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Credits. Book Layout and Design: Miah Jeffra Cover Artwork: Pseudodocumentation: Broken Glass by David DiMichele, Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco ISBN: 978-0-692-33821-6 The Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices is made possible, in part, by a generous contribution by Amazon.com Gaslight Vol. 1 No. 1 2014 Gaslight is published once yearly in Los Angeles, California Gaslight is exclusively a publication of recipients of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Emerging Voices Fellowship. All correspondence may be addressed to 5482 Wilshire Boulevard #1595 Los Angeles, CA 90036 Details at www.lambdaliterary.org. Contents Director's Note . 9 Editor's Note . 11 Lisa Galloway / Epitaph ..................................13 / Hives ....................................16 Jane Blunschi / Snapdragon ................................18 Miah Jeffra / Coffee Spilled ................................31 Victor Vazquez / Keiki ....................................35 Christina Quintana / A Slip of Moon ........................36 Morgan M Page / Cruelty .................................51 Wayne Johns / Where Your Children Are ......................53 Wo Chan / Our Majesties at Michael's Craft Shop ..............66 / [and I, thirty thousand feet in the air, pop] ...........67 / Sonnet by Lamplight ............................68 Yana Calou / Mortars ....................................69 Hope Thompson/ Sharp in the Dark .........................74 Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta / Mother and Son Go Shopping ..........82 Megan McHugh / I Don't Need to Talk Everyday ...............87 / No Little Oh .............................88 / In The House of Absolute Forgetting A Deal Was. Made ...................................89 / St. Ann St. ...............................90 Jeffrey Ricker / The Blizzard ................................91 David Weinstein / Lonely Chains ............................99 Ricardo Hernandez / [if nothing else, be still] .................102 William Lung / False Idols ................................104 Celeste Chan / Wolf pack in the Tenderloin at midnight .........115 PJ Carlisle / A Weird Blue Moment ........................117 Roberto F Santiago / Quand Tu Dors Près de Moi .............136 / The Cavalier Nature of Electricity. 137 Jenna Leigh Evans / Two Terrible Ladies .....................138 John Copenhaver / Carol Lundgren .........................146 Baruch Porras-Hernandez / Tlaloc El Lloron .................163 / Chalchiuhtlicue ...................165 / En El Templo de Coatlicue ..........167 / Que Digan Que Estoy Dormido ......169 Annette Covrigaru / Afterlives .............................171 Garrett A . Foster / The Domino Murders .....................173 Timothy Carrier / Ordinary Happiness ......................190 Alex Grandstaff / The Moving City .........................193 Ed Moreno / Pause .....................................209 / The Currawong ..............................211 Regina Jamison / Lurleen .................................215 Theodosia Henney / Some Measure of Grace ..................231 / Gesture ...............................233 / Mating Dance for Thunderstorms ..........235 / Cardium: an Etymology ..................237 Corey Saucier / Clover ...................................239 Seth Fischer / The Goblin ................................253 Marcos L . Martínez / A Study of the World's Flesh .............256 Jennie Gruber / "She wouldn't look Jewish at all" ..............266 Meg Leitold / 1967 Borders ...............................269 / Grace. 272 Claudia Moss / Not Without Passion. 274 Joseph Osmundson / There is No Other Shelter ................288 kynita stringer-stanback / Archetypes ........................292 Parrish Turner / Edge of the Map ..........................301 Noah Stetzer / Save It ...................................313 Contributor Bios . 315 Gaslight Note from the Director ∫ Tony Valenzuela Every summer during Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices I’m humbled by the extraordinary talent and generous spirit of the incoming students. I’m also reminded how powerful and necessary it is to host an LGBTQ literary residency. To spend a week among queer writers talking about books and the writing process, listening to each other’s work, deepening our understanding of craft, building community and making new, lifelong friends is a privilege and a rare gift still vital in 2015. Lambda Literary founded its Retreat in 2007 to give promising authors a leg up in a publishing industry constantly in flux where it is still challenging to get books about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives published. Selected through a highly competitive application process, the Retreat draws talented