March/April 2015 Issue
executive editor r.l. black
Š 2015, unbroken/Contributing Authors Cover artwork by Roo Unless otherwise noted, all accompanying photos are under a CC License. Font used in cover creation, inside banner, and author titles by John Holmdahl
Contributing Authors Alex Brantham Ani King Anton Rose Bryan Verdi Carolyn Abbs C.C. Russell Chris Milam Christina Murphy David Spicer Eva Roa White Evan Guilford-Blake Howie Good Jessica Van de Kemp John Grey Jon Wesick Judith Lloyd Kathy Steinemann Kelly DuMar Kelsey Dean Kenneth Pobo Larry D. Thacker Lisa Richter Mark McKee Maureen Kingston Michael Prihoda Natalie Parker-Lawrence Nate Maxson Nolan Liebert Poornima Laxmeshwar Richard Heby Sandra Anfang Sarah Kedar S.H. Connelly Sharif Shakhshir Shinjini Bhattacharjee Suzanne Phillips Galloway Sylvia Heike William Doreski
by C.C. Russell
The night you lost control and your shirt. The homemade tattoo on your left breast. There were verbs thrown, disowned. A memory aged now, but the first night you were sober with me. You took off your socks (You always were afraid of feet). You cast off your resolve. Your dark skin against my white sheets, one home-rolled cigarette between your small fingers. You took off your reticence. *** Nothing changes. Nothing ever has. You rattle this decree off of your teeth, enamel chipped by the force of your assessment. *** But that night; once sober, once tender. I entered you and believed we were changing. Your lips, what they whispered, what your fingers spelled over my skin. A story stalled for a moment. This intermission: I believed.
C.C. Russell currently lives in Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and two cats. He holds a BA in English from the University of Wyoming and has held jobs in a wide range of vocations. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rattle, and Whiskey Island among others. His short fiction has appeared in The Meadow, Kysoflash.com, and MicrofictionMondayMagazine.com, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions.
Accompanying photo by Nic McPhee
Memory by Alex Brantham I have been in this room for one hundred and seventy-two days. I know this because the nurse gave me a notebook when I got here, and told me to write in it every day. The early pages are headed with the date, written in an unknown hand. Underneath, my own scrawl, very shaky at first, records what I had for breakfast and whomever I spoke to that day. “Write about what you can remember,” they said. “Not just what happened today.” But each page is filled with the minutiae of daily life, with not a single word about the past, or who I am, or how I came to be here. For a little while I continued putting the date at the top of the page, but this didn’t last. What was the point of recording whether it was April 17th or May 23rd? These are conventions for making appointments with friends or family, and I have none. So I numbered the days, instead. And today is 172. My injuries, although not life-threatening, were painful but have mostly healed. There are scars which you can see if you look carefully, but the hairdresser is skilful and they hardly show at all now. I appear to be normal, but I don’t feel that way. I’m not even sure what “normal” is, if truth be told. And now you have come to tell me this news. You are excited, as if you have solved some great puzzle, and it appears you are expecting me to join in your enthusiasm. Is that what I am to you - a conundrum to be cracked, like a crossword? But if what you tell me is the truth, how can I have forgotten it? It makes no sense.
You say I have a wife and a daughter, and that they want to see me. You tell me they thought I was dead, killed in an accident along with our son. My body assumed to have been swept away by the river into which my car descended. This is madness: don’t you think I would remember something like that? I tell you it’s not true; you have mixed me up with someone else. A man who looks a little bit like me, who had a dreadful accident at about the time I appeared here. You want to take a sample of my spit, to show that I am that person. Yes, I remember reading about DNA tests. I remember many things: I can remember words, and books, and almost everything I learned at school. Except geography, of course, no-one remembers geography. You’re smiling. You think it’s good that I am able to tell a joke. Well, naturally I can tell a joke: I’m amnesiac, not stupid. I still know how language works and how to set up an unexpected ending to an amusing anecdote that will make people laugh. This is what we call a “joke”, and it requires no memory. But if I am the same person as the man who drove into that river with his son in the back seat, surely I would remember the shriek of the brakes, the impact as the car crashed through the barrier, and again as it hit the water, as hard as a rock? Surely I would recall the icy torrent entering the cabin, filling it up to the roof, as I fought to release first myself and then my son? If I had escaped, while he remained inside, how could I not have burned into my memory the image of his sweet face, bubbles escaping from his nose, while I pulled in desperation and futility at his door? The sight of anguish in his eyes as he looked to the one man in the world whom he trusted always to keep him safe, failing him at the time he was really needed? I would remember those things, and yet I do not. So they did not happen. I do not consent to you taking a sample from my mouth. You are mistaken. You must tell this woman I am not the man she is looking for; that her husband died in the river along with their son. He cannot return, and neither can I.
Alex Brantham endured a long career as a corporate slave, but is beginning to feel much better now he has escaped to spend more time with his word processor. He lives in Reading, England, where he writes novels and short stories, some of which can be found along with other flimflam at alexbrantham.com. Accompanying photo by Frankieleon
First Blue by Nolan Liebert When you came into the world you fell like rain, little body. Nobody else’s eyes are the madness of the river. The sky does not sink into the brown circles of your father’s face. Or mine. We cannot see the clouds crossing your vision, just quick flickers of burning sun. I tried to drown you once, child. The water wouldn’t take you. You rested in the rivulets, the whites of your eyes flashing, defiant rapids. Nobody else’s eyes drink lakes. Unimaginable, your frightening pools glittering like wet indigo. In my nightmares I see your eyes open wide, swallow the world.
Nolan Liebert hails from the Black Hills of South Dakota where he lives with his wife and children in a house that is not a covered wagon. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Gone Lawn, ExFic, Map Literary, An Alphabet of Embers, and other publications. He can be found on Twitter @nliebert.
Accompanying photo by Stefan Insam
by Ani King
Jacob lingered in the parking garage doorway like a heron- one leg tucked up, head cocked towards the stairwell. You’re still a big girl, he said. I like that, he said. And I turned in the doorway so he could lick the late summer sweat from my neck. Justice and I took the last few hits of acid and sprawled in the tub next to the toilet that didn’t flush- first with our clothes on, while our denim-bound thighs rubbed together and then without, while I closed my eyes against the swelling light. Jen. Blonde. Drunk. Slap me, she ordered, until I did, surprised then to find my own blood rushing to the surface. When her lip split, and her teeth were red, she came. Years later, after I was married, and enormously pregnant, she would not let me leave until I caressed her thin pale skin with a razor blade. I love you, she said, I do. I handed her the bactine. John and I drank a fifth of gin in a hotel room and politely discussed politics between fellatio, cunnilingus and a failed attempt at anal sex. The next morning I went home with black bruises on my thighs and arms, smiling. I made breakfast; I took the children to the library. J, when I return to him, and I always do, will roll over and ask, did you have fun? His hair is dark and rumpled and smells of sleep and whisky. Don’t I always, I ask, slipping into bed beside him.
