Poetry Lavender Wedding Shane Allison Paying for that Free Cup of Coffee Dean Wilson In the End David P. Sterner Sea and Stone Dean Wilson Shamik Banerjee A Meeting No Relief David P. Sterner Small Town, America Alli Tschirhart Masjid Roaf Shamik Banerjee The Soul Jumps with Joy Slava Konoval Aunt Bobbie Is My Favorite on My Dad's Side Shane Allison Dear Creator Mercedes Shafer Sonnet Shamik Banerjee Patriarchy Sean P. Hotchkiss Street Glitter Gigi Giangiobbe-Rodriguez How Much Is 'Mass'? Randall Camden Stemple Litany for Jaret Keene Shane Allison Shamik Banerjee A Tale of Every Night Mechanical Pencil Sean P. Hotchkiss I Know Anger Well Alli Tschirhart Backstab in French Ambassador Slava Konoval Bully Shane Allison Fetal Position Alli Tschirhart Promise Rings Bailey Moore Fat Boy Shane Allison

A TALE OF EVERY NIGHT Shamik Banerjee By midnight, once his bottle’s downed and trashed, They sprawl out on the couch and talk of stuff Still unresolved: which tutor for their son Can make his Latin-fearing brain more tough, Some loan-related duty yet undone, Or which investments need to be encashed. Amidst such things, if something unrequired Sprouts like a weed upon a verdant yard— Some past discordance or unfounded blame— It makes the husband seize her, all off-guard, Distressing her with words that sear like flame. No sense of fault can douse his evil fire. And she, the lesser, stands there like a wall, Mute to his waistbelt’s whips. Perhaps, such wild Savagery even beasts would seldom use. She finds a little corner, and their child Has ample proof before him to deduce The weak’s meant to be trampled after all. Shamik Banerjee Shamik Banerjee is a formalist poet from Assam, India, where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by The Society of Classical Poets, Sparks of Calliope , The Hypertexts , Snakeskin , Ekstasis , Ink Sweat & Tears , and Autumn Sky Daily , among others.

Nonfiction The Whisper of the Rain Brooklyn Shepard Not the Worst Day Sean P. Hotchkiss What If I Got Those Cupcakes? Keith Kunze Notice Nancy McKinley Wagner

IN THE END David P. Sterner How will they live once they’ve all returned with tales of the dead and villages burned? Will they proudly speak of how bravely they fought or now live in shame and wish they had not? Will they think that a favor they’ve done for our world that on mothers and babes tons of bombs they have hurled? Or will they then see the evil in this deed they have done and fear that from God their souls will be shunned? How will they live once they’ve all returned with those shiny cold metals that so proudly, they’ve earned? David Sterner I was born in the small town of Grants Pass, Oregon. I have attended 22 different schools in Oregon, Montana, and Northern California—including PCC—which all exposed me to various cultures. My passions are art and science. I express my inner feelings by drawing, painting, sculpting, and writing. I study science to understand life and emotions, which I find very intriguing. Some of my achievements include winning blue ribbons for my artworks, being the lead singer of the Dave Everest Band, and receiving U.S. Patent #4,572,622 for a photographic lens. I have also authored a book titled DOR: The Missing Geometric Link . My hobbies include rock and fossil hunting, and I am proud to own the largest carnelian agate ever to be discovered in the Vernonia, Oregon region: it weighs a whopping 65 lbs.

