Aux./Vox. Winter Issue

8/9/2019 Aux./Vox. Winter Issue

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About Aux./Vox.Aux./Vox. is an independent literary magazine founded in 2014by Max Bicking, Annie Rus, Dominick Knowles, and Brianomas.

We focus on experimental and traditional prose, verse, andvisual art. is is our second issue.

Submissions are rolling and may be sent to [email protected].

Cover design: “Colorful Nude” by Mary Holmcrans.

For Ben Jones.


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Featured in issue #2 of Aux./Vox.:

Prose/Verse:

Brennan BurnsideBrian Cox

William DoreskiEmily DuySophy GamberKate GlavinSarah Gow

Jason Gra Luke Harsel

Bra JoostDominick KnowlesMara KorenBen NardolilliFred Pollack

Visual Art:

Dmitry BorshchAngier CooperCatherine GauthierMary Holmcrans

Jack Savage

Contributors


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“3” by Angier Cooper

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Studies in the baggage of a Vietnam War Veteran

Part 1:

Leather USAF Emergency Medical Kit, Lang Vei, Vietnam,2/6/19682” red elastic bandage, microelectronic locator, metal sa-line work IVneedle and polyethylene tubing, narcotic analgesic (5 mgoxycodone

hydrochloride, 500 mg acetaminophen), intramuscularepinephrine(0.3 mg), angiocatheter (14 gauges), 1”X1” color prolephotograph of white unsmiling female approximately 22 years old, shoul-der-length

chestnut brown hair, brown eyes, bare shoulders, nomake-up.

Part 2:Leather Executive Aaché Case, Houston, Texas,3/24/1989

4” blue elastic bandage, Nipro syringe 10 gauge 1cc, 5/8”needle with protective plastic cover, metal saline work IVneedle and polyethylene tubing, narcotic analgesic (10 mgoxycodone hydrochloride), heroin (0.1 g) in small plasticbag, marijuana (0.1 g) in small plastic bag, ve sheets ofivory

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uncoated Carbonless CB 15# paper with ocial Exxonleerheadin 50# light brown folder labeled “Valdez Report” in

center.

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Amy Winehouse’s Panic Room

Circular room, so gray carpeted walls, bamboo oor-

ing, 2’X1’copper console table, platinum coated, twenty-sevencandlebrass menorah in center on royal purple chenille run-ner, 3”x5”framed black-and-white photograph of Frank Sinatra,

pastel yellowevolution door in south section of room, sleeping matof driedcoco grass in front of door, twenty-seven evenly-spaced recycledbeeswax candles along wall encircling the room, re-

spectively redblue and green, 2”x2”X2” leather book, ״ embossedin gold oncover under console table, rosemary incense seepingthrough oor.

Brennan Burnside

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For Haruki Murakami or Tokyo Alley Divers on aTuesday at 11:00 a.m.

Noboru Wataya,Where are you?Did the wind-up birdForget to wind your spring?

fall into space -

Tokyo streets orboxes withoutspaces to breathe

count endlessly,understand that

what you loveis lost –what she lovesis dead

wind up the

springs of yourrusted legsfor winter is hereand fallingis futile

Noburu Wataya,where is she?Forget to wind your springand sleep as I whisper

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Touch me -lose yourself andfocus on the cat paths

of your mind

understand thatcounting endlesslywhat you love - she

is deadwhat she loves - youis lost –

Brian Cox

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Lake of the Woods

I’d forgoen this lake is so big.

ey’ve built a village on the ice--gi shops, churches, a coee shop.Upstairs, over coee and date bread,a small still voice tries to warn me,but I can’t round o its vowelsor feel the edge of its consonants,

and its syntax crumples like silk.My third wife, whom I’ve never met,shares my table. So does Harold,her current lover, his gold chainsgleaming, his moustache pastedlike velcro to his lip. e vivid

winter sun is balmy. Let’s walkand discuss our future. Meanwhilemy actual wife pines over teaat a corner table, her facelimp, her ski parka oozingkapok at every seam. She wants

to know what it means, why the icegroans like a sick child, why lilaccigar-clouds bar the sun, why lovefades and spouses rotateand the planet throbs like tissueaer surgery. I leave herlooking toward the spruce-clad shoreand step outside with third wifeand Harold. Who is this womanI’m doomed to marry? Her hair