Ani King has a lot of black and grey shirts. She always means well, but ask her herb garden how that’s been going. She writes short stories and poems that some people enjoy, and she can be found at thebittenlip.com. Accompanying photo by ManAlive!
by Christina Murphy
The fidelity of stones transfigured is the denial of change and absolution. The curved lines of memory bring the rose trees into the garden and within the reflection of infinity. The moment of untouched sounds is the symmetry of grace set afoot in the heavens of starlight and the peculiar presence of streetlights in the transcendent world. You speak of choices bold—like blood—caught in the rush of universal currents like tides, like rivers against golden hillsides in twilight. Isolation bows down to fate—there are no other options save the broken starfish washing up against the shore. Who will gather up the pieces, still warm with life? Who will hide the loss from the moon and the stars and whatever passers-by care to look at the wounds and ruptures? The sky is purple with vanishing light. No towers are visible from the harbor. If church bells rang at all, the sound would be like echoes in a canyon of starlight. A vortex of squares in fused energy. Spirals eddying into grace and formless shapes. The mirror is hungry to devour the moment and save its reflection from infinity.
Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including, PANK, La Fovea, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and in the anthologies Let the Sea Find its Edges, edited by the distinguished Australian poet, Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, and Remaking Moby-Dick, edited by Trish Harris and published by EU Art Line. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net Anthology.
Accompanying photo by Patrik Nygren
by Anton Rose The tables in the diner are empty. All except one. Shades hang broken and twisted in the corner. Ted ignores the menu, its laminate peeling at the edges. He takes the ring from his pocket, slides it on. Slides it off again. It glides over the thin white hair on his knuckles. When the server arrives he asks for coffee and pie. Apple or peach? He closes his eyes. She always used to make good pie. Crumbling crust. Sweet hot filling burning the top of his mouth, leaving damaged flesh, impermanent marks. Apple, no cream, he says. Back on the road there isn’t much traffic, mainly haulage trucks and coaches. A pair of bright eyes hangs in the darkness. He swerves to the side and sees the hind legs of some beast disappear into the night. When the moon hides its face behind the clouds he stops. The back of the van is mostly empty. A mattress and a suitcase. He finds the tin tucked away beneath the mattress. She used to fill it with sandwiches every day, send him off to work with a kiss. He opens it. There are a few bundles of notes left. Enough for a few hundred miles, perhaps. Before he closes his eyes he takes the ring from his pocket, slides it onto his finger.
Anton lives in Durham, U.K. He writes fiction and poetry while working on a PhD in Theology, all fueled by numerous cups of tea. Find him at antonrose.com, or @antonjrose Accompanying photo by Jason Mundy
by Natalie Parker-Lawrence
There is an old Japanese tale of the Crane Maiden. A young woman, a stranger looking for a home, visits an elderly couple that takes her in. She has a gift: spinning fine yarn into cloth behind a closed door, but the secret of her gift must stay a secret. No one may see her do it. The old man and the old woman sell the fabric at the market for food. When she does not make the fabric fast enough, the Crane Maiden spins the feathers of her own wings into glorious threads with the help of the whirring machine. For that is the secret: the maiden is also a bird. But one day the old woman becomes curious and watches the Crane Maiden perform this magic through a crack in the door. So then the Crane Maiden must leave. And when she flies away, she takes the magic with her. This must have been very disappointing for the old couple. * There is a newer American tale of a School Maiden. A young Chinese woman, a stranger looking for a home, visits Tennessee, a state that welcomes her. She displays the gift of playing the cello and working very hard in mathematics, but the secret of her gifts does not stay a secret. Everyone sees them. The young woman earns the honor to study medicine in California. When the fulfillment does not come deep enough, the School Maiden decides to spin languages inside of whirring computers. For that is the secret: the maiden is also a human being. But one day the School Maiden becomes unhappy even after she earns a promotion and a cubicle in San Francisco. The School Maiden realizes that she has lost her way on the narrow path to success.
So when her work makes the music fly away, she reconsiders the life of the job or the job of the life. She quits her work inside the constricted and padded walls so that she can secure a window to look out. This must have been very disappointing for her colleagues. ** This is the modern American tale of the School Maiden. A Buddhist woman, a lonely woman, looking for love, she continues to see a Muslim boy also from my class who welcomes her with his gifts of math and science, laughter, and, above all, music. But the secret of their lives together is a compromise: her red mouth surrounded by her luminous white face against his red mouth above his brown shoulders, both sharing the penetrating grace of an uncolored god. Neither of their families must see this. When the acceptance of their friendship does not come calmly enough, the maiden-no-more keeps their love sunken like a hushed treasure in a deep pacific sea. For that is the secret: the maiden is also a woman. But one day their old parents make a discovery: the seven years of hiding their short intimate and long distant love. So then the maiden, who probably isn't one now, and the boy, who helped her along that path, must choose between their parents and their lives together. *** To be considerate, she writes two notes about being tired of choosing, leaves one in a white envelope on the kitchen table, wiped clean, in her apartment and one in a white envelope on the passenger seat of her car that she parks beside the Golden Gate Bridge. She does not write a note to the boy. Amid thirsty runners, each reaching for their horizontal and finished lines, she walks to the middle near the vertical bridge spires. She climbs up the fence and onto the railing. She looks back to the road as she would a crack in the door. She raises her wings, jumps high, whirring, into the air to seek the magic now stolen, the music now silenced, and the love now separated, and, for a little while, flies as the Crane Maiden flies--away and then down. This may or may not have been very disappointing to her parents.
Natalie Parker-Lawrence (MFA in Creative Writing, nonfiction and playwriting, at the University of New Orleans, 2010). English department chair and teacher of AP English Literature and AP World History at Houston High School, she is also an instructor in the Communication Department at the University of Memphis and lives with her husband in midtown Memphis, in a 110-year-old house.