STREET GLITTER Gigi Giangiobbe-Rodriguez Can you watch my section for five? we ask our coworker, one we may or may not have slept with, so we can slip outside apron still affixed and smoke a cigarette or just stand under the glow of street lamps, looking at the remains of a Tesla’s window in pieces on the sidewalk— street glitter — watching a rat scuttle across the pavement to dart behind a patch of grass, taking a moment of relative silence and fresh air. We are misfits degenerates hard workers sweethearts. We are gravely misunderstood. We smell like hops, yeast, oil, grilled meat, bread, fish. We make 500 on a good night if we’re front of-house, and we make 90 on a bad night. After our shift is over and we clock out, we drink three to six beers, depending. Sometimes, during the really long days, the really thankless nights, the nights where we cut the tip of our finger off, or have to clean up vomit, or piss, or a drunk guy pinches our ass, or some dude tells us we should smile more, we start drinking before clocking out. 86 TRIPLE SEC we yell at each and every server while we tend bar, pouring pint after pint of beer. 4 COUNT SWEET POTATO FRIES we yell as we pop out from our prep kitchen cave, to tell the spoiled front-of-house staff. BEHIND! ¡ATRÁS! we shout as we dart from kitchen to the line, back of house to the floor front bar to back bar walk-in back to the bar kitchen to the restroom restroom to the lockers storage closet back to the line prep kitchen to the dumpsters. WHERE IS TABLE SIX’S BURGER we demand of our line cooks, not daring to talk to the chef that way. STOP SEATING ME we frantically mouth to the host, after they have sat us a fifth consecutive four-top in ten minutes. Fuck. Table six stiffed me. On to the next. WHERE’S JESS? We, the almighty bartenders yell into the void. Our most loyal server finds her, tells her we have a question. Jess saunters up, already rolling her eyes— You didn’t ring this drink up right. Here’s how you do it. We hear ourselves and are annoyed. We’re nitpicking ingredient discrepancies with the servers for what, inventory? To save money? For who? So the owner can get a bit richer while we hustle our ass all night? What’s the new IPA taste like? A customer asks us, after they have already sampled three beers. “It tastes like fucking beer,” we wish we could say. “It’s really good. It’s hoppy but not too bitter. Super fresh,” we say instead. THREE BONELESS WINGS ALL DAY; FIRE ON TABLE NINE we yell from our little slice of hell stationed in front of the deep fryers, dodging hot oil, wielding knives and squirt bottles, tossing plating garnishing wiping repeat. Two hours left. Fuck I need a drink. I need five drinks. I need a new fucking job. And then we show up hungover the next day and do it all again. We don’t have much of a choice. No one’s holding our hands. We are a band of degenerates— these misfits, these sweethearts, these druggies, these assholes, these perfect human beings. We are a dysfunctional family just barely hanging on. Gigi Giangiobbe-Rodriguez Gigi Giangiobbe-Rodriguez is a writer based in Portland, Oregon but was raised in Oakland, California. She’s never met a tree she didn’t like and has what some would call an acute addiction to tea. When Gigi is not amassing books faster than she can read them, she’s writing, snacking, or scream-singing karaoke at a dive bar with her husband and their friends. Her current works include her chapbook: I’m Okay, I Promise . Gigi writes personal essays, memoir, prose poetry, poetry, fiction, and occasionally takes a stab at other genres. Her research essay on Indigenous voter disenfranchisement was showcased at PCC’s 2023 Groundswell Conference. Gigi is on the President’s List at PCC and is an All-Oregon Academic Team scholar. She is an editor for the literary magazine The Pointed Circle .

