flashglass 2019

glassworks

a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing

flashglass2019

flashglass flash Volume V 2019

MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING PROGRAM ROWAN UNIVERSITY

All work in flashglass originally appeared as digital content at RowanGlassworks.org The staff of Glassworks magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program, and Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department. flashglass, a subset of Glassworks, accepts flash fiction, prose poems, & micro essays See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials.

All other rights remain with the artist.

EDITOR IN CHIEF Katie Budris MANAGING EDITOR Jade Jones COVER ART “A Peaceful Coexistence Part II”

by Laurie Borggreve Glassworks Issue 18 COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT Katie Budris Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program Correspondence can be sent to: Glassworks c/o Katie Budris Rowan University 260 Victoria Glassboro, NJ 08028 E-mail: GlassworksMagazine@rowan.edu Copyright © 2019 Glassworks

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Table of Contents Cori Bratby-Rudd | To Be Wrong or To Be Whole. | 4 Sandra Cimadori | The Day My Tia Maria’s Face Fell Down | 22 Jennifer Companik | Dreaming of the Netherlands | 6 Daniel Dagris | Winded | 9 Lenny DellaRocca | Howard Nemerov’s After Party | 24 Audrey DuBois | Poetic Entanglements | 20 Dennis Finnell | Atlas, Sweating | 12 Christina Harrington | Hammonasset Mica | 16 Jimmy Hollenbeck | I Find My Death in a Corn Maze | 18 Robin Lewis | Directions Lost and Chosen | 5 David S. Osgood | Resurrecting the Warbird | 14 Elisabeth Preston-Hsu | Ginkgo | 10 Heidi Richardson | Consider/a/Caretaker of the Dead | 13 Lisa Romeo | A Grave Duty | 15 Amy Sugeno | Saved by a Scott’s Oriole | 21 Vanessa Zimmerman | What I’ve Drawn and What You’ve Done | 8

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To Be Wrong or To Be Whole.

Cori Bratby-Rudd

A child, clutches the sound, taste, scaled sharp, in the strangers and a child, into red.

rock bellied squirming from their mouths texture of scrutinized

These are the froze me.

Letting my from lack of

choices in which they

My hands air, skywritten my silence, this voice, like the I was afraid to hold.

once spelt stop in the

Containing and freezing of singularity. Like there can be only one.

I have flashbacks of a my family trying to hold me in tangible like simplicity.

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tongue peel use.

silence entombed in fear my voice, estranged family I once lost, lose what lying let me complexity myself in the metaphor the idea that of mothers

their palms

stranger—

Directions Lost and Chosen Robin Lewis

​ Somewhere after Dog Island but before the Leadbetter Narrows, there was a gust of wind that caught me dozing off a hangover and pulled our only chart right out of my hands. Like a pair of cotton shorts on a clothesline can be given shape by the breeze—as if it’s trying them on—the wind had a go with our chart, spreading it out flat, then pushing it out like a ghost under the boom and over the toe-rail into the bay. ​ ill laughed—a single very-high note made through closed lips, a small remnant of how I remember him being W when we were younger, when he was a little pudgy and chaotic. Now he was twenty-three, thin, and with a dark, short, and well-kept beard that covered much of his face, even his cheekbones. You wouldn’t expect that sound from him unless you were a friend, in which case it was most welcome, and a sign that all was well and joyous with the world.

“It’s waterproof,” he said, letting the mainsheet run out between his fingers, preparing to come about, always gentle and methodical now in the adult iteration of himself, as if he knew—like a postal driver who doesn’t take left turns—that the rush inevitably slows you down. He pushed the tiller over, the bow pointed up light and responsive into the wind, then through it. I let the jib backwind and then snapped it over; the sails loaded and pulled, and we climbed to the windward side, flattening the small boat and accelerating out of the tack as if we’d rehearsed it. “​ There it is,” he said, pointing just downwind, two boat-lengths away. “We’ll loop around. Make it a proper figure-8 rescue.”

I nodded, but just then a small swell washed over the chart, flooding and filling whatever parts of it there were to fill.

