dead ice

juice

Bio

Alisa Golden is a writer and artist who has worked in a used bookstore, an art-supply store, and as an adjunct professor teaching bookmaking, letterpress printing, and creative writing around the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing and art have been published in Blink-Ink, One Sentence Poems, FRiGG, and Gone Lawn, among others. She is the author of Making Handmade Books and editor of Star 82 Review. www.neverbook.com | www.star82review.com

Winter Stories

Poetry by Eléna Rivera, Video by Tom Juvan

Winter Stories

by Eléna Rivera

I’ve never lived in the country. Imagine what that would be like for me, to be followed by a house? In the city, we see brick buildings edged by white framed windows. I see a hawk, a pigeon—a man walks by in a big coat walking his dog, grey and brown. What I witness is something someone might throw at a white page or throw out into the corners of a white sky to write on. The next day there would be others. Drag into that winter stories, a mother yelling, pulling on her child’s arm; the violence of a man dragging his dog across the street when the dog wants to smell that one special smell one more time. Which is the anchor that lights the path here or there? In the city, no full stop, just a line that tells you in what worlds you exist.

Bios

Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Arrangements (a collaboration with Peter Hughes, Aquifer Press, 2022), Epic Series (Shearsman Books, 2020), and Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017). She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation and was a recipient of poetry fellowships from MacDowell (2020), Trelex Paris Poetry Residency (2019) and the SHOEN Foundation (2016).

Tom Juvan is an English teacher and letterpress printer at Westover School in Connecticut.

Love Letter Arrow

At the tip of this arrow, a love letter.

It’s addressed to the Azure Archer’s girlfriend, Gold-Crested Wren, a superhero herself, though she prefers he call her Jenn. They’re in a long-distance relationship. He protects a city in the Pacific Northwest, she protects a city in the South. She prefers to talk on the phone, can go hours without running out of things to say, but the Azure Archer, as he prefers she call him, finds it hard to express himself clearly. His words get lost on the static tethers strung between cell towers. He needs time to write it all down, so he writes it all down and looses a letter on an arrow into the night.

The arrow soars straight from his city to her doorstep, 2500 miles away. His one power is to never miss, no matter where he sets his aim.

He writes Jenn one letter a week, two at most for special occasions. Never too much, even though there is more he could say. He’s never liked the deeply-engrained marketing game of courtship: don’t text back too soon, always leave them wanting more. Yet still he plays, because when he hasn’t, he loses. His first ever girlfriend in high school lived with her mother one state over for a summer, and he wrote her a letter every day she was gone. She broke up with him the day she returned.

Sometimes, telling someone how you truly feel—and how much you feel it—is like firing a barrage of arrows at them. So he keeps his love letter arrows few and far between, modulates the way he empties himself into the inky scrawl. He doesn’t tell her of the letterless arrows he looses into the bullseye of the boss in his backyard, one after the other splitting the one that came before, counting the days down, splintering the seconds, until he sees her again. It’s not that he wants supervillains to try to take over the world, but he longs for the next world-threatening threat so he can see her again, so they can team up.

His one power is to never miss, but he misses her terribly.

He knows a letter every day can be a barrage, but not sending one feels like an arrowhead scratching the inside of his skin, trying to puncture a hole in him, to escape and release everything behind it. He wonders, on days when he stops himself from writing another letter to her, what Jenn doesn’t say to him over the phone, what parts of herself she obscures for fear they will cut a fissure through their love.

Jenn, Gold-Crested Wren, her power is a complex song. When she sings it, the song can do many things the Azure Archer can do with arrows: pick locks, catch falling debris, short-circuit evil robots. But she can do things far lovelier, beyond the reach of any arrow he invents. Her song
can tie her hair up into a ponytail, become an umbrella in a rainstorm. Her song can remove his clothing, piece by piece.

On clear nights like tonight, if he listens close, he can hear her song (he swears), her voice carried all this way on the wind, little love notes in notes far beyond his voice’s range.

