Spalding
Seeking the Language of Stars
By Fabrice Poussin
Attempting to define a new soul
he urges energies to arise.
The cosmos holds all the answers
to irreverent queries only he could fester.
It remains to discover how one may speak
to celestial bodies in complete silence.
Gazing at a milky path to the heavens
he seeks a familiar star to call his own.
Closing his eyes he projects a murmur
from the deepest realm of the unknown.
There joyful he may wait to his terminal decay
for the response hidden in the thickest darkness.
Patient he knows the universal word will be revealed
when at last he takes flight on the wings of a final dusk.
The Anarchy of Art
By Antoni Ooto
Images hold stiffly, secretive, somewhere.
In camouflage everything looks like nothing.
The canvas stares back—
open-faced, embarrassed.
It seems my fingers need to get dirty;
so many distractions, and even the light isn’t right—
(yes, that too.)
This happens; a palette waits as
internal arguments continue breeding anarchy.
To begin,
new must dig a long way
before the brush finds
the first opening note of color.
Glimmer of Gold
By Oormila Vijayakrishan Prahlad
Splintered Time
By Julia Paul
Beneath the peeling paint
Beneath the flickering gold light
The milky white of blank canvas
The milky blue of morning
All the colors of the past
All the ashes of the past
Move through splintered time
Move with the mood of the wind
Someone mentions photos of the dead
Someone questions the slant of the sky
As if nothing has happened
As if everything has happened
Grief is half-written in whispers
Grief sharpens its pencil
Which is to write invisible lines
Which is to allow the soul to speak
With light that changes like love
With breath that pulls us through
To lose someone is to open a door
To another door and endless others
Never Speechless
By Alex Phuong
Previously published in DSTL Arts – Aurtistic Zine
Jasmine sang “Speechless”
What is silent is NOT gold
Power to us all!
Women Empowerment
By Brittany Guttierez
Feminism in Chinese: A Bilinguacultual Poem
By Yuan Changming
妇：lady is a woman who has overthrown a mountain
好：wo man spelt as one word simply means good
妙：young women supporting each other are always wonderful
嫁：to marry a man is for a girl to have her own family
妖：weird would be a woman if she goes broken
姣: handsome is a woman standing with her legs crossed
婢：maid is a girl who is by nature humble
婵：beautiful is she who remains single
娘：mother is perforce a lady who is good and kind
The Neighborhood Must Surely be a Movie
By John Grey
It’s not an orchard, despite those apple trees,
their fruit as smooth as actors with pistols.
Camera rolls in, steady, on tracks.
Lights are bright enough to scare the rats.
No kid ever thought his life would make a good movie.
Foliage heeds to a calendar.
Colors are transient for all time.
The few trees there are change their color,
Bud, bloom, don bright pastels, shed.
Stand stark naked in the harshest weather.
Leaves fall.
Director makes ultimatums.
You’re a movie now. “Action!”
A young woman hugs the script to her body.
Kids play themselves.
Blanks, the prop man assures them.
No matter the time of year,
only gunshots sound like gunshots.
Not some round red apples.
that say, pick me now or I’ll topple to earth.
Someone leans beside a body,
pulls out a gun,
fires a shot at a getaway car.
Kids imitate their real lives.
They’d love to have doubles for the dangerous parts.
So they’re filming violence in a violent neighborhood.
Nothing like a Providence backstreet to grime up the artifice.
Kids with guns look out their window.
So will we get to see ourselves on the silver screen?
On some streaming app?
Suddenly, a stunt double leaps over a fence.
Another is tossed from a moving vehicle.
Then they move aside for the stars.
There’s rebirth, not just living.
There’s keeping to a schedule.
Trees grow amid tenements and vacant lots.
Another apple falls,
does its best to roll far from its tree.
Resisting arrest
By Alex Phuong
Firstly published in Moonstone Arts Center – Philadelphia Says: Haiku in February 2018
Uniting uniformed unity
You and I defy the sky
Team work and collaboration
Up to personal discretion
Civil Rights
Civility
Minorities against majorities
Stick to the status quo
But should we…?
Really?
Defy thy stars
And seek new avenues
Harness the power of creativity
And merge sense with sensibility
“Utopia” was conceived by Thomas More
But all must still must strive for more
For he was A Man for All Seasons
Arrests might be criminal
But people cannot be subliminal
If they want to break free
Listen to words of wisdom from me
“Know thyself, be thyself, harmoniously”
West of Wabi Sabi
By Carol Casey
we fabricate a furtive precision from
bling, guard against blemishes, stumbles,
aging and other embarrassments. We
strive to become facade, lose
ourselves in commotion. Our
posturing complicates the dance, no
heartbeat allowed, no breath of wind-
so dead that we look with horror
as small green things grow through cracks.
We walk in puddles of shallow sanctuary
skipping on the surface, terrified of
the underneath where we might break up-
break out in tone-deaf song to match some
raw authentic dance. We stub our toes
on the hard edges of perfection,
that erection of monolithic
proportions sanitizing our
mucky fertility. We worship the hard,
smooth edges, gaudy simplicity
that distracts us from our broken selves.
Careful to ignite precise flames
that do not throw shadows,
we find that comfort doesn’t ripen-
stays sour, sharp, bright with promises
that tears can’t nourish. We are listless,
vapid as ghosts, dirt swept under our
immaculate robes, the many layers of powder,
paint, polish that keep us from seeking
gentler mirrors. We spend money on
fear-chased illusions that Judas-kiss the
disruptive, haunting beauty of earth. We
sterilize, arm-wrestle all of nature, shun the
infinite varieties of life, hide behind sameness.
We hold youth in a terror-grip, our goddess is
two-dimensional, her smooth regular features
piercing, exacting, cruel. We wither a little
each day, double our efforts to avoid
clear reflection, are left empty containers,
all the broken, all the hurt swept away.
We go naked in our finery,
pretending everything to fill
the nothing with cheap, shiny things.
Doors close. Maybe there
is no reopening. Maybe there is
a point when we start to see the beauty
in the worn offering, the weary traveler
to mend instead of throw away,
find the gold to fill the cracks.
French Cuffed
By Ed Ahern
When I first went corporate
Executives wore dress shirts
With French cuffs and gold links.
So for protective coloration
I scrounged the lower east side
For remainders from Madison Avenue.
The quality of the shirts
Improved with my credit rating
And in time my closet held
A half-month of French cuffs.
Eventually, with retirement,
The need for dressing up
Left with my commute.
Weddings, funerals and church services
Don’t satisfy this need for ostentation,
And I find myself gold cuffed
At televised operas and poetry readings
I am addicted to my camouflage
It Didn't Make Difference
By John Maurer
The difference between architecture and anatomy
is the difference between bone and brick
Wherever it is that you live, that place will outlive you
Your house has seen people die before and it will see you die too
You live a life of working a job to pay for a mortgage
on what is just a coffin with modern decor
You talk to other homeowners
about how you don’t give money to the homeless
Say they will just spend it on drugs
as you pour out your fifth or ninth glass of whiskey
I came to two paths: become what I hate or die
and I marched in stoic silence into the flames
Way Up Ahead
By Judy Decroce
Memories for a future
scurry to catch up
Before someone owns them,
memories carried off too late
are certainly too late.
Even, when that chance is missed…
vanished, with all my hurry,
I look towards the empty fields.
The Savior in the Dumpster
By John Maurer
Not a raven of a name that’s prestigious
I am a crow named midnight;
I am darker than a lack of light
My mental illness is a black hole
It absorbs all the vibrant and leaves me
strung out and sepia tinted
I’m blind to colors not shades
I can smell the pthalo of your cardigan sweater but don’t know it’s blue
There is no loss I have sustained that hasn’t made my touch gentler
I have been broken so many times; I am most terrified of anything dropping
from my own hands to detritus; If I can’t solve the puzzle that is me for me
helping you solve the puzzle of you for you will have to do
If I can teach you to smile, maybe you can teach me
If I can show you how to love life, maybe you can show me how to stop hating it
I am the Dustman, Clutter Collector
By Michael Lee Johnson
Surreptitiously
I am the dustman.
I am this lazy spirit
roaming, living within you
weaving around your mind,
vulture consuming cleaning
thoughts, space, your slender body.
I feel it all day,
this night alone.
I am your street sweeper,
garbage collector of thought the alternator
village dweller, walkway partner.
I am key door holder to entrance
man, to Summit house.
For years of abuse, I am dust eater.
I hang high outside on lampposts,
edged inside on top wall pictures.
I dim your lights yellow inside out,
ghost inspector.
Inside I roll the house over.
I am a damp cloth, Mr. Clean,
I smooth over, clutter-free,
tick-tock clocks, books,
antique silverware,
pristine future furniture pieces
solid state advances
fragment mistakes etched in mind.
Investigations exacerbate our relationship
unhinged. My snaking gets me kicked out.
I still remember those piled up old newspapers,
future books, scattered across your
living room floor.
Shake myself, scrape out a new home,
cheaper, exasperated.
I am the dustman; dustpan shakes out.
New in Box
By Mike Hickman
It’s a Smeg, it’s new – it’s been paid for by daddy – and the salad in the crisper is as blackened as the remains of my dignity.
“A little help here would be good,” I say, hefting the anti-bac spray that I’d found in the cupboard under the sink with the out-of-date packets of honey baked ham and the food for the cat that Harvey doesn’t have.
There is a grunt-grumble from the bench Harvey had set up in the front room since the last time I’d visited. It’s right in front of the window so he can watch out for the girls in the ripped jeans he so disapproves of.
The salad slops out of the crisper and on into the already full swing-top bin like something from Alien. There’s the gentle phfitz of Harvey’s own spray – oxygen, he’d said – and I turn to see him deep inside the machine’s innards, mobile phone held up to peer into what I now know to be called the tape basket and the mechanism below.
“It’s odd talking to yourself like this,” he says.
I turn back to the fridge. There are three half-opened curries – provenance unknown, Best Before date pretty certain from the mould.
“You won’t be needing these?” I tell him. The question mark is a courtesy.
There is a grunt-grumble and a further spray. He might have paused the recording. He might not.
I gingerly lift the plastic trays out of the fridge and transport them past the washing up and the stacked tea towels. He has thirty tea towels, we’d/I’d discovered. Not a one of them used until today. Curries chucked in the bin, I pause on the way back to the fridge to get some fresh air from the open window. Which is directly above the communal bins. I breathe in, even so.
Harvey’s talking again, and again it’s for the benefit of the camera.
“Now this, as you can see, is a four head machine. I wanted to get one of the earlier ones. I wanted to get a top-loader with the piano keys, but this is the best eBay had for the budget I was prepared to pay for a warehouse find. If you do find one yourself – an old Baird or Radio Rentals, say – just click the link that’s appearing right now…” He will do the point. He does the point. “…and let me know in the comments.”
I turn back to the fridge. Next is the jar of something once red that is now red shot through with green. The button on the lid has long since been popped. Whether he’d attempted to use any of the paste – more curry, perhaps? – is unclear. A waste, I think. I was going to open it – make a point of opening it – but Harvey’s asthma is bad enough right now, what with his sour milk smelling dust-trap of a flat, and I’m sure Sonia back in the office will have words with me if I dare risk his allergies with festering curry spores. Another one for the bin, then. Half a deli-counter’s worth of cold chicken goes next.
“So, let’s pull the mechanism out, then, and we’ll give it a full service,” Harvey is saying. I pause over the slime of the chicken – because I, at least, believe in trying to recycle the packaging – and watch him lift up the tape basket. He’s put the screws tidily to one side with the few remnants of his N-gauge kit that we’d failed to tidy away this morning. The view on his camera will just be of his chapped hands. He’s been at them with the Amlactin – I know because ‘we’d’ done the bathroom first this session and it had been all over the mirror. They’ll be no different, though, from the other YouTube hands doing similar techy things out there on the internet. “Now,” he says, with the mechanism unclipped from the circuit board below – he’d given a running commentary on that, of course – “here’s where we can service things like the belt. Even though this machine has never been used…” He stresses the incomprehensibility of those words for the listener. “…the rubber belt has often perished by now and, yes, if you look here…” He’s got a little torch for this purpose. “If you look here, you can see this black residue – that’s the belt. What’s left of it. So we’re going to have to replace that if we want to get the tape to play when I’ve put it all back together.”