Then it was gone, and I was gone after it—over the back rail in my clothes and sunglasses—my arms outstretched to soften the slap of the water against my aching forehead, and behind me through the air Will just sat at the tiller, beaming and pounding the deck and laughing his little laugh, because it was summer and all was well.

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Dreaming of the Netherlands Jennifer Companik

I noticed her heel-click-hip-twist hourglass silhouette as we walked toward bright light at the end of a long corridor between Terminal B and Terminal C. My husband, teenage son, and all the other travelers flowed past on the electric walkway: She and I the only ones who’d chosen to move on our own locomotion. She clicked along a good twenty feet ahead of me, blonde hair in a chignon, a few locks flying loose around her face. She trod with long-strided purpose. But her heels could not outpace my flats. I caught up, though I did not overtake her. That’s when I noticed the zipper pull on the back of her uniform: a little silver plane-shaped pendant hanging three or four inches from the top of the zipper on a blue jeweled chain.

Did the dress come that way? I asked.

No, she said.

I like it.

Thanks, she said. She smiled with dimples.

I blushed.

The winged pin on her chest, which I’d hoped would say her name, said, “The Netherlands.”

I’d never been. So many places I’d been... But not there.

I slowed my stride to match hers. She noticed me noticing.

You should come, she said.

We both walked more slowly. She brushed the inside of my palm with her fingertips.

I should, I said, blushing harder.

My men hailed me from the end of the hall like a pair of foregone conclusions: I hurried to rejoin them.

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I didn’t know then we’d be on the same flight; where she would serve me water and champagne, coq au vin, strawberry tarts, honeydew like a plate of crescent moons, and for breakfast an omelet and rose-petal tea; where my men would sleep, one row up, snoring, farting, oblivious; where I’d spend the eight and a half hours between Paris and Boston awake, dreaming of pulling her zipper; where she would offer, in the dark, on her break, somewhere over the Atlantic, to “tuck me in”; and where I would, foolishly, decline.

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What I’ve Drawn and What You’ve Done Vanessa Zimmerman

My white grandfather uses his narrow hallway to display the work of his granddaughter. The wall acts as a timeline, dating back to my first kindergarten project that is now curling at its edges, yellowing from time.

Calendar Contest 2004: won Two young boys face each other with rosy cheeks, and open smiles. They wear corresponding winter jackets with matching mittens. Between them a near complete snowman begins to take form, with coal buttons and branches for arms that look like long stringy fingers. The boy in the green scarf is reaching up high on tip-toes with a carrot in his hand, ready to finish their masterpiece.

Their faces aren’t colored in: white as paper.

Comic book Contest 2005: won Supergirl is fighting a villain I have since forgotten the name of. They both are midflight, surrounded by puffy clouds. The sun shines as a half circle in the top right corner. Supergirl’s hand are balled into round fists, and her hair blows in the opposite direction of her cape.

Her face is neither apricot nor peach: white as paper.

Picture book Contest 2006: won A ballerina joins a clown on a boat ride. They pass through twists and turns as they point in amazement at every new exhibit they pass. An enchanted forest with tiny fairies in sparkling dress shine brightly on the third page.

All of their faces: white as paper.

Self-portrait Contest 2007: lost This is the first time I have colored a face in.

My skin: the color of rust. I excitedly overcolor. I am burnt and too dark.

The rough construction paper broideries are ripped at the corners, as my grandfather hangs up the wall art without order. But as he takes his guests down the hall, he points at the white faces I’ve drawn: stamped with 1st place ribbons. He tells them how he passed on his artistic gene, how we spent many afternoons doodling in a sketch pad together. He tells them nothing of the way he would erase the penciled shadings of my characters faces until they were once more as white as paper. And now they all hang, as if it’s a collage of evidence, a wall for ​him to point to and say, look at what I’ve taught her.

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Winded

Daniel Dagris I swim through the man’s long hair. After a night of blistering past rocks and a morning of casting waves into the eyes of fishermen, I dance with brunette locks tied by leather. Slink between sunglasses, squint eyes, mix with breath. His wife clicks. I frame the shots with her own spray of split ends, and dive under the collar of her coat, pulled tight against my invasion. I tickle her smile, knowing a fan when I brush against one. Even in the cold, this woman finds my presence to be a blessing; a texture of life. The man does not, but for him, her adoration is enough.

