FINDING FEATHER BY NICOLE PEPAJ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 136

I’m on some broke-off ridgeline writing this on my phone, eating the crackers in a Chilli Mac MRE.

The view from here is scorched earth, ash-grey for miles like the bomb on Nagasaki all over again. The air smells like napalm and sage.

Men have fought fire since Tribes ruled the Great Plains, before horses, before hand tools. The land has always burned, and we’ve always fought it the same way. Planes and drones help. But fire will always need men and women on foot to meet it.

And oh the people who fight fire: ex-gang members, discharged veterans, displaced intellectuals, lost college athletes.

This is the way.

I am like a kid in the Marines. That’s what this is to me, my Marine Corps. I drank the Kool-Aid hard, shoved it into my brain through a metal IV tube, rewired every neuron for this one relentless purpose.

Being a Hotshot.

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BIRDS BY JOHN T ALTMAYER, STANDARD SHIFT BY MARCIA L HURLOW, MILFORD MILLS BY HJ DUTTON, BEFORE I FALL BY ELLI MARI, HARD DRIVE BY MARK SMITH, PARANTO’S JUNGLE TRAPS BY VARTAN KOUMROUYAN, THE GIG BY RL CLEMENTS.

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BIRDS BY JOHN T ALTMAYER, STANDARD SHIFT BY MARCIA L HURLOW, MILFORD MILLS BY HJ DUTTON, BEFORE I FALL BY ELLI MARI, HARD DRIVE BY MARK SMITH, PARANTO’S JUNGLE TRAPS BY VARTAN KOUMROUYAN, THE GIG BY RL CLEMENTS.

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WILD GIRL BY COOPER SY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 35

Who were you when you took off like speedo 

for sunny California, radio full blast while dreaming 

awake? Who was the boy? Who was the girl behind 

the wheel of the old Dodge convertible leaking oil?

Was he or she the one who went blind from the  

dust of the open road, rivulets of rain running 

down muscle and swollen veins?  


Did you light his cigarettes? 

Did she light yours?


Who snatched the zippo from a store in Wyoming 

with a cow or James Dean embossed in black on 

the phony metal? 


What town, or state of mind did you grow tired 

of laughter and maybe love?

COOPER SY

Thanks to my mother’s foresight and tenacity, I never had to celebrate my birthday on April 20 the same day as Hitler’s. Although an obvious struggle, Mom waited until the minute hand safely crossed the border from 11.59pm to 12.01am April 21. Looking forward from that day to the present I realize there have been many such fortuitous crossings, crossways, crossovers, fords, streams, rivers, and oceans. One voyage still in progress uniting my mythic longings with reality was being accepted to The American Film Institute (AFI) as a Directing Fellow. Foregoing reason and especially foregoing practicalities, I packed my life, including my young son, into an old Dodge convertible and crossed the continent to the dream factory. Standing on top of the AFI’s terrace at sunset I believed fame and fortune was as close as the Hollywood sign I could almost reach out and touch. Decades have passed, I haven’t yet entered the pantheon of film gods, but still feel hopeful, even lucky to be making films, directing plays, having my poetry, short stories published.

BIRDS BY JOHN T ALTMAYER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSSUE 141

Tanner called me on my way home from work and asked if I could bring some beer. So I did. He was my friend, so I had to.

Plus it was a sad situation over there. Tanner’s only daughter was dead. Her name was Vivian, five years old. She was drowned by the Missouri River in a boating accident.

Tanner’s wife Jodi was at home when it happened and she would never see it as an accident. She blamed Tanner, reminding him at every chance that it was his carelessness that took her only source of light, the only thing she lived for, from this Earth.

It caused a divide between them so that they slept in rooms on opposite ends of the house. God never intended for them to live separately under one roof, but those were the circumstances.

When I got to Tanner’s place we stood in the kitchen drinking the beer and he talked as I nodded my head, and then he said, “Douglas, man, you know I love Jodi, but I just can’t take it any more. She won’t work, she won’t eat, she won’t talk to me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I sipped at my beer and shrugged.

“You want another one?” Tanner asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

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STANDARD SHIFT BY MARCIA L HURLOW 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

Here’s when my urge to live 
another person’s life began, 
on the drive from after-school
orchestra practice, my cello 
case flat on its back, lodged 
securely behind my seat. 
My friend’s bass viol wobbled 
in the station wagon’s
cargo. Its scrolled head thumped  
against the tailgate window. 