I take the anti-bac spray and return to the fridge. The glass shelf is mould-spattered and worse. I take it out, bring it over to the sink, start to work up the suds and he forgets this time to shush me.
“Now, the heads,” he says. A couple of blond girls in cut-offs go past the window in front of me and I expect, when they’ve turned the corner of the block, he’ll see them down there and he’ll have to comment. “Although this machine is essentially new, they’re going to need a clean before we entrust even a sacrificial tape to them.”
I turn the shelf over – somehow, a goodly proportion of pizza topping is still affixed to the underside. This includes the pepperoni. Also green.
“What you’ll need for this is a folded piece of paper. Not Qtips. Never Qtips. One fibre gets in there and that’s game over. So, a folded piece of paper and back with the isopropyl alcohol. I saw someone try to use WD40 for this. You can imagine what happened.”
I can’t.
The girls in the cut-offs stop to talk prices and suppliers and effects and Harve would normally stop to listen, mumbling just loud enough by the open window for bits of me to cringe-shrink into other bits of me already cringing until I turn myself inside out with mortification. This is not necessary today.
“Woah. Nearly used the Dielectric Tune-up grease there. Could have been nasty. We’ll leave that for the switch when we disassemble it in a mo. Okay, folded paper, isopropyl, here we go, remembering to turn the drum anti-clockwise – that’s the direction of the tape, of course, and there you go, see?” He’s cleaning the drum and holding his iPhone at the same time. He’s got the torch between his teeth now. “Never used and yet, look, look at the filth coming off there.”
I think about filth for a moment. I think about the contents of the dresser we’d upended last time I’d been here. I turn back to the fridge shelf and the floating pepperoni.
The screws go back in on the tape basket mechanism and Harvey reaffixes it to the main board, taking care to clip the wires back together and to grease the cogs without which the tape transport will foul, as he puts it. He’s rootling around for the lid and the screws for the lid when I push the glass shelf back into the fridge and turn my attention to the inside of the door and the jars and bottles and – oh, God – the pickle collection, some of which is dated as far back as 2014. I’d mentioned this earlier. He’d grunted and said it would still be okay. Made with vinegar, isn’t it? Preserved, isn’t it? It would still be good.
I hear the tape being pushed into the VCR and the sound of the mechanism as it takes the tape from the cassette and loops it round the head drum. The girls are still talking out there, and Harve still doesn’t interject, not even when they start talking fashion. He can’t abide fashion. Theirs. Mine. His own. I turn to see the picture form out of the rolling static on the portable CRT telly he’d hooked up to the VCR for precisely this purpose. He looks pleased. So it’s not like I’m going to say anything about the state of his fridge. Or my need for his Amlactin, come to that, after all the washing.
“And there we have it,” he says, “fresh from the box – after thirty years – and, after a little jiggery pokery, it works a treat.”
I stand next to him and watch the tape roll. It’s a home video. Family. Park. Dogs. Children. He turns off his mobile and he watches. It is another five minutes before he turns off the tape, the machine gives it up, and he packs the VCR back in its polystyrene.
Not another word of commentary is needed.
Outside, the girls laugh and I watch them take the quick perpendicular route out of the street and away.
“Scored, then, I see,” I say, as Harvey reverently puts his one and only VHS tape back next to his one and only book – a history of the railway, of course – and the toy trains he’d told me weren’t toy trains and should never be called such ever again.
“You…er…going to put that up online, then?” I ask, as he puts his phone down on the table, sits down in the sag of the sofa and continues to stare at the tape box as if replaying it without the machine.
Harvey blinks, frowns, blinks. He rubs his eyes. He considers me, Henry Hoover behind me, the dusters and the Mr Sheen on the kitchen side, and then me again.
“Those curries still good?” he asks, “I could murder a spot of lunch.”
Kintsugi
By Tricia Knoll
Kintsugi and Green Tea
By David W. Landrum
It had been a large rock on the track, lodged just under the surface. When Etsuko, running at high speed, came down on it her foot turned, twisting her leg, throwing her kneecap out of joint, tearing tendons and muscles. She screamed and fainted. Dennis Ohsumi, her boyfriend, who was with her that day, drove her to Emergency.
She woke up in a hospital room.
The following months were filled with surgeries, walking on crutches and, later, with a soft cast on her leg. After numerous evaluations, ultrasounds, and two more operations her doctors told her she would never run again. The accident had brought an end to her status as a top high school runner and to her hope of getting into college on a track scholarship; her dreams of qualifying for the Olympics and then settling down to a job as a running coach evaporated as well. She developed a small limp that physical therapy and prosthetics could not correct.
People told her she should sue the school for not properly maintaining their track. Etsuko considered but decided she would not. What would be the point in it? Why behave vindictively against a school that had been gracious enough to let her use their track for her training? She put away the trophies and awards that had once filled the shelves in her bedroom. Circumstance had handed her a bitter defeat.
She battled the onset of depression. She spent time with her family, with Dennis, and with friends. She explored new career paths and talked with job counselors. She could not be an athlete or coach. She had to decide on a different major than she had envisioned for when she left for college in fall and think about a new career. In the past she had not paid a lot of attention to religion but now hoped worship might sooth her and be a balm against the overwhelming despair she felt—surprisingly, it seemed to help. She accompanied her family to Temple. She began to read Zen texts. A week or so into December her mother mentioned that she had seen an advertisement for women interested in learning how to conduct a Japanese tea ceremony.
“The tea ceremony has its roots in Zen belief,” her mother told her.
“You can’t conduct a tea ceremony if you limp,” her daughter shot back.
“You don’t limp that much,” she answered. “And I doubt that they would discriminate against you for something like that.”
Strangely, the idea appealed to her.
She wanted to dismiss it. Her school counselors had suggested she go into teaching, business, or sports medicine; perhaps she could become a medical doctor. Her parents had taught her to study diligently; she made good grades and was an honor student. She would have no trouble being admitted to some of the top universities in the country. But, oddly, the idea of training for the tea ceremony intrigued her; somehow, pragmatic as Etsuko was, it loomed in her mind as a possibility; absurd as it seemed, it held appeal.
When she shyly mentioned the idea to her school counselors they could hardly conceal their surprise and what she sensed as indignation.
“Isn’t that something you learn without making a career of it?” Miss Asano, her adviser, who was Japanese-American (Etsuko’s high school was predominantly Asian) asked. “How long do you train for it?”
“Three years.”
Miss Asano reacted to this, momentarily slipping out the detachment and decorum academic counselors usually displayed.
“Three years? Etsuko, that is appalling.” She quickly realized she had broken protocol and perhaps offended the sad girl for whom she felt so badly. “I’m sorry if I over-reacted, but you’re a bright girl, you have good grades, and I’m sure you could get a scholarship to any college you wanted to attend. If you spent three years training for something that would most likely be a hobby it would delay your entrance into college and put a hold on whatever career you chose. If you’re considering medical school such a delay would hurt your chances of admission after you finished your pre-med major.”
Making a massive effort to hold back her tears, Etsuko explained that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to college right away; that her accident had been traumatic and she needed to recover from the emotional damage it had done to her; that the training might a good way to slow down and get her focus back. Mis Asano apologized for her reaction, but her apology, Etsuko could see, was qualified. She still thought training for the tea ceremony would be foolish. Thankfully, she saw Dennis after she left Asano’s office. Talking with him in the school lounge over coffee helped.
She let the issue fill her mind to the point that it was distracting her and making her more melancholy and depressed. After deciding that the best way resolving the issue was to find out more about it, she told her mother she wanted to answer the ad.
She received a reply asking her to submit a short essay stating why she wanted to learn the tea ceremony. Etsuko spent a week wondering what she might say. She decided she would be honest about the matter. She mentioned the accident and its challenges. She told how she hoped training to be a presenter of the tea ceremony might be healing and help her see through her hopelessness and confusion. A week later she received a response inviting her in for an interview.
Her mother thought this was a good idea. An interview, she said, would help her decide if she did want to pursue this particular path or go on to college. Etsuko called the number on the letter she received and agreed to the interview.
She dressed modesty and conservatively, tied up her hair, and tried to remember her best manners. When she arrived at the address she was surprised to find herself in a very conventional-looking office. The woman who would interview her looked a little over forty and was beautiful in the stately, dignified manner of women her age.
“My sympathies to you, Miss Watanabe, on your tragic accident,” she said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hiroka.”
“Yes. Your reasons for applying are interesting.”
Etsuko felt a wave of anxiety at the ambiguousness of the word interesting.
“I thought I would be honest,” she answered, stammering a bit. “I need healing of my heart. I imagine the tea ceremony might be a path to that.”
She expected this to be the end of the matter. But the woman across from her said, “I commend you that you told the truth. And from what I read and the motivations you expressed, I think you might be admitted to the program.”
Etskuo was too flabbergasted to answer. She fancied a faint smile came to Mrs. Hiroka’s lips.
“So, yes,” she continued. “But we do have some standards. Are you a virgin?”
The question startled her. It took her a moment to give the reply, “Yes, I am.”
Etskuo came from a traditional home and the constant regiment of athletic training she had undergone since age thirteen demanded all her energy and most of her time. She had dated, but never became serious with any young man; she rebuffed all attempts that would lead to sexual experience. And she did not want to risk getting pregnant. So she had kept herself chaste. Denis had always respected her standards.
“Good,” Mrs. Hiroka said. “It is permissible for a woman who conducts the ceremony to be experienced, but only through a sanctioned marriage. A girl who is not married must be a maiden.
It was odd hearing the archaic term maiden.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“Is there anything at all that might might hinder you from hosting the ceremony?”
She had wondered if the question would come up—but she had to tell the truth, and Mrs. Hiroki had probably noticed when Etsuko came into the room.
“From the injury I described in the letter I have a slight limp.”
“Does it affect your balance?”
“No, ma’am.”
‘Can you kneel and get to your feet without hindrance?”
“I can. The limp does not hinder my mobility very much, but it is visible. People will notice it when I walk.”
“If it doesn’t hinder your balance or your ability to get up and down, it is no matter.”
After a pause—it was less than a minute but to Etsuko it seemed an eternity—Mrs. Hiroka spoke.
“I would like to invite you into our program, Miss Watanabe. You have a week to respond. Let me know of your decision by next Wednesday. If you decide to enter the program, you would begin training in two months.”
Too astonished to speak, Etsuko bowed her head.
****
The next week she anguished over whether to accept Mrs. Hiroki’s invitation.
She had long talks with her parents. To her surprise, they said they would support her decision if she did chose to train for the ceremony. In the past when they had discussed her future her mother and father had favored medicine (they said she would make an excellent doctor) or business, though they warned her that business might prove soulless. It had always been understood that she would pursue a professional career. She was surprised that they favored her entering training that would not result in prestige or financial security. She stayed away from Miss Asano and other school administration. Undoubtedly Asano had told her colleagues about what Etsuko was considering; undoubtedly their reaction would be the same as hers.
She asked Dennis what he thought. He was surprised but supported her.
“I think it would be a good thing. Have you ever been to a tea ceremony?”
“No.”
“It’s beautiful. There’s something … peaceful about it; something I can’t quite express. I think it would be the kind of thing you would naturally fit into.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. Can’t say. Maybe because it’s just gentle and orderly.”
She fought back tears. She had been crying a lot the last week. She knew she had to stop being led around by her fears and her emotions. She needed to decide. She and Dennis went to his house and watched YouTube clips of the tea ceremony. As she lay down to sleep that night she knew that sometimes pragmatism had to be set aside. There were things that brought healing—the arts, ceremony, and, as Dennis had said, things that were gentle, orderly, and could bring grace.
Thinking it would be crass to relate her decision over the phone, Etsuko called Mrs. Hiroka’s office to make it appointment. Her secretary was able to set up an appointment that afternoon. She stated that she would be humbled to accept the invitation to train for the ceremony. As if she had not done enough to diminish herself in Mrs. Hiroka’s eyes (at least as she saw it), she began to cry. Big tears ran down her cheeks. Mrs. Hiroka later told Etsuko that if she had reacted any other way she would have doubted the wisdom of her choice in admitting her.
****
Her decision startled everyone. Dismayed looks formed on the faces of the school guidance counselors when she said she planned to train to host the Japanese tea ceremony and that the training would be for three years. Being more polite and measured this time, Miss Asano tried to talk her out of her plans. Etsuko held to her resolution.
