quick brown fox

spring 2011

welcome

Quick Brown Fox is a new independent publisher of creative work by the writ-ers and artists in the five college area. We strive to bring the isolated creative communities of the different colleges into dialogue with one another. Our goal is to highlight the work of students by making this publication accessible to the five college community.

This is the first issue of Quick Brown Fox. We received over 60 submissions for our inaugu-ral issue, “Those Meddling Kids,” and the quality of the work was outstanding. We extend special congratulations to the creators of the 16 pieces featured in this issue. These pieces represent what we see as the best work of our peers. We hope you enjoy reading these as much as we have, and urge you to contribute in the future.

The Gardener to PeterSEAN NOLAND

Equinox ‘99HOLLY MITCHELL

AleksanderAMANDA ROBINSON

KidsAUTHOR

Divine EmbouchureMADELINE ZEHNDER

NoahCARA GIAIMO

Four Dead WomenRHIAN SASSEEN

UntitledCLAIRE HARPER

The White Sky HangsELISE LASKO

the TABLE of CONTENTS

JessNIKOLE ANDERSON

Women in Fur Hats / Women in No HatsCLARE COOKE

Coffee and LionsCHEN CHEN

Lying Back We LiedJULIA TEELE

FallowALLISON BIRD PILATSKY

BrotherIZABEL NEILSEN

The Fallen MountebankJULIE HOWD

UncleKELSEY SWENSEN

We Are RealMATT COSBY

The Gardener to PeterSean Noland

“Who will take up the shearsWhile the old guard dreams?Who will prune the hedge at GethsemaneWhen the hours have gone?”

SEAN NOLAN is an English major and member of the Class of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts. He is the bassist and songwriter for alt-country band ‘The Futurenows.’

Equinox ’99Holly Mitchell

We walked to the Dairy Queen, ordered vanilla cones, sculpted them all back home, where the heavy orange

curtains still hung from floor to ceiling. In the summer, those curtains made the den feel like a fort, like a secret drowned

in orange juice, peanut butter, graham crackers. Pulp-crumb-syrup-stuck. I loved you then.

We would draw our fingers across each other’s spines. We would fall asleep with landscapes centerfold on our spines.

We watched Babe in the den. Our feet clapped the cork floor the puppy had yet to teethe through.Call it an orange rind. The windows big cuts

of citrine. Sweet sting drug out to the curb with the curtains.A fleck of crayon left

in the holes you found in my body. The leaf ’s stem gone fromthe holes I found in yours.

HOLLY MITCHELL is a Mount Holyoke student. Her writing can also be found at The New Gay. Once, Amanda Hess quoted her.

AleksanderAmanda Robinson

Aleksander is from the Ukraine and is constantly telling the rest of Mrs. Grant’s fourth grade class that one day he will be a famous classical composer, like Mozart. I have never heard Aleksand-er’s music, but I hear his mother affirm his genius to my mother one afternoon, squared off over their cups of coffee. He makes my hands shake until I can’t hold a pencil. He looks like a martyr in moments of concentration, but when he opens that sorrowing mouth it is to taunt me. He has the habit of repeating everything I say two octaves higher, vowels dragged through the air as though it were mud. The day I scream into his face midway through a lesson on the Louisiana Purchase, he is the least shocked of all of us. In the following embarrassed silence, Mrs. Grant suggests that he would do well to be nicer to girls. His smirk is like iodine, but the rest of the year, at least, passes in silence. I picture him, a math major at a respectable university in the city, the grave overseer of his grandfather’s pocket-watch. He holds his spine very straight when he walks, eats only a little, is sure to let his friends see that he drinks his coffee black. Women admire the carefree tangles of Ukrai-nian on the phone with his sister and the still way he watches gulls wheel over Lake Michigan. But Emma Czerniak will remember him for the one thing he said when whatever it was between them finally went sour beyond repair. The slur itself was unimportant, but the way he let it hang in a lull, tenuto, turned her own complaints to salt on her tongue. It circles her for weeks, this thing, and one night she dreams of priests with sorrowing mouths.

AMANDA ROBINSON is a second-year student at UMass Amherst, where she studies English, French and Chinese.

STEPHANIE GIBBS is a freshman English major at UMass Amherst.

