After the Pause: Winter 2016

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After the Pause Volume 3, Issue 4 Winter 2016

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Now you get to read about those people who made this thing by writing something. Brigitte Aflalo-Calderon is an artist and writer based in Princeton, NJ and France. https://www.facebook.com/brigittewordsandcolors Emma Axelsson is originally from Sweden and a recent graduate from the University of Warwick. Charlie Baylis is a figment of your imagination. Francesca Brenner’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in FRE&D, Crack the Spine, Cutthroat and OxMag. Fbrenner@mindspring.com Nikia Chaney is a poet from the Inland Empire of California. Steven Chung lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has poetry published or forthcoming in Glass, Potomac Review, Kweli, and more. Christina Dalcher lives in the land of Styron and barbecue, which is to say the extreme northern part of the American South. Janet Dale is a teacher, reader, writer, and human being. Sarah Escue is a poet, editor, and visual artist in Boulder, Colorado. Evan Gray is a writer from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Mitch Earleywine is a professor and clinical psychologist in Albany, New York. Justin Hilliard reads and has a severe writing addiction. Betsy Jenifer is tall, obsessive and likes to believe she is super cool. Rob Kirbyson is an artist driven to paint Dark Matter. Allie Long is an economics and English double major at the University of Virginia. Matt McBride is standing outside a broken phone booth with money in his hand. Erika Mortimer is a senior literature major at Ohio Northern University, who doubles as the poetry editor for Polaris Literary Magazine and is especially bad a writing witty bios. Al Ortolani’s newest collection of poems, Paper Birds Don’t Fly, was released in 2016 from New York Quarterly Books; his poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and New Letters. Simon Pinkerton is a big, stupid jerk from London, UK, who loves to be found on Twitter @simonpinkerton and writes super funny or just MEGA AWESOME short fiction and humor for cool magazines. Fabrice Poussin Eva Redamonti, Pen and Ink Artist & Illustrator based in Boston MA. Monica Rico is a Mexican American feminist. Domenic Scopa is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize. Hannah Siobhan is a young writer currently living in Minnesota.

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Cathryn Shea is a cat whisperer, but only to one cat, which may take a human form at times. Turner Wibbelsman is an undergraduate and poetry thesis candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. m.nicole.r.wildhood is a writer, hiker, saxophonist and scuba diver currently living in Seattle, WA.

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…ingredients… freshwater runoff catastrophe recovery beauty hope villainy disdain three creams, two sugars a dash of cinnamon the state of emergency our country has entered post-November 8th dissidence dissent poetry (I guess) obloquy (is that even a word?) the candidates for supreme court justice (well, in spirit) the hazy ghost diminishing from the Cubs post-World Series win reverberations of Hamilton, the off-broadway production love, maybe men without names women looking for names red herrings food coloring flash fiction the human experiment

…result… unknown

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...the briefest of introductions to provide minimal context on two, never-beforeventured entries in this, the newest issue of After the Pause… Within, an adventure we’ve never undertaken. Not just the inclusion of art, but the inclusion of two artist features, one from the magnanimous Nikia Chaney, whose otherworldly word art will dazzle and amaze you, the other from Rob Kirbyson, a comic strip of sorts, but also not a comic strip. Either way, it will enchant, horrify, provoke, and otherwise push the liminal boundary of what a mind on Red Bull can accomplish. With both entries, we hope you enjoy. These artists gave us a chance to promote something wilder than we’ve gotten our hands on before and in a much heftier package than we’ve ever published from single contributors.

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Christina Villafana Dalcher

Separation I dream we're at Gran's house on my birthday and they tell me to wait at the far edge of the cornfield for my surprise and I do it, because I'm eight and I like surprises but they say not to come back until they call and they don't, even though I hear them laughing and I see the twinkle lights and smell the smoke from Poppy's woodfire while it draws curlicues against the moon. * The blueberry swirled candy—not a cane, because it doesn't curve, but one of those straight old-fashioned stick candies they used to sell at stores called Ben Franklin and Five and Dime—becomes an ice pick while I shiver in the cold and watch my parents twirl and dance on a white sheet, performing camel spins and arabesques while a giant man made of gold looks on. * Five hundred feet over the water is a bridge with no rails and I don't know where it goes but I need to cross and I need to make sure my foot doesn't slip, but I know it will slip and I might not make it to the right side where my mates are waiting and I'll be part of the cool water, heavier than foam and lighter than reefs. A mermaid. * On our first morning at our first house, I leave my first husband in bed and make the coffee and stand with it in the driveway watching colored leaves blow around my ankles while I pull my robe tighter and breathe in bitter steam from a mug someone else gave me in high school, but I don't remember his name. * I wake up with a mouthful of teeth, but I didn't have any an hour ago and when tonight comes and I lie with the covers over my head they'll go away

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again because that's what teeth and lovers do when you sleep, whether you wrap your face in electrically-warmed blankets or not. * That summer when the heat kills the French and Italians and Spaniards I miss my bus while reading the last page of a book that scorches my soul, and in the shadow of the Duomo I watch the last of my religion turn to ashes as gooseflesh dots my sunburned arms. * The night before finals, a clockwork something swallows me and orders me to mark time and for an hour it's all right, I can keep up, but then I can't anymore and the heaviness of my feet turns me into a crippled ballerina or an Amazon warehouse worker who knows the music but can't…quite…keep…the…pace. * I watch Bermuda become a hook in the ocean before clouds take it away from me and ask the old woman in 1A what she's drinking, and that's my first martini, which the old woman calls her Dutch courage and I call my first martini and it is as clear as the water on the lost beaches of my childhood. <<<<<>>>>

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Emma Axelsson

do not open I repeat

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close the lid, please

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Simon Pinkerton

Hemingway’s Lost Works: Just Lists of Stuff He Did Hemingway is famous for his minimalist style of writing, eschewing flowery, descriptive language for terse, functional prose. Anybody who ever used simple words in their writing, such as "and", "if" and "hell", is copying Hemingway, and their work will always be derivative and without value. But did you know that before his suicide, "Papa Hemmy Baby" wrote a series of unreleased works that have only now been unearthed at his Idaho estate? Not that godawful unfinished book about him wanting to be his sister, wanting to marry his sister etc. (The Garden of Eden, 1985, Scribner)—no: these books are a return to form, taking his simple style and turning it up to 11! 1955, "Booze!" This first in the series starts with the enduring line, "I love getting drunk" and goes on to list all the times he could remember being drunk in his whole life, chronologically. There is no description at all of his escapades, just dates! 1956, "Fish!" A wonderful, snappy list of all the fish types he liked to try and catch. I counted zero adjectives. 1957, "Shoot!" Really two novellas, the first is a diagram of gun parts, notable for its omission of all words: you can tell that there were originally descriptions of the gun pieces at the end of lines pointing to those pieces in an earlier draft, but that these were subsequently cut—too hyperbolic! The second novella comprises a list of animals. There are seven animals total. 1959, "Marry!" Who needs Wikipedia, when this book has the names of his four wives? 1959, "Swim!" A photograph of him swimming. 1960, "Booze 2!"

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This incoherent polemic against drinks not named after the author typifies his increasing disillusionment with life, his battle with depression, and his bipolar relationship with alcohol. A note about this particular work, I am a Hemingway scholar, but the writing may not be accessible to the lay reader, as it is just two squiggly lines. 1961, "Sad." The toughest in the series to read, this final work demonstrates Hemingway's mastery of dialogue, but is also a goodbye. When you complete the 650 pages, you feel drained, as keeping up with the speech can be tricky due to there being no tags whatsoever. Then again, its simple message is conveyed, and the author does this poignantly with the repetition of "I am sad now" 24000 times. Powerful. As we now know, it was shortly after completing this work that the world was robbed of its greatest literary action-hero. Goodbye "Crabby Divorce Bear"! We will never forget you. May you be forever deleting adverbs in Heaven.

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Janet Dale

Evening 1

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Janet Dale

Evening 2

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Janet Dale

Evening 3

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Evening 4

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Al Ortolani

Black Beads 2 I went out to the strip pits to sit by a body of water and to listen to the wind and birds. I was too restless and tired to relax. On the way back to town, my prayer beads that I’ve kept hanging on my mirror broke, dropped to the floorboards, clattering everywhere. Even weeks later, they keep turning up, spilling out of nowhere onto the floor mats, seat covers, the stack of papers I haven’t graded. rolling my reflection down with the window

meadowlark song

Spooning Miles away in a rest home, my mother has been lying awake in her bed. The drugs to keep her sedated have been pushed away. She knows she is not in her own home, but she cannot find the words to complain, nor can she work her legs to get up and walk away. She communicates by the alarm in her eyes, by the reports from the nurses that she cries out at night, a bird in a cat’s mouth. Afternoons, I spoon her words off her chin and back between her lips.

her toe pushes the wheel chair

a circle on waxed tile

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Allie Long

A Method of Prayer As a girl, anxiety meant retribution for fear of everything but the father, though I spent every night kneeling before the altar of my bed, praying the lord would pluck worries from my head like his children from the devil’s hand, that he would siphon the human out of me: unbecoming what he created to please him. I recited prayer for the anxious from a book my grandmother gave to me, lineage of anxious women hidden in hopes it would not manifest in progeny, though god had other plans. As is typical of god. My mother watched my face contort in silent straining like the suppression of her profanity when she hit her toe on the leg of our sofa. She told me to keep trying, as if belief in the sky being filled with anything other than forced thoughts can be practiced, yet I continued to plea even as she tucked me into my covers. I wrestled my way from their warmth before I could drift into sleep somewhere between dear god and amen. Waking to the shame of a sunrise, I scrambled to remember where I left off as I locked eyes with the creator’s watercolor: initial pastels fusing with red and yellow hues as he hung a finished portrait of morning in the sky. That illusion of fire.

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Cathryn Shea

The Ides of June It’s my birthday and the backyard is my brain without weeds, the patio a cooked afternoon. It’s where I go to watch bamboo usurp the fence, trespass on the shrubbery. I feel the rhizomes creep along the bricks toward my chair when I try to dream. The sun hits my face. This day splits open in panic, then sighs. It’s just the imagery of another year out of control. The stone in me loosens. I walk on the pathway cushioned with peaceful rubbish.

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Charlie Baylis

the piper at the gates of dawn morning came late anyway morning came there were twelve wise men robed in pastille robes I wore pink and green pyjamas horseshoe shoes the sky rotated 180 degrees I had I had to think on my feet the bell and the ball fell from floor to ceiling anyway a dice tumbled from pavement to gutter anyway a monk took my hand marched me into church untied my rainbow laces pushed my head under alter there I breathed six clean cups of light I shook god of heaven's distant images the melody the melons the choir calling for the piper at the gates of dawn the liturgy was typed in pain serpents slithered and slipped around the words but the words meant much less than a word meant the penny dropped anyway there was nothing in church but pretty pictures the drowning fire the gullied bird Adam's blue hands anyway the morning came anyway god : it's a pity we can't be together i think we can still be friends.

but

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Sarah Escue

Solitary

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Sarah Escue

Birthright

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Sarah Escue

Ancestry

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Domenic Scopa

Stain Let’s start with this coffee I just spilled, stain spreading, steadfast as the walnut floorboards that must still swell with moisture in the room my family swarmed for dinner as a boy, window shades filtering the adamant, decaying sun of summer evenings. I focus all attention on the earthy, robust smell, that seems darker than the coffee, and I refuse to recognize the way something dark, and completely simple, like this now half-cup of coffee, trembles, then stills a second as I hold it, and stare into it a long time, until I am remembering that man how heavy he was the morning he dropped from the South Tower and that house where I watched him on the television, ten years old, with a certain sense, bewildering and paralyzing as the takeoff of a plane is to a toddler. And despite a looking back that said goodbye before I could say anything, and his deep breath, his wave, he still turned carefully away, forever, scrutinized the skyline, face tilted upward as if supported by the feeble sunrays girdering through the smoke, and stepped off. Like light he desired darkness. Sometimes, when I try to imagine myself as that man, I feel released for seconds, and if that release persists, terrified. And to be honest, as a child, I was terrified of everything: clowns, report cards, the filthy fingers of a family friend all over me. But that other fear is different.

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Even so, I thought I could forget that man cascading through the chaosdetermined, free and whether or not his fall was soothing. Bathed in the television’s tide of light, I sat, a moth fixed to the flame of what it wanted, and watched as the camera trembled, going out of focus… Then came a reporter, sweat glistening her forehead as she talked, calm as habit, the microphone shaking in her hands. And all the youth I felt, whatever left me in my nervous laugh, did not return in the deep breath I drew in, slowly, a second later, the first breath of a young man. And who knows where that boy went, too numb to speak about what he thought was only someone’s cowardly surrender. But maybe, after all, he’s here, in this coffee stain on the carpet its shape not a body flattened on concrete, but only the random result of gravity, a blind design with a silence and force that transforms everything.

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Domenic Scopa

Man Painting a Fishing Shack on the Pier There’s the possibility, of course, you’ll plummet off the scaffold, yet as always, as I walk here every morning, thinking of something else how lobsters navigate the mystifying forests of the seas, or how the water reflects the final strands of sunlight, reflects all that’s left I see the stubborn progress of your brush. But I beg for you to keep in mind: if you slip and plummet, swallowed by the ocean’s constant folding and unfolding, I cannot hurl myself out there to rescue you in swells like that. Surely you can understand? I can’t be the fisherman to hook, and pull you up, drowned, covered in seaweed It can’t be me searching in all directions for help, alone, hearing the shush of high tide decompose the pier’s wooden support beams little by little, the way, perhaps, downpours decomposed the swing set in your backyard, while your mother’s voice called you in. And if you do die, don’t make me try to confess what every moment of your life all the heartbeats, all the grinding forward, inch by inch, of your body through every second signifies, when I’m only twenty-four, so overwhelmed, like a sea lion plucking floating bits of food, then suffocating with surprise when the torpedo frame of a great white launches from below. Do I really need to tell you why it all matters? I mean, you’d be dead, and a crowd would crane to see your corpse rolling in the waves without breath, which somehow escaped from you in all your carelessness… Clearly, it would be cruelYou wouldn’t be ready.

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But would you recognize it works that way for everyone? My being there would be cruel, too, because of my unpreparedness, my shock, my lack of anything to say except: you drowned, you drowned, I didn’t help, I didn’t help.

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Erika Mortimer

Horoscopes Aries You will spend the next month curled like a cat in your worn leather armchair. Use this time to smoke cigarettes – tobacco rolled in old journal pages, Aries. You’ll see how your words taste. Taurus Let a stranger read your palms, or tarot cards, or tea leaves. Listen not to their words, dear Taurus, but look instead at their footprints as they walk away. They will help you to better understand your fate. Gemini Carve runes into the back of your bedposts to capture the nightmares you’ll never speak of. Dissect them in the safety of dawn, Gemini. Search for guilt and anger and loneliness – or the color of your sister’s eyes. Cancer This month, will recall to you the sound of an October moon whispering poems to you as it pulled the stars across the sky. Fill the emptiness in your chest with the meteorites you collected from the craters left by painful silences. Leo Leo: this is a month of arson and bridges; press your hands into the ashes and draw out the still-glowing embers of your past. Drop them in a glass of water and watch the steam rise. Virgo To best preserve your memories, Virgo, wrap wildflowers in aged love letters and poems

