Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work explores themes of religious and romantic entrapment through meticulously crafted immersive worlds. Her award-winning films and photographs invite viewers to engage with emotional landscapes, offering catharsis and connection through raw, authentic storytelling. As the founder of Finding Bright Studios and executive director of the Arlington International Film Festival, Jaina uses her art to transform personal narratives and foster healing. Find her at@jainastudio.
74 Gratitude Practice for New Year’s Morning by Annalise Parady
76 Bequests by Christine Harapiak
79 Sundown by Martyna Russo Londoño
81 Regret by Tanya Moldovan
83 Pretend by Sarah Bean
86 Only a Memory by Lisa Lancaster
89 Collections by Judith Rypma
95 Dear Frogs of Pinckneyville, Illinois by Terry Lucas
97 On Divorce by Anna Weber
99 The Work of Intricate Things by Christina M. Ward
101 Talking to Himself by Benjamin Green
106 Popo Kept Breathing by Anne Bower
109 Missing Dad by Irene Fick
111 Iomshruth; so by Emma Elobeid
113 Earth Tones by Bud Ratliff
116 1989 by Stephanie Walgamott
120 Rabbit Regrets by Alice Twemlow
123 Porous by Nina Köll
126 Letting Leenie Go by Kristofer Schleicher
131 Time’s Lament by Cayden Olsrud
133 Potholes of Regret by Lisa Ochoa
135 A Monster in the Wood by Russell Chamberlain
143 Chronicle of a Teenager in Love by Ashley Abitz
147 Roscoe in Slabtown by Kevin Joseph Reigle
152 Maybe Then, I Would Be Enough by Julia Williamson
155 Waking up from anesthesia by Lina Buividavičiūtė
156 (Not)good Girls by Lina Buividavičiūtė
157 Anna by Laurie Billman
160 Subtext by Julie Benesh
162 Trepidation by Eden Absar
166 What we do with love by Ocean St. Amant
169 In Winter’s Slack Remorse/Rages Summer’s Flame by Dick Altman
172 Drums of Kamala by Dick Altman
173 Venus Unbound by Yvonne Morris
175 The Way He Was Looking At You by Ananias Reese
178 In The Philosopher’s Pub by Carolyn Ostrander
180 My Lost Son by Gail Vallance Barrington
182 The Statue of Liberty by Hope Cotter
189 Dad Teaches Son to Fold Box by Aaron Barreras
190 To Weave by Aaron Barreras
191 The Concert by Shelly King
195 The Flower Vendor by Nadine MacKinnon
198 Kuchisabishii by Suhjung Kim
201 With Regrets by Nicole Powers
206 In Another Universe by Alina Kuvaldina
209 The Night Shift by Lauren Miralle
212 If Only by Rebecca Hanauer
214 Awakening by Laura Bota
219 le cimetière by Mark Mrozinski
223 Transcendence Phobia by Sarah Dantas
226 The Crush by Peter Coe Verbica
230 La campanella by Joel Clay
237 The Last Time by Mollie Jackman
239 Memories by Kathleen Nicklaus
241 A Mother's Hand-Me-Downs by Martina Sandora
243 Cancel the Broom Wagon by Amy Soscia
245 The Entrepreneur by John Spudich
248 I Never Said Goodbye by Inna Tysoe
252 Then by Jeanne C. Wilkinson
254 Reconciliations II by Edward Baranosky
Mary Barbara Walsh
Mary Barbara Walsh is a teacher, a philosopher of politics and a poet. Her research has been published as articles in numerous academic journals and chapters in scholarly books. She is especially excited to bring together her academic research with her creative, literary voice. Learn more about Mary at www.marybarbarawalsh.com.
Haunted
I am haunted by memories of all that is not to be.
Life unlived.
Love unloved.
Hands unheld.
Words unspoken.
All that will never be follows me.
I am haunted by the people I didn’t see, the pain I didn’t share.
Withheld smiles. Withdrawn hands.
Unspoken welcomes. The hesitant giving and receiving lessens me.
I am haunted by the injustice I leave behind. Averted eyes.
Fearful complacency. Blind disregard.
An unchanged world.
All that will never possibly be, because I did not see.
After All
Emmy White
Emmy White is a writer, screenwriter, and poet from Sydney, Australia. Her work has been featured in publications including Griffel Magazine, Fauxmoir Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and Train River Publishing's Spring 2020, Summer 2020, Winter 2020, and Spring 2021 anthologies.
I asked if you’d ever felt a ghost
Between us, a body swept in slumber, Never rising to the curtain’s hollow light.
If its beak held the words we kept between breaths, Squawking and quaking, And, if so,
Should my hollow slumber make more sense?
Its shriek was something different, The cautionary cry of a crow
With a bullet through its skull.
My ears won’t recall the sound
Of rainfall hitting eastern streets, if it hummed, Or drummed in a low, looming rhythm,
If we sang it to sleep with anxious breaths,
A child petrified of moonlight.
I asked what you thought it was, that midnight nausea,
That wretched growth that bloomed between us, Gnawing at the mattress, if you could be sure it wasn’t
Just a screech on the motorway.
A closing door. A creak in the hall. It was only us, after all.
Some People Stand in the Darkness
Maranda Greenwood
Maranda Greenwood is a writer and poetry instructor in Vermont. Her work can be found in Driftwood Press, Quarter After Eight, Sundog Lit, White Stag, Cathexis Northwest, and other journals and anthologies. She was a prize winner of Vermont Poetry Society Poetry Contest. In her free time, she collects Zoltar tickets.
I’ve missed California my whole life. I thought this would be where I ended up. With my silly dollar degree in something that doesn’t exist anymore.
How I like to communicate in fine details will only translate to a small percentage of people and I have no idea where they are, but I’ve been convincing myself for as long as I can remember that someone is listening in California, me and my dead love language know how to make a place out to be more than it really is. I’ve been daydreaming oceanside in neon glow arms wrapped around my knees staring out over the Pacific, night breeze the kind that makes you tilt your head and close your eyes. I am thinking about what else but, love. The pier is a tiny city on stilts, with history so heavy it can hardly hold itself up anymore. It is leaning under the weight of love stories it’s holding, it’s beautiful. I want to fall in love up there. Maybe it was too many episodes of Baywatch theme song promises or those Saved By the Bell Malibu Sands episodes where Zack Morris is with someone outside of the group and they eventually accept it. Maybe it’s that I like to jog early in the morning next to the ocean because I like the image of someone struggling against a beautiful backdrop.
Somehow, when I was young, I started buying Billabong and Rip Curl and never wearing shoes. Somehow, I was always better at Frisbee and Volley Ball and skipped all the Vermont ski field trips. Somehow, I boarded a plane back to the East Coast and will fly into Boston during a blizzard and drive 2 hours on ice into the forest, nowhere near an ocean. I will look at flights for next year in the middle of winter, when I need to save myself, to save my love language from being buried in another 8 months of what am I doing here?
What I Should Have Said Choked Me Instead
Dominique N Kent
Dominique N Kent is a queer poet of Jamaican-American descent. She has published poems in African Voices magazine, the Nevada Arts Council Nevadan to Nevadan project, and Brushfire Literary Magazine. She has had journalism pieces published in the Nevada Sagebrush, PantherNOW, and FIU News. She has lived in Nevada, Florida, and Alabama.
Your hair was my favorite color, especially when it caught the light, a color too beautiful to name, and I couldn’t wait to see you, and you made me feel better just by laughing, or smiling, or standing there. All I wanted was to make you laugh. That’s what I should have told you, should have said I wanted to be near you, should have said how much I longed to touch you.
But for all the words that came out of my mouth, they were seldom the ones I wanted to say. The fear-filter blurred out the love and I shrank away when I wanted to lean in.
I thought if I worked hard enough, I could be a normal woman, could say ‘touch me’ in a way you would understand, could say I want to hold you by doing it.
But I could not undo my anxious heartbreaks, or make the ground under my feet feel more solid, or quiet the noise in my head.
I couldn’t promise my brain wouldn’t go somewhere else when I so desperately wanted to be with you. I could not change what life made me, instead I endured the mortifying reality of wishing you could love me even with my broken shards, even though they may have cut us both.
Even though you deserved someone whole.
A Letter to My Former Self
Audrey Towns
Audrey Towns, a literature and composition instructor in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas, explores intersections of environmental, social, and political concerns. Her work is interested in the spaces between—deconstructing binaries like human/nonhuman and culture/nature. She has published, or is forthcoming, in Driftwood Press Anthology, Spellbinder Quarterly Literary and Arts Magazine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal, Eunoia Review, Willawaw Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine, among others. IG: @audrey_haferkamp_towns
Sweet sixteen came so fast… or so slow, if you count years by the number of times you clasped your hands together and whispered prayers to taste the air outside of your routine, to walk away from the house your father had built with his own hands. And you were so sure when he surprised you with a party and invited all of your friends, that it was to witness the arrival of your freedom. It could take any form; a black Chevy pickup, a white Taurus, the red Dodge with a slight dent for sale down the street. But when it arrived as an armoire, you didn’t hide your disappointment.
But look up and see how beautiful it is.
Look up from the blue carpet you’re kicking. Look impressed when he tells you with pride in his eyes that it’s handmade, with an extra-large bottom drawer to keep all your important things safe.
Look at the sanded edges and the fancy curve of its feet. Look at the shimmer of the topcoat and the brass pulls.
Look at your father’s face searching for a hint of reassurance that he got you just the right thing for your special day.
Look up. Look up. Look up at the curve of his face and the tint of his eyes, the hook of his nose, and where his dark hairline starts.
Look, so that moment will last longer than the car you worked so many evenings and weekends to save up for. You won’t remember what kind of car it was, just that it took you across town, took you to your first apartment, took you further away from days together… and it only took you a few years before you sold it, moved on to the next.
But the armoire is still here.
Still beautifully made with time and love. Still curved at the legs and tinted mahogany, Still holding the things you want to keep safethe photos and funeral program wrapped and pristine, still the only things in the bottom of the extra-large drawer he made you.
Great-Grandmama’s ½ Franc
Dani Arieli
Dani Arieli is an audacious poet and author, Pushcart Prize nominee, and lover of weird, dark, and archaic literature. She has creative works featured and forthcoming in B222, 7th-Circle Pyrite, Beyond Words, and more. She is currently working toward her Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing and Publishing degree at Sheridan College. During most writing sessions, her black cat sits atop her lap while she fervently taps away at her keyboard; she very much enjoys having a writing partner who can meow.
In a sashay of Phrygian delight, Marianne was sewn into rusted silver; a withered shroud of halcyon in the chipped glint of the coin, she was cerise fraternity doused in navy liberty with only but a dash of stagnant alabaster in snug equality.And it was said that the greater variant of greatgrandmama cherished this coin. Why? Oh, I knew not.
But the solitary sizzle of the gramophone reverberated off the walls of this corner-street pawn shop making love to the accordion in the rafters, and the cello down the street.
I never found there to be any weight to coins of silver or gold, but the former specifically, the former not once held a drag to my hand; always, the sweat was riddled purely with estrangement. An amalgamated blur of ashen silk now sulked around in my mind, before her voice, gentle and brash, spilled into the split hems of my blurred disconcertment:
It was first that I discovered myself in Montmartre.
Beneath the peeling paint of sinking windowsills, and the slender scoliosis of midnight alleyways, she would paint the greys into slapdash streaks of vibrance; the soles of her enamelled path met with the meretricious entrail of anonymity though, the strings of her harp tingled tenderly to the unconstrained breeze of Paris. No arrondissement was to be found within her chords, yet still, she swayed along down the easels of painters in constant motion and congealed unison, dipping the dark bristles of her brush against palettes of all shapes and colours until the dusk had finally seeped in through the imperfections of each canvas. Come dawn, she was a sower. The bearer of such furtive seeds was nevertheless abstruse to Parisians dancing around the southern circle, in wonder of how it was this young woman planted such flavourful pips on the structural
grounds of this golden epoch. Well, no one really knew but she allowed the grandiose paste of the city to only encompass the aureate barriers the avenues had built up. Without an end in sight, her roots flourished in the cracks between paint shops and burlesque cafés now, a path of soles to conglomerate further artisans; a blonde effigy of belle unicité, in an age of embellished femininity and commonplace gaudiness.
Well, that was what she told me, anyway.
And now, as I remained grounded in the flickering haze of this pawn shop, the coin suddenly felt a whole lot heavier in the sultry stick of my palm and I could only ask myself, as its new-found weight plummeted down into those unfamiliar hands, what more could I have learned?
From the strewn paintings being hung
over the rooftops of starved bellies and spry men, to the corsets wherein identified female pulchritude incarcerating their seeded abdomens. What more could have been said, really?
Truthfully, the coin was just that an ode to philately.
Yet, why was it that I suddenly felt longing for this coin?As I watched it slip away, the only seed that now took root, was regret.
Penance and Reconciliation
Marlee Abbott
Marlee Abbott (they/them) is a woman-shaped entity usually spotted in their native Florida habitat. They received their BA from the University of Miami and their MA from the University of West Florida. An Academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart nominee, their work has been published online, in print, and via occasional fever dreams. They believe in you.
I find poetry in the parts of my psyche that ache when I touch them: the memory of the serpent of a man who, at this moment, is walking across a stage to receive his diploma from the garden that was his hunting ground. When the dean of students shakes his hand, I wonder if she will feel the weight of those three girls he left bleeding on dorm room floors. My silence taught him there would be no punishment for biting into the fruit that was forbidden to him. How long must I look in the mirror and see the piece missing from me shaped exactly like his teeth? When I am buried, there will be no casket, just a hole in the ground: rich soil waiting to reclaim my body, return my tainted heart to the earth so that trees may one day burst forth from my ribcage and reach, yearning, toward the sun. When I am finally engulfed by cleansing fire, I will spread my arms wide, shake the dirt from my hair, and cast my gaze toward the heavens. As the flames lick my skin and the sparks fly upward, I close my eyes and pray for forgiveness for the sins I did not commit, but still failed to confess. When I drown, I will open my mouth to welcome the flood, smoke and ash bubbling from my lips to the water’s surface. The sea purifies me from the inside out, and when my lungs fill with salt water, it tastes like absolution.
Understanding
Caitlin Mitchel-Markley
Formerly an attorney, Caitlin Mitchel-Markley is an autistic poet and stay-at-home mom to three incredible autistic children. She now spends her time writing poetry, cuddling her lovely husband, advocating for her kids’ educational and additional needs, and sharing her love of all things geeky with them. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Gold Man Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, La Piccioletta Barca, Voices, the second and third volumes of Aurora: The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. IG: caitlinpoetry
Please get your own bank account. He spends everything in your joint account. Honey, you don’t understand – that would be a betrayal. He taught you that. That it’s a betrayal of him to protect yourself, with your own money, that you earned from your own hard work. Honey, you don’t understand – we share everything. He wore that into your being – that what’s his is his, and what’s yours is his. His whims matter more than your security. Honey, you don’t understand – he takes care of me in his own way. You could just put in half your check, or even just a little something every month. Something for you. Just something. Anything. He takes everything. Honey, you don’t understand – we need everything I make - there’s only enough to pay the bills. But you make more than the bills. How is there money for his collectibles, his interests, and his hobbies, but nothing left for you? Honey, you don’t understand – I’m no good with money, he’s always handled it. He emptied out your retirement again. You’ve worked your whole life and he has taken it all. Honey, you don’t understand –he needed it again. No, he wanted it – you need it. It’s time to retire and he’s left you with nothing. Honey, you don’t understand – it’s complicated, but it will all work out. How can you take financial advice from someone who wastes money? Honey, you don’t understand. How can you take career advice from someone who can’t keep a job? Honey, you don’t understand. How can you take relationship advice from someone who has burned every bridge with and broken every heart of those who loved him? Honey, you don’t understand. You’re right Mom – I don’t understand.
my filthy kitchen
Itzel Santiago Basaldu
Itzel Santiago Basaldu is a UC Santa Cruz Creative Writing graduate from Monterey's Central Coast. Itzel is inspired by literary fiction and frequently explores issues like the MexicanAmerican dream. Writing in both Spanish and English, Itzel’s work frequently explores the intricacies of identity as well as the beauty of their surroundings.
I uncoil my body, mouth, and feet from their cramped position under the kitchen sink, feeling every inch of my muscles stretch in protest. My eyes scan the empty kitchen room, taking in the silence. The walls are brown, the color of crap. There’s an island in the center where my flower vase remains untouched. There used to be three chairs, but now there’s only one.
I hear the slow dripping of the leaking faucet and the low rumble of my stomach. The sky is shining deep shades of orange that bleed into the black sky–like embers of dying fire smothered by a heavy sadness. The fog rolls over the mountains in the distance, creeping closer by the second. The scent of decay and rot permeates the air, mingling with the bright citrus perfume that clings to the checkered kitchen tile floor, like a stubborn stain.
I sense the rush of blood in my ears. Something isn’t right. The sink is overflowing in a bath of backwash and food waste that throbs with a life of its own. The pipe in the kitchen rattles violently like a cannibal breaking free from a prison of rust. The sink isn’t the only thing alive.
Around me, everything throbs yellow. Humming to low vibrations, the Marigolds sway gently and the blue cabinets tremble. The dining table is bare, the cabinets are empty, and there is no sign of food anywhere. My hunger wakes the rumbling in my stomach some more.
I want to swallow the kitchen and its entirety; to consume every inch of it until there is nothing left but the memory of its emptiness.
I sit back on the kitchen floor and feel the cold tiles against my bare skin.
They’ll find me when the sun rises and they’ll think my kitchen has been abandoned, left to perish in its own filth. What will they think of me then?
Still Trapped in the Moli
Jonathan Goldman
Jonathan Goldman, teacher and master's candidate at Harvard Extension School, is from Los Angeles where he has worked in education for over a decade. Jonathan also has a wide array of short stories and poetry that deal with local social causes in Southern California and hopes to be considered as part of a new movement of Modern fiction. Currently, he's working on a Cozy Fiction portal fantasy called The Little Brown Bird.
In the moonlight, the sharpened moli gleamed as the taaulaaitu showed it to the tribe. Legend held, this moli trapped the essence of the moon--that it could be used to speak to the ancestors, reveal the past. Or even see the forbidden, the years beyond, the Hei. Like many tangata whenua before, Mikaere was a healer, a taaulaaitu, using bone and ink to preserve their link to the past. But that all changed for the Māori when outsiders began visiting their shores.
The Māori were part of the sea, and the sea was part of the Māori.
The ocean was rife with opportunity. It brought them fish for food. The tides pushed them out further and further away from home. The more islands discovered, the more they thrived, grew. How could they not think the Gods’ favor shined down on them? They built their huts by the sea. But the sea swelled from beyond the horizon. Something else was coming in with the tide.
On that night, Mikaere dipped the newly fashioned moli into the ink he ground from kukui nuts and sugar cane. It was a job many in his family had done before him. More than just a healer, he was a tohunga, advising the chief on all things. But when Mikaere needed guidance, he relied on the sacred moli and performed a special ritual.
The chief was not usually on edge. He liked to talk but tonight not a word. Other tribes reported sightings lately. Pale creatures offshore only heard from lore. Some believed they were the Gods. And the Gods only returned when they were angry. Of course, Mikaere did the same as generations before him. Looking back through scrolls, he talked to all the tribesmen, young and old, and tried to calm them, to reinterpret the omen. And it worked until it didn’t. He understood why the Chief called the meeting, especially so late into the night. Something needed to be done.
It began the same as any ritual. The chief laid his right arm flat on the ceremonial rock. Mikaere began hammering the point of the bone into the surface of his skin. With small deliberate strikes, and half a moon’s passing, black and delicate lines began to develop into the shape of a man. The chief stared ahead, not daring to look at the image unfolding on his arm.
Mikaere stopped. He traced the silhouette of the image with the tips of his fingers. The outline looked human, but it was not one any in the tribe had seen before. He stopped and looked up at the moon. His eyes shimmered, then turned solid white. He knelt to begin again. But this time, he moved with an unearthly speed.
Deepening into a trance-like state, Mikaere could no longer see the rest of the tribe. The old medicine man dipped the point back into the small ceremonial bowl. His hands were a blur as he expanded the image on his skin, until the intricate black lines covered the entirety of the chief’s forearm. Now, much more than just the shape of a man. The tribe gasped at the sight.
Long before the first outsider, the moli was used to embed the mark of the tribe. However, Mikaere’s moli was different, special. Once, Arihi, a famous fisherman, had speared a white whale. A white whale was a bad omen. Storm clouds crackled overhead. Arihi believed the Gods were unhappy. He towed the carcass to shore, but the sharks ate most of the meat. Only the head survived.
And Arihi was a changed man. He told the healer that he was cursed. The remainder of the carcass was not shared with the rest of the tribe. “To spare them,” he said. But he hammered off a piece of the jawbone and gave it to the taulaaitu, believing its spirit still trapped in the bone. Only a holy man could be trusted with such an enchantment. Many moons later, Mikaere would inherit the very same moli.
He snapped back from the deep recesses of his mind. Mikaere’s hands stopped moving. Everyone moved closer to see the image. In the center, a strange white creature was holding a large, sharpened stick. At his feet, outlines of bodies littered the ground, and a huge ship loomed in the background. The hushed voices grew in consensus. The Gods were angry indeed.
Mikaere raised his head, his black pupils visible again, and the entire tribe was silent. Only the cicadas’ trill filled the dark space around them. With the spell broken, he pointed at the chief’s arm and began, “Our ancestors showed me a warning. The pale ones come with the pull of the sea, as we did. And will use their weapons
to overpower us. Those that surrender will be taken away as slaves. None will survive! There were no signs of help. Only the sea ran red with blood.”
With the prophecy, the chief stood from the ceremonial chair. His large stature towered over the rest of the tribe. His face was dark and tanned from many suns at sea. When he spoke, Mikaere heard traces of fear in his voice, “No, it can’t be.” No one protested, so the chief continued. “The sacred moli first led us here. It’s protected us from one generation to the next. Maybe there’s another way. I can’t ask you to do it, Mikaere. The cost is too great. But without your help, how will we survive?”
In a haze, Mikaere rushed to prepare the moli. There was no thought of himself. Only the tribe. His hands shook. He steadied them. His head was still spinning. It was unwise to go back in so soon. He never broke that rule he learned from his father, his tupuna. At the very least, the spirits would be displeased.
The chief presented his left arm. Mikaere dipped the tip into the ink and began hammering out another image. The taulaaitu’s eyes went white. Sweat pooled at the top of his head. His hands whipped feverishly. His body shook and then grew still. This time, when the lines developed, a large canoe came into view. There were many men, and they all bore the tribal mark of the wave. When he finished, the chief smiled and tapped his finger on the image of the canoe. “We will go back to the big island,” he said with a smile. But Mikaere didn’t move. He couldn’t move. His last act cost him dearly. He was buried at sea which was tradition. But without him, the connection to the Gods, to the past, to all things, was severed.
7 moons passed and then Sev, the tribe chief, commanded one hundred canoes in total to head out toward the big island. In the open ocean, large black clouds appeared out of nowhere. The captain knew immediately. Just like Arihi, it was a bad omen. A bitter wind whipped from the South, pushing the canoes off course. The more the chief tried to steer away, the more they veered into the heart of the storm. After the rain blinded them and the waves reached up twenty feet into the sky and the winds beat down on
their backs, the ocean simply swallowed them whole. The entire tribe disappeared beneath the foamy darkness below. The chief clutched the moli till the very last.
Many seasons later, a grand wooden boat anchored off the shore. A pale man in fancy garb stepped onto the sandy beach, the palm trees swaying in the breeze. In one hand, he carried a flag with a red cross and a blue X behind it. And with a feverish cry he exclaimed, “Behold, the Isle of Sandwich. We claim this land in the name of King George. In the name of God.” Broken pieces of wood lined the shore. Maybe a bone or two remained.
A rustle down the shoreline grabbed his attention. He drew his long, black metallic sword. It glinted in the heat of the sun. He was ready to pounce from months and months at sea. And that’s when he saw it sparkle in the sunlight. The bone, white moli lying on the shore.
Plucking it from the sand, he couldn’t help but feel it was special, different. Exotic. He pocketed the lost tool. To him, probably a treasure, a prize. But one thing was clear: the power of Arihi, of Mikaere, of Sev the chief, of every woman and child of that lost generation still flowed through that moli. The curse continued. Needless to say, Cooke never made it off the islands. And to this day, the moli remains near that same shore. And to this day, its mark continues.
The Train
Caroline Broderick
Caroline Broderick, a 19-year-old writer, seeks to inspire profound thought and introspection in herself and others through the power of storytelling.