Divine EmbouchureMadeline Zehnder

“It’s God’s instrument, boy!” he shouted,arms above his head as if to pull downthe Big Man himself to lend his argumentsome weight.It’s not like he needed the help:a barrel-chested man weighing inat well over four helpings of mashed potatoes,he could fill his lungs until they were readyto pop and his face turned a bright watermelon;only then would he bring his lips to the mouthpiece,and let wail a stream of pure gold,as rich and sonorous and terribly aliveas anything you can imagine Gabriel up thereplaying with his five-piece band.“So move that air, boy!” he cried,pulling at the collar of his shirt,driving his hands down to the flooras if pushing the invisible columnthat roared to life through his student’s slidein a tawny cord of muscular sound –jolting the boy from his chair andsurprising even the big man,who paused and exhaled up towards the heavens;“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

MADELINE ZEHNDER is a sophomore at Smith College, where she studies Musicology and English.

Noah Cara Giaimo

Noah built an ark. It was sturdy wood. Well, one piece was. The rest was airplane balsa. Red writing still on it. “For best loop-the-loops, hold here.” Noah said it was decoration. He stole the neighbors’ chickens. Two of each color. Four cocks, four hens. And eight babies (he couldn’t leave the babies). And all the eggs. Explaining, “eggs turn into babies.” The neighbors were riled. They used the full moon. Followed a trail of feathers. Found sleepy Noah, marching chickens. Two by two. Ramp made of a busted drainpipe. The chickens kept falling off. “What is that thing, boy? That ain’t a coop. And these ain’t your birds.” They’d brought chicken sacks. The birds seemed relieved. The Johnsons left two eggs. Only ‘cause Noah cried. Next, two barn cats. One black, one brown. They both seemed like boys. I voiced my concern. “You ain’t Noah,” Noah said. His arms were shredded. “You’re Isaac. Go off and get killed.” He touched the biggest scratch. I didn’t correct him. “Or find me acoupla snakes.” I did. Garters. We mud-slicked the ramp. They slid right up. Then I netted three songbirds. We let go the ugliest. Noah kept expanding the ark. Adding rotting timber nobody’d miss. I thought of school reopening. Of Ms. Bosman’s mice. The cage was dirty, heavy. It barely cleared the window. We carried it home together. Dark-ness woke the rats. Familiar nighttime scuttling between us. For once exactly placeable. The ark was getting full. Noah grew worried. We took shifts. I brought two river fish. He started jar-ring bugs. I wondered about me. Noah noticed. Looked backwards at me. He wanted to be plain. I was helpful, deserved frankness. There might not be room. He may need a girl. He was considering his options. I yelled I’d be pilot. And I’d take his sister. He bloodied my mouth. It was sudden and stung. Tasted wretched. I ran home, mouth dripping. I skipped a day. The next, Noah was waiting. The fish had died. The cats ate the birds. The snakes ate the eggs. The ark was all mouths. Fanged or dead and gaping. The entrance was a mouth. “Damn this,” Noah said. His eyes shone. Not from crying. Eggshell on the snakes’ backs. “Let’s go to the zoo.” We snuck in. Pocket money long gone. Not many pairs there. One giraffe, tall and lonely. One matted lion. Game farm rescues, both. Two dozen rabbits, all girls. The monkey cage was empty. Closed for repairs. Noah stood on a bench. “Where do they put them?” He swayed back and forth. Looking. “Where’s a safe place?” I had no answer. I wondered similar things. But differ-ent. Based on my own name. What I’d die to save. Or who. Why the ark needed pairs. If both could make it. If each sank the other. My mouth was still tender. I stood on the bench, too. It started to rain.

CARA GIAIMO studies Biology at Amherst College, so she recognizes that a Noah’s Ark-style flood rescue would lead to genetic bottlenecks and thus fail to stave off mass extinction. But she also studies English, so she still likes the idea.

Four Dead WomenRhian Sasseen

In childhood, they had constructed a kingdom, albeit one in which the sky had already begun to crumple.-

As always, Emma is the first to return, and as she is enveloped into her father’s hug all the old worries come back: all the same tremors, the same anxieties of the body. The house itself has barely changed, except for the soft, almost imperceptible groan of her mother’s oxygen machine spreading slow throughout the halls. In her bedroom, her mother’s crooked body lies attached to a dozen spidery tubes, a plastic web that Emma slips gingerly through as she hugs her mother hello. Blood has bloomed bright in her mother’s right eye, unfurling like a sea anemone; her father tries to warn her, but the burst vessel does not scare her. Rather, Emma is reminded of another moment of bloodshed, when clots as briny-dark as ocean water spattered down her thighs and into the green of the toilet bowl. The comparison gives her a moment of satisfaction; when she leans to kiss her, she thinks again of all the things her mother could have told her, but didn’t. This is why she agreed to come. “Don’t tell your mother she’s dying,” her father begged her over the phone, his voice tinny in her ear, like a shell’s whisper. “Isn’t it obvious? I mean, how high of a chance does one have of surviving two strokes?” Emma asked idly, not really caring what the answer was, and penciled in the flight information for the coming week.

