Riggwelter #15

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RIGGWELTER #15 NOVEMBER 2018 ed. Amy Kinsman

The following works are copyrighted to their listed authors Š2018.

Riggwelter Press is copyrighted to Amy Kinsman Š2017.

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Foreword At Point Nemo Selective Flying As Seagulls Fall from the Skies Stripped Off Middletown, USA Uncle John Elizabeth, My Dear Grownups me and my brother home alone in the 70’s Iglesia de San Francisco, Saturday Afternoon Iridaceae The Unfinished Book of Wren Two Landscapes Dust as an Anxious Landscape Scallop Baguettes Lost in transliteration Animating Abstract Nouns Intercostal AA Meetings The Analyst’s Concern for a Client Leaving Therapy The Neighbor Show Dockside ~ Bristol The Zen of Homemade Socks derby day The Angel of Death Lives Out in Our Shed Now kids don’t know about the second law of thermodynamics Theft Empty Evening Synesthesia Lithograph The Wound Fire Steam-Crossed Country Broken moon Nude 2 Night Music Aubade Contributors Acknowledgements

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Foreword

Welcome, dear readers, to the fifteenth issue. This issue is all about flight; literal flight – avian flight and space flight, but also flights of fantasy, soaring hearts, departures, getaways and even our own personal flocks, our nests and fledglings. Humans have always been obsessed with flight, long before Wilbur and Orville made the first powered flight in 1903. There’s something deeply magical about leaving the ground, a freedom and a rapture that many of us dream of, but with flight also comes falling and it can be a very long way down indeed.

As Douglas Adams said: “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” These are thirty-five pieces which encompass that strange piece of advice. We hope you too, feels these words and images taking flight and stirring that yearning inside you.

Some thanks before we begin: thank you very much to the reviews team, Sarah, Jack, Deirdre, Maryam and Beth, who have been doing a marvellous job. Thank you to everyone that spreads the word about us on social media or elsewhere. Thank you to all our submitters and contributors, without whom this would not be possible and most of all, thank you to you, yes you, reading this now, without whom this would be a bafflingly pointless endeavour.

Enjoy! We’ll see you again in December.

Amy Kinsman (Founding Editor)

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At Point Nemo*

At the height of youth I circled earth.

It spun at my feet, a distant beauty; admirers attracted into graveyard orbits.

For me the sun was another star and though I learnt its physics, I worshipped it as Ra, studied its secrets.

I was unbreakable and made of light and time was for other people. I witnessed the fall of peace - Mir breaking up on re-entry with smoking hands and fireballfingertips, crashing into the South Pacific.

My own descent into waves was sudden, knocked off course by junk and debris.

For decades I lay on the seabed with other wrecks and remnants of life.

Diving down through miles of water, you swam into the sunken city of my heart, emptied my drowned mouth. I listened to your stories of the surface, began to believe in rebirth, in escaping gravity’s grip on my bones; felt like I was back in high orbit. But you left how you arrived ― a lone explorer on a mission, fearless. And every night is terminal velocity, nothing but the cemetery to break my fall.

Karen Dennison

*“Point Nemo” (oceanic pole of inaccessibility) is the area of ocean furthest from land and is the location of the so-called Spacecraft Cemetery where retired spacecraft are sent.

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Selective Flying

Unremittingly, by the second graveyard at far Gunwalloe, Cheryl waits for Jane.

She’s usually a few years late. It stems from the pact on the cliffs 80 years before she first took off, diving the headwind from Gunwalloe Cove, crashing headlong to the rocks and surf, forming fractured spindrift and causing Jane to lay 5 years of longing and a small white bouquet among the thrift.

It was shortly after that she met Jane again, firstly at night, and then in the church among the dunes. Cheryl was always wet and mostly bloody and Jane, in widow’s weeds, joined her, after learning to fly in the same manner.

There are two bouquets now. I placed the second after meeting them, firstly at night, and then in the church among the dunes.

And some days I feel like flying.

On one such selective flying day, they will teach me to become spindrift.

You will lay the longing and three white bouquets.

I will meet you there when called.

Ronnie Goodyer

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As Seagulls Fall from the Skies

When the leaflets ordering us to leave fluttered upon our ruins, we thought even the seagulls flying toward their ocean possessed the grace to die, as we witnessed their synchronized capsizing. God, if I could name you, it would be refugee, newborn swallowed by sea, father whose arms collect beached infant bodies, none of them his own, all of them his own. Amidst the hollow bones snapping mid-air, mirage of dry people on land scoffing, pronouncing Muslim with a hard “Z,� dirty word on tongues turned dead birds. God, if I could name you, it would be removal. They tell us to leave.

They never tell us. Wreck. Flock. Come.

Alia Hussain Vancrown

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Stripped Off

Your creased white shirt lies winged and flat, suspended in flight across my bedroom floor.

Weighted, you fled by juggernaut, tyres skidded stripes on roadkill pressed down patterns left heft marks the tread, dark and deep, inked waves permanent beneath the surface of my skin.

Your lithe limbs are lost to me – bewitched at midnight, your flourished sleeves refuse to warm my feet.

Freighted, afraid, I am pinned down, empty.

Feathers moulted, skinned alive. Unable to fly.

Ceinwen Haydon

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Middletown, USA

If there was a hell for dogs, Brutus was going to be at the right hand of Satan himself, probably humping his leg. It’s not that Brutus was purely evil, Tabatha didn’t believe in absolutes, but his behavior was fundamentally at odds with the behavior of everyone else around him. And after all, she thought, wiping her forehead with her dirt-stained hands, isn’t that all evil behavior really is? It’s not whether or not the behavior itself has some sort of inherent moral or immoral quality, but whether or not it violates the rules of the space in which it exists. Tabatha, her mother, and her grandmother, would not poop in the middle of the living room and then drag it from room to room, whining and stinking and ruining a beautiful antique rug passed down through 3 generations of Middletown women. Tabatha, her mother, and her grandmother would not find sexual gratification by blindly mounting any object smaller than an ataman. And Tabatha, her mother, and her grandmother would not gnaw the flesh off the fingers and toes of great-grandma Dorothy while she lay peacefully in her plush, floral armchair.

Dorothy had probably died the night the rest of her family left for the county fair, which meant Brutus had 4 uninhibited days with the body. When the family arrived home at twilight, toting a soft melody of clinking jam jars, Grandma Rosaline had stopped suddenly on the front porch.

“Do you hear that?”

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The silence surrounding the farmhouse pricked in their ears, and all three women stood in awkward suspension, their muscles creaking under the unnatural weight of stillness. Surely, Brutus would have heard them by now. His bark should be echoing in the valley, and Dorothy should be yelling, pointlessly, for him to “Shut up, you stupid beast!” Minutes passed and the silence settled in the cracks between them. No barking, no screaming, no wind.

It was Tabatha’s mother who had finally reached for the door handle and pushed it open. The smell rushed out like a wall of water and Tabatha immediately turned to throw up in the grass. She stood next to her mess and listened to her grandmother and her mother coughing inside and fumbling to find the light. She heard a click, then a sob, and then a voice that must have been her mother’s.

“Brutus! Get off! Get off of her! Get off of her you -” A crash. A yelp. A gasp. Her grandmother, “Oh, Millie.”

Her mother said Brutus hadn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, but, Tabatha thought, it didn’t matter that he was dumb, that he was just doing what came naturally to him, he was dead now, and he had done something that he wasn’t supposed to do.

He had acted on instinct, and he would pay for that. As she patted the ground with her shovel she thought again of her mother rushing out of the house with Brutus in her arms. She had dropped his limp body on the grass beside Tabatha and looked at it in silence for a few moments before turning her face towards her daughter with desperate eyes.

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“I didn’t mean to – I just wanted him to stop.”

Dylan Jones

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Uncle John

He had decided to leave a generation before the morning he didn't rise, still fully clothed, paint-splattered boots unlaced, stretched on the bed as though after decades of his veneration death had lifted his obese body and placed his head on the pillow.

His bed was always alone though I like to think, even now, decades later, that on one night he was joined by a fellow laborer, perhaps the thin Alejandro with his eyes sad the way the morning light was sad across the soft body as the hearse driver and his own thin helper strained and grumbled, and that they, my uncle and Alejandro, lay on the bed that was not yet a deathbed and he who gave me his name allowed his calloused hands to be held and his lips to be kissed and our name to be whispered a last time.

John Riley

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Elizabeth, My Dear

The virgin queen was seen as beautiful by some clever and cunning. She had sent navies to the ocean’s farthest reaches and conquered from the comfort of her throne.

The body of a weak and feeble woman but the heart of a king.

Yet the thing is, a man’s heart can betray you, even if it is your own.