The rain was like small bullets pounding through my bones. Mud chewed at my skin. My hair, soaking wet, leeched to my neck. It felt like the whole world was rushing past me...
Yet I stood still. My feet rotted in that field.
Did you see me? Maybe it was your hand that pressed against the window. The one in the last cabin?
I was a statue. The roar of the train numbed everything. My arms were made of concrete, and my fingers were sand. You were gone. You were really gone.
I ran as fast as I could to get there. Ma screamed for me to stop, but I didn’t listen.
I thought that maybe… Maybe if I ran really fast…
We talked about this for months… and it was always months away.
Did you wait until the conductor blew his whistle before boarding? Did you search for my face in the crowd?
I don’t know how long I stood there. After the train disappeared, I stared at the tracks. I thought about following.
My socks squished in the mud. Every step held me closer to the ground. It was like the earth wanted to remind me that I couldn’t go with you.
My train hasn’t come yet.
The Boy Who Loved Me
Cheliss Thayer
Cheliss Thayer graduated with an MFA in fiction but she now writes mostly creative non-fiction that doesn't exactly fit into one specific category or box much like the toys that litter her house in the current life stage she finds herself in. She lives in Corvallis, OR with her three boys.
I cried for three days straight after grandpa’s funeral. Every-one patted my back and gave me space and food and sympathy. And I felt guilty, so I cried some more.
See, I’d taken the occasion to also break up with my boyfriend. Two deaths, one day.
It was not entirely heartless. There was, for example, 600 miles between our bodies on any given day—an emotional relation-ship lacking a body. More than long distance. There was also my body, which I’d begun to throw around carelessly and felt on the precipice of losing. So when you look at it that way, it makes more sense.
I was back in town. We were dressed up. My boyfriend was there to rub my back and hold my hand. I cried then, too, but it was for complicated reasons involving grief from every direction.
During my visit home four months earlier, my aunt sat me down on my mother’s bed and told me to cut it out with the nice guys already. By which I mean she told me what I already knew: you need a boyfriend whose body you can dig your fingernails into, trace your fingers over, exhale into.
This one is too far away for you, she said.
Who’s he touching? Her eyebrows asked.
Who’re you touching? Her chin asked.
I blinked quick, but the image I saw in that darkness made my sternum pulse. She was right. That camping trip, the weekend before I came home, where I’d slept in the bed of a friend’s truck— a boy who also loved me. We’d spent an hour three inches apart, pretending to sleep, until I unzipped my sleeping bag and he slipped his hands against my skin, traced his fingers lightly, delicately, hungrily across my body. I knew it meant something different to us both. But I was ravenous, and he held my chin, nose, jaw, ears, neck.
I’d asked, is this okay?
He whispered, yes.
I’m not really explaining this right, so let me try again. I was afraid of commitment. So I held myself back and became a library, checking pieces of myself in and out and also losing the records of who had what. Which means it all got blurry. I’m getting off track.
This one starts after grandpa’s funeral. After all the family photos at the Veterans memorial. After the eulogies and the prayers and almost all the condolences. Before the three days of crying, before I’d removed my modest funeral clothes and taken a plane ride back, I held my boyfriend’s hand tenderly in the parking lot of the Veterans memorial. I brushed away hair that wasn’t in my eyes and patted his hand. I made as little eye contact as possible.
I told him he was nice. I told him I thought I loved him, no, I’d always love him, but I couldn’t keep it up, the distance thing. The handing myself out thing. There was also the matter of him living with his parents still, the fact that I’d never seen his bedroom because of it, but I didn’t tell him that.
He said, okay.
He said, what?
Then he left.
He called the next day and asked to meet one more time. I wanted him to hold me, make me feel better about all of the broken pieces. Instead he gave me a box of everything that reminded him of me.
The next day, my friend picked me up from the airport in his truck, drove me to my house, put me to bed. He sat on my couch for four hours until my roommate got home. They whispered in the living room. He must have said she won’t talk to me, she just won’t stop crying. My roommate must have patted his arm, I’ve got this. They only knew of the one death.
He said, I’m sorry.
He said, I know you must miss him.
He said, what can I do?
Scream from a Passing Train
Lawrence Bridges
Lawrence Bridges' poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016).
You can find him on IG: @larrybridges
The ration I made was eaten by time, made for measles when caught, but never caught but by needle, or don’t I remember the spots?
Distance revs with headache then disappears.
Donkey collars and cuffs amble in.
Cry, medicate, or hike it off. You face trailers. You face the dead air of three decades accelerated and twirling inside a numb moonbounce. The concrete is particular as to fact.
Touch with hands free of gesture and jargon, the terrible journey with privation behind the melting ranges and now, salt. I regret being so direct as I am now and over the years.
Better my silent face in labor
blurred by noises. I turn to hear a passing scream from a train.
Dear Emma
Jenni Dawn Muro
Jenni Dawn Muro is a professional survivor of a cancer diagnosis she received in her teens, along with a spinal cord and brain injury that occurred just a few years ago. She has also recently been diagnosed with Lyme disease. Jenni courageously pursued a career in Hollywood, working alongside some of the most famous talents in the world. Now, as a proud mother of a nine-year-old and two rescue dogs, she resides with her family in the enchanting city of New Orleans. Jenni leads writing workshops for cancer and health organizations, serves as a speaker and entertainment consultant, and is currently working on a memoir. Her writing has been featured in Newsweek. Zibby Magazine, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.
It’s been over twenty-five years since I slept with your boyfriend. It was freshman year at university. You weren’t just a friend but my “big sister” in our sorority. In a sea of young women, you chose me. Then, I destroyed the miracle of your friendship.
I could never make things right or even try to make amends since that ship sailed so fast from the port of betrayal where I was the captain. But I am still left with the need to explain (more) and publicly share (condemn) my biggest regret.
Will you hear me?
The shame, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and ultimate ostracization caused by my brief insanity were all well-deserved. Every sleepless night, side-eye stare, whisper overheard, and tears shed were also earned. At the time, I believed it even led to my cancer diagnosis…
I once read a book about a cancer patient’s theory that someone’s illness, its origin, is directly related to their actions: cause and effect. For example, the author wrote about a defense attorney who developed tongue cancer. See the connection? Well, I was convinced for a long while that my Ovarian tumor was caused by momentary sluttiness.
A few months after that night, when a seven-pound cyst was discovered during a routine checkup at the gynecologist, I wondered if the stress inside of me fed the beast around the clock.
I lost an ovary and a year of my life to chemotherapy. I lost all my hair, too. It felt like punishment. I was sentenced to a hospital, with intense despair from all around, that I breathed in and out for months.
Subsequently, I was forced to withdraw from college, the ultimate banishment. I understood when it occurred to me during treatment
that you never reached out. Why would you? That realization was the final nail in my proverbial coffin.
***
If that cancer folklore was merely a coincidence, then what else can I say for myself that is based on facts alone?
Naturally, I can blame adolescence, which sensationally veiled my judgment. We all recognize the years that fall in the in-between. It’s a poor decision paradise.
I can blame alcohol even more. Drinks mixed with the atmosphere of Cancún on Spring Break was the nastiest combination. The continuous buzz initiated my openness to his flirtation, his flirting. I have never ordered a Sex on the Beach since. Excessive drinking was new to me, which must have been evident to anyone in my orbit. I woke at dawn, alone, from a terrible sickness. I was vomiting from the drinks and panic. I vomited until there was nothing left but my feelings. The beige bathroom floor held me for hours. ***
My honest recollection of the timeline is pitiful. The images remain sepia-toned flashes, and conversation is absent from memory. The dismal montage replays in my head and haunts me during deep thought and reflection.
But let it be known I also blame him.
He sensed my weakness and sought my attention. I wore insecurity in neon lights. The thought of his common name or crooked smile wave like a banner of shame through my spoiled mind. He was a poster boy of college life but a dangerous frat guy underneath the facade. He earned that reputation. He took advantage of me. I was never safe in his path. He must’ve been better somehow to earn your love, but the cons erase the good. So, during your pain, I hope you understood at some point that I didn’t betray you alone.
If I could tell that college girl then what I know now, it would be the indisputable rule – never cross the line with a friend’s boyfriend. Ever. And if you do step over it, you might feel eternal pain in a once genuine heart. I’d also tell my younger self how easily we can become targets. And how easily alcohol can drown a fun time of good intentions - and change happiness.
***
Oh, beautiful Emma, you will always come to mind when I think about the detours of my life.
I can still smell your Chanel perfume and picture your deep-set eyes over an iced coffee. I can still feel the fortune of your presence and hear the echo of your harmonious laugh. You embodied every notion of a dream girl, but more painfully, a role model friend.
Sometimes, I imagine the direction our friendship would have gone. How we’d get together in New York, introduce our partners and children, and pin your holiday cards on the fridge.
During darker times, I daydream of hearing your gentle voice from that chemotherapy chair. In that fantasy, you walk into my hospital room carrying sunflowers. We both loved sunflowers.
May you find my remorse a page turned. A book closed. If you ever acquit me, life’s jury, or even a single reader, it won’t matter since I can’t turn back time. ***
What would be your erase and rewind?
Log 777: Incomplete
Gordan Struić
Gordan Struić is a Croatian poet and lawyer who writes about moments that often pass unnoticed, yet carry something that lingers. His poems have appeared in regional literary journals. He is currently working on his first poetry collection, where inner landscapes unfold through language and image.
> user.log: opened time: unknown
emotion: persistent status: unspoken
// entry.001 you asked for honesty I replied with a smile.
// entry.007 saved your message read it too late.
// entry.015 typed “don’t go” then deleted. cursor blinked longer than I did.
// entry.026 you paused. I mistook it for peace. it was distance.
// entry.033 searched: “how to undo a goodbye that never made a sound”
// entry.040 no results found.
log incomplete memory loop active error repeats
[continue anyway] [shut down]
As The Crow Flies
George HS Singer
George HS Singer worked as a janitor, paper boy, goat herd, carpenter, Zen Buddhist priest, special education teacher, group home director, research scientist, poet, husband and professor. He is a father of three and grandfather of six. His first collection of poetry Ergon from WordTech Press is available on Amazon.
I told you of the boy who lived up Cheyenne Canyon, how he had this crow that glided behind him as he walked to school, how it appeared again every afternoon at 3:00 to escort him back up the Canyon, clockwork black. I’d managed to tell a story you’d never heard before.
Sometimes I think I’ve ruined my life with my lies, temper, the way I became my father’s son. But I may yet amaze you again.
The Man Who Watches All Things Go By
KN Zaidi
Fantasy allows us to look at ourselves from a new perspective. It lets us redeem, forgive, and overcome. We need to entertain ourselves correctly. KN Zaidi is here to put that right.
Each day starts the same. The same grey light streaming through the grating. The same flat pillow on which he rests his head. The same white walls without a speck of decoration. The same dull life which he swore he’d never have.
He scratches at his unkempt beard and dresses himself in yesterday’s clothes. His students will be waiting on him. Today, their most important lesson. The day they realise arriving late to his lectures, or not arriving at all, is the primary teaching method of Professor Mazak Ala. Today his time will be spent on better things. Personal things. Something to leave his mark on this world.
He ascends the narrow stairs of the parapet, winding his way up to the tower attic above. It was locked and forgotten before he began using it. To everyone else it still is. The university administrators are too busy puckering up for the next feast of public funds to pay attention to Mount-Rose Wing, a place unrepentant professors, broken lab equipment, and the odd narcotised student go to disappear. The door is locked from the outside. He pulls the key and slides it in, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
A grimy skylight does little to illuminate the mess. Sloping rafters graze the tops of piled notebooks, bundled letters, diagrams, maps, borrowed tomes, loose pages torn from the ones he couldn’t borrow. They teeter in the cold, clutching the warped floorboards like seabirds on a sail. The dull edges fade from his thoughts. A current propels him, awoken by the presence of his life’s pursuit. His maze. His unfinished masterpiece. A mosaic of lost colleagues, friends, lovers, and family. Crime, judge, and executioner all to itself.
In the centre of the room, a salvaged piece of machinery sits in the midst of modifications. Everything analysed, classified, and piled up around it has been leading to its development. A convergence of ancient knowledge and contemporary craftsmanship, a key to the door, a gateway to the bridge. The proof he needs to convince the university that not only does the afterlife exist, but we can manipulate it, wield it, shape it to create a new age of man. Mazak’s mouth salivates at the prospect.
He stole the various parts needed for this machine from across the university. A second-generation microscope discarded by the Psychic Ordinance Research Facility makes up the bulk of its mass. A twelve millimetre electropic lens filched from the Alchemical Distension Project is soldered into the framework. The latest in mechanised computation juts garishly from the side, and underneath the whole thing its engine runs on spare bicycle chains, sewing machine pedals, and clocktower rotors. It’s taken him years to cobble together. It took him even longer to compile the research. All in all it’s been a decade of dead ends, headaches, cuts, bruises, accusations and investigations. He has longed for today, dreamt of today, bled for it, lied for it, wept for today. And now, finally, he is ready for those long years of torment to turn to a whisper in the wind.
He sits down at the machine. His feet pump the pedals. Gears hum into action. A shiver runs down his spine. Sat atop the pile of schematics, a fresh syringe awaits. He pulls back his sleeve. The needle is poised above the vein. A single drop of sweat rolls down his skin. Don’t hesitate, it tells him, you are ready. He plunges in the needle and extracts the blood, excitement in his eyes, mouth twisted in a grimace. Pushing back the sleeve, he doesn’t bother to stem the blood, a dark red circle spreading across his arm. Leaning in close, he drops a few beads under the electropic lens and pumps the pedals harder, faster, grinding the gears against each other until a filamental beam of true light descends from the quartz lens of the microscope. It touches the top of the blood. There is a light hiss and a few wisps of blue vapour rise from the ledge. The computer suddenly clicks into action. Strips of stamped code begin to spill from its mouth. Licking the rough crescent of his bottom lip, Mazak Ala peers into the lens of his monstrous creation and his life is changed forever.
First there is nothing. Then a sensation. Beginning at his feet, working its way up his legs. A rending, tearing, kneading sensation, like his whole body is being sorted into its individual fibres. It hurts, but he cannot pull away. The light is inside him now. There is no escape.
Second, there is a sound. Small at first. A distant song sung by one voice, brushing against his ear, studying his body, ordering his thoughts. Then a new voice joins, and another, and another, and soon he is awash in harmony so beautiful he becomes twelve great oceans colliding at once.
Third comes light. Every conceivable colour of the known world falling like rain. Gathering in strength till the storm of jewelled splendour rushes into a single point. And as each drop falls, the light takes on more permanence. The colours amalgamate. Their borders realise into a shimmering plane. A mirror. And he sees himself, for the first time, fully and truly.
He sees the panicked lines and dark rings reflected in the eyes of yet another relationship blamed for his personal failings. He sees his clenched hands around the wine glass as he explains to his father why he cannot come home. The tears on his cheek, the slumped shoulders, the closed throat as he stumbles through his eulogy.
He is transported from surface to surface watching his life in reverse. A lost young man wandering an unfamiliar city. An arrogant student taking hits from the glass pipe. A lonely child looking out over the bay. He is reflected in every window, rain drop, ripple in the ocean. He is the city, the empire, the sky itself. And still he rises.
The sun glints off iridescent scales, shimmering in unbroken light. Knowledge eternal in the midst of its eyes. Silken gold cascades from its cheek. They float in the belly of the shadow and the creature flicks its tail launching Mazak back towards life, spinning end over end, tumbling as the world shifts around him.
He sees men marching on men, banners flying in the turbulent winds of war. Across the Red Sea, under the blazing sun of the Southern coast, in the misty vales of the North, men scatter their blood and grow roads, houses, temples, and palaces.
He sees divinity touch the material plane, the sun descending to the penitent. It drags the beauty of the moon before it and from their loins spring conquest, philosophy, medicine, and art.
He sees the song of one become the song of six. Three kings and three heralds uniting the living. A hammer, shield, and voice unwavering guiding them under harmony.
And life itself proliferates before him. Twelve beings of creation, twelve perfect creatures, all knowing and all powerful, formed from knowledge eternal. Where they walk new life is born and the world is filled with bounty and splendour.
But where there are those that cast joy into the world, there is that which knows only despair. Mazak is cast beneath the soil into rock and shadow and air too foul to breath. And the dark one crawls and carves and waits in jealousy and hatred, grasping at the living, whispering its corruption.
And still further down into the earth he is cast, into a world of unceasing madness. It peels and unravels, strips his will from the bones and flesh. And one great eye looks upon him and says, I see you.
All this Mazak knows in an instant, though it takes an eternity to comprehend. How many sunsets and sunrises have been since he left his body back home? He claws at the air. He is ready to return. Return to his loft, to his research, to what family and friends he may have left. He sees his body hunched over the machine. He swims and screams and fights and pleads, but he cannot reach it. The tides of time move against him and he is thrust far away from himself. He is thrust back into the infinite, back into the void of reflection and refraction. He is thrust into a new role amongst creation, a single tear on his cheek, forced to watch all things go by forever.
Still Counting
Lucy Elgee-Taylor
Lucy Elgee-Taylor is an English Literature graduate from England. Her work explores intimacy, loss, and the tension between the grotesque and the beautiful.
i’m counting headless chickens again their tattered feathers, the tartare yolk fertile and cunning they scatter across the gravel with their jagged, chipped talons like unfathered children
snaggletooth smile i know this game their heads lined up for the taking aching phantom limb slick in my pocket
mother hen’s blunt beak still warm in my palm
honeyed sky, embers of july the flightless air the mayfly dance wings clipped like a promise
i remember them your beady dead eyes the freckle beneath my locket boot on my throat sweet, swallowed secrets and i’m still counting on you
To Whiskey, On Seeing Her Legs
Ernest Troth
Ernest Troth is University of Chicago grad, former diplomat, and now a distillery owner. Poetry often reflects on the exquisite enjoyment of food and spirits. Whiskey and bacon are food groups.
I’d taste you again, one fleeting sip, Your tender embrace, vanilla-kissed lip.
With ribbons of toffee and cedar’s soft glow, You linger like warmth when soft shadows grow.
But now, you're a trace, a hymn left unsung, A melody spun from oak’s golden tongue. Do barrels still dream of the spirits you gave, Or fade into quiet, the stillness of staves?
Precious
Ruby Fitzgerald
Ruby Fitzgerald is an author and traveler, dedicating her life to exploring the function and beauty of our planet and our minds. Instagram: @descendants_of_war
Somehow I knew I would never be enough there would always be another page, another name, a ding on your phone in the middle of the night. But I would bite – my tongue that is –too in love to say goodbye I would weep in my sleep, silently, beside you, then smile in the morning like my heart didn’t hurt knowing the whole time, I’m precious, I am. But not to you
The Rooms We Leave Behind
Alves dos Santos
Alves dos Santos was born in the South African city of Johannesburg, but he grew up in Machico, the land where Portuguese explorers first set foot on the beautiful island of Madeira. Alves dos Santos has been described as a traveler of the soul, an explorer of human stories and uncharted realms. In his words, we find the beauty of an essence in constant ferment—a blend of pure air and volcanic undertones—but above all, the portrait of a man who lives in harmony with discovery, truth, and, most of all, life.
I remember the room, its walls steeped in stories we never finished, the air heavy with smoke and the weight of something that never truly belonged to us
You were therea sated shadow no longer seeking the lightwith a smile like an unfinished sentence, brave and bitter, sweet and sharp, a melody daring the silence to speak
Outside, the city pulsed - urgent, relentlesswhile we hovered in a stillness that seemed borrowed from another world
There was a moment - wasn’t there?when the chaos paused, when the world outside held its breath, and we believed, perhaps for just a fleeting instant, that what we shared was more than ephemeral
You said love was a coin spent recklessly, a song that promised more than it could deliver Yet still, you sang it like a hymn, every note a defiance against all that sought to break you
“We’re broken,” you said, “but we have the music” And I knew then that the music was enough for you, even when I wasn’t
You left as if you’d never been, slipping through the cracks of a city too vast to hold you
I stayed, not by choice, but because I didn’t know where else to go You never looked back, not once, not even when I whispered the words you didn’t want to hear: “I need you” Or when, in desperate denial, I shouted, “I don’t need you” The truth was always somewhere in between I don’t want to say you were the only one, but you were the only one who mattered And though I rarely think of you now, when I do, it’s always the same: a half-lit room drenched in regret, your voice fading like the end of a song that refuses to leave
The Falls of Us
Elisabeth Fowler
Elisabeth Fowler is a novelist and avid reader. She hails from Alabama and writes her stories from a place of regional empathy to true human nature. She might also be addicted to coffee and the smell of old books.
His truck smelled of spearmint and potted meat.
The Little Tree freshener danced from the rearview mirror, but there was no telling where the hint of sausage came from. If I had to guess, I would say it was his breath.
The two-door black Ford kept up with the heavy demands Daddy's foot laid on it. It only vibrated some when he tried to push the old thing past 85 mph. That was his warning to ease off the accelerator, which he did in a series of agitated grunts.
Riding in the truck was unbearably silent at first. My brother was the natural buffer, but when he asked to come, Daddy said no and left him standing in the gravel driveway as we kicked up a plume of dust. We got on the highway and headed north. Daddy's lips moved in scratchy sync to songs that were before my time.
I tried to rest against the door jamb, but every hit pothole caused my head to assault itself against the window. How stupid I was for agreeing to join him in the first place, although I suspected there was no real choice in the matter. Even though I was made to feel like there was such a thing as free will, that's usually how it went for a girl two years into puberty—I was expected to do as I was told.
After an hour of traveling, Daddy cleared his throat and turned down the blues. I heard his deep, pebbly voice fill the truck for the first time since he demanded I get in. The sound unnerved me since our silence had grown familiar and safe. I learned to enjoy it and was irritated when our streak was broken.
"You thirsty, guh?"
I lifted myself from the edge of the plastic-covered seat and faced him. "Yes, sir." The words squeaked out from my parched windpipe. If he hadn't asked, I would've endured the hours-long trip with a dry mouth and an empty stomach without so much as a hint of complaint. That's how he raised us—to stay out the way and don't beg for nothing.
Daddy pulled off the highway when he noticed a dusty-looking gas station ahead. Maneuvering to the end of the parking lot, he shut off
the worn engine and waited. The truck made some tinkering noises that sounded like it had been dismissed from a hard day's work and needed to vent.
I giggled under my breath.
When a woman darker than Daddy exited the store, he decided it was safe for him, too. The lady staggered past, holding the rim of a liquor bottle bunched into a long paper sack.
I followed Daddy's lead and opened my door. Pulling down the orange shorts that crept up my crotch, I peeled out of the truck. The back of my legs glistened from the sweat of the plastic. He was already inside by the time I finished properly adjusting myself.
Alone, I entered the store and scanned the place until I caught sight of his head in the back with the drink coolers. He pulled down a Pepsi, then walked towards the aisle of dry goods, oblivious to my presence. I traced his footsteps to the coolers and picked a peach iced tea in a glass bottle. At fourteen, I thought glass bottles made the drink more refined.
I walked over to my father and asked if I could have the expensive Snapple. With his back turned to me, he didn't answer. After waiting a few awkward seconds, I walked down the next aisle and grabbed a candy bar and some sour straws. While second-guessing my choices, Daddy was already at the counter to pay for his Pepsi, potted meat, crackers, and a handful of Long Boys. I hustled to add my snacks.
While the store clerk slowly rang up our things, I could feel her staring between us, trying to work out the math. Daddy and I both knew that look. Those types of people were why he kept his distance from me in public, and I hated her for it. I often wondered if he hated me for it, too.
She was trying to connect the dots on how an intensely dark, stoic Black man came to be the traveling companion of a wiry, fair teenager whose loose curls and sandy blonde edges might lead one to believe she was just another tanned white girl with frizzy hair. I was determined to shock her with the answer.
"Daddy, can I get some cookies?"
He slightly nodded, and the woman raised both her eyebrows. After turning away from them to grab the Lemon Planks I passed on my way to the counter, I smiled to myself.
He paid with cash, thanked the lady, and we left the station. Back in our metal prison of a vehicle, we returned to our unspoken alliance for the next two hours.
As he slowed in an unfamiliar town, I started to pay more attention to our surroundings. He turned into a parking lot with a giant castlelooking tower with a plain stone building attached. On the outside, big red letters read 'Ruby Falls.'
Through sheer curiosity, I mustered the courage to ask, "Where we at, Daddy?"
He grunted, "Tennessee. You ain't never heard of Ruby Falls, guh?"