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and press them for weeks between the pages of your favorite book. Paste botany sketches on the tender, chlorophyll-stained paper. Libra You can measure the passing time in teaspoons of orange blossom honey and slices of lemon. The sun will act as a metronome, Libra, keeping pace with each swallow. Scorpio You'll spend this month wondering if moving under water could possibly be the same as floating in space. It is, sweet Scorpio; there’s a similar weightlessness and suffocating silence. Sagittarius You will wake, Sagittarius, having dreamed of giving birth to a blue-faced child with fragile moth's wings. Extract this from your memory – light it on fire; return to bed. Capricorn You may find the only knot you can remember is that of the noose, Capricorn. Hide the rope. Instead, buy yourself a new black dress. Wear it out on Friday night. This is not a month for leaving, but for dancing. Aquarius If your throat burns when you speak, Aquarius, carry a set of worry stones in your pocket: turquoise, quartz, and obsidian. Swallow them one at a time; their coolness will soothe your fears. Pisces Your alarm clock will break this month, dearest Pisces, But you should wind it anyway. Use the silent hours to listen for the rusted cogs, frozen in place. You

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will soon learn that time will not stop for you.

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Artist Double Feature

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Nikia Chaney

All These Names for God

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Rob Kirbyson

Collider Provider On September the 10th 2008 at approximately 10:28am local time, a strange new dimension popped into the universe, probably created by the inaugural run of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, buried deep beneath the Franco / Swiss border. Within this dimension, three organisms were spontaneously created. Rob 6, a mutant nightmare from the dark recesses of the mind of Freda Lingstrom, the creator of BBC's 1950 creation, Andy Pandy. Lucien Sarti, an abandoned idea by a French hit man for a children’s toy that was a rabbit/giraffe hybrid. Francoise Le Clown, one imagined alter ego of John Wayne Gacy. Despite being just thought forms in our dimension, these three entities of antimatter have that most unfathomable and inexplicable quality in quantum physics: Conciousness.

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Evan Gray

Sleeper for HDT I wish / I could / remember

the word for one becoming aware of their existence. maybe something / wild could

whisper it into my ear so I would never forget.

somewhere I is always in its place. asking myself / because I /my reflection

a bus window reminded me

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Evan Gray

Images crabbing boats painted Jesus Saves on the bow, / saw grass washed to dunes—

know what it meant, sign

glowing: all the fried shrimp you can eat. still water makes me a distance, / stuck

here—waiting,

second guessing sad voicemails. sound like God crying out not to forget

accidents.

they fold

in, /towering oaks sawed, half termite ridden, half standing.

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Francesca Brenner

The Complexity of the Subject is You (Ah, Wislawa Szymborska) She writes a line like she walks into a room Sees the carpentry work of the bookshelf before seeing the book Sees the masonry of a paved road before the spirit of walking You see, lifting a knee shifting a hip finding balance Those fairies that move the body appear much later Engineering lifts the knee thus and so, thus and so Then behold hut instead of tree law instead of might trade instead of conquer While people do what people do She sets about dusting eventually creating the FabergĂŠ egg

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Justin Hilliard

to hell with Michelangelo said this guy next to me I didn’t respond and kept painting had a lot to get done by lunch my inspired muscles muscled the roller pole shag cover spits paint from either side watch the damn paint said this guy next to me I didn’t reply, just kept working until lunch, where we all huddled under the Sistine vestibule to hell with Michelangelo said another guy, but I paid heed only to my food we all went back gotta finish the west wall by nightfall an itallian with a mustache walked out of the Sistine taking a drag from his cigarette I went to him and he let me bum one

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we smoked what’s the difference between a painter and an artist? asks the Italian i didn’t know what to say next so I went back to painting the moon replaced the sun to hell with that Michelangelo I said, and went home

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Matthew McBride

Untitled The bathing caps were altogether too loose, our clothes painted on. Walls were too short, so our heads keep peeking over. People drug other people by their arms like giant sacks. Through periods of sleep and unsleep we cottoned, suffering a kind of hungriness that fed on its own hungriness.

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The figures all put on their tiny, black gloves. Echoes louder than what they echoed. Anything spoken was an extra. I had this job painting over the street signs in white. I was drowning in an ocean only big enough for me.

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Fingernails rained. Her throat was an extra letter. Fruit bleed when we peeled it, and the fish kept dying in the milk. Everything was at the mercy of the flies in their beautiful, transparent capes.

