, unable to shift his gaze away from the seething, churning sack. The night slid away, they both drank too much, and he ended up back at her place. Once she’d fallen asleep, her naked body prone on the futon, he rose and walked down the hall to the bathroom. He studied himself in the mirror, tried to recite his mantra, but the words had fled his mind like a canary whose cage has been torn open.

Before him, his features throbbed and shifted. Parts were cut away, others enhanced. His face became the face he’d glimpsed in the cracked mirror—the face he knew was no illusion.

In the bedroom, he knelt beside her futon. As lightly as he’d once scored flesh with a scalpel, he drew up the edge of the burlap sack. Carefully, tugging first one side and then the other, he worked the cloth up, sliding it in minute increments out from under her cheek. The glowing red face of the clock beside the bed marked his progress—the removal of the sack took two hours.

When the last bit of burlap gave way, his heart ballooned. It roiled and rippled. On the other side of the window, the sun slathered its light across the sky. He felt like the boy who’d lost his mother in a department store, and his eyes sought the one thing that could bring him comfort. Viewed straight-on, the face was far more arresting than it had been in reflection, and as breaking day illuminated it clearly—entirely—he cried out. Cerulean eyes flew open, and pink lips, but he couldn’t hear what they shouted. A droning, crackling sound deafened him. Sensation started to solidify. As she scrambled for the burlap sack, he watched the multitude of serpents twist and slither around her, and he understood how they felt—ecstatic, giddy, and free. Grinning, he gaped until he could breathe no longer, until pressure squeezed him from all sides, until the world hardened and was no more.

• “As You Can Imagine, This Makes Dating Difficult,” first appeared in The Pinch, 40.1, and won The Pinch 2019 Fiction Prize

David Treadway Manning is a three-time winner of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate Award. His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, 32 Poems, and also Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina: A Guidebook, edited by Geogann Eubanks (UNC Press). His last collection of Poems, Sailing the Bright Stream: New & Selected Poems won the 2021 Brockman-Campbell Award for Poetry.

Death Valley February

We shed the muffler in Afton Canyon
& racketed the Merc into Furnace Creek,
arriving after dark. Stan & his buddy
shaved in warm radiator water & went

to some dance a sandstorm away
in Rhyolite. They rolled in after midnight,
still having a good time, voices high
& hooty, making lovesick coyote talk,

so I left them & roamed the moon-
flooded valley, night whispering
shy gusts, warm secrets,

walking the moon under earthshine
from Daylight Pass to Shoshone
looking for something I left behind.

Dannye Romine Powell is the author of five collections of poems, two of which won the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian. Her latest collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, won the 2020 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, among them The Paris Review, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Harvard Review Online, The Southern Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Cave Wall and Tar River Poetry.

In the Sunroom with
Raymond Carver

October.
Here in my bright sunroom, you,
Raymond Carver, grinning, your cap
and sweater like those
of the young boys
in “Happiness.”
Here’s the thing, Ray. May I
call you Ray? Alive, you were older
than I. Dead, however, you
are only fifty, and now,
unbelievably, I have
a son your age.
A son, I might add,
who drinks night and day.

I have a question.
(Sure, Ray, go ahead. Prop
your feet on the coffee table.
That’s fine.) In your poem
about Christine,
you said, Daughter,
you can’t drink. You said,
It will kill you. Like it did
your mother and me.
Did she listen, Ray? Did she stop?
Alcohol is killing my son, too.
He doesn’t listen. He keeps right on.

So here’s the real question:
How did you manage to grab
at happiness, Ray, even while Christine
drank her life away?

In “For Tess,” you said
that at times you felt so happy
you had to quit fishing.
You said how you lay on the bank
with your eyes closed,
listening to the sound the water made,
and to the wind in the tops of the trees.

That’s a lot of happy, Ray.
I want that, too. I’m older now
than you, and before I die, I want
to feel the wind in my hair.
I want to feel it down to the roots.
I want to wrap my arms
around the world and sing.
But the words get stuck in my throat,
Ray. They get stuck.
And all that comes out is his name.

Cheryl Wilder is the author of Anything That Happens (A Tom Lombard Poetry Selection), named second finalist for the 2022 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award. Her work appears in Barely South Review, Verse Daily, Cream City Review, Literary Mama, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. Anything That Happens examines what it takes to reconcile a past grave mistake, a present role as caregiver to many, and a future that stretches into one long second chance.

Bailed Out

The house stirs with my stirring.
I am the elephant, the devil’s minion.
Secure in my arms a woven afghan

blue and darker blue. I run
fingers through holes and open
like a wish bone but cannot pull

them apart. A wish not wished
establishes habit, like sleep-dancing
or tangling the vacuum cord around my wrist

to make love. I am two people now—
the before and the after; one I’ve already forgotten
the other I have not met. I hear voices whisper

what if—a crossroad so difficult to leave
I build a roadside bench. At some point
I will rise from this bed, speak though I only hear

his curdled breath, allow my first taste of bone
in the broth I can smell, but no one will notice
my stained hands, the bloody prints on the wall.