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burns on her like dry chaparraland her face narrows to a blade.Beneath her blood-maroon parka

her body’s a stone in my throat.e lake crackles underfoot. e weightof this temporary villagemay be too great. e dark waterplots year ‘round, like the ideaof fate, which shapes all marriages

to the aatus of landscapeslit by pink and lavender skiesreected by Harold’s gold chainsand by that luster our eyes retaineven aer the lake thawsand we toughen like cooling lava

despite the friction of embrace.

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Te Landscapes I Own

Sometimes the landscapes I own

shed big chunks of stone or iceand expose esh and bone to coldor the winsome gaze of strangers.Yesterday as sleet whistled down

on cupolas and skylights a crime

occurred over tea. Someone spokeyour name, pronounced it correctlybut with dierent intonationso it seemed another name,

one I recognized by color

rather than phonetically. Seaustered at the breakwater,the lighthouse burned out its bulb,and gulls with collective greed

swooped on the huge old landll

abandoned a century ago.at’s a piece of scenery I ownbeyond taxation. No one asksif I’ll sell or develop these non-

performing assets. No one asks

if I’ll build you a coage shapedlike a popover or dinner rollcapped with a perky thatched roof.But I would, you know. I’d build

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with those chunks of stone or iceshed by other plots. en maybewhen earthquake or thaw reveals

the aws in my constructionyou’ll appreciate how much land

I’ve peeled from the planet to applyto the wounds we’ve savoredlonger than we’ve known each other,

longer than the geological angstthat predates the human race.

William Doreski

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“The Making of Brothers” by Dmitry Borshch

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Folie à deux

Home is a hive ensconced in raersgaslight dim

At Walmart, brightyers tell us who’s missing. One reads:

Dorien’s photo is shownage progressed to 24 years.He was last seen in Amarillo, Texasriding an aqua blue bicycle with white tires.He was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans.

, a yawn stretches across the town.A friend one mile away orgasms quietlythen falls asleep with a pillow between her legs.

Return to baseor whatever we call it this weekese honeycombs-----catacombs where we pay exorbitant sums to liveand shit and breathe and oatin and out of each other’s spaces like upholstered ghosts.

Home is a hive ensconced in raerswhere time ossiesDormant bees trickle over their queen.

Emily Duffy

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/Kiss each other clean

This is you, and me, and everybody I’ve ever known:

1.wandered across in the city/that dark scary corner in Kennsington

where a man(boy?) called to me from across the

street

complimented my ass and I was scared,

and you just the other day tried very hard not

to unkindly fold me, roll me, take me in yourhands

and tell me what I great ass I have/

2. come across in a crowded place/(the way I came

across you—?) /

3. whimpered to in the folds of an evening between

folds of sheets,rolling together, lonely. (I’m sorry if it disappoints you as

much as it disappoints me.)

There are small boxes I keep under my bed—

one for each man(boy?) to ever enter

into me,

crawl around within/without my body, each man to whom I’ve lent out

my mind

on the back of our careless

breath—

I do not know if I should give you a box.

I do not know if you t the criteria of care-lessness.

I am that street in Fishtown where the bike store and the

place with the great coffee

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glowing lowly,for the next een years.

I think about your body, and my body, and our shoescurled up haphazardly,cuddling on the oor to keep warm…

And oh—, this is

you, and me, and everybody I’ve everknown.

How do we /kiss each other clean? forgive ourselves?

Sophia Gamber

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Obituary

Aristophanes doesn’t have to tell me the story of our

bodies born together, four arms and four legs, a singlehead, two faces. Once full person, now split humans.Now halves of ourselves, sewn up by Apollo. Ourbodies reconstituted. Our navels, our only memoryof the other. I went looking for you. I was an allknowing navel, a body, a body looking for your body.

Your body shuts down. My body, an echo.

