She said:None of you can hurt me now

He said:I wanted to see her again, close
without that silly staircase between us

She said:He can’t hurt me now

He said:Sometime after midnight, there will be a man
leaning against a streetlamp, wearing a dark coat.
Go to him, ask to see Saul

She said:And the night will be heavy with perfume

He said:He can’t hurt you now

She said:And the night will be heavy with the blood of the lost

He said:I have known that murder
can sometimes smell like honeysuckle

She said:Sometime after first light, there will be a woman
bound to the bridge’s railing with heavy rope.
Go to her. Tighten every knot.

He said:And the night will be heavy with your choked breath.

She said:I have seen Saul. I knocked the hat off his head.
Then I knocked off his head.
There is a box on the kitchen table. Don’t open it.
Wipe clean whatever has leaked from the seams.

He said:I am alive again.

She said:I am terrible brave.

Paula Mendoza’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, The Awl, and The Offending Adam. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, and lives in Austin, Texas.

Jeremy Davies’ debut novel Rose Alley is a conundrum of the delicious sort. Rose Alley defies containment, and Davies seems to have deliberately written an unfilmable (and unsummarizable) narrative on the subject of filmmaking. Readers will find themselves caught somewhere between the lyricism of Faulkner and the timeless character studies of Chaucer. And perhaps that’s where one should begin—Rose Alley is effectively a composite of character studies, lyrical and poignant, with priorities set not on a narrative arc, but on capturing the vagrancies of the human condition.

Rose Alley is divided into thirteen chapters, with each chapter encapsulating a character. Often a character mentioned in passing in one chapter is later awarded a chapter of his or her own—sometimes, the reader discovers parallels between narratives, and sometimes the reader will be forced to hurtle gaps of a hundred or so pages before discovering a sense of meaning in a particular character’s introduction. (Davies was kind enough to include an appendix.) Appendix aside, this formal move forces the most stubborn of readers to cease the search for a linear thread, and to embrace the riveting turbidity of Davies’ prose. “Filmmaking” functions as the narrative conceit—the novel opens, closes, and touches throughout on a filming project in France during the riots of the 1960s—and the character studies read like unedited, unorganized, candid snippets of film. As a result Rose Alley comes across as a finely polished body of prose left intentionally unfinished.

There is of course the question of whether or not the hurdles Davies sets out for his readers will be off-putting for all but the most patient. At times Davies awards his reader too much faith, and those readers who seek a narrative structure that will take and guide curious strangers by the hand will doubtlessly become frustrated by Davies’ approach to narrative structure, which keeps a steady distance of 100 (and sometimes, it seems, 1,000) yards ahead.

The real gem to be found here is in Davies’ mastery of syntax, in his ability to capture so many different dimensions of humanity within the confines of a single sentence. Readers will delight in hauntingly accurate caricatures of generational gaps: “Eugenia called it rape plain and simple—the reason she’s taken her mother’s maiden name, despite its own distasteful association […] But Hannelore just shook her head and smiled, as though rape like rock and roll had been invented by a generation of faddish malcontents, beyond Hannelore’s comprehension and—any-way—beneath her notice” (98); and syntactical plays: “The fevers and insomnia marking 3 A.M. to dawn the optimal time for sleep, the wounded bristled too at the earlier dawn come spring, and asked Wilhelmina to institute a local ‘darkness-savings time’—to keep the hospital an hour ahead of the surrounding townships, with the soldiers’ bones thus an hour closer to knitting—and to paint the window black” (74); and quaint lyricism: “The dead shall live, the living die. Music shall untune the sky” (167). Questions of patience aside, Davies’ real bravura emerges in his sweeping approach to various syntactical and stylistic techniques, which nonetheless read with impressive fluidity.

Hallow

A holy man holds holly plants aloft,
so wholly bent on kissing every saint.
Though he mis-thought (it’s mistletoe he wanted),
my haunted face will dip beneath the branches,
masquerading as each missing martyr.
Watch me barter for his hijacked heart.

Hollow

What wasn’t there was never mine to lose.
(Empty: the promise. Empty: the noose.)
When he pressed the depression at my throat,
he was not cruel. I was not forced.
Like me, the tree’s worst weakness is its hollow.
I always do regret tonight tomorrow.

Heresyphilia

Love of radical deviation

The way change sounds you think there’ll always be more of it; jingling cacophony for the bus ride, for the Laundromat, reinventing itself the way change does—hands empty one moment and the next, windfall. You’d think all change happens that way: a misinterpreted conversation and suddenly you’re in Rhode Island, two days later, four hundred miles and gas money you didn’t have, your last quarter plinking into the steel eyeslit of a vibrating bed the likes of which you’ve only seen in movies, highway high-beams bursting two by two in the window like searchlights, working alchemy on your parasol of cigarette chain-smoke so the whole damn room shines like a steel ceiling. The way change happens you’d think the air always looked like this, like furious fog hiding the highest peaks of a bridge inside her coat, but a breeze shivers through the room and now everything’s different, and you’re younger than you remembered and Rhode Island is perfect, perfect. The conversation was not misinterpreted, you see that now, it was a dozen conversations plaited together to keep them tidy and smaller than they were. You left because you wanted to. There was nowhere to go, but here: the extraordinary thing about the horizon is that it is everywhere.