An anxious first-year 
driver, I scanned the fields 
for a deer or hungry fox 
that strayed onto Green Farm Road. 
An angry Angus bull 
could rage through the fence
and right into my dad’s 
black Pontiac. Mark said,

“Pull over and let me drive. 
It’s late. My mom’s car has 
standard shift. I’ve practiced. 
I can drive this baby 
like shifting hand positions 
on my bass. If the cops 
pull us over? Just say
it’s urgent. I’m driving 
you to the hospital. 
Say you broke some foot bone 
when you dropped your cello.”

I watched the gold twilight 
over empty corn stalks, 
the scythe of new moon 
rising through skeletal 
fence row trees. “Listen 
to the engine when I 
downshift. In third now
it’s a tuba. Now, fifty!” 

I fought the sudden
inertia that threw me 
back in my seat. I wanted 
to push my hands ahead,  
clutch the padded dashboard. 
I wanted to match  
Mark’s head tilted above 
the steering wheel. He wasn’t
going home. He squinted  
into another dark 
mile, its long silence.

MARCIA HURLOW

My husband, linguist and artist Greg Stump, and I sit together for two hours every weekday to “create”. I don’t always write poetry but I have the space in those hours, physically and mentally, to do it. I have published two collections of poetry, Dog Physics, and Practice Rapture. I am the co-editor-in-chief of Kansas City Review.

MILFORD MILLS BY HJ DUTTON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

They found the town by accident. They made a loop of Marsh Creek in their scuba gear with mesh bags collecting fishing line, shoes, paddles, plastics, all that trash.

Virgil drifted through the murk like a trashbag with legs, barely kicking.Then he saw a building.

Yes, it was real. No larger than a shed, it had windows and a door. No roof, the beams jutted where it used to be, like ribs. Past the shed more buildings. Many more, barns and farmhouses, and a grid of scars in the lake’s floor, roads flayed of asphalt.

The house windows seemed to stare them down. The doorways gaped like toothless maws.

Joel backed away. What was any of this doing down here? For a moment he hovered in the murk, watching after Vitgil as he peered into windows and doors.

Joel rapped on Virgil’s tank and jabbed a thumb upward. Virgil nodded then turned back to the town.

Joel swam up to the surface. No use trying to drag the old boy out. He’d come up on his own time.

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BEFORE I FALL BY ELLI MARI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

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HARD DRIVE BY MARK SMITH 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

The hard drive in Harry’s laptop clatters to a stop.

OMG the screenplay’s gone.

He turns the laptop off and on. That worked before. Not this time.

Harry calls Jack.

What? (Jack hates the phone.)

The hard drive died, Harry says.

You backed up?

Always back up.

Harry, I have a meeting, I’ll text you, right?

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PARANTO’S JUNGLE TRAPS BY VARTAN KOUMROUYAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

I didn’t think there would be squirrels in the jungle. I always thought squirrels lived in cities, like cats, dogs, and rats. Sheryl said in the jungle there were skunks and armadillos, snakes, eagles, bearcats, and yes, squirrels.

I planted a thousand pineapple, or piña as Sheryl liked to call them, their Spanish name, and I noticed that the squirrels liked them, and they were many, as if they all bunched to razzia the plantation.

I suggested to Sheryl we pick the pineapples not quite so ripe, but she always refused, saying the pineapples needed more time. Of course the squirrels got to them first. So I decided I had to trap the squirrels.

The wildlife in the jungle on the island of Palawan, Philippines, was not just squirrels. I could hear guttural sounds that I imagined were from a big owl perched on the tall Apitong tree. There were many varieties of ants, red, the most lethal, black, small, medium and large, and another species that filed in long spartan formation from one side of the house to the other on the wash line or the transom of doors, thousands of them on their commuting route that made me think I’m in their way and I have to adapt.

In the mush of a rotten and decomposing tree trunk I found black scorpions, like a brooch in the soft yellow nesting cocoon with a fluorescent rainbow on their carapace like oil leak on water. At first they seemed surprised for the inconvenience when I poked a stick at them.

Many tarantulas hid in the planks of timber Uncle Ontoy cut with his chainsaw near the well, that I brought to store in the sala, the storage room at the back where we had a bed and a wardrobe. One day Sheryl found a constrictor snake, three feet long, baby size. There was a family of geckos who had chosen the rafters to settle, perhaps because it was easy for them to prey on insects and equally easy to hide from the wild birds under the roof.

