SERENA CHOPRA
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The lion figure encroached, crouched around the walls of stone manipulation and sought. What was the feeling of such an event? The area was cold and sifting in scattered mounds of mica. The light was papered along the stoic, posted like a sign across laps and faces. Nothing ever happened here. Nothing was so bold. And to think of the way mercury allowed itself. We spent all day learning to let go, and here was the wind again, tearing at our eyes, sucking up our noses till all was red. Even the clouds fell to setting, lazily, with the sun.
The startled eyes, like a thousand eclipsed moons. And the hounds hunting them out—from a cold place, from a cold place. These words never left their lips, fading mocha like hospital tile. On all of the decisions I knew hung moonshine, indecisive blinks, to the peril of shooting blankly at an intruder.



































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How can things last so definitively? I remember the sound of a rotary phone. We were wearing time like a mink coat and now we only feel it on the lining of each other’s pockets when we walk quickly through the night. We stop at a corner, lean into the intersection, and feel the car too close to our faces as it drives past. The lamps glare like collapsed webs of lights, and I don’t know if this is how every one sees it, but I used to watch them spin like slow motion pinwheels as we drove between them at night. Arriving under it, we were inside it, and it sighed over us a big yawn the color of an autumn moon.
Later when we talked about where it had come from, I said I didn’t know. We talked in circles, which is something to do when both people are stubborn. We crafted beautiful tree-ring sentences, wrapping each other up deeper and deeper into our own prattling forest. A wind, and the leaves shushed us. An intense quiet, like sound had turned itself inside out. The silence curled up in the nook of our ear like an infant and we let it overflow us with its sleep. We heard the air move through our ears, erasing our thoughts and sensibilities. As night set in we unzipped our sleeping bag and listened for moose in the water. If there were two fleshes in that bag, I could only feel one wrinkled about my bones and frozen muscle. And if there was a dawn, I never saw it. We built a fire that never stopped smoking and popping the wet wood. The moments were thin and cold as the lake, and having only our hearing and no other sense, we hunted for munching rabbits and listened for nuts falling from trees. We listened to heartbeats that rushed away like subways and tickled like a second hand ticking. We listened and forgave and left the camp sight singing over the rain. The car warmed up quickly, showing us our rosy lips and how bad we really smelled.





















































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The road out was dark and curled above a small beach town. The headlights blinked between the brights and dims, and I looked back in the rearview mirror to see that the volcano was still smoking. The diner we stopped at was on the boardwalk. The waitress smelled like sea salt and talked like a scuttling crab. She stared out the window, into her dark reflection, as she took our order: A coffee, and some burgers and fries. The diner lamps gave off a flat, lackluster light that bounced off her hair as it did off the plastic booths. The waitress grinned at the window and walked away like a mantis. The man sitting in the next booth got up to use the restroom. His swim trunks, shirt, and flip-flops were yellow and made him look like a banana split in the diner. When he left, a woman came to his booth and ordered a strawberry milkshake from the waitress. When the man came back, the woman excused herself, eyeing the man as she circled his booth and left the diner. The door blew in a few loud kids and a whiff of cotton candy and fried dough. The waitress brought the milkshake in a tall pink glass, and a tin shaker held what wouldn’t fit in there. The man pulled the long spoon out, dangling it by the very tip. A blob of shake fell onto the table before the man could get the spoon to his mouth. He looked around and noticed how I was staring at him. Before we were served our dinner we had a fight and all went our separate ways, except for one of us, the smallest one, who stayed and waited for us each to return. She did not eat without us. We fought in the rosy bathroom and in front of the silver diner doors. We came back to the table, started to cry, and excused ourselves again. One of us slit our wrist, on the topside with a broken Coke bottle from the street. When we walked away for the final time, the seagulls nibbling at our feet, we fell into an embrace and said that we could not finish dinner each alone. We held hands, all of us, and walked back to the diner and sat in our booth, where the small one waited with her fries, those cold and soggy potato fingers. We ate in silence, nibbling and embarrassed, looking around from the corners of our eyes. One of us had our wrist wrapped in a hundred tissue-thin, red napkins.






















































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A spectacle is a dimension made out of the head, out of reach. Certain lovely thoughts are drawn like long ribbons through toes, touchy as nerves and one can only exhale and gasp uncontrollably. The vision is quiet and feels like grumbling, which has the appearance of an unfinished stone wall. What is this but the story of writing. What is this but the story of us seeing our world from the inside, of us never being allowed to leave. We take shelter inside the structures, always dreaming them outwards. And the root of this is gravity—pulling us together, keeping us between and cellular.











































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And a dusty breezy blew into the shelter. Four men in flannel climbed the stairs.





































































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The chairs, orange, triangular, were positioned at the table, neatly tucked at either side. The woman drinking there was flat and nimbly rolled cigarette paper between the thumb and index of her left hand. The bar was washed out in the late afternoon sun, which also washed out the customers, who were either working or sleeping in the white heat.
Chiciro was hanging over the bar, sleeping with a rag under her cheek. A bottle of whiskey cast a slim, dominant shadow across the back of her neck. The red blouse she was wearing was loose and slipped off her shoulder in a wrinkle that echoed the one on her nose when she laughed, even if half-heartedly, at the gently teasing customers. The bar was open until three in the morning, sometimes later if the customers would not leave, and opened again the next morning at ten. The old woman who owned the bar could only afford to hire one tender, and so it was understandable to both owner and customer that the young girl take a gentle nap before the sunset corralled the town into the wooden benches and booths of Lasso Minnie’s Whiskey and Ale.
When the ice cubes had melted, the woman rolling the cigarette, swallowed the diluted whiskey and walked over to the bar. Her boots were heavy and firm over the loose talking floor boards so she walked slow and easy up to where Chiciro lay. The woman leaned into the bar, her long hands fingering the bottle of whiskey. The light was behind her as she watched the fair skinned tender sleep in the shadow of the woman’s broad shoulders and low, dark hat. It was a sunhat, awkwardly tumbling over a woman of her hard stature; and it warped, like melting plastic, in a wide halo around her already large head.      

















































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Along the moonlit suspicions of his solitary bedroom wall, shadows drooped like long, wicked noses. In this he saw, and he knew, that in a person such as himself there was only one, only a single one that watered down and sipped on like the poet’s whiskey; and it was this one, this single one that cursed and dreamed upon the world the many myths of a looped mind.    
How suddenly she slipped in, her long, straight black hair brushing, like a midnight wind through midnight grass, against the door. And her cheeks were sallow. And her eyes he could not see, slipped away like the opening of her mouth, which was casting a projection through him.
I CAN HEAR YOUR HEART, ZED. IN THE NEXT ROOM.
How suddenly she was gone. How suddenly she no longer cared to listen with large eyes, like his grandmother used to do from the bed next to his own. He’d ask her to sleep, NANI, SLEEP. But she’d insist, TO MAKE SURE IT WON’T DIE. And frail, frail; and frail, frail she too fell away.

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  ISSUE DOS!