Accompanying photo by nicholas
Sadness by Michael Prihoda
You couldn’t handle the way I talked about sadness. As if my parents had said anything else while baby-talking me in the cradle. But I couldn’t handle you, so I guess it’s fair. If anything is anymore.
Michael Prihoda is a poet and artist living in the Midwest. He is founding editor of After the Pause and his work can be found in various journals in print and around the web. He loves llamas and the moments life makes him smile.
Accompanying photo by Vineesh Devasia
by Kelsey Dean I’m sorry Dinah, I had to leave, my shoes were too tight and I couldn’t breathe when that boy looked at me. Remember when my brother spilled the milk and it seeped right into my skin? It covered up the bruises that were all blue like the lake in my belly button when I climbed out of the pool and sprawled on my back to watch that boy through my sunglasses; those glasses are shaped like cat eyes, like your eyes, Dinah—don’t look at me like that, Dinah, I said I was sorry already; you saw how my feet swelled up in those sandals, in that summertime suffocation. The straps were soaked in milk and his skin was soaked in honey but the buckles were digging into my feet and he was digging into my ribs with his beautiful fingers—Dinah, they were so beautiful they were blinding me through the sunglasses, so I had to peel away the soles of my shoes and run away into the daisies and I’m sorry I left you. The spilled milk is swirling across everyone’s eyes and no one can see the blue bruises and red marks on my skin, not even you Dinah; everyone knows I’m a blue-blooded American girl anyway, but I don’t want to be a stiffjointed doll with a pet kitten and a permanent smile. I’m sorry I’m leaving you Dinah, but I can’t breathe again and he won’t stop rubbing his beautiful honey fingers into my secret bruises.
Kelsey Dean spends most of her spare time stringing words together and training her hands to draw the pictures in her head. Her writing and/or artwork can be found in several publications, including 3Elements Review, Glint Literary Journal, Neutrons Protons, and Arsenic Lobster. You can view her artwork here, and you can read more about her in this Artist Spotlight.
Accompanying photo by Ryan Hodnett
Available Light by Howie Good Just anyone can't go there, a museum of empty picture frames and blank canvases that’s in the process of being torn down, someplace special for elderly retirees with cameras hanging from their necks to visit. On a bench outside the museum, the former mansion of a child star, they discover a sleeping woman with a blue vase. Her sadly changed appearance comes through their cameras despite the meager available light. One old man has some questions for her. Questions can be formed in four different ways, but the easiest way is to just raise your voice at the end of a sentence. Can I bring my wheelchair? Are you gay? Is this real?
Howie Good's poetry collections include The Complete Absence of Twilight from MadHat Press and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press.
Accompanying photo by Beverly Goodwin
by Evan Guilford-Blake
I open my eyes. There is a wall before me. It has a gate -- solid, gleaming gold or brass. The wall is enormous, extending higher than I can see into the clear-as-still-ocean sky and to either side to vanishing points that must be miles away. There seems to be a door in the gate; it’s locked. The keyhole is within easy reach, but I have no key. I have tried to peer through the keyhole but I could see nothing, and there are no hinges, no handle, nothing that will allow entry if the gate were unlocked. I stand there, alone, awed. Except for the wall, the landscape is bare: As far as I can see there is only the gleam of light off the brightly polished surface. No trees, no grass, just a softly packed light brown surface that, as I raise a sandaled golden foot, spreads like fine dust. But not far: The air is still, so still that, were there clouds, they would seem not to move. The dust settles. There is no more motion. Neither is there any sound. I have never experienced being so completely removed from outside sensation. I raise my hand and look at it; the sleeve of my white robe slips down my arm and bunches at my elbow. My hand is golden, like my foot. Like the wall. I squeeze it. It is yielding, unlike the wall.
I call out: I am here. The sound rises and disappears. I call again, louder. The sound rises and disappears. If there is another being, human or otherwise, within the range of my voice, he or she, or He or She, is choosing not to acknowledge my presence. It is as though I am at the center of the universe and surrounded by the implacability, the ethereality, of time. * I am reminded of when I was a child. I would lie in bed and stare out the window, an act of boketto, and, though I did not move -- not even to bat an eyelash -- each moment, each fraction of each moment, would seem a different universe, as though time were not a continuum but a series of planes separated but conjoined, one flowing into, layering on, the next, surpassing it yet remaining intact itself. I floated with those planes, on them, fully conscious of the fact that they were unchanging: were, and would remain, for all of eternity, and that I was a new and distinct being in each who, after existing on a billion trillion such planes would eventually disappear from the next and never “be� again. I could not explain this to my parents. My father existed in, and for, the linearity of the real, the tangible. My mother believed we made our way from God, to God, and that through the journey we became, at its end, part of God and immortal as God. My father believed God was an intangible and thus not real. He would stand with me outside the golden wall of the Church and watch the sky while I stood there, awed, and watched what my mother said was Heaven. It, too, stretched farther than I could see and neither did I have a key to enter it. * On this plane, or rather these planes, nothing changes except me. I cannot note how I change, yet I am certain that I do. I must. Man is mutable. Change is immutable. The wall, the gate stands before me, as though waiting for me to pass through, or to scale, or to go around. Each nanosecond passes, a different universe reveals itself. I close my eyes. I wait. What else can I do?
Evan Guilford-Blake writes poetry, prose and plays for adults and children. His work has appeared in some 45 print and online journals, and several anthologies, winning 21 awards. He has pieces in forthcoming issues of Dink Mag and RAPoetics, and the Haiku anthology Centipede. Noir(ish), his first novel, was published by Penguin. Holland House recently issued his short story collection American Blues. His plays have been produced internationally. Thirty-one are published. He and his wife (and inspiration) Roxanna, a healthcare writer and jewelry designer, live in the southeastern US. Accompanying photo by Alex
A Creaky Path by Poornima Laxmeshwar It was not less than a callous murder. A tensed heart, sweaty forehead, misty eyes and a broken pen. Her hands were so full of ink. Words had abandoned her leaving her no place to seek refuge. They further pushed her into the hollows of solitude where she did not want to belong. broken bridge the dreamy moon smiles on the other side
Poornima Laxmeshwar resides in the garden city Bangalore and works as a content writer for a living. Her poems have appeared in Kritya, MuseIndia, Writers Asylum, The Aerogram, Stockholm Literary Review, and are forthcoming in Northeast Review and Brown Critique. Her haiku have found space in several magazines like Frogpond, Hundred Gourds, BottleRocket, Under the Basho, and others. Accompanying photo by Sigfrid Lundberg
Forward by Mark McKee Sometimes they argued on the front lawn in front of the complex where all the neighbors would hear. The arguments indoors were pedestrian affairs and both of them knew how each would end. Deidra would say she felt smothered and Susan would say Deidra needed to get over herself. Looking around, they knew the neighbors were simply waiting for them to kiss and makeup, the makeup being unnecessary as long as they kissed. Voyeurism was all they had to look forward to.