I finger the holes in his jacket cuffs, and whistle through the punctured points in the rig he is posing against that predates the term SUV and has seen so many winters that it can no longer hold heat. Everything frays along him and the things he calls his own. Including her. The machine and the man both hold together just long enough to get from one place to the next before coming apart again. He watches his wife. Her grin infects his lips, weighed down at the ends like gull wings just after they’ve muscled through me. The woman is a disciple of mine. A dancing partner always ready to dip and spin. She and her husband have spent years floating just above the waterline, lungs hoping the next wave might not be too much, still burning with the salt of times they couldn’t stay afloat. I swirl the clouds aside to give the couple a moment of sun. A bright photo of their rugged love might fill their sails; might lift them just above the next swell.

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Ginkgo

Elisabeth Preston-Hsu Last week, the ginkgo tree next to our back door dropped all of its leaves and berries. A late-day sun tumbled to the ground in a million pieces stinking of your room, acrid and rotting.

“It itches,” you told me as you dug your fingers into your belly today. The cancer started in your colon. Now the tumor sat at the surface of your skin, lumping your abdomen and oozing. “I want to go outside.” The room hung with your pungent tang, not well masked with cinnamon air fresheners.

“But it’s starting to snow,” I told you. It was early this year.

“I want to hear the snow.”

I smoothed a knitted cap over your partially bald scalp. We walked outside along the back porch, you hanger-thin wrapped in a Harry Potter scarf and grey coat. The spindly trees and your papery body with almost the same silhouettes. Golden ginkgo leaves and berries in mats. Scalloped ice like your half closed eyes. Fluttering snowflakes.

“What does the snow sound like?”

You stood in the same position with your head tilted, thinking for a long time. I almost repeated my question.

“I can hear my heart in my ears and I don’ t feel sick.”

I don’t feel sick. Why wasn’t it I feel well? Did you ever forget? Did a lapse trick you temporarily?

I scraped up some leaves near the door. Something thudded in the leaf bin when I tipped it to throw the fallen ginkgo inside.

A tightly curled chipmunk rested at the bottom. The variegated swipe of symmetric stripes along its back was the only cue that it was more than just a clot of brown leaves. The color of burnt cinnamon pastry. Your hair last year in the sunlight. The smooth-sided bin doomed the animal the second it fell.

Poking it with a stick, you exclaimed “It’s alive.” It did not stir.

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You picked it up like a tiny kitten and cradled it in your hands, stroking its stripes.

In one fell swoop, you pitched the chipmunk like a softball to the ground and stomped on it. Crunch. Crick. Crump.

Its yellowed teeth stuck out of its now disarticulated and shattered jaw. The furry stripes tangled. Shocked, I stayed quiet. The peace of you was gone, replaced with quiet fury. Had you ever been so callous?

“It’s dead,” you declared. “Musta been for a long time. Hard like a rock.”

You scratched your belly, then your palms. “I’m burying it.”

You chipped away at the ground with your fingers. You scraped the chipmunk pieces into a shallow grave.

“I’m done,” you said as you packed the red dirt around. There was dirt under your nails, on your coat. “I heard the snow.”

“Me too,” I lied and helped you negotiate the porch stairs. We knotted our elbows together and ambled back inside.

Smelling sickness with cinnamon. Mouths of tiny yellow teeth screaming. Yellow ginkgo rotting. I don’t feel sick.

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Atlas, Sweating Dennis Finnell

​ Talk about your camera lucida, talk about your cave.

Bob and Glenn’s Mobil Service Station, St. Louis

A man holds a Cadillac over his head, his arms like limbs of an oak, the Caddy a house above, all a tree house, trunk-man and car-house, with a flying red horse sewn to the man’s left shirt pocket, Glenn stitched in red threads on his right. And that bikinied woman tattooed in smoke in his right arm, True Love Margaret & Glenn scrolling an inked heart in his left.

Glenn steps from under the Cadillac, the Caddy staying put, shifts a lever at the wall. Cadillac descends to the garage floor. And then numerous actual events occur for the first but not the last time—bells ringing for service when car tires roll over the rubber hoses, looking like super-long nightcrawlers, bells ringing for gas, for dipsticks to be eyed, tire pressures to be gauged, windshields to be wiped, several while Glenn wears a dampened red shop towel around his neck, to cool him in the St. Louis summer, so humid the rag does not dry, is more a length of haze about his neck.