- Rebecca arrives in the evening, after dinner has been picked at and after Emma has begun to attack the dishes their father has neglected. Pointy elbows, she thinks as she hugs her younger sister, and sits at the counter to watch this display of domesticity. She has heard it said that the smell of chicken fills the air in the moments just before a stroke, but their fa-ther said that their mother had been eating a Danish, and Rebecca can see the plate of them shoved off to the side. Days old, their sugar has congealed, slick as snot, and completely unappetizing. There is almost nothing to eat in the house. “How long does she have?” “Oh, the doctors say it’s soon,” Emma says as she dries the forks. “At this point, she’s so filled with painkill-ers she probably can’t even recognize us. Dad says the nurse told him that she can hear and understand us, though.” “And Olivia?” “She’ll be here tomorrow.” Rebecca watches her sister move throughout the kitchen. When they were little girls, the island and the house itself seemed to hold limitless possibilities, and they were the three sisters, the kind found in every sort of myth and fairy tale. It is cliché to swath one’s childhood in this kind of make-believe, but there is something irresist-ible in the myth making, some kind of youthful opiate she wants to swallow whole again. Impossible. Once, yes, she was a girl, as opposed to a concept or idea – but how much time has passed, how many rules has she has forgotten, and how much has she transformed since sixteen, when Olivia left and the neigh-bor boy took her, his fingers sloughing off all the innocence from her skin.

- “Olivia!” Emma shouts when the door swings open, and Rebecca hasn’t seen her this animated for a long time. Their older sister’s voice rings out as she comes towards the kitchen, already trailing loud words, and when she enters the three are together for the first time in years. Rebecca is reminded again of before – inescapable, in this house – and she is again transformed into the line between Emma and Olivia, the youngest and the oldest, the two extremes. Where is that one picture, the day they took the ferry to the mainland? – but Olivia has already found it, in the study, and the three peer over it, eager to glimpse themselves in that time just before adolescence, when their bodies had only begun to wriggle and grow like tadpoles. “Oh, God, look at me,” Olivia says, pointing to the center, where she looks as pretty and angry as always

. Emma, too, is as sly and scrawny as Rebecca remembers; she herself stares directly at the camera like she always did, directly at the parent taking the picture. She remembers this day, when she realized how useless the arguing was, the day she realized that their words were only carrion to be picked over by their mother. “Why did you leave?” Emma asks quietly. Olivia tries to laugh. “Silly, I had to go to college.” She puts the picture down. They have all remembered what is going on upstairs.

- When it happens, there is no surprise. The week itself has been enough preparation, and it begins when their father has ducked out for a moment only, and the three sisters lounge sleepily around their parents’ bedroom. There is no need for hospitals, and so time has taken on a strange and suspended quality; it now feels incongruous for someone to die in the comforts of their own bed. They are learning that they are not immortal. They are repeating this to themselves like schoolboy Latin, reminding them that eventually hearts will always stop, skins will always wrinkle, and breaths will always cease. They are remembering that they will die. Their father returns and holds their mother’s hand. It is happening, it is happening. Olivia stands near their parents, a hand upon their father’s shoulder. Emma is standing, too, but farther from the bed, a look of morbid hope painted plain across her face. Rebecca sits on the ottoman, hands folded, watching the three other women. When it happens, their father’s shoulders sag. Rebecca does not feel any kind of wind or soul passing, like some of the books on grieving said she would. The sisters look at each other, and in this moment there is the ques-tion, and the silent consensus is that they should be happy. Rebecca thinks again to all the stories, all the legends; now the wicked mother is dead and they should be rejoicing. She sits up with a weird revelation and says, “We’ve got the wrong myth.”

RHIAN SASSEEN is a junior English major at Smith College who has won numerous awards for her writing, ranging from local prizes in her Washington hometown to the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.

CLAIRE HARPER studies at Smith College.

