"Untitled" by Jing Lin

If a Boy Has a Gun in the First Stanza, It Has to Go Off in the Second by Kate Wright

Even if it’s at a party in the woods and you’re seventeen and your mother doesn’t know you’re there and everyone is drunk (especially because everyone is drunk). Even if he thinks you’re on his family’s land and you try to tell him that you’re not and he’s mad, you can tell that he’s mad because he’s furrowing his brows, a vein in the middle of his forehead is throbbing, because he’s like every picture of everyone you’ve ever seen who’s mad, and he points the pistol at everyone who’s talking like it’s some sort of talking stick from the third grade and soon everyone’s talking and he’s waving the pistol around and you’re pointing at the trailers that aren’t his and the four wheelers that aren’t his and the sign by the entrance that doesn’t have his last name on it which has to mean that this land isn’t his but he clicks the safety off anyway and everyone gasps then is silent and you’re sure you’re going to die, seventeen and drunk and in the woods and you face him but your eyes search for places to run, everyone’s eyes search for places to run, and someone’s hand thrusts out a beer and by some miracle of god he takes it, clicks the safety back on, but oh that crack- hiss sure sounded like a

pop.

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Kate Wright received her BA/MA in English from Penn State. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Kate’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Rust + Moth, Columbia College Literary Review, Sport Literate, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @KateWrightPoet

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 In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, portrays a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see?  www.jinglinphotography.com/

Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA.