 I am 12 years old and I have a whistle for a front tooth. I am 12 years old and I learn about two girls who tricked the world into thinking fairies were real and I wonder how they kept their dresses so white. Young girls are strange things and young women are even stranger. I am 12 years old and I am a young woman. Two girls put pictures of fairies on hatpins and someone calls them a miracle. Two young women claim to commune with paper cut outs and someone calls them a “mental disturbance.” I am 12 years old and I am a mental disturbance. I am 12 years old and I begin to hope that the growing pains are just like coming home in a white dress with wet feet, that I am on the cusp of evolutionary perfection and my theosophical burgeoning is nothing but a lazy skipping of stones until something better happens to me. Two girls make a product of their potential, print it on glass plates and hold their tongues. I am 12 years old and there are grooves in my tongue for fingernails. I am 12 years old and I am learning to affix the smallest wings to my biggest lies. I am 12 years old and I am just doing what my foresisters did before me. I am 12 years old and two girls teach me how to replicate the prettiest parts of myself for maximum consumption. Amy Devine is an artist from a lineage of artists whose work has been featured in several publications including Orange Peel, Gems, and Beyond the Veil Press. She is based in Sydney, Australia and she is inspired by history and the narrative of humanity. Follow her on Instagram: @devineinspirational
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 The day I learned you once lived in the jungle, I was in your knee-wall attic, looking for envelopes of negatives your wife had asked me to find. “It should say BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS,” she hollered from the den, as if such a request would prove easy, should prove easy. As I sorted through towers of cardboard storage boxes, most neither dated nor labeled, I wondered when the last time was that she was up here. Or you. “I don’t see a box with that year, Aunt Audrey.” Though I didn’t hear her respond, I kept opening boxes, rifling through contents for negatives. I found Christmas tree lights. Christmas ornaments. A tree-topper. An envelope. Full of photos. No negatives. Then you. A picture of you. A much younger you. Sand in your hair. Sunscreen on your face. A tricolored beach ball in hand. Your wife next to you. My mother on the other side. A rippling, clear-blue ocean as background. What fun you must’ve had without me. Before me. I felt something stuck to the back of the photo. I turned the picture over, revealing another. You again. An even younger you, though. In olive green. A necklaced ball chain on what must’ve held your dog tags visible. US ARMY above your left patch pocket. Other young men beside you. Also uniformed. Also smile-less. Jungle as background. As green as your camos. Patterned like them, too. As I studied the photo, something else in the box caught my eye: on what looked like a small, framed diploma, George Washington’s profile gleamed—gold in color, enclosed in a heart-shaped medal; ribboned with purple; above printed text: TO PRIVATE FIRST CLASS MACKENZIE H. AMBROSE, UNITED STATES ARMY FOR WOUNDS RECEIVED IN ACTION. Below the citation, wrapped in yellowed newspaper, was your Purple Heart, mounted in a presentation case. As I gently pulled back the crumpled newsprint, fingered grainy images of B-52s, anti-aircraft guns, and aerial maps, I read the front-page headline: CHRISTMAS BOMBING: NIXON ORDERS OPERATION LINEBACKER. Now I could see the whole picture. Now things started to make sense: your laconic responses, your gruff demeanor, your hearing loss, your refusal to dine at Vietnamese-American restaurants. With your Purple Heart in my hands, I grew somewhat resentful at your wife and my mother. Why hadn’t they told me? Didn’t they trust me? Yes, I was still a freshman, as much the activist against Bush’s War as those against Johnson’s and Nixon’s. But I wouldn’t have said anything. I wouldn’t have asked you about what you saw, heard, or smelled. I knew better. So enwrapped in my own thoughts was I that I did not hear your wife calling me from below. Only when I felt the vibrations of your heavy footsteps on the stairs did I scramble, quickly but carefully putting back your pictures, citation, and medal, closing the lid to the box and shoving it behind the others. As you opened the door to the attic, I tried not to glance at your secrets, now boxed together again, letting on that I was snooping. “Have you found the negatives yet?” you asked, standing inside the doorway. I frowned and shook my head. Not the ones that you mean, uncle.