JessNikki Anderson

I.Tip-toeing into father’s dresser – blue suit coat, starched white button downtoo crisp for an eleven year old to loosen,the little girl reflected in the mirrorsensed the presence of a little boy.

She searched through books and bedsto find an answer. Preferring footballto dolls, she hid herself in baggy blue jeans,frayed at the edges of her identity.

Where could she find those like her? Or him?Confusion struck her hard asher father’s slap, soshe ran fast to a blank slate, where every face isneutral, no turning backas the teenager sought safetyin the anonymity of New York City.She had a choice to make.

II.She hung her khaki chinos on thebrass towel rack as sun bledred on the porcelain walls,she longed to end the shame thatpoured out of her every month, drained the man she desired to be. Theneedle gleaminghormones tinted yellow,

veins peered out like little girlsafraid of the dark,a shot of whiskey to her heart,melted her outsides,a deep breath as the liquor washed the sense of calmness she needed tostab her thighevery two weeksthe man grew stronger.but mere passing glances providedacceptance.two small mountains, deflated.

NIKKI ANDERSON is a senior at Smith College studying psychology and education with a concentration in poetry.

III.Black stubble roughed her face,now a chiseled square jaw, slimmed,curvy hips cut off with each shot,juice-stimulated muscleformed with each pump of iron. Voice dove deeper, barelyrecognizable as calluses grew overher rugged hands like weeds,

a rough exterior presented itself, the five o’clock shadow was a bush to hide behind in the men’s room. anxiety brewedbut mere passing glances providedacceptance.

IV.The last of her clung to his chest,two small mountains, deflatedby testosterone, inescapablefemale identity:

scalpels scraped tissue off anewly flattened body, as lumps ofdisease gave way to railroad track scars,slowly healed tomasculinity.

A dull pain throbbed as he saw himself reflected in the full length mirror, bandages hung like cobwebs on the smooth surface,staring him in the eyes the body he had wanted,he turned the cold knob to step outside into the city,no longer unidentified

His breath froze on his beard.

The White Sky HangsElise Lasko

a frozen yolk in her hair, the silhouette of an earringthat glistens only when she tosses her head to smile. Her motion stirs a huffing windthat silences speech and screeches inuncovered ears.From below, her yellow-red dancers delicately float on her breath, lifelessly jostledlike sleeping puppets still strung to tressby invisible thread – snow’s predecessor.

ELISE LASKO is a sophomore English major with a poetry concentration at Smith College.

Women In Fur Hats,Women In No HatsClare Cooke

little drips bounce anddive in and out of couch potato sleepersbread weeperscowbells sing your songas frozen iciclesbits of tinselharsh against the exposednape of the neckgnawing gently to peel away the skin

ripples of skin blinding the homelesswho should have found a kinder placeto be that waysinging songsmy old-time some-timeradio on the radiator resonatingthrough ripples of rippled time lostthinking of that metal hitting pavementeach morning the snow piles upmakes me trip slip flipit’s ok no one is hereto see me

CLARE COOKE is a senior studying english and art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Coffee and LionsChen Chen

Why did I flinch? I loved you. – James Merrill

1.In the final winter of my teenage youth, I fell in love with a flight attendant, flying from Helsinki to Shanghai. He came down the aisle with his squeaky little cart and in a soft, slightly drowsy voice asked me if I wanted my coffee with sugar—in Finnish…then Mandarin…then Cantonese…Korean, Japanese, English. Knowing three out of the six, I still couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t. Months later, he finds me on the same online dating site: “You’re that guy who couldn’t make up his mind! You’re cute.” There’s a picture of him in Hong Kong with his sister’s cat cradled to his bare chest. I try to think of what to say, things I like. I like trees, ghost stories, ginger candy. I like this picture of him, with the cat. I like cats. It’s spring already. I turn twenty, and I can’t answer him. I can’t. He doesn’t message me again. I remember how his steward uniform clung tight to his shoulders, and how, on that nine hour and five min-ute flight, I wondered if anyone else could see his nipples through the navy fabric. The coffee, it was black, ultimate-ly, and almost too hot to pick up and actually drink. And those two dark points—they were almost purple, peeking through that happy shirt.

