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Contributors Grace Alvino is a queer writer, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia, and an unabashed Kroger enthusiast. Shannon Austin is a poet from Baltimore, MD, who loves poutine and claw machines. Jake Bartman is the pen name of Jacob Thomas Bartman (1992-), a writer living in Santa Fe, NM. Kika Dorsey is the author of three books of poetry: Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010), Rust, and Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions 2016, 2018). Sabrina Gaskill is a psychotherapist and teacher who lives in rural New Mexico and makes experimental text-visual work. Marissa Glover is a writer who dreams of wide-open spaces and tweets @_MarissaGlover_. Peter Grandbois is the author of ten books, the most recent of which is the novel, half-burnt. Michael Hammerle is a writer from Gainesville, Florida. L.R. Harvey is a seeker of the mystery. WDH aka William D. Hicks is a writer/artist who creates in Chicago and whose work appears in numerous magazines. Danielle Kotrla is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University whose work can be found in The Pinch, Pidgeonholes, and others. Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a mom, wife, poet-memoirist-novelist-person, and a cat lady. Edward Lee is an artist from Ireland whose painting and photography have been widely published and exhibited. Avery Kit Malone is an academic researcher, admirer of cats, and perennial insomniac. Paul Robert Mullen is a poet, musician, and sociable loner from Liverpool, U.K, who is widely published across the world. The adventures of Daniel Naman can be found on Instagram @danbo88 while more of his work can be located in Eunoia Review and Piker Press. Fabrice Poussin does not consider himself a photographer or a poet; he merely takes photos and shares his writing with all who might want to get another view of the world. Jason D. Ramsey lives halfway between Detroit and Chicago where he writes and serves as the publisher/executive editor for Barren Magazine and Barren Press. Vicky Sharples is looking for clues.
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Martin Stannard is English and is the holder of three diplomas in cynicism: Cynicism for Beginners, Everyday Cynicism, and Advanced Cynicism. Eric Stiefel is a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University. Jessica Wang is a poetry enthusiast who could (probably) pass off as a raccoon. John Sibley Williams is the author of four poetry collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019) and Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Timothy Wojcik is a literary agent and Pushcart-nominated writer living in Queens, NY. Jeffrey Zable has amassed a fortune in emotional debt.
Featured Contributor John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. Sundowning will be out this year with Main Street Rag. John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, and many others. John has read at venues all over New England, and for years he coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition at Hill-Stead Museum. He teaches for the national recitation contest Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches at Manchester Community College in Connecticut and lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
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The POND John L. Stanizzi
Author’s Note We have lived here for over 30 years. While the pond has been important in our lives—the kids fished there, canoed and ice skated on it, and built campfires—I had never really studied the pond closely. At night, it comes alive with activity: raccoons, coyotes, opossums, frogs, foxes, deer, and birds…it is a magical place. And so, on November 9, 2018, I came up with the POND project. The POND project goes like this: at some point every day (exact time of day does not really matter), I walk to the pond with my notebook, my pen, and my camera. I stay for a while, in meditation, and take notes, sometimes taking a picture or two as well. Once I have a page of notes, I head home, put the journal down, and go about my day waiting for the muse to speak. I never know her arrival time, specifically. She works on her own schedule and I follow. The poems themselves are acrostic. The first line begins with the letter “P,” the second line with “O,” third with “N,” and the last with “D.” I never use the same starting word more than once, meaning I need 365 words that begin with “P,” 365 with “O,” and so on. It has been an exciting and enlightening project.
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Winter
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1.8.19 1.13 p.m. 38 degrees
Proclamation of the wind; freeze the pond and the obscurant vapors will float metaphors into the air, though they cannot null the stillness there, which is not so much a metaphor as it is a dream-worthy fantasy, a reverie about tranquility, warmth, and joy.
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1.13.19 8.23 a.m. 15 degrees
Priding themselves on their size and intelligence, five crows obey the call, and though hardly a murder, all the other birds scatter nonetheless. Food is scarce, and the bitter cold continues; the run-off is frozen. Digging deep beneath dead grass some tiny creature scratches for warm, sustenance, food.
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1.21.19 7.43 a.m. -2 degrees
Piercing bitterness. Everything is frozen solid. Outwitted by the freeze, the bone stiffening air, I shuffle neatly vigilant over frozen mud, frozen sand, frozen snow, daintily shuffling my way home, the landscape lit with ice.
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Spring
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3.1.19 8.00 a.m. 22 degrees
Pristine pond‌not a track, not a windblown ridge; I am obliged to whisper give thanks for this most gentle snow. Noiselessness is an image in this softest flurry, as two robins drink from the chill stream, my presence just another piece of the drama.
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3.2.19 8.38 a.m. 29 degrees
Purifying snow, steady and in relief on all the branches, and yet our thoughts this morning are of the coming warmth; your days are numbered snowstorm, and although the pond is a flawless white, days of emergence, of new life, days of color are right there, almost in sight.
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3.15.19 9.03 a.m. 52 degrees
Pulling along its meteor’s tail of mud and sand, the stream has overflowed its narrow track and now drags the rags of a nomadic mid-March storm through the mud of late winter, its detritus – soda can, tennis ball, newspaper (its headline washed away).