In recent months, to her the habit had come of calling the pages one by one and parting her legs for them.

The noblemen were insane with outrage.

“How can she sell herself so cheap to men whose company she would not keep In any other circumstance?

This perverted dance of lust and thrust void of chivalry and charm does harm the very notion of what is right and proper”.

They scoffed and held aloft their noses in disdain and the righteous certainty of he who sits in judgement of others.

How could this rose, this precious pearl, sully her worth by giving herself to nought but a page.

A wage slave who could not believe his luck at an easy fuck and a royal breakfast.

“They must surely laugh when her back is turned.

Why would she spurn wooing and wealth, learning and class for the unwashed mass of men who must bed a different maiden every night?”

They lowered their opinion accordingly.

They esteemed her more when she had been the Virgin Queen.

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The Queen cared not. For the stomach of a king brought an appetite for men not splayed and broken, bathed in blood on a battlefield afar, but bone tired, safe and whole, wrapped in cotton whilst she watched them breathe.

Ha! As if she had ever given anything to a man.

It was they who lay spent of seed, unburdened of passion, freed of the need to dominate provide, command.

It was to her hand they gave all.

They awaited the dawn laid in her arms like children.

For there could be no shame in giving yourself to a Queen.

They were freed of the manhood that lay heavy on them like chains.

She could have explained, but the noblemen were tiresome.

Behind each trite word of compliment, each tired and hollow sentiment, was a different motive that they thought her too foolish to see: the pride of having taken a queen.

For it would seem that this bestowed a power greater than a king.

To have her bent to their will; the thrill of seeing their faces reflected in her crown whilst she bent down at the knee to pleasure them.

She owed no explanation.

As if she had ever been a virgin anyway.

Their plots of coup could not touch her when there were legions of men happy to take her command.

Who saw not the weak and feeble body of a woman but the shoulders of a monarch, upon which they could place their burden. “Let them scoff,� she said, smoothed the sheets on her bed and lay herself in waiting for the next page.

Stephanie Lonsdale

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Grownups

Mr. Grant said he’d fall in love with a woman of action if ever he met one, so I leapt from our rowboat into Lake George. It was like diving through a plate glass window, frigid October waters, but even at eleven I was a strong swimmer and made it to shore just fine. From the beach I could hear Aunt Cheryl’s screams, could see Uncle David’s grip on my baby sister Emmy, who fought to wriggle free and follow my example. In the middle of that cracked tableau, Mr. Grant pumped the oars. His blue eyes flashed mischief over their heads, watching me watching him.

Back at the lake house, my aunt and uncle sat me in front of the fireplace, stripped the blankets from all the beds and draped each one over me. I stayed silent in the face of their concern. I didn’t know them well. I understood even less what Emmy and I were doing there with them and not in school, why our parents had stayed behind in the city. But I understood grownups. When you’d made some trouble, to say anything only made more.

Mr. Grant sat down beside me and winked. He’d come from the shower, and his dark hair was as wet as my own. I wanted to reach up and twirl one curl around my finger, wring out the water until it dribbled down my arm.

“Are you a mermaid?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m a woman of action.”

Mr. Grant laughed, because he was only barely a grownup, and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. It warmed me from the inside out, better than the fireplace, better than the whole heap of blankets. I wanted to inspect the fingers curled around my tiny bicep, but I held back. I’d memorized them already.

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He smelled like oranges, spice.

“No doubt about it,” he said. “The girl for me.”

That night, after Emmy and I had been put to bed, I snuck down to the kitchen.

The window behind the sink overlooked the sunroom where, in the glow of the space heater, I could see the grownups huddled around the card table. They were playing Shanghai Rummy, talking. I couldn’t make out the conversation over the Steely Dan horns blaring from the stereo, but I could read from their expressions that it’d been a good hand for Mr. Grant.

I willed myself older, willed myself his. I imagined how nice it would be to sit beside him, congratulate him with a kiss.

His girlfriend turned up the next day. Staci, with an I on the end where a Y should’ve been. I recognized her as the new secretary at my dad’s firm, where Uncle David and Mr. Grant worked, too. She had pink fingernails, and in the evening she brought out the bottle of polish and a VHS copy of Pretty Woman and pretended she was doing Emmy and me a favor. Emmy, such a silly little dupe, so easily won, unscrewed the top of the polish and began slopping it over her fingers. I snarled. I hated pink, especially this pale pink, pink for babies, a shade my mother might’ve called “sweet.”

“We don’t like pink,” I said to Emmy, because Emmy never knew what she was supposed to hate unless I told her.

I knocked the bottle onto its side. The polish spilled out like a tongue across the surface of the coffee table then trickled over the edge and dribbled into Staci’s open purse.

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Emmy screamed, but I couldn’t understand what for. When the grownups came running in from the next room, she pointed her finger, slathered with tacky polish, at the mess I’d made. I thought they’d ask what I’d done it for. Instead, they carried us both to bed.

In her sleep that night, Emmy reached for me. Such a weird, weightless creature, my baby sister. I craved a stronger arm than hers draped across my chest. I hoped I’d dream of one, but I didn’t dream at all.

When Sunday came, we took the train home to the city. In spring, I found the bill from our father’s stay at the Meadowbrook Recovery Center. The next October, he shot himself through the chest. We moved to Texas, where our mother’s family lived. Real Jesus freaks. They didn’t believe in suicide, which meant they stuck around whether you wanted them to or not.

After fifteen years, another suicide: Uncle David’s. Emmy and I flew north. Our mother stayed south with the Jesus freaks.

I hadn’t thought of Mr. Grant at all. Not when I’d planned the trip. Not in a long time. I didn’t think of him again until I saw him at the wake. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten him, I immediately understood, but that he’d crawled into the folds of my brain and hidden himself so well he’d fused with the tissue. Every boy whose worth I’d ever bothered to assess, they’d all been measured against him. He’d been the one to choose or discard them, and on I went believing I called the shots.

He remembered us both. Could it really be, he marvelled, those funny little nieces?

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After the wake, we went for drinks at the bar across the street from the funeral home. I couldn’t decide whether or not he’d changed. If he had, would I have known what to look for? He talked too much about real estate law, but maybe he’d done that before, too, with the grownups. I thought about card games and Steely Dan. I could do whatever I wanted, now.

Sensing what was coming, Emmy excused herself early and returned to our Airbnb. Mr. Grant and I took a cab to his motel. His hands, the ones I’d once committed to memory, were inching under my skirt before we’d even arrived.

“Didn’t you jump in the lake for me?” he whispered, and I laughed at him. I couldn’t help it. It was the way he asked, the emphasis on you, like maybe he’d mistaken me for some other heartsick baby.

After, when he lay naked on the stiff motel duvet, I noticed that his balls had faded to the same pale pink as Staci’s nail polish. I imagined holding the bottle in my hand, upending it over his crotch. He’d have a bitch of a time washing it out.

“What ever happened to Staci?” I asked. He didn’t know who I was talking about.

When I got back to the Airbnb, Emmy was already in bed. I showered and crawled in beside her.

“I fucked Mr. Grant,” I said. I knew that she knew, but I needed to say it out loud so I couldn’t spin it into something golden and lovely later on.

“I hope you didn’t call him ‘Mr. Grant’ while you fucked him.”

Had I? “Why did we call him that to begin with? Everyone else just called him ‘Tyler.’”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess because he was a grownup.”

“We’re grownups now, though.”

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“Don’t say that. We don’t like grownups.”

Emmy tossed a leg and an arm over me and snuggled closer. I don’t think we’d slept in the same bed since the lake house. Under the weight of her, I tried to trace the thread that joined that night to this one. I wanted to find the spot where its heft had changed, and where it had first begun to fray, but I was asleep before I could even see its color.

Sutton Strother

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me and my brother home alone in the 70’s Karen Little

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Iglesia de San Francisco, Saturday Afternoon

Two small girls stand in the sun.

One step will take them into the church as they follow the bride.

The older girl smooths her dress and straightens her flower crown, but the younger watches the bride, moves when she moves, a mirror. All three, their dresses white, So bright their heads and arms emerge from a penumbra of lightness, multiplying the sunshine among all of us tourists and locals weekending in the square, the girls orbiting the woman who is to become One with someone. A remote signal aligns the trio into a triangle to walk the aisle.

The brightest girls I’ve ever seen are swallowed by the cavern of cool dark.

Even their dresses darken and disappear from sight.

Stacey Margaret Jones

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Iridaceae

We hacked it back.

In front of the house.

And then a fierce strim before raking.

The soil, still overwrought from one insatiable winter, shrunk, it seemed, further at the denudation.

Nevertheless the debris needed a place to accrue.

When it arrived it snowballed, as if haughty, by way of those gloss-sploshed calloused hands.