Mark McKee is from the American south. In his spare time he collects nervous breakdowns. His work has appeared in decomP, theNewerYork, Literary Orphans, and others. Find him at goodreads.com/markmckeejr. Accompanying photo by Parker Knight
by Eva Roa White It’s a February day as one imagines it to be: pepper grey, with spots of lacy salt swirling in the roaring squamish of the polar vortex. A day when even the walls of a strong house tremble in awe, when mighty trees sway like reeds and humans huddle by artificial fires. A perfect day to claim love as the universal panacea to the violence of nature, the darkness of winter, and the promise of death. For my old cat is napping on my lap and my sweetheart is singing in the shower.
Eva Roa White was born in A CoruĂąa, Spain and raised in Lausanne, Switzerland. She has lived in several countries including Saudi Arabia. She is at work on a memoir. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in Page 47 Online Anthology, Transnational Literature, disClosure, Natural Bridge, Marco Polo, Buhito Press and The Common. Accompanying photo by Whitney
thing in the world, believe it or not, is a rack of periodicals grinning with news. Obama’s face lurks from the upmost slot, along with a couple of folded newspapers. Yes, Der Spiegel and Bilanz are German magazines. Yes, we’re in Germania, somewhere south or north of Germany. Yes, everyone here speaks Germanian, especially readers of Auto Bild, whose interest in complex mechanics you share. To demonstrate your skills you drove from Rhode Island to Germania with your eyes shut. Now they’re open. You claim not to understand these publications, but you were born to read Teutonic dialects. The Mirror. Balance Sheet. Auto Image. The smell of the Atlantic clings to you, but now you can distinguish the beautiful from the ordinary. And now you know how the beautiful expresses itself in German and Germanian: languages much richer than the one with which your mother soothed you when you wet the bed.
by William Doreski
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals. Accompanying photo by Michael Coghlan
Walking Home from Work by Judith Lloyd
The city is full of electric light and drop boxes. You find the moon where you can: along the bevel of a screw head, along a nickel’s polished side. Walking in the city at night you forget things: the names of trusted friends, say, or your efforts toward self-betterment. What you remember is: stay alert. Keep your purse at your side. Don’t meet anyone in the eye. What you remember is: trust is weakness. Find the moon where you can: in an outed traffic light, in broken concrete at the curb, parallel to parallel in car windshields, the streetlamp given back in razor cut circles they can’t manage against the sky.
Judith Lloyd is an artist, writer, and monologist who studied in the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an undergraduate. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her first publication, Read It Back, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.
Accompanying photo by damon jah
The Titanic Sails at Dawn by Nate Maxson
The great ship unthinkable groans at its own cleverness berthing from the glacier, smooth enough to avoid being heard beyond faux-Gatsby posturing in lighthouse ballrooms, original purpose forgotten but it sure is bright with blue eye shadow smeared on under restroom candles when the blackout rolls in it will be the right time, just the right amount of hushed dignity like a football player applying war paint in stripes and one bright corporate sponsored racing-brand straight through the middle. Mustn’t move too fast though, best to keep things slow, slow at first these old bones thrown in divination tumble at a crawl: the good luck ritual, like a traditional Jewish wedding where you break a glass for a blessing, mazeltov: the missing rivets hang in the air spinning disco from high above we break, out of tradition and old bones, old ways: rattling ivory dice scores, just getting my sea legs (we haven’t left yet) this red lipstick comes off when I lick my hands, symbols we associate with victory: overboard with the optimists into the cold harbor to avoid looking arrogant in front of the professionals who hold the rope. Massaging iron coaxed to escape in butter and honey, honey and butter: guttural European bribes, sizzled facsimile of industrial eroticism melted into seaside fragrances bottled and sold, bottled and sold, sold and bottled: honey and butter, contrails pumped out smokestacks to lure in
the hungry but this is how the west was won: I’m ready for my close-up, there’s a bull crossing the mountains with my name branded on his haunch. Silver ship in the bloodstream, in the memory, in the blue waving tubercular handkerchiefs to mean goodbye when it could just as easily have been shouted over the engine the show begins and all the dancers in borrowed clown noses sway to pay off the debt, now I’m no bullfighter but out here in the north I hear him rowing and snorting as he rows and rows and points his horns like lodestones sparkling in a wineglass but every time the ship sails, takes flight, escapes: we the gathered animals ignore the last time and who we left behind. So a song comes over the engine, not the radio, not the voice (humble, humble, humble) we are waiting to return but we must remain leashed and expecting a fat bonus come the holidays, a song, a song: play us a song you singer, you stitcher, you butcher, you priest (you undiscovered virus) alright, the buzz of horseflies below the stage amplifies sand in the hourglass I keep inside the piano, have to reach in and turn it when the clock strikes seven. Mistaking a speech impediment for a bon mot (they’ll talk about this one for hours) carved from the old oaken plagiarist, sharp, very sharp but not a shred of originality to the whole thing and night after night the same routine, where I am made of tin and twine and pages and expected to skim a rock off the big thirsty, free refills and out it goes: sunk, sunk and sunk.
Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently "The Age Of Jive" from Red Dashboard Press. He discovered poetry as a boy the way other people find religion or drugs and hasn't looked back since. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Accompanying photo by Vincent_AF
Green Colored Id by Shinjini Bhattacharjee
You cannot climb a broken fig nest with a set face. The dust laden mirror mimics your voice, horizontal like the graveyard’s silence. My voice scrapes whispers from yours, a bundle of pinching nettles buried in deer horns. The rock of Sisyphus never settles on our spines. We steal each other’s shadows to mock our own. The piano laughs out loud.
Shinjini Bhattacharjee is a writer and the Editor-in-Chief of Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal. A Pushcart prize nominee, her poems have been published, or are forthcoming in Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gone Lawn, Crack the Spine, Small Po[r]tions, elimae, Metazen, Red Paint Hills Poetry, Literary Orphans and elsewhere.