2. A long time ago, I was in love with two amateur long distance runners, one of them scrawnier than the other, but both scruffy-faced, both with 5K best times under twenty minutes—acceptable. I wasn’t in love with them both at the same time, at least not in the sense you see in the movies, with flowers going to the wrong or maybe right one, and awkwardly hilarious elevator encounters because, it turns out, everyone works in the same office building. No, one love happened and ended years before the other. But after both ended, I saw how the latter had been a kind of continuation of the former, as if one actor had been called in to replace the other one in the same, long soap opera. Indeed my love life, I discovered, was more of a Spanish TV series than a Hollywood movie: no clear resolution, only more of the same, and with the possibility of a main character’s death by horse stomping in every episode. And despite the slightly above average athleticism the two of them had in common above all else, instead of crav-ing a change, I felt it was simply my destiny to fall in love with yet another long distance runner, especially if he ran a 5K in around nineteen minutes. I wasn’t looking for an Olympic marathoner, for someone too glorious and too busy for a relationship, just someone who wouldn’t throw up after a 3.1 mile race, someone who knows, after the finish line, to keep walking in order to cool down properly, and then reach out for my hand, stand with me awhile under the trees. This third love hasn’t happened. Now, though, I realize that all of this has to do with runners’ legs, and my appreciation for that body part in general, which is very different from many gay men’s particular fascination with biceps and abs. See, I’m not looking for a hero, for someone to save me with their legs. I’m an amateur runner myself. This is a philosophical argument. A pair of shapely, muscular legs is aesthetically and, in the long run, practically more sound than a six-pack for the beach. Practical, I say, because if you find yourself in the unpleasant situation of a mugging or lion attack, you’re probably not going to win, because you are, more likely than not, pretty average in terms of body strength, and in any case, no competition for knives and gazelle-tackling jaws. However, if you possess an above average set of legs, strong legs, you just might be able to scale that fence or rock formation in time to avoid getting an ear cut or an arm chewed off. Or, if you’re lucky, you can seduce them; I mean, scare them, by making that little extra effort, being an amateur.

CHEN CHEN is a fourth year student at Hampshire College, concentrating in creative writing, history, and Asian/American studies. He is currently at work on a manuscript of poems exploring family stories and candy.

Lying Back We LiedJulia Steele

Lying back we liedIn beds and laidSuch lies in bedsUnmade we triedAnd stayed we lied(For lying laysAnd laying lies)With eyes and bedsAnd hearts and heads,With touch, looks, and cries

JULIA CHADWICK TEELE is sophomore at UMass majoring in English, and minoring in French and Philosophy.

FallowAllison (Bird) Pilatsky

This is the closest I have come to forever:hands dyed red, shade of water drainedfrom boiled beets, an earth bitter smell.The kitchen is full of roots as I submerge my handsin water, prepare what we have been given.Memorytakes on this smell, dark like red cabbage,shredded and pickled, an oldGerman recipe, the plants pulled upwith an effort that flushes our cheeks.

I am made of this: Not morning, but star-stuff turnedearth-stuff so that I can trap itbeneath my fingernails, burymy history in it, some time capsule of proofthat I was, am here, to carry with me.

We plant and pick to remember some selfwe never met, old family with cabbage pink flesh, but you die without telling the stories.

This is why we leave these fields fallow.You become star-stuff, morning-stuff, earth-stuffat once, and I will be nothing but dull-eyedand dusty. Mom says I have your eyes.

ALISON PILATSKY is a junior at Smith College, double-majoring in English Language and Literature and the Study of Women and Gender, with a concentration in Archival Work.

BrotherIzabel Nielsen

How you untie the looping wool and stretch your taught skin to make yet another hat.

If you let the yarn sleep,

You will see that the hat keeps stitching and aching between your fingers.

A bigger hat no less is on your head, a little tight but I like it that way.

I can see your mind reaching for the wool again,

Please weave me into the next one.

Your words are no good here for I am pasted with imagery

Or is it memory of your strings finely tuned?

Warped with small hands plucking out silence.

The body of a cello makes me look unraveled in this light.

To design such hands would be a sin,

Hands that can hold fabric and sound and still have room left in your palms,

Space never empty but singing with another kind of energy.

Sometimes I see a ship sailing in those palms,

A ship that has no destination but clear direction.

We sleep on the deck in fear of the night and in awe of the stars.

Sharing the spot under the mast we discover that a colander could strain our fears,

Letting the light be our only dream that plays on quivering chords of air in the sails

When I call your name, “brother” I yell,

I cannot turn my head to face you

I would rather listen to the beautiful sound of strings,

And a voice that whispers behind the wind.