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4.22.19 11.40 a.m. 65 degrees
Prelude to all night rain, the day grays, the showers begin. Object of greening, reed-grass has begun its emergence. I will name this grass, and the surface of the pond that throws itself north –I will declare it motion, color, warmth, growth, occurrence, patience.
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Summer
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6.7.19 9.16 a.m. 70 degrees
Preternatural this coupling and flying, this double-decker dragonfly, from an otherworld, spectacular, and apparently tasty – the swallows dive trying to catch them napping where they rest, bumping reed or water, and whether dragonfly or damselfly, everyone is moving, flying, wary, trying their best to stay alive.
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7.6.19 7.28 a.m. 66 degrees
Photo-op shy, the new frogs leap from the shore ahead of me, and I admit to feeling overwhelmed by the daily sameness; the miracles of damsel and dragon, the swallows’ nifty gliding, hunting, and the miracle of the tadpoles’ metamorphosis, their diurnal changes which they are too frightened to share, those powerful new legs, that archaic tail.
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7.11.19 7.40 a.m. 59 degrees
Pretentious candelabra, the staghorn sumac, and the breeze this morning as overheard as a whisper in church. A pair of green frogs noggles the landscape with gulps, and just along this shore the tendrils of diving reed-grass are as sleek and smooth as a brushstroke.
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Marissa Glover
Shoot Me Now
He’s doing the elbow thing again. The goddamn elbow thing. If he’d included this tidbit in his Tinder profile, I wouldn’t even be here. I’d have swiped left so fast my finger might’ve hurt—much faster than it takes me to be disgusted tonight, and that’s pretty damn fast. I’m only halfway through a martini and I’m wishing for a shot of tequila or an Uber. A tornado. A terrorist attack. Nobody likes when I joke about terrorists or shooters. Mom says I shouldn’t say such things. Mom, who would probably shoot me just for being on this date. On Tinder. For the martini. For putting up with the goddamn elbow thing. For saying goddamn. People say I’m particular, but I’m the General Motors of women. Something for everyone. I’m on Tinder and out on this date, so clearly I have an Everesthigh tolerance for awful men. BFW’s we call them. “Bad for Women” is a name my best friends and I created for the kind of man that leaves a woman more damaged than he found her. A guy that sets the room on fire with his pheromones and then hoards all the water when you’re burning to the ground. He knows he’s dangerous. You know he’s dangerous. The whole fucking world knows he’s dangerous. And I’m gonna swipe right until he swipes right too. I remember Rae at the bar: “Don’t take the drink. Total BFW. Give it back; ask for cash.”
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And Kate, after I’d been ghosted: “I told you he was BFW. Condo at the beach you’ve never seen, some sad story about his dog having cancer, pictures of his model ex still framed on his walls. B. F. W.” But I’m an evangelist, on a crusade to save awful men. The worse, the better. Once, I agreed to go out with a BFW again after he passed out on our date, while he was driving us to dinner. I somehow managed to pull the car over before we died and swore on my sweating armpits I was done. But a few months later it was Easter, and I sat in his front yard full of forgiveness in a folding polyester camping chair I kept in my trunk, drinking wine from a bottle of Cleaver red, waiting for him to get home from some potluck. His phone was about to die. He was sorry. Could I wait a little longer. I don’t believe in predestination. I will convert all the BFWs in this entire world, dive headfirst into the deep end as they drown in their miserable sin. I’m a strong swimmer. Not even a sour ballsack or a wife is enough to stop me when I’m on a mission to save a man. And this is why I’m on Tinder, why I’m on a date, why I’m downing a martini as fast as my gag reflex will let me, ready to two-fist the tequila as soon as the waiter brings shots to the table. This is why my mom gossips about me when she talks to Jesus. Why I rot on the altar like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
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Jessica Wang
The Myth of the American Dream
To make a living is to navigate a sinuous labyrinth of crumbling aspirations, of poverty that creeps like ivy and ensnares its victims as they scream through parched lungs legions upon legions of prayers per capita.
Icarus wanted more than an escape from that prison; he wanted an escapade. Thirsting to puff his chest in the air like the sail of a yacht, to graze the wind like a king gliding down the staircase of his summer palace in Athens, to feel, upon his shoulders, that binding wax turn back into petroleum, petroleum to gold, Icarus became the sun itself.
He was consumed by the fiction of success. Pinned by his wings onto a clothesline, feet dangling above the fresh-cut grass of a lawn somewhere in the middle of suburban America, Icarus melts beneath the sun’s oppressive heat; he scoffs, shudders, drowns in the seductive dream that spans from sea to shining sea.
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Shannon Austin
Pointillism
Bodies glide through fissures in the cream plaster, bundles of dots shadowing a bowl of vinegar I leave on the countertop. Today I read a headline claiming there’s a black hole that could let us encounter infinite futures. Clusters of gnats impersonate spots on the backs of Dalmatians, mountain ranges on redrawn maps. I message you at five a.m., insomniac, estimating the distance between my bed and the ground. My pinky erodes a potential summit. In all of these futures, I miss you marrying our birthmarks into capitals. I fall asleep with a gnat hovering over my head, convinced it knows the way out.