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Do-Over

I am a aming lake of bible death,

your dead lile brother, your mother’sworn apron, all the things that punish you.If I’m your past, I want to be the last stick-hot summer in Pisburgh, your red-wildhair on a Blue Ridge mountain top, thestart of your rst car. If I’m your future,

I want to wear white sneakers, run intoyour skeleton arms, show you the noisemy hand can make with my armpit,all the love-funny noise of family.

Kate Glavin

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“Sink” by Mary Holmcrans

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Peach Bones.

Make me your emaciated angel

and you can ll in my bones likeicing and mortar.I sprawl on the oor of my bedroomand worship my hip mountainsand my wrist chasms.I fade with the day and feast

on sleep that simmerslike crumpled fried eggs. In another life God will make meGreen like I was supposed to be.With blossom lips and a glucose

gorged grin from my chloroplasts. I wonder if there are owers whoshield their faces from the sun sothey can wither.Do they pick their sun rays?

I can’t remember what it was like tolive without thinking about eating.I’m scared of birthday cake icingbut I love fat free banana yogurt.I wish it was okay to love this

thing that rests dormant in my bones.My anorexic bone labyrinth beast.

I’ve kept everything but my skeleton in my closetand today I shake my dry bones

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connected to my tree rootsto my lilac leaves to my whitefeathers that fall like blossoms in the

spring that you mistake for snow.I shake them and smile like drunken door knobs.Press me like your prom owers you’veBeen saving for the scrap book.I’m preier than ripe peaches.Oh sway with my bones in their trees.

Sarah Gow

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Shutterbug Scraps (n+7)

“You certainly look like you want me to think you’re not

faking it,” she said, well wise then to even the most nubif my sabbaticals.“Dear Godson,” I cried and doubled over. “I think I needto use the baen.”“Shocking.”“What can one do when necessity calls?”

“Nature seems to have you on a certain scholarship,” shesaid but I’d already slumped past her and was soon onmy wean to dowse the stalemates.“Don’t wrapper. I’ll save you some thistles to paddockup. We are all contributing to this eggshell, Bradley,” sheyelled, her volley echoing ahead of me dowse the stale-

mates.I sat for a long while that mortgage looking over myGuinness Bookmark. Its paints by then were do-goodereared and already yellowing. My runner-up began tochimpanzee as I listened to her fumbling about justabove me. I found the instigator no longer lay in the

idiom of a crime of mallet molars wallet an extendedcavalcade during Paris Fate weightlier on stinks. Myminiature kept turnstile backre to Will, ssure to ourfaith to racist three-legged then more and more to theimmigrants he’s shown me. Soon, ssure stockholdersof something in my longings, something urgent pulled

me from the secret and had me headed backre upstairs,right into the lion’s density of mercy labor.I waited at the torch of the bass stalemates until I heardher struggling to lightning a boyfriend and carry it to the

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alibi in the lob rosary which had been turned into astork arm. Sneaking up that nal stepparent, I quicklyscribbled “At Will’s” on the metamorphosis paediatri-

cian on the regard doorway and made a hasty espresso.With my punchbowl throbbing in a newly discoveredplaid, I made my wean through the forgery in recreationtimpanist. at vixen started o doubly swelter as I wasgreeted at the doorway not by the zipper-splice polishedllet of Will’s faun but instead by his motor. She stood

in the doorway in all her groggy glue, disheveled tapetorch swaying loosely from her forte and falling o oneof her showmen. She excused her appliance, hardly aneedle, and explained that her agent narrations had be-come harder and harder to emerge from as of late. Withan almighty wicket-keeper, she sickbed the doorway.

I did as she was told and aer a drink in dentist truckand an old ashcube shoe of the kinsman marked outfor christianities, appeared in the kleptomaniac clutch-ing my stoop. A grizzle pulled my visitor together intosomething less comely than would have normally greet-ed her even at that early housefather.