As he leaves each night Glenn never forgetting to check the payphone for any forgotten coin ​day’s gratuity.

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Consider/a/Caretaker of the Dead Heidi Richardson

When the dying time came, like a gavel struck demanding pallor and ash, you receded from a house to a room to a box, destined for a closet sharing flat caramel carpet with these feet. You are boxed and taped and I am full— possessing your images, your proof ’s—of jury seats, divorce decrees, of love letters resealed by time, of certificates of birth and fevered secrets poked in drawers—of Jew and Black etudes—clamoring, when all I crave is erudition; your counsel of skirt hems and bad men, of how many bags form a lazy man’s load, up these stairs, up my steps and not your own. Where do you end/ I start, orphaned ridiculously old, mourning this closeted quay at which I sometimes cower; confused sole cantor seeking words, rustling sermons that append pogroms, lunch counters, tar paper shacks and vile beginnings, but not too much—not to unceasing oppression, a sole source in readiness—for here there is no silo to grease lest rats steal our grits, nor chilblains to treat, nor blood-soaked rags to hang on a line, there is only me.

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Resurrecting the Warbird David S. Osgood

I was thirteen when the cancer took my father. Old enough to comprehend, young enough to shatter me. He spent hours in his workshop building model airplanes, wearing thick bifocals, and sticking his tongue out as he pressed glue to plastic. I sat in the stool next to his and create Blackbirds, Hellcats, and Blackjack Bombers. We never talked; we concentrated. He pointed and patted and slowed things down with his hairy hands.

I stopped building planes with him when I turned twelve; I think it bruised him. We talked more but connected less. I didn’t know he was sick. He built the last few planes by himself, alone with his disease. I would pass by the workshop and roll my eyes. He never looked up from his work, but he knew I was there. Did he wait for me to open the workshop door, hoping to hear the familiar creak of its rusty hinges, getting a little bit sicker each time I didn’t turn the knob?

I​ sat on the sleeper chair next to his hospital bed. Right before he died, he whispered, “I finished it.” He told me where to find it, in a wooden box under the hobby table. The World War II military warbird had taken two years to finish. The last time I worked on it was the last time I worked on anything. My wing wouldn’t stay on and I stormed off, never to sit next to my father again. Yet here I was, holding his hairy hand as his soul exited his body.

I found the warbird and marveled at its intricacies, staring at it for hours. Good and bad memories collided and became jumbled until I couldn’t tell whether my time with him was mostly happy or mostly sad. I told him I didn’t want to end up like him, just a big kid stuck in an old man’s body doing childish things. I wanted to wake him up and take it all back. Tell him it’s not stupid, it’s cool; it’s not childish, it’s timeless.

I carried the warbird outside and waited for the wind to change. Cyrus Bly and his cronies skateboarded down the street, flicking lit cigarettes at each other. I stayed still and hoped they wouldn’t notice me. Cyrus raised his arm and the whole crew stopped and jumped off their skateboards.

“Hey, guys, look, it’s little dick Ritchie and his baby airplane!” Cyrus announced. I tucked the plane close to my chest like an unfit mother holding her child for the last time. Cyrus snatched the warbird and pushed me down. He crushed the plane over his knee and kicked the wreckage. They laughed, threw high-fives, and skated off.

I shuffled the broken pieces around on the lawn like a detective inventorying a dismembered body. I carried them to the workshop and placed them gently on the hobby table. With his bifocals on my head and my tongue out, I began.

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A Grave Duty Lisa Romeo

When my children were young, when I was run ragged working, dieting, and binge eating while sparring itinerant depression, my mother sent me crisp $20 bills with the note, “for the grave.”

She meant her mother’s grave—my Noni, toughest broad I’d ever known, the one who loved me most fiercely. I lived near Noni’s cemetery in New Jersey, but Mom had moved 2700 miles across the land. In spring, she wanted me to plant fresh annuals on Noni’s resting place; in December, to lay a plastic holiday wreath; at Easter, to pound a palm cross into the ground; in fall to put potted purple mums in front of the stone where it said Josephine Marco.

