Chapter 1: Golden Hour

Golden

HOUR

BOOK 1 CHAPTER 1

PINK APPLE PRESS

JULY 2023

Featuring Christian Ward Kate Wylie Donovan Darling Jacob Fortino Ulyses Razo Breia Gore Eli Boveroux Molly Likovich Alicia Turner Alexandra McIntosh Brad Davis Ed Higgins Jen Fischer Davis Shore Grae John Spiegel Ell Cee Kait Quinn Sophie VonLehman Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi Jim Zola Phoebe Neremv Paul David Adkins

Dear Reader, As a new magazine, Pink Apple did not have any expectations for the submissions we would receive, and we were blown away by the amount of quality work we were fortunate enough to spend time with, a small fraction of which we are able to host between these pages. To those who took the time to submit: thank you; you and your art are appreciated.

Golden Hour occurs twice a day, every day, the last hour before sunset and the first hour after sunset. These two hours offer new light and colors that fall on the plants and animals that always exist in our line of vision, reminding us that there is magic in mundanity. Thank you, contributors, who have created this light and warmth and thank you, reader, for spending time in our own Golden Hour.

xoxo Megan Mary Moore Princess-in-Chief

Fox Hour Let's rename the golden hour the fox hour.

Look how feral foxes make playthings of parking lots, back gardens, railway lines and fast food restaurants, while we ghost halfway into trees, tethering ourselves to other people's dreams of flight.

Look how the sunlight absorbs their colours out of dismay, jealousy, fright.

Christian Ward

Shadowsong I was standing in the middle of our backwoods gravel road, the glacial sky refusing any sentiment of snow. No signs of rain, no clouds or disappearing moon, just pitch pines stretching on and on for miles and a doe laboring on the shoulder, tall grass growing all around her. I’d seen her grazing in the willow tree grove, stomach swelling in twilight, dark eyes flashing at the sound of footfall.

Steam was rising from the truck’s red hood. Four thin legs extruded from her. She pushed once more, and finally the fawn slid from her. Where there should have been a flutter of heartbeat, there was stillness.

Where I prayed for a tremble of mercy, there was none.

My only wish was to not be afraid..

Kate Wylie

When the Hot Boy Sun Balls Fire in the sandwich of a saturday in march i’m burning lumber when the hot boy sun balls fire in our silver crowns. i’m sweating neon bows on baby trees and fixing their broken spines like mine and i glitz orange smoke and grassy flames dab and floss across the day old biscuit. i run to mini waterfalls and waterslide orange terror when the waterfall pukes out a snake’s tender skull. i say fuck fuck fuck and sad hug fire grenades coughing up white dust and call 9-1-1! to my wife. the phone scrambles nightmares so i shovel and slap the fire’s ass until she groans licking grass and pine tree feet. and the red boys blast their hoses and kick up biscuit dust.

later a bully’s heart droops a golden horse. he knuckles my lapels like his failure dirty laundry. he jokes about the fire with patrick bateman’s gleam a grinny chimpanzee. are you so lazy you’d start a fire? i popsicle and make a joke did you hear the one about heal-all? crushed it grows back into the heart of the earth.

Donovan Darling

Gold Drogue Jacob Fortino

Portrait of a Worker from the Factory Where Clouds Are Built I am on a crew that works on clouds.

We have been sculpting a mammatus as of late.

I am the one who paints it pink.

Sometimes I think I hear lightning chrome screams inside of me, when the moon reveals itself to be nothing but a teratoma.

I have not been sleeping well.

I have seen the inside of a heart, learned the emergency of my life was having an emergency.

In others’ words, I am haunted

by Eurydice. By doves on fire falling from the sky.

When I walk through parks in the middle of November I see orange angels crucified on the trees.

For she said, as we dropped our love, “Evolving,” “Alone.”

Take it, look at it: consider how briefly the apple’s beauty is going to last.

There are holes in my wooden arms like the marks abductions leave behind.

But I pass the port of Morrow.

I hear a tumbling in the sky.

Ulyses Razo

Lucid Dream #1 "Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”

- Baruch Spinoza This is how I feel about fires.

I mean sunrises.

This is how I feel about sunrises.

There are no Gods, only fires.

I mean sunrises.

There are only jelly-red sunrises showing up to consume like an existential glutton.

It is almost funny.

Asking if the sunrise is a fire, waiting for colors to speak, then gulps up the earth.