He parked the death trap and got out as if I was supposed to suddenly remember something I never knew. He stretched a bit but waited for me this time. True to character, he didn't give any further explanations. Not now or when we first left the house.
My brother and I were playing in the yard when he sprung the trip on me. "You coming with me?" was all the information I received before blindly hopping into the truck.
I wasn't sure if my white T-shirt or orange shorts were even appropriate for whatever Ruby Falls entailed. I smoothed down my plain clothes and followed Daddy inside the building, still wondering what possessed him to bring me there.
After entering, I looked around the eccentric gift shop while he spoke to a man who donned a long white beard and a matching bucket hat. He reminded me of a gold prospector seen in our old social studies book. I noticed Daddy pull out his billfold and hand the man money for two tickets to Ruby Falls.
"We go down in five minutes," the man explained loudly. He turned to greet more customers ready to pay for the tour, leaving Daddy
standing alone in a corner. He seemed out of place and nervous. I watched him while I touched all the interesting knick-knacks and wondered if my mother put him up to this.
I groaned.
When the five minutes were up, Daddy motioned me away from the souvenirs. We stood at the back of the line, waiting for the large metal and glass elevator to open. Once the small group finished piling in, panic rooted in my belly. I couldn't tell Daddy I didn't want to go. He already paid and would be upset if I wasted his money and time. I closed my eyes and held my breath while we descended.
The bearded man turned out to be our tour guide. He made overrehearsed jokes as we slowly went down and exited into the cave that led to the Falls. I heard his voice but refused to discern his words. My brain was on fire. I didn't understand why we were here.
The man led us through the trail while talking, and Daddy stayed in front of me. The way was tightening and dank even though it was meant to feel commercialized and safe.
Our guide spoke of years past and how the place had evolved into what we now saw. He spouted facts about the hanging stalactites still dripping water and shaping the underground world that was initially discovered by accident.
I masked a distorted display of interest, for Daddy's sake. I listened with my eyes since he had spent his hard-earned money on this unnecessary field trip.
The air was crisp in the cave, and a snaking breeze tickled one of my exposed legs. I slapped at it in disgust, not wanting to be touched— not even by God.
The boys at the Kingdom Hall had made sure of it.
With my shattered sense of humanity, I reached for Daddy's callused hand despite my transformed nature. His focus remained
on a wall of rock ahead. There was no pressure in his grip, and there was none in mine.
Now we understood each other perfectly the truth would not be faced today.
Just like that, I wasn't his little girl anymore torn away by age and undue experience. The latter proved to bend us beyond the point of breaking, so much that it only distorted the bar.
In the dimness of the potted lights, I studied what I could make of his face. The scowling lines etched into his forehead transcended worry and doubt. His was a born poker face. I wondered how he convinced himself to marry my mother.
"Daddy, do you love us?"
Funny how the loaded question never escaped my throat, choked out by a nervous cough. He looked down at me briefly to see what was the fuss. I shook my head to ward off his false concern. Of course, he loved us. He just didn't know how to conform to the world's definition of the term.
We were alike in that way, so I kept silent about my recent lesson on the subject. In the end, it was my bubblegum-colored diary, with holographic stickers and a flimsy lock, that betrayed me my chicken-scratch inscription into the one thing I thought was mine.
I bought it from Claire's with my grade money. Ten dollars an A, they promised. With forty dollars to my name, I landed on the diary as a small consensus to my impulsive nature. The rest was for college, I convinced myself.
As hard as I tried, I couldn't scrub the lesson from my thoughts, so I forced it out on paper for relief, but it hadn't worked.
Days later, I was waiting my turn to ride the four-wheeler when Mama came bursting through the screen door of our doublewide. The flimsy thing hit the siding in protest of its treatment. She was holding my secrets in her hand. "This ain't true, is it? This one of your little stories?" Afraid, I lied. I told her it was true. But the short
passage left out the sodomy and most of the other sordid things that happened to me that day. I was too ashamed to admit to them, even to my diary.
She screamed, stomped back inside, then called for my father. I could hear her bare, wide feet pummel the route to their bedroom from the thin walls outside. My skin prickled with fear-induced heat. I marked the day of my death, but it never came. What came instead was a massive interrogation that spanned five families and an entire church congregation.
The cave trail continued for about an hour, and I stared at the wet ground as we shuffled through. I forgot to be grateful and pay attention, but Daddy didn't complain like he usually would. He stayed slightly ahead of me, giving the atmosphere the regard it afforded in his quiet way.
As we walked together, I mulled over my lie again and tasted it in my mouth. It was bitter, for sure, but at the time, it was the only flavor I could manage. I thought I had brought it all down on myself—that it was my fault.
It would take me decades to fully register that every detail about that warped lesson of love was utterly out of my control. From the car I didn't drive, the hotel room I didn't reserve, to the extra boys I didn't invite. Even after my mother had mostly discovered the incident, what I would expound to my parents and to the church was determined by those same boys.
I was handed my story of damaged goods, the scapegoat, the hoe. They were all warned.
Daddy grunted, breaking my concentrated rage. I turned to the waterfall cascading from the highest point of the flowstone. He waited for a pocket to form in the crowd so we could move up to the rails overhanging the pool below. The facility placed changing lights in the walls to give a colored show across the roaring water.
Sickness overwhelmed me. I stared at one of the less exhibited walls to calm myself. The last thing I wanted was to embarrass my father
a second time by bringing up curdled Lemon Planks and murky peach tea.
Daddy told me to look at how high the falls were. I willed my eyes to obedience and smiled for him. After making some incomprehensible comments, we left.
In the throes of overstimulation, I never recalled how we made it back up and through the gift shop, but instead of leaving immediately, he took me to see the top Lookout Mountain. Staring out at the rolling greenery, I waited, but the follow-up questions never came, and he never asked for the truth. He never once asked me to explain myself. This was his version of love a revision I desperately needed. One I would never forget.
He let me play my music on the long drive home.
We listened to the shrilling runs of Mariah Carey and the smooth adlibs of Sisqo. His jaw clenched tight, unapproving of my tastes, but he relented to them. I should have appreciated those small delights more those new lessons if only I had known.
Daddy ended up leaving us two years later.
Cycles
Kimberly Wilder
Kimberly Wilder (she/her/hers) is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Qualified Supervisor, and EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist, Consultant, and Facilitator. She is a single mother to two fierce daughters. They live in Tallahassee, FL where Kimberly tries to enjoy the nature of North Florida as much as possible. When she is not busy running her private practice, she enjoys traveling, hiking, seeing live shows, having deep meaningful conversations, and learning new things. She grew up in a small town where she developed a passion for writing in middle school that has continued to grow with her over the years. Her poems “After the Funeral” and “Reciprocate” were recently selected to be published in an upcoming book with Poets Choice. As a trauma survivor and first-generation college student, she hopes to inspire others to find and follow their passions to become the hero/heroine of their own stories.
There they stand like infinite mirrors my mother, her mother, then hers and on the ancestral reflections go. It will take far longer than my lifetime walking along these shores to learn their stories.
Still, I return to the crashing waves every night to search for answers.
I thought I did everything right so these cycles of sexual abuse would stop eventually.
I'm held captive as a prisoner of that hope and these matriarchal ancestors hold the keys.
Do their keys unlock the chains of these oppressive cycles or do they finally free me from this cell of unrelenting hope?
This is the quest I embark upon each evening when my eyelids can no longer withstand the weight of exhaustion.
In the light of day, my mother takes the form of a vibrant cardinal. When the moon is high, I follow her ethereal silhouette down, down, down into the depths of despair.
I speak to her in the light and night yet, it is only in the night where she responds.
Her tear-stained cheeks express more than words ever could and in her eyes a glimmer of that galling hope endures.
I explain that, when awake, I am so wrought with heartache that I feel it in my bones.
Amongst the living, I am a blackhole where even glimpses of joy vanish before they're committed to memory.
She smirks with such knowing and begins to introduce me to our ancestors who have come and gone before.
They bear the same gut-wrenching tear stains on their skin. The hope in their ghostly eyes feels equal parts pressure and possibility.
I'm taken aback instantly by the juxtaposition: both elation and devastation are their responses to my presence.
Our collective sigh communicates the same question: How the fuck are we still here?
Suddenly, it's as if we can read each other's minds, we lift our heads and hold them high.
An ancestral circle then forms, enclosing me, whispering "You are exactly where you need to be."
Their whispers feel like a shout in my lungs to live and live well so my daughters know how it's done.
Then, I'm gently pulled back to the waking surface by a light.... beep, beep, beep.
I
Didn’t Go Molly Seale
Molly Seale has published poems, memoir, and short stories in an array of publications, including Hippocampus Magazine, Hotel Amerika, The Write Launch, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Dipity Literary Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poem, "Tug of War," was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Theatre from The University of Texas and resides with her husband and two gray cats in Makanda, Illinois.
She was dying. I didn’t go.
One hundred miles away. I didn’t go.
Her lungs heaved and fell.
“She’ll last ‘til midnight,” the doctor said.
I didn’t go.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was ripe with my second child due on Saturday, a risky pregnancy.
“Don’t come,” the doctor advised. A nameless, faceless doctor who didn’t know me, didn’t know her.
I didn’t go.
Relief.
I had permission.
I comforted myself: “My brother is there, she’s not alone.”
I didn’t go.
I slept that night, our three year old curled between us, my belly full with baby. At 6 a.m.—the chime of the phone. My brother: “She died at midnight.”
The day after death my brother cleared her house, chose what he thought I’d want, little of which I wanted.
Her wig, the pink polyester dress she wore to my wedding, the fold-out couch, two chairs, the corner hutch, the sewing machine, her china and silver, promised to me.
But – her costume jewelry, the small, simple shadow box which hung in our houses throughout my childhood? Gone. Parceled out.
Years later, I ventured back to Texas, visited my brother. We drove to the little country cemetery where our parents are buried. The urns were broken. I placed fresh flowers on their graves, envisioned their bodies lying beneath. I groaned, held my breath, sobbed. My brother, embarrassed, retreated to his truck, left me.
Later, he told me the night she died he waited for her death in the waiting room of the little country hospital.
He wasn’t by her side. She died alone.
I didn’t go.
Gratitude Practice for New Year’s Morning
Annalise Parady
Annalise Parady is a poet and a social worker. She was born and rooted in Wyoming, but currently lives, writes, and grieves in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Her work has been published in Sonora Review, Corporeal Lit Mag and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Annalise is always available to tell you a fun fact about the creatures and plants of the desert; you can find her on Instagram at @annalisewrites and on Substack at Third Place Poetry.
Before it was vomit in grass, the night was disco lights. It was warm humid dance floor before it was cold bathroom tile but you and I were never that good before we went bad. Blame my phone, juiced dry from capturing our reverie. Blame my friends for not seeing you order your fourth or fifth drink, for spinning me in their arms as we sequined with sweat. Blame the whiskey for the influence, for my fingers on your phone searching alcohol poisoning with the year only two hours old. Blame who you want, it was my clock tick choice to check your texts, sending our relationship out in fireworks instead of the quiet chime of midnight. Blame you or blame me, regret chooses who to haunt, and these are my ghosts: the last dinner we’d ever share retching up your throat. Her name lying like bile in mine. Our fancy clothes crumpling, our legs curling around the toilet, our time running out. We could admit that you never really loved me, or that I spent years trying to force your heart. Instead, reality hung like the stench of confetti popper smoke in the morning air: you had to cheat for me to give up on you.
Have you ever been crushed like velvet by the truth? I’ve found there’s nothing softer than being saved.
Bequests
Christine Harapiak
Christine Harapiak is a poet and playwright living on the footsteps of a national park in Canada. Until she started practicing law she wrote poetry regularly to make sense of her world. Then, for 25 years she went quiet. She has since hung up her robes and is back story-hunting, finding inspiration everywhere she wanders.
What if the old man had not filled the basement to the ceiling with books in thousands of solid green boxes made for cases of motor oil but filled, in the end with books?
What if the niece or the cousin or the wife (it doesn’t matter who does the work but know it will be a woman dutifully verklempt but determined to get on with things rag in hand to clear away the dust) is certain that fossicking through the perilous stacks will leave gold in their hands?
What if instead of the careful inventory of sailing ships glossy coffee table books too heavy to lift in that last flush of illness he had a well-worn library card and memories of when he went to sea? In that world all that is left, in the end
is a leather bound journal which holds the brackish sting of sea spray still and a photo of the same man much younger not sickly or ailing at some port of call with a handful of others toughened by work but cheeky and impish and free posing triumphantly with a parrot like a crew of boy pirates who finally discovered their lodestar. In that world the woman left with the work of clearing up is his daughter and she hears her father’s voice in the pages of his journal in the spidery stroke of his pen This is another fine pickle the boys have got me in and she laughs.
Sundown
Martyna Russo Londoño
Martyna Russo Londoño is a Polish-born, Amsterdam-based writer who brings stories to life both on the page and at live storytelling events. By day, she helps creative teams scale in the tech industry; by night, she writes about missteps, doovers, and the small moments that change everything.
A beam of her brightness, a glare to remember. A ray of could have been, that burns mid-November. She became farewell at sundown, a light - but too slender to last.
Regret Tanya Moldovan
Tanya Moldovan started to write poetry as a way to cope with grief and all it entails after her mom died. She hopes her poetry will resonate with those who experienced a loss, and will move those who didn't - either way she hopes it will touch the hearts of people.
I had a dream last night. There was a man, who told me that when someone dies, you’ll see a rainbow. Bright and beautifulif you treat them right; dull and burnt all overif you don’t make the effort. His face worn out, with pain in his voice, his eyes tired and full of regret, tortured, from having to see the grey rainbow every day. He shared his vision of his rainbow. His sister said, in a harsh tone, that it’s all his fault. Her face full of anger and despise. He said he knows. He looked wise, like he lived a thousand years, like he’d give it all up for a chance to redeem what can’t be undone. I had a dream last night. There was a man, who looked familiar. Was he a stranger or, was it me?
Pretend
Sarah Bean
Sarah Bean is a poet and fiction writer from Western New York. Her work has appeared in North Country Literary Magazine. She has an MFA from Emerson College and currently works as a Library Assistant at her hometown's public library. You can often find her on the internet talking about everything from her affection for swashbuckling space pirates to the difficult journey of learning to love herself.
It’s 5:43am. Bon Jovi is playing quietly on the radio. You can barely keep your eyes open in the passenger seat as your sister hums along. Her face is relaxed as she stares ahead but her grip on the steering wheel is tight. You want to ask if she’s okay but the words won’t come. When she catches you watching her, she tells you to go back to sleep, it’s gonna be a long drive. You ask where you’re going for the second time in three hours. I told you, Callie, it’s an adventure. You’ll love it, I promise. You wonder if she has a plan at all but you lean your head against the window and watch as the sun edges its way over the clouds. Trust me, Lucy says, and you want to.
You want to believe she dragged you out of bed in the middle of the night for a fun sister road trip, that she packed everything so quietly in the dark for the fun of it all. You want to believe that when you asked what about mom, she meant it when she said don’t worry, she already said it was cool, and that the note Lucy left was just a telephone number and not an explanation. That you agreed to come along because you wanted to and not because you were frightened.
Not of Lucy, though. Never of Lucy.
Your sister is wild and unpredictable but you love her more than anyone in the world, even if she disappears for days on end and you don’t understand half of what she’s talking about sometimes. Like when she comes back from a weekend with her boyfriend, her face pale and sad, but she apologizes because she was having such a good time, she just lost track of the days. Or, when you notice the weird scars
up and down her arm, and she laughs it off, you know how boys can be. You don’t but Lucy changes the subject before you have a chance to say so.
You watch her, now, as she hums along to the radio. She’s gently bobbing her head to You Give Love A Bad Name and when she catches you watching, she smiles and starts mouthing along dramatically. She wants you to think everything is okay but you can still read the tension in her body. You know this look because you’ve seen it any time Lucy and your mother are in the same room.
It reminds you of a snake, coiled so tight, ready to lash out at the first sign of danger.
You want to ask so many questions, but they all stick in your throat. Instead, you reach your hand out to curl around hers. She flinches but lets you. You make a stupid face so she laughs. She unclenches her hand from the wheel. She tangles her fingers with yours.
It’s not enough, but both of you have always been good at pretending.
Only a Memory
Lisa Lancaster
Lisa Lancaster is an Australian storyteller and writer. Her work has been published in the Scene and Heard Journal, and she writes weekly flash fiction and short stories on her blog: https://lisalancaster.wordpress.com/
She wasn’t just the woman who sat silent and still watching the sunset.
Every day at three-thirty, the nurses would wheel out her chair to the picture window. She would watch the hazy blue horizon of the eucalypt-shrouded mountains, which would eventually swallow the drooping sun. She was everything.
Even now, when I sit next to her, tracing the outline of her heartshaped face in the golden glow of the setting sun, I remember her razor-sharp wit and how she used to stand behind me in the kitchen and smack my hand with a wooden spoon. She used a spatula once when I had kneaded the bread that should have been soft and doughy into a sticky and stringy mess.
I opened the container on my lap, and my latest bake had the delicate perfume of an orange blossom. The recipe said one tablespoon, but I just free-poured until I thought there was enough. Probably too much.
“Here, Gran. I made it this morning.”
She turned towards me with a polite smile. It was a vacant gesture because she no longer knew who I was. It was the manners instilled over 85 years that gave me that smile. Not my Gran.
“Darling. Put some butter on it. Thick as honey. ‘cause I can tell you left out the eggs. That slice is going to be drier than the time you made those Anzac bikkies.”
It wasn’t what she said, but how she said it, that sent the knife in my hand skittering across the speckled linoleum. Her voice was warm, sharp, and kind. My heart clenched in my chest as I searched her watery blue eyes for the woman I had lost.
“You remember that?” My voice was shaky, but I pushed it past the lump in my throat.
“Remember what, dear?”
She was gone.
My heart fell.
So did my tears.
Collections
Judith Rypma
Judith Rypma writes fiction and poetry. Published short stories include work in Mobius, So to Speak, After Dinner Conversation, and Nightsun. Her published novels include Amber Beads, Mrs. Fleeney's Flowers, In the Shadows with Catherine the Great, and Baba Yaga and the Stepmother: A Retelling of Snow White.
Before you arrived—unwashed clothes stuffed in plastic trash bags and eleven-year-old face set in a perpetual scowl I didn't particularly care for children. Who needs a house littered with smelly diapers, chewed pacifiers, broken toys, outgrown shoes, disappointing report cards, discarded hobbies? I've always preferred things neatly arranged where they belong. I can’t explain why I volunteered to pack and store my carved ducks, Hummel figurines, even the Bradford plates to make room for you. Not that you take up much space yet, although my husband and I plan to fill it with warm things: quilts, dolls, love.
You have morning glory eyes—same shade, you announce—as your dad’s. He would write from prison, you claim, if he had this address. "It's for the best," I offer weakly as those eyes close tightly, resisting attempts to provide the sunshine that will let you blossom.
***
No, I don't agree there isn't anything to do here. I own the entire Nancy Drew series, or as many as were written when I was your age. We could get you a library card, too. Or you could help us work the garden, feed chickens, milk goats. What about a camp in the barn? Or your own pumpkin patch for the 4-H Fair? No, that's not just for nerds. When you finish moping in your room, we could make butterscotch cookies. Or you could explore the meadow out back not alone yet, of course, because we wouldn't want to lose you.
The agency has rules. Eventually we can break them.
***
While we walk, I point out jack-in-the-pulpits, trout lilies, trillium, all the floral harbingers of spring. We collect samples—except of the trillium and you seem to care when I explain endangered species and how if you once pick a trillium blossom, the plant will die. You help me press the other wildflowers between wax paper and
arrange them in a notebook on your new desk just like I did as a child.
You've stopped calling nature walks stupid.
We make dandelion necklaces, weaving them through each other's hair. Yours is blond and fine as corn silk, inherited, as you mention repeatedly, from your mother. Hopefully that's all you inherited, but I'd plow under all my gardens before I'd say it aloud.
***
Our summer projects are more ambitious. We collect chunks of granite, gypsum, and quartz, then glue them on cardboard. You pack a picnic basket with pimento cheese sandwiches, Milky Ways (your favorite), Babe Ruths (mine), and Cheese Nips (ours). At Lake Michigan we scour the beach for shells polished as our bodies, which turn honey-colored, amber, then bronze.
This is the first time in decades I've had anyone to swim with. You especially like racing between the buoys (yes, I know you only finish four strokes behind me now). Swimming lessons must have been one of the few good things your mother did for you, although when I mention her name now you hunch those bony pre-adolescent shoulders and pull into yourself, your eyes more black than blue, more closed than open.
***
The three of us have developed a nightly ritual: dinner, barn inspection, drive to Dairy Dip for chocolate cones, two games of euchre, and bedtime (involving several tries on our part, creative delays on yours). We've changed some routines; you've changed all yours.
Lately you haven't mentioned how "sick" it is not owning a television. It's not easy to explain how to live without American Idol
or cable reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 and Baywatch. We're hoping you'll figure that out on your own.
Weekends we head for festivals, flea markets, antique shows, pow wows, nature centers, county fairs, state parks all new and wondrous to you, and I have to admit, more fun for us. When I look at your china doll face leaning into my shoulder on long drives home, I want to preserve these moments, cannot imagine anything more precious or worth keeping forever.
***
I've always been a collector, show you my stamp collection, but you have no interest in philately. I explain how my sister and I operated a lemonade stand, wove potholders, and picked blueberries. For fun my friends and I saved dinner napkins, going door to door requesting fancy specimens and then trading duplicates. Occasionally we’d dare ask for unwanted costume jewelry, laughingly playing dress-up and making fun of old ladies’ tastes. It’s the same stuff I see selling for exorbitant prices in antique shops. You laugh at such notions, preferring to collect trolls, baseball cards, old Disney videos: things someone will buy you. Probably me.
It's true you've nearly outgrown your room, now crammed with accumulated clothing, collections, trinkets. I don't miss the junk I used to keep there. I'd rather come in here at night, perch on the edge of your bed, tell ghost stories, tuck you and your stuffed animal buddies beneath the patchwork quilt you helped me finish.
Sometimes you let me kiss you goodnight, just a gentle flutter on your rose-petal skin.
***
You've started coming outside and curling up on the grass, filly legs tucked beneath you, to watch me weed. At first you couldn't
understand why I plant so many flowers, but now you act interested, favoring foxglove, delphinium, Jacob's Ladder, anything tall and purple. Amazing, isn't it, how the perennials return year after year? Such an incalculable reward for a small investment of time and love.
Sometimes you give me strange looks when I say such things, though I suspect you understand more than you admit.
I know what they say about the past, but people can change. It’s unbearable to think about how you used to live, wandering all night puffing cigarettes (or worse), picking up guys who wanted things you still don't comprehend, pocketing lipsticks and lighters behind clerks’ backs.
I'm trying to offer you another life, one you can keep. One that doesn’t have to become extinct. Please don't reject, trample, discard it. Forget me not.
***
In the middle school counselor’s office you knot and unknot your fingers. I know you feel afraid and uncertain, but a few more months and you'll like it here, I promise. Maybe spring break we could all fly to Epcot, gather sand dollars on the Gulf, even bring one of the new friends you’ve so far resisted making.
On the drive home I dare dream ahead to basketball games, proms, college entrance exams. If I had to assign a title to this period, I'd call it "Motherhood, Surrogate Style." And I wouldn't sell it or trade it for all the collections in the world.
*** When they show up unexpectedly to bring you back to your mother, you don't shed a tear. Or say goodbye. Not to us or the goats, whom you renamed Nancy, Bess, and George. You just haphazardly stuff
trolls and clothes into the suitcase we bought you, yanking out our hearts with as little feeling as I uproot dandelions.
In the room where you used to sleep I rock myself for hours. Outside, flower beds snooze beneath a protective layer of snow. I don’t think I’ll miss gardening. Don’t care whether the rose bushes will survive.
There is a Secret Garden growing inside me. But without anything to nurture and protect it, I doubt it will bloom again.
I should have kept a scrapbook or journal while you were here, since now there is nowhere to collect memories. Instead, I sort them into mental cubicles, labeling each: beach times, holidays, picnics, bedtimes, close times. I store them in my mind’s attic, waiting for cobwebs to accumulate. Knowing I won't dare take out the remnants to examine for a long time.
The memory I refuse to file is of you hurrying jubilantly out to the agency car, morning glory eyes evading mine, flushed cheeks matching the purple loosestrife bouquet I thrust in your hands.
You never once looked back. Spared no more regrets than I did long ago when I finally tossed my childhood collections, scattering dried wildflowers, rock specimens, and pressed leaves to the wind. Not knowing what I'd lost.