The cleared arena was trounced by carpet, panels of wardrobe, de-bracketed chipboard and dark pre-war bedframes weakened by worlds of sustaining.

Sinks and two-ringed cookers completed the slumped tableau.

And it was then that I thought of the irises.

Annually reliable, their cataclysm of colour never faulted.

But where now, the bulbous roots?

Expunged? Strimmer-nicked then crushed?

Or still pleasantly mum where nestled?

A few days later and a blink. Gone.

Nothing but bruised, black ground and broken stem ends littered with dust and nicked white flecks.

Our bay tree still islanded in the middle but the irises? There. There they were.

Like oversized, overfed larvae, the rhizomes stamped into mud.

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They were still intact.

I could ready myself for May. For delicacy.

Jeremy Punter

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The Unfinished Book of Wren

On my way to infinity, I find a wren waiting with its nervous flutter. It’s not the one I need, but need can be the absence of a sufficient desire to accomplish. Wrens could be the anxious intention to fill the vacuum. If Wrens, for example, rush headlong to curious possibilities, perhaps it’s because one kind of exciting poverty does not have enough patience.

Sparrows arrive after the work is done. No assistance is offered. None is expected. Wrens are a different kind of thought that can be found lurking near adjectives, but not in the phrases that require conclusions. Wrens are not a true reason to write, but they provoke the impulse to enter an unfinished book, where commenting is done only by characters, many of them nervous. The author, of course, may make himself a character, but the character can be only a part of the author, who is already becoming another character. How do they know when to stop? All they can do is think of something else, like smokeless chimneys.

Smokeless chimneys appeal to homeless wrens. Such cave-like evidence of availability can tempt wrens to enter what once was a vertical human canyon, where the stories of birds are sometimes born, the ones that haven’t actually happened. You might think of one as a household inspection or a dust-brown engagement?

Little governors of change move one feather at a time, so quickly followed they cannot be separated. Every law of flight or even hopping is a sudden bold revelation in another unexpected direction. I ate a little bolt of gray lightning, but I have failed to

digest it, says the chimney, offering its throat, unaware the trap is useless. Do you have any more discoveries for this occasion?

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A sleeping wren is a bounty of tiny unshuttered lanterns nurturing the star-lit pinholes in the universe, quick breath puffing here to there like complements. On my way to a different moment, demanding attention in the same place, I find the same wren. Or one that could be. It’s still many little instances, and the only gesture I need. I seem to be entering someone else’s discovery. You’ll forgive me if I’m not you, if I’m nesting for just a moment, the only moment. I lied about infinity, but that’s the only way to get there from here.

Rich Ives

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Two Landscapes

I Harvest, as it once swept through the mead halls of northern Europe, hĂŚrfest, harbitas, hervist, herfst, haust, is a word we seldom hear. In capitals and municipal towns only the Old Norse, harfr, meaning to harrow. Bodies farmed for organs.

II Autumn, in the old High German herbist, a time of gathering.

October fields. Birchwood’s scattered corpses.

George Messo

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Dust as an Anxious Landscape I'm swarming as a cloud of pink dust, of doubled plosives and potpourri, feeling sentimental as I watch my body dissolve into a wash of scattered pregnancies – nasal cavities, nuclear reactors, nectarines.

Dust fabricates its residence; and clings to the throat, like an ellipsis scorned by the sigh and confession.

In the light, in a dull room, the dust then, a specter, stills before the dots are waved from the air, resettling instead, in conversations about museums: their exhibits, the materials used in construction, the nervous tics, my ears – Never my arteries, though. No, those irrigate the valley of my ribcage, where small and shadowed men struggle with crosses, as children seed the swamps with my hands and feet; and my mouth, the wildflowers.

And perched there, atop the great slope of my scalp, the puritan women who pluck my hair to spin into yarn.

Hunter Lewinski

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Scallop (Cover Image) Melinda Giordano

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Baguettes

1.

A man named Carl Leonard went to the grocery store where he bought a loaf of French bread which he took home, planning to eat some of it with dinner and maybe make a sandwich with the rest, for lunch the next day. When he got home however, he realized that he wasn’t very hungry, but was very tired, so he went to sleep on the sofa and when he woke up the next day the bread had dried out and he couldn’t make a sandwich and had to throw the whole thing away.

2.

A man named Enrico Cavasello went to the very same grocery store the very next day and ended up having the almost the very same experience with the French bread. Only somewhat different.

3.

A woman named Laura Cleo went to the grocery store and put some French Bread in her cart, but then thought about the very few other things that she needed to buy and realized that she didn’t need a whole cart and started to feel as though people would look at her – in a judging sort of way - if she had an entire cart with only a couple things in it, so she put the French bread back and put the cart back and picked up one of those plastic baskets and she filled it up with the very few things that she needed to get for her pasta dinner, but she forgot to go back to get French bread – because in her mind she had already gotten it – and she didn’t realize her mistake until she had

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gotten home and made her pasta and sat down at the table to eat. Laura did not usually swear, but she looked down into her bowl of pasta and said, “Fuck.”

4.

Laura’s father, who was named Carl Cleo, went to the grocery store because he needed to pick up some cheese for the wine and cheese party that was about to begin at his home. He had asked his wife – who was Laura’s stepmother and not her real mother – to go and pick up a variety of cheeses that afternoon, but she had failed to do so and so now he was in a rush. As he tossed several bricks of cheese - of varying consistencies and flavors – into his basket - he always used baskets as opposed to carts, because they were more efficient – he realized that his wife had probably not purchased any bread either. Probably also, she had neglected to get wine. He rushed around the store and loaded his basket down with bottles of wine, but he forgot to go to the bakery for bread. So when he arrived back home and realized that he had no bread for his wine and cheese party, he was enraged, but his wife – Laura’s stepmother, who had been Laura’s best friend in high school – put her hand on his shoulder and then pressed a thick baguette of bread into his hand. “This I remembered,” she said.

5.

Since he had not been able to use any of the bread that he bought, Carl Leonard went back to the grocery store the next day, after work. There was woman already at the bread area. She was wearing a little business-causal skirt that he liked and she was squeezing the French bread. She was squeezing all of it. Every long loaf. Carl admired her slender fingers as she did this; as she squeezed them all. Then – suddenly

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remembering that no one would ever love him - Carl said, “Could you not touch all of them?” Then he reached past her and grabbed one of the few remaining un-groped loaves. He went home, but was too upset to make dinner. He shoved the bread into his refrigerator; thinking that that might keep it fresh. He went to bed, frustrated. The refrigerator did not keep the bread fresh and so it was both cold and dry the next morning. He threw it out again.

6.

Laura had spent the day thinking about how she had made such a mistake at the grocery store the day before. She realized that she had let herself become overcome by her hurried emotions and her desire to be efficient. She decided – while eating her microwaved, left-over pasta in the breakroom at work – that she would take her time that afternoon. So when she went to the grocery store, she spent a nice, long, contemplative time standing in front of the bread. She discovered that she liked the way that it felt as she felt it. She liked that it was spongy and rigid. She liked the way that she had to squeeze down hard at first, but that then she could feel it soften under the pressure of her fingers. As Laura was there, touching the bread, a man reached roughly around her and said, “Could you not touch all of them?” The man grabbed a baguette and rushed off. Laura, who did not usually swear, turned and looked after the man as he absconded off toward the registers and she screamed, “FUCK!” after him.

7.

The man named Enrico Cavasello was in the grocery store because there were few things that he loved more than a nice big plate of bread and cheese and salami. Other

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things that he loved very much include dry red wine, wearing button down shirts unbuttoned down to reveal the treasure of his lustrously silken black chest hair, his own moustache, and women is business-casual dress wear. He was just placing a wedge of creamy brie into his basket when he heard a woman call to him from across the store, over near the bread, where he was planning on going anyway. “FUCK!” she called to him. When he arrived there – his cart stocked full of cheese and wine – she was staring off, incensed, toward the registers. “Miss,” he said to her, “I have no idea what has happened to you, but sometimes I find it soothing to squeeze the bread until I calm down. Do this with me.” The woman looked at him. She was ensorcelled by him, and his chest hair, which looked like a smooth and shimmering puppy. Together they chose a loaf of French bread and they went back to his apartment, but they opened the wine first and never got to the French bread. The next day he had to throw it out because it had gone stale.

8.

On the third day, the man named Carl Leonard went to the grocery store after work. He bought French bread without incident. He was so hungry that he ate it, alone, in his car in the parking lot.

James Bezerra

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Lost in transliteration I could take your words and express their anger, sarcasm and loneliness in the secret language of penguins who have six thousand, three hundred and twenty-two words for fish, but have never needed any words for cold feet or the smell of fish.