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Shannon Austin
Blank Tapes
His memory gets worse, & the VHS collection gets converted. We walk through their library, white labels with his slanted scrawl two or three to a tape, as if to say we fill every space given to us. Aged copies of Tommy Boy & Weekend at Bernie’s stacked next to home movies, a video of a six-year-old tugging her pigtails, walking my eyes towards the camera. Episodes of Rugrats & DuckTales. The one where Angelica runs away & no one realizes. Where Launchpad doesn’t time-travel & still changes the past. They watch DVDs with replicated covers. Pop falls in love with a young Sharon Stone. I write a story about his hands, a poem about the non-existent leap year. More accurately, Launchpad remembers the past differently. 23
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John Sibley Williams
Tonight Let’s Love Like America
“The destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward.’” —William Gilpin, 1846
We make war naked, terribly winged, with all the colors of the sky raging between us. Narrow mattress. Loose coils. Bruise. Carving our names into whatever body will wear them beautifully & repeat them back to us. Not quite enough light to drown in, but the city outside the motel window is lit just fine. We can see the parts of the world we knew were there. The rest absent. Obscenely absent. Not yet conquered into existence. & the hour is blue & there’s blue at the center of the candle & the candle won’t burn out; we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried everything to melt with it. Still we can’t seem to love what’s freely given. 25
We must take until all the taking is done. & since the taking is never done, we have so much more to love.
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John Sibley Williams
Origin of Illumination
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Because the sky doesn’t burn bright enough, we make morning out of teepeed matchsticks & rough red scraps of flags & our bodies pour like gasoline over it all without need for spark. Everything we hope to forget incinerates. Perfect plots of ash like those new-dirt graves no one’s yet wreathed in flowers. Across it, so many small holes. Cigarette burns? Half-healed stars? Hinges: opening or closing? History has no business here, in a country famished with glimmer & guilt. Or tomorrow, which looks the same. Right now let’s simply relish our end, how much hurt the light we’ve forged can cause.
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John Sibley Williams
Origin of Optimism
Wind whistles through the not yet brittle bones animals won’t scatter until evening. The birds are shot through with light, months before they too leave us for warmer skies. Not yet done with the dying, my son asks again to take on my share of the world’s grief. Thinner than rice paper, his body still weighs down the flattened corners of things. As distant fires rage the deer closer, so the wolves. I think he’s praying. Or not. Somehow I say yes, this is all the same sky.
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Vicky Sharples
Data Correction
The following census has been compiled and distributed by a representative from our data collection department. ※|※|※|※|※ Imagine it’s a Sunday evening. Outside, the city streets are slick with spring rain. A stranger knocks at the door. What do you do? This is unusual. Request identification. Alert the authorities immediately. He is up to no good. Let him in. You notice your visitor is holding a book under his left arm. Why does this concern you? Printed materials are frowned upon. You recognise the book. - It’s a book you wrote. - A book nobody is meant to know about. You realise that this is the first book you’ve seen in twelve years. What does he want? ※|※|※|※|※ The Department for Re-education and Attitude Correction (DRACO) has made the perpetration of criminal activity almost impossible. In fact, recent data analysis tells us that nobody has successfully mounted a significant criminal attack in our jurisdiction for over twelve years now, and believe you me, we’re not going to let anything negatively impact those stellar performance statistics. ※|※|※|※|※ Criminals are often violent. What might be the actions of a potentially dangerous man, having been admitted into your apartment on a Sunday evening? He sits in an armchair with the crumpled grey stare of someone who has been awake for a long time. 29
He talks about the past in a way nobody does any more, as though it matters. He speaks of things that have largely been forgotten. He asks you about books, about writing, before. He says he’s read your book, the book nobody knows you wrote, and liked it. He asks you to write something for him. He smiles slightly when, despite all your misgivings regarding this dangerous, law-breaking man, his appearance here, you say yes. ※|※|※|※|※ Our recent amendment of certain outdated (and, frankly, not fit for purpose) Human Rights laws has enabled vital actions regarding the capture, interrogation and imprisonment of potential offenders. ※|※|※|※|※ What do you do when the man you’re now associated with, the man who’s visited your home with restricted materials – with a book you wrote, no less – appears on an official watchlist? What if this man, described as dangerous, a fomenter of discord, who smells of sweat and the outdoors and fear, asks you to take what you’ve written, a story of unpalatable truths, and conceal it somewhere no one will think to check? What if he has piercing blue eyes? What if he reminds you of someone you used to know? Yourself, before all this? What then? ※|※|※|※|※ We’re all about sharing, and that includes knowledge. Withholding information is a serious crime. In which of the following situations should you inform a local DRACO representative of what you know? If your usually quiet neighbour, a data collection operative, suddenly, inexplicably, begins to receive visitors late at night. 30
If the visitor seems familiar to you in some way, perhaps from a security watchlist. If you feel your safety and comfort may potentially be threatened in any way. ※|※|※|※|※ When did life become about ticking boxes, meeting targets, toeing the line? Sometimes, you have to make a change. No matter how small, how insignificant. No matter the cost. ※|※|※|※|※ In cases of concern, our most capable agents carry out home invasions at locations where offensive or unwelcome activities are suspected, eliminating any perceived threat to civilian wellbeing swiftly and efficiently. ※|※|※|※|※ What are your options for escape? Shoot your way out. (You don’t have a gun.) Hide somewhere. (Where, exactly?) Climb out of the window. (Fifteen floors down. As many up.) Jump out of the window. (Tempting. But still, fifteen floors down.) Talk your way out. (Ha ha.) Looks like your fate’s sealed after all. Perhaps it was sealed all along. ※|※|※|※|※ What if you’ve been living in fear for so long the sound of your front door swinging open, heavy footsteps in the hallway, the buzz of a taser charging, feels like a kind of relief? What if the only thing, the one good thing you can do is hit Share? What then?