Dear Frogs of Pinckneyville, Illinois
Terry Lucas
Terry Lucas is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Everything: New & Selected Poems, winner of the 2025 Blue Light Book Award. Dear Frogs of Pinckneyville, Illinois previously appeared in The Thing Itself (Longship Press, 2020) and is included in his prize-winning New & Selected Poems. Terry is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County California and a freelance poetry coach at www.terrylucas.com
Forgive me for all the times I forced you into Welch’s Grape Jelly jars filled with cotton balls soaked with ether from my father’s starter fluid can he sprayed into dead diesel engines on frozen December Mornings. I am truly sorry for not throwing you higher. Please know that I wanted to put you into orbit like Belka and Strelka, the first warm-blooded animals to trick gravity and return alive, but my nine-year-old arm wasn’t strong enough to launch you over the peak of the barn’s roof crumbling into itself in the vacant lot next door. I tried again and again as you tumbled behind glass like green-clad daredevils in clothes dryers. Naturally, I performed post-mortems, the point of my mother’s sewing scissors fitting perfectly into openings seemingly created for entry. I squeezed rough sides to lift white bellies, avoiding injury to organs while I opened you up. You voiced no objections when I showed the neighbor kids your digestive systems, The contents of your stomachs, your kinked intestines totally in the interest of science. Like the other animals slain so humans could travel safely to the moon. I am sorry for them too. But not as much as treating you as if you were created for us to experiment on in order to protect those mothers’ babies who grew up to be astronauts. As if the empty womb of space wasn’t holy. As if you were not.
On Divorce
Anna Weber
Originally from Louisiana, Anna Weber currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her work has appeared most recently in the Idaho Review, Poet Lore, Fiddlehead, and Nimrod, among other journals.
Because you work in words, you look for a way to make it a metaphor. You remember a poem your first poetry teacher showed you, remember the last line—his face was a hole where the ice could not hold her.* Perhaps you, too, can be a hole. Swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. Your ex-husband said you were a lot. A lot too much, really. And you see it now as you make your way in the world, hoovering it all in like a power vac. You are a blue whale, that abyss of an open mouth. Thousands of pounds of plankton and krill and who knows what else, down the hatch. Discernment was never your strong suit. You picture him, the man who was your husband, telling anyone who will listen about just how much you were. He is at the movies, or in a restaurant, or simply walking down a mid-size city’s road. Too much. He tells it to a flock of girls in the park. They are fair-skinned and pretty, girls who search for the shade of a sturdy man. You are the sun, beating their shoulders crimson. He tells it to a buddy who offers commiseration, agreement, and you are the napkin this friend uses to dab beer foam from his upper lip. Too much is your battle cry, your war whoop. Out in an open field, he tells it to a blackbird overhead. But the bird, an impartial observer of the failed marriage, remains neutral. The bird is wise, suggests perhaps both parties were to blame. His feathers, dark and cloaking. His song, a tune you hummed as a child. Or maybe you two sang it together? It’s hard to remember how anything used to be.
* the actual line, from Simon Armitage’s poem, “Not the Furniture Game,” reads: And his face was a hole / where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.
The Work of Intricate Things
Christina M. Ward
Christina M. Ward was born and raised in rural North Carolina. Her “naturist” poems have appeared in poetry books and anthologies such as Organic, Fireflies, Vita Brevis Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, Alternating Current Press’s The Coil, and others.
Late one August afternoon I observe a sprawling patch of Lantana camara, a tangle of limbs, inflorescence, sun, amidst a whir of pollination.
A kaleidoscope of butterflies lifts in a whorl, carries on in delicate, transcendent dance. I have never felt so out of place. I am an interruption, intruding on the delicate work of such beautiful things.
Talking to Himself
Benjamin Green
Benjamin Green is the author of eleven books including The Sound of Fish Dreaming (Bellowing Ark Press, 1996) and the upcoming Old Man Looking through a Window at Night (Main Street Rag) and His Only Merit (Finishing Line Press). At the age of sixty-eight, he hopes his new work articulates a mature vision of the world and does so with some integrity. He resides in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
I
From an array of four windows: the tops of cottonwoods trending towards bronze the season announces October again— reddish-brown soil and stone buttressing the flesh tones of volcano-born cliffs (ponderosa studded) under blue sky and an archipelago of drifting clouds— named after Diego by Spaniards in Spanish, a language he never learned.
In the middle of a long life in the canyon, watching clouds build, billow, wither— this is what the old man sees.
II
He arrived half a life-time ago, decided upon red dirt, brown stone, lava cliffs beneath the many shades of blue sky— chose them for inspiration, as sources of wisdom, and ways of knowing. The choice marked the second time
in his life that he made a vow.
He grew a garden in the dry dirt, planted a few trees, followed trails, decided which forks to take, until, nearing the end, he resembles the tattered trunks of the junipers that border his vegetables. Perhaps the lichen, or the spines on the cholla hold his memories better than he does, now but thinking, honestly, he knows he possesses no regret and no shame, no desire to make other choices. Truly, he thinks, he cannot make things right, or any better. His heart contains no nostalgia. He looks out his window at the beautiful perfection of the hellish place that he is, at last, made of.
III
Slow. Water, wind, ice, lichen dissolve a rock, morph what was hard into soil, dirt.
Small. The old man digs stones from his garden, feels the soft fuzz on the leaves of tomatoes. He stops to pluck a few browning leaves, tossing them in the worm bin.
He worries if his heart will be measured by the handfuls of earth he added to this garden. Time. Does the world ever run out of time? Or does the world merely forget?
He drops flower seeds marigolds over the strawberries, cosmos in the beans. For the birds, he says. A feather is a beautiful thing.
Meaning. What does it mean? He will let the rocks decide.
IV
He walked many paths, some mapped, some merely passages, forcing his way forward past obstructions. He often tries to remember who he is, imagines some abiding sense of identity, and vows not to wander.
The looking back fills with confusion, but not regret, he affirms. He remembers choosing amelioration over reconciliation, always. Was this a scattering Or remaining intact? he wonders.
No matter, never mind; what is left is precious to him.
Popo Kept Breathing
Anne Bower
Anne Bower teaches tai chi in rural Vermont, though earlier in life she was a Prof. at The Ohio State University, teaching American Lit. and composition. She has 3 poetry chapbooks to her credit: Poems for Tai Chi Players, The Space Between Us, and Getting it Down on Paper (the last one co-authored with Pamela Ahlen). Anne's writing interests include food, which shows up in a number of her poems, the body itself, and how we grow and change. She works on creative nonfiction and long form fiction too.
Popocatépetl blew smoke into perfect blue skies constant backdrop to our rambles through narrow streets with pink and purple and turquoise houses cut-paper Día de los Muertos banners idling in soft breeze where I helped you haggle for a fat wooden flying angel, my Spanish more fluent, your German-tinted efforts no use, and Popo steamed on our dusty bus ride to Chalula's pyrámide, topped by a dilapidated church, where we tasted grasshoppers toasted with chiles, and Popo kept breathing all that week against the horizon during outdoor receptions, lectures, shared meals at the university or Puebla's restaurants and tavernas.
I should have read its signal known beneath our hugs and promises through weeks and months of drinks and research and talk of tenure, parties and drag shows under gray Ohio skies of ambition and doubt where we settled into jobs dull highways apart, hidden doubts grew— pressure of our histories, heat of our needs, and the miles between our days.
Until years later, against another blue sky where Maine's rough waters crashed and fell, where my family laughed and cooked, danced and swam, where we had no private moments, no secret giggles, no scholar talk, your angry lava spewed into hot words crashing against my cool withdrawal, my stumbling attempts to hold you back as you threw clothes into suitcase, slammed out the door, drove away, leaving our small village of friendship and love tumbled, smothered. I still smell its ashes.
Missing Dad
Irene Fick
Irene Fick lives in Lewes, Delaware. She is active in several writing groups. She has had two chapbooks published (Main Street Rag and Broadkill Press) and a full-length manuscript will be published this spring by Broadstone Books. Her individual poems have appeared in journals such as Gargoyle, Philadelphia Stories, Poet Lore and Willawaw Journal, among others. Missing Dad was first published in the Eastern Shore Writers Association Anthology in 2022.
And now, one by one, they’re departing this earth, and it’s clear to me now, exactly what they’re worth. Oh, they were just like Atlas holding up the sky. You never heard them speak, you never saw them cry.
- Barbed Wire Boys by Susan Werner
We didn’t know what Dad did all day. Mornings, he disappeared into the bowels of the stone gray station, boarded the Illinois Central for the long ride, one of many men in new suits bound for desk jobs in the city. We were brushing our teeth for bed when he came home, retreated to the paneled den with briefcase and leftovers.
We didn’t know why he spent years bent over thick books with small print until that GI bill diploma arrived in the mail. Dad framed and hung it, just so, in the den. We barely noticed.
We didn’t know what Dad did in the Big War. He never spoke of his wounds, his hepatitis, how he must have cried as blood gushed around him, limbs exploded. Did he serve at Normandy Beach? Iwo Jima? In the conceit of our youth, we didn’t think to ask.
We didn’t ask why this son of an immigrant shoemaker left behind brothers and sisters and cousins and his fated life in Flatbush. Didn’t ask why he packed us up in the old winged Chevy as the grandmas wailed their farewells. As Dad drove west on I-80, did he imagine an untethered life, a boundless sky?
When Dad’s liver began to fail, we watched him root through worn letters, mementoes, yellowed photos. Then, he retreated once more, one of many silent survivors, now stilled under flat gray stones.
Iomshruth; so
Emma Elobeid
Emma Elobeid is an emerging poet from the Isle of Wight. In her day job, she writes about circular economy solutions to big global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, material and food security. She has two sons, two dogs, and many many poems hidden in her phone notes. Previous work has been published in Dublin based poetry collective Not4U and, most recently, The Madrigal.
whatsapp-weary / with the unforgettability of friction / the fallacy of fiction / forever moved by one act of inaction / our original / missed / sin makes amnesia impossible / apathy absurd / an akinetic kinship / twelve years of ebb / twelve years of flow / you type ‘hi’ / and still / like the sea / I rise when you say / so / here we go / sensemaking a-gain / in the senseless swell / fact-checking / all the things we said / everything we didn’t / the tea / the toast / the too-soon hunger / the too-late thirst / reliving / regretting / wanting / after / in the bleak mid tide / foam and spray make moan / sink as I stand / receding waters reveal / slack groynes / empty shells / my seaglass soul / wounded / polished / thirty-three words to explain / this game / each breaking billow / brings a tsunami / of untabled thoughts / what if / what, so / what, never? / if waves are our way / then in truth / Iomshruth / turning in on myself / wrecked / buoyed / I bob back home / to clean surf / still sheets / the comfort / of an offshore bore.
Earth Tones
Bud Ratliff
Bud Ratliff lives in Midway, Kentucky, in between cities, centuries, cultures, and publications. He writes to capture the depth of what he doesn’t know.
The girls say I should not wear brown clothes.
“Earth tones,” I protest, “not brown!”
“Why?” I ask.
These are sandy Bedouin paths, worn leather-bound books, murky storm-tinged skies.
“Ray,” they say. They know him from town.
At the diner, he sits in his corduroy coat and polyester brown shirt.
He drives a tan-colored Cutlass, its rusty bumper waving: friendly; resigned.
At the Walmart, he chooses Salisbury steak and Alpo. He is subsisting: his brown a slick, bare riverbank, where nothing grows.
So they say, “Ray.”
I look up brighter colors: the coral sunrise, the verdant forest, the turquoise ocean.
Without this vision, I might stay in clay.
With good will I shed all my brown clothes
and assume new feathers to fly:
after that brilliant sun sets, I shall have eons to wear brown.
1989 Stephanie Walgamott
Stephanie Walgamott is a graduate of the University of Illinois and lives in Tampa, Florida. She is a professional fundraiser, an amateur cat mom, and an Oxford comma enthusiast. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, kayaking, and spending time with family and friends.
In 1989 as the Berlin Wall fell, I lived on an American military base in West Germany that shared a runway with a major international airport. My family’s apartment was about 500 meters north of the main terminal in a dismal neighborhood called Greenwich Gardens. Here, the apartment buildings were boxy and yellow with orange window frames that failed at their cheerful intent. There were no actual gardens, just grass and skinny trees made of nothing but scratchy trunks all the way up to the sky where they finally branched out and their leaves formed a canopy over the paintpeeled monkey bars and rusty swings in the open spaces between the yellow box buildings.
The neighborhood kids were bored and rough. Bikes were stolen, fights were fought, curse words I had to research were spoken daily. Madeline Krueger was the worst of them. She lived in the apartment above us, and rumor had it her parents would lock her out, which is why she was always outside looking for trouble.
The first time I met her, she was supervising a group of kids digging a wide hole through the playground sandbox deep into the dark dirt below.
“What are you doing?” I asked, approaching the sandbox. I was shy but knew it was important to make friends every time you moved somewhere new.
Madeline brushed a tangled lock of brown hair away from her face with a dirt-smeared hand. “None of your business, bitch! Get outta here with your hot pink jellies!”
I took three steps away from her and walked over to the ladder that clearly used to have a slide attached and climbed to the top to watch them dig until I finally got bored and went inside.
Madeline and her gang concealed the hole with sticks and leaves, and the next day a boy fell in and got stuck. The MPs were called,
and Madeline got in big trouble. That night, I could hear her dad yelling. “Get your fat ass in your room! You’re grounded!” I felt ashamed to hear this, ashamed for him, ashamed for Madeline. All the neighborhood kids were afraid of her dad, thanks to his booming voice, perpetual frown, and the stories Madeline told about the guns and knives she swore he kept inside their apartment.
Madeline was the first of us sixth grade girls to go public about starting her period. She once hid a pair of bloodstained underwear between two Judy Blume books at the school library and got suspended. Her livid mother had to pick her up from the principal’s office, where Madeline sat inside smirking and refusing to speak. She was lucky her dad was deployed at the time.
As time went on, I began to admire Madeline. While I was a rule follower and did everything everyone else wanted me to do, Madeline made her own rules and did whatever she wanted to do, regardless of the consequences. We never became friends, especially since my parents wouldn’t allow it, but we would often find ourselves in the same classroom, at the same lunch table, on the same soccer team.
Her existence made me braver, and I started sneaking away from Greenwich Gardens, out the back gate on my bike. I would pass over the autobahn, turn off the road, and then I was in a new world of lush green forest with a network of paved trails that stretched for miles to different villages. I eventually knew these trails by heart and could bike myself to parks, swimming pools, a petting zoo, a cafe that sold ice cream shaped like spaghetti, even a train station. The forest, in all its majesty and freedom, was mine alone. I never saw the kids from base there and doubted they even knew about it.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, after my Girl Scouts meeting, instead of going home to help my mom with dinner, I stayed on my bike and slipped out the back gate. Dusk was my favorite time in
the forest since I could usually spot a deer or a boar then. As I turned right onto a long straight trail that bordered a forbidden section of the forest which was fenced off with barbed-wire to protect people from unexploded World War II bombs, I heard someone yell my name. I turned and saw Madeline, who had been absent from school for over a week. She was on the other side of the barbed-wire. The forbidden side. I stopped my bike.
“What are you doing?” I yelled at her. “You’re gonna get killed.”
“Yeah!” she laughed. She was extra dirty and looked like she had been crying.
A panic I couldn’t name came over me. “Where have you been? Are you sick?”
“Look what I found.” She held out a dirt-covered object and took three steps towards me. A pistol.
Before I could say another word, she lifted it to her head and pulled the crusty trigger. She never heard me scream.
Rabbit Regrets
Alice Twemlow
Dr Alice Twemlow’s research into climate crisis transects design history and environmental humanities. At the Royal Academy of Art she explores deep time through creative practice; at the University of Amsterdam she surfaces histories of women in design. Meanwhile, Alice is working on a collection of poems about punctuation and a novel about a woman who when her apartment is flooded believes she needs to be rescued, when in fact she needs to start swimming. www.alicetwemlow.com; alicetwemlow@gmail.com
When I squeezed Moira’s hand, it was fever-hot.
Our classmates were doing homework. We were in the lobby of Skandals, the carpet sticky under our heels, a muffled throb from the dance floor resolving into lyrics as groups of older, cooler clubbers barged in and out of the swing door.
We had sniffed Poppers, stolen nail varnish from the high-street chemist, and lifted up our tops as we cycled past the Boys’ Remand School. Until tonight, the nightclub had remained out of reach. But now, abetted by some fake IDs, electric-blue eyeliner and a fourpack of Diamond Whites at the bus stop, we were over the velvet hurdle. It was me he worked on first. Plied me with drinks and tidbits of flattery. The DJ’s dry ice had hazed over my blackheads and doughy arms; so that in the mirroring behind the liquor bottles, I thought I caught a glimpse of someone prettier.
He stubbed out his cigarette, leaned in close, put his lips to my ear, almost at the spot where mum had kissed me that morning and, shiveringly he breathed, “Make sure she comes to my room, ok?”
He meant Moira, of course, with her milky skin and slender limbs. But, at the time, I thought that also meant me.
With giggles and handbags and lip-gloss, then, we arrived as a brace to a suite on the fourth floor. From the window, we could see all of our town spread out below us, unfamiliar from this angle. We drank
minibar vodka and cokes and sat on the edge of the bed, the nylon coverlet slippery under our thighs. Not much later, when I came back from the bathroom, he had taken my place beside Moira.
When he noticed me he turned and mouthed “thank you” and nodded his head toward the door. I looked at Moira; tried to read her face. It was flushed and her eyes were unfocused. But she winked as she said “See ya tomorrow, babe.” My job was done. They’d found their tempo. I lurched out of the room, blood thumping in my ears.
Now, I’m the age he must have been then. The adult life I thought was outpacing me was all too easy to catch. Each weekend, it seems, I run another version of the same race, as if one day the circuit might fork. I ride the elevator up with anticipation. And the night bus home alone. Thinking: perhaps that wink was a wince.
Porous
Nina Köll
Nina Köll is a scholar, writer, and educator. Nina has published academic and journalistic texts, literary essays, opeds and poetry in German, Dutch and English. In previous chapters of her life, she worked as a filmmaker and cultural curator. (Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ninakoell)
Perched on the sill you tossed your fag and drenched our ship in ocean mist the guard knocked gently on the door our hands curtaining our cackle
“It’s 2 a.m.” he hushed and coughed his look arrested by your skull clean-shaven as you’d asked me to and I had tenderly conspired
Under our blankets we shirked the scholars sought shelter from canteen cuisine our linen littered with morsels from Marseille of biscuit boats you’d brought from home their orange zest dousing our mouths
Wrapped in the thund’rous verve of youth we conjured up eccentric lives through rituals of non-conformity
But friendship is a breathing creature we plotted in a distant past porous and young we sailed ashore and lost
each other on the way
At the horizon you now laugh hollow your muffled roar an air of familiarity it comes in waves courting my rev’rie
I peel an orange to lose myself and find your memory
Letting Leenie Go
Kristofer Schleicher
Kristofer Schleicher has been a storyteller all his life, first dealing fiction to authority figures when expedient as a youth, and then telling stories professionally as an attorney, minister, and teacher. He was obsessed with distance running and cycling until his fancy bike threw him headfirst onto the pavement, leading to an early retirement from practicing law (apparently, clients are discomfited when you can’t remember their name). Thus, he no longer identifies as a lawyer and now spends his time spinning written tales instead of wheels; all the while trying to convince his three teenagers to make fewer decisions they will regret.
The dream is always the same. I imagine the first light of morning climbing over the sill of a bedroom window and making its way across the floor and up the walls. I see us lying in bed. I am awake but still. She is still sleeping, with her arms around me and her head under my chin. Awake or sleeping, she always holds me tightly, but it never seems tight enough for either of us. There is no room between us, even after years together. I love her as much as I have ever loved anything, anyone. But it is a love weighed down by her great loss and my inexplicable cowardice. I dread that she will wake up and realize that it was my fault, and she will let go of me. She will be gone. But then I wake up and I am not with her. It was the dream again. She has never been with me.
The memories of the day I lost her flood my mind and overwhelm my senses. I smell the dark water, the wet leaves. I remember the dampness in the air, the chill as the late autumn sun disappeared behind the hills around the lake. I remember the sweat under my coat from running hard. The moments before were filled with joy and heedless abandon. We ran clumsily down the steep path to the dock, slipping and sliding on the damp red and orange leaves, breathing hard. Little Leenie somehow got ahead of me, her red hair swept by her rapid pace, her little shoes moving furiously fast. I was bumping shoulders with her brothers Mike and Don, and we stumbled on the first plank of the dock, falling over each other, elbows into wood, laughing. Mike lost his shoe. Their mother was behind us, yelling, “Boys! Leenie! Slow down!”
But Leenie accelerated towards the end of the dock, looking back over her shoulder to be sure no one would pass her. Then she tumbled into the lake. The sound of her entering the water silenced everything else. I ran to the end of the dock with her brothers close behind. There was only a faint circle of ripples where she had disappeared. Everything was still, no sound but our heavy, fearful breathing. We looked into the dark water and saw nothing. Her
mother reached the end of the dock and stared helplessly at the now calm water. Everything in the woods held its breath.
After a few seconds I saw her floating up to about a foot below the surface, her small white face slowly coming into focus. Her eyes were wide open, looking up at me with great surprise, her hair swirling around her face like bright red seaweed. She seemed to be trying to say something. “There she is!” I shouted, pointing into the water, but I could not seem to move. Her mother pushed past me and jumped in, grabbing Leenie and then sinking out of sight with her.
“Mom can’t swim!” exclaimed Don. Both brothers leapt into the water. I still could not move. Soon all four of them surfaced, and I lay down on the dock, stretching out my arms. Don pushed Leenie to me, and I lifted her up onto the dock.
She felt so very cold in my arms. She coughed water down the front of my coat and gasped for air. I leaned back flat on the dock and held her against me, trying to squeeze the water out of her lungs. It came out in waves around my neck and shoulders, a frigid river running around inside the collar of my shirt to my back. Her little fists were clenched tightly, holding onto my coat under my arms. When she stopped coughing up water, I sat up and pulled her head under my chin.
Her brothers were still in the lake but I did not see their mother. They were turning in circles with their arms out, hoping to find her. Their faces were grim and desperate. Every few seconds, one of them would go down into the lake water and then come back up alone.
“Leenie,” I said, “sit here and don’t move, I need to get in the water.”
“No!” She pulled tighter and closer against me. “No! Don’t let me go, don’t let me go.”
“Get help!” Mike shouted. I stood up with Leenie’s legs wrapped around my waist and her arms around my neck and ran up the dock and up the hill towards the parking lot, slipping on the wet leaves, trying to keep my balance and hold on to Leenie, who was now shaking and sobbing.
I looked frantically around the parking lot for someone to help us. There were no other cars. I opened the door to her mother’s car and pressed on the horn as hard as I could until I saw a Park Ranger trotting towards us from the woods. “Down there! Down there!” I shouted. “At the dock. Her mother fell in and can’t swim. They’re all in the water!”
He ran past us and down the hill. I tried to set Leenie down in the car so that I could follow, but she clung to me. I lifted her out of the car and walked back down the path toward the dock, her arms still locked around my neck and her legs still wrapped around my waist. The Ranger was standing at the end of the dock, looking down at the still, dark water.
“I don’t see anyone. Is this where they went in?”
I bent down, still holding Leenie, and picked up Mike’s tennis shoe where we had fallen over the first plank of the dock. “That’s where everyone but me went in.” He gave me a quizzical look and then turned back to the lake.
“I can’t see a thing,” he said, kneeling to look into the water. “Are you sure they didn’t get out and walk back?” I reminded him that we had just come down the path to the dock. He said that the water was too dark and too deep to find them without help. I walked back up the hill with him, still carrying Leenie.
Back at her mother’s car, I again tried to set Leenie down in the front seat. “Don’t let me go,” she pleaded. I sat down on the bumper, holding her trembling little body against me.
“I won’t let you go, Sweetie. I swear, I won’t let you down again.” I tucked her wet head under my chin again and rocked her slowly.
I was twelve, she was barely five, but I knew then, even if I could not articulate it, that because of my hesitation, my cowardice, I was now bound to her, like her legs and arms wrapped around me. And because she was lifted out of the water into my arms, I knew they would be the only arms she would ever trust – the arms that should have been the first to save her, the arms that should have saved everyone. Now, there was no one left to save but her. I vowed that I would do so every day.