Her parents gave a farewell party just before her departure for Japan. Toward the end of it, as night fell, Dennis appeared. He carried a gift box.
She smiled, hesitated, and then kissed him. They shared a small embrace. She remembered the time, not long after the accident, they saw each other in the parking lot when she was still on crutches. He had asked how she was doing. She told him about her injury and that it would end her athletic career. Then she broke down, wept, wailed, and lamented. He held her. He murmured her name from time to time, but other than that he did not try to talk to or comfort her. He simply let her weep. Eventually people noticed. Someone called a teacher and school faculty appeared to take her to the nurse’s office. Since that time she had felt full of … love? Affection? She was not sure what she felt for Dennis but it filled her mind and heart.
After the perfunctory things one said at a farewell he gave her the gift box. She opened it, took out the object it contained, and tore off the tissue paper in which it was wrapped.
Etsuko gasped—as did everyone around them. The gift was a white ceramic bowl; but a bowl that had been broken and repaired with gold lacquer. It was kintsugi—an ancient Japanese technique used to repair pottery but (as with many ancient practices) carrying with it a meaning. The pieces of a broken vessel were reassembled using lacquer mixed with gold. The repaired vessel was strikingly beautiful with the seams of gold running through its original design.
She gazed at the bowl. It had apparently been shattered into several large pieces. The craftsman had retrieved them and assembled them, joining the pieces with “gold repair” and, in small areas where sections of the bowl had been too badly damaged to recover, filled the spaces with a solid layer gold. She gazed at it, helpless in the spell of its beauty.
She looked over to Dennis.
“I thought”—he began.
“I know what you thought,” Etsuko said. “And it’s beautiful beyond words.”
The party resumed. She and Dennis sat together. Her father and mother did not intervene when she held his hand.
“Can I come to visit you in Japan?” he asked. “I’ve never been—always wanted to go.”
Etsuko knew Dennis’s family had been in the United States for four generations and probably knew no one in the mother country. His motivation for wanting to visit rested elsewhere. And that was fine with her.
Outside, the moon shone full. She glanced at it through the window. Its scarred surface reminded her of the broken vessel and of the scars she carried inside. She saw that scars could be beautiful. Dreams, as well, could be reassembled.
Reverence
By Alex Phuong
Firstly published in Moonstone Arts Center – Philadelphia Says: Haiku in February 2018
Never forget ancestry
Honor the past rather than dwell on it
Reverent
Fear not the revenant
Be Magnificent instead of malevolent
Don’t hate; celebrate!
Remember respect
Especially self-respect
On the Side of the Road
(nonfiction)
By Riley Winchester
My dad frequently used the side of the road as a bathroom during my childhood. Number two, as it’s politely known as, is what he went when he did. It was a calculated and illegal process. His hands tightened their grip on the wheel, his back became rigid and pushed into the seat, he scanned for other cars and a spot to pull over to with the fastidiousness of a forensics detective at the scene of a murder, he mashed the breaks, sometimes heads lurched forward, he pulled the car over; without saying anything, my mom opened the front passenger door and I opened the rear passenger door, forming a double-sided barricade; my dad ran around the front end of the car, hip fastened to it as he took a sharp turn to the passenger side, he squatted with his tailbone propped against the bottom trim of the front passenger door for support; he quickly did his business, my mom handed him napkins to clean up with, he picked up the waste with three, sometimes four, plastic grocery bags, cinched it shut, placed that in two more plastic grocery bags, and put the package in the trunk to discard at a restroom later. Then we got back on the road and continued whatever conversation we were having before, never missing a beat.
None of this was done to satisfy some sick scatological fetish. My dad used the side of the road as a bathroom because he had Chron’s disease. Chron’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that throws a laxative-coated monkey wrench into the gastrointestinal tract. Those with Chron’s disease capitulate control over their bowels to the disease. This meant when my dad had to go he had to go. His body didn’t care where he was or what he was doing. There are no medications or procedures that can cure Chron’s disease. There are, however, medications that can mitigate the disease, and my dad was on all of them, but his Chron’s was still uncontrollable.
We accepted this—my mom, two sisters, and me. But still, it was hard for me to not get angry with my dad when we showed up late to my baseball games because he had pulled over three times during the forty-minute drive, or the anxiety I had when friends rode in the car. I always prayed my dad wouldn’t have to pull over, forcing me to explain the situation to someone unfamiliar with the art of the roadside bowel movement.
My family traveled a lot when I was a kid. Always road trips—we had an innate Kerouacian spirit. But the problem with American roads and highways is that there aren’t restrooms every eleven yards, which is what my dad would have needed if he were to avoid roadside bathroom breaks.
One of his most memorable roadside incidents happened when my family was driving north through Tennessee. We were in standstill traffic and a brief tornado moratorium. A tornado had just trundled through Tennessee and ripped apart the town we were driving through. I remember seeing a Waffle House with no roof, front windows shattered, and the letters to the sign lying limp in the parking lot like scattered Scrabble pieces. On the radio the local weatherman was warning Tennesseans about a second tornado on its way.
I saw the tension in my dad and his back get sucked into the seat. I knew what was happening. He merged into the farthest right lane, cutting people off and receiving an array of honks, found a good spot, pulled over, and rushed over to the passenger side. A tornado-wrecked Walmart sat across from him just off the highway. I kept looking through the window behind me for a tornado, waiting for it to roar through and swallow us. The sky was wolf-gray and looked angry. I thought for sure this would be how we died. But my dad finished up and we drove away safely. We later learned the tornado hit that area an hour after we drove through.
Years later he had another memorable incident, though this time it wasn’t roadside. It was in a parking lot. My family was driving along an empty road on a Thursday evening and my dad got that tense look again. For some reason he eschewed his standard roadside procedure and found an empty parking lot to use as a bathroom. The parking lot, it turned out, was empty on a Thursday evening because it belonged to a church. He emptied his bowels on the verge of the parking lot, where the asphalt and grass met, and cleaned up his business. We were all privy to the symbolism but my mom was the only one who said anything. A pithy, “So a church, huh?” Even the most benevolent of gods might struggle to forgive that act of desecration.
But there was one person who was always forgiving and always stoic through every roadside stop: My mom. And she always had the worst of it. When my dad pulled over we used the passenger doors to cordon him off from the view of other drivers. He leaned up against, and defecated under, right next to where my mom sat, patient in the front seat, prepared to hand him wipes when asked. She was unflappable. She took shit better than anybody.
When I say my mom took shit the last thing I mean is in the metaphorical sense. She took my dad’s shit, but never his shit. I remember a handful of instances when I was younger where angers flared at dinner and my mom stormed up from the table and left with the car. We didn’t know where she was going, and when I was really young I didn’t know if she was ever coming back. She left sometimes for only half an hour, sometimes three hours. Nevertheless she always came back, but never pacified.
My mom didn’t simply leave and forget about it—my dad was going to get his comeuppance. She never hesitated to call out my dad on his antics and overreactions, tell him when he was being a jackass. And she was always justified, deliberately and dexterously telling him what he was wrong about and why he was wrong for it. She never sat in silent resignation, not with my dad or with anybody else. I had never seen someone speak to my dad, or anybody, with such cutting candor.
My mom is a small person. She stands half an inch over five feet tall and is svelte enough to be a gymnast. But she has a way of growing in size, like one of those toys you throw in water and watch grow—sometimes it seemed like she was hulking over my dad’s six-feet-tall frame. She can cut into you like a Gatling gun, each wound making you realize you are in fact in the wrong. This isn’t her only side, however, and truthfully it’s her less prominent side. She’s kind and caring. She’s a pretty little hummingbird with the suppressed dominion of a drill sergeant that comes out only when she deems necessary. Her green eyes are warming, and the way she cocks her head when she smiles lets you know when you’re with her, in this moment, the world is indeed a beautiful place to be. She’s loving enough to take shit but strong enough to never take shit.
My dad eventually stopped using the side of the road as a bathroom. One day he came home from a doctor’s appointment with tears in his eyes and told me he had been diagnosed with colon cancer. I’ve yet to meet someone with worse luck in one region of their body. He underwent rounds of chemotherapy to attenuate the cancer enough until his body was ready for surgery. He had a total colectomy, and the cancer and his colon were removed.
Without a colon the body can’t release excrement the natural way, so my dad had a colostomy bag fixed into his stomach, on the left side of his belly button. He couldn’t control when he went—so some things remained the same. Excrement is released into the colostomy bag without warning once it’s been digested thoroughly, and that’s why it’s imperative to always have the bag hooked into the port unless it’s being changed. My mom was always the one who changed the bag, which is no small act. The smell of colostomy discharge and colostomy bags is something I struggle to succinctly put into words. All I can say is it smells like how I’d imagine a moldy head of broccoli and a racoon carcass festering in a porta potty in the French Quarter in July would smell. It’s bad.
But this never stopped my mom. She was always there, ready and willing to change my dad’s colostomy bag for him. The smell didn’t deter her, the circumstances didn’t dampen her. She was resilient. She endured a lot of shit—roadside, illness in the family, putrid bag-filled—and she always came out golden and serene.
A couple years after the total colectomy the cancer came back in my dad. But this time it wasn’t going to accept defeat. The cancer took hold of his body from the inside out and his health deteriorated. He was admitted into hospice care when it was evident there was no hope.
At hospice the nurses changed his colostomy bag and administered his medications. Whenever a nurse came in to tend my dad, my mom watched with an attentive gaze. They were doing the jobs she had learned and mastered over the years—she had all the skills and knowledge to be a nurse at that point. My mom didn’t watch the nurses to catch an error or tell them they were doing their job wrong. She watched, I think, because it reminded her of what had now ended. She played the role of mother, wife, and home nurse for so long, and now she was losing the latter two roles. She watched so she wouldn’t forget.
My dad died five days after he was admitted into hospice. My mom, my sisters, and I finally left hospice so his body could be taken care of by the nurses. The car ride home was silent in the beginning. My head was leaned against the front passenger window, eyes set on the side of the road, ruminating. I broke the silence and asked the car if they remembered all the roadside incidents. “Oh my god, do you remember Tennessee?” my mom answered first. “Shitting in the middle of a tornado!” We laughed and then we started sharing our favorite roadside stories. My mom was at the wheel.
Trashcan Sunset
By Misha Lazzara
“I am not the kind of woman who dances behind the bar. I don’t spin in circles and pop the cap of the beer bottle while I’m pouring a vodka soda and smiling at the single (and married, I might add) men staring down my shirt. I have always only been able to do one thing at a time. I once heard a person—forcing empathy—say to me that everyone can only do one thing at a time. But for me, that’s actually true.
I take the black trash bag to the alley out back and try to avoid getting cut by broken bottles. Booze and warm beer drips into my shoes, but there I stand and watch the sunset fall all pastel pink and orange over the brick apartment building and that sub shop that gave me food poisoning once. Remember? The back-alley sunset is, like, burned into my memory. I do feel safe back there. Like suddenly, I don’t feel like I’m wandering around aimless, wasting my life. I can see it now when I close my eyes. Mostly, I don’t have to take the trash out because the venue hires people to clean up after the shows, but I like to because it’s quiet, and I can watch the sun set fat and peaceful, like it knows what it’s doing. Plus I smoke behind the dumpster for about two minutes before someone misses me.
You might think for how busy we are that we make good money working big shows. But all I ever get are a dollar or maybe two on twenty. Every drink costs ten bucks, regardless of what you order. No one coming to the shows can really afford that. Sometimes jam bands play, and their fans are mostly rich white frat boys and sorority girls. They just ignore the music while they scream at each other about certain memories that the song reminds them of. Remember that time we went tubing on the Catawba and Billy almost drown?! Remember that time we all went to Jenny’s and dropped that full bottle of tequila off the balcony onto that minivan?! No one thinks the bartenders are listening. Or maybe no one cares. Actually, sometimes they make sure the bartender can hear. Like they scream a little louder, perform a little happier. But those frat boys have money, or look like they do, still they don’t tip more than a dollar.”
“Does it bother you to see people having fun at the shows, Michelle?”
Barbara, so damn Barbara-ish with her tight bun and brown leather boots up to her knees. Barbara is a tiny woman in her massive cream-colored upholstered chair and thirty-ounce cup full of something green and chunky. All of her artwork is perfectly Barbara with its vaguely spiritual aesthetic without any one religion claiming hierarchy. Is that a lotus flower? An angel? Is that a picture of a saint, a mystic, a cult leader? Only Barbara knows. Bless her. I sighed. My parents paid a fortune for my visits with Barbara once a week, might as well try to make it “work.”