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Peter Grandbois
Silence
What happens first and then snow? What ends and then the smell of bright dust? An hour before the birds and then maybe no one can remember. A moment after the stray tangle of twilight and then the dog panting and shifting on the rug— maybe it’s like that.
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Peter Grandbois
Tell me how to speak
Of beginnings of prairies deep as oceans and darkness bound by flame Tell me how to leave in pieces the softest parts of us, or how to convince the trees to reveal their secret cathedral When sometimes silence licks the night, until endings hit like a lover’s backward glance, and we’re left standing beneath a stunted sky, arms upraised, shuddering before our own nakedness
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Paul Robert Mullen
lazy Sundays
light trickling from the edges of the room like water from a tap it’s not late and the rebounding images of golden age Hollywood dance on the down-turned blinds it feels like i’m alone but for the soft heave of your chest the feint rattle of your nostrils enticing particles of sleep and empires of my imagination i can see your dreams afloat in the ether gathering like children at the edges of the ceiling waiting to be called home
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Paul Robert Mullen
for you i’ll try
to like Gil Scott Heron
be someone call you from time to time face the days with something more than indifference with something i can call mine and should you be inclined share you with a summer’s eve as if i was yours as if things could just work out this time
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Sabrina Gaskill
Absence of Appetite
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Sabrina Gaskill
Division
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Avery Kit Malone
Passerine
I. I am sitting at my kitchen table. A mug of coffee cools between my palms. In another room, a voice: muffled undertones, the familiar cadence of my wife. Maybe neurodegenerative and observations and utterly novel drift into the kitchen and sit heavily at my feet like hungry dogs, slavering and snapping. I do not react. I take a sip from my coffee. I am looking out the window. I am serene. I watch a small songbird perched on the spidery limbs of the crabapple tree just beyond the window. The pink blossoms erupting along the branches ruffle as though the tree is shivering, or raising its hackles. The storm winds blow twigs and leaves past the window. The bird struggles for purchase, caught in the sudden tumult. Rain begins to pelt the window. We’ve never seen this before, from the other room. Scans showed no
damage. A question from my wife; I can’t hear it, just the tone. The answer: We don’t know. I am serene. II. Sometimes there are strangers in my house. Each time I enter a room to see an unfamiliar face in a white doctor’s jacket I experience a jolt. Then they remind me, in a practiced, patient tone. I wonder how many times I have heard it. I wonder if the white lab coats are for my benefit. To signal their identity immediately. To give me something to grasp at. My universe has collapsed into a span of three weeks. My wife told me this is my second reset this month. I wonder if I came to terms with it as well the first time. I suppose it took me the whole first week to adjust: to open my eyes as a newborn, to wake up from hypersleep.
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Last night I asked her if I’m still me. She didn’t understand what I meant. Each time I fade into oblivion, I feel less of me coming back. I didn’t try to explain this. Instead I held her in the dark, listening to her breathing. The gentle warmth of her skin. I close my eyes and wonder who I’ll be when I open them. Her breathing. The flutter of her hair against my chest as she turns. Her hand clasped in mine. My fingers, sifting through her hair. Hold on to it. Hold on to it. III. I have a day to exist. Three hundred and sixty-five iterations of myself, materializing each morning, burning out each night. I wonder how much we all have in common. I wonder if I’ll forget what is happening to me. To wake from the void, return to the void, blissfully unaware. Whatever I did yesterday never happened. Anything I wrote, anything I said: none of it existed. The universe truly is born in our perception, and I am a fickle god, to create it again and again and again. My sobbing wakes my wife. She doesn’t ask any questions. She doesn’t mumble any platitudes because she knows there is nothing to say. There is only her thin arms encircling me in the dark and the brush of her lips against the back of my neck, till my breathing steadies and I die again. IV. I wake to a mug of coffee in my hand, and I startle, spilling it. My wife does not seem surprised; somehow, she is ready, a napkin in hand to clean the scalding rivulets dripping down from the table. I mumble an apology and she smiles and returns a placid, mildly affectionate deflection, and her eyes are hollow, her face a carefully cultivated smiling mask, but I can tell. I can tell it is a mask, and the lifelessness in her eyes, the dark circles beneath them, destroys me. I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. A stranger enters the room and asks me questions about my mood. I tell her I’m uneasy. I’m scared to die. I look to the kitchen window. I see a bird and feel a surge of sorrow and I wonder why that was important to me. 39
Behind me, the clock ticking on the wall seems loud suddenly in the silence and I wheel around to face it. “We should remove that,” murmurs the stranger to my wife. V. I’m waking up. I can’t remember where I was before, but I think it was a dark place. I was dead, I realize. I’ve returned from hell. A tremendous wave of relief washes over me. I’m crying. My wife enters the room. She’s crying, too. “It’s miraculous,” I say, laughing into her shoulder, her hair teasing my face. “It’s miraculous.” She is sobbing, patting my back. “Yes,” she whispers strenuously, “It’s miraculous.” “Back from the dead. Back from the dead.” I’m waking up. I’ve come back to life! I was in hell before, I realize. My wife is holding me, sobbing. “I’m alive,” I reassure her, running my fingers through her hair. Something about this action nags at me. Something familiar. Something important drifts through my grasp, falling out of reach. VI. I’m waking up. I’m waking up. I’m waking up.