WHAT IF I GOT THOSE CUPCAKES? Keith Kunze Wes picked me up after I was done with class at Clackamas Community College. I didn’t want him to pick me up from home because I didn’t want my family to see me with him. I also knew a lot of people in the area, so I wanted our first date to be a bit more out of town. I had never been on a date with anyone before. We had been chatting for months on a dating site and it was a big deal for me to meet anybody. I was still in the closet and ended any communication from a group called Exodus International whose slogan was “Change is possible.” At some point prior to meeting in person I told him about “ex-gay ministries,” which he seemed interested in. Exodus International formed in 1976 and claimed to have helped many men live a life where they can be a family man and have a happy marriage. What they didn’t advertise was the incredibly low success rates and the fact that you can’t change your sexuality. I made sure to emphasize this with him in an effort to prevent him from looking into it. He only realized he might be gay after he saw two men kissing for the first time. He’d recently moved to Oregon from Texas where he’d never met a gay person before. We both grew up Christian Evangelical and we shared similar beliefs. Every day I woke up to a “Good Morning” text from him except once—to which I reached out saying, “Excuse me, where’s my good morning text?” in hopes he’d find it funny (he did). Boundaries were set and we agreed this meetup was a platonic date. I was waiting for him anxiously and kept looking around to make sure nobody saw me hopping in the car. His orange Fiat was small and felt appropriate as he was wearing orange-smelling cologne. Wes wore a white button down underneath a gray sweater vest. On his face he had thick-rimmed glasses, probably because I told him I had a weakness for them. He also had a small gift bag with a paper rose on top. I remember being embarrassed and a little nervous because I didn’t want anyone to ask me where I got the rose from. Inside the bag was a book called, The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm, which I loved! We chose to go to the theater at Clackamas Town Center because they had a cupcake kiosk right next to the theater. My nickname among friends was “cupcake,” due to my love towards them and I wanted to see if they had Christmas flavors. Naturally, the theater was decorated for Christmas and the cupcake kiosk was in the food court, just across from the entrance of the movie theater. We checked the time and agreed we should wait on the cupcakes because the movie had already started. While we both weren’t big fans of using guns, we enjoyed movies with guns. The movie we chose was the remake of Red Dawn. I’d always loved action movies and the original was a classic, so it was an easy choice for us to make. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know how that movie ended. *** In 1999, two teens killed 13 others at Columbine High School. There were seven victims in 2005 during the shooting in the Living Church of God, located in Wisconsin. Thirty-two dead at Virginia Tech in 2007. In a movie theater in Aurora, there were 12 killed and over 70 injured in 2012, and that wasn’t even the deadliest one that year. “Everyone should have a gun on them so if there is a shooter, you can just shoot them first,” is an ideology I subscribed to for a long time. About 430 deaths happen per year in the U.S. due to accidental firearm usage. I was required to take gun safety classes as a kid and I’m not sure if that could prevent accidental deaths if everybody took those classes. Before 2012, there had been many conversations about mass shootings and gun control. We as a country have also experienced two of our deadliest ones since 2012: one at Pulse Nightclub in 2016, where forty-nine died and fifty-three were injured, and the biggest one where sixty-one people died and over four hundred were wounded during a concert on the Las Vegas Strip. Continued conversations about gun control happen often and little has been done to prevent mass shootings. *** I had knowledge of these incidents before 2012. Of course, I wasn’t thinking about them when we entered the movies. Just a few minutes into the movie, an employee of the theater came in. She sat right behind us looking petrified. After a few seconds, she leaned forward and calmly said, “There’s somebody right outside shooting a bunch of people. It’s really bad.” Then she leaned back into her seat. We looked at each other. I wondered if she was crazy but also remembered the face of the man who killed all those people in Colorado just a few months prior. The movie was the latest Batman film and apparently some audience members thought the gunshots were from the movie itself. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had heard real gunshots and assumed it was from Red Dawn. The employee left and after a few minutes, everything seemed fine. Suddenly, the movie stopped playing and she came back in. “Attention!” she announced to the audience, “there is a man shooting people in the mall. You are to remain in here until police escort you out of the theater.” Her posture was rigid. I remember she wore a navy-blue dress that looked very formal. She had no emotion in her voice, but you could tell she was in shock. Maybe the lack of emotion in her voice was her way of processing what was happening. Did she see it happen? It seemed like hours had passed before we were finally able to leave the theater. My mind and body felt numb; whenever someone tried to talk to me, I sank out of reality momentarily. The officers maintained a calm composure as they led us out of the theater through an exit I hadn’t noticed before. They gave firm directions and led us outside on the sidewalk near the entrance of the mall and theater where we were instructed to continue waiting. “Oh my God, there’s bodies,” said a bystander. I caught a glimpse of paramedics transporting motionless figures in wrappings. I saw that the cloth absorbed crimson blotches and quickly looked away, avoiding being exposed to their faces; I didn’t want to see them. Neither Wes nor I had much to say in the remaining moments. Eventually news reporters came and one started asking us questions about what happened and what we experienced. We told her everything and she asked if we could say it on camera. Both of us in unison firmly said, “No thanks.” She looked very surprised but thanked us for our words. It felt like a firework of reality hitting me in the face. This was my first date and it was with a man. Both of us were trying to be as discreet as possible. The dread of being seen on TV with a man my family didn’t know made my skeleton jump out of its own skin. The past hour I was only processing what was going on. I forgot about everything else in the world. I hadn’t realized it was extremely cold and a lot of people were shivering. It’s hard to explain but just being asked if I could “say it on camera” snapped me back into my reality outside of these moments. If people knew, would they say this happened because I was on a date with a man? Did I believe this? My church friends might say that. I’d finally cut off all ties to gay conversion therapy and this happens. Is there some tragedy everyone experiences when they come out? Is it bad that this is what I’m now focused on? How many more mass shootings are going to happen? Will this be the only one I experience? Keith Kunze Growing up in a rural small town in Oregon made being in the closet quite an intense experience. Journaling is something that I found beneficial and was a huge process in accepting myself as a gay man. Besides non-fiction storytelling, I enjoy a variety of other genres, but especially enjoy stories that are a “slice of life” with scifi/fantasy components. Playing video games, watching shows, and researching miscellaneous topics that might not be relevant to anything of importance are things you are likely to catch me doing at home. Currently, I am studying to become an elementary teacher, after taking a hiatus from college.

THE WHISPER OF THE RAIN Brooklyn Shepard It was a stark and unforgiving mid-winter’s evening in western Oregon. This was my second time in Corvallis in a week. The light from the Shari’s sign reflected off our faces, casting a morbid glow on the pavement. Sitting on the ground of a rain-soaked parking lot, I held Jason’s uncalloused hand as he bled to death. The dark rivulets spreading out from his body were growing into a puddle, somehow avoiding the place where I sat, as if they too blamed me for their presence. “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason spoke quietly. Three days prior, my daughter had called me, hysterical on the phone, blubbering out, “He hit me.” I already wasn’t fond of Jason Williams. While my daughter, Cha’uri, felt he was a mature and distinguished older guy, I just saw him as the nearly thirty-year-old who was dating my barely legal daughter. I may have been able to get past that, but he had been accused of molesting his much-younger sister when she was a baby, and he was all too often around my infant granddaughters. When my youngest granddaughter was born to Cha’uri and Jason, the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and refused to let Nova go home with him. They called me early on the second morning of my daughter’s hospital stay and asked if I would take the girls until Jason completed a psychosexual parameters test. We didn’t expect that he would refuse, but he did. At the time of the incident, I was living in Forest Grove, a tiny agricultural town two hours north of Corvallis. It was a harshly beautiful night. There was no moon out, and the stars glinted hard like chips of quartz freshly dug out of their earth. The highway was lonely, and headlights spit their beams through my windshield in stark bursts breaking up long periods of darkness. During my frantic drive south, Cha’uri and Jason had the ill grace to make up, and she sent me a text right before I left the interstate telling me to turn around. She tried to assure me that she was fine; it was all a big misunderstanding. But once a plate is broken, no amount of glue can put it back exactly the same as it was before. I convinced her to meet up with me, and we talked, but she decided not to go home with me, to stay instead with Jason. No amount of my considerable persuasion could change her mind. She was definitely my daughter. Stubborn as a mule. I couldn’t let it go. My boyfriend of the time, an ex-Army grunt, pitched one solution that would remove Jason from ever being a problem again. If the United States Armed Forces is good at anything, it’s at training its recruits that killing another person is a solution to most problems. The next day, I offered to meet up with Cha’uri and Jason for dinner, saying I had something to talk to Jason about. I never intended to have a conversation