Accompanying photo by Randy McRoberts
Not of This World by Jon Wesick
The electron had just returned to the atomic orbital he called home when an evangelical muon burst in. “Have you accepted the Absolute Ruler as your personal metric?” Having experienced the shortening of objects moving at relativistic speeds during his work at SLAC, the electron tried to explain that no meter stick is preferred over any others. The muon would have none of it. “I used to be a doubter like you but once I accepted Seventeenth-Century Physics into my heart I felt the peace of knowing there is a reference frame that is still when everything else is moving. Won’t you join me in cup of communion?” Before the muon could fill the glasses with luminiferous aether, he decayed into a beta and pair of neutrinos. The electron shook his head. If only the muon had trusted relativity, he could have extended his life. Still he sympathized with the muon’s views. Often when the Higgs field slowed his progress and constant demands of his cloud of virtual particles frustrated him, the electron wished he could step outside the universe and simply exist. But there is nothing outside, no framework of clocks and rulers in which the universe sits. Whatever serenity there is must be found within.
Host of the Gelato Poetry Series, instigator of the San Diego Poetry Un-Slam, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, Jon Wesick has published over three hundred poems in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Pearl, and Slipstream. He has also published over eighty short stories. Jon has a Ph.D. in physics and is a longtime student of Buddhism and the martial arts. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest.
Accompanying photo by Lauro Roger McAllister
Mortality by Richard Heby
I have been struggling with questions of mortality lately. I went out to take photos today, in order to spend my time how I'd want to spend it, because time is limited. I took this selfie on a whim, and it really encompassed my feelings of transience, but also excited me with all its colors. Life is a colorful splash and then it's gone. wrought branches a shadow of passing light at sunset
Richard J. Heby is a New York City native who writes about philosophy and nature. Accompanying photo provided by the author.
You Died Here Once by Sarah Kedar
You drag your feet in this dark, forlorn prison. Barefoot, you explore the smelly, noisy walls. A trail of dark blood stalks you, hurt from the thorny shackles. The rule of this prison, salvation from life, but death won't ensue. Marooned to roam with your haunted mind, each step, a drop of blood. This city, a nefarious labyrinth. You died here once many years ago. You hear voices, smell food; a mirage. You stay vigilant, but the chimera deepens the misery. The fetor of rusted iron floats around you, you're free to roam this land of blood and dirty bones. You sing the song, but you won't recall the words. Liberation from death is what brought you here again. You died here once many years ago.
Sarah Kedar lives in Dubai, UAE, an engineer by trade, a writer by passion. She loves to sketch and mostly writes Crime Fiction. She is EIC of her own online fiction journal, The Fable Online.
Accompanying photo from Pixabay
by Larry D. Thacker A man experimented with a cross section of tree rings from a great fallen oak, fashioning a genius mechanism for translating rings and knots into a piano language through a record player, generating a ghost soundtrack of a tree’s life – a synthesized record, of a record, of the tree’s whispers over 57 years. Another man, inspired by the first when reading the morning papers over coffee, took a weekend off and trekked up to a wise granny woman’s cabin. She was rumored to be of witch descent and could, for a price, speak on behalf of trees. The man brought her a crosscut of a maple tree, 67 years old, planted by his great-grandfather. The tree had grown large and a widow maker limb had fallen and killed the man’s father on the day his was born, stranding him as a seventh son who never knew his father. There was another man who stared too long at a reverse light optical illusion on Facebook. Afterwards, he saw Jesus everywhere, in all things and at all times, in sleep and waking. No one and nothing could solve his problem, no doctor, no preacher, no drink or drug. Nothing and no one would save him from his visions. The next week a cemetery worker was cutting a tree and noticed in the crosscut the unmistakable face of Jesus, eyes closed, brow pierced running dark from thorns. An overnight eBay sensation, he failed to garner his minimum bid of $35 and resorted to taking it to the flea market. The man with persistent Jesus vision noticed it, saw it matched his vision and bought it for $15 after half an hour of serious haggling. The man with the imprinted Jesus vision stared at the crosscut, which, after a few hours, miraculously reversed his ailment to his secret disappointment. After reading about the inventor of the tree ring record player, the cured man took the crosscut for a recording. They made the record. The inventor then took that recording to the granny woman, curious as to what she might hear. It is both, she said. The voices of a tree and of Jesus, all at once. But also the Buddha. And all the words of all the Gurus. And of God. Of all Gods. And of everyone you’ve known or never met, before you and after you. But especially your own voice.
Larry D. Thacker is an Appalachian writer and artist. His poetry can be found in past or pending issues of The Still Journal, The Emancipator, Motif 2, Full of Crow, Kudzu Literary Magazine, Country Grind, The Southern Poetry Anthology, O’ Words Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee, Mojave River Review, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Moon Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and Appalachian Heritage. He is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry chapbook, Voice Hunting. He serves as Associate Dean of Students at Lincoln Memorial University. Accompanying photo by Steve Snodgrass
by Carolyn Abbs out the corner of my eye, an olive skinned hand, black notebook on lap. profile in glass like a ruffled blackbird. unclasps a green purse, takes grey-marbled pen, gold nib, writes in black ink. a mark on the back of her hand, could be a mole or an age-spot. too young for an age-spot. an intelligent hand, rounded nails. might be a burn. I see steam billowing from a kettle, hear a screech. someone coaxing her to a tap. but the writing is bold, she’d live alone. no rings, not fuss, get the first-aid kit. she’s counting, fingers perfect as piano keys. what does she do? can’t be much, jeans, scuffed burgundy ballet shoes. crosses legs, fake tan. deep in thought, jots down a word or two. checks phone, applies scarlet lipstick (using phone for a mirror). stands, is tall. reminds me of a suffragette, must be the black velvet jacket. alights from train, melts into crowd.
Carolyn Abbs is a Western Australian poet published in Westerly, Cordite, Rabbit, The Best Australian Poems 2014, and other journals. Her PhD is from Murdoch University where she taught in the School of Arts for a number of years.
Accompanying photo by hobvias sudoneighm
Gorilla Dreams by Sandra Anfang The old silverback sits cross-legged, arms hugging his chest. His perfectly-coiffed mane ripples in the breeze. He’s an airbrushed centerfold, searching across species. His stoic face belies his quickening heart. Black fur, fluffed like a silver-tipped rabbit-hair muff, stuns as he watches bodies pass along the glass wall. He assumes the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, turns tail with attitude, and quickly strides away. I close my eyes, feel his chi, lean my shoulder into the wall. When I come to, his eyes are locked on mine; our palms matched on either side of the glass. No one will believe this happened twice.