So I set a trap for the squirrels. I used a slice of pineapple rind to lure them into a cage. For camouflage I cut a bunch of leaves from the Marang tree, grass, dry twigs, tufts of crabgrass, and placed the trap where the sun plays on the shade. I set another trap near an avocado tree because there were many squirrels, and I thought with another trap they might get the idea and change their plans.

It’s their territory and I’m their guest in the jungle, I grant that, but they were ruining the pineapples one after the other without eating them completely, spoiled brats.

In the same way I might trick the chipmunks, skunks, hay rats, or jungle mice, coming up from the rice fields to fill the gaps when the lowlands are ploughed and there’s nothing to eat. They seem to understand what razzia means by instinct, all of them, the ants, the owls, even the eagles, when they hover and eye the chicken or the puppies and think of the possibilities to swoop and pick one.

It seems that’s the only purpose of life and everyone was to defend a territory. Wake up, wash, brush, comb, pee, scroll, swipe the screen when there’s connection in the middle of the jungle, buy the traps from the hardware store in Taytay, nail more barbed wire on the perimeter, wash again near the water tank in the patio because the Pacific atmosphere feels heavy in the air and the indigo-cyan clouds look like a painting in fusion when the sun sets tufts of peachy, crimson, cherry red flock of sheep on the mercury sky, plunging its last rays behind the mountain range, and its suddenly dark.

Walking to Quintilla’s grocery store in the barrio on the path with the chirping of some colourful birds, Paranto passed me on his Rusi 125cc motorbike and beeped in recognition. The beep is in lieu of a salute. He won’t release his grip on the handles because the path is rough.

The shady section in the lee of the trees on the path is like the non-gravity feeling of the amniotic fluid the body remembers when suddenly a wave of freshness sweeps from undergrowth and I inhale all the aromas in one breath, the harvest moon a silver coin on top of the trees, the dry hay, the rice chaff, the drying mud, the wet grass, the dew glints, the warbling birds, and body and mind are exhilarated, until the path winds under the piercing sun on the opposite slope and the weight of terra firma tugs on the feet.

I asked Paranto if I could go with him to the jungle, because he always brought us meat when he came back from his expeditions, wild boar rib bones, chunks of meat I cooked in the caldero with beans, green chili, tomato sauce, on the campfire under the awnings, breathing the amber smoke of the dying timber dust, those I picked up from under the Apitong tree where the land suddenly fell into the precipice. Thick, heavy branches that had fallen in storms and were worthy for cooking “because they last longer” Sheryl explained one day. I didn’t know the difference between the timbers and their use, those that flared up and consumed quickly from those that burned steadily for longer periods to make the stew simmer longer with just one log.

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THE GIG BY RL CLEMENTS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141

At the end of Zappa’s Peaches and Regalia some dudes in the crowd start yelling, “Boogie, boogie, boogie.” The Maestro, the one with the thick, bushy, absurd-looking mustache and dark shoulder-length hair, says, “Okay, so, you want to hear some boogie.” He gazes at the dudes. “Fine,” he says.

And with a twitch of his nose he strikes up the band with Son of Mr Green Jeans, which is as far from boogie as far fucking out. The crowd applauds like it’s the best song they’ve ever heard.

“You think you’re so smart!” shouts a shirtless dude. He cannonballs out of the crowd and climbs up onto the stage. I’m thinking, you’re on a bummer trip, man. Don’t let the drugs hijack you.

The Mothers of Invention blank-stare out this loonytoon. Then a giant black man comes from backstage, calmly grabs this guy, picks him up, tucks him under an arm, and takes him off.

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BROTHER X BY STEVEN MCBREARTY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 100

Brother X cranked up a portable record player in our religion class and played A World of Our Own by The Seekers. On the chalkboard he wrote: A World of Our Own? Yes?

I sat surprised, curious, mesmerized almost, pondering the ramifications of this tour de force of an introduction to a religion class. I didn’t know what to make of it. Playing a pop song was so far removed from the norm that it was mind-blowing.

When the record had finished, Brother X sat on his desk—that was his signature move—swinging a leg up under his cassock. He waved magisterially in a let-me-have-your-attention kind of wave.

“So-o-o,” he said, pensively stroking his chin. “A world of our own. What do you fine young specimens of American manhood think that’s all about?”