Breia Gore

Untitled Eli Boveroux

sweet tea in the summer -after "seven" by taylor swift

we used to be young enough to curl up on the cold grocery store tiles and wail until our vocal cords frayed. if the world dared disappoint us, we screamed at the sun. we raged to teach it a lesson. the moon couldn’t shine without our permission. lemonade had to be as sweet as we commanded and the tea too bitter to taste. tea parties were always had at my house and you brought your dolls all the way down the lane. even when it rained, you bundled them up beneath your cardigan and unsheathed them proudly as you arrived rainboot-heavy and storm-trodden in my front hall. you stayed with me, snug under the bed, flashlights flickering. you stayed until you cried at the thought of going back to your house. four walls haunted by your dad’s anger. the kind of rage that can never be sunny or sweet.

so i told you stories of india. i made my grandma get her old suitcases out of the attic and i demonstrated how nicely all your dolls could fit. i asked you to braid my hair like yours and as your fingers wove through the honey locks on my head i knew you were the furthest thing in my world from a grocery store floor.

Molly Likovich

an ode to my ballerina jewelry chest i want to say something about new beginnings // the ones draped in pink velvet // how they feel like old endings // a ballerina // string-tied to the ceiling // how the world keeps spinning // despite us // or because of us

Alicia Turner

self-serving sunrises he and i are both self-serving sunrises that sometimes serve each other in ways we can't pronounce. instead, we speak in tongues, a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, where we bite and bleed, declare ourselves the color of a sunset. and then the sun comes up, sets but doesn’t settle, (like we do). and all along, we set our clocks backward. he and i are miles apart, but tonight, we pretend to see through sheer sheets and touch palms the way lovers love when they need to feel needed

Alicia Turner

Spring Evening After Ice Cream Your silhouette in the truck ahead of me, Chevy S10, the part in your hair, left arm out the window, the freckles, veins I can’t see from this far back, but feel in memory, as familiar as the staircase banister of my childhood home. Your grandpa had muscly arms even at 80. We fell in love talking about our grandparents. I’ll love your muscly arms at 80. We talk this way.

I’m jealous of your sister, that she grew up with you. You say that’s not weird. You understand.

In the park you outline the curve of the hillside, tree limbs hang like a lampshade over our bench. The oil paint smell of your palette mixes with cut grass, spring time, the smell of your neck.

Alexandra McIntosh

Dairy Market Brad Davis

a young blue heron car hit earlier this morning I’ve rescued alongside our country road such wild terror in each eye fear’s bleaching color the lost ability for flight feathers on the s-curve neck blood soaked early summers they wade in my field’s standing waters: they eat frogs field mice and snakes this brownish juvenile lacks adult blue-gray back and wings or head white with black stripe ending in distinctive black plumes behind the eye later in the barn where I’ve spread hay on a tarp the bird dies.

Ed Higgins

He makes things grow like rosemary, a priestess in a backyard bed. Like him, she never lies. I like rosemary. He likes the frustration of dill. Too easy to court, too free to tame. He might pickle the fickle nomad if she comes back next year. He named the rosebush Olenna, lady of literature, pink-cheeked and hardier than anyone would suspect. He strokes her branches, wonders at her discoloration, loves her first May bloom like an offering. He likes to know she’s still there. She likes the dignity of her placement, a throne with a peeling storage shed tapestry for a backdrop. I like his cheeks, pink when he invites me to walk the garden, to understand rebirth.

I like the glide of his Wusthof through a firm, Golden Gate Roma, juices pooling on bamboo like a sun-fired Pacific bay. He likes to feed me things he’s grown. I sip Beaujolais and thank the gods for fertile soil.

Jen Fischer Davis

Planticide The pothos I had sitting on the windowsill wrapped herself around a cactus in a desperate attempt at planticide, suicide in plant terms, or to finally feel the embrace of another depending on how you view it.

I carefully unraveled her stems trying to avoid getting hurt in the process, she lay limp without her support.

I made a note to find a new spot for her where she could lean on a bookshelf without the temptation of self-harm or lust.

How can you hurt yourself with the touch of another?

With someone’s skin or their hands on your own?

The first time you touched me in your tiny bedroom in November, under your gray sheets on the night we first met.

How clumsily you grabbed my body before you memorized every curve and ache.

Is it pain that I feel when I think of your hands? or bitter yearning?

Maybe the last time you hugged me outside of my car in Norwood, it hurt to separate.

Whether from your cold touch or the fear of never feeling your arms around me again.

I am not sure when thoughts of you stopped soothing my rapid brain and began to prick at my anxious skin.

I am sure I should separate my plants before they kill each other in the winter sun, before the other’s touch is the last thing their skin remembers.

Shore Grae

March 25—Haibun Windows down, I backroad home after class; a calf hops in front of its mother. A lamb sticks its head through the fence. Puddles after rain stream and creek their way down to the drain. Yes, it is Spring. Trees still bare but bud; grass still low but grows. Wood planks around my garden rot in half, roots from a tree I never saw degrade underground and my front lawn sinks by centimeters each season.

Something is falling, failing, while the rest grows, grooms. I am the carpenter and the ant.