Suddenly, Leenie leaned back from me and pointed across the parking lot. “Let me go! Let me go!” she shouted as she unwrapped herself from me and ran toward her mother and brothers. Her mother wrapped Leenie in her mother’s arms, hugging and kissing her. Mike said they took the wrong path up when we left the dock. I handed him his shoe and said nothing.
Leenie talked and talked the whole way home, laughing about her unexpected swim and trying to tickle me. When they stopped to let me out at my house, she said, “Bye-bye, carry me again sometime! Bye-bye.” I could see her smiling and waving in the rear window as they drove away. I just stood there, letting her go; drowning.
Time’s Lament
Cayden Olsrud 李愷登
Cayden Olsrud 李愷登 is a high school teacher and Master's student in Washington, D.C. His poems largely discuss themes of remembering, nature, interconnectedness, heritage, and Buddhism.
Winds rage from the east, Shorn from the power of the pure morning dragon
Clutching the pearl Sun in its claws blowing autumnal leaves down towards the soil
A mix of colors, stages in life, each at the end of their heavenly years, the last thing they see are their old barren branches, that each promise new budding life in Spring, only to be reborn facing the Earth knowing their ultimate destination.
All life is so, and time spins and expands like space a winding river that drains into the sea, only to be brought to the heavens, and released again and again, For such is the beautiful tragedy of life, and one can only futilely pray, as a leaf in autumn for the coming flowers to never blossom.
- District of Columbia, 11/8/2024
Potholes of Regret
Lisa Ochoa
Lisa Ochoa is a Latina writer living and working in her hometown of Tucson, AZ. Her writing explores the complicated world of intimate relationships and the things we do to survive them. Her works have been curated by In Parentheses, Bridge Eight Press, Moonstone Arts, Beyond Queer Words, Musepaper, and others. Her poem, "Lost & Found" was a 2023 Musepaper Poem Prize winner. When not writing, Lisa can usually be found curled up with a good book, crawling her favorite antique stores, or in the kitchen testing Instagram recipes. IG: lmotuc
I am the road less traveled packed with potholes of regret pathways pitted with wishes left behind towards forget sidewalks lined with dreams tossed away not sowing seeds humps of 'what ifs' gather slow my breaking speed washed away by wonder un-detoured destiny leaves bridges made of promises self-deceit and make-believe still the horizon beckons vanquished by the wind whispers of urgent warning drowned out by ancient sin
A Monster in the Wood
Russell Chamberlain
Russell Chamberlain was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family. He writes short stories, fiction, and poetry.
So many gray afternoons blur together in my memory of those early years of fear and discovery and the slow, boring afternoons after school. One evening stands out as my mother drove me home as the light faded on another weekday. I noticed something on the road near my morning bus stop. The school bus stop was across the street on the corner from my childhood home, just a short distance that seemed more significant in my memory. The waning sun limited my understanding of what I saw on the road. I hoped I was not seeing what I feared to be there, but I knew. I knew with devastating certainty. Why would they have done that? I thought with great disappointment and sadness. They should not be there. Both of them smashed into the road: brown, yellow, orange, and black. Their shells had not protected them. Their death was my fault. I discovered them. I told the neighbor boys about my great find, and now the little turtles were dead on the road. I wanted to undo this action somehow and bring them back to life if I could return to the right moment. Suppose I had just kept my mouth shut.
A vast forest existed behind my house; at least, this was what my developing mind perceived. The tall trees in the sunken land provided a dense landscape for my imagination, bringing joy and fear. I imagined whole worlds and adventures sitting in my swing, staring across the landscape. Seeing my path to the Misty Mountains of Tolkien, the Forest Moon of Endor, and countless other scenarios, I imagined for myself. The small plot of land felt huge in my adolescence. This place inspired adventure and fear, especially as the shadows grew longer toward the end of the day. Dense blackberry bushes created a border on the hill, separating the upper yard from where the oaks grew tall at the hill’s basin.
These bushes could be treacherous. When I was preschool age, I sat in a wagon on the hillside one warm day. I rocked it back and forth when suddenly it began to roll. I remember the rush of fear at the loss of control. My father, seeing all of this, started to run after me.
In a bid for self-preservation, I rolled sideways out of the wagon as it continued down the hill. My father’s momentum worked against him, and he could not stop. I was no longer in danger, but he continued running down the slope and stumbled through the briar patch. I ran inside to get my mother. Just as I had her attention, my father walked through the front door, pants torn and bloody with scratches all over his body.
For a time, specifically in the summer, when the days grew longer, I understood that something evil lived down the hill. Maybe not in the pure evil sense, but undoubtedly malevolent and ill-humored. I knew it to be something leafy and ancient, and it wanted to eat me, enslave me, or perform some manner of horror on my body and mind. Honestly, I don’t think the manifestation clarified itself in my brain, but I knew it would be terrible. I do not believe this evil ever had a name, though it presented a tangible fear in my mind. It was immense and often peeked over the tree lines of my imagination. When you are small, everything appears large and potentially dangerous. I think the notion of this creature came from one of my neighbors. He insisted it lived among the bushes and trees. I dismissed these ideas in the safety of the well-lit day. He was clearly hoping to scare me. He was pretty successful. I worried about this creature for several nights.
Though brave in the daylight, these ideas would keep me awake as I envisioned the creature moving closer to the house. It would move among the shadows and into the tall cedar outside my window. Its twisted fingers would no doubt pry their way into my room. I would often awake with a physical jerk. Suddenly conscious, I was positive something at the foot of the bed had my ankle and would pull me to my premature death. I could feel the hard jerk in my leg, now fully awake. Yet, strangely, nothing was there, and I would settle back to sleep with some concern. Once, I was so scared to walk down the hall I peed in a little trashcan beside my bed. Luckily,
nothing grabbed me from underneath the bed as I kneeled to relieve my bladder.
My fears must have dissipated over time because as I reached my 7th year of life, I started to venture further into the wooded area to explore the landscape and find the hidden treasures the land would no doubt offer me. I do not remember my parents being too worried about me exploring, which meant there were no real dangers. Or, at least, none they could imagine at the time. My father probably warned me about poison ivy, which I was highly allergic to.
“Watch for the leaves, and don’t grab onto the vines either. Your Grandfather got it in his eyes one time, and believe me. You don’t want that.” That sounded horrifying to me. I would no doubt scratch my eyes out. “Remember, the leaves look like hearts, and the vine looks hairy. The vine can cause you to itch, too, so be careful.” Years later, I would steady myself on a trail by grabbing a tree and not seeing the vine; I would end up with a poison ivy rash on my left hand. It itched terribly.
Despite such concerns, I descended the hill and into the woods. I carried a long stick in my hand as a mock sword. This could have been Excalibur or a lightsaber, depending on my interests of the day. Small trees made good knights or stormtroopers, and they all needed to be vanquished as I walked.
Tall oaks, small trees, and tangles of thorny bushes surrounded me. This section of our yard and neighborhood was indeed neglected. I never saw any neighbors exploring or attempting to maintain the area. I heard shuffling in the trees, but the sounds were always birds or squirrels. Never anything too nefarious. When I reached the base of the hill, I was surprised to see that the ground was less overgrown than I had first assumed. The bottom of the hill opened up a bit, and I could walk around without much trouble. The tall grass mostly fell to the side, forming little mounds.
I continued to explore and noticed the ground getting squishy under my shoes. I could hear water trickling. A small stream of water divided the property in two. As I walked, looking for the water source, I noticed several small creatures on the pebbles and rocks where the water was pooling. Four turtles sat perched by the running water. I could not believe my luck in such a significant find. It was unexpected. I had no idea such exotic creatures lived near my home. There, they sat in their black shells with orange and yellow spots decorating their backs. Each turtle measured about 6-7 inches from nose to tail. They defensively retracted their bodies into their shells as I approached, not knowing if I meant any harm. In my excitement, I decided to take one home with me. It would be the perfect pet and the envy of my classmates. I imagined taking them to school in a terrarium and the popularity such an event would bring me.
Back home, I left the turtle on the deck and went to find a shoebox to keep it in. I had several shoeboxes in my bedroom to choose from. Once I emptied the toys, I sought something to feed the turtle. I found some iceberg lettuce and a carrot, hoping that would make some tasty options. Once I set up the makeshift terrarium, which was just the shoebox with a piece of lettuce and the carrot, I placed the turtle there in hopes he might stick his head out of his shell so that I could get a better look at him. The legs came out, but his head remained hidden. I picked up the piece of lettuce, thinking this would entice the turtle to stick his head out for a taste, but this was probably more terrifying than alluring.
When I showed my parents my discovery, they did not share my enthusiasm for this new pet.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” my mother offered. “Turtles need a lot of care.”
I probably argued that plenty of my friends keep turtles.
“But those probably came from stores, and this one is used to being in the wild. We don’t know how to care for a turtle in captivity,” my father added. “He will be much happier living in the wild. It is all he has ever known. He will have everything he needs. We should take him back. They like to eat bugs. I don’t think they like carrots as much.”
I was disappointed, but begrudgingly agreed that my parents were probably right about the turtle. It would be happier back in the woods by the stream. I did not want to hurt its chances at a full life, so I relented and returned it to where I found it.
The next day at the bus stop, possibly looking for something to discuss or some exciting news, I shared my discovery in the woods with the neighbor boys. The boys were brothers. One boy was my age, and the other was at least two years older, but only one grade ahead of us. The older boy was around nine and where I first heard of sex. He described what sounded like an absurd act.
“But, you pee out of there; why would you put that in there, and how would that even work?” I was confused, which prompted the need to have “the talk” with my father. To my horror, I discovered that the boy was not lying about this strange activity.
Anyway, that day at the bus stop was focused on discovering turtles, not things to do with girls. “No way, you got to show us where you found them,” the younger boy said. His excitement inspired me.
“Sure, after school. I felt a pang of betrayal for the turtles. Following my parent’s advice, it would be best not to disclose their whereabouts. “They are just down the hill behind my house.” Maybe this was a secret not to share, but I told myself it would be ok. I would show them. It would not be a big deal. This kind of information felt impossible not to share for a boy my age.
That afternoon, we went down the hill where the four turtles sat in roughly the same spot I had left them. I was surprised by how little they had moved. They were comfortable where they were. Perhaps they were trying to stand in the sun’s warmth, which was the best spot.
“These are great,” the younger boy said. “I’m going to take one for my brother and me.” His brother had not come down the hill with us.
I tried to explain that this was a bad idea. The turtles are happier here, and we can come down to see them, but we should not try to keep them in cages. I quickly realized the boy was not impressed by these arguments.
“We’ve kept turtles before; it is fine.” That ended the debate for the neighbor boy. So, he headed up the hill with two turtles. Maybe he did know how to take care of them after all. Perhaps my worries were unfounded.
I stayed there looking at the two turtles that remained. They looked up at me in return, absent two of their companions.
As I made my way up the hill, I felt something was wrong with the situation, but I was unsure how to articulate it. The boys thought I was cool for sharing my discovery, but I felt it was wrong to take the turtles out of the woods now.
A few days passed before I rode home from school with my mother - the day when I saw what remained of the turtles on the road. I found out later that the boys decided to play a game to see how fast the turtles could cross the street. They lacked the speed to survive, as would be expected.
A few more days passed, and I checked on the remaining turtles, but they were no longer there. The boys came back for them. I felt sick. I don’t think I cried, but I wanted to.
I used to fear monsters in the woods, but now I was confident about what the turtles saw as they looked up at me when their companions were taken away.
Chronicle of a Teenager in Love
Ashley Abitz
Ashley Abitz is an MFA student in poetry at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The Dewdrop, The Harbinger, and elsewhere. She received the Stephen Ross Huffman Poetry Award in 2021. She works full-time in marketing and volunteers as Art Director and Print Editor for Redivider. When she’s not writing, she’s likely curating her moody, midcentury-inspired space or planning her next adventure.
Taps her shoe against the curb, loosing lodged gravel. Black satin acoustic-electric
slung at her hip, she rubs the red groove where it sits. Midnight Texas heat folds in,
constricts, coaxes moisture from her skin. She tugs handles of parked cars,
How hard can it be?
Searching for keys in a blacked-out Beemer checks under the seat, barely believes the handgun fingers the grip, then someone sees across the street she runs back aching, pastes herself to brick, the car creeps past window down: What's he gonna do? Shoot me? I didn't even do anything.
She wipes her tears, he passes, so she travels on.
Trudging thighs tumefy and t-shirt clings, when a stranger pulls alongside asking: Going far? She thinks
Maybe he just wants to do a good deed. Eyes gaze into hers too deep, hackneyed pop ballads scratch and he asks What are you doing out here all by yourself?
Lies glide from her lips, cooling shut-in air around them, anxious Left here.
Turn there. Going until reality squeezes and what-ifs asphyxiate
Stop!
She slings the suburban door open, bolts takes cover in oleander, stiff until headlights back up, turn around, disappear. She rubs away shin splints, stands up, the danger already forgotten, giddy: Finally free. Treads up the drive to tap tap tap the window, waiting taptap knocks another no answer.
Exhaustion pools in her feet, she sinks, furls, heels throbbing, stinking, a spider crawls onto her foot, falls asleep. Hours later shivers awake, sun scrapes the horizon, she massages a crick in her neck — Why didn’t he answer?
Isn’t he home? Makes her way to the front door, she’d never admit desperation. She wavers, feeling dismissed I can’t help her — around the corner pull one two three police, and her mother’s light-blue SUV.
Heartbeat a pith in her throat
No no how did they know? How predictable?
Officers give young lady lectures, she glares, expletives roll off her tongue,
finally, mom cries, the metallic blue door slams but not before I hate you.
A decade later I can’t sleep. I wish there was some way to go back, tell myself to believe their lectures or say that True Love at fourteen is a leap… but I wouldn’t have believed me. It plays over and over in my mind,
mom’s eyes everywhere but mine, something beyond disappointment foggy fingerprints dot the keyboard on my phone as I open and type
I love you.
Roscoe in Slabtown
Kevin Joseph Reigle
Kevin Joseph Reigle's fiction has appeared in The Brussels Review, Bridge Eight, Beyond Words, Drunk Monkeys, Bristol Noir, and several anthologies. Roscoe in Slabtown was first published in the May 2022 issue of The Dillydoun Review. Kevin is an English Professor at University of the Cumberlands.
I came home from work and there sat Roscoe in front of his trailer surrounded by garbage bags. I tried not to stare as I parked in the gravel driveway to my shotgun shack propped up on a concrete slab. Most of the houses and trailers down here in the hollow were built on slabs due to the constant flooding. That’s how the place got to be known as Slabtown.
Even though the sun started to tuck in behind Rarity Mountain, I could still get a decent look at the old man sitting in his yard, weeds sprouting up around the trailer. I tried to do a quick count of the garage bags, but there were too many and I didn’t want Roscoe to catch me staring. Whatever was going on between him and his old lady, had nothing to do with me.
After a shower, I sat down at the kitchen table and drank a beer while flipping through my phone. Amy still hadn’t answered my texts. I thought about calling, but last time I did, it went right to voice mail.
In her old bedroom at the back of the house, a few boxes were still filled with toys and trinkets. A torn poster hung on the wall of a pop princess who probably had her last hit twenty years ago.
I dropped the empty beer bottle in the trash can under the sink. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Roscoe still sitting in the yard. He hadn’t moved since I came home.
It was no use trying to pretend he wasn’t there, so I went outside and sat down beside him. “You alright?” I asked.
“I suppose,” he said.
“You had me worried.”
“You couldn’t have been too worried.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“’Cause you sure waited long enough to come check on me.”
I reached out and felt one of the garbage bags. It must have been filled with clothes. “Roscoe, is this all your stuff out here?”
“Sure is.”
I looked at his trailer. The driveway was empty, and the windows were dark. It was in rough shape. Even the twilight couldn’t hide the age of the siding or the rotted wood of the makeshift deck. “Where did she go?”
He shrugged. “She took my money and left. She’s got my social security checks. I guess I need to get them sent somewhere else.”
“I’d say that’s probably a good idea.”
“I gotta go get my address changed.”
“Do you have someone that can help you?”
“Maybe my daughter.”
“Where’s she?” I asked.
“No idea. She’s always liked her mother better.”
“It’s getting cold out. Do you have someplace to stay?”
“Nope. She locked the trailer and took my keys.”
“Why don’t you come over and we’ll figure out what to do?”
“I sure would appreciate that.”
I helped Roscoe up, knees teetering as he took his first steps. My palms pressed against his back in case he lost balance. The short distance across the gravel lane could have been miles with as slow as he walked.
As soon as we got inside, Roscoe sat down on the couch and turned on the television. He wasted no time before screaming at Coach Cal and the Wildcats. Whatever worldly problems were going on outside vanished as the blue and white attacked the basket. I grabbed him a beer, and he took it without looking away from the game.
“You said something about a daughter?” I asked.
Roscoe put the bottle on the coffee table. “She don’t like me much. I can’t imagine she’d help.”
“What if you call her and ask?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t got my phone. It’s in one of those trash bags out there. And before you ask, no I don’t remember her number. It’s saved on the phone.”
I looked at the front door. “You probably don’t know which bag it’s in, do ya?”
He took a swig of beer and didn’t dignify my question with an answer. Instead, he just went back to watching the game. I looked at my phone and that’s when the idea hit me.
“Do you know your phone number?” I asked.
“Of course. What do you think I am, some kind of idiot?”
He gave me his number and I punched it into my phone. While opening the front door, I pressed the green button and an instant later, ringing echoed from his lawn. It took me a couple tries before I ripped open the right bag and found Roscoe’s phone buried under several shirts and a carton of cigarettes.
Roscoe was still watching the game when I came back inside. I handed him the phone and he found his daughter’s number. When he lifted the phone to his ear, I stepped away.
At the end of the hallway, the door to Amy’s bedroom was open. I must not have closed it earlier. Walking back, I could faintly hear Roscoe. That was a good sign. At least she answered his call.
Realizing he might be on the phone for a while, I stepped into the bedroom and sat down on the mattress. There were no sheets, just the bare mattress on a creaky box spring.
A child’s drawing on construction paper pressed between the headboard and the wall. Two torn pieces of tape stuck to the corners. A smiling stick figure with outstretched arms reached for an orange sun with the words, I Love You Daddy scrawled in blue crayon.
My phone vibrated with a text notification as I picked up the drawing and placed it on a sealed cardboard box. The message was from Amy and said, Hey Daddy.
Maybe Then, I Would Be Enough
Julia Williamson
JuliaWilliamson is from Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. Poetry has always been her favorite form of writing. She focuses mainly on love sonnets as she get most of her inspiration from her family, friends, or nature. She has had two poems published in anthologies, and has two publications forthcoming. A single poem can be interpreted in numerous ways and Julia thinks that is the beauty of poetry.
How do I break the cycle of cement filling in my chest, simply, at the thought of not being enough? And how do I stop the fog that swarms in my brain, before the rain pours down my face from dark grey clouds working as doors to my soul?
What if I chose bliss in ignorance instead of craving the unknown wonders of the world–the universe, the evils, and the goods in humankind?
What if I treated my body as a prop to be used, flaunted, and worn for anyone to see or to touch–to take for themselves as they see fit? My love, for all, wildly, carelessly, promiscuously so that it is no longer yours–only an amber peach amongst many peaches to be plucked and consumed then thrown out; only meant to regrow and be plucked again in a vicious rhythm. What if I thought and said less–was less of, me? Maybe then, I would be enough.
Two Poems
Lina Buividavičiūtė
Lina Buividavičiūtė was born on May 14, 1986. She is a poet and literary critic. Lina is author of two poetry books in the Lithuanian language. Her poetry is published in Matter, Masters and Proverse Poetry Prize anthologies, and the magazines: Drunk Monkeys, Beyond Words, The Dewdrop, The Limit Experience, Beyond Queer Words, Maudlin House, Cathexis
Northwest Press, Poetry Online, Red Noise Collective, Sad Girls Diaries, as well as the Versopolis poetry platform. Upcoming publications include New Millennium Writings, Cathexis
Northwest Press, Red Noise Collective, The Stardust Review and Beyond Words.
Waking up from anesthesia
I cry – everyone thinks it’s from joy –they put You on my chest – all slippery, slimy, shouting – but you are not beautiful to me. I’ll burn in the ninth circle of hell but there’s nothing, I feel nothing for You –I understand how much I have tricked myself, consoled by friends and family – told love will awaken when I first look into Your eyes, told they don’t know of any mothers who do not love their children –that’s what the husband of my mother’s friend said – oh how I tricked myself, thinking I would be happy –oh, how I betrayed myself –you can’t inspire love, you can’t learn love –this I understood from the first touch, from You searching for the breast, so helpless, smacking your small pink lips, so close, nothing can be closer – so far – I shudder from You.
Translated from the Lithuanian: Rimas Uzgiris
(Not)good Girls
I am an unloved girl, I have adult children of alcoholic’s syndrome, I have a 50 percent probability of psychological disorders in my DNA strain, I have dreams where I sometimes lose my mind, I return to the old flat that was not a home, but was the only one I tried to escape, jumping through the window, my son has his grandmother’s face, I recite unlearned poems, the guys at school lift my skirt up again –but this time with sheer undies – again I hear the old taunts –Čiolė and strutis – again I solve mathematical equations in a more complex way, fatally slash all of my friends, all of my relatives, because I was a good girl, good good girl, and those girls don’t get angry, they don’t show their girl parts to boys in the yard and don’t watch them piss, don’t climb trees, never contradict, don’t eat candy, let their stepfathers kiss them on the lips, do not mastur-bate, aren’t afraid of cockroaches, like vegetables, are happy and sweet, gentle like bunnies, iron their shirt collars every day, fasten their braids with plaits of hair, forgive everything, desire nothing, don’t condemn anyone, do homework for four hours, don’t have bad thoughts, let parents live their own lives, spend summers with two old ladies in Balbieriškis village, never laugh without reason –will have to cry soon – knows the Litany of the Saints, don’t ride a bike, don’t skate, don’t go out –go fuck yourself, degenerates, - that’s how they talk when they grow up.
Translated from the Lithuanian: Ada Valaitis
Anna Laurie Billman
Laurie Billman is a Licensed Professional Counselor with roots in rural Colorado. She has worked as a counselor on the Zuni, Ute, and Navajo Indian Reservations, Alaska, California, and DC. She also was one of the first women members of the International Laborers’ Union, a fish cannery worker in Alaska, waitress, and short-order. Her travels have taken her from Alaska to Peru, Gallup to Kenya.
I was a graduate student before the time of laptops and cell phones, studying psychology with a group of students bound for small town clinics across the Rockies as clinical therapists or rural schools as guidance counselors. I was thirty years old and up to this point I had been able to keep a great distance between myself and death. Then my mom called to tell me that Anna was sick again.
I had a dream. She was on a ship, dancing in a chorus line of glamorous Italian woman, wearing a long white flowing gown. “They are whores,” an old man told me. It was strange with her fundamental Christian beliefs that she would be dancing with such a crowd, but now that I think about it, it was not so odd because Anna accepted everyone, enjoyed all kinds of people.
Our friend Monica had filled the upper truck with gas and was ready to go to Anna as fast as possible. It felt right to take off then, not wait for anybody else, as if speed would change the outcome. It was late fall, and we needed to use all the daylight left to make it over Independence Pass.
Her three sisters greeted us when we got into town, after making it over the passes. The sorrow-soaked women gave us the bedroom facing the canyon. In the morning before visiting hours, they gave Anna’s daughter a permanent, talking softly with towels draped over their arms, the air thick with ammonia as they wrapped her hair in little pink curlers, showed her how to look good in the face of death. Laughing about how Anna always stood up to her father as a kid. I did not know at the time this was a eulogy.
Anna looked so small and pale in a green hospital robe. I ignored the obvious, wanting to distract her with talk of the future. Patient with me, always, she played along, smiled when I bragged on the California I was moving to, a place beyond the Colorado winter with long beaches, trees heavy with oranges, incredible men. “Visit me when this is over,” I said. “I’ll look good in a bikini, after this cancer
diet,” Anna said, and laughed, too weak to sit up in the hospital bed. Church folk came to pray and held hands over her. Monica and I stood uncomfortably beside them. A storm was coming, and we decided to leave the hospital. At that time of the year the passes got dangerous fast. We promised a prayer for Anna on our way, one we felt would be better than those of the church people. We would detour up to Mesa Verde and give Anna a blast of spirit. Anna would feel it all the way down the mountain to the pioneer hospital. Anna played along so nicely; said she could not wait.
In the cold Anasazi ruins, weighed down by our heavy coats, we watched lazy snowflakes falling on the empty doorways of the abandoned rooms lining the mesa cliffs. Monica said, “We promised a prayer, here it is God let that good woman get well.” I added a silent plea, made my own promises.