Some days, some years, I did those things, stopping first at the nursery or supermarket with my two sweet and curious boys, then parking along the narrow-edged cemetery lane. There, I’d unload the older boy along with his bright green shovel, my hammer, a pink water can, and bundle the smaller boy into his stroller.

Some days, some years, we snapped pictures—me, hair astray, wearing a dirt-smudged too-tight top, and two smiley boys, not at all bewildered to be posing in that quiet, verdant place, next to a granite marker.

When my boys were nearly men, I found those photos in my dead mother’s nightstand, and was sickened with a sharp stab of guilt.

Although I always said, “Yes, I took care of it,” when Mom asked if I did the grave, what she never knew is often, I didn’t. I hadn’t. Instead, the twenties went toward a toddler’s eyeglasses, my therapist bill, ingredients for ice box cake—the bananas-graham crackers-pudding dessert Noni fed her grandchildren every Sunday.

I never confessed because it didn’t feel like cheating, then. It felt like a kind of fierce love. Today, Mom is buried nearby, and I’m not so sure.

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Hammonasset Mica Christina Harrington

My younger sister takes the spray can of dry shampoo from the table where I left it, after I complain that it never works, never wicks the grease from my hair the way I need it to. She’s always been better at this stuff than me. Ever since we were children and Kate would swoop perfect layers of purple polish onto her tiny fingernails. My fingers always looked like a crime scene, they still do, even though now I’m approaching thirty and have learned to just pay for a manicure instead.

“You’re just not using enough,” She says in the same rough way she says most things to me. Years ago, I would snapped back with something rougher, but years ago she would never have taken the can to help, as she does this morning.

After I close my eyes, she unloads the can into my hair, pressurized ammo that chills my scalp. Between long blasts, she runs her fingers through my hair, working the product in. “You gotta really get in there,” she says, after one last spray. ​I open my eyes and catch my breath. “So?” I ask. “How does it look?”

She shrugs. “Better,” she says. I don’t believe her. But we’ve spent enough time lingering in her best friend’s white, bright kitchen. I have a train to catch. ​ e eat omelets fat with feta cheese and bacon and onions and peppers in the diner of our shared childhood.

W They’ve torn down the façade outside to update it, but indoors is still the same. Turquoise vinyl banquettes, mirrors arching around the edges of the ceiling, neon signs sputtering above the bar. It’s all nostalgia, alive and breathing.

“They’ll change this next,” Kate says, knowing what I’m thinking.

The next time we’re both home together—neither of us knows when that will be or if we’ll be getting along still— this place will be gone. Places move on without you, is one of the first lessons I learned as an adult.

We leave, tipping generously. Every waitress reminds me of our mother, and I leave my guilt behind in 5s and 10s.

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There’s dirt under my fingernails, yesterday’s deodorant still in my armpits. Mica from beach sand glitters my feet.

Yesterday, we drove to Hammonasset and spent the afternoon standing ankle-deep in the calm Atlantic. We talked the way we both have always wanted to talk, we laughed easily and shared ourselves with each other. I’m grateful that sometimes people don’t move on without you. That they pause and look back and wait for you to catch up.

I sip cold brew on the Metronorth after Kate drops me at the station. The train hurries. I watch through the window as the green slips away, watch as concrete and metal replaces it, watch as the city builds itself, mile after mile after mile. It’s a subtle shift, one that builds so gradually you’ll miss it, if you aren’t looking for it.

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I Find My Death in a Corn Maze Jimmy Hollenbeck

with two lines after Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” Now nameless I will go seek my death. I enter as the rest have, bumping into those around me, randomly, entropic.