Emoji Arrow

At the tip of this arrow, 🙂.

The Azure Archer is not very good at expressing himself, except through arrows, so he crafts an arrowhead that matches his feelings, 😡 or 😭 or 😍 or 😨 or 😊.

He rotates between them manually, an easy dial on the arrow’s shaft, but he’s working on a version that syncs with his emotions directly, like a mood ring, but one he can nock and let fly.

At team meetings, the Azure Archer looses 😏 at the mission map, the role of cocky prankster snug on him like blue spandex. Stop that, Cavalry Man says, We can’t afford to keep replacing these maps, and the Azure Archer looses 😔 in contrition. On the phone with his long-distance girlfriend, he looses 🤗 and 😘. I can’t see what arrows you used, Gold-Crested Wren says when she hears the thunk of arrows lodging into his wall. She sighs, and he tries to think of something
to say.

The Azure Archer looks forward to his phone’s operating system updates, when he can scroll through the menu for unfamiliar icons, sticking out like a sore 👍, so thrilling in their shiny newness, the dimensions of his feelings expanded. But why limit himself to emotions? The more he uses the emoji arrow, the more utility he finds: 🙌 sent in thanks, a trio of 🎉 to congratulate, 💪 after a tough workout, 🍕 when the team votes on what to order for dinner. We can’t afford to get takeout every night, Cavalry Man scolds the group chat.

Naturally, the Azure Archer also loves the arrow emojis: ⬆️, and ➡️, and 🔀. His favorite is 🔙, its particular obsolescence. It feels like an arrow loosed two decades ago, in the desktop glow instant messaging, back when 🙂 had to be Frankensteined together from type, from taps of the Shift key. :-). An introduction, a connection, an ending, all stitched together at a ninety-degree angle. He can’t imagine how someone might use 🔙 now, the brbs and away messages of texting’s ancestral past long since abandoned. There’s no need to note a break anymore, nor to signal a return. Everyone is always right back. Everyone is always right there.

There are still some gaps in the Azure Archer’s robust and ever-expanding arsenal of emojis. He longs for an emoji to express the simultaneous pleasure and torment of anticipating a first date.
An emoji for the moment in a book so scary that he has to close it and pace around his apartment, giddily haunted. An emoji to reassure Gold-Crested Wren when her voice is small through the phone, when she says, I’m worried about you, I miss hearing your voice, even your texts, it’s all emojis now. He’ll have to wait until they develop the right one for this situation.

Sometimes, late at night, the Azure Archer dreams up the words he’ll say to her, how he’ll finally explain, but in the morning, the news reports a horrific tragedy, some irreparable harm, another disaster he and all his trick arrows couldn’t prevent, and there are no words anymore,
and no emojis either.

The Azure Archer opens a 🗺️ of her 🌆, imagines her on the 🚌, 📖the 💌 he sends to her, picturing her life as so many tiny pictures, simple and safe. He 🙏 if she can’t 👂 him, she can understand the 🌊 and 🏔 and 🍎 of his far-reaching, multiversal 💙 for her, his only ⚓, even in this bleakness, where it feels like reaching around in the dark, searching for 💡 to make sense of all these nonsensical surroundings. Because he doesn’t know what else to do, he texts her 🐙. He texts her 🕸. I think I understand, she says today. She texts him 🌌. She texts him 🔄. It’s ⏰, he knows, to get out of 🛏, to start the 🌅, to try to save the 🌎, or at least leave it a little better.

Outside, ☔🔈.

Bio

Sam Martone lives and writes in New York City.

Two Poems

YELLOWISH PEARL

Bio

Denise Newman’s fifth poetry collection The Redesignation of Paradise is forthcoming in 2024 by Kelsey Street Press. For her translation work, she’s received two NEA fellowships and two PEN Awards. Newman is also involved in video, installation, and social practice poetry projects. She teaches at CCA in San Francisco.