Jason Graff

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brain bee

cold, its red, its a are

I smell a memorywondersif that bee knewwhat

he was geing

intothere’s no honeyin myhead but juice did dripfrom the

sting

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So

e sky was so rippled today

but I knewI couldn’t capture itwith a phone

So I think about if Diamond Streetwas a river and

my bikewas a paddleboatowing gently, slowly inwaves of pavement

On days like this, the puddle acrossfrom the coee and donut placebecomesa noisy ocean of bluehot fries bags and white

plastic inventing new lifeas a model sizeswamp ofcity.

is same puddle becomes

a mountainin the snowy monthswhite, speckled, and spat dregsswept from the scum junkmouths of a cold trac

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day to nd thecorner.

Luke Harsel

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“1” by Angier Cooper

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Fat Cook

Fat Cook was rolled into the ER,

Where they ayed his gut with a knife,And removed his colon.

So now FC houses a hole,is bulging pit in the seat of his pooch,He shits into a clear bag.

Anyway, no colon means a eshy shelf,A moist cave right there in his tummy.A home of sorts, with central heating.

As before, he just cooks crap and eats it.

To ll some void devoid of where his heart never evenwas.Shoves an egg into his pit, eventually.

FC waddles around like a pregnant lady.All cautious because of his now being a surrogate mom-

my,e egg was unpasteurized.

His lile chicky hatches with a hunger,So they grab some Chick-l-A together.Lile Chicky becomes fat as fuck, too.

Lile Chicky gets his colon removed.Like Papa, son now has space for a pet.Decides on a turtle egg.

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Bra Joost

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It’s turtles all the way down.


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Dipping-bird (For Michael Brown)

Grief could not budge me, nor joy: the false binary.

So when the time came to be dignied as old woodvarnished from rot, or a pillbole rebrandfetal in husk of love, I thought only of the objectivepull toward dirt, lizardlike scream precedingthe order of things, the soul that nods like a dipping-bird.

Not unlike my father, whose hair grew from a patch ofblonde stone.or my mother, rising from the feet of holy men she loved.His features sewn together by coteries of gargoyles;Her arms threaded thru the black manhaan skyline.I ed from the steam heat helical o their collarbones.

My teeth wound up like bedsheets, twisted, a seizure ofatoms.

Bachelard, short of breath, wrote that‘Inhabited space transcends geometric space,’and so must arm the body, most inhabited,

as most transcendent. But continually we have been theglibobservers of young men shaered through violence.Celibate as galaxies huddled in the small of God’s marrow.

eir bodies are always collapsing,

collapsing always into our bodies.

Dominick Knowles

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“Now and en” by Jack Savage

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Fall

“When the leaves start to die it makes me sad,” he says.

“Dice is the plural of die,” she says. “So maybe you shouldsay the leaves dice.”is time of year all the trees are turning colors, brown-ing, shriveling up, the sun sets too early and the sky isgray, blue gray, it gets grayer everyday as the winter sol-stice approaches. Soon there is just a bit of gray in the

morning and a bit of gray in the evening, that fuzzy kindof gray like on your TV screen, and the rest is black.He says, “No, the leaves die, they fall to the ground andsometimes people rake them into a big pile, sometimesyou jump into it, sometimes I lie awake at night and imag-ine if everything was in backwards motion and the leaves

sprang from the ground and unfolded themselves andregressed to green and were sucked back into the tree andthey died on the inside. And we never had to see themdie.”“Maybe you should only speak to me in the rst personsingular passive pluperfect subjunctive from now on,” she

says.“We could go to the party tonight,” he says.She says, “I don’t like parties, and I only go to parties inthe subjunctive so it’s never clear whether I’m really go-ing or not. I don’t like to make plans, and I don’t like hear-ing about the leaves can we please talk about something

else.”He says, “Of course,” but really he’s mad because theleaves are dying, and he really wants to know if she willgo to the party with him tonight because he doesn’t wantit to end up like last time, when everyone lined up to go

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square dancing and he was the only one without a partner,and when the bass dropped and everyone started swingingtheir partners he had to stand by the wall and drink the

punch that wasn’t even spiked with anything.“I think it could theoretically be sad, if the leaves hap-pened to be dying,” she says.