But this is no closed system. Faced with two choices, I decide left. The path is narrow, cold. A dead end— I see myself, the self I was when I was eight, running from mother, her chasing me through the stalks with a bottle of medicine, telling me with her hinting southern voice darling this’ll help you let me blow your nose you have a fever— I double back, take the right, and for hours (or else, weeks, my beard thickens with each frozen step), I wander through the dark maze. When hungry, I shuck an ear of raw corn, drop to my knees and sink my teeth— There’s a long straight hall (if one can call a row of barren field between stalks of decaying corn a hall) with no turns. The corn here wilts, limp as a cow’s utters. Too thick for water to reach. Dirt is dust. I delve further— ​ n open area, the size of my first apartment. Myself, now nineteen, stampedes into where the living room would A be. I am master-fate, I am minotaur-breath, I am become death, destroyer of plastered walls. My fist meets white barrier— My own footsteps, missteps, places I was lost, couldn’t find my way out. I’m eleven and I push my brother down the stairs, I’m walking through desolate streets with Patrick at four a.m., I can’t breathe. I try, find-swallow empty words— I​ n another dead end, I see my first dog, Binky, named because I was an infant, obsessed. I follow her through mindless turns of the maze, she pleads with me Where have you been why aren’t you here I protected you I protected you I— There’s my father, from what I remember. He sips a beer, I’m seven, I ask him for a taste. He looks to see my mother isn’t around, says we’re all dead ends. We who kill ourselves dwell here. I grip the glass and open wide— ​ orn grows stale. Each day I chart the stars from within the maze, a makeshift sextant borne of corn stalks, try to C get a sense of direction. I remember being seven, hiding from my aunt between soft rolls of clothes. She calls my name—

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Winter enters the maze. I wear a coat of corn, my hair married to icicles. I see my grandfather Christmas morning. I got a camera that year, it was the last time I saw him. He whistles a tune with no rhythm, he calls me Jimster I called him— It’s been years. I forget my name, shrug it off like so many coats. Each turn feels familiar. I unexist, I’ve always been here. Find me there, muttering incoherencies to myself, beard sticky with corn juice, running into each solitary dead end—

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Poetic Entanglements Audrey DuBois

I. Atoms and words combine themselves into complex structures: molecules and sentences, poems and beings.

These pieces hold a limited amount of meaning alone, but it is only through the interconnected relationships of these base elements that they can ever become alive. To break apart these structures is to kneel before a pile of discrete pieces of information. A cell is defined by its purpose for the body as a whole, a word by the body of work.

There is value in the syntax, the order, the configuration. Rearrange the elements and the whole thing may fall apart.

II. Language evolves. As time goes on, a combination of sounds mutates into something that doesn’t resemble itself anymore. Every time a sequence is copied, it brings the threat (or blessing) of alteration. Without this swerve, every product created by nature or poet would be a mere copy of the original.

III. A good poem already exists. The writer can imitate it, ensuring that she never rises above her predecessors and lives her life a parrot. She can rebel against it, at the risk of estranging her readers and defining her work by spite. Or she can take that work and distort it slightly, expand the boundaries to her advantage, test the limits without going too far off the edge. Nature works the same way; she is a fine poet.

IV. Poems adapt to the fitness of their environment. As language evolves, the values of art must shift as well, else they will become extinct due to the meager supply of fitting words. The ideal poetic line is a genome, manipulated by entropy until an infinite series of variables miraculously synchronize with its surroundings, and it thrives. It’s hard to watch old words die. They don’t represent the language of the listeners anymore, but they preserve the language of the writers. Leave them behind when history turns its page. They will be fine.

V. Poetry is a ring species. It is tempting to categorize history into eras. A segment of time is defined by one concept, and then in one single strike of the clock is defined by another. The division of history into Renaissance and Shakespearean and Romantic erases the links in between that hold them together. Change is a gradual process. The process isn’t over yet. Every individual moment is an era, defined by itself.

VI. Think about the music of the spheres. The universal symphony is never over; as one tune ends, an elided cadence begins a new melody, recombining the same notes into an impossible number of variations. The last line of one poem is the opening to another. As long as art continues, it can’t really fail; even a poor piece of writing or a mislaid tune may serve as inspiration for the next. The only mistake is to stop creating. Everything finds its natural place in the end.

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Saved by a Scott’s Oriole Amy Sugeno

My sanity hangs from a single, brilliant, dew-soaked spider thread.

I did not ask for this. You did not ask for this. These hurricanes of fury and passion and wreckage and fear which have no end. Ahead of the eye, walls of gray rain march forward, fierce and unrestrained. Behind, tornadoes and bolts of fire descend from the angry sky, shocking the land and its overflowing waters.