And if that happened, you could reply using pigeon's words for sky inserted in the lingo of octopod entanglement where anything with a knot in it is rude, but there is only one word for any object hard enough that a beak can't break.

And then we would be courting; assigning and assorting our endearments (as thoroughly disguised as they may be) in ever stranger languages and customs: the words in which a tree describes diagonals of light and shade, in terms of friends who make them; or the speech in which woodworm explain the enclosed tracks, their intersections, loops, forwards, backs indistinguishably from their taste; or the complaints of mayflies about eternity on any summer's afternoon.

But all this would be hypothetical you speak only your own language and in any case you are not listening.

Ian Badcoe

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Animating Abstract Nouns

In my mind I am sculpting their faces – bending their limbs into place – layering muscles, skin and clothes over armatures. I cast them up. Time becomes a man, slender, with tapping fingers and a nonchalant curve to his back, he appears to always be leaning. Sanity I make a woman. Her hair winds in tight curls around her face, a leather purse slung over her shoulder. When I set them in motion they slip away together – eloping to some secret tryst and Sanity offers Time a cigarette.

Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe

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Intercostal

When the First Man’s rib was harvested to make him a Suitable Helper, it made the papers. Headlines proclaimed Man’s by-product a success: “Man Made Woman,” they declared, the wink-eyed wordplays knowing no end. Countless think pieces were devoted to pondering her usefulness and the potential for working out the kinks (a penchant for tangents and a sweet tooth, for two), in future models, but most marvelled at the new choice on the market. Innovative. Tempting.

The media splash was inevitable, but it would die down, we’d been told. We—the starkeepers, that is, the divine minions—were in charge of God’s dirty work: the smiting and smoting, the famines, plagues. Omnipotence, outsourced and micromanaged. That was us.

Surgery was a new one for us, and it wasn’t pretty; no anaesthesia (it’s character-building, say the powers that be-and-ever-shall-be, foreverandeveramen), just a few slideshow’s worth of training and a single hands-on workshop before the real deal, but the patients forget all about it once they’re earthside. So we do as we’re told; a pay check’s a pay check.

It didn’t go cleanly, that’s for sure, the meat clinging to the bone like it wanted to stick to the prototype rather than be downgraded to the status of trendy derivative, one that would stay in fashion only as long as it stayed shiny and useful. Once it was plumbed of its novelty, certainly it would reach the same fate as streetcars and selfies and be blamed for all societal ills, yes? But we handed over the rib, washed our hands, and left. We weren’t about to ask questions. Questions, the First Helper learned, got you nothing but more thankless labor.

35

But our job wasn’t over. Before the media cycle could make its investigative turn, we were quietly asked to remove the Woman’s rib as well (the name, Woman, a bit on-the-nose, I thought, a bit reductive; but you don’t question your bread and butter).

We’ve performed millions of these extractions since then, giving the bones of Those-Called-Men over to the Creative department so they can be fashioned into supplementary beings. The Helpers’ bones, we harvest and pick clean just the same, but they get messengered off elsewhere—down to the bowels of the lab. We only know because we can hear their polished shoes clapping down the hallway to the left after we hand over the bones with slick gloved hands.

That hallway ends in the service elevator, and the service elevator ends in the God-knows-where (and wouldn’t tell us) of this labyrinthine nightmare. I knew, though; a few too many stoned nights in this place and I knew the only place kept locked was the basement storage room on the north side of the complex.

We don’t know what they’re used for—the bones, that is. Most of us, I would venture, don’t want to. We’re just the grunt work, after all. But I’ve always wondered.

Morbid curiosity has always plagued me, keeping me in the trenches instead of the cushy upper management job I could have landed if I’d just kept my head down. That’s why, showing up to an uneventful night shift a little early, I finally made my way to the basement.

It was easy enough to slip down there. I had a universal key—we all did—and we operated under the honor system. Everything around here was under the honor system.

36

The key clicked to the left and I was breathswept for a moment, disoriented in the midst of the kind of beauty that only tells sad stories, writes obituaries, bleeds poetry.

Jars. Millions of them, glass, backlit in the dark room, creating a starsea of canned glittering galaxies. Fluorescent light filled each one like a green swirling universe. Some kind of liquid. And the centerpiece of each jar: A bone, born Woman, made artefact. White. Tissueless. Hung quietly in a tiny stratosphere.

Here were the rib-bones of teachers and strippers and factory workers and actors; of women who thought blow jobs were underrated and absinthe, overrated; the bones of some who thought monogamy was a social construct, and others, a moral imperative. Women who loved women and men and children and Jesus and nothing but their own hips; those who weren’t women at all, but men, and still, here, their bones.

Of mothers. So many mothers, their bones now strewn and collected for the looking, attached to nothing but their own capacity for display.

They had been boiled, to be sure, scoured of unsightly gristle and fat, doused in hydrogen peroxide. Bleached, I guessed, though I couldn’t be sure; I was no curator, and certainly not a taxidermist. Bereft of marrow, bones made empty, rinsed clean of the original sin of being. Lobotomized bones, freed of the restraint of thought and the tyranny of unmet potential.

Each one was suspended in its own miniature constellation-in-a-jar, a combination of shimmershine, preservative, and empty spaces where worries might have gone. Instead: A museum of bones, displayed triumphantly for no one.

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They’re beautiful, I thought before I turned to go.

But what, I wondered, could they have made?

Laura Dorwart

38

AA Meetings

It felt like friendship, a lunchtime support group in the outdated bathrooms at the back of the building.

We unleashed our frustrations one by one and watched them bounce about the tiled walls, tumbling down the toilets – becoming lodged in the sinks. We took it in turns to compare our hunger pains and dizzy spells; using a rating system of zero to ten, scoring our desire to be beautiful – always an eleven – and pitched it against our desire to eat.

When we called our parents and we each told the same lie: “I’ll have dinner at Ana’s house tonight.”

This is where it started.

Charley Barnes

39

The Analyst’s Concern for a Client Leaving Therapy

Have you noticed any recent change in the caliber of your existential exuberance? In our last meeting, you spoke with waxing eloquence regarding your childlike wonder at the lightning-bugs stranding the honeysuckle at your backyard fence.

Beyond the fence, vast acres of ripe blue-grass in early dusk, waving their bronzy purple hello to your retinas which you believed had undergone the Purkinje shift in color sensitivity specifically for you to see that inorganic shade as a transcendental vector to what is beyond the grit and grind of quiet desperation.

An extraction of your preverbal spirit into the world of acausal hyperspace as you called it.

That place that is/was before the universe, the big bang, war and pestilence, original sin, the inhuman human condition and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I am wondering: What it was like for you out there?

What did you think of yourself?

How did other Transcendent residents regard your unanticipated arrival?

Was your chronic anxiety/depression relieved or did it also, with time, take on ecstatic proportions?

We see this from time to time.

Bobby Steve Baker

40

The Neighbor Show

The police visit my neighbor. Not often. But not just occasionally. One’s there now. The mother of two—three?—speaks civilly with an officer. Everything is cool, everything is kosher. Whatever it’s about must have happened a while ago.

A grey cat slinks by their chicken coop. Sometimes I see it on their roof. Another neighbor pretends not to pay attention to the cop with the clipboard, or to the very calm conversation. The mom’s young boy twists in the chair hanging from the tree a few feet away. He stares at his feet with the abstraction of a kid who doesn’t know he’s dealing with feelings.

I’m just sitting on the steps of my porch across the street. Nice spring day. Gusts of wind whip leaves into that sound like the rush of a mother’s heartbeat in the womb, and I’m briefly a different creature, deprogrammed from civilization by a primal sound syncing my brainwaves to a different pitch. The picture becomes one big thing, the people fuzzy little patches. But then I’m back, and the TV drama vignette is on the air again.

She seems so peaceful now. Overweight in a very momly way. Early middle age.

Tattoos and sandals and long red hair. Solicitously deferent to the officer, who is solicitously deferent in return. But I’ve heard her yell at night, like she very much needs her boyfriend but he doesn’t understand that about her. I sympathize with her. I’ve watched her load her kids into the car and I like how she does it.

The cop is back in her huge SUV now. I don’t remember when cop cars got so big. She’s bent over a clipboard in the intimidating cockpit. It takes me a slight

41

conscious effort to stay truly cool with a cop nearby, even one who’s focused on business that has nothing to do with me. The mom is back inside.

I’m starting to notice my butt on the concrete, think about whether I’m actually presentable for sitting outside. My neighbor’s life isn’t on display anymore, doesn’t transport me like a sitcom away from my own woes. For a few short minutes, she gave me a simple, shallow life away from my own, like the cat does when I watch it slink in and out of the alley or peer down from the roof at people coming home.