“Does it bother me, Barbara? Yeah, it bothers me when they’re faking it. When they’re blank eyed, their only so-called happy memories are weird and violent and terrifying. It bothers me that they scream into each other’s ears instead of listen to the music they paid to hear.”
“Yeah, that seems irritating. I get that. I don’t know, though, I wonder if maybe music can work, for some people, as a way to reconnect and reminisce with friends and loved ones. Maybe those people can commiserate and find joy in these bizarre experiences they shared when they were younger. And the music’s sonic triggers work to call back those memories. I was hoping to talk about your brother Carter, though.”
Barbara took a deep breath. Somatic breathing, she called it. A performance for my sake, I think. “I know you always loved the music he played, the bands he worked with. I know you mentioned that you were thinking of finishing that album he had started, the one he sent you before he passed. I wonder if you’ve considered that any further.”
“Not really. No. I—I can’t really bring myself to listen to it again. Just that once, I thought, I should finish this for him. But I don’t have the time. I work pretty much every day at four in the afternoon. And my Garage Band updated, so I don’t know what the fuck’s going on with that anymore. It would take me forever to figure out how to work the updates. I can barely make it here to see once a week for an hour, honestly.” Pointer finger working to dig a hole in the upholstery of Barbara’s faux leather couch. Left foot tapping a pace so rapid it wouldn’t even hold for an EDM beat.
Imagine: a bird flies at the window. Imagine: a fracture like a spider’s web. It would only take one finger to shatter the glass. Imagine: escape. It was only one story down to the sidewalk. Not even a broken ankle, probably. But not once has a bird ever sacrificed itself for my freedom. A goddamned diabolical miracle.
*
I sang my own lyrics to all nine of the songs that Carter sent me before he died as I opened beers and handed women in earplugs cheap white wine in plastic mini bottles. I knew the words by heart, in the order that they would go on the unfinished record he sent me with only the guitar parts recorded. Carter insisted we should write a record together. He was so sick of that hired gun life and was ready to branch out on his own. He wanted us to put out our own record, some family band duo.
I couldn’t tell Barbara that I had already written melodies and lyrics. That all the lyrics were about memories. Memories from when Carter when he was a teenage boy and I was a little girl. Memories from when he flew me out to Paris to see him play four shows at the Palladium when he was playing guitar with that southern rock band and got so drunk he puked in a brick alley while holding a lit cigarette up like a baby bird he had to protect. Sonic triggered memories, or whatever bullshit she had manifested from her repertoire of pseudo-spiritual Barbara-isms. Bless her heart. I couldn’t tell Barbara because she would encourage me to finish the record. But then what would Carter and I have left between us—just us?
Blonde girls. Three. Ripped up black t-shirts. Ripped up black jeans. Studded purses. Black pointy nails. These are the uniforms of the uninitiated. This is what they believe people wear to rock and roll shows. This is what Rock N Roll Barbie would wear. But just below, right below the surface the souls are all fluff and Starbucks foam, reality tv shows, retail jobs and backstabbing gossip and—
“What?”
“Four PBRs, please!” The one in front turned to her friends. “I’ll get this round, guys! Congrats on your promotion, Sarah! And fuck Brad! Who needs him!”
“Forty.”
Her eyes went wide. “They’re tallboys.” All I could do was hold my hand out to collect. No sympathy for these three, even if Brad was an asshole.
One of the songs could be layered vocals. Four different harmonies about the Christmas before Carter died. He Facetimed for twenty minutes before dinner. I was already wine drunk, drinking dad’s good stuff as fast as I could. Carter said he was saving up for a new console, something he could use to record our record on. Told me it was crazy expensive but that way we could record and produce ourselves. Lyric ideas: something about two wine-drunk siblings awake al night on different continents, so that Krampus couldn’t come and deliver then any gifts that year.
A man. Kid? Twenties. Beanie. Beard. Orders a beer. Coughs when I tell him the price.
Bud light. Ten dollars. Cough. Coors light. Ten dollars. Eyes wide.
Whiskey on the rocks. Twenty dollars. Flirts with me. I shake my head. Turn around to clean something that I’ve never cleaned before.
Rock N Roll Barbies are back for more PBRs. Sarah gets this round.
It’s nice out tonight, not hell-hot like normal, so all those people who aren’t interested in the opening band have filtered out onto the cement “patio” with beige plastic cigarette receptacles flanking my alleyway. I am jealous of the sunset I know they will be watching soon. But probably, no one will notice it while they talk, but never listen, about their own violent sonic memories.
I sing more lyrics to the Carter’s songs that I know I’ll never record. I think about Garage Band updates. I think about Barbara and birds and broken windows.
Suddenly the building shakes. Something loud, louder than the band, louder than the people screaming into each other’s ears quakes the venue. I look to my left and can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. Bricks, pipes, drywall, the hood of a car. Not just a car but a fucking Hummer or maybe a Jeep or one of those Fords that I always mistake for a cop car. A huge front end of a car, right there in the hallway next to the bathrooms. People are screaming. Bricks keep falling onto the hood. I can’t see the driver, but the car’s barely dented. I can’t hear anything now. Suddenly, everything is quiet except for me; I’m soloing the lyrics to Carter’s songs. A series of high notes in a waltzy country cadence.
And then, there it is. Bright pink and pale blue streaks through the hole in the wall. Some goddamned diabolical miracle. And so, what else could I do? I walk out into the trashcan sunset, that space between the truck and wall, singing my songs. A fracture in the structure, just big enough for my body.
1970
By DC Diamondapolous
Drunk and stoned, Scott staggered out the door of the Whiskey a Go Go and into the night. A blurred neon sign from the Sunset Strip flickered and shuddered through the ebb-and-flow haze that hovered from his high. The notice to appear before the local draft board was crumpled deep in the pocket of his bellbottoms like a wet snot rag.
He lit a Camel. “Happy birthday to me, but who gives a shit,” he shouted at a group of foxes in hot pants. “I’m gonna go to Canada, wanna come?”
Jelly brained, Scott closed his eyes and leaned his bushy blond head against the building until his knees buckled, and he landed on his ass. He blew a stream of smoke up at a three-story-high billboard of Linda Ronstadt, then flicked the cigarette across the pavement.
“Fuck-off. Go on. Get outta here,” said the bouncer, standing outside the entrance to the club.
Scott crawled to his knees as a wave of barf started to peak. He ran up the sidewalk to the back of the Whiskey and threw up on the steps of the fire escape. With the bottom of his tie-dyed T-shirt, he wiped his mouth, felt better, took out another smoke, and lit it.
He didn’t have rich parents who could get him out of the war, he wasn’t a psycho, and no way was he queer. He didn’t have the grades or want to go to college. His passions in life were drawing and surfing. The only thing left was to run away to Canada. But Scott hated the cold, and there were no decent beaches. When his father saw him sketching he’d say, “You’ll never make a living at that sissy artsy-fartsy stuff. Cut your damn hair. Join the military. Be a man.”
If he did go to Nam, he’d kill people he had no beef with. When he told his old man this, he exploded, “Communism must be stopped. Or we’ll all be talking Russian.” His mom stood in the background nodding and silently crying.
When the National Guard killed four students at Kent State, his father told him they deserved to be shot for protesting the war. Scott was dumbfounded. “What about My Lai? Did innocent Vietnamese deserve to be raped and murdered by U.S. soldiers?” “That’s war,” his dad snapped. “It happened in WWII. Korea. It’s no surprise it happened again.” His dad’s answer blew his mind.
Scott asked him if he’d been born German would he have sent Jews to the ovens. His father said, “I would have followed orders, that’s what soldiers do.” “Then you’d be a murderer,” Scott yelled. His dad slapped him. Shocked, Scott held back his rage from wanting to wallop his old man and beat the callousness out of him, but that smack turned the shine on his father’s pedestal to rust.
It was hell living with his family in Hawthorne. Scott moved out, got an apartment, a job at Mattel. He hated the nine-to-five monotony of assembling Barbie Dolls for a paycheck and the tired empty feeling of coming home, getting drunk, smoking pot. He missed the old days when he and his dad fished off the Redondo Beach Pier. He missed having a father.
Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” boomed then faded from a car as it cruised the Strip.
His childhood friend, Robbie, had come home in a body bag. For what? Their generation was screwed. He had no say about the war because he couldn’t even vote. If attacked, Scott would gladly take a bullet for his country. But this war? He slid down the wall of the Whiskey, dragging his angst with him.
His mother called that morning, wishing him a happy birthday. She told him his father loved him. Then why didn’t he call? Scott knew why. His father was stuck in a time warp when going to war was heroic. His dad thought him a coward for not wanting to fight. His parents would freak if he’d run away to Canada.
He stubbed out the Camel and brushed vomit off his sandals.
Through the mist of his high, a mellow warmth broke through. He took out the crumpled draft notice, smoothed and folded it, and stuck it in his pocket.
He needed to draw. He imagined his hand flying across the page, creating a world of his own. It calmed him, made him feel in control. Not even sex could do that.
Scott turned away from the glitz of Sunset, the shimmering lights of the city beyond, and headed up Clark.
His mom’s ‘58 Ford Fairlane — last year’s 18th birthday present — with the remaining scraps from the peeled off bumper sticker, America Love It Or leave It, was parked up the hill.
A group of hippies walked toward him.
“Peace man,” one of the guys said, holding up the V sign of his right hand as he passed.
“Yeah, man. Peace,” Scott said without hope, his strong young body to be used as a killing machine.
He unlocked the Ford, took out his drawing pad and pencil, and sat on a low concrete wall facing Sunset and downtown L.A.
Street lanterns and outdoor apartment building lights cast ominous shadows from manzanita plants.
Scott could have drawn in total darkness, so clear was the picture in his mind, the certainty of his decision.
With the pad on his knees, he sketched the sun setting on a beach in South East Asia with a sandy coastline, palm trees, bamboo boats.
He heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns in the jungle, hissing insects, the smell of death in the rice paddies.
The sprinklers came on and he jumped up, shielding his paper. But Scott liked the river of tears running down his drawing, leaving their trace on his dying body as he took his last breath on the shore of the South China Sea.
How to Make Waffles Like Mom
By Leah Sackett
I am a bully with an origin story. I don’t really have a type of victim. The closest I’d be able to label it was as someone vulnerable. I measure my misanthropic manifestations as minor mishaps, misdeeds of meanness, such as helping an old woman carry her groceries to her car, and bluntly making off with a bag or two. However, I didn’t enjoy my ne’re do well moments. It’s just that assuming the bully’s role was a more natural way to access my mother, who died two years back. Over the divide of mortality, I was trying to force a confrontation and put this trauma to bed, and my mother to rest. Granted, she was six feet under in Sweetgum cemetery with a sizable granite tombstone. It stated her name and that she was a mother, and then dates of here and gone. It said something about being beloved, which one of my sisters put in. Sally, Mary, and Catherine had a different mother than I did. They had a beloved mother. I had the accursed, set upon, put out mother. My mother was plagued with the son of a bastard. He’d walked out when I was four. I had become her albatross by the time I was five. She had no need of men, she’d say. And she sure as shit was not going to raise a womanizing little dick like him.
To be honest, it was my own fault the first time. Mom was curling sally’s ponytail for school. I was eating a piece of grape jelly toast.
“Get that toast out of here, Jacob,” Mom said. “You’re going to get jelly all over the bathroom.”
“Yeah, Jacob, you’re going to get jelly all over,” Sally parroted Mom. That was her only talent to repeat Mom. For most of our childhood, I hated her. I didn’t need two Moms walking around, fingering my real and unreal transgressions. Even when Sally knew the Lego mess was hers or the deck of cards on the coffee table, an abandoned, failing game of solitaire, Sally had no compunction of letting me take the wrath of being a slouch and weak. Sally’s transgressions were pinned on me, and as Mom’s attention magnified with each unforgivable sin, I was getting more and more of her attention. So, while I was pushing my luck with the jelly toast, I saw the opportunity to engage with Mom, and maybe gain something more than wrath, like sympathy, God, what I wouldn’t have given for some sympathy from her punched-up curled lips.
Mom set the curling iron on the gold-flecked sink counter. I dropped my toast on the bath rug, a little flaking of crumbs with a blob of grape jelly on the white bathroom rug. Mom and Sally turned toward the purple glob of horror, and I wrapped my hands around the curling iron barrel. The sound of my own scream was surprising to me. I had really no idea how bad that was going to hurt, and hours later, how bad it would keep burning. My sisters caught the bus, although Sally wanted to stay back and put her two cents in. I shored up any notions that men have a lick of sense in them for Mom. After that day, I was her testament to the stupidity of men and boys. I wondered if I hastened my place of lowliness in her eyes. If I had been brave enough to go out for the baseball team, the swim team, any team, I might have won her approval. But those dreams were spent in the bathroom that morning. I was a worthless fool.
***
The second time, and every time after that, Mom was the guilty one with the curling iron. My sisters would be in the living room, watching, dumbfounded by the morning cartoons and commercials. If it was a school morning, Mom would hurry to corral my sisters out the door and to the bus stop. As soon as they were made scarce, Mom would do it.
“Hold your hand out. Palm up,” she said.
In the beginning, my palm would bead-up with sweat in anticipation of the coming burn. If I screamed, Mom would break out in her own sweat against her brow, followed by a slow creep of a smile on her face. When she removed the iron, the first thing she did was check her curling iron for flesh. Then she’d admire her handiwork. Next was the forgiveness I was giving her. I would make little coos as she cleaned and dressed my left hand. At that moment, she was motherly. Her voice was also soft like a nesting pigeon. Then she would drive me to Sweetgum Elementary school.
***
Once this ritual was tacked in place in our home, it was just a matter of time before school wondered about my bandages and scars. Mom received a phone call and had to pay a visit to the Principal’s office. I had no idea the power of the principal reached all the way back home. The next day, I walked on to class, baring hard looks from my mother. She sat in the sitting area of the Principal’s office, she tapped the heel of her left mustard pump in a rapid rat-a-tat-tat. Even the dust bunnies shirked her presence. By the time my sisters and I tumbled through the front door, I wished I could blend in with them: curls, ribbons, and giggles. But I stood out as I always did.
“Jacob, come in here, please,” Mom said.
I met her in the bathroom.
“Put your hand out,” she said.
She’d never burned me in the evening, only right after breakfast. It hurt the same, but my stomach felt empty, knowing I was vulnerable to her any time. But in the evening, she’d have less time to care for me. There was dinner to get on and laundry to do. Mom told me the story she gave the school. I was informed I was to play along. And I did, it made us complicit in something. It was something I could give her, and she’d be forced to give it back.
Mom had told Principal Sallow that she was worried about me, that I was different. How she’d repeatedly warned me not to touch the curling hour, but inevitably I would. She was thinking of seeking out a child psychiatrist. Principal Sallow gave my Mom a referral, someone in the school system. Mom accepted the business card, and I watched her throw it in the white bathroom waste bin. Mom held no truck with that mental crap.
***
The following school year, I lucked out and got Miss Wisse for fifth grade. She was a billow of logic against the storm front of my mother. For every obvious answer my mother gave, Miss Wisse had another integration. In the second semester, over Easter breakfast, my sisters, too old to participate in egg hunts were next door at the Smiths, helping the little kids and helping themselves.
Mom was making a stack of waffles. I was foolishly nearby.
Mom had filled the iron with batter and paused to look at me.
“You’re getting big,” she said. “You’ve grown a good four inches this school year.”
I watched her watching me. By this point, I knew her look of interest could only simmer down into my injury.
“Put your hand in the waffle iron.”
I hesitated, and she grabbed me by the wrist to force my hand. As she closed the iron, I considered that the batter might buffer the burn, but my hand’s overall damage would be increased.
Upon release from the waffle iron, it was apparent that it actually was less damaging than gripping a curling iron. A sense of relief nestled briefly in my grasp. Mom removed the half cooked, half flesh fragmented waffle and settled it on my plate. She looked like she’d just swallowed a prize kill. A new form of torture had been served up. When Easter break was over, Miss Wisse was on watch for me. She inquired about my burn’s real estate, and I told her it was a waffle iron. Mom was already on the phone with the school secretary, telling our sad tale. In the end, Miss Wisse, as well-meaning as she was, was no match for my mom. I felt a little bit proud.
***
To this day, I cannot eat waffles.
Too Soon, The Snow Will Bury Us
By Richard LeDue
The leaves are yellowing early,
like teeth more afraid of dying
than flossing every day.
Lecture from the dentist
justified, but bleeding gums
more comfortable than a coffin,
prepaid and chosen on a summer
afternoon- undertaker joking
about his last toothache,
although you never asked.
The Wisdom Tooth
By Jim Rogers
It’s been said many times: pulling a wisdom tooth is hell. But it’s not true. The extraction itself is a doddle. You’re under. You don’t feel a thing, don’t remember a thing. But a day or two later, that’s when the pain starts. And it’s no wonder, with that gaping hole, down through the gum to the bone beneath.
I was told I might lose sensitivity because the nerve was so close to the tooth. I wish. Bloody nerve never shuts up. “You’ve a hole in your head! You’ve a hole in your head!”
Yes, yes! I know! Do you have to keep reminding me?
It’s just like the wife, the way she goes on and on with the same old gripes. Her assistant is lazy. Her manager is clueless. Her patients want everything right now, but they don’t want to pay.
I’m not saying she doesn’t have good reason to complain, but it’s the nonstop stream that gets to me. She never sees the bright side. And it’s not just work. We had a really nice meal in a Korean restaurant the other day but all she could do was complain about the table beside us getting served first and how the waiter didn’t warn us the bowls were hot, even though he did.
I cherish my hours alone in the apartment. I get up late, edit a little of the previous night’s work, then watch the soccer. Until she arrives home. I’ve come to hate the sound of the locks. I hear the key and the clunky rotations and I grab the remote, thinking ah crap, there goes peace and quiet for another day.
“I’m going to get that jackass fired if it’s the last thing I do,” she says now as she comes through the door. No chance of hello, darling, how was your day? Tooth still bothering you? Nope, it’s rattle out the complaints like someone just popped the starting gun.
“I found him hiding in the sterilization room,” she goes on.
Ah you were playing hide-and-seek, I might have said some years ago, when we used to have a laugh together. Now, I gaze longingly at the blank TV, the excitement of the game draining from me. The whole thing is so aggravating. Arsenal were losing going into the last ten minutes and now I must wait till she’s gone to bed to see if they managed an equalizer. It’s ridiculous. She cannot bear to see me watching the game. “You sit there all day watching sports,” she’d mouth if she caught me, “and then you’re up all night. It’s not natural.”
I’ve given up trying to explain I write better at night, with her in bed and a bottle of beer next to the laptop. She’d go on about the beer too, if I didn’t hide the empties. It’s tiring, all this negativity. All the more so now with this damn tooth. Though it’s not the tooth that’s to blame, it’s the goddamn hole it left behind.
When she heads off around the corner to the toilet, I take the opportunity to skip over to the shoe rack and pull the bottle of Motrin from its hiding place inside one of my winter boots. I pop four in my mouth. Normally I’d have taken them before she was home but with the celebration of the Arsenal blunder, I forgot.
I chew the tablets, swallow. I don’t know why I chew them. It’s like eating chalk. I think it started when I was reading The Shining a few months back. Jack Torrance liked to chew his aspirins.
The toilet flushes. Here she comes. “You still haven’t done the windows.”
“Didn’t get a chance.”
“What were you doing all day?”
“Writing.”
She sighs. “Only four windows. How long can it take?”
Forever, darling, I want to say but I don’t. There’s no way I’m going at those windows, fifteen floors up and no window guards. It gives me the willies standing next to them when they’re open like this in the summer, even with the mosquito nets in place. I wanted to have window guards installed but the co-op wouldn’t do it for free because we have no children and she thinks that’s outrageous.
She opens the freezer and cries out like she’s found a head in amongst the Häagen-Dazs.
“What the hell’s wrong now?” I ask.
She holds up a box of frozen peas, her eyes wide. “You didn’t get the ones on sale. I wrote it on the list. A dollar a box. How much were these?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s the receipt?”
“I threw it away.” I put my hand to my cheek, wondering when the tablets will kick in. The pain is going up the side of my head to the top of my brain. It’s like there’s a clamp on my skull to keep my jaw from falling apart.
“You have to bring them back.”
“I’m not bringing them back.”
“Fine! I’ll do it.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll go!” She bags the offensive Birds Eye, all ten boxes, and hands them to me. “Though will they take them without a receipt?” I wonder.
“I told you to keep the receipts.”
I walk down under the Williamsburg Bridge to the supermarket, cursing. A dog and his owner give me a look.
I have a friend I meet for a few beers every now and then and he says he envies me. His whole life he’s been looking for a woman. There he is, with only himself to care for. A free man. He’s never had to return his peas. He’s happy with whatever peas he gets, happy if he never gets any.
I don’t return them. It’s too embarrassing. Foregoing the refund, I put the outrageously expensive peas back in the freezer and buy ten for ten. Big savings! She acts like we live from one paycheck to the next. She’s making six figures, for God’s sake. But she’s not happy because others at work are making more and some of them hardly even went to college. I’ve tried to explain to her that it doesn’t matter what others are making, it’s what she’s making that counts. We’re well off in an apartment with a beautiful view of Manhattan. The Empire State Building out one window, the new tower down at the World Trade Center out the other. Of course she doesn’t like it. She wants an apartment on the other side, with a view of the river. Nothing is ever good enough. People dream of having a view like ours and she wants to look over at nondescript Brooklyn.
I like the new tower, the unusual shape. Watching it slowly climb into the sky, the triangles forming, was inspirational. It was the root of the idea for one of my best stories yet. I remember it was the morning I got the wisdom tooth out that I first noticed it peeping into view, the cranes on top like antennae.
I get back home and she’s cleaning the living room window, the sun silhouetting the tower beyond. She turns to look at me and I can read it all in her face. Useless, lazy, sitting about all day, watching your sports. Drinking your beer. Can’t even do the few things I ask. Every day I have to transfer them to the next day’s list.
The list. How I hate the list. Written on a folded sheet of paper. Trivial stuff. Do this, do that. And do it this way. And every night she has to go over it. I have to stop what I’m doing so she can go over the list. “I can read,” I sometimes argue.
“Yeah, you can read and yet you get half the things wrong.” Like the peas, I suppose.
She puts her hand on her hip, in that backwards fashion that seems so unnatural. In the other hand she holds sodden paper towels and she looks at me some more. Then she gives her lip the twist, her expression of disgust. Even in the early days, I disliked the twist.
She reaches out the window to clean the outside. Silly old girl doesn’t even realize you can turn them inside-out. She wobbles a bit and grabs the frame. The twist unfolds and forms an O. I drop the peas, run to her, grab her legs and throw her out the window.
I turn away from her look of utter shock. That wasn’t on the list. I feel bad. I wonder if it’s how a parent feels when punishing a child. But it was the right thing to do. It was for her own good. Mine too. The world’s. I’ve replaced two unhappy people with one happy person. Isn’t that a gain, overall? And she was unhappy and always would be. She couldn’t help herself. Some people simply have no idea how to enjoy life.
One Last Trip for Jim
By Zachary Vacek
I build the chord. First hand in the sixty-third position, second hand in the seventeenth. I begin the progression with my palms touching, pulling them apart as if playing the old accordion in the closet at home. This chord is the Valentine’s Day Jim tried to cook coq-au-vin in our red dutch oven, except he forgot to buy vin at the grocery store and thought Davey’s grape juice was a suitable substitute. We never stopped laughing about that.
Jim lies motionless in his hospital bed. The larghissimo rising and falling of his chest keeps time like the metronome on our piano in the living room. There is nothing on earth so fragile, I think, as Jim is right now. But still, I know, somehow, that he hears these memories.
I continue to play our memories as Dr. Nazad comes in to check Jim’s vitals. With his back turned toward me, Dr. Nazad won’t notice a thing.
First hand in the thirty-third position, second hand in the seventy-second. This is the time Jim picked me up for prom in the midnight-blue corvette his dad let him borrow. He wore a black tux and the sleeves were so long they covered his fingertips so before we went into the dance I used two clothespins I had in my purse to raise the sleeves. His face turned beet red and I knew then that I loved him.
