Noble Gases When the last tank of helium arrived, Ben and I were the only people on the loading dock. We were on our lunch break in our uniforms, the supercenter's logo on the back and the front. I was eating a tuna sandwich my mom had made me. She puts lettuce on either side of the tuna so the bread doesn't get soggy. I placed what was left of the sandwich back in the Ziploc it came in and stood up, so as to meet the shipment like a real employee and not some schmuck who was

See You Again When I return to the lab, the new tanks are the first thing I notice. My colleagues had no details about my daughter’s service, no address to show up at or send a card to, so I think the octopuses might be their version of sending flowers. I flip through the paperwork. They were delivered on the very same day as Kara’s burial—with the kind of spontaneity that has had no precedent in this lab for twenty years. And being the only evolutionary psychologist on staff

The College Guide for Secret Diabetics Blurb Diabetes will bankrupt you and it will kill you. While you have it, it’s time-consuming, restrictive, and painful. You wish it didn’t exist—or at least that you didn’t have it. You’ve decided to hide your diabetes as a form of deep personal denial, great! I have, and you can, too, with this nifty guide to keeping your condition undetected. A Brief History Somewhere in India, sometime in the 5th century BCE, a doctor tastes your pee

Dispatches from the Cypress Cities Since the pandemic began, I’ve been looking for a canoe. The internet is a swamp of backorders, thousands of us waitlisted, pining for bikes and boats. Everyone says get a kayak if you want to go out alone, but those are sold out too, and besides: I want a canoe. I covet a thirteen-footer, something I can slide onto my truck by myself, tip over my head and carry like a mollusk, or set on wheels and roll down the launch. You can lay down in a

Dirt Roads Today, hiking along a river in another state, I’m thinking of the dirt roads between Belle Fourche and Spearfish, and how in early summer when there is still enough rain, the prairie folds itself like velvet into Spearfish Creek, the banks like two hands cupping grain. And the railroad-tie bridge the boys jumped from, and the abandoned white chapel we must have broken into when we found that cooler of Keystone Light. Not every river reminds me of sex. But I’m remem

Sans Souci I. He asks, “What brings you to the estate?” and you know that you and your boyfriend are going to say different things. “Fresh air, close sunlight,” Gregory says at the same time you say, “Relaxation, and the fountains,” and then Gregory laughs, and you smile, and the desk man smiles, and everybody is playful and winking. But Gregory’s wrong, and you’re right. The fountains are the reason for the trip. Even now, he won’t speak it out loud to a stranger. Too ashame

Of All the Metaphors for Being a Daughter I’m drawn to the strangler fig’s cosmic swirl of execution, aerial trapeze artist mining down through the body. And who am I to pretend I have any stake in that death: dissolving nutrients, nonconsensual sacrifice, melted trunk a banquet while the whole canopy looks on, quiet in growth. The silent dissolution, and after, nothing but soil made richer for the disappearance. Reader, which one daughter, which one mother? Repeat after the

Portrait of Woman as Coal Mine They abandoned you like the land. Your bones collapsed, your breath, the friction of shadows springing fire from torn rock. Your pipe scorched holes in summer’s green upholstery. You were careful to smoke out the sun. One clear day, I saw you in the light. You laughed like a fox hit by a car. Not quite dead. At the punk bar you spat blonde beer in the eye of a woman who presumed to strike electricity from your veins. The woman was you. From your

i think i’m finally ready to admit that i don’t know the first thing about forgiveness once i wandered in penance an oasis desolate as an ocean cleared by a storm the only souls still around a small band of ghosts who stretched their legs on a sunless veranda rattling a tune with jars full of teeth i plucked petals off pale tulips heard the same song in she loves me not & can this kill me for years i’d steal every vessel from its siren pick the matchw

Darrin Maier Portrait, 2020 ink, 5 x 7" Smile, 2018 charcoal and ink, 9 x 12" Loomer, 2020 collage, 10 x 14" Good Wife, 2020 ink, 10 x 14" Nothing, 2020 ink and collage, 8 x 12" ISIS, 2020 oil paint, 6 x 9" Vertebrate, 2020 charcoal and ink, 18 x 20" Codeine, 2020 ink, 10 x 14" DARRIN MAIER (@darrindraws, b. 1985) is a mixed media artist who works and lives in South Jersey.