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Jeffrey Zable
Other Than That
Of course I’m a Picasso weeping blues and reds down a canvas into a waste basket. I am also a kiss on the lips of a hyena, practicing its lines for a new television show called ‘This is your life, let’s see if you can use it for more than a hat rack.’ Finding oneself trapped inside a brainless barometer is no less revealing than yodeling a tune on a broken bazooka, which is the only prerequisite to becoming a cadaver at the foot of a hurricane. Other than that, it’s not easy to be alive if you’re an ant beneath a waterfall, or a bat with no teeth flying through the anus of an unsuspecting buffalo.
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Daniel Naman
Wilted
The sun
going down, as instantaneous electric lights. The hours were always difficult, and further tarnished by the opinion of chairs with their coffee-cups
beside them.
Silence,
silence.
Decayed bodies of sounds--
a cough,
intermittent
a horrible wheezing, bones
Little theories about
being mauled.
gestures and appearance.
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Jason D. Ramsey
Bleak Water Days
For M.
You bought a 26 footer after I left, a midlife crisis revealed through boat shorts and bloat. When I returned with your first grandson, you traded it in for a 28, as if two extra feet might lure us across the state, him cramped in a car seat, wailing, dribbling milk. Before he was born, I sunned on the bow, slept like an infant, burned like incense, prayed to gods behind paper clouds. We chopped rough water south to Detroit, docked at restaurants as if breaking at port, pointed to cathedrals regal yet worn. Bleak water churned in our wake, bone batter, headfoam oil-thick, white bass streaked black, lips hooked, choked. Two extra feet of fiberglass in exchange for my son, pattering around the hull, blithe in a storm he'd never know. Now, he and his brothers swim the docks alone. You sold it years before he could float.
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Jason D. Ramsey
It starts with a slip
For K.
It starts with a slip. A forgotten word. A clean slate in clovered plains. A sawgrass blade across the brain. Memory stretched through walls of bone -- frost-white plumes unearthed like foxgloves, sons abandoned for lavish harvest -- lyred flues neither reaped nor sown. The spread weeps slowly from a distance. Canopies of bloodwoods shadow bright summer fire. It wilts, leaks, this brain marrow faucet. Dead neurons ghost snapshots. Warm winds rake your brittle limbs. Fog lifts just enough for you to recognize my children -their doe-eyes -- arms flailing as they pull on your shirttail, laughing, pleading for sweets. But, you no longer bake or drive or stand without swaying. The sink drips, like the tears in your eyes when you begged dad to forgive you for an affair you never had.
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Kika Dorsey
Easters
1 It’s Easter and I paint my nails powder-blue and eat deviled eggs. I call my old boyfriend, leave a message, and pull on a jacket when the clouds roll in. I hide plastic Easter eggs filled with confetti at a neighbor’s house, where I talk to a nurse who obsesses on her health. I clean the drawer with broken crayons when I come home, and I pick ticks off the dog. I look at our lone daffodil and don’t pluck it. I buy irises and stick my nose in them to breathe their sweet breath. I cough because I’m sick with a spring cold and go outside to pick up sticks from the willow, set them in a pile, and then read a book with alligators in it. I drink a shot of whiskey. I’m sitting on my green couch, and it is soft and dirty and it is mine. 11 It was Easter again and again and my mother baked ham, my father was always dying, and my sisters and I squabbled. The maple tree housed squirrels and blue jays. It was sunny, or it was raining. We went to church to learn about resurrection. I thought about my friends as the preacher droned on, or I thought about how my history teacher didn’t like me, or I thought about the white mice my science teacher fed the boa, or I thought about sex. We ate jellybeans and played marbles. We ate chocolate bunnies and played jacks. My father lay on the couch so we sat on the floor. It had a design of flowers and a castle. There were no faces on the rug, not one eye to watch over us as we played to win and sometimes lost. I was on the floor like a beetle. I was on the floor like a fallen seed. I was a queen with no throne, sitting on the floor because my father would not rise.