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In the dream, I was in a rowboat pulling my own dead bodies out of the water. A feeling of skinlessness; a general Aspriny taste. I struggled to recognize myself as a figure. The missionaries’ bibles all ended up blank. The clouds could’ve destroyed us.

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Objects carapaced in Elmer’s glue. I took my turn watching the last dove. When it got dark, albino rats blanketed me like a coma. There was more hell than not.

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Fabrice Poussin

Reserve

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Fabrice Poussin

Frozen World

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Mitchell Earlywine

Puzzling Through What They Said When You Knew It Was Over 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Across 4. Life is a refining transmission of transformative wellbeing. 5. Well, what are your favorite shows? 6. Why don’t poets just say what they mean? 7. When can I meet your parents? 9. I just don’t want to get caught up in the murky waters of all that hegemony.

Down 1. Who is this Finnegan and why would anyone want to read about a wake? 2. You’re not a night person. 3. My therapist said that you’re stable, not boring. 4. It’s not you; it’s me.

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7. You’re nothing like my father. 8. You’re a lot like my father.

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M Nicole

Y = yes

Divorce

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= no

Time in years: ďƒ 1) Do you trust yourself? 2) Did Jesus really walk on water (or was it just full of salt like the only thing that obeyed His command?) 3) Is it important to be able to explain it to other people? 4) Is it important to be able to explain it to yourself? 5) When (and how) will you tell your parents? 6) Will you keep the name you both choose to change to?

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Betsy Jenifer

Illuminate

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Betsy Jenifer

Leaping Droplet

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Steven Chung

Wreck That summer they gave a hurricane your name. In Florida the season was already over because there was nothing left to flood. And I was on a boat, netting ocean and salt. I flung grids at waves and called them unclaimed cities. Come winter there were years packed in sandcastles, they could claim histories older than themselves. You placed a letter in a bottle then watched it crack as it hit the water. Someday, the earth will rise in two parts: land then sea— what you wrote. I wanted to believe it the way the ocean believes the shore, always returning. Or the way we must hope for destruction, because that wish always comes true: the towns I discovered now drowned in fish, the nets that collect nothing but floodwater. You were somewhere in the sea, trying to retrieve shards of the bottle, maybe the boat, any vessel that carries, all the parts of a storm caught in them. A city rediscovered under all this proof of life.

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Turner D. Wibbelsman

Rock Hunting I sit and read and sink, humbled by the strokes of the painters around me, and think and stare and grab and go back to other things— that require less heart. But I am drawn back, by the unlikely chance that I find amethyst hiding in nanna’s mulch * so maybe now the nausea and the heat, and the pressing sweat can help fever-wither this hazy night: that I may come to purple quartz amidst this drunken dance.

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Eva Redamonti

Koi Fish

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Eva Redamonti

Thinking Alone

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Eva Redamonti

Emily’s Dream 2

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Eva Redamonti

Cats in the Tub

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Eva Redamonti

Water

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Monica Rico

Borderlands1 Evaporating for nearly a night of untroubled absence, the skies dozed dimly like wine between the crack and splatter of eggs. Another word for heat is to miss the world.

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Borderlands is redacted from pages 184-185 of The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand by Jim Harrison (Grove Press, 2001).

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Editor’s Note #? For notification of any missing ingredients, please notify the NSA, the DOJ, After the Pause, your local library, or anybody employed by the public words department.

About After the Pause is an online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN, featuring poetry, flash fiction, and artwork, published quarterly. We also publish a yearly print anthology whose proceeds go to charity. We look to feature the best creative arts from new, emerging, and veteran creators. Find us here: afterthepause.com or @afterthepause

Purpose We believe art is a product of life experiences, from the joyful to the heartbreaking to the absolutely mundane. Life throws pauses at us. Art follows the pause. We want to share the best art we can find and bring hope through those artworks.

Cover Art “hands up” by Brigitte Aflalo-Calderon

Departure Until next time.

Copyright 2016 All rights of the material within belong to the authors.

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