The wind swells and takes me someplace else again for a moment. March air and sun make me cold and hot at the same time.

Back inside, I watch the sitcom about myself—I’m the person watching the neighbor watching himself, the person watching the cat watching the person. There’s no wind here, nothing to carry me away, and I watch the sitcom for a good hour before I turn it off, and have a few weird moments before it comes back on again.

David Evan Krebs

42

Dockside ~ Bristol Tina Huckle

43

The Zen of Homemade Socks

Linger along wool-stacked shelves heaped with sweet shop shades, tropical colours, deep tweeds.

Pick a skein to hand wind, spellbind; arms relaxed in rolling motion, leaving lots of elbow room for rumination. * Cast on.

As yarn runs through fingers feel the flow, test the tension. Knit a rib to grip the shin. Turn the heel, slope a shapely instep.

Relish the run along the foot’s strait. Tackle the tricky toe.

Then repeat from here * to there ** to make a pair.

After the effort, let go; shoes off, feet up.

Appreciate, celebrate snug fit, perfect form.

Forget life’s constant chatter, lose yourself in contemplation; maybe get a spinning wheel, keep a sheep.

Ann Gibson

44

derby day

you sneer at football as religion; it's not. there is no coherent theology, nor can we expect one when we look in Mourinho's deadfish eyes; though Zlatan might just count as some kind of bargain with the devil. the worst transgression is not sin, but a certain tactical naivety. in Manchester, snow has turned to rain; the game goes on. here are thousands screaming for spirit of place. yes, young men are getting paid more millions than we could dream, but this is the bill for home, at least the one we believe we must foot these days. the ball bends the net; we burst with moments of ecstasy, bust with despair. it seems we care.

Mark Rossiter

45

The Angel of Death Lives Out in Our Shed Now

One of Dad’s favorite stories is the time Mama damn near choked from laughing because I asked if we could name our souped-up lawnmower the Angel of Death.

He’d thought it was pretty funny, but said I oughta run that by her first. He wasn’t sure she’d approve.

Mama wasn’t like that though, always tried to see the humor in things. Once she quit hacking and dried the tears leaking from her eyes, she said to go ahead. “But if you hurt yourself,” she added, “I’ll strangle you.”

With her blessing, we cut a stencil and spray-painted those letters on in pure, pure white.

*

We’d gotten the idea for the go-kart some weeks before, running errands. I spotted the hull of a Toro Snapper out rusting on a sidewalk, waiting for the dump.

“Think we could turn that into a racing machine?” I asked, and Dad pulled over.

The Ashland County Amateur Derby was a big deal in those days (until the year some kid lost a hand and they had to shut down, anyway). It was mostly rich kids, since regular go-karts were expensive. But there weren’t many rules to it, so technically, if you rigged something up with four wheels and a motor, you could race. Thus: the mower.

Twenty minutes later Uncle Charlie was there, helping us heave it into the bed of the truck, then wheel it out to the wooden shed below Mama’s window.

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Though she couldn’t come see, from her bed she could hear us labor on it every night.

The mower’s the rotten innards soon piled up on the floor; we cleaned what we could, replaced what we couldn’t. Dad machined a cold air intake, and I tweaked the throttle. Grease and dirt clung in permanent rings beneath our fingernails, proof of our faith that she would run again.

Finally, the engine was whole. We exchanged glances. Dad let me pull the starter.

The mower roared like a jet.

“What the hell’s going on out there?” Mama yelled.

“Quiet, you old fish!” Dad yelled back. We told her we’d win her first prize; we told her we’d make her proud.

Dad poured himself into that machine like it was all he could think about, although I’m sure that wasn’t true. I was too young to know better, but those were lonely days for him. People can smell grief, and it kept most of them away.

He must’ve needed the distraction—he was always talking about how to strip the weight down or boost the output. His eyes would light up and he’d talk real fast. It was good to see him that way, like his old self. “A man’s only as good as his tools,” he once told me; it really hollowed him out when life handed him something he couldn’t repair.

Once we’d resurrected the engine, Uncle Charlie lent his blowtorch, and we purged the beast of its blade guard and other dead weight. I asked about a long lever by the wheel; Dad said to leave it.

We swapped out the tires, bolted on a lighter seat, and emptied a couple cans of Rust-Oleum until the thing gleamed black as midnight. A trip to Home Depot yielded

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pockets full of labels peeled off of boxes and tools. We plastered them across the kart, so it’d look like we were sponsored.

“Now all she needs is a name,” Dad said.

*

Race day. We rolled out of the shed, into the backyard where Mama could see.

She gave a thumb’s up from her window. I raised my hand to forehead in salute.

The sky was sunny and perfect, the track a winding asphalt belt between hay bales. The other kids stared as we wheeled our creation off the pickup and into the staging area. I realized what we must have looked like, our resurrected mower-racer alongside their shiny store-bought karts with seatbelts and brakes. I’d hear the laughs, but when I looked, they’d be turned, eyes averted. I clenched my fist, wondered why we’d been singled out as a spectacle. But then again, mine was the only kart with a steel blade.

Before I strapped on my goggles and started the engine, Dad pointed to the lever we’d left alone. He was not a man who believed in luck anymore, he said. “You get in trouble out there, you yank on this.”

I nodded, and climbed in.

*

When the gun went off, I ripped out the gate and into first. I led down the straightaway, but the beast hugged the hay bale turns about as poorly as you’d expect

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for a souped-up lawnmower on worn-out tires. One kid passed me on the outside, then another. I stomped the gas, but it was already floored. Other racers bunched up around me. Then I remembered about the lever.

As I pulled, I felt the blade buzz angrily beneath me. It kicked up a cyclone of dust around the kart, and some kid trying to pass on my right screamed and dropped back. I had a comfortable berth after that.

*

I nosed across the finish line a full minute behind first, but still made the podium. A man from the newspaper took our picture, and I held the trophy high overhead. Dad stood apart from the rest of the crowd, clapping and crying.

After the ceremony, he asked if I wanted to drive the kart back, and I said yes, so he filled my tank and followed behind in the pickup as I eased up onto the road. I drove one-handed, the other on the trophy. The blade howled against the empty air, Dad jammed down the truck’s horn, and both of us whooped and hollered until people had to come outside and acknowledge us, to watch our two-man parade, to see the Angel, fearsome and beautiful as it motored down the street toward our home, toward Mama.

Michael Vangel

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kids don’t know about the second law of thermodynamics

last week i brought my kid a set of building blocks which you can fit one to another to create an array of exotic shapes. you can make castles, sometimes a truck, sometimes trees and sometimes the rough shadows of optimus prime. the infinite plasticity of its innocent topological space, which you can dismantle, and make it again, or try different permutations at your will. unlike life, in this game, there are endless transformations, and uninterruptible alchemy of shapes; but no death.

The other day he was with me in the balcony, he picked a fallen marigold, and moving closer, he tried to attach it to the plant with his tiny hands, and with the eyes that can fit all the galaxies in the universe, he looked at me and says baba, it is not fitting in. out of words, i could not explain it to him not everything is his building block, and the world we live in is a big entropy-train filled inexorably with deaths, sufferings, pains decays and countless wilting flowers; and how i wish i could say; there is nothing wrong with dead-ends and the irreversibilities. be your own buddha. find the deathless center, within the perimeter of all your mortal fears.

Sudeep Adhikari

50

Theft

I expected dust, powder for lifting prints but the police didn’t bother.

The ring, the coins, the camera, the laptop gone.

Swiped clean, out the front door. Nothing to trace.

The laptop, a theft of essays incomplete, files unopened, of emptiness marking loaded hours reserved for nursing, the relief of so little lost, of unprofessional choices vindicated.

But the class of ’54 ring, it was not mine to lose, handed from mother to son to me, placed safely away when my fingers swelled with life, with the coursing blood for growing digits and heart and lungs, and meant to be removed from velvet case and worn again.

I miss the stately gold and green glass twirl of that ring on my finger still.

Ann E. Wallace

51

Empty Evening Peter Gutierrez

52

Synesthesia

Reds are late fees, dues, the electric bill, my credit score. A latent eviction notice and zeros on missed assignments. These various hues bleed into maroon and maroon is the sound of my own voice I when I say “I’ll never love you and I’m really sorry I promise I tried my hardest.”

Sobbing is transparent.

There are lime greens embedded in my head too. They’re brought to life by a flute bubbling high notes, high heels on a hard floor, deposits reading +$387. Texts saying “Congratulations!” or “I had a really great time!” or “I hope you’re doing okay, miss you!”

Laughter is translucent.