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Timothy Wojcik
The Small Acts of Kindness We Afford One Another
One person whispers into the next person’s ear, & then that person whispers into the next person’s ear, like the first, & then that person whispers into the next person’s ear, like the others, & on & on down the line. The only sounds are the fricative consonants in the words that the people are whispering & the explosions somewhere far in the distance, well beyond the hills on the horizon. I am somewhere in the middle of the line. I think of the last time I saw my mother: she was walking with the dog in the garden. She was watering flowers, digging holes. That dog chased & finally caught a rabbit once. Squirrels, birds; most got away. But that one rabbit! Irremediably torn asunder, yanked from the firmament, then surreptitiously placed in a thicket of bushes. I never did tell her about it. The person in front of me leans in to my ear & whispers The Elephants of
Genuine Emotive Responses should be here soon to save us from this terrible impending death. It is our only hope. I nod solemnly & turn to the person behind me, a small & frail old woman, hunched & trembling, & whisper There is a huge & brilliant firework show happening in the next town. It is incredible. Some of the fireworks even look exactly like elephants when they combust. She smiles, nods, & turns to the next person. We do this sometimes: comfort each other in small & dishonest ways. I close my eyes & wait for the elephants, in whichever form they may take.
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William D. Hicks
Ghost Dot Rainbow
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William D. Hicks
Lot
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Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Another Ceremony
Pull the curtain back on the Christ, the statue, the symbol of grieving, to watch these proceedings: a man and woman in a room, in a new religion, called performance. She is his creature. He is trying to teach her, words: cell, sex, interlocutor. He tells her not to look elsewhere for the definitions. She goes to the dictionary. She goes to the Internet. Not because she is tempted, but because she needs the history. Of words, previous interpretations; something of the mnemonics so she has a second strategy for learning; so she might see which of these words are related, are sisters. She has lost her sister. The sister was there a moment ago but she lost her, through the streets, the buildings, the obstacles other people present. But then she is gripped by the insight; that everything she knows in this scene is supposed to come through him; he is not only God, but nature, and the alternative outcomes; he is everything she perceives, so there is no need to memorize lines, block out movements, devise optional theorems and relationships. There is no need to look for her sister. There is no need to do anything until he takes his insight and applies it to another woman, another actress, another statue. His idols must be fresh, untested, unaccustomed to the ritual with the curtains, when they are drawn, when the icons must be concealed because death is a medicine show that lasts three entire days. Afterward, they may be exposed for what they are, inanimate and dependent on human feeling. But which human, and which feeling?
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Jake Bartman
Third-Person Omniscient
That she could be in their living room, drinking a glass of water and thumbing through news headlines on her phone, turning the television on and then off again, experiencing a certain restlessness and a neck sore from some position she couldn’t seem to find a way not to be in – that such small things could matter, could in any sense exist while meanwhile, on the nighttime highway, he would be in the midst of something – That the two could occur at once, the highway steep and snapping back and forth like the mane of a wild horse, its switchbacks ensuring that from a distance the impact wouldn’t have sounded like anything, so that later she’d try to imagine how close you would’ve had to be in order to hear that sound unnoticed even by the driver who’d come around the highway’s blind corner only a moment afterward – a stranger drawn to something amiss not by noise, but by the way those twin lines tracked directly through the turnout’s dirt while clouds of dust drifted through his headlights’ beams, toward the torn steel ribbon and the nothing beyond – this passerby who’d pull from the asphalt and press the triangular red-orange button on his dash, who’d climb from his car with his heart already beating at one and one-half times the rate of the emergency flashers’ steady tick, tick, tick, and why should the sound of impact matter as the man would’ve stepped nearer now and nearer still to the guardrail whose jagged edges were garnished by a patina from her husband’s Honda’s white flank, paint that’d clung to the split steel as if in its own attempt at self-preservation – At which point it wouldn’t yet have occurred to her that her husband was late. At most she might’ve registered a vague restlessness, the sense of something amiss, a superficial discomfort where she couldn’t seem to settle even though sometimes he stayed late for work, of course he’d been later than this on other evenings, and she wouldn’t have been able to say why she felt so anxious while she scrolled through the news, while at that moment the passerby who’d happened first onto the scene would be looking into the 51
canyon below the turnout where, on a winter’s day months before, they had stopped to photograph far-off snowy peaks framed by dramatic blue-black clouds, where with the sort of awareness that’d been so typical of him he’d observed the pale eggshell-quality of the light – a memory that would underscore the fact that the accident had happened in darkness, its timing some rebuke of all that he’d been and all that he’d felt in life – although it’d be months yet before she could articulate this notion, leaving her in the meantime with the blunt fact that she’d been here while he was there, a contradiction that to comprehend would require the nearest approximation of God she’d ever attain, faith that some consciousness could reconcile how bright it’d been in the house plus too warm even with all the windows open and the ceiling fans awhir while above the canyon and beside the highway the stranger would’ve peered past the fractured railing into nearimpenetrable dark, a gloom broken only by taillights that glowed far below like pinpricks of neon blood, and he would’ve swooned then, steadying himself against the guardrail’s splintered wooden posts, fumbling now for his cell phone – But in relating this she’d find herself at odds with the way that in speech one word of necessity follows another, so that no matter how quick or breathless the telling she couldn’t capture it, couldn’t explain what it all meant. Instead she’d have to try again, attempting with her hands to show how she’d been here while he was there, seeking to demonstrate the impossibility of the fact that they who for nearly a decade had lived life together could be in the end separate, apart, unified only to the extent that they’d existed for the same brief instant – a thought so unacceptable that there’d be nothing but to attempt the story once more, to say for the five hundredth time I was at home. He was driving. It was dark, and a rock came loose from the cliff above, which surprised him, so he jerked the wheel – Still she couldn’t escape the yoke of her own experience, he drifting across twin yellow centerlines while she shifted in her seat, she drinking from her glass while the nose of his car traversed the opposite lane and shoulder to close the five feet then one foot and an inch from the guardrail, culminating in a noise lonesome like nothing she’d ever heard in her life, more metallic even than the armchair’s aged spring when she pulled its lever and caused the footrest to spring forth, casting her backwards as at the same 52
instant so immense a space opens before the nose of his car and she couldn’t even keep the tense straight, had happened or would happen or was happening still, the whine of the Honda’s engine as its tires encountered friction no more, and neither could she imagine what horror he would’ve felt by the time she’d collapsed the footrest and gone into the kitchen to pace restless around the island, as already the light would’ve left him with the suddenness of sound’s elision after the car had split the guardrail like teeth through a pummeled lip, plummeting then, sinking past brambles and jagged stone so quickly that for all anyone knew there might never have been any sound at all.