“It’s almost time,” Dr. Nazad says, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Dolores. He’s not in any pain. I’ll leave you two alone now.”
I nod and listen for the machine’s chirp that keeps time on the one vital sign that matters. For a few hours, it’s been slowing like an unwelcome train coming into the station, a decelerating chug-chug-chug I hate hearing yet love to hear because it lets me know he’s still there.
This chord—first hand sixty-third position, second hand seventeenth—is the day we loaded our old grey hatchback and moved to New York so Jim could pursue his dream of becoming a Broadway actor. He never made it on Broadway, but he found good work as a stagehand and I made a little extra teaching kids to play piano so we did just fine. I know Jim would have been a star if only someone had given him a break. I’ll create that memory for him now. I can improvise a little, make it up as we go along. First hand thirty-eighth, second hand ninety-fifth. And there he is; Don Lockwood in Singing in the Rain.
Jim lies there, shriveled and distant in the way any man who’d survived three massive strokes would be, and each time I play a memory for him, the chirp quickens ever so slightly. It’s how I know he’s there. But as time slips by, his heartbeat starts to slip too, no matter which memories I play for him. And that’s how I know he’s ready.
It’s time for the greatest hits.
First hand in the first position, second hand closed. The day we met. First and second hand both in first position. Our wedding day. First hand second position, second hand closed. Davey’s birth, our beautiful baby boy.
The best memories are the easiest to play.
I hold this chord a little longer, pulling unseen strings between my heart and his, extending my arms as far as they go, then bringing them gently back together, a decrescendo of sorts. Then I lean over him, and say, “Wasn’t that a great day?” I kiss his forehead, hold his hand, and stare into his brown eyes. “We had some of the best days.”
His chest rises and falls, keeping time.
Davey is waiting outside in the hallway, and I motion him in. “It’s time,” I tell him and we both cry together and say goodbye to a husband and a father and a friend. Through my tears I see Davey’s hands widening and moving gracefully across his own unseen strings. First hand eighty-fourth, second hand fifth. I wonder what memory the two of them are sharing.
My hands, too, begin to play again. First hand twenty-ninth, second hand third. The time Jim had to go on a business trip to Boston, long after he gave up on Broadway and got a “real” job. I drove him to the train station to see him off and he took a seat by the window so we could smile at each other for a while longer. The whistle blew a long, loud goodbye and Jim blew me kisses and I caught them. Then I stood there on the platform until the train disappeared around the bend.
Music of the Spheres
By Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Flashpoint
By Antoni Ooto
In the panicked footfalls of terror
and the weary waves
of birds winging
unnamed heroes wage heated battles
rushing onto the orange stage
with no simple exit
changing over useless scattered seasons
leaving a stone on our tongue
Utter Destruction
By Irfan Jeddy
Sachiko, age six born in 1939, sat in her class quietly solving a math problem given by the teacher. She raced against her other students, calculating numbers in quick sloppy strokes. It was quiet in the room for the most part except for the fan that made a humming sound as it whirled around cooling the class on this hot summer morning. Each student positioned themselves the same, hunched, leaned over their desk, holding down the corner of their paper firmly with a left fist. The teacher eyed the clock on the wall counting each second till a minute passed by. The morning sun crept through the rectangular windows of the room. The windows faced the entire city. Cars and pedestrians went about as normal. The city itself was busy as usual.
Every now and then Sachiko’s hair would flop in her face, distracting her eyes from her calculations. She blew her hair from a puffed out lower lip but it only came falling back down again. Taking a moment’s break she tucked her hair firmly behind both ears and began working again, writing even quicker to make up for those lost seconds. Sachiko, was one of the brightest students in the class, most of the students even thought so. She excelled particularly at math, and luckily for her it was her favorite subject. She was able to solve what most of her peers couldn’t. The numbers came to her head like musical notes. They played like a tune for her, as if each equation she solved was its own unique song. She was in control of the speed, the pitch and what sounded best to her. Almost always, did she play a perfect tune.
Her wrists slid down the page almost faster than she could write. She never used her eraser and only scratched out her mistakes, she felt that erasing would slow her down. And in the practical sense who could argue. The teacher counted down the last ten seconds of the minute. Her sight was still on the clock. As the long hand positioned itself at 8:08 the teacher shouted in an inside voice “Time!” Sachiko shot her hand straight into the air. She wiggled her fingers loosely as her arm locked stiff. Sachiko eagerly looked at the teacher with a smile and a respectful stare. Her hand was the first one up just by half a second from the rest of her peers. The teacher looked around the room waiting to see more hands raised and indeed a few seconds later the remaining students sprung up their hands. She lifted her butt off her seat trying to look a bit bigger in hopes the teacher would call on her. The teacher looked at the written question on the black board and called out “Sachiko, please answer!”
Sachiko was delighted and she popped out from her seat grabbing her sheet of paper and quickly walked to the board. She took a piece of chalk off the ledge of the black board, looked at her piece of paper, and began to write on the board. She tried to write with her usual quick hand but the teacher stopped her. “Please explain each step, Sachiko,” she said. Sachiko proceeded only now steadying her hand and writing legibly. She would write out a step, turn to the teacher and the rest of the class, explain her step, and would turn back to the board to write the next step.
The remaining students would compare their steps with hers, and whisper to each other as to what answer they got. “No talking!” The teacher said without looking over at the rest of the class. The rest of the students zipped their mouths and looked back at the black board. Sachiko finished sufficiently and the teacher looked at her answer that she had circled in a bubble. Sachiko looked at the teacher with blushes of nervousness in hopes she hadn’t made any mistakes. The teacher rose from the side of her desk she had been leaning on and moved towards the black board.
“Correct” she said with a smile. Sachiko gleamed brightly and went back to take her seat. Her fellow classmates all congratulated her as she walked back, her smile was her only response. The teacher had erased the black board and wrote down another problem. This time one that was a little longer and a little harder. “One minute” the teacher said to the rest of the class. In unison the students flipped over their sheet of paper and began to solve the new equation. The teacher looked back at the clock. Sachiko sprinted her hand across the page trying to be the first to find the answer.
During this time a nine ton “Little Boy”, as it was named, dropped from a plane. It flew down along with a parachute into Sachiko’s city. It dropped down and reached the city in only forty five seconds. Forty five seconds was all it took for calamity to happen. It unleashed a giant cloud as it detonated that caught the attention of Sachiko as she saw it in the corner of her eye. She turned towards the window and her eyelids snapped into each direction. An uneasiness set inside her. She put down her pencil and raised her hand at the teacher. “Already, Sachiko?” The teacher said with surprise. Sachiko shook her head and pointed at the window. The teacher tore her gaze off the clock and turned towards the window, and fear struck her from what she saw in the sky. She screamed in terror and the remainder of the students looked to see what was happening. A shock wave shot through the city, impacting the school with spiteful speed. The teacher and the students were suddenly swallowed up by a piercing atomic light. Within a matter of seconds their home and their entire existence was wiped from the face of the earth.
Catastrophe
By John Grey
All this from seeing
another door opening,
blithely entered a house
where for the hundredth time
I had no chance –
as if this was the only state –
it was of walls
keeping the rooms separate,
my hands feeling their way in darkness,
my footsteps unsure,
so many places to look
but never saw another in one,
the entire experience
bypassing my mind,
so I lashed out
and I stomped hard,
broke a panel or two
but only rats spilled out,
could no longer hold my center,
then the floor went
and I crashed down to the basement –
this is where I sent the post card,
looking up at where I’d fallen from,
my world – and no way of reaching it.
Tacit Bond
By Antoni Ooto
Before heeling away,
she glared back at him
taking measure;
husband, father,
lover, bastard,
saying…
“There are two things
you’re really good at;
making money, and stealing joy.”
And in the cooling time
She’d again put him above all else.
It was her way.
She practiced for 55 years,
had a talent for loving the wrong man,
you see,
holding on, even when all of us,
her children were gone,
holding on was all she knew—
After he died
how relieved I was,
thankful even, to be rid of threats,
rants, inflated expectations—
thankful, at last, for peace.
But now, twenty years on,
he finds a need to sneak from the grave,
stealing relief, filling my head,
with scenes I wish to forget.
You & I: Through the Portal
By Yolande Brener and Danielle Imara
Brener and Imara pace their rooms, trapped indoors. On different sides of the Atlantic they slip into each others’ realities and merge in a maelstrom of chaotic colour.
Those Moments of Silence
after Loreena McKennitt
By Robert Beveridge
It is those times after sex, when
you have fallen asleep, as my
fingers play the curves of your body
and your sleeping throat
sings muted pleasure.
It is those times after work, your
key in the door and the way
your hands squeeze my shoulders,
how our kiss releases the day’s
desire for one another.
It is those times after sleep, when
I awaken with my chest against
your back, our legs entangled
and the scent of your hair in my nose,
when your neck is relaxed, open to my lips.
Kintsugi
By Sarah Jane Justice
When I first heard the word kintsugi, I saw myself more cracks than clay. I was split edges that didn’t fit back together, I was rips cut through rips, I was missing fragments lost across a map of years half-lived.
I met men who with the best intentions bent and glued and stretched my edges, jammed them into place and said they thought they’d put me back together.
But, where they gave me glue, you gave me time, you mined the gold I set between my gaps, and called me art for all my splitting cracks.
These days, I wake held tight as if you think I’ll drift away, as if your still half-dreaming eyes are sure I’ll float if you let go, as if I’ll rise to live inside one of those clouds we walk below.
With eyes still closed, you grip me like you worry I’m a dream, like you’re scared I’ll disappear, that both your eyes will fully open and I’ll never have been here.
I’ve lived through fog, through days so dark that I can’t see where lines might split apart. But now, I wake to feel your arms. I wake to hear your voice. I wake to feel the heart that gently beats beneath your skin. I wake to feel your golden threads where all my cracks have been.
Kintsugi
By Julia Paul
My Sticky Weight of Gold
By Eric Isaacson
these keyboard fragments shiver
into a sound like frantic laughter.
a nervous shuddering of wild eyes
and promises broken into points.
that dulled their hungry sharpness
of you-said and you-failed, boy
hungrily into my skin
so slowly, too ouch
slowly dragging worry lines
into my forehead each night
as I try to sleep with my
thing of a shattered mind.
sometimes I notice the dripping red in my eyes.
but most times, I yawn a scream, then get extremely high.
so that a daisy is a here, my dear never again
will things end when
I said they never would.
Ever.
but soon I crash
into an even more fragmented semblance
of me? on the ceiling as I sleep
the shards weep a dream that
says my skull could be repaired! with a substance
other than a holy golden ecstasy trip to the moon
for an hour of odd after-hour tinder sex
incinerated by moaning the wrong name.
whoops, time to dance out the pain on a dance
floor. more coke? For me? Thanks, best friend!
I don’t even know. lets throw a party
in the laughing eyes of our gold
so that everything is perfect and
the epoxy hens of mourning shitting their egg bombs
into my sleeping plaster cracks. the waning evening sun screams
I wake up into this dopamine-loss of ‘never again’
yet again. my jeweled masks are thrown around my room
like last night’s thrown-up expense. no time
to scramble some eggs of my brain gotta
grind that mind into showing up, never growing up
into the smoothie of making dat bread again.
let’s do this terribly golden song and dance again and
wouldn’t it be nice if this poem had an ending like cheap tape.
let alone one rhyming in the pretty schemes of its relentless gold.
Promise (as usual)
By Constance Woodring
You and I
By Juliet Lockwood
My hands shake as I unlock your apartment door. I didn’t eat a whole lot for breakfast, but now I wish I hadn’t eaten anything. You knew when I’d be coming. For a second, hope rises. Maybe you’ve decided to grant me a tiny piece of amnesty; maybe you’re not here.
I shuffle forward. How many times did I come bounding into this apartment, full of excitement, so delighted to see you? I remember the time I realized you liked me as more than just a casual friend. I walked up those same stairs, ran my fingers as I would countless times after over the same scratchy spot on the adobe wall.
That day you were wearing your favorite overalls, the ones with all the patches, the ones I would come to love the sight of, and you gave me your crooked contagious smile and said, “Well there’s the best part of my day! What took you so long?” What a crazy brand of magic you kindled inside me with those words, even more powerful than the day we met.
