When laughter twists in panic MarkVogel

Surely no innocence remains long in this backwater where thick green sheen coats the surface, masking primal moves by creatures raised in murk. The smell of fish rot slows the historical record, which has forgotten how the New Madrid earthquake stopped time, created this cut-off horseshoe bend where the Mississippi once flowed left creatures that proliferated in the hierarchy of muds. No thin-skinned trout could survive in this still swamp. Instead, alligator gar crowds hang at the surface, endlessly patient in a psychedelic shimmer, oblivious to me standing with fishing rod in hand at this rough end of the road where boundaries dissolve what is within mixing with the humid outside. In this ancient scene real as day a vision appears, a childhood cartoon that again makes the frightening comical. A smart aleck skinny gar wearing a tux, singing with Louie Armstrong’s growly voice one more predator re-made into friendly spectacle. Amazed at what flickers in the heat, I watch a whole community of bullet-shaped gars float on the surface, all pointed teeth and bony ribs, ready to attack anything that moves even the very real zigzagging cotton-mouth water moccasin. In this meditative pause I accept all that is muddy and draped in green algae all that is dangerous and can wound. A gar long as my arm rushes at blue gill, makes them skitter and flee just like its ancestors did eons ago. In this sweating sauna I bond so naturally with these rough natives thriving in mosquito-rich heat. At home in this liquid essential poised in this Faulknerian hallucination I wait. Thin and bony after my travels far back into savage provinces, I know for sure I am back home.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals.

The first punch made you see Orion, Cassiopeia and Taurus. The second left a nebula's starling shades on your right cheek. Leo, Gemini, Auriga. The third made you slump like the Big Dipper against the changing room wall, your hand shaking from the sound of the family car; Canis Major and Ursa Major growling at the state of you, ready to wrestle.

The earth coughs up snowdrops while we slowly defrost. Let me drink meltwater to remember what I stashed in the empty cave of a winter heart; to remember what must be renewed, not just consumed.

Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Double Speak, Obsessed with Pipework, Primeval Monster, Clade Song, Uppagus and BlueHouse Journal.

Not what I expected, the lone guy in Spanish For Nurses, who’d scrawled Served in Iraq when I asked about exposure to other cultures, looming now from the back after our review of body parts, feelings, routines and foods,: Does it hurt you the head? Do you have hunger, thirst? The imperfect as used to, the perfect as has been, tallying pain, 0 to 10, how to say IV, ventilator, to be scared, broken, alone. He says that alien language and COVID masks remind him of drills in midday desert, the smallest gap between cheek and gasmask turning sweat to gushes of tears and snot, fingers fluttering down his face, and as he thumbs his phone I expect shots of buddies posed before the IEDs, or after, fitted with cutting-edge legs. Instead, the blur of a sonogram, another of him masked, holding his newborn daughter. Actually, they do the hard work, he says, waving at the women as they pack up. That was the only time, I swear, that I ever really lost it.