My favorites are the blues. Lapis is the color of bathroom stall philosophies, drunken songs, and the expression of fears. Arctic blues are expiration dates noticed on the date of expiration- a blissful moment where you can satisfy yourself by binge drinking a half gallon of chocolate milk under the guise of not wanting to be wasteful. Indigo is a sigh of relief or misfortune. Regardless of the cause, it’s beautiful, rising from the mouth like a fine mist.

Silence is opaque.

Cavin Bryce

53

Lithograph

Fingers tap the steering wheel while you croon with Ronnie Milsap.

Your adroit thumbs apply sunscreen to the very edge of my squinting eyes.

Sun-darkened hands buckle my cumbrous orange vest; hook swiveling leeches that fasten suckers to my palms; show me an improved clinch knot; net my longest Ontario musky.

Slick with its iron-rich blood, your hands gut my first November whitetail.

And on Sundays you point at the TV, teaching me to malign our hapless Vikings.

But with callous hands, you also chisel from me that which will not flake or spin to the floor unforced.

Paddle me naked over your knees, a garden of dahlias blossoming with each strike; bend back your Ace pocket comb, and apply its unbreakable guarantee to bath-tender skin still dripping Johnson’s no-tear shampoo.

I learn to stand mute.

Like bruised alabaster, I absorb the brunt of their centripetal love; pose unflinching as you force me

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to lift the toilet seat 100 times, a stabbing finger emphasizing disgust.

You swing your maul to claw within, and fine grit roughens my tongue blood warm as malleable womb: my imperfections meticulously rasped from my need to please you— to belong.

Reduced to dust, I thus learn this lesson from your hands: how to submit, surrender unworthy into negative space.

Gina Marie Bernard

55

The Wound

I was less your lover than your disciple following my heart’s unruly compass while you led the way to paradise.

If I’d believed, we might have been alright but some demon you’d not exorcised whispered in my ear how the world turned when you went by, that you were a false prophet and I was a fool.

I sat in the dark listening to the voice as I waited for you to return from a night out with your friends, your sweater draped over a chair remembering something of the shape that appeared in the doorway to hear what the voice had to say.

I remember how your shoulders trembled as I counted your tears.

I just couldn’t believe you’d come back until I’d touched the wound under your ribs.

Andy Armitage

56

astro addict Colin Hill

57

Fire

She reaches over to the wall and flicks off the light switch. Climbing down from the chair, she takes a match in her hand and rubs it against the box. Once, twice, and on the third strike, it rears its head, flaring up as it bites into the dry summer air. The flame sizzles softly as it moves down the wood, whispers of smoke climbing out through the window. She can’t help but feel as if she has kindled life in the palm of her hand.

She knows that her mother keeps them out of her reach for a reason, but there’s something irresistible about the flame, about the soft orange glow that it throws across the marble countertop and the way it dances to-and-fro, leaving ripples of air in its wake. The smoke makes her cough, but she doesn’t mind; there isn’t much, and the smell reminds her of a campfire.

Her match is nearing its end. She throws it down into the sink, and it sputters out.

That’s another thing she loves about them--how they can disappear in the blink of an eye. One moment, more alive than life itself, and the next, gone. Just like that.

She lights another match. It casts a ghostly reflection in the window glass, a pale golden blur that mimics the dance of the flame, flickering as she moves it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

Only a stub remains, now. But it’s so warm...she doesn’t want to let go, not just yet…

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A shard of flame leaps up to meet her skin, and she gasps and drops the match.

There is a burn the size of a grain of rice on the tip of her index finger. Wincing, she reaches for the tap.

There is no warning--at least, none that she sees. All she knows is that one moment the match is sputtering out on the counter and the next, the curtain is alight.

She knows she should be worried, knows she should try to put it out...but she’s never seen this much fire before. Never seen anything this beautiful.

And she had thought that the flame was alive. She stares at the fire, eyes wide, golden glow dancing in her pupils. It seems to move in every direction at once, licking at the curtain and sputtering at the wall and strangling her with its smoke…it’s not just alive, she can’t help but think. It’s life itself.

There’s more smoke, now, but it no longer smells like a campfire. It clings to her dress and snakes into her throat, clawing at the insides of her lungs. But she can’t move away from it--it’s as if the heat has melted her feet into the tiles.

She knows that the fire must be angry, to have been held prisoner for so long.

She can barely imagine it as what it once--a meager flame, twitching on the end of a wooden stick. What would it be, to die like a fire does? To burn out after only a few moments of breathing?

She is almost glad that the fire has escaped its cage. It begins to make its way up the wall, and when it hits the light switch, golden sparks fly into the air. One of them catches on the bottom of her sundress.

It blooms into a tongue of flame, spreading across the bottom seam, stabbing at the flesh of her thighs. Her hands fly to her waist, tear and beat at the fabric, but the fire jumps up and singes them, and she jerks them away.

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It occurs to her that she should try to put it out, but her hands will not move, and she still cannot bear to destroy something so beautiful.

Prisha Mehta

60

Steam-Crossed Country

1.

It begins with curiosity, mutates into desire, then necessity, as if it was stamped in a hardbound hymnal in the shadow of his skull.

2.

The Deserter roams wide and indiscriminate, drifts in an out of kaleidoscope eyes, starved, ribs growing like wings, skin molting like feathers.

3.

This is where his mind should say no, but he’s heard of the sweet gut of the blueberry stuffed black bear, that purple meat guiding him blind, his sight gone on account of vision, clouded as the milky ether above.

4.

He loses the bear when his stream of consciousness turns bone-dry, falling over heaps of broken skulls and dentures, groves and groves of post oak, wet earth and gypsum, into a virgin dominion whose inhabitant’s lifelines hang for dear life on the edge of such line.

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5.

A babe’s silence, as life unearths itself.

White-frozen eyes staring back at the outlander, sketching out the shade of his intent.

You can hear the slow draw of their limbs, the subtle stir of water, their bodies beginning to flex and ready for a hunt.

These brown figures radiate something warm and nameless through The Deserter’s sopping wool uniform, his mouth wide and open and consuming and choking on the ghosts of this land, releasing them upon his exhalation and flight… …a wild animal roaming forbidden land, fleeing from the shocks of electrical currents.

6.

The Old Omaha Doctor, she sweeps hair particles and blue brain matter, pours bucket after bucket of water on blood stained pine, peering at pieces of floating miscalculations resting on shelves in jars of formaldehyde.

7.

The land before the Old Omaha Doctor’s shack is flushed an evening red, twilight’s trill lulling donkey brays, scuttles from the small and unseen, an overcast of dreams of westward-bound men, young bull thistle sways in drafts of rain-spray, sifting itself of the death particles and blood water feeding its roots.

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8.

The Deserter slices through a crosshatching of dense thicket on The Doctor’s land, hopping over newly laid train tracks, balancing a piece of arrow suckling his retina, with the cushion of his hand, dark, gazing faces falling dim along the scrub, their own faces obscuring amongst themselves dropping one generation after next into the loam, they are the dead stars pointing a hard light on us.

9.

One warm beer and her hands are sober and planked.

The Doctor works beyond the screaming, humming Home! Sweet Home! to subtract the pain from the air, she makes her sorrow so small, you could take it from her in a handshake, like an infection passed through soft tissue, you know her forever.

10.

The Doctor holds the Deserter’s eyeball in the western light towards God, unmoored from humanity, bloody and free, his good eye studies her sallow-face staring off into green-horn mesas, until the second train he ever saw blazes through and nearly buckles the shack, The Doctor running her hands along the foundation, delicately shifting and shading her liquid children from the fever.

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11.

All she knew about humanity could fit in these jars, she wondered if her skin has gotten too thick, wondered about shattering it all and sinking into the Deserter’s blackened socket and letting the skin grow again over the soil, dreaming images of the future, what it will bring, and how it will speak to the errors of her past, our past, our history stretching like wound up rubber, waiting to be released upon us.

Zack Stein

64

Broken moon

In the cold war, Star Wars eighties, I am driving my dad’s car, with half an eye on the road, half my mind on the night ahead, and I see you, not a half moon, not an inscrutable crescent smile, but a broken moon, jagged, snaggletoothed, destroyed.

I don’t even dare to give a second glance, switch on the radio for news, but set my face to stare ahead.

Still, even an unseen moon drags megatons of water from their rest, even the fragment of a broken moon tugs at the back of my head. It takes all the blindness, all the cussed, stubborn human determination to ignore the damage, to make sure I don’t look round.

I park a street or two off from the club, wait for the clouds to part, wait for your cold indifferent face to look down on me, whole.

I dance like a madman on the last night of the world.

Mike Farren

65

Nude 2 Alexander Chubar

66

Night Music

The vinegar is warm, pungent in this heat. I empty cask after cask into the tub, pouring thousands of pesos worth of spoiled rice wine into the galvanized steel trough, so that the liquid displaced by the weight of my body rises to my chin, just past the hair- like seam which binds my skull to my throat. This feels unspeakably delicious, like some sweet sin.