In between the storms, the sun shines, and we rebuild.

Standing behind the big chair in our living room, I watch, through little pools of tears, as the raging hand of mania strangles you. And I curse the sadness I know will follow and try to drown you. The shadowy, gnawing beast has come out of hiding and has swallowed you whole.

I have lost you again.

As despair pulls me under, a bird catches me and lifts me back up. Through the window next to me, he lands at the feeder. A sun-yellow body draped in a night-black hood. His beauty is so stunning, so perfect, he is all I can see. My eyes fill again with little pools. How can there be so much beauty in the middle of so much pain?

Yet here he is. Right now, in this moment, with this pain.

Having had his fill of sweet nectar, he disappears over the tops of the trees, carrying the bright s​ un and dark night with him as he steals away.

And leaves a little piece of sanity behind.

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The Day My Tia Maria’s Face Fell Down Sandra Cimadori

Tía María’s face fell down on a hot July day while she changed clothes in front of a window fan. Abuela called and I could hear her frantic voice over the phone as I stood close to Mami. We rushed to the subway. I was five so I imagined we were going to Tía María’s apartment to help pick up the pieces of her face and put them back in the right spots. I touched my nose, mouth, eyes. It would be funny to mix everything up. Mami cursed the heat, the subway, the city.

The doctor used the word droop when talking about the right side of Tía María’s face. But in Spanish things don’t droop. They fall down. And that’s how it looked to me – eye, cheek, mouth all fallen down, down.

“Can you not smile at me, Titi?” I asked.

A tear ran down her paralyzed cheek.

Abuela blamed it on the fan because cool air on a hot body is dangerous. She also believed night air was full of diseases and that people could make you sick with the evil eye.

Mami wanted to know where that bastard Hector was. Hector was Tía María’s husband and a minister.

“He is down in the Bowery saving the souls of whores just like Jesus Christ did,” Tía María said.

“He is a man of God,” Abuela said. “He will pray and María will get better.”

The doctor looked at us in a way that made me think he did not like us much. It made me sad. “Have you experienced any recent head injuries?” he asked.

“Like being pushed out of a moving car?” Mami said.

“I slid when Hector made a sharp turn,” Tía María said.

“Or being shoved down a flight of stairs?” Mami said.

“She tripped. Always so clumsy,” Abuela said.

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“And how about being knocked to the floor?” Mami said. Then she raised her hand before anyone could speak.

“Oh, yeah... sure. You fainted.”

Abuela caressed her daughter’s ruined face. “It was the fault of the fan. Cool air on a hot body can be deadly. Hector is a man of God. He will pray and María will get better.”

Mami cursed. The doctor left. And I prayed that my Tía María would someday smile at me again.

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Howard Nemerov’s After Party Lenny DellaRocca

Then there’s the time I went to Books and Books in Coral Gables to see Howard Nemerov, and though I can’t remember anything he read—either it wasn’t memorable, or my memory is on the loose in someone else’s mind—I remember the wine & cheese afterward upstairs where I expected Jacob Marley or Boris Karloff to emerge from the bookshelves. Anyway, I walk up to Nemerov with a plastic cup of wine and a paper plate of cheese chunks and tell him I loved his reading-which was a lie—I said Mr. Nemerov—I thought the Mr. was appropriate out of respect though I learned later from a friend that the old coot had been grabbing the asses of half the women at the reading, but it was Mr. Nemerov, and I told him I had a horrible job selling messages-on-hold to telephone companies that sold telephone systems and earned fifty-thousand dollars a year, which was pretty hot shit, especially back then, especially for a guy like me, no college, no trade, just a high school diploma, and I said Mr. Nemerov, should I quit my job and concentrate on poetry? He leaned forward like a lumbering Dean Martin with his bloodshot eyes and alcohol breath, and just looked at me like I was a fucking idiot.

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Contributors Cori Bratby-Rudd is a queer LA-based writer. She graduated Cum Laude from UCLA’s Gender Studies department, and is a current MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts. Cori enjoys incorporating themes of emotional healing and social justice into her works. She has been published in Ms. Magazine, The Gordian Review, Califragile, and PANK Magazine, among others. She recently won the Editorial Choice Award for her research paper in Audeamus Academic Journal and was nominated as one of Lambda Literary’s 2018 Emerging Writers.