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Eric Stiefel
Encountering Judith and Holofernes
after Klimt
The author had decided narrative was an aesthetic choice: pale chest exposed, the neck gold-collared, hand holding a severed head that glances about its station with the derelict nature of the muse, lip cocked, gown sheer, sword hanging offstage. How a life could be condensed into a series of fragments discarded and found by a pedestrian on their way to lunch. Later I abandoned my fascination with the sensual and opted to sit alone outside a bakery on an overcast street. I could make a story out of anything, ask no one in particular about the rules of composition and receive no reply. An espresso cup rests on a table and waits for the rain as if it were part of a mosaic depicting isolation and joy, its off-white shining misdirection— I could disappear as well as anyone, artifacts littering the scene. A self-portrait in the breeze.
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Edward Lee
Raw Hope
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Grace Alvino
My Girlfriend is Now a Ghost and She Lives in the Charlottesville Kroger
1. She is sleeping on the ice with the fish eyes she is loving me by the Goya no less sodium black beans never the less sodium and salad cream in her hair. She is kissing me with her tongue out against Probiotics; she is smearing the tahini through the glass on the shelves. She is perching with her toes on the net to catch the loose grapes. She is sticking them to my breasts and under my armpits but the green ones, only the green ones, round and seedless like sunbursts. My nana used to steal them, she tells me. Like this.
Pop. In her mouth, I find the grape whole. She smiles as I take it out. You win, she says. I lay basil leaves on her eyes. She blinks through them until they fall into her palm and holds them in front of me. Trade? We switch. She pockets the grape. Stay here, she says. I lean against the sprinklers that keep the kale and the leeks damp. She comes back with a lightbulb. Compact fluorescent: soft white. For later, she tells me. They’re restocking. Do you wanna—
Yes. Are you sure— Yes. She takes my arm and lifts and carries me over the shelves and sets me on the coolers that form the top of 6. FROZEN: Ice Cream and Popsicles. Down the far end is Hoodie Stock Boy, and between him and us all the freezer doors are propped open. Do you remember Bomb Pops? she whispers. I lick her shoulder. They were white and—and red and—
Blacktop. And the egg— And it didn’t fry. My nails on her knees. I loved that—that fake. The red. The red flavor— Scribblers, I say. I was Bomb Pops. Gently. You liked Scribblers. 56
Scribblers. She pulls back and shakes her head. They had red in them too, didn’t they? Yes. Thank you, she says. That’s not so bad. 2. We don’t know why she can only eat electricity. She likes the stickiness of the copper on what we still call her skin, and it was the overheads before, then lightbulbs, and now the self-checkouts. The wires are so tight, she says.
It’s unreal. For me, though, she keeps taking the used halogens. I bring them to her from home in brown paper bags, and I quote her own words back to her: Don’t throw them out. They’re recyclable. She lets me pick the aluminum scraps with my ring fingernail. Like everything here, her teeth are white and unbelievably solid, and when her voice goes out, she bites the central nervous system of the intercom. She projects over it: Hey! Hey! I love you! The feed cuts back, and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band comes on. I put my hands around her waist and lean into her soft chest, into the not-quite deodorant that is not gone from under her arms. As long as we are touching, no one can see me; it is better than being hypervisible. Again, she sits on the produce bins, and again, she shucks the shallots into spirals or rose petals, and at the bottom of my backpack I find peels like receipts. When there is abundance, I have begun to believe, loss means something more like nourishing. 3. I do not say it because I tell her when I call vegetables growies. Without it, we could not bump our hips going down the aisles, and it is there when we peel off the stickers from the Mandarins: the smiley-face cartoon oranges with their halos. It is in the newness of a jar of sweet piquante peppers, and when she forgets there is always something else. She is learning, and teaching me, the contours of this universe. It has to do with the thickness of coffee grounds. It is like taking a bite of a crushed raspberry. The graininess of the skin turns mealy in your mouth, and it is close to nothing so much as the pulp of a 57
steak fry. Things have unexpected congruence. They sing to each other, and the basil sprouts capillaries like the heavy one that sat underneath her right eye. It thrums, and at night they don’t turn the lights off. The store blooms, she tells me, with electricity. All the doors are sealed like a glass case, but inside everything has more room and more breath and she doesn’t have to move—she can just lie there—to feel it. Outside, the parking lot stretches. The grist of the pavement is uniform in its hot gray, and there are no careful lines of bottles like a hand on your back. There is no safety, and there is no moonstruck logic. It is the sultry and indifferent expanse. In the store, though, my fingernail has patterns. The water in the cottage cheese runs clockwise when I stir, and its granules are the same color as instant Alfredo powder, and there is no one leaning out the window screaming from their car. What looks like a surprise has been laid out in the tiles, and when it spills it is in my mouth or in a line over the intercom, and we were both wearing dresses, they could have known, we were in dresses and the headlights cracking as she folded on the hood. There is still a skidmark in the parking lot from her slipper, but it blurs through the window and its tinted glass. When you rot in the face of this world, corporate lighting gives you second chances. The nectarines were shipped from over the ocean: they caught a blight, but it made them last. 4. We had dropped the egg on the blacktop in front of our apartment. It was hot enough, but it did not cook. We did everything right, I told her, and she believed me. We did everything right, she tells me now, and I say, Yes.