John Spiegel

Spooky Pink Horizon Ell Cee

Demeter’s Promise Sky bleeds gold, lenten rose soon will be in season. & the cicadas will crawl from Hades toward sun. & the Bombus will languor drunk on fermented nectar. & worm moon will call milky pink nightcrawlers home: first buds peeled in pinks, mouths black as damp umber that birthed them.

Kait Quinn

Red Tree Sophie VonLehman

Pasture Statues

Millie mooed.

Cate mooed with her.

The cow stared at them.

Millie giggled at the old joke, a pure, authentic song.

Cate giggled with her, exaggerated, trembling notes.

The cow stared at them.

Millie continued to pet the cow's cheek. Cate stroked the other, looking for signs of impatience in the otherwise stoic animal, searching its blank yet somehow knowing eyes for knowledge of her charade. What made her want to release the scream that had been lodged in her throat for inconceivable minutes was how Millie, sitting comfortably in her numb arms, was so far away from screaming; Millie, who had every justification for adding her shrill voice to the one behind them.

She hadn't asked Millie if she was all right; doing so would have given her the impression something was wrong. She hadn't asked Millie her actual name; as far as the little girl's amiable behaviour indicated, they had known each other all their lives, and names didn't matter. She hadn't asked Millie her age; from the moment she took the little girl into her arms, she could tell the small human being was no older than her career.

Three-years-old, Cate mused again, as she transferred Millie from one desensitized arm to the other, careful not to break contact with the cow.

Three years, and once again she imagined the retirement banner, growing longer and larger as the idea cooked in her mind, advertising the pitiful number.

Cate was grateful for the brown-and-white animal's presence.

Moreover, she was grateful that the cow was the first thing Millie had noticed. She wouldn't have thought to mosey on over to the cow; instinct —training—would have told her to immediately transport the disheveled little girl to her car; and there they would have waited for the next routine steps. And then she would've known something was wrong, she thought. And then she would've started screaming.

A scream perforated the ambience, a cocktail of pain, fear... and perhaps a note of anger.

"Mooooo!” Cate issued her loudest impersonation yet. Millie echoed her sentiments, prolonging and exaggerating the bovine language until it devolved into more giggling.

Another scream smothered the laughter, and, for a terrible moment, Cate thought she felt Millie stiffen; thought she saw registration on the little girl's suddenly sagging face.

"Moo mooooo moo moo moo mooooo moo,” Cate interjected, the single word spoken in the rhythm of conversation. She fixed upon Millie's eyes, hoping the little girl would take the bait, ready to shift her little body should she decide to go peeking behind her back, toward the scream.

Millie's bowed lips glistened, saliva pooling as she gathered her thoughts about the conflicting sounds. Cate readied her own lips with another string of nonsensical cow-speak, when Millie broke out of her trance, and fired off a meaningless statement of her own: "Mooooo mooooo mooooo”—laughter—"mooooo moo moo moo.”

Relieved, Cate kept the dialogue flowing for as long and as loud as was necessary to beat the intermittent screaming from Millie's ears. As their banter rose and fell with the outbursts behind them, she imagined how the others must have seen them: vulnerable backs; a revolving red light highlighting Millie's arms wrapped comfortably—Or is she in shock?

Cate couldn't decide—around her neck; mooing from unseen lips; the cow itself unseen, blocked by their combined bodies. How unreal it must have appeared to them.

How grotesquely real it was to her.

How beautifully real it was to Millie.

A terrible thought returned Cate to their cozy huddle: This is your first time, isn't it? The scream she struggled to keep deep down in her gorge threatened to erupt. It occurred to her that this cow—not the pair grazing further down the fence, dangerously close to the break; not the calf flanked by several adults; not the others standing nonchalantly, laying nonchalantly, living nonchalantly; not the countless others that might have been a blur in Millie's passenger window—but this cow might very well have been the very first cow Millie had ever seen.

Cate mooed, and wondered if Millie could detect the underlying melancholy. You don’t need to meet a cow, she desperately wanted to assure the little girl. Not now. Not like this. She was certain that when Millie was one day no longer a size fit for one's arms—There's no guarantee of that, Cate sadly reminded herself—she might learn to hate the cow. All cows. The way Cate hated them for what they had done to Millie. To her.

To Millie's mother.

The human sounds behind them were less frequent now, quieter, the pain, the fear, the anger—if ever there was—giving themselves to realization. Cate hoped Millie's mother would soon forget how to scream; hoped her mother forgot her daughter's name. This line of thinking was drenched in selfishness, but Cate had accepted it... for now; may guilt torment her later. It was just that she and, more importantly, the cow had worked so damned hard to keep Millie occupied.

Or are we keeping the cow occupied? Cate thought for the first time.

She looked into the animal's eyes, glossy black islands surrounded by thin halos of bloodshot white. Pulses of red light, rotating like an angry lighthouse—an eye of its own—searched those eyes, much as Cate was doing now, for knowledge.