Sandra Anfang is a lifelong poet who began to write daily in the last couple of years. Aside from a few workshops here and there, she is mostly self-taught. Sandra hosts Rivetown Poets: A-Muse-ing Mondays, a monthly poetry series in Petaluma, and is a California Poet-Teacher in the schools. She self-published four collections of poetry before beginning to submit her work. Her poems have appeared in the The Shine Journal, Poetalk, San Francisco Peace and Hope, West Trestle Review, and The Tower Journal. In 2014, she won an Honorable Mention in the Ina Coolbrith Circle Poetry Contest, a First Place award in the Maggi Meyer 35th Annual Poetry Contest, and inclusion in the Healdsburg Literary Guild's From the Heart Chapbook (2015). Sandra is inspired by the natural world and the common threads that bind us together. Accompanying photo by jacme31
WET CELLOPHANE by Kenneth Pobo
Jake, the 20-something clerk at Used Better Recordz, eats a smelly tuna sandwich while Gwen leafs through the “D” artists. She finds two Donovan’s: The Hurdy Gurdy Man and Open Road. Gwen remembers when she first got the Hurdy album. She had just turned twenty-one and her boyfriend, Ribbon Ben, who got his name because he put ribbons on almost all of his shirts, knew she “worshipped” Donovan and he got it for her. He called Gwen his Flower of the Hour. This got grating after a year or so but for a while Gwen didn’t mind blooming for him. Ribbon Ben was gentle except when he wanted sex. Then his flower and incense personality got like a boxer with a punching bag. He told Gwen he was just “passionate.” Ribbon left, or she broke it off, well, things go as they go, but she still loved the album. She’s not sure when she lost it. There was that party at Jenny’s house. Everyone got plowed and Gwen thinks maybe she left it there, though surely Jenny would have called. Maybe not. Jenny was like a ping pong ball in mid-air.
Or maybe her first husband, that garbage dump, Ralph, took it. If it wasn’t nailed down, he’d take it even if he hated it. Gwen still thinks that half of her dresses ended up in resale shops just so he could make a few extra bucks. Ralph didn’t like music much, maybe an occasional metal head band, but for him music was at best a snack. Gwen could make a 7-course meal out of a single under-two-minute song. Melodies rolled through her head, marked every day. Her dreams had scores, or so she told her mother who looked at her like she’d just swallowed the phone book. It was clear that this record store wouldn’t have it. “25 Jim Croce albums but 2 measly Donovan’s,” she said to no one. She had to have the original vinyl—the needle had to have a chance to caress the vinyl. No compromise. The sound was deep as a canyon under an ocean—where Gwen wanted to be. Even vinyl only took her to that canyon for the duration of the songs. 43 years later, and at 64 she’s married to an it’s-better-than-nothing kind of guy who at least wears ribbon-free shirts. Tree likes to watch games. If there’s a ball, he’s watching. But only if men are playing. He says women’s sports aren’t sports but just “gals” who want to get out of the kitchen. Gwen waves goodbye to Jake who says “I’ll keep an eye open for that Donovan.” The Record Cage is twenty miles away, a store she actually prefers, and it just might have the album, but not today. There’s still the bank to get to and Milly at the bakery said that the English Muffin bread would be ready today. Best toast. Ever. Donovan will have to wait. She’s 64 going on 21, slender, no white hair, and the local streets fill with faces of people who have moved away or died. Maybe Donovan himself will give the album to her. Stranger things have happened! For now she sings in bad traffic, drives faster, a sudden rain making the windshield look like wet cellophane.
Kenneth Pobo has a collection of micro-fiction published by Deadly Chaps called Tiny Torn Maps and a new book of poems forthcoming from Blue Light Press called Bend Of Quiet. Accompanying photo by Dee Ashley
THIS LOVE POEM KILLS FASCISTS by John Grey Your charm is a probe into the randomness. What about us can’t it imagine? Each cast of eyes is a lake trip to the stars. I’m always snapping and cannot fill your nothingness with green. So we are not complete until we see between spheres, joy in the bodies spiraled then glided into bubbling cauldrons of wonder.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Rockhurst Review and Spindrift with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Big Muddy Review, Sanskrit and Louisiana Literature.
Accompanying photo by Petras Gagilas
by Kathy Steinemann Wake up and blink—three times. Throw off the triple layer of blankets and touch your toes— once, twice, thrice. Swallow eins, zwei, drei Prozac with three gulps of water. Look at your feet and frown because you don’t have a third leg. Pull on your slippers. Shuffle into the bathroom. Flip the light-switch un, deux, trois times. Check your reflection in the trifold mirror and realize you look like you haven’t slept in three days. Shrug in triplicate and call the office of psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Gutarzt. Speak to the receptionist. Ask her for the names and appointment times of your first three patients.
Kathy Steinemann has loved writing for as long as she can remember. As a child, she scribbled poems and stories. During the progression of her love affair with words, she won multiple public-speaking and writing awards. Her career has taken varying directions, including positions as editor of a small-town paper, computer-network administrator, and webmaster. She’s a self-published author who tries to write something every day. Please visit her at KathySteinemann.com.
Accompanying photo by Abulic Monkey
by Lisa Richter Entombed within painted burgundy walls, I sit sipping a cappuccino. A doll-sized lamp on my tiny table wears a cumbersome shade, and above, budget chandeliers flash Lucite bling. Sprawling brown leather sofas pack the floor. At the windows: black, open-weave sheers—whore’s lace—with zigzags of cheap sparkle. A boudoir of blatant, palpable sensuality, the Klatch elevates an already unrelenting want. The barista wiggles narrow hips, fondles the rings in his ears, spins once, twice, then wipes the counter with a damp rag. At regular intervals a shrill, male, giggle-wail escapes from the narrow kitchen hidden behind a shuttered door. Before me, brown velvet cascades the full length of a wall, and pinned onto it: a heart within a heart, the outer one woven from thorny twigs and lit with mini white lights, in its center another, this one of red iridescent glass, puffed, ripe. A man enters briskly, then stands at the counter shifting his hefty pounds left, right, left, right, darting eyes scanning the territory. He wears a fedora of pale straw, a red feather waving from its left side, the hat pressed snug over his damp face. Heavy rubber-bottomed Velcro sandals are strapped to sun-fried feet. Nylon gym shorts stop just above thick knees. A square-bottomed, buttoned-down, blue and white polka dot poly shirt almost as long as the shorts, and open at the throat, reveals a necklace of pierced coral chunks. He turns his attention to the handsome, longhaired, Jesus-looking dude I, too, have been pondering, who leans against a rear wall inspecting the plastic lid of his take-out coffee, lifting it, flipping it, poking a finger through the drink hole, smiling dopily in an induced, psychedelic bliss.