If heaven knew you were here would they let you stay?

Are they aware of your talent to untangle angels hair?

And how you knit god’s dimples into every hat?

How do you keep going when the ship is sinking into the mind of another sea?

If you swim I must not have recognized you,

For the water is the same color as your eyes.

Hems will unravel and you keep sewing

For your eyes are still thirsty and they drink from the gourd of your brow.

IZABEL NIELSEN is a junior at Smith College, double-majoring in English Language and Literature and the Study of Women and Gender, with a concentration in Archival Work.

The Fallen MoutebankJulie Howd

I’m in the process of falling over:first my body will go near the groundthen my head will go near the groundthen the ground will come up and whack me,lime-yellow and hairy, back up towards the sky.

It’s a disaster when you’ve atrophied, bathedin cotton sheets and feverish nights, beggingfor water and then begging for water. My head’sbeen wrapped up for some time now. I fearthe walls that aren’t mine. Do they bite?Do they let in the seashell air?

I lie in a state of anxious quandary. I museover the juju of breakfast toast; it fallslike manna from Your palms, not brusque,not violent like the way I’ve fallen. Margarine, I’m thread-splitting veins.

I imagine it: the escape, bursting forthlike garden hose water, fast and everywhere.I hug the grass for a minute, then on my waynowhere. I lift Dasanis from the Hess station,window shop for pairs of power-line boots,laugh at all the cars like RC’s on the rotary.

I scatter like sawdust. They know meall over by the great big hat I foundon the side of the road. I make my livingselling sermons atop a milk crate. They lovemy words, they swallow them whole like vitamins.

I sleep in different cities each night like a superstar.Fliers tell folks when I’m coming up. I fish fountainsfor pennies in the moonlight, pose with statuesto scare the drunks. And every morning I wake upand do something else.

It’s thrilling, life as a free agent, trailingnothing. Not this, not my body like a pincushion, not like an aisle spill someone forgotto mop up. You come to my place now and then,and I beam like halogen. I show you my words and tell you: I wrote these, I wrote these, the rotaries.

JULIE HOWD is an English major at UMass Amherst with a minor in Psychology. This is unfortunately her final year, and she will be graduating in May.

UncleKelsey Swensen

sometimes i surprise myself and think of you curled in that blank cell in fort dix making use of your hands to pass the time

my cousin says i should hate youbut i bought your cologneto spray on my pillow at night

just so i can prove i am not unfeelingjust so i can prove i can still be turned on

i am a victimi have been told this for years but

they still havent told me what you did to me if i was broken why

KELSEY SWENSEN is a sophomore at Smith College. She is majoring in psychology and enjoys taking creative writing courses.

We Are RealMatt Cosby

We made stews. We ran between trees. Bone, horse, cucumber. You plucked at my fur. We watched birds. We waded through swamps. I howled at geese. You howled at the ocean. Storms moved the water. We built shelters. We cooked stew. Logs, skins. I love you, I said. I love you, you said. We cracked bones. We counted planets. We smiled. Venus, Mars, Jupiter. Some had no name. It was a secret. Monsters cannot get along. We bared our teeth. We caught rain in cups. We tore villages apart. We lit fires. You drank sap. I caught fish. We walked together. Trees parted for us. We gnawed on bones. We ran. We had a secret. Storms broke the trees. The ocean howled at us. We swam. We tore down statues. We feasted on churches. We made towns into stews. We trembled like children. You killed kings. Snow covered the trees. We built better shelters. I killed children. We were in love. We feasted on horses. We licked up blood. You bowed your head. We bared our fangs. Winds grew. We burned king-doms. We touched each other’s mouths. I feasted on emperors. The swamps grew red. We counted planets. We stretched our jaws wider. We swallowed planets. Monsters cannot escape their nature. We held each other. The sky grew red. You washed my wings. We caught blood in cups. You dried my face. I dried your face. We opened our jaws wider, wider. Monsters cannot love. All monsters are alone. Wider, wider.

MATT COSBY once built a gingerbread house. Matt Cosby is a senior at Amherst College, where he studies English and Art. It was more like a gingerbread fortress.

CLAIRE HARPER studies at Smith College.

submissions and information

for submissions and information:quickbrownfox2010@gmail.com • quickbrownfox2010.wordpress.com

if you are interested in helping out next year, please contact Rhian Sasseen:rsasseen@smith.edu