Slowly, I let my head sink into the soup, feeling the vinegar seep across my scalp, tickling the roots of my thick black and gray hair. It feels like a lover’s fingers. I sigh. It's been a while since I used up the last man I kept around the house. I could stand to get another one. Although my time is short, I spare a moment to caress the soft bud-like skin of my nipples, admiring the way they stand, high and proud, on my small, firm breasts. Mortal women do not age like this. Most of them are dead by the time they grow into the age that I look; too young, their wombs burst in childbirth or their organs withered from some unaccountable disease.

I still have the body of a girl. I often catch men staring, their dark eyes sliding across my nut-flesh skin like an oiled feather. Thinking of this, of the eyes of those men (and the clouded hatred embossed on the faces of their wives) I let my left hand sink to the cleft between my legs to brush the coiled rosebud hidden there until I shudder and add a bloom of eggy white to the sauce I’m simmering in.

Spent, I lie still for a moment, body bobbing gently as the sun sinks, bloody, between the warped fingers of the trees which grow outside my window.

I watch for the moon. By the time that it rises, I am not breathing. But then, I never breathe at night. In any case, when the first cold rays of the moon touch my skin

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I feel the old, familiar, click, that ancient sundering as the seam around my neck gives way again and my body is temporarily freed from the service of my mind. There is a small splash as it sinks deeper into the tub.

The vinegar is clear. If I roll my eyes downward, I will be able to see the redmuscled stump, flesh wrapped tight around tubes for air, food and the white knobbled top of a vertebrae.

For a moment, I’m just a head floating in something that looks a lot like water, bobbing a little in the waves my sunken body made, but then my wings unfurl (as they always do) from the pockets in my lower jaw. Leathery-black, utterly hairless, they beat like a heart, splashing the surface of the vinegar into a stinking froth until they've built up enough force to raise me out into the cloying, humid air. I take a brief tour of my hut; past my narrow bed roll, the cold steel oven, the shelf with my clothes, limbering up before I plunge out the window and into the deepening night.

I am ready to hunt.

I fly through the forest, hair long and wet, trailing behind me like a tail. I shriek with naked, owl-like joy as I dodge vines, branches, the startled monkeys who shriek and clutch their tree-limb beds with their tails to prevent themselves from falling. I grin at them as I pass. They needn't worry: I do not hunger for their flesh.

I follow the thin white path into the village. I built my hut, for safety's sake, at the farthest edge; miles from the singing stream whose clear water has been a curse to me since it was blessed by the priest who uses it for baptising. In the years since, as though the women could sense the safety of that place, most have needled and bitched their husbands into moving closer to that sandy pool. Since then, it is true, there have

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been far fewer deaths in childbirth, far fewer miscarriages. Only the most determinedly rational have remained where they were.

I'm rushing to one of those reasonable households right now; the one shared by Maria Sanchez and her beautifully stubborn husband. Oh, I've heard her in the market, complaining about him. Wailing to unsympathetic ears about the children she’s lost and the way that he listens to her treaties and then, calmly, cooly, refuses to budge from the earth his grandfather broke with the spade that he stole from the Spaniard.

'Maria,’ he says, 'It's only superstition. The only monsters are found in the minds of men. Our troubles are coincidence.’ 'But Miguel,’ she answers, 'we’ve lost six already. I can't take any more sorrow.’ I smiled when I heard her say that, though since I was clad in my fleshmask, I hid the expression behind my delicate hand.

That was six months ago. Now, I circle their small, thatched house, peering in through the windows, investigating the quality of the dark.

Satisfied that the only sounds I hear belong to two people sleep-breathing, I swoop in across the unpaned sill, whispering thanks to Miguel as I do so; he’s sensibly removed the bouquets of wild garlic and frangipani that his wife begged to keep there.

Burning with righteousness, he’s swept away the protective line of white salt which would have barred me out.

There are two pallets spread out on the floor of this house. They’ve slept apart, as is the custom, since Maria’s belly started swelling like ripe fruit. He’s lying, spreadeagled, on his blanket in front of the stove. She’s curled up on her naked, woven mat, arms curved protectively around her bulging womb. Her legs are jack-knifed up, touching the bottom of her ripening protrusion, so that she looks (almost) like an overgrown fetus herself.

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I settle my stump (it’s only oozing a little) on the floor by her feet where it will leave a faint, round print. Watching her, brimming with joy, I open my mouth. My song pours out, sweet and calming. I sooth her sleeping mind, relieving her motherly anxiety enough to coax her into unfurling like a blossoming bud. She rolls, heavily, onto her back so that her belly blocks my view of her head. Her legs grow loose as the neck of a three-day-dead swan. They flop open, feet facing outward, revealing her cleft.

It opens like a door, for me, the entrance to my larder. I feel saliva pooling in my mouth, running down my jaws. My tongue emerges, long and flexible as a tapeworm, as silver as a high-value coin. It slithers across the floor to connect with my target. It is the right key for this portal. Once my venom touches her, she will not wake up. I will feed on the fruit she is growing. It will be sweet by now, large enough to satisfy my cravings for at least another month. In the morning, Maria will wake with a sore head and a flat belly. She will rise once more from a pile of small bones and dust. If I strain, I will hear her long, wailing cries from the safety of my house.

Bethany W. Pope

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Aubade

I wake with you in a nest.

We are still one in the dark.

They kept the frankincense smoking all night but it didn’t curl up here.

Everything is moss and bark.

I am smudged with muck and salt.

They say it will be a good day’s plough.

Your heart has bloomed with mine for nine long months, but soon it will be time for the wrench of dawn to crack yolk on our basket of blood.

Each iron grip brings us closer to becoming two my love

but I will always be yours.

Ostare is rising now with her milk-flower butterfly frock.

They will flutter to us soon and leave her naked her body stripped to earth like mine. And I know they will try to heal the split cord flitting from my nipple to your lips trailing silver umbilicals in the air.

They will stretch this glowing trail for us for many dawns to come to help me let go.

They will dust wings on blistered cheeks coat my forehead with eggshell frost.

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But now the wings batter at our nest.

I blink and know it is time.

Rachel Bower

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Contributors

Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/lecturer from Kathmandu, Nepal. His recent publications were with Beatnik Cowboys, Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, Occulum, Silver Birch Press, Eunoia Review, Utt Poetry and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis. Also a Pushcart Prize nominee for the year 2018, Sudeep is currently working on his 4th poetry-book Hyper-Real Reboots, which is scheduled for publication in September 2018 through Weasel Press, Texas, USA. Andy Armitage is a poet and editor from Leeds and has published poetry in the UK (Acumen, Dream Catcher, Strix) and in New Zealand (Poetry NZ, New Zealand Listener, Turbine, Blackmail Press, JAAM) where he lived for 10 years. In 2017, he won First Place in the Leeds Museums Poetry Competition and in 2018 he was Highly Commended in the York Mix/York Literature Festival Poetry Competition.

Ian Badcoe has been a scientist and engineer. His poetry explores themes of humanism, geekhood, gender, mental health, science, art, technology and literary genres such as Sci-Fi and Crime. He has a long term collaboration with German Alternative Rock Musician Hallam London and hopes before too long to release an album. Some years ago he realised the effort of getting poetry published would constitute a third full time job and so instead now makes it all available for free at ianbadcoe.uk Bobby Steve Baker grew-up the Canadian side of Lake Huron and now lives in Lexington Kentucky. His work has appeared in, The Tule Review, Cold Mountain Review, Prick of the Spindle, Into the Void, Cloudbank, and Picaroon. His latest book is This Crazy Urge to Live (Linnet’s Wings Press).

Charley Barnes is a Worcester-based writer who has recently gained her Doctorate in Creative Writing. Charley's short story collection, The Women You Were Warned About, was published in May 2017, and her debut poetry pamphlet is forthcoming with V.

Press.

Gina Marie Bernard is a heavily tattooed transgender woman, retired roller derby vixen, and full-time English teacher. She lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, own her heart. Her chapbook Naked, Gettin' Nuder was a 2018-2019 Glass Chapbook series finalist, and has been accepted for publication by Clare Songbirds Publishing. Her work has recently appeared in Cimarron Review, r.kv.r.y

quarterly, The Hunger Journal, Waccamaw Journal, Rat's Ass Review, and Jet Fuel Review.

James Bezerra is a writer and MFA student. His work has been published in Chaparral, The Bicycle Review, Citizen Brooklyn, and elsewhere. He blogs at standardkink.com

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Rachel Bower is a poet and Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her debut pamphlet, Moon Milk, was published by Valley Press in June 2018, and she recently coedited the anthology, Verse Matters, with Helen Mort (Valley Press). Rachel is also the author of Epistolarity and World Literature, 1980-2010 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Rachel is also the founder of Verse Matters, a feminist arts collective in Sheffield.