I talk talk talk about Lynda about music about life about death about Lynda about how we’d only begun about us about love about me about Lynda. I know if I were not sitting alone sipping this cappuccino that has become tepid, its froth wilted flat, I would be in the thick of a verbal mania again. The amped music turns to Carol King’s, It’s Too Late, a song Lynda had performed, a song she’d sung for me. I remind myself Breathe. I tell myself There is a way through this loss. And yet, how many months, years, more before it springs its claws from my gut? The polka dot man tentatively steps toward Jesus who regards him with soulful eyes, a delicate smile. They stand side by side and share a moment, the moment, the only one that is: the one alive, just now.
Lisa Richter is a fiction writer and poet and a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her work has appeared in The Santa Monica Review and is forthcoming in the Squaw Valley Review and bioStories (both online and in an anthology). This past fall, she was acknowledged with an Honorable Mention in a Glimmer Train fiction contest. She holds degrees in mathematics and creative writing, mentors at WriteGirl (a non-profit organization of women writers empowering teen girls in need), and lives in Laguna Beach, California.
Accompanying photo by Fotochaotin
by Bryan Verdi My memories of you are here, somewhere, but it has been so long since I saw them last. The grasses have grown thick and dense in that long vacant lot of my mind, where we spent so many afternoons watching the irises of our eyes, laughing ourselves to sleep. And I have grown old without you. I look out on that lot, with nothing to lose, and slash my way through the overgrown jungle, searching for the lost tokens of our past.
Bryan Verdi currently lives in southern California as an aspiring wordsmith and worldtraveler, hoping to establish himself as a human of value. His interests and hobbies include: philosophy, literature, biking, nutrition, culture, permaculture, and hearty laughter.
Accompanying photo by Maelick
James eddied in the attic’s oxbow of dust, fallen laths, fugitive glues. He made an idling spider his fixed point of reference, attempted to brace himself against a dormer. Generations of beatnik spiders had surfed the attic’s excelsior waves unchallenged, their hammock webs loose, carefree, ignorant of footfall. He was the menacing gunboat anchored offshore, intent on upsetting the island’s peace. He bent from the waist, coughed blue flames, lobbed scalding bobbins into the spider’s righteous threads.
James popped a nailed crate with a claw hammer, found a dozen milk-glass domes. He stroked their hobnail pattern. The fixtures were old-fashioned and yet brand new at the same time— sealed-in light of a bygone era. His mother had never used them. Mother was too intimate a word. He had never known her. She was the woman who’d given him life and then promptly died. That sort of thing didn’t happen much anymore. Why had his father not sold the domes? Twenty years ago milk glass might’ve fetched a decent price. In another crate, half-moon glass shades: waterscapes this time, reverse-painted icons of Niagara, Old Faithful, Yosemite Falls. All the places his father had promised to take his mother; places he would never go himself after her death. James retrieved a bulb, plugged in Yosemite. Frazil floes came to life—rivers of slush crossed the attic’s rafters, frothing one moment then suddenly freezing in place, awaiting his next spin of the shade belly. Yes, he was the great wizard of off and on, the architect of his parents’ hushed lives. by Maureen Kingston
Maureen Kingston’s flash fiction, essays, and hybrid prose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Gravel, The Legendary, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.
Accompanying photo by Ross Elliot
Sink
by Jessica Van de Kemp
Coldest winter we’ve ever had. It’ll be hot by midday. The construction cranes blow in the wind like origami. I watch the birds fly for new branches. The black ones in the dark. Black conduits. Space rock. On this day, I reveal myself to the instruments. Let myself see starry installation. Neighbours wonder if I’m wrong in the head. I leave the house only when I have something to keep secret. Music for the dune-beds, flower-riddles, bloom-cities. A hundred lives per second. The devil, too. Seashell anvil, smoother, smooth. I understand you like to build ships in a bottle. Nests the birds know. Smoky figs you tempt the sky with. Come down to my level.
Jessica Van de Kemp (BA, B.Ed, MA) is a 2014 Best of the Net nominee and is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, Four-Coloured Memory, from Bitterzoet Press. Her poetry appears most recently in: The Wayfarer, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Written River, Vallum, Hello Horror, and the Switch (the Difference) Anthology from Kind of a Hurricane Press. The recipient of a BlackBerry Scholarship in English Language and Literature, Jessica is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Waterloo. Visit her author page: jessvdk.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter: @jess_vdk
Accompanying photo by Leon Fishman
Spring by Suzanne Phillips Galloway I’m a very small person, running down a hill in a park, chasing a big, blue, dimpled ball that’s rolling away from me. I’m wearing a pink gingham dress and a hand-knitted baby-blue cardigan: I’m sure my parents must be somewhere close by, but that’s not a memory, that’s an assumption. I am focused entirely on following the ball, running where it rolls. The running is effortless and I seem to run forever and ever, never getting out of breath or encountering any obstacles. The memory never reaches a conclusion; there’s no outcome. I can’t recall catching the ball, just running after it. I found an old black and white photograph of me, clutching a large dimpled ball at the bottom of a hill in Aston Park, dressed in gingham and a hand-knitted cardigan. And, in the photograph, I’m laughing.
Suzanne spends about a month each year around Avon, Colorado and the rest of her time in Kenilworth in England. She wrote her first piece of creative fiction at school shortly after catching the blue dimpled ball in "Spring." Unfortunately she was meant to write a factual piece on "How I Spent My Holidays" and so she was told off for lying. Accompanying photo by Steven Depolo
Yellow Duck Walks in Bar by S.H. Connelly Duck with three feet and green hat walks down street flat, turns out, he’s my Dad. The duck is yellow and can swim so my Father, he jumps in. Now yellow duck with green hat changes to blue fish but with same hat; gets out, shakes off, back to yellow duck. Loses green hat. Yellow duck finds bar, gets drunk, hits on three pretties (one for each foot), and then gets slapped. Twice by first pretty, twice by second pretty, only once by third pretty (third pretty was much madder). Yellow duck stays yellow duck and finds red hat. Puts it on, then throws it back. I ask yellow duck why yellow duck didn’t turn dumb-dog when yellow duck put on red hat. Yellow duck turns around, changes orange feather, swaps direction, leaves forever. I guess that’s just my Mother’s Lover.