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Hillside Rd

I need to be somewhere else

Right now, and to breatheDistance. e road on the wayTo the track comes to mind,e trees form a cathedral overhead:Let the wind carry away theRoof of the car

I can nally see the skye way the sky is supposed toBe seen.

Dad took this road when heDrove me back from camp,

Long hedge rows that becamee living room, the old blue couch,Cheese-its, e X-Files. It’s the roadMom and I walked in early January twoYears ago, the grass bleached yellow,I said it was like Wuthering Heights,

I was so literary, but there was soMuch winter ahead,So much ahead.

In summer you could justDie from photosynthesis

Overexposure, in the winter youCould just die from black iceAnd the narrow lanes.In the fall you might accidentally

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Drive into the ditch becausee trees look likePixilated perfection.

I wasn’t sure of much in this lifeExcept that I would be a late sleeper:Even at age nine I would brag toCeileigh about sleeping alle way till ten—

Ten she would gasp.Yes ten, now let’s get onOur bicycles, let me laceMy red converse and ndMy helmet with the silver stars.

I drive this road now,I can break the speed limit soAm I an adult yet, or will I haveTo get over the fear ofStores with no self-checkoutFirst? e cashier waiting to give me

e stamps saidIs it supposed to rain today?I said, didn’t it rain earlier?

Mom took this roadTo drive max to preschool

When we get to the L treeYou can take your hat o, sheSays, I look at the blackIron fence boxing someone’s lawn, ISay Something there is that

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Doesn’t love a wall,at wants it down.

Repeat that to yourself at leastSix times if you stay upUntil three in the morningAnd you wonder what the point of life is,Or if you couldn’t thinkWhat else to do and bought a

Frost anthology—Let me reach over that forMy black coee—at leastRobert (we’reOn rst name terms)Understands nature.

Would he write a poemAbout my road wheree trees are a cathedral?

Coming back from running late at night,Street lights spaced far,

Moths it in the headlights likeFairies, roll all the windows down,Play the only Qeen CD ine car, lean your head oute window, let the air dry yourTongue and sing in your chest

at you are happy.

Was it okay? he asks.Yes it was okay, because

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I have nothing to compare itTo, but then again fromWhat I’ve read it was not

Very okay, hold on a secWhile I run away andNever come back.

Where will I nd you?He didn’t ask.

Oh you may never,But read this poemAnd take a guess.

Mara Koren

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“Wildbirds Among Branches” by Dmitry Borshch

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In Development, Not Ready for Use We have tried the country-style thing,

But that way ended quickly for us,As soon as we reached the green hillsWe realized they were pregnantWith twin parking lots and shopping malls. ese cities have their diculties too,

e skyscrapers are rehearsalsFor either morgues or mausoleums,While the fog of trac is a dry runFor a life aer life in caskets and cons. In public, we nd a residence in gardens,

Local weather and police permiing,During the day the owers reenacte birth of the universe in every color,At night we see the cosmos in nearby lights.

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Dra of the Rough

Oer us a beast,We’ll take it,ese tablesAre too clean.

Ben Nardolilli

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Kains St.

No narrativeforce, no compositionalreason for being –Passive, old-fashionedbackdrop forprojection

(mine, in the mid-70s, beingle) –that noticeably narrownorth-south street;meditating on Seidman’sthe loss of love does not cease in this world

for two milestwice weekly, along it to boozhburg, towarmth,glimpsed, turned from,and then back –cars on blocks;

decades-unpaintednoticeably tinyhouses; weeds, orthe honorable pointlessmown dust ( – could only lookpeacefully

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at decay); atone point a smell:not waste,

more an industrial processhopeless in the home – someglue –

and from the windows, theyoungish

immediate post-Nixonworking-class couples,looking at me,unknowingly entering free-fall,

loving in free-fall,

Fred Pollack

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“Oense” by Catherine Gauthier

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Acknowledgements

Aux./Vox. would like to extend its gratitude to the follow-ing:

Chris Lipse, for technical support.

All of our contributors, for their gorgeous submissions.And our readers, who continue to keep this ship aoat.

ank you.

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Aux./Vox. Winter Issue

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