Kakorrhaphiophobia

Fear of failure

Derailed, your vantage point is not of stairs
you’ll scale, but stars you can’t. Wrong turns advance
no grace and no divine. Anywhere
you land feels falsely fine. When you commence,
each errand’s a half-empty glass to sip
your water from, to sip your wine. You start
a dialogue with never done, a trip,
a wire, a current to defibrillate
your half-stopped heart. Breathing uncaught. Unfailed,
you delve. Another devil is de-veiled.
A doppelgänger born with every task:
the evil twin of its unfinishing.
The harbor, never there, is menacing.
Its ebb, unanswered question asked and asked.

Jessica Piazza is the author of two poetry collections: Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013) and This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Born and raised in Brooklyn, she’s currently a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at USC. A co-founder of Bat City Review and Gold Line Press, she’s now a contributing editor at The Offending Adam.

“I’m not religious, I’m spiritual”—at long last, the eye-roll inducing mantra is granted explanation and elegance in Mary Szybist’s second collection of poetry. “Incarnadine” is a word whose Latin roots (from “incarnare”) mean literally “to make flesh,” but its modern meaning of “blood-red” or “to make red” was first used by Shakespeare in Macbeth. Szybist explores both in this collection; the epigraph to the book is a quote from Thomas Hardy, “Repose had again incarnadined her cheeks.” She extracts classic religious imagery and, weaving it throughout several experiments of form and style (some poems reminiscent of e e cummings with scattered bits of punctuation and half words, others many pages of paragraphs, some rhyming, others not), uses it as the backdrop for modern scenes of nature and raw human experience. In “Invitation,” for example, she addresses all manner of Earthly angels: “If I can believe in air, I can believe / in the angels of air… angels of embryos, earthquakes…Angels of prostitution and rain…Angels of water insects.”

The Annunciation, the Biblical announcement that the son of God is going to be made flesh (and presumably the inspiration for the title), is her focus throughout the collection; she shows us how it occurs every day between flowers, birds, politicians, girls in dresses, and famous writers. It becomes less of an angel speaking to a girl and more of the revelation it entails, small moments in which godliness and elevation leak through. In “Annunciation in Byrd and Bush,” an ominous stranger speaks to a girl using only direct quotes from the speeches of those men: “I don’t need to explain, he says, / (his sleeves swelling in a nudge of air) / —but the highest call of history, / it changes your heart.” That “angel” with his swollen sleeves appears in many forms in other Annunciations: in “Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls,” he is a flock of birds, feasting on Mary’s living whale body: “For they / swoop down on her wherever she surfaces. For they / eat her alive. For they take mercy on others and show them the way.” In “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle,” the Annunciation appears for a split second in childish musing: “And are we supposed to believe / she can suddenly / talk angel? / Who thought this stuff / up? I wish I had a / velvet bikini.”

Szybist shows us that the Bible is (metaphorically) like life in a decidedly non-religious way, not shy to address the horrors (and even boredoms) of heaven on Earth. “Another True Story” tells of a variety of mundane saints: “Saint Good Luck. Saint Young Man who lived through the war. Saint Enough of darkness. Saint / Ground for the bird. Saint Say there is a promise here…. Saint Shoulder, Saint Apostrophe, Saint Momentary days.” Nature is the apex of the experience: in “Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine,” for example: “I’d fasten myself / to the touch of the flower. / So what if the milky rims of my wings / no longer stupefied / the sky? If I could / bind myself to this moment, to the slow / snare of its scent….” In “How (Not) To Speak of God,” Szybist invokes His name in several lilting, emotional phrases arranged in lines splayed out in a never-ending spoke—perhaps a play on the Alpha, the Omega, the beginning, and the end, but also reminiscent in its shape of the sun or a faraway glowing star (and in its lines: “whose face is electrified by its own light”).

Szybist’s collection evokes the old Catholic direction to find God in all things, but you don’t have to be Catholic to understand exactly what she’s getting at. Rather, she merely exposes the supernatural as it occurs among us every day and invites us to marvel at the spiritual heaviness of the world—which, even in its darkest moments, she skillfully demonstrates as beautiful.

every rib written in silt.
Every year the huge lake froze,

ice figures clawed
and covered the pier.

Even in summer we shivered with cold,
my two brothers and I,

the lake growing inside us,
farther from your shore.

The Dark Sky

The sky has no memory
for phone numbers,
not the jingle
nor those dim, papered rooms.

So many stars,
so many oars dipping down,
it’s impossible to compare
the universe to oneself.

I have avoided the name of God
as if I were an instrument
that chilled, calibrating
murmur and sound of water.

Bravura threads itself between
my teeth. I love the yearning,
and what is love
hurrying us to a house of clouds?

Air full of salt—
I guess we’ve evaporated.
We lie down on a palette made from decades.
I shouldn’t touch and fear

you—a knife that pierces
the frost with breath.

Unfastened

Father, no matter where I lived you sent flowers
to mark the day I was born.

In Munich they arrived without a card.
The man who rented me a room took them,

hoping they were from his father
who’d abandoned him long ago.

I knew they were for me.
It was cold and gray and I needed

the red and blue anemones.
Those years irony meant nothing to me

as I traveled from one country to another,
searching for a pear tree—

glimpsed from a train—
supported by ladders.

Abigail Wender’s articles and poems have been published in Guernica Magazine, Mead Magazine, Epiphany Literary Journal, and other reviews. A finalist at the Frost Place 2013 Chapbook Contest, she holds an MFA degree from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and lives in New York City.