Though, I’ll never forget that day either. I was sitting in that coffee shop, completely inside my turtle shell with a book firmly affixed to the front of my face. You stood behind the counter, magnetic as ever. I would never have had the guts to chance so much as a sideways glance at you, let alone try to have a conversation. Then that young guy came in and started talking about some independent film he’d just seen, and he made that reference to Capra which made both of us laugh. That’s when you looked up.
After he left, you came over and looked at my book since it was in front of my face. Finally I lowered it; our eyes met.
“What a little punk, huh?” you asked, jerking your head slightly toward the door. I laughed again, because I couldn’t imagine anything intelligent to say. In my brain, I was racing around gathering up all the bits and pieces I knew about Capra, nearly panicking, because there wasn’t a whole lot. How I feared looking foolish to you, but you didn’t want to talk about Capra, thank god!
Of all things, you liked that I was reading Vonnegut. I kept to myself that while I enjoyed him, I found his style a tad too facetious. We talked about the one of his we had both read, much firmer ground for me. Good literature, I know. And then your friend walked in. I’d seen the two of you talking and laughing together before, so I expected you to retire from me. Instead you invited her over and tried oh so hard to encourage the three of us to have a conversation. Of course, it didn’t work out. She clearly wanted to talk to you alone, and that was just fine with me. Our little chat
was about all the excitement I was up for that day anyway.
But I kept coming back, and you kept talking to me. I appreciated that so much, because most people gave up on me after one or two attempts. That was before you taught me all the little tricks to keep a conversation going and how to exit gracefully whenever I was getting tired. It was after the third time I ran into you that you casually invited me over to your apartment. You seemed to know I’d be more comfortable with no firm commitment, even though I had started to crave knowing you better.
I remember waking up the next morning, agonizing over whether to go, staring and even talking to myself in the mirror, reasoning back and forth and saying stupid stuff like, “Right now, this person thinks you’re cool. If you go over to the apartment, you might do something stupid, and then you’d never be able to go back to that coffee shop.” I considered and waffled for about 20 minutes before picking up my keys.
How many hours did we spend together right here after that? We cooked. We played Rummy. We watched ridiculous daytime TV. You told me story after story from your life. I couldn’t believe you’d actually lived in New York and grown up the way you described, like one of those feral teens. I’d always been afraid of them, but I never felt afraid of you, well, not till last week anyway.
And now I see you at the sink. My body freezes; inside, anxiety is crashing down in my stomach. I almost lose my breakfast. Do you know I’m here? I can’t tell. You’re scrubbing dishes so hard with your back to me.
“Get your stuff , leave your key and get out.” Your words rake my already raw heart. I might bleed right on your carpet. How could one tiny mistake create so much change? I only told you so you could guide me through it. I needed your sage advice, your superior world experience. I didn’t think it was such a betrayal, such a “breach” you called it.
“You did know,” you said, when I confessed to you last week. “You did know, because we talked about this very thing. That’s what actually makes this a thousand times worse. You knew, because you know that happened to me before, because I’ve told you about the worst thing that ever happened to me, so don’t say you didn’t know.”
I sure as hell don’t know now. I don’t know anything, not even where my stuff is, because I’m terrified of every single thing in this room, all the memories, this new version of you, that I’ll collapse from shock at any second.
You turn to me, and I just can’t believe that seeing me this way won’t soften you, won’t remind you of how far you’ve brought me in a way only you could. You told me once I was the most idealistic and genuine person you’d ever met. If you know that about me, how can you not know how hard this is on me? How can you not believe the truth, that I really didn’t think it was such a big deal? Would I ever have told you if I’d known it would hurt you so much? You must know I didn’t mean to hurt you!
“You must know I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I say it quietly.
“Don’t start.” Like a scythe, your words. You have that command over me that you always do, even as crazy thoughts run through my mind. I’m riding on the strength of your words, now. I have none of my own left. You point to the box in the corner, and like a robot, I go pick it up. I’m simultaneously staring at you and away from you. It sounds impossible, but this is an impossible moment. I start toward the door.
“Your key,” you remind me. Again, that perfectly even tone, as if you too have nothing at all inside you. I stop, set down the box, pull my mess of keys out of my pocket and find yours more quickly than I would have thought possible. It helps that I’m not fumbly anymore. You’ve put me into that zombie survival mode I’ve only experienced a few times. My spirit, where I live inside myself, is freaking out, but a baser part of me, an ugly creature free from flesh and feeling, has taken over.
Without looking at you, I snap the key off the ring and set it on your counter before turning to pick up the box of stuff that I won’t have the stomach to look through for months. As I walk to the door, I’m screaming on the inside, Turn around, look back, look back one last time! This is your last chance! But it’s like you’re sending me out with your sheer will power, or perhaps that’s my sheer terror, or they’re one and the same now. I’m down the stairs before I even remember to run my hand over the scratchy part of the adobe one last time.
Can’t believe it! Can’t believe it! Can’t believe it! But I’m opening my trunk and putting the box inside. I’m getting in my car, driving away, and I still haven’t looked back! It’s several blocks before the zombie mode wears off, and I pull over opening my door just quickly enough to retch onto the road instead of all over myself.
Shaking, I drive to the nearby park, avoiding our gazebo and parking in the small far lot where we never did. I walk to the tree where I used to sit and read when I was in high school. Plopping down underneath, I expect I will finally cry, but I don’t. I stare out over the empty park and shiver in the sharp wind. What would I be doing today if I’d had the good sense to keep my trespass to myself? What would we be doing today?
More importantly, what would we have been doing next year, 10 years from now? I’ll never know. I’ll never know if we would have grown to love each other more, or if some other stupid mistake on my part would have driven a wedge between us. I’ll never know if I could have possibly tired of any tiny detail about you. I can’t imagine that, but it’s common wisdom that familiarity breeds contempt.
And we were surely getting familiar before I opened my big mouth last week, before I let what I thought was just a tiny drop of guilt dribble down my chin.
Friendship in Silhouette
(nonfiction)
By Jennifer Shneiderman
Ruby’s dark silhouette falls away. Now I can see the karaoke singers. They are women in denim short shorts, wearing too much eye makeup and belting out “Black Velvet”. Ruby’s head had been blocking my view of the stage. Now her head is on the filthy floor, the rest of her splayed out and oddly stiff, like a deer laying on the side of the road. Her eyes are wide open, staring at the black rubber feet of the bar stools. I crouch over her and she stands up stiffly as though her body has been encased in papier-mâché; she will crumble and collapse if I touch her.
I walk her back to her rented Catalina Island vacation house. I tell her how guilty I feel that I never said anything. All the nights I heard clinking ice cubes and liquid pours during our late night chats. The time I accidentally tasted her spiked drink during our vacation in Hawaii, and she just looked the other away. I did too.
Ruby and I are close. She is more important to me than a sister. She is a tiny person who drinks large tumblers, 95% alcohol and 5% juice. Her breath smells like she is fermenting and decaying from the inside. Worry sets my head on fire.
“You aren’t saying anything I haven’t said to myself a thousand times,” says Ruby, shivering, her long, thin dress and sandals no match for the night ocean breeze. Her husband meets us at the door. I cry, telling him of Ruby’s collapse. He laughs and shrugs.
In the morning, Ruby calls me at my motel. She is cheerful and invites me to go kayaking. She refuses to acknowledge her blackout. I confront her. She never speaks to me again.
Fifteen years have passed. I try to remember what she looks like. Ruby’s dark silhouette falls away.
Fractures
By Greta Mau
Previously published in Up North Lit
In a dream, I bite into an apple and it shatters like glass in my mouth
In the next, I am drinking from a bottle and find chips of the neck imbedded in my gums
And all I can think of is
how you turn my dreams to glass,
how you turn my dreams into blood-spitting numbness.
You seem to weasel your way into everything I create.
But I must be too much like Icarus. Too greedy. Too awed by the sun’s rays for my
shabby wings to hold. I was blinded by its soft warmth and dropped by what I thought
was keeping me afloat. After hitting the water I gasped for air, only to spit out sea glass.
It is a curse.
But my dreams cannot be real
For my gums have not bled since I lost my baby teeth.
For my apples are handpicked from my backyard.
For Icarus was just an overzealous boy, weary for escape,
unlistening to the words of
his like minded father.
Yet, in the mornings
I check my mouth for scars.
But when I smile at you,
I still taste blood.
Primordial Handicap
By John Maurer
Would they ever believe
we poison ourselves for pleasure?
Do they understand
an artist deconstructed?
Parts of themselves laid out
on the galvanized steel countertop
Rearranged for what will surely not be the last time
I do not expect me to be myself
I expect myself to be who I wish I was
I only love myself when I can be what I am not normally
and I love normalcy, but I certainly can’t comprehend it
I would be it if I wasn’t everything that can’t be it
Born with a brain that can’t be the same even over the course of a day
I am manic and modular and the antonym of consistent
I am the unnamed color that waxes and wanes but never lands on a singular shade
Serene Aquamarine
By Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Between Sun and Tide
By Antoni Ooto
a wind grey gull
sails across my canvas
an ocean and a day possessed
of instinct and scent
temperature and
wind
all of which I am
as connections piece themselves back
any of which may be true
across a familiar vision
and me
with less time.
Cold Gray
By Michael Lee Johnson
Below the clouds
forming in my eyes,
your soft eyes,
delicate as warm silk words,
used to support the love I held for you.
Cold, now gray, the sea tide
inside turns to poignant foam
upside down separates-
only ghosts now live between us.
Yet, dreamlike, fortune-teller,
bearing no relation to reality-
my heart is beyond the sea now.
A relaxing breeze sweeps
across the flat surface of me.
I write this poem to you,
neglectfully sacrificing our love.
I leave big impressions
with a terrible hush inside.
Gray bones now bleach with memories,
I’m a solitary figure standing
here, alone, along the shoreline.
There are None
By Diana Raab
Of all those who I’ve met
I cannot find one
whose essence I admire fully,
whether it’s their clothes,
their walk, their house,
their fragrance or their vibe.
There’s a little bit from one
and a little bit from another,
put together, they are whole like me,
but please don’t hold me accountable
to who I love—
I love none.
And there is no hope
Golden Glue
By Mary Maeve McGeorge
We’ve all got things to give. Those things (infectious hope, advice, a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold, a listening ear, parts of ourselves intended to make others feel whole, that golden glue, intended to piece them back together until they’re gleaming anew) eventually run out. Once you give, you can’t get it back. It’s theirs now, no longer yours.
I didn’t realize, until that very night, just how much of my own golden glue I had used to fill the voids of others. Until I saw the cracks coursing through me, the broken pieces that now needed mending and noticed I’d given all my golden glue away.
She always said, “You fix me in a way nobody else can.” Something I always took as a compliment, words I didn’t realize weighed the teeter totter so I could hardly stand on my own without her pushing me back up again.
That night, she called (as she always did when her world crumbled). “I need you.”
I went over without hesitation. It was the way I had always been with her: unapologetically there. I drove around her block a dozen times before I found a parking spot. The streets were clogged with the last stragglers of the commuters, dreary from the routine that had sucked up yet another four hours of their day. I walked into her apartment four minutes after I’d promised I would be there. She was curled up on the couch, her hair in a messy bun, her eyes stricken with red veins snaking beneath her pupils like a broken frame.
“You’re late.”
“What’s wrong?” Deflection was a critical shield of mine, when it came to her. Claim indifference of the criticisms she threw my way like arrows. Most times, she hit the bullseye.
“I slept with him.”
“Who?”
“Well, you know how you said sometimes the only way to move on is to find someone new? So I texted him, and we’ve been flirting back and forth for weeks. Then last night, he asked if I wanted to get drinks. Of course I went, he’s dreamy…”
I stopped listening to wonder who he was. Something in my gut told me I didn’t want to know, another part of me knew I needed to know. Intuition is funny like that. Sirens sounding: a warning bad news is hurdling your way, bad news you won’t be able to blink away once it has pushed past the walls of ignorance and risen to the surface.
“So we’re talking and it’s going great. I swear his eyes lit up with every word that came out of my mouth. But then I guess I had too many drinks, because the next thing I knew I was in his bed.”
“Who is he?”
“So anyways, when I wake up this morning, he’s telling me he has a really busy day…blah, blah, blah. I hardly even heard him because I knew what he was doing. Absolutely devastating.”
“What was he doing?”
“Preparing to ghost me, of course. Didn’t you say that’s what he always does?”