Do you see the red light? she mentally transmitted to the cow. Do you understand it? Did you see what happened before the red light? Do you understand what happened?

The cow stared.

Do you understand that this little girl I'm holding, the one mooing at you, the one petting your face... do you understand that her mother is the one who killed your calf?

Based on its indifference, she couldn't tell if the calf was blood-related to the cow. Would he or she—Cate couldn't tell which—bite Millie if it understood the situation behind them? Would he or she reconsider biting if it understood the whole thing had merely been a matter of a broken fence? Would he or she refrain from seeking revenge upon Millie if it understood that the calf had wandered through the broken fence, onto the asphalt, and before Millie's mother's car?

Would he or she rethink their potential bite if it understood that Millie's mother had, from the looks of the finale, done her best to avoid the calf, but instead clipped its behind, sending her speeding vehicle into the ditch? Would he or she accept that the calf had been mercifully put down, quickly and painlessly, unlike Millie's mother, who found herself wrapped deep within her metal womb, gasoline-for-placenta everywhere, unable to be reached or moved, lest she perish sooner?

The cow stared.

Cate focused on Millie's silhouette within the animal's sheeny eye: Do you understand?

A voice answered the question. Cate couldn't make out the words, only the harshness of the voice. She sensed an approaching presence, and immediately understood what was happening. In a voice tailored for Millie’s benefit, Cate said, “Please, don't come any closer,” and resumed mooing along with Millie.

“Officer?” The voice didn't sound so harsh. Perhaps it hadn't been at all.

Perhaps, Cate decided, she was prejudiced against voices outside of her and Millie's precious bubble.

Cate sensed the intruder take another step forward.

“I said don't,” Cate said in her rosiest voice.

“Officer, I need to examine the little girl,” the soft voice said.

The well-meaning plea incensed Cate. She's fine. I checked her when I pulled her out of the car. Some scratches, a few bruises, but she's fine. I checked her.

And I named her. She knew someone close to Millie must have known her real name, but for tonight, in her arms, the little girl would take the name of the first girl Cate had lost on the job.

Footsteps crunched behind them.

“Don't,” Cate emphasized, momentarily breaking her character of utter serenity. Before the intruder could interject, she added: “I... just give us a few minutes, okay?”

And then what? she thought.

Once again, she caught Millie's silhouette in the cow's eye. Do you have a father? Grandmother? Grandfather? Uncles? Aunts? Anybody? Do you know your name?

What would become of Millie when Cate decided enough “few minutes” had elapsed?

What would become of the little girl when the cow was gone?

The intruder's footsteps—a paramedic just trying to do her job— retreated, but Cate sensed she hadn't gone far; Millie did need to be examined.

She realized the screaming had died. It made sense to her, not because the outcome was inevitable, but because the paramedic now had time to check on the only survivor.

But they still had a few minutes.

And so Millie mooed.

Cate mooed with her.

The cow stared at them.

Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi

Movement (a haiku) cattail's sway. the way curtains billow with June's breath. lungs heaving 'gainst lungs.

Kait Quinn

Untitled Jim Zola

shiny thing To be of the sun— light falls inside, outside, a sunshower of daggers raining. An omnipresence, a soul extension. Tapping your finger on every breathing thing. Rising in the East, Aphrodite’s sea.

Me, relentless and begging.

My tongue is a shiny thing.

The moon— a masquerade, luminous. Duochrome paint on the ceiling. Thread from the same spool.

Barefoot, eternal, intertwined. Dancing in the West, cathedral of stars. Untouchable, giddy, celestial.

You, dreamy and overlapping.

You sigh and the whole world takes a breath.

Phoebe Nerem

Arthur Herman Bremer, Using References to Contemporary Television Programs, Comments After His Guilty Verdict in the Attempted Assassination of Alabama Governor and Democratic Presidential Candidate George C. Wallace, Part 1 -- [The prosecutor] tells me he'd like society to be protected from someone like me. – Bremer’s Statement at His Sentencing “Like me.” As in, me.

Like means similar to, nearly the same as.

God help you is all I can say. I don’t know another like me, but neither does the next guy, the next guy, the next.

We all swirl, riding the tornadoes of our own fury through our towns, our shopping centers, our theaters and hotel lobbies.

We’re watching The Brady Bunch: Here's the story of a man named Brady, Who was screwing up / three boys on his own, They were four men living all together, Yet they were all alone.

And now we’re viewing Gunsmoke, but it’s really about Miss Kitty.

We’re eating frozen chicken dinners.

Dad snaps off the set: it’s time for bed.

But nobody moves. The tubes need to cool, white dot evaporate.

It could take five, ten minutes.

Paul David Adkins

Princess-in-Chief Megan Mary Moore

Managing Editor Haley Hulett

Creative Directors Samantha Lakamp Emma Lawson