Cavin Bryce is a twenty-one year old graduate from the University of Central Florida.

He spends his time off sitting on the back porch, sipping sweet tea and watching his hound dog dig holes across a dilapidated yard. His work has been published in Hobart, CHEAP POP, OCCULUM, and elsewhere. He tweets at @cavinbryce Alexander Chubar holds a BFA from Hunter College and a MFA from the Pratt Institute.

His work has previously been published in Gone Lawn journal, Door is a Jar magazine, Subprimal Poetry Art, The Tishman Review, and several other publications. More of his artwork can be seen at http://www.PaintingsDrawings.com Karen Dennison’s (kdennison.wordpress.com) poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies. Her first collection, Counting Rain, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012. She has designed several poetry collection book covers and is co-editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press.

Laura Dorwart has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University and was a Fletcher B. Jones Dissertation Fellowship recipient at UCSD as she completed her PhD. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lady/Liberty/Lit, McSweeney's, Catapult, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She lives in Cleveland, and more of her work is available at lauradorwart.com and @lauramdorwart.

Mike Farren is an editor in academic publishing from West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies, including The Interpreter's House, The Blue Nib, The High Window, Strix and Valley Press's Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry. His debut pamphlet, ‘Pierrot and his mother’ was published by Templar Poetry in 2017. He publishes under the Ings Poetry imprint and hosts the Rhubarb open mic in Shipley Ann Gibson spent her childhood in Dublin and now lives in North Yorkshire. She has an MA in Literature Studies from York St. John University and has published poetry in Acumen, Prole, Orbis, Ariadne’s Thread, The Poets’ Republic magazines and various anthologies. Her poetry has also appeared online in Algebra of Owls, Ofi Press Magazine, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, Pulsar, and The Ekphrasis Review.

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Melinda Giordano is a native of Los Angeles, California. Her artwork has appeared in magazines such as Pearl, Amelia, new renaissance, The Altadena Review, Stone Country, The Bellowing Ark, Cactus Heart Press, Written River and The Sonder Review. She has always used either pen and ink, or graphite to capture the play of dark and light, of pattern and shape. She values the architectural properties of the small things - plants and shells: subjects as vast and complex as any cityscape or countryside. They are the loveliest of blueprints.

Ronnie Goodyer’s poetry has been widely published and he has 6 solo collections.

Ronnie was on the BBC Judging Panel for their Off By Heart poetry competition (BBC2) and Cornwall County Council’s poetry representative for ‘Writing Doctor’s Surgery’ at Cornwall Book Festival. In 2018, he was appointed Poet-in-Residence for the League Against Cruel Sports. Ronnie runs award-winning Indigo Dreams with partner Dawn.

They live with rescue collie Mist, in an ex-forester’s house in rural Devon.

When he is not traveling, Peter Gutierrez lives and works in Essex County, New Jersey, where his photographs have appeared in the Gannett newspapers.

Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and writes short stories and poetry. She has been published in on line magazines and in print anthologies. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University in 2017.

Colin Hill started writing rather badly in 1983, hitting a productive high in '85 before casting himself adrift in the world. 2014 saw him resurface, gasp for air and write like a man possessed. With one (unpublished) novel under his belt and countless poems blogged, he remains happily out there exploring those little moments in life that happen upon us without warning, through words and multi-media images he likes to call his PhotoPoems.

Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe is a poet and mum from Dukinfield. She has an MA in Poetry from Bath Spa University. Her work has appeared in Magma, The Lake, Atrium, Picaroon Poetry and The Black Light Engine Room amongst others. She also enjoys wargaming, painting models and scrapbooking.

Tina Huckle is an amateur photographer and published poet. Her coastal photography has won competitions by Sea Salt clothing and Quba Sails. Her poetry, written under the name Edwards (a nod to her Grandfather who was also a Poet) has been published in Reach Poetry by Indigo Dreams Publishing. It can also be found online in Visual Verse and Clear Poetry. A keen walker and keeper of ducks, she currently resides in North Somerset.

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Alia Hussain Vancrown has published in journals and magazines in print and online.

Her poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was selected to participate in Winter Tangerine's 2018 workshop, Singing Songs Crooning Comets, featuring seminars by Kaveh Akbar and Aricka Foreman. Alia works at the Library of Congress in the Law Division. She currently resides in Maryland.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press, poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York, fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leakin (What Books) and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press, hybrid).

Dylan Jones is a writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She enjoys writing about the cosmic and the crass. When she isn’t writing she loves reading, kayaking, and spending time with her fiancé. dylanjonesmn.wordpress.com Stacey Margaret Jones’ work been published in venues like Slant, Ariel, North Coast Review, and Poetry Pacific, and her novel, Mr. Catherine, will be published early in 2019

by Creators Publishing. Her MFA was earned from the Arkansas Writers program at the University of Central Arkansas, She was an award-winning Knight-Ridder newspaper columnist before the sad demise of that media corporation. She is now a free-lance columnist and an independent market researcher.

David Evan Krebs has used various forms of art to cultivate meaning and movement in his life in the face of chronic illness from a young age. He lives quietly with his fiancée in Lawrence, KS, and generally strives to make each day better than the last.

Hunter Lewinski is a student at Hamilton College studying History and Creative Writing. Outside of writing, Hunter co-hosts a college radio program and plays guitar in the Hamilton College Jazz Band. He has previously been published in By&By Poetry, Fourth & Sycamore, Maudlin House, and Anon Magazine.

Karen Little trained as a fine artist at Camberwell school of Art, London and has exhibited internationally, often under her artist name Kazvina. She is widely published as a poet in the UK and further afield.

Stephanie Lonsdale is a Manchester based writer and performer. She performs regularly on the Manchester spoken word circuit and has been a guest performer at Evidently, Punk in Drublic and Sunday Assembly. Recently she has collaborated with Manchester soul/gospel group Canter Semper, performing at their Club Academy gig.

She has also written for Not Too Tame Theatre Company who have performed her writing in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe and Latitude festivals.

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Prisha Mehta is a student at Millburn High School, NJ, and is very passionate about her writing. She aspires to be a successful author one day, and has won many writing awards, including a Scholastic National Gold Medal. You can find out more about her at prishamehta.com George Messo has four poetry collections from Shearsman Books and is the translator of more than a dozen collections of Turkish poetry. He lives for much of the year on a remote forest farm in northern Sweden.

Bethany W. Pope was named by the Huffington Post as ‘one of the five Expat poets to watch in 2016’. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described her latest collection as 'poetry as salvation'.....'This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.' Bethany has won many literary awards and published several collections of poetry. Her first novel, Masque, was published by Seren in 2016.

Jeremy Punter is a London based poet in his mid-30s whose poetry has previously been published in Popshot and Bunbury magazines. He has also written and produced two Renaissance style verse plays for London fringe theatre.

John Riley works in educational publishing. His poetry and fiction have appeared in

Metazen, Connotation Press, Smokelong Quarterly, Blue Five Notebook, Willows Wept Review, The Dead Mule, and many other journals both online and in print.

Mark Rossiter grew up in Yorkshire and has lived and worked in ten cities across three continents; since 2014 he has been in Chiang Mai, Thailand with his Texan wife and their two children. His travel writing has been published in several media. He is coorganizer of monthly Magic Theatre poetry readings in Chiang Mai. Zack Stein lives and writes in NYC. Some of his most recent work can be seen in the Matador Review, (b)OINK, The San Pedro River Review, etc.

Sutton Strother is a writer, composition instructor, Kentucky native, and New York transplant. Her writing is featured/forthcoming at Jellyfish Review, Longleaf Review Natural Bridge, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel about grief, mermaids, and family dysfunction.

Michael Vangel is a writer, musician, and wannabe chef. His writing has appeared in City Pages, SF Weekly, Stanford Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was a fiction writer in residence with Springboard for the Arts. Currently based in Minneapolis, he's writing his first book manuscript, reading for Coffee House Press, and living with his partner and their succulents.

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Ann E. Wallace writes of life with illness, motherhood, and other everyday realities. Her work has recently appeared in The Capra Review, Juniper, The Literary Nest, Eunoia Review, Rogue Agent, The Same, and other journals. She lives in Jersey City, NJ where she teaches English at New Jersey City University. She is on Twitter @annwlace409.

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Acknowledgements

`The Wound’ by Andy Armitage was first published in his pamphlet Letters to a First Love from the Future (Half Moon Books, July 2018).

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ISSUE #16 COMING DECEMBER 1st 2018

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