One or two hands went up. Brother X clapped his hands. “Come on, gentlemen!” he said. “What do you think? You look like some pretty smart guys to me!”

Some more hands shot up. “There, that’s more like it!” He scanned the room with his finger, then pointed: “What do you think? You!”

That first student, and everyone else, thought pretty much the same thing. The song was the ideal, that to be in love and to live with somebody together sheltered from the trials and tribulations of the outside world, was what all of us half-baked 14-year-olds aspired to.

Brother X sat there shaking his head amiably, inscrutably.

“You’re all correct, that’s what the song is saying,” Brother X said. “But that’s not what God wants from you. God doesn’t want you to hole up and hide from the world. He wants you to share yourself with others, share your happiness, share your love.”

This was revolutionary stuff. Hands were going up all over the place. We spent the remainder of that first class in a rousing free-form discussion of our role in creation, our purpose as human beings, our place in the universe.

When the buzzer sounded ending class, I walked out in a kind of trance, navigating through the crowd in the hallway as if entering a new dimension. Being a good person meant being good to others, not blindly following a set of prescribed rules and regulations. Being a good person meant going outside yourself to serve others. Thinking I had any love to share at all was itself a profound deviation from my former mindset.

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GOLDFIELDS BY CHRISTINA BAKEWELL, RAIN SETS IN BY PATRICIA WALLESVERD, ALMA’S TREASURE BY DESMA SHEERER, EPIPHANY BY MICHELLE CACHO-NEGRETE, GLUE TRAPS BY DARRYL GRAFF.

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GOLDFIELDS BY CHRISTINA BAKEWELL 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Two months into my sophomore year of high school and every day gets harder to endure. I’m surrounded by children. My 15- and 16-year-old schoolmates have no fucking idea what real life is. Their adolescence radiates innocence and inexperience. I can’t handle it. I’m on a whole other level. The only thing we have in common is I’m still a virgin.

The fourth-period bell rings, jumping me in my seat like an alarm. That’s it, I’m out. I grab my bag and walk out to the parking lot. Kayla rolls up. “Let’s go!” she says.

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ALMA’S TREASURE BY DESMA SHEERER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Alma took a long drag of her imaginary cigarette. She held her breath for a four-count before letting it out between her pursed lips. In the frigid February air the steam from her breath rose like the smoke from the nearby mill stacks.

How long had it been since she’d had a real cigarette? she wondered. Close to 18 years. Ever since her first grandbaby’d been born. She’d watched the baby’s trash mother, her son’s now ex-wife, blow a cloud of smoke over the baby’s bald head, and had thought to herself, no ma’am. Alma hadn’t touched a cigarette since. The pack of cigarettes she’d bought that very morning had gone straight in the trash can. The ex-wife could’ve gone the same route for all she cared.

But sometimes on nights like this, when her nerves were frazzled, she’d find herself standing outside in any weather with one hand jammed in her coat pocket and the other trying to trick her brain into some level of calm with the old smoking habit.

“Alma! Alma, let’s go! Jesus, I’ve been calling you.”

Just like that her placebo calm disappeared into the night air with the breath she pushed out in a heavy sigh. Dan had had that effect on her since he was a little tyke. “I’m coming.”

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RAIN SETS IN BY PATRICIA WALLESVERD 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

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EPIPHANY BY MICHELLE CACHO-NEGRETE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Chris kissed Bart and whispered, “See you soon.” She made her way back to his room. She sank into an easy chair and watched pigeons strut along the windowsill in the rain.

The banal elements of the hospital reminded her that somebody else had taken charge of her life with Bart, the bleached smell of the linen, the bitter medicinal odour of the air, the endless blood tests, the checking temperatures, the dispensing of pills.

The rain became a noisy torrent rattling the hospital windows and she felt nauseous. A gray veil of dingy light shrank the contours of the room making her feel claustrophobic. The table was piled high with boxes of candy and baskets of fruit, wrapped in cellophane. Bright flowers spewed from vases like vivid graffiti against the walls. Everywhere were cards hand-made by artist friends. The previous night, Bart had joked, “Preserve them, who knows how much they might be worth some day.”

She dozed, then Doc Logan was there, mask pulled down beneath his chin, blood dotting his surgical whites. He smiled, pulled the soft cloth cap off his head and said, “Success.”