S.H. Connelly is currently a senior at Southern Arkansas University in the English department. He plans to attend graduate school in Creative Writing upon graduation. Poetry and music have always been the tools used to help unmask the world around him. He finds peace in the sanctuaries of folk and classical music as well as books of written verse.
Accompanying photo by Artondra Hall
by David Spicer
I carried with me poems, poems which spewed out of everything – Gail Dusenbery I roamed the streets, searching for poetry books. Stores I visited offered the usual mysteries and thrillers. Then, during a romp around 2-for-1 joints, I found hundreds of paperback poetry books for 50 cents each. I swooshed them into my arms. They had dog-eared pages and bookstore stamps on the inside front covers. I found small magazines that published known and unknown poets. I wondered who in the city loved poetry so much that he or she had owned hundreds of poetry books. Later, I learned it was a poet fallen on hard times, who had edited a fly-by-night poetry journal. A friend told me this poet admitted that the hardest thing he did was sell his poetry books. I paid for the books with my rent money. The clerk stacked them into four paper sacks. I carried two and she followed me to the bus stop and placed the other two on the bench. I leafed through the books, stopping to read a poem with a catchy title. When the bus arrived I struggled up the vehicle’s stairs twice, put the sacks on the closest empty seat, and inserted my change into the slot. I sat down and pulled out a book of poems. Opening to a random page, I read ‘I Carried With Me Poems.’ for F.K.
David Spicer has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Now, Ploughshares, Yellow Mama, Bop Dead City, The Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks. He is the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis with his wife and two Maine Coons.
Accompanying photo by Jon Nicholls
by Kelly DuMar Love is a planet he inhabits with Sylvia. Twice a day we make contact from mission control. This is how life is supported from earth. Hello this is Dusty - I love you Who is this? What’s that? I can’t hear Sylvia turn down the noise Okay that’s much better Who is this? Hello dear It’s time for my what? And which pills are those? Sylvia where is my medicine? Oh here on my nightstand are somebody’s pills Sylvia get me some water this damn thing won’t open Sylvia please help me open Wait which am I taking? Friday Oh Monday it’s Monday a.m. Okay then we’ll open the one that says what? Sylvia where are my glasses? Okay there are one, two three four pills in Monday Oh Sylvia says Friday p.m. I’m taking them now so thank you for calling I love you Who is this? Goodbye
Kelly DuMar is a poet and playwright from the Boston area whose chapbook “All These Cures,” won the 2014 Lit House Press poetry contest. Her award winning plays have been produced around the US and her poems and non-fiction are published in many literary magazines, including "Lumina Online," "Corium," "Poydras," Tupelo Quarterly," and "Milo Review." Her website is kellydumar.com Accompanying photo by Julian Carvajal
by Sylvia Heike
The day breaks, stagnant and interchangeable, with a sky the colour of faded 80s denim. As I drive north, its calm blends into the restless clouds, forever holding out creased promises of rain. At the house, I turn on the cream-coloured dishwasher. I remember Mum, clattering dishes in the kitchen, her fuzzy pastel slippers stamping the carpet. Whirring, oozing, the dishwasher hums an erratic symphony of childhood, spitting out background noise that’s always there, but no one ever listens. I wander through every room of the house like a ghost, a child told to wait and left behind. When the dishwasher clicks, no one empties its load. The laundry’s been perched on the line for weeks, months, turning into nothing after all these years--its deprived, hard-set wrinkles still holding out hope that someone might come back to pick it up before the rain. I push the button and resume the longest wash cycle. I wonder how it’s always Sunday, yet it never rains.
Sylvia Heike lives in Finland. She writes flash fiction, short stories, and is working on her novel. Her work has appeared in FlashFiction Magazine, Mad Scientist Journal, SpeckLit, 101 Fiction, and other publications. Visit her at www.sylviaheike.com. Accompanying photo by Graham and Sheila
by Chris Milam
On our first encounter I wanted to remove my skin with the steak knife. It sat there on its bed of white linen, harassing me, a serrated mirror of reflected chaos. A simple incision in my lower abdomen, a wound as thin as a crĂŞpe, then tear it off like a pale shroud. But you sipped your wine and digested my ugliness. You listened to my scars with indifference on your shaded face, a Rorschach image of disinterest. If you had seen the authenticity that resides in my charming ventricles, witnessed the crystal gas percolating in my virginal lungs, you would have found the truth. The unblemished answer of what love can be, its potential blossoming in attractive organs. If I had shed my repulsive husk before you vanished, before your mind thought of monsters, maybe I would see you again.
Chris Milam resides in Hamilton, Ohio. He's a voracious reader, an obsessed baseball fan and a consumer of sweetened coffee. His stories have appeared in Molotov Cocktail, Firewords Quarterly, Dogzplot and others.
Accompanying photo by TESFox
by Sharif Shakhshir I’d like to think that he’d walk off a cliff and consider looking down, maybe wonder what is keeping him from falling, but I know he wouldn’t. Not intentionally. He’d never give up just because someone else is more dashing. Wile would go back to you and figure out what he did wrong just to have you blow up in his face like good TNT hooked to a cheap ACME detonator. He might paint a hole on his chest and try to pull you out of his heart only to feel that you can enter where he can’t—he’d be confused over what had happened and maybe about how he felt. He would strap on rocket roller skates and chase after you. He’d keep doing the same thing over and over again. Until the film grows old and his color fades he’d try.
Sharif Shakhshir is a Mexican-Palestinian poet from Los Angeles County. He has studied creative writing at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Southern California. Shakhshir’s work is known for being aggressive, irreverent combinations of high and low art. His work has appeared in Perceptions Magazine of the Arts, East Jasmine Review, and the Writing That Risks Anthology. Shakhshir draws inspiration from Russel Edson and various cartoon heroes, sometimes literally as he is also a cartoonist.
Accompanying photo by Flavio Ensiki
Thank you for reading our March/April, 2015 issue of Unbroken. We hope you enjoyed these selections as much as we did. As always, a huge, heartfelt thank you to the talented authors who allow us to showcase their work. Be sure to check back for our May/June issue. Until next time ‌ happy reading! unbrokenjournal.com unbrokenjournal@gmail.com