We drove down Independence Pass on roads so slick Monica kept the truck in second gear, passing wooden crosses along the hairpin curves, the darkened mountains freezing into winter night. We had to drive the last hour with snow falling so hard the flakes appeared to be going horizontally, going slow enough to guess the road but fast enough to not get stuck. We were relieved to see the lights of town.
Anna died the next day. When I heard, I knew I had run out, betrayed her. If I had done it over, I would stay, hold her hand; talk with her daughter and sons, stand next to her church friends, put our prayers together in a way that would please her. In that better world I would say a decent goodbye, instead of a rushed denial.
I have never gone to her grave. Instead, I drive to Mesa Verde, stand among empty ruins, and try to understand the silence.
Subtext
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh is author of the poetry collection Initial Conditions and the poetry chapbook About Time. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places, earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. Read more at juliebenesh.com.
I tease him that he always looks at reviews of shows he has already seen, as if to help him to determine the quality of his own recent lived experience; he asks me if it's wrong to be open to influence and revision.
He reminds me that I check my smartwatch to assess how I already slept; how I ask his advice on accessories; that I routinely succumb to buyer's remorse. He tells me the sunk cost fallacy stuffs my closet with sweaters I can neither quit nor commit to. It's true that when I can't decide what to order in a restaurant,
I select whatever combines the greatest number of ingredients, flavors I like. We all choose our rubrics to measure out and mitigate our doubts. Maybe? I answer.
Trepidation
Eden Absar
Eden Absar is a graduate of the MA in Teaching Writing program from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a 9th grade English teacher who aims to share the joy of storytelling with students developing their skills in writing. The primary muses of her writing are her mother, her husband Rafi, and her wonderful daughter Ruby Noor. Eden lives in Houston, Texas.
Hands shaking. Gathering balled up socks and worn underwear. Looking in the mirror.
Making sure I look…
Desirable.
Pulling my ratty pajama top low, Unbuttoning the top two buttons, Applying jasmine oil to my pulses. Staring into my dark, dark eyes, I can no longer recognize myself. There’s…
No telling who I am becoming.
No telling the reason I am waiting
For a stranger to arrive In the dead of night.
No telling why. Why am I…
Waiting with baited breath.
A Quickened heart rate.
Sweaty palms quickly wiped on the couch cushions. I tuck and untuck behind my ear a loose strand of hair.
A knock at the door. Can’t back out now. Everything changes after this moment.
Welcome the stranger into my home. Watch as he removes his shoes.
Accept an awkward hug.
A tickle in the back of my throat: Spicy bergamot. Sandalwood.
A thought creeps through My spine to the center of my brain:
Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. Some voracious sense of sexuality, or danger… Can’t be sure which…
Paralyzes me. Walk to the couch.
Small talk ensues. How are you?
I’m good, and you?
(Feeling insane) I’m okay. Do you want something to drink?
I wish for a deluge on the Sahara that is my throat.
Let’s watch something, he offers. Making himself at home. Perhaps he does not feel as electrocuted as I do. He has done this before.
I nod. Offer him the TV remote.
The power switch.
Stretching out on the sofa, extending an arm
As an invitation to lay beside him, As if we’ve known one another Forever.
I allow myself to become smaller
Laying next to him. Breathing in vapors of expensive perfume. Placing my head on his chest.
Allowing his arm around me and down my back.
Aware of every cell in my body
On fire.
I can’t decide if I want this moment to stop. I can’t think fast enough.
Clouded judgment. Clouded eyes unable to recognize Who I am.
Canned laughter. Funky jazz music. Can I kiss you?
Paralysis spreads as I nod my head yes. Moments later.
Opening inside me is a deep dark deadening. A black hole. A chasm.
Catastrophic.
Whoever I was simply a half hour ago Was torn apart atom by atom Into nothingness.
An old Van Gogh T-shirt.
Faded sunflowers. Faded happiness. Any glimmer of hope is gone. Eaten away by the abyss that is me.
Plug earphones in…
Drown away in music…
Until I fall asleep.
Nondescript lyrics. Discord. Dissonance. Dark home, dark world, even darker soul.
My eyes only shut
When the sun comes up.
A singular thought: I want to die.
I feel like a bag of bones, A fallen star looking for a home. Obliteration.
What we do with love
Ocean St. Amant
Ocean St. Amant is a writer living and working between WA state and NYC.
Packing your lips into mine, A kiss of iron.
How bodies can Carry so much inside, How they are like dirt In this way.
My fingers washing In your mouth, your teeth
Biting down, And the blood going across the
Side of your chin, and the look You give me after.
You are like A cub, stained in the scraps Of something once alive.
Staring into my eyes, I nod, I smile, because we both know how this all ends.
One covered in the other,
Left with the burden Of bones
Two Poems
Dick Altman
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.
In Winter’s Slack Remorse/Rages Summer’s Flame
Northern New Mexico
Rio Grande’s corrugated valley sweeps out like waves from under me, until it reaches the shores of the Jemez, mountains two miles high, volcanic by birth, whose remaining glaze, lean/simmering in sun, races cloudward.
Beloved snow, your fine white lace, collaring the peaks, incandesces their splendor, like no other moment— a moment whose beauty evokes in me fear that here, at seven thousand feet, in high desert’s Indian Country, I’ve seen of you the last.
Seen clouds a hundred miles distant, whose spare aspect foretells summer’s drought. Your loss leaves me, my woodland
nurtured by hand, impoverished, daunted that your spirit might kindle another summer’s blaze of unyielding die-off. Needle by needle, branch by branch, a light rain at first, then a deluge. As fir/pinion/spruce thirst toward oblivion’s nakedness. And I can do nothing.
Melt how can a syllable so innocent ignite in me so many threads of fear? Snow, your spare runoff hides wild fires in waiting. Runoff that sustains me and all around me, instead of seeding torrents, turns streams to sand. Forests their beauty to tinder.
Yas as Navajos call you beg sky’s mother of clouds, I beseech you, to resurrect yesteryear’s storms of plenitude.
Your remorse could conjure my fears into green majesty of mountain and low land, recall my modest glades from dying back to earth.
Or are you saying sky’s fevered breath, bitter and dry, reveals your diminution as sign/evidence/answer that I and others like me have crossed the line, from which there may be no return? While your meager flecked facets of light drift down wind’s face, with the reluctant tempo of tears.
Drums of Kamala
Northern New Mexico
She isn’t the one, I hear you say, weeks before election day. Your words, throb/chant in my mind, here in Indian Country.
Not the one
Not the one
Not the one
You, a young politically minded woman, versed in law, someone I could see running for office, not far down the road.
Not the one
Not the one
Not the one
If America’s women flock to Kamala, I say, as I expect, the deal’s done. You don’t understand, you say. Yes, she’s a woman—but not “the one”. We didn’t ask for her. She’s been thrust upon us.
Not the one
Not the one
Not the one
If not Kamala, who? You cite a woman, in Congress, notably outspoken, about your age. And an older, highly visible, cabinet member. Women who are “doing”, you say, not “being”. Not a statue in the president’s shadow. How naïve, I write you next day, of my simplistic male viewpoint.
Not the one
Not the one
Not the one
Not Kamala—the refrain keeps thrumming in my head. A drumbeat of sadness, I wish weren’t so. And I could, without care, or tear, let it all go.
Not the one
Not the one
Not the one Ever?
Venus Unbound
Yvonne Morris
Yvonne Morris lives in a small town in Kentucky with her three rescue cats. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books) and Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press). Her work has been published in online and print journals, including The Ghudsavar Review, The Santa Clara Review, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere.
Venus Unbound first appeared in Mother Was a Sweater Girl, The Heartland Review Press.
He hums the blues to the silent horizon blue sky, blue sea, blue man and remembers a woman with the tide in her blood— how she rose from his bed like Venus the wild waves of red hair the white foam of her body
But now he watches a lone gull gliding, so high above he can barely see, unties his line and leans his sails toward her distance where the earth falls away and is paradise again
The Way He Was Looking At You
Ananias Reese
Ananias Reese is an American Poet/Writer from Georgia. He writes emotional pieces from his life experience. If anything at all, Ananias hopes that his writing will eventually be a glimmer of light to an otherwise gloomy world.
A by-chance-meeting in a crowded store leads to hand shakes
You were good friends back in high school and ended up going your separate ways
Just a harmless run in from a past you left in another life, I’m assured it’s nothing
But his congratulations were sharper than a double-edged sword, I felt something
His goodbye was polite but a bit too heavy
A mirror image showed him watching us leave two seconds more than was necessary
I know that to you he is just a good friend, hell I have friends too
But you should have seen the way he was looking at you
Fixed dilated pupils focusing like you were the one that got away
Holding back tears like he wanted to drop down and beg you to stay
All’s fair in love and war
but suddenly I’m the villain in his story, I knew when you told him about us sealing the deal that this battlefield was going to get gory
The battlefield of love is littered with the bodies of those who gave it their all
The ones who were brave enough to stand against dragons with nothing but bows and spears
Now all alone, afraid to rise and fight again because what was once the apple of their eyes is now the root of all their fears.
He found out too late that love is like a game of thrones where a single missed arrow
Was enough for me to swoop in and get the killing blow
Because even though he was just a good friend I saw the way he was looking at you
Like his entire world revolved on an axis surrounding everything you’d do
How he lied and said he’d love too but wouldn’t be able to make the wedding
But I could have sworn I saw him over by the oak trees nearly out of view
Shielding his eyes from the blinding light of your perfect white dress
I know that to you he was just a friend, and I have them too
But I saw the way he was looking at you.
I saw the way
The way
Such a way
I saw the way he was looking at you.
In The Philosopher’s Pub
Carolyn Ostrander
Carolyn Ostrander mostly writes history, family, and poetry. She has published work in Stone Canoe, Beyond Words, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review and The Comstock Review. She is an editor for The Comstock Review. She is also an advocate for disability rights, rural education, health and housing, and the arts and humanities in education and civic life.
The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way; The names that can be named are not the eternal name. Lao Tzu, as translated by Victor H. Mair
When I think of the beginning of love, I don't remember your face, not your voice or even the dress that you tell me I wore. Feel how my heart turned. In smoke and silence wisps of answers to questions yet unasked: it was not Lust that drove me to pursue you.
Light, laughing words and sideways glances that charmed never told you my secret. My heart didn’t spring to my lips in a light moment, though the weight of your name lurked in my throat, pressing tightly and blocking true speech. Not Possession that condemned me to lose you. I named it tenderness; I knew that I loved you but nothing confirmed this in my face or your hands, which I glimpsed as I turned away. But I know, it was not Loss that led me always to long for your return.
My Lost Son
Gail Vallance Barrington
Gail Vallance Barrington has had short stories accepted by Intangience: The Lighter Side of Weird, WayWords Literary Journal, and an anthology on kindness by Wising Up Press, each story exploring the concept of redemption with the help of just a little magic. Her poetry has appeared in The Rumen, and she continues to explore grief in her poetry. Gail is currently working on several fiction projects, including some fun popup stories available on her website gailbarrington.ca/creativewriting/
I will eat your bitter apples, wash your ashes from my hands, and think of all the moments lost.
The candle flickers in the glass, shivers, and dies.
The city is a strange, dark canvas stretched against the night sky, a painting never finished.
The Statue of Liberty
Hope Cotter
Hope Cotter is a writer and poet. She is a graduate of New York University. She lives in Hopewell, NJ with her three sons and bengal cat Cheddar. She won the top 20 Personal Essays by Reader's Digest in 2024 to be published in 2025. Her work has been included in WILDsound Writing Festival, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Moonstone Arts Center, Red Door Lit, Wingless Dreamer, Poets Choice's, and other publications. She is working on a long-form book about motherhood and women. She loves the smell of old books and new ideas. Follow Hope on Instagram @hope.cotter
I scrub the egg residue off the cast iron skillet in my deep farm sink. My cheerful children are silent in the other room, building Legos from a recent birthday party. They wait for me and the clock to agree on the departure to our next adventure: our first visit to the Statue of Liberty. The mess from breakfast recedes, and I look around the kitchen for the next thing to do. Our cat investigates leftovers near me in hopes of a morsel. I shoo her away from the breakfast and pet her in the same movement. I go upstairs to collect the things I carry – hat, purse, sunglasses and recently, lipstick. It makes me look alive on the outside when I feel a little dead inside.
“Ready?” I ask as I go downstairs and retrieve my car keys.
“I can’t tie my shoes,” Winston says, collapsing with defeat onto the floor. Being the youngest means you are the clown with the crown, and he has us wrapped around his finger.
“Yet,” I correct him. “You can’t tie them, yet. We are all still learning to do things.”
We pile into the Toyota Highlander with our kids James, Teddy and Winston in the backseat and my husband driving. I visited the Statue of Liberty once in 1997 with my mom Carol and brother. I remember being amazed that a foreign country would bestow such a gift. What does one give to France as a thank you for a large copper woman holding a book and a light? Does she still inspire the enlightenment and power as she did to me back then? Weaving and passing through the industrial build outside of Newark, I see beyond Liberty Science Center, smooth water with a tiny green woman peeking over the horizon.
“Can we get a street hot dog?” Teddy asks. He is reading Horrible Histories, a series of books to inform a younger audience about the battles, compromises, and victories of the past. I see myself so clearly in him that it’s a little scary. “Or a pretzel?”
“You just finished breakfast; do we have to immediately talk about the next meal? Are you guys excited? I’ve only seen her once up close.”
“Yeah,” James says. “It’s like part lighthouse and part woman, on an island that used to be a fort. She has a nice color.”
“Why is she green?” Teddy asks. “Is she sick?”
“I think she’s jealous,” Winston says.
“Of who?”
“She’s stuck on an island, by herself, alone with broken chains at her feet, with all this inspiring freedom stuffs. But she is not free.” Teddy says, emphasizing the last words. He is a glass both half full and half empty kinda guy. He sees answers to questions that are not presented. He is an original and stubborn thinker.
“I think she’s free; she’s away from everybody,” James says with diplomacy. “No one can bug her.” He immediately pokes his brother in the side, and they laugh loudly. Some kind of tousle explodes in the backseat, and I wait for their tiny storm to pass. I do not intervene. I do not say stop. I can’t tell if it is fun or not. They can learn to set their own boundaries. I know these micro moments shape them as much as my mom-ologues do. I restraint myself verbally from controlling them, telling them what to do.
“Do you have the right exit?” I ask my husband who is our captain and pilot. It is the same road I took twenty-two years ago to see the statue, and I think the same questions arose then. My mom drove exhibiting a country grit in city navigation without GPS. She made me hold huge maps in the passenger seat and detailing each mile from Route 80 until we arrived safely. She took me to visit NYU and see if I might like the university, the dorms and the programming and then, the requisite Statue of Liberty.
“It’s the Holland Tunnel exit, I’ve got it,” my husband replies.
“You know I feel like the Statue of Liberty is the mother of the USA. Like she gave us all freedom,” I say. I fall sad into my heart, thinking about my last visit when I was so close to my mother and now I am so far away. I admire my mom Carol the way I do the Statue of Liberty.
My mom has been gone for a decade. We had a falling out. I retain the statue of her in my mind, frozen in time. Her voice, buttery smooth and mild, would explain the Dewey Decimal system in the local library that would unlock brave new worlds far beyond. For my childhood, I looked up at her from knee level, gazing at her face, her lightness of spirit and steadfast choices. She had these tiny pearl earrings that would swing by her neck that smelled of vanilla lotion. Her warm brown eyes had all the love she could spare. Her hands were strong ropes that held me up as a child.
Should moms say to their children that there’s liberty for all? It seems disappointing. And unrealistic. For my mother, she instilled this zealous self-care of whole foods (before there was a Whole Foods), and natural products (when you had to make them yourself or find a woodland fairy to sell them to you). For me, I took these beliefs that I could indeed be a free woman and have it all – career, family, hobbies and perhaps even a thriving herb garden. And now I am trying to decide what to pass down to these three little rascals in the back seat. What is freedom? What is liberty? Why am I forcing the family to visit this statue?
The ICON parking garage is full. My expert husband circles until a spot appears. We pile out onto the street corner, and the children chase the pigeons with fervor. The group lags in pace, complains about the journey, and we board the ferry boat.
It is cinematic, the approach to the island where the magnificent woman stands tall, glass gleaming in the sunlit late morning. Her shape takes up our view and moment by moment, she has us all craning our necks to see the torch. Her light. I remember going here with mom and thinking it was so magnificent. I hoped today to find that spark again with my family. We walk around the base, exhaust our feet, and take pictures from every angle. We enter the gift shop, and I am ready to spend some green to push away the blues I had from last night.
“Can I have the pencil sharpener?” Winston begs.
“What about this pocket watch?” Teddy inquires and poses like a Sherlock Holmes detective.
“A miniature statue,” James says locating the object he loves.
“Yes, yes and yes,” I say.
We glide back across the bay on the ferry boat, disembark, and walk to the car. We stop on the bench to get the obligatory hot dogs. And then, a quiet car ride home. The rhythm of the car puts Winston to sleep, and he leans on Teddy who pushes his head into the seat belt. He cries out, yells foul play. I use the last resort item in my purse: emergency lollipops. No one can speak when eating a lollipop.
As the sugar spreads into the children, I wait with my last question in reserve. I am curious about their experience with the Statue of Liberty. I’m hopeful that there was some resonance, a sense of awe. I know Winston is too little but the older two, maybe. As a mom, I hang my hat on maybe. Alot.
“What did you think?” I say, straining my neck to look at them. Teddy raises his hand, as if I were a teacher.
“It was pretty…”, Teddy’s voice trails off, and I wait for him to complete his thought. “Pretty disappointing. We didn’t go up in her eyeballs or face or anything. I thought we might throw something out her nose. Her original lamp was on the ground and there’s a fake one in her hand now.” He went on and on, describing the inadequacies and how it did not match his vision. I listened understanding that in his view, he wanted more grandeur. I realize that today and the day my mom took us to the Statue are twin days in a sense, mothers trying to show their children ‘what liberty looks like.’
Carol was a beacon of light, strength and knowledge. She defined the word, mother, to me. She is a fixed and frozen memory. She did not take the grandmother title when it was offered. We have not intimately spoken or connected since I became a mother. I have what I have. Thirty years of love, compassion and unwavering faith in me. Twelve years of not talking or seeing her. I’ll take those, the reels of memories and place them on the island in my mind where
she lives. I can visit her. I cannot build a bridge because the waters are now too deep, and the chasm too wide between us. She is a lady who built her own life and freedoms far away from mine. She is in the harbor of my heart, but on an island of her own making. My mom showed me her version of a liberated woman, free to be her truest self. She’s my own Lady Liberty.
“Was there a person she was modeled after?” James asks from the backseat, crunching his lollipop.
“No,” I say, “And there’s not many women celebrated in statues or monuments. I think it’s less than ten percent. She’s rare. Unconventional even. Do you guys want to go again?”
“No, I want Chinese food. California rolls.” James states.
“More food?” My eyes widen, incredulous at their consumption. My hunger is not physical at all, but entirely mental and emotional. “Does anyone want to go again?”
“No, I want TV. Do you want to go see the Statue of Liberty again, Mom?”
What I want to do is climb up in her arms made of grace and steel and be comforted. What I really want to say is that you have to hold fast to your freedoms because people will step all over them. That being a mother is the biggest sacrifice and the biggest reward of my personal freedom that I battle to balance. Instead I respond, “I think so. But it’s enough to know she’s out there for me. For now. Representing the ideal.”
Two Pieces
Aaron Barreras
Aaron Barreras is an unlikely writer who started life as a small-town boy from New Mexico and somehow stumbled into a career in film, animation and VFX. After making pixels all day, writing is a chance to escape the screen, which he stares at far too often, and to make words instead, which he doesn’t do often enough. He's no longer a boy, but still lives in a small town. The desert always keeps its own.
Dad Teaches Son to Fold Box
The only thing I learned from my dad was how to fold a box. Or how to rely on small flaps of cardboard to hold back the tides of something larger, or how to fold blinders so neither of us would have to look inside. A box is square, a father's wisdom is too. Rigid, unknowable, able to stand on its own, but always hiding something. Leave a father out in the rain and his confidence will wilt, you will see your father for what he is, corrugation supporting a thin and fragile surface, one that tears easily when left out, or when streaked with tears. I know now that I'm not folding cardboard to hold a belonging, not shaping brown paper to look like a new front-door delivery or an old paupers coffin, I'm not overlapping the flaps like a flat knot, friction, torsion stronger than glue, tape, twine. Instead I lay them across like hands folded in prayer, and in this way I'm not trying to keep anything but him, that teacher of boxes, trying to hide away the memories, good and bad, trying to preserve the father I almost knew, that almost was a father, but now is old, is one-sided, and me, the child, folding him in blankets so he can sleep at noon, unfolding the morning newspaper so he can read, wrapping his meals for later when his hunger returns, stacking little boxes like steps so he will not fall coming or going through the back door of a house that long ago gave up being square and merely sags its walls, sopped with rain or tears, like him, trying to remain upright, to hide the rot, to appear strong, though it is clear neither wishes to be a box anymore, neither wishes to contain, or to hide, but to fulfill their destiny, to be allowed to wilt in peace, unobstructed, to show there is grace in losing one's edge, just as there was strength in once standing tall, there is relief in learning how to let go, to not control, to not contain, to not fight gravity as it makes walls into lumps, earthen hills, burial mounds, fertile soil, furrows for what comes next. I have a Schrödinger's father. As long as I don't look, he is still young, authoritative, intimidating. As long as I don't look, I won't have to know that someday I won't have a father. I take this box and hurl it atop my highest shelf. I will not forget it's there. But I have not yet grown tall enough to reach it.
To Weave
So that I might become famous, let me weave a rug. I don't know how, no one ever taught me. But I did make a clay swan in art class once. What does a desert-child know of swans? Only that their backs are empty and must be candles. I pour in the wax. Teacher is pleased. Forgot the wick. Now she cannot burn, for that is what I want. I want them all to. Years later I've learned that's not what swans are for, they are not meant to carry anger on their backs. So I take it off the shelf, malformed, teacher lied, off the shelf it is shit, in the shed the wax wilts. Now it holds coins, paperclips and thumbtacks. Metal, flat, sharp, cold. I've learned to spend money, to bind papers and to tack old family photos to parts of the wall guests never see. But I never learned to weave. So I sit down upon bare ground. The unfamous earth warmly receives my porcelain bones, waits for me to melt.
The Concert
Shelly King
Shelly King’s short fiction has appeared in The GW Review, Epiphany, Slow Trains, Dos Passos Review, Coe Review, Palo Alto Weekly, and The Writer magazine. She is the author of the novel The Moment of Everything (Grand Central Publishing/ Hachette), which has been translated to a dozen languages around the world. She has taught numerous workshops and classes for the California Writers Club, Cabrillo College, and other private organizations, and is the co-founder and executive director of the Rogue Writers Collective based in Grants Pass, OR.
Neither of them had done anything like this for a long time. A concert. In the middle of the week. Leaving work early and canceling meetings for the next morning. This was the kind of thing they’d each done in their 20s, him a decade before her, two marriages ago for him and one for her. They climbed and climbed the red-carpeted steps and wondered if someone would be waiting ahead with oxygen tanks or perhaps a sherpa. When was the last time either of them had sat in balcony seats? Coming to the upper edge of their middle life, starting over together, they were orchestra seats people now.
They were so close to the top that they felt as though they could touch the carved ceiling, painted bronze and changing color with the lights from the stage below. They wondered why the audience was this sparse. The concert was sold out. She’d bought the tickets from an intern at work to help the guy out, only knowing the name of the band from the People magazines at the salon where she got her hair done. Where was everyone? And who was the guy alone on the stage with a guitar? They had both forgotten about opening acts.
It didn’t matter. They giggled. They felt young, even he, with his knees barking as he accordianed himself into a seat built at a time when people his height must never have gone to the theater. He wrapped his arm around her, squeezed her close, kissed the top of her head. In her hair lingered the scent of bacon from the BLTs she’d made for a quick dinner earlier. She smelled like lazy weekend mornings, bedsheets that needed to be changed, their softening bodies that were new only to each other.
She said something he couldn’t quite hear with his bad ear, but from the look on her face, he knew she was pleased with what she was saying. He leaned in closer. Something about the design of the theater. Classical with an Indian motif. She said things like this all the time, words he recognized as English but made no sense to him. But
lovely. She was always lovely and kind in the way second chances always are. He kissed her bacon-scented hair again.