dear dorothy, another temp record shattered today every afternoon almost unbearable here in late summer & not just from heat the ants & spiders & blackberry canes all creeping increasingly into our sanctuary indiscriminate in their efforts to multiply exponentially & we may call them invasive so eager always to claim ourselves the caretakers of this land a land for you & me it’s said despite our complicity in its partition & destruction indeed our own inheritance is invasion & we have never settled for less & how dorothy do i convince my neighbor of this? ~ dorothy, a new flag flies across the street. our community is full of them, each a sort of exclamation mark after the silence inflicted on us in the grocery store the clerk either stares wordlessly or scowls while they ring up our toilet paper & canned caffeinated sugar-free water & the vegetables & eggs & what offends them escapes me there is one flag which doesn’t fill my throat with dread across the street from the daycare but its solace is tempered by angry signs & slogans adorning many of the local homes & of course the pickup trucks with headlights that strip corneas bare or that sport steel testicles at the back end or pejorative decals about vegetarians & the sign nearest our home in the window of a man who flies the flag of the marine corps says make the liberals cry again & i wonder who it is they imagine crying because when my people cry it is often because one or more of us has in some fashion directly or indirectly been eliminated & what do the people praying for our blood lose in their defeat except pride & access to unfettered violence anyway we cannot fly a flag in answer or it might put our child in danger like every time we drop his other trans friend back home in her neighbor’s window the flag of the confederacy permanently displayed makes my blood rise my hand ache for a brick. ~ dottie, thinking about dying again feeling ridiculous you ought to see the puppy so tenaciously mischievous i can only wish i could ever be so uninhibited & yes this brings us to two dogs & three cats which brings us to two adult queers a queer child two dogs & three cats & i’m thinking about dying again i have a family & i’m thinking about dying again yesterday i felt jealous of roadkill on the way back from the ocean until upon passing i realized it was a backpack when you write will you tell me can a person who remains broken in the presence of purest love still be saved? ~ dot, can’t decide if we’ll sell this house of other people’s memories the indecision reminiscent of the back and forth of this country on whether personhood should apply to everyone & we’re likely screwed we can hardly afford to rent even in this town & it seems we’re unwelcome—too many manicured lawns presiding over stately homes with darkened windows who knows what goes on behind some of those what propaganda is digested nightly full of pundits passing judgment on people who dare defend free expression or even worse advocate for its expansion—might be a while before i write again my dear friend as it is nearly time for another election. Garnet Juniper Nelson is an androgyne birthed & corrupted in the American high desert who now writes from the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, their work has appeared in publications such as Salamander, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Frontier Poetry, Salt Hill, and Pidgeonholes, and has received nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. They currently teach writing at Centralia and Lower Columbia Colleges.
 Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash Heavy folds of Sherpa blanket sag down her arm, cold air rushing into the pocket of warmth. Watching the ripples of her breath gently crash through ginger and lemon tea, she hopes the draping makes her look like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Maybe Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic. It doesn’t. No kind wind pushing hair back. No full moon to gaze at. Snow hits the window, at least. But no drifting flakes. Just a frenzied swarm of tiny shards. The caretaker commented on the luck yesterday. That burying someone during the warm before the storm was easier than cutting deep into frozen ground. Maybe he didn’t think the young woman running her pale hand against glossy dark casket again--wishing the surface wasn’t so smooth, wanting a splinter or rough patch but feeling nothing but slippery varnish--could hear him. Fair enough. Most would be preoccupied after screaming, yelling sharp words that cut jagged lines in the throat. Words not spoken ten years ago, but left to molder, infecting the mouth. The heart. Finally spewed out over the corpse of a mother. Hoping the venom might pierce the armor of the pressed suit of a father. Hands and fingers aching for something to break against, yearning to feel something other than polished walnut. Settling for mangling a business card offered with soft words, words that would probably work on another woman, other children that weren’t left with rot in their bodies. But the slick card felt too smooth against trembling hands, too much like the coffin. She pulls the torn fragments from her pocket now, the blanket gaping further, her chest more vulnerable to cold. Tea and honey having soothed, the empty cup is set down slowly enough to not sound against a desk. The puzzle of a torn phone number is carefully solved with fingertips skimming the surname she abandoned. She remembers a gift given over a decade ago. Carefully chosen green and blue stripes, the favorite colors of father and daughter matching against each other. The same pattern seen on an old faded tie yesterday. A tie too old and cheap to match well with a fancy suit. But worn anyway. One hand gathers lumpy blanket closed around a shivering chest. The other hand carefully consults a torn number and raises a phone. Two rings, and then an answer.
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