She thought he expected her to hug and thank him while in fact she hoped to never see him again, but she was grateful. “Thank you, so very much,” she said, hugging him. He smiled, told her he’d see her in a week, hugged her back, and left.

Then cross-legged in Bart’s bed she ate half a box of chocolates, and called everyone they knew.

Bart was discharged with prescriptions for antibiotics, painkillers, instructions, and warnings that it would take him some months to feel like his old self.

“I’ll never be my old self,” he said in a solemn tone of voice. He said he was flooded with a new psychic energy, a new vision of his work, and a new, profound love and connection for the whole damned world.

The doctor, hand on Bart’s shoulder, said, “It’s often what I hear after cancer surgery. Survival’s euphoric. Enjoy it.”

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GLUE TRAPS BY DARRYL GRAFF 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

We are checking out a complaint of illegal occupancy at the basement of a building. It’s 8pm, near the end of the day for me and the Fire Department lieutenant and two probies.

The art deco lobby is filled with a warm, lamp-shade yellow light.

I take a picture of the blue and black terrazzo floor.

“What’s he doing, Lou?” Carlos, one of the probies, asks the lieutenant.

“It’s his thing. He’s got a whole collection of Bronx terrazzo floor photos,” Bobby says.

I ring random bells on the intercom until someone buzzes us in. We take the elevator to the basement.

“There we go,” I say at a beat-up grey metal door with a SUPER sign stuck on it. I knock on the door with the edge of my clipboard.

The door is opened by a guy in a white T-shirt. “What’s up?” he asks, leaning against the door frame.

“Department of Buildings. We got a complaint for illegal occupancy at the basement.”

“So?”

“So we have to check it out.”

“You need me?” the super asks, lighting a cigarette.

“You got the keys, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You just answered your own question.”

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THE FLATNESS OF HYPER-REALISM BY ALLISON RICHARDS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 110

Value is a funny thing to measure art by. Talking about conceptual art as if it holds no “value” is wrong in several ways and correct in a couple more. Let me explain.

On social media an artist–very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of painting–posts a time-lapse film of their work from start to finish. We, the viewers, are stunned by how true to life the figure in the painting looks, how the eyes look so wet or the cheeks look so soft. It’s just like a photo, we think as we watch, impressed by this artist’s ability to represent life exactly as it is.

We’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning over them forever. But now the artist films the process and speeds it up to less than a minute, and shares it with millions of viewers on an app designed algorithmically to show us things we will react to.

The glorification of hyper-realism we’re seeing right now is fascinating to me, not because I am a fan of the kind of exact replication of form that seems to stun viewers, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art makes perfect sense in the context of our waveringly democratic reality.

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. Endlessly striving for some fucked-up idea of perfection is a pillar of white supremacy, and a barrier to entry into a world outside the joyless one most of us inhabit in good old late-stage capitalism.

We viewers cannot paint perfect figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time, so we don’t make art. We watch a video on TikTok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection in the mirror, and so we don’t make art.

So some people think abstract artist Rothko is full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. We can have specific tastes in art without being fascist, obviously. But what isn’t fine is the flatness of hyper-realism and the way it exists in our attention right now.

When the art we make doesn’t contribute to its own commodification, it is seen as having no value economically. When what is most commonly commodified is hyper-realism, our less exact, less time-consuming, or more wildly imagined art is seen as less valuable. So, in this way, yeah. Conceptual art can be economically valueless.

When we cannot commit one hundred per cent of ourselves to our art because we have to go to work and we have to take care of our families, or we don’t want to make art that way, we aren’t going to become pros at hyper-realistic art. We aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like TikTok virals or whatever.

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my economically valueless art still has value. Not only is it a rebellious act to spend my time making something “valueless”, it is also a practice in fighting idealized perfection.

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that artists have been making provocative, ugly, confusing, weird, seemingly unimpressive, or seemingly disturbed art in response to global hardship since the First World War. Surrealism, right?

So while hyper-realism is having its day, what’s brewing is (hopefully) something really fucking weird. Make fucked-up art. Even if it pays you nothing back.

ALLISON RICHARDS

I’m a 20-something writer and artist living in East Nashville. Before this I was in Boulder studying writing and literature at Naropa University–which explains why I have no money and too much time to write. I write essays and poetry about walking home, my struggle and ultimate recovery from anorexia, what it’s like moving through the world as a woman, chess, sucking dick, being afraid, being in love. girlseekingpeanutbutter.blog