The seats around them began to fill with people in their twenties, younger than his children who were now wiping stickiness off the tiny hands of their own children and brooding over not getting promoted and missing holiday sales on towels. Cannabis filled the air, and they both breathed it in. The smoke was so intense now, not like the kind he’d smoked through law school. A few weeks ago, for his birthday, his daughter had been giddy as she gave him a bowwrapped bag of gummies from the dispensary she and her husband had invested in. He thanked her and acted delighted, then put them in an empty drawer in the kitchen he ignored. But smelling the smoke, sinking into its swell, he was tempted to turn around and ask for a toke on the fire.
Then she said something else he could barely hear. This place. This music. That’s what he thought he had heard, but wasn’t sure. He put his good ear next to her lips, but there was nothing. Turning to see her face, he saw her eyes pooling, her lips working at words that wouldn’t lead to tears. He knew then what she was trying to say. My son would have loved this.
She never tried to hide her grief. She talked of her boy and showed pictures of a freckled face though school, cars, a PhD program, and commitment ceremony. Her only child. They had been close, especially after the divorce. She had never said so but he somehow believed her son to be the core of the divorce. Or perhaps he imagined this in his desire to be better than her past, better than his own past. With more time gone than lay ahead, what more could he do than try to be more than he had been?
Her tears came rapidly now. Eyes around them turned toward her then him. He could see the whispering. They had moved from curiosity to spectacle. So he kissed her, deeply, embarrassingly. The
whispers would change now. She’d told him once she’d rather be conspicuous because of lust rather than grief. People were so much more tolerant of lust. No one wanted to see you grieve, especially the young who had yet to meet the people they would miss the most. She began to laugh into his mouth, so he pressed harder to push the joke just a bit more. When he pulled away, she was smiling, wiping her eyes and sniffling. And just like that, it was over.
On the way home, after leaving early to beat the traffic, she fell asleep in the passenger seat, leaving him alone in the dashboard lights. Forty short minutes to her house and her cat who liked to sleep in his armpit. Another night together, perhaps another tomorrow night, each one a raindrop in a river that was rushing much too fast.
The Flower Vendor
Nadine MacKinnon
Nadine MacKinnon was born during World War II in Belgium and has lived a long life filled with the experience of regret as well as joy. She studied acting at The Royal Conservatory in Liege, Belgium, and moved in America in 1960. She studied writing at Marymount and The New School and has been working on translating her father's letters written from a POW camp in Germany. This piece is about loss which always comes together with regret.
I used to look at him from my window during those long cold nights when I could not sleep.
He was short, huddled behind a see-through tarpaulin hanging from the awning of a deli. It made a plastic cave for him where he subsisted and rarely came out, a cave open on one side to the wind and long rows of flowers. If the temperature dropped or if it snowed, he would hang more tarpaulin to protect them. From his precarious shelter, crouched on a wooden bench, he would make small bouquets.
The roses were delivered in the middle of the night. Profusions of roses in every size and every color that he arranged in tin containers. Sometimes he slept, bent in on himself. He had no gloves and no parka, just layered shirts and a flannel jacket with a hoodie. I wondered if he came from the high Andes and was impervious to the cold. It was a relief one night to see the small glow of an electric heater shining through his cave. A few hours a day he was replaced by another short stocky form squatting on his bench or bent over the flowers.
It was warm in my apartment and for months, like a candle burning slowly, my daughter quietly passed away.
It has been a year now. Today I want to celebrate her with the flowers she loved.
I stare for a long time at the roses, undisturbed by the noise, the screeching trucks, the roller skaters whizzing by, the strollers pushed aggressively. The vendor is eating a sandwich. He does not look at me. I avoid looking at him.
Which color? White of course! With the white candles I have, white roses will be just the thing. But they have no smell. She loved the scent of flowers; of the lilacs and the hyacinths I always brought her on her birthday. But they are not in season. I’ll add calla lilies
instead, they smell good. Oh, here are freesias! There are only three stems in a bunch, but their petals are so fresh and their fragrance floats throughout the stand. I wonder where they come from. I’ll take them and a few ferns also.
The vendor has finished his sandwich. I explain what I want. He obeys without a glance and silently wraps the flowers. I pay and hand him a big tip.
Suddenly he looks up at me and words unexpectedly stumble out of his mouth.
“You think too much,” he says in halting English. “You think too much… I see you and you think too much. You live there,” he says, gesturing toward my tower with awe, “and you think too much. Me, I don’t think! Every morning I pray God. He gives me a peaceful day. I don’t think. Nobody bother me. At night I thank God it was a good day. Nobody hurt me… you think too much. Don’t think. Pray God!”
I look at him in a daze. Shored by antidepressants, I haven’t felt anything for months but the endless and corrosive shards of my tormented grief. Now something vague and long forgotten slowly washes over me, something I do not dispute, something I recognize as gratitude.
Kuchisabishii
Suhjung Kim
Suhjung Kim is a poet from Seoul, South Korea. Her poems have appeared in Blue Marble Review, Paper Crane Journal, and elsewhere. She has attended writing workshops with Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Kenyon Young Writers.
Kuchisabishii
noun
longing to have or put something in one’s mouth
Lonely Mouth. Shovel down food. Scarf down the stale burrito. With barbeque sauce. Gorge this leftover cheddar sandwich and strawberry jam. Inhale the tube of cookie dough spoon by spoon.
Fill the barren. Root out the creeping ails. Soften the spikey pain. The tough crust of guilt. I can hear Mom’s longing through the phone.
But don’t call back.
The jagged stones of envy, my green eyes scouring every person; the lady on the metro with the long swishy hair, I stuff my own short, frizzy hair into my hood, the couple and their stupid joy as they walk past me, hand in hand. I shred away each soft peel, each delicate layer. I look and look for their crusts, their stones.
To prove we all have a horrible taste in our mouths.
To prove that I am not alone in spite.
To prove that I am not bad.
I can never find them.
The food fills my gullet, dribbles out.
My mouth is no longer empty.
With Regrets
Nicole Powers
Nicole Powers appreciates her life now that she has decided to address her regrets. She knows the issues she faced because of her wrong decisions are part of who and why she is. Today what she regrets most is the impact of her wrong decisions on others that can not be changed.
I was already living past my expiration date. The restraining order was extended into next year. The constant harassment wherever I went, and an inability to find peace, left me questioning my decision to leave my husband. I knew he loved the boy and he would never deliberately hurt him. Just like he would never deliberately hurt me. Maybe I should just accept my inevitable death. At least it would be a release. I couldn’t see anything more in my future so I should just let go and stop resisting.
I seldom was physically attacked any more. It was now a verbal and mental assault. When I went to pay my utility bills at the department store, it meant taking a reconnaissance sortie to make sure there wasn’t a line and I could quickly pay the bills. Inevitably he stood on the other side of the store and started his harangue.
Barraging me with questions like, “How could you have the man you make love to arrested?” and “What kind of woman would arrest the father of her child?”, this went on between his screams of “puttana,” “filia de merda,” “peza novante” and other obscenities. The questions in whole sentences were always in English, while the verbal filth was in Italian. He chased me with his foul mouth in the streets, in grocery stores, outside each new apartment from which I was eventually evicted because of complaints from the neighbors. I was banned from shopping at any local grocery stores in the area, so I had to go to surrounding cities.
My son experienced similar assaults and hid inside the entrance of the school until the school bus picked him up to take him to the YMCA after-school program. He knew his father might be waiting to cause havoc in front of the teachers, other parents and school friends so he became reclusive too. I tried to get my husband to back off, for the sake of our child’s mental stability. The man made me a proposition. “Let’s talk about it over dinner?”
For the good of our son, I believed him and agreed. What could I lose if we just talked at dinner? It would be in a public place and we could talk rationally. There is a rational consensus that when the heroine in a movie decides to do something stupid like open the door to an axe murderer, the whole theater will shout, “Nooo… don’t open the door!” - I should have listened to my instincts.
We met at a quiet German coffee haus in my town. It wasn’t too busy so we sat down right away and ordered. We never touched on the subject of what was for the benefit of our son, but only about getting the family back together again. The more I tried to steer the conversation, the louder his insistence became to repair the family. He went from kissing my hand to pushing his chair over, throwing his glass of ice-water in my face, and walking out. It was his classic move to get out of paying the piper or the bill. Sadly, all I could do was ask for the check. I walked out of the restaurant and back to my car. He came out of the cover of darkness and assaulted me among the trash cans from the restaurant.
My head whipped around as he sling-shot me to the ground. What happened? I tried to see my attacker but I didn’t have to see his face to know. He tore off the coverings of my body and rode me like a horse, grabbing my hair and humiliating me from behind with savage lunges, forcing the top half of my body farther into the trash can with the garbage. Finally, he finished with a slap on my hind quarters. Saluting the moon, he lit a cigarette and faded back into the darkness.
I slowly gathered the remnants of my clothing. I knew I couldn’t report him to the police because the entire restaurant had seen us together as a couple. I had invited this attack like all the others when I married him. There was no point whining so I detached. Silently without a tear, I drove myself to the hospital, dragged myself through the emergency-room doors, and sat silently in a chair
shaking uncontrollably. Hours passed, but I could not come out of my catatonic state, not until a nurse happened to ask, “Where’s your family, honey?”
So, there I was without a clue, after more than a month trying to figure out what to do. My husband had been relentless and all I could do was ask myself, “Why go on with this charade of life?” It was no longer feasible to continue the cycle. I had to resign myself as mother of maybe two, three, or however many babies, until he killed me or…? What were my options?
It had been such a long time, years really, that I had an original thought, a thought that wasn’t controlled by a demented egomaniac or a government agency.
What kind of a future did I see for myself and our child? What was my “raison d'être”? Merriam Webster’s definition was, “the thing that is most important to someone or something: the reason for which a person or organization exists.”
What good was it to dream, to hope for something, anything? I began writing down my feelings. Those thoughts on the paper were so dark. I knew in my heart I could not kill him but torture was another story. Crippling him in my imagination was pleasurable and ate my soul. It filled me, immersed me in a very dark and dangerous ocean of despair. Humiliation and disgust ate the light, and expelled the product of his anger down the commode.
He says he loves me more than anyone else could He knows he is everything I need I beg him please, I’ll be good Don’t do this… evil… deed
I felt the crack When he stomped on my rib
My arms unable to fend off the attack
My blood drooling so much I need a bib
My eyes so swollen and my lips so sore
We’ve just about come at last to the end
Unable to cry any more
The black comes… as a friend
I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other, about what happened in my bathroom, but it was clear. The poem I wrote welcomed the inevitable outcome of my dark future if I didn’t stop the violence.
Get a divorce, save my child! I knew I must cut my losses before he did it for me. I set myself to fulfill my karma. I was a good mother and I was courageous. I consulted the only oracle I knew, the “I Ching.” This was a 5000-year-old divination book of changes. I threw the coins six times and looked up the prediction of success. “Perseverance,” … again. “Success rests with the one who crosses the great waters.” So intoned the I Ching.
In Another Universe
Alina Kuvaldina
Alina Kuvaldina is a writer of Ukrainian origin currently residing in Germany. She enjoys writing short stories, flash fiction and poetry.
I take my foot out of the sandal to touch lush green grass, dusted with cherry blossoms. My parents and I are sitting at the old wooden table in the garden. A warm breeze plays with the white tablecloth while my father pours us his own-made apricot liqueur.
It has been a long time since I have visited my parents’ home and now I am a little surprised to see their heavy graying temples, their weak and wrinkled arms. I remember how I used to look at them as a child. They were beautiful and young. But I also remember looking into their tired eyes and the downward curves of their lips. As well as I remember how I could correctly guess their footsteps before they could enter the gate of the yard. And how I used to shudder at those steps.
In those days, I often imagined what their lives would have looked like if I had not been born. I imagined my mother putting on red lipstick, wearing a flowery light dress, and running off on a date with a handsome tall blond man who was not my father. In that life, she graduates from university, travels a lot, and laughs. And then she gives birth to a daughter. This daughter is exactly what my mother wants her to be.
My father, on the other hand, marries a woman who loves him. She hugs him before work and laughs at his jokes, and in the evenings they sit at the table with a cup of herbal tea and have a long talk. She gives birth to his son. That son whom my father loves.
I remember how often as a child I felt regret that I was born. And how often in my childhood my parents reminded me how much regret they felt about my existence.
Now I am thinking about that, looking into their eyes that became much kinder with age. It is even hard to believe that these are the same people I grew up with. I am looking at them, thinking about their youth and loss, when suddenly I begin to feel like my hands are getting smaller, the wrinkles on my mother's face are smoothing out, and my father is straightening his again-broad shoulders. I feel like getting smaller with every minute until my body shrinks into a tiny point and disappears altogether.
And then my mother, wearing red lipstick and a flowered dress, walks down a green city alley holding a beautiful little girl's hand. And then my father brews herbal tea for his funny green-eyed son.
Only for some reason, no one is smiling. I stare into my father's tired eyes. I notice the same lowered corners of my mother's lips under her red lipstick.
They are both standing in the other scenery, almost exactly as I remember them. They stand numb in their same self-dislike. Ready to give it to those who appeared closest that time.
The Night Shift
Lauren Miralle
Lauren Miralle lives in Encinitas, California with her photographer husband and their two teenage sons. Her work can be found in publications such as Literary Mama and on her Substack. She has studied under novelist Lisa Fugard for the past several years.
“The people of the room are unaware of what I’ve done.”
— “Night Sea, 1963” by Victoria Chang
In the middle of the night, she lays on the couch in the living room while her family sleeps. Deep, deep into the dark hours, her knees bend up like draw bridges and her toes curl into the cushions as she stares at the ceiling vaulted above her. The moon is still nearly full, slipping across the middle of the sky, inch by unnoticeable inch, until it’s found its way to the window above the stairwell. She turns her head to the west, catching the glow as it enters the curtainless frame, first as a slice until it hovers as a giant orb, throwing light into the pitch black room. Shadows form around the outlines of the dining room chairs, and a shard bounces off the kitchen counter in the distance, casting a shape like a sword onto the new refrigerator. This house was the remnant of her first marriage, the salvaged pieces that splintered but quickly reassembled, glued together by a new love, one that would give her hope and children, sandy toes and big dogs. A tear drops from her tilted face, and if only someone was there to see it, it glistens in the moonlight as it travels over her cheekbone before hitting the pillow below.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way, she whispers to no one.
Upstairs, her kids slumber, deep in their teenage dreams. She thinks of them kicking inside of her belly, and smiles before a gasp escapes her throat. She throws her hands over her mouth, a stern order to stop the sobs that want to escape her. The kids must not be awakened, they still have growing to do. Her husband snores in the bedroom down the hall, and she wonders how he can sleep without her by his side. How he doesn’t notice that she is dying inside. How her voice makes no sound inside of his ears.
Her phone buzzes next to her. She already knows who would be sending messages at such an hour. For a moment, the emptiness is filled. The dopamine floods her receptors with the soft vibration
between the throw pillows as a second message comes through. Her left hand digs to find the phone and the electronic blue light drowns out the moon, shrinking her pupils to pin heads.
Hey baby. I missed you all day. I can’t wait for the day when we can be together.
Her tongue floats to the front of her teeth, and butterflies hatch out of a million cocoons inside of her. The corners of her mouth curl skyward, and suddenly she is with him in France, standing backstage as he croons to a sea of frothing teenage girls. She watches him, with pride, and hearts in her eyes, as he turns his head towards her between songs and winks at her, coal black hair flopping perfectly across his forehead. She is in love with him. The idea of him. The dream of this whole thing being real. Of him being in love with her too.
The light fades on the phone before turning back into a black mirror. The moon has moved almost completely out of the window frame by now. The darkness returns, laying black cloth over the stairs, the tables and the family photos on the wall. She drops the phone back to the couch and closes her eyes to the obscurity. The ache returns to her chest. The ravine between her desires and her reality gapes further apart.
Her dog rolls over on his bed in the corner. One of the kids lets out a cough from his room above, and she hopes he’s not getting sick. There are two more hours before the alarm goes off, and the morning hustle of lunches and school drop-offs begin. She grabs her phone and walks through the black space to her bed, slipping in undetected next to her husband who rolls away towards the closet. She hugs her phone to her chest, the cold glass screen on her bare skin, and wills her eyes to close before the sun comes up again.
If Only
Rebecca Hanauer
Rebecca Hanauer is a poet and writer whose work explores the complexities of human emotion and experience through evocative, lyrical verse. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, their son, and a lazy labradoodle. IG: @purlbird
If only my mother had gone to the emergency room when she fell and hit her head on the edge of the kitchen counter. There was a gash, and a gush of blood. Maybe they would have done a scan, saw the tumor that was growing in her brain, stopped it before it got worse. The thing about brain cancer is that you don’t usually know until it’s too late. Then her right hand started to misbehave, her words were a little harder to find, the lights went out occasionally in her mind. If only I had been around more to see the subtle changes myself. The lost look in her eyes when she knew something was wrong, but didn’t know how to voice it.How do you find the words to say I think there are spiders growing in my head? After brain surgery, her hand gave up and her words evaded her, eclipsed by some unseen thing. Confusion and allusion. Late night conversations with my brother. I asked him, which is worse? To lose someone suddenly and unexpectedly? Or to know the end is coming? I selfishly wondered how I would deal with the loss of my mother. He replied, but you never know what the person who died suddenly was suffering from. If only I knew. Two weeks later he was gone. I didn’t know that was the last time I would see him. I didn’t know he was talking about himself. I didn’t know he would end his life, that I would be making decisions about the remains for both of them. I didn’t know this life could be so immutable, so elusive. If only I had been a better sister, daughter, I could take the spiders and the nightmares away, I could heal the hurts and scare the darkness away. If only.
Awakening
Laura Bota
Laura Bota is a Romanian profoundly in love with travel and writing who has called The Netherlands home. Having been shortlisted for various writing contests, she has had poems and short stories published in multiple international journals and anthologies, such as Beyond Words, Grande Dame Literary, Half and One, Free Spirit, The Bangalore Review, Down in the Dirt, etc. She has also been nominated for the 2023 One Khasi Hills Creative prize. As a writer born in a communist country, Laura focuses primarily on existential crises and social injustices in a troubled (post-)communist Romania. Writing has been a very intimate way for her not only to process her past, but also to reflect on the complexity of our human nature and the world we live in. Awakening is part of a larger inprogress project called “The Gilt Trilogy” that revolves around the lives of different characters dealing with inner demons and a traumatic past rooted in a communist era.
The bed springs squeak under my twists and twirls, in competition with Florica’s grunting and grumbling; a choking clunker. No sleep for me again. It’s been thirty six days - I check my late mother’s bedside clock again: 00:03 - over thirty six days since I haven’t had a proper sleep. I've always been able to doze off like a blind old dog pretty much anywhere. Even in my crammed truck cabin.
The summer night is hotter and more humid than usual. Sweat droplets are sprouting above my harelip - a failed surgery when I was a kid - which I hide behind an anemic mustache. Hair just won’t grow on my body. A few hairs here and there around my belly button, on my buttocks and almost none left on my head.
I pull the tight elastic of my underwear; aaah!, my chubby wet fingers feel like ointment on my chafed groin pulsating with pain. I have pretty sensitive skin. My wife, who has the figure of a barren surfboard, always mocks me that even in my fifties I still have the build of a voluptuous old woman: curved thighs, saggy breasts, layers of sausage rolls around my waist and the swinging of a fattened goose. I don’t know if it’s my body or my charm but I’ve never had a hard time getting laid. Getting laid. Almost two months now. I just haven’t been in the mood. And Crystal - that’s her work name - suddenly turned into a killjoy: cash or no play. Florica has been hypervigilant, counting every penny I spend so I have to - at least I used to, before I got my driving license suspended - pay in meal coupons. Everybody has to eat at the end of the day.
00.05, the clock drags its pace like a dying snail.
Ever since he’s moved into the empty flat on the first floor, right above my own, there's been a constant back and forth, most evenings filled with clinking and clanking, stomping and pounding. What could he possibly do up there?
And yet, tonight is strangely quiet.
00.06, the clock tic-tocs in sullen silence.
Bang-bang, reverberates the sound of car doors slamming shut, followed by the all-too-familiar baritone laughter. My ears perk up. He’s late. And unlike before, he’s not alone tonight. Always in a rush to come and go. With his horse-like legs, he jumps two, sometimes three stairs at a time on the way to his flat. Now that I’ve got all this time on my hands - the trial is still months away - I may have watched him through the peephole once or twice when Florica was at work. He floats, rather than walks, muscles curbing under his pastel Polo T-shirts, as if dancing on some music known only to him. From behind the rimless eyeglasses, two eyes as dark as sin smile whenever I accidentally - lately it happens to be every day - pass him by in the hallway, as his plump lips round up in a fugitive, yet playful song-like “Bon-zh-uor.” A shoulder-long curly mane matches a coppery Musketeer beard, stylishly trimmed. He moved into the flat above over a month ago. “A Frenchie,” according to Florica. After all, nothing moves around here without her knowing.
The laughter muted so I strain my ears again, but there’s only silence ringing in my head. The sheets are burning under me. The bed springs squeak like a slaughtered pig when I crawl out of bed, but nothing seems to disturb Florica, her teeth grinding in her sleep. I’ve never even noticed how loud she gets at night as well, but now that I am such a light sleeper I can hear everything.
In the hallway crammed with a bulky drawer hanging above an old Albalux washing machine, I press my ear against Relu’s door. A chain of oohs and aahs is coming from his bedroom. He must be watching porn again. Like father, like son, I smile a proud smile. He’s learning the ropes early, although my sixteen-year-old looks nothing like me at that age: a muscle machine, unlike the barrel that I used to be.
Florica grunts, turning on her side, as I close the door behind me heading for the living room, where Geta’s sleeping. At least I know where Florica got her snoring gene from. My father-in-law passed away two years ago, after which she moved in with us. She hates my gut almost as much as I hate hers. Since my truck accident that put that little boy in the hospital, she’s been whining like a dog, always calling me a loser or a drunk. Bitch, as if! I would have kicked her ass out in the street were it not for Florica, who’d bellow all day long about her poor mother stranded in that house up in the mountains.
I curl my lip up as I tiptoe past her couch-bed, all the way to the entrance hallway, next to the kitchen. The stinging stench of fried sunflower oil, carp and raw garlic is still floating in the air, tickling the hairs inside my nostrils. Fucking trolley, I bite my tongue, as I hit my pinky toe into a wheel. How I’d show Florica where to stick her stupid trolley. My toe’s still throbbing when I stumble on the garbage bag - I should take it out before Florica wakes up in the morning, or I’ll never hear the end of it. I squeeze by to reach the door where I hold my breath and perk my ears - nothing but a bunch of moribunds sleeping like logs. I check the peephole. The lights never work properly in this building packed with hogs. And yet, the milky darkness is filled with moonlight sneaking through a pair of filthy windows. Silence.
I nudge the door ajar. And then I hear before I see them. Someone’s chuckling nearby. Who could he be with? It can’t be my neighborhis voice is hoarse and deep, and this is wet and soft. When they finally reach my door they stop, my neighbor’s hand wrapped around a slender body. A man’s!
Heart pounding in my chest, I take a sudden step into the flat, but an unheard voice keeps calling me. When I check the peephole again, my eyes lock up with his. He can’t not have noticed it as well. A faint smile is sprouting in a corner of his mouth when he bends down to place his voluptuous lips on the other’s mouth.
My heart is racing, my cheeks are burning and my groin is throbbing.
With her highschool Romanianized French, Florica also learned that our new neighbor is “marié”. Married, that is. To another man, for what it’s worth. The thirty something dandy had come to do volunteer work at The Angels’ Orphanage in our little town nested in the middle of the mountains. “Ptooey. Steal our children, more likely,” Florica decreed back then, spitting on the side, and bowing to the ground to make three human-size signs of the cross like every good Christian. To which I added with a lump swelling in my throat: “Faggot! I’d teach him faggot if he were my son.”
When I sneak back into bed an hour later, Florica is still snoring. That blissful sleep I used to know so well. Loud enough to hide the pumping in my chest.
Cash or no cash, I will pay Crystal a visit tomorrow.
le cimetière
Mark Mrozinski
Mark Mrozinski, Ed.D., began his career as a pianist, composer, and teacher, before serving as a dean and vice president in higher education. His short fiction has been published in Mystery Magazine, The Lit Nerds, and The Write Launch. He was shortlisted for the 2021 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize and was awarded second place in the 2022 Tennessee Williams Short Fiction Contest.