with him. Upon arriving at the Shari’s Saturday evening, I expressed a desire to smoke, and predictably, as smokers will do, my daughter and Jason followed outside, bumming smokes off me as we huddled under the bicycle rack out of the rain. I stepped away to drop my filter in the receptacle, and the first shot ricocheted off the bike rack and hit me in the knee. No plan survives the first attempt, and my plan was already going awry. The shots came from across the parking lot, in the wooded area near the cars, and the pops from the gunfire were so loud and so close together that they sounded like fireworks going off in the space between us. I fell to the ground, and saw my daughter, still standing, staring agape at Jason, who lay on the ground behind me. I screamed at Cha’uri to get down, honestly afraid for the first time. What would I do if she got hurt? She dropped and scrambled over to me on hands and knees. I checked her quickly, desperately making sure she wasn’t injured, then shoved her inside the glass-walled entrance to the diner. The door chimed, an incongruous welcoming noise. I crawled over to Jason. He lay on his back, several small red marks scattered across his body, like he had been dotted with a red Sharpie. I could see that none were immediately fatal, but it wouldn’t be long. Suddenly, this wasn’t what I wanted at all. Death, right in front of you, goes from being a distant, sterile concept, to being a real and present event. “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason whispered to me. I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “You’re going to be fine,” I lied. There was no reason to frighten him. It would be pointlessly cruel. Both of our lives were fading away like the last light from the sky. While he would never hit my daughter again, I hadn’t saved her. I had cost her both her own free will in her relationship choices, and her time with her mother. As I watched her through the plate glass window, safe within the restaurant, I realized I would spend most of the foreseeable future unable to hold her when she needed me or be by her side as she celebrated life. Our lives would be as they were in this moment: me on the outside, watching her, and all too often doing so through glass. The police and ambulance arrived in minutes. It didn’t take the detectives long to arrest my boyfriend and me. I was treated at the Corvallis hospital for a superficial gunshot wound to the knee, and released into the custody of a detective of the Corvallis Police Department. After spending eight months in the county’s ancient and derelict jail, my co-defendant and I were each sentenced to prison time for our roles in Jason’s death. I received eighteen years, and he got twenty-five to life. It could have been worse. I’ve been at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility for a little over eight years. The time has passed quickly, but I’ve missed so much of my life outside of these walls. My granddaughters are now nine and eight years old. Like them, I’ve learned and grown. Most importantly perhaps, I have learned that no one has the right to take life from someone else. It is possibly the only thing we own that is ours alone. The ending of a life is a lot like strong perfume. It’s impossible to put it on someone else without getting a little on yourself. My freedom died with Jason that night in the parking lot, our funeral dirge the whisper of the rain. Brooklyn Shepard Brooklyn Shepard, who also goes by Crescent Holiday, is a resident at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. She takes college courses offered by both Portland Community College and Portland State University, where she majors in English. She is the mother of a number of children including Soriyah, Britain, Iliyana, Indigo, Sterling, and Cha’uri—and she has a husband who is the love of her life. She can be reached by mail for comments and discussion: Brooklyn Shepard/Crescent Holiday CCF #15721242 24499 SW Grahams Ferry Rd. Wilsonville, OR 97070

SMALL TOWN, AMERICA Alli Tschirhart Yes ma’am no sir. In school, we prayed before every football game, the coach hand in hand with the players as amen rings out. Giant pickles wrapped in paper at every single event. Four churches in one square mile. A dog named Bear roamed the streets of town for years before we realized it was a pack of fluffy white dogs all with the same name. Once, through the window of our truck, I saw them, a pride of lions resting after a hunt. We find one on the side of the road one year and collectively grieve for a dog we didn’t really know. An old silo brittle and sharp, roof gone from past storms, we play carelessly, counting down for hide and seek. A vast backyard where we run, wild children screaming and pushing our hands into mud. The sprawling pecan tree in the yard that I spent so much time collecting the nuts from, and then more shelling. The one small bathroom with no windows that we all huddled in as the tornado warning rang out. The worn-out trampoline that my dad would spray in the summer so we could dance with the water, sometimes we would just lay out and watch the stars. Alli Tschirhart Alli Tschirhart is an aspiring writer and poet. From Texas, she enjoys being outdoors and reading, as well as her three cats. Her work has previously been published in The Bellwether Review and Free Verse Revolution . She is continuing her passion for reading and writing at PSU this fall. Instagram ~ @allitschirhart