Sandra Cimadori was born in New York and grew up in South Florida in a multilingual home. She graduated from Florida State University. She teaches and writes, dividing her time between North Carolina and Florida. Visit her online at: www.sandracimadori.com ​​Jennifer Companik holds an M.A. from Northwestern University and is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly. Her accomplishments include: Pushcart Prize Nominee, Border Crossing; first prize, 2014 Fiction Awards, The Ledge; and work appearing or forthcoming in: Adanna, Muse, and Northern Virginia Review. By reading her work you are participating in one of her wildest dreams.

Daniel Dagris’ work has appeared in the Buckman Journal and Chaleur Magazine. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.

Lenny DellaRocca is founder and co-publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal - SoFloPoJo. Audrey Dubois is a Rhode Island poet and creative writing graduate student at Emerson College. She likes weird antiques, frozen yogurt, and PBS documentaries about Karen Carpenter. You can find her on social media as: @platypusinplaid Dennis Finnell has published five books of poems, Red Cottage, the first, awarded the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. His most recent book is Ruins Assembling (2014) from Shape&Nature Press, which was nominated for the 2016 Poets’ Choice Award. He has taught literature and writing at the University of Tennessee, Mount Holyoke College, and Wesleyan University, and served as Co-Director of Financial Aid at Greenfield Community College for several years. He hails from St. Louis, but has called western Massachusetts home for years.

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Christina Harrington graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2014 with her M.F.A., where she was the managing editor for LUMINA. Since graduating, she has fulfilled a lifelong dream by working in the comic book industry, first for Marvel Comics and now as the managing editor for AfterShock Comics. You can find her work forthcoming in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and Gyroscope Review.

Jimmy Hollenbeck is a graduate student/assistant at Central Michigan University, currently working in their writing center. His hobbies include brewing beer, reading comic books well past the typical age, and listening to jazz and pretending he understands it. He hopes to graduate in December 2019 with his M.A. in creative writing and to pursue an M.F.A. following that.

Robin Lewis graduated from Colby College in 2017 with a degree in Environmental Policy. He likes boats, job sites, succulents, and vacuuming his room. He also likes Maine, where he’s from. He currently lives and works as a carpenter in Burlington, Vermont.

David S. Osgood is a short story writer. He resides in Holly Springs, North Carolina, where rural and suburban collide among crepe myrtles, and he has a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.

2019 has been a breakout year for David: he is celebrating his first publications in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Crack the Spine, Firewords, Treehouse, and Eastern Iowa Review, and he won the Microfiction Honorable Mention Award from San Antonio Writer’s Guild. David’s website is designed for wanderers to discover and dream. Find him at: www.davidsosgood.com Elisabeth (Lisa) Preston-Hsu is a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation physician in Atlanta, Georgia. Throughout her medical training and career, Lisa has dabbled in the arts with music, writing, and blogging a years-long streamof-consciousness love letter to her family at: storyofakitchen.com Heidi Richardson is originally from San Francisco and is a Creative Writing alumna from California State University, San Bernardino. A 2014 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2016 Cave Canem Book Prize finalist, her work has previously appeared in Ghost Town Literary Journal and Pacific Review.

Lisa Romeo is the author of the memoir Starting with Goodbye (University of Nevada Press). Her nonfiction is listed in Best American Essays 2018 & 2016, and has appeared in the New York Times, Longreads, Brevity, among other places.

She lives in New Jersey. Visit Lisa online at: http://LisaRomeo.net

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Amy Sugeno is a mental health therapist, mindfulness teacher, and former wildlife biologist. A life-long outdoorlover, she has tracked rattlesnakes in dusty deserts and taught people to meditate in fields and forests. Amy lives outside of Austin in the rocky and rugged Texas Hill Country. She is currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction essays about nature, mindfulness, and adoption. Visit her online at www.amylsugeno.com Vanessa Zimmerman is a poet currently residing in Ithaca, New York. More of Zimmerman’s work can be found in The Merrimack Review, Sagebrush Review, Slipstream Press, The Healing Muse, Literature Today, and Serendipity magazine.