Everything fights you the moment you enter le cimetière. The elements are the first to present themselves. Today, the sun and the humid languor that come with the summer slow you before you even enter the gates. Once inside, you feel the mighty oaks with their gnarled limbs reaching almost to the earth as though they were sentinels, guarding what the world has forgotten. You leave the paved avenue, and the paths are in such disrepair you find it difficult to walk any semblance of a straight line, weaving right and left to miss the heaved cobbles, the roots that grab your feet, that attempt to hold you and prevent your progress.
Your mémé had shown you the first time you came, and again the second time and by the third, you knew the way. The route wasn’t easy: two turns to the center of the cemetery, down a narrow gravel path; turn left and walk across M. Beauchamp’s grave, for it was the only way. Count the headstones and there you’ll be you hope.
You remove your hat as you stroll along the great tombs of the prominent citizens. You’re in the shade now, and when you’ve reached la treizième division they’ve all been carefully numbered in the French way, following some arcane inscrutable logic a new series of obstacles awaits. Here, the graves are of the most modest variety, for persons something less than a marquis or chevalier. But they attack the heart as well now, for you can read the inscriptions, the ones not worn smooth by the forces seeking to eradicate the past.
These people are forgotten. That’s your first thought. They’re packed so close, almost one on top of another. And none look to have been visited in any recent decade. No paths worn in the grass, no fresh flowers, no juvenile whimsies on a child’s grave. If anyone has ventured this far, the earth has taken the vestiges back. And on everything there is something. In the grass there are weeds and thistles. The once gray monuments are now mottled, colors of black and green with mold and lichen. Even the trees are not themselves,
consumed with all types of parasites, ivy, moss, mistletoe. Yes, there is life in this place of the dead, but life that grows chaotic, uncontained, like a symphony without a score, every musician finding his own way to a dissonance that repels.
The earth rises as you come close to the spot, and you nod to M. Beauchamp as you pause a moment to catch your breath. Then you count the stones like your mémé taught you. Starting at the broken concrete planter, still upset even after the decades, you begin. One… two… three stones, the low iron fence, and there, beneath the canopy of a chestnut.
How could it be unchanged after all these years, for you swear it looks the same? The last time you were here you were eight, and now twenty years later the colors, the scents, the sounds they transport you and you become that child again, the one whose hand your mémé held tight. You would tell her you were afraid, sad, but she would shush you and say, we’re all sad here, mon petit chou, but we must.
You didn’t know her, this person without a face beneath your feet. Neither did mémé, but she said someone needed to remember. And she would kneel before the stone and clean it with stiff bristles. It always looked the same after she finished, yet she did. Then, she would take a pair of hand shears from her bag and cut the grass away from the stone and say the words aloud. You couldn’t read them, for even then they were worn almost to nothing, as though permanency was never intended.
Ici repose Mme Aliénor Clément. Ne m’oublie pas.
Despite being all but dissolved, the letters still insisted. Don’t forget me.
“She asked that we don’t, so we won’t,” mémé would add. And she made it clear it would be up to you someday.
But you did forget. First, mémé was gone, spread in the wind as she wanted, and you didn’t see the reason, so you avoided, feigning busyness. Then you ran away, left Paris, distracted by your own life, your own loves, everything but this, and how could you, with so far to travel? Until now, and you feel the shame of neglecting something so simple, but so meaningful to someone.
You pull the shears from your pocket. Snip, snip, snip, and you finally read the words aloud to no one in particular. But this time there’s no fear, just sadness. And then you see, perhaps the way mémé saw, that it’s not for Mme Clément, but for you.
Transcendence Phobia
Sarah Dantas
Sarah Dantas is a Brazilian woman, poet, and researcher based in Stirling, Scotland. Sarah's academic work focuses on using arts-based methodologies, including poetry and photography, to investigate and facilitate mental wellbeing in autistic people. Sarah's poems are inspired by a childhood in Brazil and her Buddhist spiritual practice, including publications in Writerly magazine, the Orbis literary journal, and Beyond Words magazine.
You spent a life building a container for the idea of you
Decorating the stage, adorning your costume of identity
Smiling at the mirror
You're building maps and stirring ships
sharpening edges and straightening curves
Counting likes and views and hours of sleep
Struggling proficiently
And all along a tiny voice condemned to a shrinking space in the back of your heart like a woolen cardigan in a tumble dryer
Annoying, insisting, whispers every day more silently, pokes you every day more feebly: Is that all?
For a second you allow yourself to wonder, giving in to the inconvenience, What about that muddy footpath you avoided where the road bifurcated?
What about that gnawing longing for something that feels more like home?
And don't you remember the childlike wonder of sitting back and noticing?
But you ignore it, customarily –it feels weird thinking about that stuff you feel like an abandoned swing set clunking with the wind outside is howling You shake it off. The inbox is full and it's getting late. The coffee will go cold and your makeup isn't waterproof.
The Crush
Peter Coe Verbica
Peter Coe Verbica grew up on Rancho San Felipe, a cattle ranch in Northern California. He earned his BA in English from Santa Clara University, a JD from Santa Clara University School of Law, and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sometimes it’s best to just admire the winks of dew suspended in silver. Take a long drag off the smoke of the morning and exhale uncertainties.
Disregard the singing siren, patient spider, and allure of abandon at the center of our yearnings. Each long stare, casual hand on a shoulder, or quiet reassurance is but a strand. Like whip marks upon a penitent hidden under a thin shirt.
A folded map of frenetic streets in a sacred city.
A woman may draw you in, knit a God’s eye to hypnotize you.
But after a man is caught, how rare for him not to be devoured.
Love is a feast, but your secrets are the dinner.
Your confidences but liquor on the lips.
After the hurt, one is but a husk.
After the fire, the flesh is consumed.
We die and despite our animation, we are but the bones.
The wine and slumber are sweet but ask Samson about the scissors.
Ask Samson about the chains.
Odd
that things become clearest when you see with cauterized eyes.
There are times when the only path to freedom is to render the whole house down on top of oneself. There are times when the only path to freedom is to welcome the crush.
La campanella
Joel Clay
Joel Clay lives in Kansas City, where he is an investment company managing partner by day and writer by early morning. He graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha in 2019. His short stories have appeared in J Journal and Boston Accent Lit. He has been a fiction editor at The Good Life Review (a quarterly online literary journal) since its inception in 2020, and he is actively writing short stories and a novel.
I recognized the groaning of Carla’s unhurried steps on the stairs above me. A Liszt piano solo crawled from speakers in each corner of the low-ceilinged basement room, which we used mostly for dance parties, and which was adjacent to my bedroom. Each note crept with the rhythm of the stair creaking through the dank semidarkness and under my bedroom door. Rain pattered on the shallow mud puddles outside my ground-level window.
Carla stood in front of me as I sat up in bed. She leaned on her hip, like looking at me made her need support. “Aren’t you coming to Green Lady?” she said through dark purple lips. “Nathan will be annoyed.”
I slid my feet off the bed onto the cold concrete. I checked the time on my phone. “Sorry.”
“I’ll wait.”
I put jeans on. She sat down on my only chair, a metal foldable one. A new song began as I pulled socks on. Carla stopped moving, which was rare. Awe froze on her face.
“You okay?”
She blinked like she had been transported from far away and now recalled this room… and me. “Do you know this piece?” she said.
I concentrated. “La campanella.”
“You have long fingers. Have you ever tried to play it?”
“I tried.”
“Could you ever really,” she seemed to rise, to expand, “like really play it?”
“Not really. Never got close.”
“You gave up.”
“Or I realized I didn’t have it in me.”
We were in the nethermost room of the ancient mini-castle near the plaza. The house had always been street-less and address-less to me. We called it The Castle. I was with bandmates and tagalongs my first two visits. I knew the route and could identify its shadowed contours by my third, when I hefted a single mattress down to my concrete-walled bedroom.
The night in question occurred near the tail end of an epoch that spanned half a decade and revolved around three bands with overlapping members and an ever-morphing friend group that partied together at least twice a week. It was also marked, for some of us, as a period of spiritual curiosity maybe that matters.
Carla and I had each played or sang in two of the three bands, one of them—the second—together. She tasted like Fireball during our first kiss, which came after the last gig I played before leaving Raging Narcissists. From there, I’d go to shows, sip whiskey-heavy drinks in the back, watch Carla’s skinny legs straighten and bend as she sang and picked. I went for the moments when she scowled with emotion, stretched her dark lips, when she leaned low for the mike or guitar. She might as well have had a spotlight on her. I’d stay afterward. When the others had collapsed or left, she’d still be orating. I’d listen, entranced, and then we’d usually leave together.
I tried, sort of, to have the talk in her bed one morning. I said, “Us?” pointed from her to me. “You and me?” I held my palms up in a shrug to accentuate the question. She laughed and looked into my eyes with a big ambiguous smile and pecked me on the lips.
Carla yanked a black t-shirt off its metal hanger, which swung gently to background La campanella. She held the shirt up, whipped it in the air twice, and tossed it to me. “Have you ever intently listened to it?” She rubbed her forearm on her chin. “Tried to feel
every note? Turned up the volume? Felt like you were on the verge of ecstasy?”
I just looked at her, which is what she expected.
“Do you remember,” she said, “what you felt when the disconcertingly high tinkle came in?”
I looked up and out through the window. A dim yellow light filtered in. I shook my head and returned my gaze back to her. She was staring at me. Her mouth open, eyes stoic. “Eerie, hopeful,” I said.
She didn’t seem to hear me. “I’ve been in love.” She was looking at the ceiling, where cracks spider-webbed from a single point. “But I never felt anything like La campanella. Is it because I heard it before love?”
“Maybe you haven’t loved.”
“Maybe not. But I’ve been in love.”
“And what’s the difference?”
She made no movement, nor contorted any muscles, so it must have been the duration for which her green eyes held mine that seemed to say, Oh, you poor imbecile. Are you even worth this vital conversation?
I put a shirt on and watched Carla as she listened. Her dreamy air made her less real than she’d ever been. She looked down at my feet.
“I think each human is given one experience that is so inexplicable and powerful,” she bit her black nails, “that we spend the rest of our lives chasing it. Maybe we don’t recognize it then, but it changes each of us and our paths forever.”
I nodded for her to keep going.
“I think human connection or religion or drugs are the most accessible conduits for these moments.”
I leaned forward and said, “But we discover that these moments of euphoric clarity are unique to each individual, that no one can feel them the way we do.”
“Which reminds us how alone we are.”
“But with people on the outside who care.”
“For the lucky, yes.”
“The lucky and the irresistible.” I lifted my eyes upward, as if the sky outside my tiny window might hold an opinion.
“LSD, or Liszt, or whatever distraction,” she said, “might trick us into thinking we found what we’ve been looking for.” She tapped her fingers on her ribcage. “The first time I heard La campanella, that was my moment.”
“What were you doing and where were you doing it?”
“I was thirteen and obsessed with Travis Barker. Mom gave me classical CDs for Christmas. I ignored them for months and then one night when I was depressed I slid a fingernail along the clean clear plastic seam. I was lying in bed. It was the third song on the CD, and nine seconds in I sat up. This was a secret that had been kept from me until this moment. Those who knew, and had not told me, were conspirers.”
“Yes.”
“And those who had heard it, but had not heard what I heard …–”
“Were much worse.”
“Unspeakable.”
“Tell me more.”
She let herself share a smile with me. Then she looked toward the door. “Listen to the ending.”
I pulled the door inward till it touched the wall. The volume increased. We were silent for the frantic virtuosic burst and explosion, and then the brief damper pedal almost-silence.
“When I heard that the first time it was as if it were merely my glimpse,” she said. “My just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg glimpse of Shangri-La. The ending was the premature pullout.”
I laughed and dared not speak as her lips parted again.
“I kept re-playing it. I needed to go back to the start to see what I’d missed. I smell the cinnamon-scented candle that burned that night each time I hear, or even think, of La campanella.”
“Then what? That made you want to play piano, then every instrument, and to sing?”
“I realized deep into that night that the piece had begun something in me that would never be completed.”
“Like first love. It was your first love.”
“Does that make any sense?”
“As much as anything. As much as you and I existing here briefly.”
I reached for her hand and she let me take it. She also let me kiss her, but when I put a hand on her hip she stood up and hugged me, laid her hair on my chest and said, “Let’s go,” her face pointing away from me so that her voice sounded like it came from another room.
We went to Green Lady Lounge and drank locally brewed pale ales and Jameson’s and cavorted with Nathan and the other musicians and musician admirers and we sang with what was playing
overhead and we hugged arrivers and leavers and it was an especially boisterous night.
I was flirting with a girl named Darcy when I smelled Carla pass me. She held the hand of a guy I did not recognize. She turned back and raised her other hand toward me. She was saying goodbye, I could see it in her smile, her full midnight lips showing pink-red creases, but the way her fingers dangled toward me felt like an invitation.
Later that early morning, I left my mattress and fumbled to the piano in the corner of the basement. I began to play La campanella. The memory was nearer than I expected. The haunting trills came back. A lifted-up feeling surged through me. I envisioned practicing octave jumps for hours, mastering it step by step until I had in my fingertips an aural icon of immortality. As quickly as the thought filled me with hope, self-awareness reminded me that I would not sit for endless hours at something I could not master, something that, despite its growing beauty, would leave me feeling unworthy.
The
Last Time
Mollie Jackman
Mollie Jackman is a poet and editor residing in Columbia, MO. A graduate of Lindenwood University's MFA in Writing, she is passionate about making poetry a more accessible form for nontraditional readers. You can learn more and purchase Ornithomancy, her debut collection, at mjackmancreative.com
I hope you don’t remember that I fed you sips of water just before I kissed your forehead for the last time.
I hope the morphine had you Horseback
In the soy fields you would mow a path around, for us to ride. And when I brought the spoon up to your lips and gently held your chin for you –it took all the strength you could muster to swallow – I told you I love you but I didn’t cry.
Because I hope you saw me in the summer, bareback on the palomino parading through the front yard leaving hoofprints all under the evergreens.
And in my dream you hugged me tight, and listened to me tell you – you are not gone I will feel you in the Autumn breeze. You are still here, I will see you in the Shagbark Hickories.
Memories
Kathleen Nicklaus
Kathleen Nicklaus is a writer, editor, and newly retired professor who lives with her family in Lakeland, Florida. She enjoys swimming, cycling, and playing piano with too much sustain pedal.
We echo down stairways voices lost, like pennies tossed into a fountain.
A Mother's Hand-Me-Downs
Martina Sandora
Martina Sandora is a poet drawn to themes of regret, nostalgia, and generational cycles. Their work explores the weight of unspoken words, self-reflection, and the quiet devastation of time. A mental health therapist by profession, they weave emotional depth and raw honesty into their writing.
I used to look at you and wonder if you’d grow into your mother.
I’ve watched in the distance, every time you came in and out. Watched your face fatten, then shrink again. I’d make up stories of what your life was like.
Now, I hold my breath as your baby wails with its first. Pink, wet, screaming— like I do when realization hits.
Into the hands of chapters unfinished. A baby in the arms of someone too afraid to face their own reflection. And I see you, in your family portrait. Your daughter’s grandmother a familiar face.
Another generation of lessons not learned.
If I’m honest, I don’t know if this is your karma, or mine.
Cancel the Broom Wagon
Amy Soscia
Amy Soscia received a Pushcart nomination for her story, Life on the Ledge, winner of the 2023 Tulip Tree Review Wild Women Story Contest. Her writing has been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and newsletters. Her forthcoming debut novel is titled The Frozen Game. www.amysoscia.com
If I had taken the car, he would’ve dragged me back to kill what’s left of me. My ride, a rusty skeleton from childhood, propped against a cinderblock wall, begs for my breath. I peddle hard, regretting only how many years it took to initiate this hasty departure. Perhaps no one will notice an overweight woman on the ride of her life.
The Entrepreneur
John Spudich
John Spudich is a creative writer and clinical psychologist who lives and works in Berkeley, California. A fan of the short form, his flash fiction has been featured in 101 Words, Witcraft, Book of Matches, and Panoplyzine. His themes address developmental transitions and the psychology of trauma.
They were very hungry, all of them, having wandered into arctic waters where nothing lived. It felt painfully ironic, even for the boy who did not yet know the word, because his grandfather had harpooned so many grey whales and narwhales in his long career, stripping them of their oil and their meat. And this same loyal crew had hoisted up the whales and done the gruesome carving. Now the crew were being carved up by the emptiness of the ocean, their bodies sucking inwards, lax skin on obtrusive bone and ropes of yearning muscle. Their lean figures mopping the decks, polishing the portholes and the great gun, in the cutting white sun, like skeletons cursed to serve some demon captain. The boy watched all day the fruitless routine, and waited for night where he could escape into dreams. As he struggled to sleep from his famishment and from other things, he would picture all the bodies of the grand whales killed by his grandfather, picked clean and pearly, ranged across the ocean floor like cold white galleons. Riding with that ghostly fleet was his only hungry lullaby.
One morning, the boy saw something coming, something new and horrible. He watched his grandfather pacing the deck in the frigid mist of morning; the footfalls had new purpose, the bent head contained a storm. That night, the captain broke the weary empty round of life, barking new orders through the mean teeth hidden in his gunmetal beard. The crew grew fevered with a desperate energy, loading the great harpoon gun and rotating it ratchet by ratchet until it pointed up into the night. The gun cracked, the harpoon hissed,
the black barb stuck into the silver meat, and the moon was jerked right down from the sky, crashing bright and bobbing round in the suds of the roiling water. The cutting-spades and mincing-knives were drawn, and soon the sweet meat was passed all around. The boy ate too, that pink buttery flesh, the thin crust of grey sand, while he gasped and he cried because his belly was finally full but the night had grown much darker.
I Never Said Goodbye
Inna Tysoe
Inna Tysoe and her family fled the former Soviet Union when she was eight years old. They built a good life in America. She became American. But she never had the chance to say goodbye.
It was my turn to be blindfolded. My friends joined hands and circled me, shouting and laughing, as I tried to find my best friend, Lena. We were like sisters, Lena and I. I was always welcome in her apartment and she in mine. We read the same books and play-acted the stories we had read. I was confident I could find her, blind fold or not. We had found each other like this so many times before. But that day, inexplicably, I failed. I was about to try again when Mom called me in to supper. “I’ll try again tomorrow!” I told my friends as I raced home past the ever-watchful Grandmas sitting with their kerchiefs and their knitting needles at the entrance to our apartment building. They looked at me disapprovingly but then they disapproved of every child. We were too loud.
I had to climb the stairs to the ninth floor. The elevator stopped working about two years ago. The mechanics would come out every few months and look at it. I knew their schedule. We all did. We, children, would try to be on hand when they arrived because we could learn many interesting words from them. Then the mechanics would leave (having educated us a little in the ways of the world) and the elevator continue to not function. So, stairs it was. No matter. I was eight and climbing the stairs to our ninth-floor apartment was, if not exactly fun, then definitely a challenge I relished.
Entering the apartment was far less fun. It was bare these days. I don’t know how it happened, but I was sure the mysterious night phone calls when my parents would shoo me out of the room had something to do with it. As did the couple that kept coming to our flat. They were an elderly man and his wife. If you glanced at them, you’d think they were nice. But when they crossed our threshold, their faces took on a predatory visage and their smiles reminded me of the villains in all my fairy tales. I would run to my room when they came. But my bedroom was not a refuge either. They would come inside and look at everything with eyes calculated just how
precious all my most valuable belongings really were. They never left empty-handed. Some of our most valued possessions always left with them. And now our home was bare. Even my grandmother’s sewing machine, record player and books were gone.
The meal was basic. Some borsht, potatoes, chicken and off to bed. Never mind that it was not even eight and my bedtime was nine. I started to point that out but there was something in mom’s face that made me reconsider. So, I trudged off to my makeshift bed. (My real one had long since disappeared.) There were no books or bedtime stories that night, but I finally drifted off imagining how I would find Lena the next day.
My Mom shook me awake. It was dark outside, but she was dressed in her best jacket and gloves. My Dad had his best clothes on the clothes he reserved for business trips. My best dress was on the one chair we had left and Mom forced me into it before I was fully awake. Then, before I could ask what was happening, I was told to eat the porridge I hated, but under my parents’ watchful and stern eyes could not refuse. The minute I was done I was shepherded out the door, down the stairs, past the never-working elevator and into a waiting taxi.
I was told to sit in the front as I got car sick. The taxi driver turned to my father who handed him a bottle and we were off. The little Zhiguli sped down deserted streets. No-one spoke. I kept wanting to ask what was happening but the silence lay heavy on the car. It felt like we were in one of those fairy tales, where the prince must cross a fog to find the treasure or princess or both. Except of course the prince knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. I had no idea.
And then we were there. A burst of sound. Everyone talking, yelling. So many people! And there was my family. My entire family. All my uncles and aunts lined up in the cold and the damp, their dark coats and fur hats doing little to keep out the morning’s chill. What were they doing here?
We embraced. Every single person touched us. But it was no normal touch or caress; they touched us the way you might touch an apparition, someone who is not quite there. We moved just inside a huge building with even more activity. My Dad said he had to go give our bags. Why did he have to give away our bags? No-one answered me.
We stood talking about nothing. I saw a girl who reminded me a little of Lena and wanted to go say hello. My Mom’s iron grip on my arm prevented me from moving. So I stood there nodding and smiling, wishing this odd family reunion would end.
A loudspeaker called something important. Everyone stiffened. Embraces, tears and my Mom dragging me forward. I looked back. My family stood there, not moving. Watching us.
I was on an airplane for the first time in my life, watching the clouds below. In a few minutes we would leave the Soviet Union forever.
We came to America in 1979. I grew up, became American, gained a fine education, married a wonderful man. had a great career, and became a Mom to three rumbunctious pugs.
I never saw most of my family again. I never got to say goodbye to my friends.
Then
Jeanne C. Wilkinson
Jeanne C. Wilkinson is a writer, artist, and educator whose interdisciplinary career reflects a life of creative exploration and reinvention. After living on a rural commune and an organic dairy farm, she earned a BFA in Art/Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and an MFA from Pratt Institute, later teaching art and art history at Pratt and CUNY. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in Columbia Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and many more, and on NPR and WNYC, while her art writing has been featured in Sculpture, American Ceramics, and The New York Review of Art. Wilkinson’s visual work has been exhibited internationally, with experimental videos screened at BAM and the Greenpoint and New York Independent Film Festivals. http://jeannewilkinson.com
There was a dog and I said no from this dog
I want nothing, nothing
I was angry, angry
All around like mad dogs
Circling then we were in church and you said
Let’s go get a drink please let’s just go get one
Before I go, just one, and I said no it‘s not night yet and You said nothing but I heard you think that You would be accompanied by your conscience and your god and both things hung a darkness on your head a halo dark as sooty smoke before you
Looked away and turned and walked from me in twilight which is strange
Because you never had a god of any sort at least
That’s what you always told me.
Or a dog.
At least that’s what you always told me. What you always said.
Until you didn’t.
Reconciliations II
Text and artwork: Edward Baranosky
Edward Baranosky has painted seascapes since he was seven years old. His focus on marine-scapes draws him back to visit his native home in the American east coast, for inspiration from the North Atlantic. His work emphasizes the present, in the ever-changing moments of water. As a poet-artist he crosses the channels and pathways between the visual and the textual. Website: https://painterpoet.weebly.com
It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.
Stanislaw Lem; Solaris
1
You would like to have kept a beach stone, Rounded by the lunar tides at the edge of creation, Black basalt, or quartzite, or labradorite, A molten moment washed ashore
Evidence of intense pressure, compressed Presence, calming in your palm,
Asymmetric, cool with mixed memories, Salted sand and undertow,
And the molten core of gravity Under your sinking bare feet, awash
With the rhythm of endless incoming waves, Pearl-green over indigo breakers,
The untold spindrift secrets of lost Memoirs of contraband amulets.
2
There's a certain grace that precedes Turning homewards after a long absence.
A symmetric answer to a long-forgotten question, An argument taken with yourself wearing thin, No matter if you got to somewhere else, Or completed the incomplete longing
To be something more, or just what was intended-You left leaving the doors open, untouched.
The rooms of memory oddly vacant, You still have stories to express,
Erase, re-edit, suspend in the light Like dream catchers in your final shadow,
With few dreams or fish left to catch, And a presence, burn of the timeless.
3
Standing between twisted trees, Without horizon or coast in the fog
Swept over perilous cliffs fading out of sight, You watch the breakers rise into light
Out of their distant and muffled roar, Thundering in, saltwater washing over
The cold stone cliff supporting your easel, And no sign of a human being.
But the sound of a flute weaving Eric Satie Into the seabirds' cry driven inland
By an unseen, deep-water storm.
A stone throw’s memory from a plein air beach
Long past remembering the lost paintings. But they welcome you home when you have tired.