Her words pierced me as recognition came to the forefront of my mind. “Who are you talking about?”
My expression must have mirrored the horror I felt inside, because her face fell. “I thought you told me to go for him?”
I took a deep breath. With her, I had always told myself to tread carefully. She had been through a lot, was still working through a lot, would always be going through a lot. “What part of I don’t think I’ll ever be over him sounds like you should go for him?”
She regained her composure, sucking at her cheeks and widening her eyes. All feigned looks of innocence aimed at exuding the perception that she was broken. Like I’d be prepared with my golden glue, ready to put her back together again. Tears formed in her eyes as bile pushed at the back of my throat, her way of being suddenly nauseating to me. Even more nauseating was my propensity to help those inclined to step across my own broken pieces, shattering until I was nothing but dust sticking to a muddied floor.
“You told me he was great, and that I needed to move on with someone great.”
“Anyone other than him.” It could have been anyone. She chose him.
“But you guys never even dated.”
My thoughts swirled in opposition to one another. She’s my best friend. She isn’t the same friend to me as I am to her. He is the one person I will never get over. She knew that, but did she? If I did this to her, how would she react? Would she still be standing here? Would she be rationalizing me as a friend worth keeping, or would she say I was never there in the way I should’ve been?
I stood up. Bit my tongue. Committed the look in her eyes to memory, promising myself I would remember it as the antithesis of empathy, the poster child for fulfilment of selfish desires.
“I’m going to head out.”
“Oh come on, don’t be so dramatic.”
The irony was that every tiny tangle she encountered in her life seemed to be ablaze with disastrous consequences. I was always the one waiting to extinguish the flames she herself built. Filling the cracks she shattered, my golden glue gleaming with empty pride.
I left without another word.
The streets were empty now, amplifying the most unwelcome realization. I was alone. If I fell, no one would be there to pick me up. I pushed past the thought, and continued the trek to my car. It was a Monday night in the height of fall. It was the type of night meant to make you feel lonely, prematurely disappearing sun, crisp air that bit at your cheeks, closed doors and sealed windows.
A ticket was waiting for me on the hood of my car. Loading zone. Three hundred dollars down the drain; I wouldn’t be getting new tires anytime soon. When I returned to my studio apartment just off the edge of the Marina, the lights were all off. I didn’t turn any on. I knew my way around, and somehow the light seemed too harsh for that moment. As if seeing my own hands would confirm just how much of myself I had given to those who didn’t deserve it.
Broken
By Sarah Bricault
I have heard love described as brokenness —
that it takes you apart and puts you back together.
And deconstruction is — god — so damn beautiful,
an expression of trust
that they will see you shattered, all those
sharp edges, nothing left to hide,
and pluck them, one by one,
caressing every part of you,
until you are whole again.
But shattered is where you left me.
I tried for so long to find each piece a
perfect fit
in my broken body —
but it never worked.
It took years for me to realize —
I am not the pieces.
I am the sinew, the white-knuckled glue, the
god-damn duct tape holding them together.
And, perhaps, if a lover melds you, guides your becoming,
maybe then the seams are golden and beautiful.
But I am proud of my duct tape.
I feel myself teetering on collapse,
stitches pulling taught against a wound infected,
threatening to throw me back into that perfect
broken
abyss.
I have made it this far.
And maybe tomorrow I will fail.
But duct tape is strong.
I am strong,
and I can make it, one more day.
Blurred Insanity
By Sophia Vesely
Most nights,
I am there
fighting the rain.
Windshield wipers
as boxing gloves.
Headlights
as a most menacing glower.
Most nights,
I am there —
angry
while the torrential chaos
persists as the pestle
to the aggrieved mortar
of the steel exterior,
while the rubber tires
slip and slide
beneath the rumbling ire of my gears.
Yet tonight,
somehow I am here
finding solace in the storm.
In my obscured vision,
In the absolute of its blurred outlines.
The world is nothing more —
existing no further
than the two inches ahead.
Yet tonight,
somehow I am here
passionately consumed
in an illusion
that I am not the only thing
misshapen,
the only thing
unclear.
Unknowing that it takes a deluge
to shroud my incompletion,
to deafen the pulse of my
insanity.
Chasing a Dream
By Mehreen Ahmed
I am old. But I wear a slippery, silken skin without a single crease. I carry a great many twigs, logs and sodden leaves. I bear boats and swords and house swordfish, home to spoons, plates and glasses. Gold, and silver of priceless trinkets. I witness listless stories of storms and floods. Human dramas played out upon my body. Great tragedies, even comedies sometimes upon my breast, cherished ephemera, jeweled bridal cavalcade of lost arks. Destruction of land, giving way to new ones across the other side. New farms yellowing, new laughter ringing, new loves budding, on the far stretch of the alluvial soil.
Then one day, the drama takes a turn as I bend around the lofty gums. All is going smoothly on the precious, fine land. There is a thud. A branch falls off. Splosh, Splish, Splash. I cave in, a moment, pirates are on the run. A sepulchre is lowered. It touches the bottom of my gut. That the pirates mutter, not enough, not enough is taken from the new land. A new bride’s home has been ransacked. Her bridal jewelry in the casket; bales have been torched, and people burnt alive. Yet, that is not enough, the weighty sepulchre, more gold and more silver on the horizon. My body is murky and heavy in places. Dark and grisly sorrow is painted. In my burrow, I see what I see, I hear thee. I record all your grievances and I bury them down-under. I record, not recoil, but the vengeance is mine.
A cyclone slaps hard, a catcher in the rye, takes the pirates on the lurch, in frenzy of a ruckus. They flee as far as they see. But the eye chases them until it is dawn. It takes them astride. The pirates are funneled and then embedded, not far from the sepulchre. This is the story, I take back to the maiden, bereaved in white garment. It has happened. Now you can move on. Make new jewelry, even more fashionable ones. The maiden hears me out. But she says nothing. And I wonder, why this news has not sunk at all. The sun has risen. Vultures have flown away. The time is now ripe to chase the dream of life.
The divine numbers, 1,2,3 and 4 are pure and willful. They do what they do. They slide, and never look back. Use it. This window of opportunity may not return. Pirates are gone and will not be coming along in a long, long time now. I cannot wait for I am the tide of both glad tidings and bad. I proceed unhindered. I mope for loss. When the bridge is crossed, over the moss, I see an albatross. Swooping low, it speaks to me, oh no no! The maiden is cursed. No rhyme, no reason. They said she brings bad luck. A community of fools has decided that they must condemn her to distrust. No happy ending, this tale ends here. My nuanced waves cannot be euphoric. No winds to stir it, no big ships foghorn. On my placid waters, the maiden’s body surface. I push on at once. The chase begins —- an endless motion of chasing a dream, a metaphor of a wavering journey yet to be realized.
Sixteen
By Sadie McCaulley
October
By Gregg Williard
The graphic narrative of a woman broken by a fall but getting up anew is echoed in the jangled rhythm of animation frames, that resolve (as she does) into stillness, and then a measured walk over the horizon.
Rationale for Yelling at Passing Clouds
By Richard LeDue
All we leave behind are mouths sewed shut.
That’s why we must be loud while living:
make love with the windows open,
let polite neighbours reminiscence
about yesterday’s sneeze.
Don’t always just smile, repeat
your name until they remember it,
tell them you’re allowed
bathroom breaks at work,
let their deaf eyes struggle to make sense
of those who still talk to themselves
on empty mornings.
Or better yet, find the tallest building,
let elevator music sooth you
until you’re at the top
and then yell at the passing clouds,
only to accept the madness
that goes alone with the hope of being a little less
silent than the rest.
For the Coming of the Storm
By Fabrice Poussin
Winter Mornings
By Lydia Chapman
It was crisp winter mornings like those
When winter whisked flurries into whipping window overhangs
Bushes yield to wind in lackadaisical sway
Frost embalmed each thorn and thistle while snow drizzled over dormant twigs of trees In such a lively season, yet so much of nature is gone or dead
Faint stoneface reflection in the lake frozen over
That the sapping of warmth from my shivering body reminds me that life still does dwell Here, I am life.
It was crisp winter mornings like those
When winter whisked flurries into whipping window overhangs
Bushes yield to wind in lackadaisical sway
Frost embalmed each thorn and thistle while snow drizzled over dormant twigs of trees In such a lively season, yet so much of nature is gone or dead
Faint stoneface reflection in the lake frozen over
That the sapping of warmth from my shivering body reminds me that life still does dwell Here, I am life.
The Shower
By Allison Whittenberg
It’s winter.
The water runs cold
She is about the blizzards
She imagined as a child
How she’d think of herself trapped
And far from home, the spring
With its gentle rain never coming,
Those summers with their nights
Of heat lightning
Court and spark…
Soul Search
By Elizabeth Lueth
Standstill for Superspelling: 3 Found Stanzas
By Yuan Changming
1/ U as in You
See less Watermelons On Sale
Try Our New Anus Steak Burger
Drive Thru Loaded Bowel: $3.99
Cuntry Inn Closed
15 Best Things about Our Pubic Schools
2/ S for Suck
Sweet Pee
No Regerts
Welcome Back, Hope You Had a Good Brake
Have a Family Escape Plane
Violators Will Be Towed & Find $50
3/ A as in America (Great Again?)
I love my whore family
Now hiring smiling feces
The Blind Feels the Elephant: East Idiom Reinterpreted
By Yuan Changming
Here’s the elephant,
Said Rajah’s servant to one blind
Man, showing him its head. To another, its ears; &
To the third, its trunk, & the tusk, the foot, back, tail &
Tuft in turn. Then, Rajah asked each to describe what
An elephant is. It’s like a pot, answers the one presented
With the head. No. It’s like a winnow, the one who has
Studied its ears. In fact, it’s a ploughshare, the tusk-man
Claims. You are all wrong. It’s a plough per se, insisted
The trunk-man.
Add all your descriptions together, says
Rajah finally, & you can perhaps get the whole picture!
Or can we?
Kintsugi for Razmuffin
By Bumphead Parrotfish
embrace the damage done
expose the battles won
broken, shattered
fallen, damaged
restore, transform
showcase beauty
scars on display to see
my lacerations freed
the pristine perfect transforms to beauty through fracture and reconstruction
my soul in a cup, a fragile cell cracked by hurt and pain, fractured by love lost
broken, shattered
fallen, damaged
broken, shattered
fallen, damaged
the scars displayed
for all to see
the ongoing story
of your beauty
the puzzle pieces…
Chagall's Mirrors of Perfection
By Sena Chang
***content warning: graphic imagery of death***
There was Brain Activity
By Dominic Traverzo
after the second shot of reposado
the paramedic speaks of a call from a man with a gun on his tongue
nervousness causing the barrel to slide out just before firing
blowing his jawline and dentures into the backseat
into his third beer
he mutters about a twenty-two year old who combined adrenaline with asphalt
hair and eyebrows remained pristine, bloodied chaos to everything below
a poor bastard who now needs to edit his Tinder profile
laughter
silence
sleep is at times hard to find
when the meat grinder mangles the hand of an assertive factory worker
firecrackers obliterate the forearms of a father
while his children wait to be astounded in vibrancy
the bludgeoned elderly Haitian man who called the paramedic Jesus
and whispered to not take him away from his family just yet
a knife invading the skull and nicking the temporal lobe
of someone trying to stop a fight between drunken nephews
engage and detach
laugh and become silent
the clouds reclaim the airspace
Avoiding Stagnation
By Alex Phuong
Firstly published in Art Block Zine; Volume 4, Issue 2: "Processing" in July 2019
Change is the only constant,
but only those willing to
change themselves
can make the world
a better place
Towards the Other Side of Night
By Yuan Changming
Since yester twilight
Along the borderline of tonight
With fits of thirst & hunger
Among storms of pain
Under attacks of evils & viruses
Between interludes of insomnia
Beyond both hope & expectation
At the depth of darkness
Amidst the nightmare
Through one tiny antlike moment
After another…
Against deadly despair
Until awakening
To the first ray of dawn
Axis of Power
By Lindz McLeod
I – a globe –
haunt briefly under heady suns.
Revolve, our partners held at length,
while tidal guts disguise shifts
in naïve bones. Loaded
scales slam-judge our dead
on headlined hope.
Borders like kintsugi’d flaws,
glow gold from tethered, woeful space.
Galaxies
By Fabrice Poussin