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Michael Hammerle
The Good Stuff
goes out of your head like a spinning quarter Dog-Star twinkling off the edge of a table. The bad stuff stays circling like Saturn’s ice and strata rings. Slow down long enough and find the iron core is magnetized. After the fallout see a starscape that hasn’t been observable for one thousand Halley revolutions.
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Michael Hammerle
I Should be Able to Move You
out of this house but I can’t. I should be able to move you with more than my words. It ticks in my mind. When I sit there is a guilt stabbing my hip like a cramp. I should be able to move you, the baby, and these dogs to somewhere else. We eat so well we could almost forget the mold and the bow in the ceiling; outside, the fleas in the dirt, sirens, crime in the street. I should be able to move you with more than my words.
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Martin Stannard
View #12 The Melody Maker
The day begins in a cloud hat. “My Lord told me how the King has given him the place of the great Wardrobe.” Foreign language tunes are not as popular as once they were, yet some people insist upon saying we have come a long way. Having written a really catchy tune in his head he cancelled the rest of the week. You just doodle and dawdle and it’s enough to make your fortune. But if we were all able to do that, well, where would the challenge be? The crooked lane stretches a crooked mile and it is not always possible to reconcile optimism with how things pan out. Walk headlong into the dip of doom with one’s eyes closed. Deciding what to wear to the dance is always a problem. People are whistling, determined to be happy. Out on the village green there is a re-enactment of something from the past when we won. What o’clock is it? It might be too late already.
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Danielle Kotrla
Aporia
I know at light of sunrise, We will reload the guns And press the barrels once more Against the other’s temples. I am uncomfortable with the lack Of cold metal against my skin. We sit by fridge-light, And you say, slowly, “This moment in which we exist is nothing.” I take it personally, The edges of the words— Sixty nothings to a minute. I can see it in your face, The need for a response. I cannot verbalize what it means To feel blood Grind to a halt, alive.
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L.R. Harvey
the road behind the hill
At 8:13, the solitary oak outside the kitchen window pulls down the sun with groping, fibrous fingers. Shadows stroke the stucco wall in stenciled lines, and on the counter, store-bought casserole is cold. His mother snores. He creaks the screened-in door to slide his bare feet over the concrete stoop in callous whispers. Outside, the evening air is soft as puppy’s breath. The grass is wet.
His mother’s face was wet the day his dad had went away, wet Carolina sunset streaks of red on cheeks that he had kissed. John had moved in that year, a cheshire smile from cheek to cheek that said “just call me dad,” but whiskey fists can’t hide behind a smile. Cicada song blankets his lilting stride across the lawn, his shuffle leaving strokes of green on cloth of dew. They sing him on his way out to the road to stand on top the yellow lines that split the street that splits the town in two. The paint is cool as kitchen tiles.
That day, his father hooked the tin-roof trailer behind the red-roof truck, the earthy smell of split-hoofed cattle mingling with the odor of burnt tobacco leaf and hay. They’d stood out by the barn together and watched the geese 63
fly past the house in waving ribboned strands, to disappear behind the beechwood trees that lined the field. His father's algae eyes spoke longing in the silence. By evening he was gone. The citrus moon drips down a lemon rind of evening light that sprinkles him alone, staring down the road that drops away behind the distant hill. Tonight, he swears he too will one day walk the yellow lines that sink beyond his sight. He'll disappear to find the land of weary fathers, geese, and all who feel the world is not a place for staying.
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Fabrice Poussin
Twins
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Fabrice Poussin
At the Beginning
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About
Founded in 2014, After the Pause is an online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN, featuring poetry, flash fiction, and artwork, published quarterly. We look to feature the best creative arts from new, emerging, and veteran creators. Find us at afterthepause.com or on Twitter @afterthepause and Facebook /afterthepause. The editor of After the Pause and the overseer of its entire doings is Michael Prihoda.
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 Designed by Michael Prihoda.
Departure Until next time.
Copyright 2019 All rights of the material within belong to the authors.
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