writers from every region of the U.S., Canada and around the globe. Lambda Fellows (Retreat students) spend the week working on their manuscripts in fiction, nonfiction, genre fiction and poetry (with a playwriting class being added this summer) in small, individualized workshops led by our community’s leading authors. They also attend guest lectures throughout the week covering the gamut of issues pertinent to getting published. Recently at a national writers conference I ran into the poet, Ellen Bass, who taught the poetry workshop at Lambda’s Retreat in 2010. She made a point of telling me that she’s taught at writers residencies all over the country but never has she taught a workshop in which her students went on to publish their books as frequently and win other fellowships and prizes as her Lambda students. There’s so much that I’m proud of when it comes to Lambda’s Writers Retreat but above all else, I’m proud that Lambda Fellows enrich the Director's Note / 9 fabric of our literature by their own literary contributions. As if that’s not enough, many also go on to start or finish graduate programs, to win other fellowships and major prizes, to start their own literary journals or find meaningful work in the publishing industry. Lambda Fellows are engaged, productive members of literary communities around the world. They are not only the future of LGBTQ literature but also what’s most exciting about the present. I invite you to enjoy Gaslight, a superb collection of work by Lambda Fellows in our first annual anthology of writings from our summer residency. I’d like to especially thank Miah Jeffra, the brilliant editor of this volume for doing such a beautiful job with this inaugural issue. Tony Valenzuela Executive Director, Lambda Literary 10 / Gaslight Editor’s Note ∫ Miah Jeffra I met my 2014 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices cohort at the top of Los Angeles, in the middle of summer, at the bottom of news: Israel had just begun its retaliatory assault on Gaza. My heart was heavy as I settled into my Berber carpeted dorm room, dropped my necessities, and sat on my bed, wondering who would be bunking alongside me for this string of mysterious days: all I knew was that it would be a stranger. An LGBTQ stranger. A LGBTQ stranger who likes to write. What a collusion of stuff: disaggregated violence and a queer with a pen. I hoped that I would meet some dedicated and inspiring writers to settle the disruption in my gut; I hoped that I would write, perhaps about something I cared about. My expectations did not extend beyond this utility, and I unpacked my bag with rocks in my hands, and the weight of the world pressed against my chest. And then, Seth appeared. Or rather, I returned to my room from a stroll, and there he was, my Fellow roomie. Upon sight, his whole face lit up with welcome and opportunity. Yes, a light in the face. A lightness. And that was the beginning. From then on, during the seven days of this retreat, his face became one of forty. A surprise--I was lifted, by them all. We fell in love. Writing is love. Writing is justice. A little context: I did not want to become a gay man until well into my twenties. The reason? Literature. In all the queer-matter stories I read--by Winterson, Rechy, Cunningham, Hall, Baldwin, Crowley- -everything seemed anxious, either a circumstance of repression that led to death and alienation, or a rather lascivious abandon that, well, also led to death and alienation. I felt the truth in these works, even a little tingle in the most necessary parts of my body, but I wasn’t looking forward to living the narrative pronounced by these tales, especially if it resembled the dark tones of a life not quite on the horizon. It was all so anxious, so self-conscious to me, then. Hopeless. Editor’s Note / 11 I realize that an editor of something like this is supposed to sit with the collection of texts, wade through their poetics, their choices (and such terrific choices!) and declare the emergent theme. [imagine theme being sounded out with the slow sumptuousness of still-hot taffy, or Savannah humidity]. Not the case, here. The only emergent theme in this collection, besides our identities as queer folks all across the spectrum, is just how much of a rounded horizon that spectrum has become. There is plot play, political jabs, social polemic, meditations on nature, domestic scoping and, of course, love. And, of course, music. And, of course, perspective: that sliver of the truth, that light of a blade, or that to light the way. We fell in love. Writing is love. Writing is justice. I finish editing this journal as people, including myself, walk across freeways and stop traffic to disrupt routine, the routine of forgetting that all lives matter. Again, my heart is heavy, as I settle in to write this note. But I do walk, and I do