Frostwriting

Gerald Solomon

by

Message

by Gerald Solomon

Sometimes hawks come overhead.
You see them appear,
two, three, five at a time,
looking down for mice to eat.

Near the hayfield, where the garden ends,
my wife, tying up the bean-sticks.
Working steadily there,
too far to hear me call.

Up here in the shade, trying to read,
intending to understand,
I think of my books indoors,
my rows and rows of books.

There, the names working to believe,
writing down what they need,
words that make words behave,
trying to join far with near.

They may not have some words
I need most of all for myself….
When you come you’ll see our house,
the last one in the road.

Issue 7

by

Issue 6

by

Swedish Microverse

by Jörgen Johansson

postponed . . .
the executioner
killing time

 

disturbingly quiet
the loud
neighbour

 

From JJ’s chapbook wishbone

Ebony Marie Coward

by

Alicja Kwiatkowska

by

Paul Dance

by

Sierra Petty

by

Swedish Microverse

by Öyvind Helgesson

The cabin is bolted shut

On our lake the loon’s cry

goes unheard

 

Stugan tillbommad

Utifrån sjön ropar lommen

ohörd

 

From Fri haiku Autumn Issue, 2011

Katy Whittingham

by

Steve Komarnyckyj

by

Swedish Microverse

by Daniel Gahnertz

in separate windows
old people
watching the sunset

 

i var sitt fönster
gamla människor
tittar på skymningen

 

From Fri haiku Winter Issue, 2010

Sean Quinn

by

Paul Beckman

by

Arun Sagar

by

Katharine Sargent

by

Dan Hanna

by

Amanda Hempel

by

Robert McDonald

by

Vanessa Blakeslee

by

Carand Burnet

by

Noah Berestizhevsky

by

HEALING TIME

by paul beckman

The news wasn’t good my father told me over the phone and then he hung up.

I called my sister in Cleveland and told her that the news wasn’t good and when she began to ask specific questions I said to her, I’m sorry, I don’t know and hung up.

She called my brother who lived four doors down from me but since we didn’t speak she told him that I had called and said the news wasn’t good. He asked her to explain and she told him that she couldn’t—that’s all she knew.

You’re siding with our brother he said and hung up.

Next my brother who wasn’t speaking to me called my mother’s hospital room but when my father answered he hung up since he wasn’t speaking to my father either.

I put on my hoodie and Keds and drove to the hospital but my mother had left instructions that her sons were not allowed in her room so I called my sister in Cleveland and told her that if we want to know anything she’d have to come out and talk to our mother since us guys weren’t allowed in the room.

The next day I picked up my Cleveland sister from the airport and drove her straight to the hospital. On the way to my mother’s room we came head to head with our father who hadn’t spoken to his daughter, my sister, since he caught her going down on her boyfriend in her sophomore year in high school.

My sister stayed in my mother’s room for hours while I sat outside and my father sat in the waiting room talking to my neighbor brother who didn’t speak to me. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer so I walked into the waiting room where the vending machines were and bought myself a Payday and a Dr Pepper. My brother walked out and I sat next to my father and ate my lunch while my brother neighbor took over my seat outside my mother’s hospital room.

After a while my sister and my brother walked into the waiting room and stood blocking the door so neither my father nor I could leave.

She said that Mom was gone and at peace.

We asked her what she and Mom talked about for all those hours and she said that Mom had asked her to keep their conversation confidential as long as we had family members not speaking to each other.

My sister and my neighbor brother walked into the waiting room and closed the door behind them. They took seats and my sister began and said to our father that she forgives him for not speaking to her and bears no ill feelings and hopes that he’ll come to Cleveland and meet her husband and kids. He shot her a look and got up and walked out of the room. I began to say something to my brother neighbor and he held up his hand and said, Don’t bother, and left and then it was me and my sister from Cleveland alone in the room and we’d always spoken so I asked her what Mom had said since we were the only ones speaking and tried to talk to our father and my brother neighbor.

She told me that as much as she wanted to tell me because there was information that I’d like to know and should know, she’d have to live up to her promise and not say anything until all of us were talking.

I took my last bite of Payday and walked out leaving her to find her own way back to the airport and Cleveland.

Law (Geography Returns)

by Carand Burnet

The afternoon sun exhausts the leftover water
sits in unmoving puddles, putting off itself
Down streets nurses cling to their thin white shawls
Overhead wrens shift and flick their shapes
nicking distances
Now the wind is fervent perturbed by the many
Quite far
and where I walk and what it was
Where is the sun? pitched
in some child’s palm or thrown out
A maid stares through pale highlighted glass
Leaves pick up like waves and wind
shifts them higher leaving me under the
false water surface
Geography Returns.
For years I have waited to see
an object backlit by the sun

Dry

by Katharine Sargent

Porcelain inkwell, given to me
the writer, for my birthday.
Aunt Annie, divorced, fearful,
shedding all she could not carry.
She said, “for inspiration.”

A china bulb set upon a flowered dish,
according to the precise year pressed
upon the bottom, like my father’s
puckered pocket watch, it has seen
times far more civilized; like sugar
spoons and monogrammed warming pans.

A bit of forgotten ink is cemented
to the bottom of the well. A thin
blotting, a place where confident
pens had scratched. Enough for one
last word, a dash, a question mark.
I have no feather quill.

On the inkwell’s side there is a rendering,
a windmill on a far shore, the blades
are still, do not spin in the coastal breezes.
Imagine the farmer waiting for the wind
to start. Imagine his fear, the churning
doubt that fields will not yield. Imagine
his feverish wish for blustery days.

Two Poems

by Amanda Hempel

Aubade in Iron January

In the shining silence of the morning of the night
a deer was spooked just at the foot of the wall, and leapt
silent as the moon but for the sharpness of its hooves.
It hung like breath in the air for a vast unseen moment,
its last, before everything became terrible and it screamed,
twisting its soft great belly on the spire as it spilled.
The wild onyx of fear glittered in its eyes till they dulled
and became a horror awaiting the late, frozen dawn.

 

——-

What Is Foolish

My grandfather doesn’t care about the broccoli on his plate.
We all know he’s dying—he knows he’s dying—
but my father still worries over his diet.
He has been harassing the nurses all week,
demanding food good for the cholesterol.

The following year I am given an intelligence test at school,
and the man asks me a series of questions like,
What is foolish about what this person did?
A judge sentences a criminal to be killed, then says
After this I hope you will have learned your lesson.

I think of my father hiding broccoli in the mashed potatoes,
the only thing his dying father wants to eat.
Of how my grandfather eats the broccoli for his son,
and of my father crying as he lifts the fork.

What is foolish? the man asks me, and I tell him all I know.

Things You’ll Miss

by Sean Quinn

These are the things you’ll miss: bus rides back from the town of Florida into the capital at 7am, setting your alarm not to sleep through your stop. Her singing Carlos Gardel tango in bed. Her voice in English. Her voice in Spanish. The smell of a coconut and dulce de leche cake baking in the oven filling your room as you siesta. Bites on your shoulder sitting at restaurants. Cigarettes and silent stares on the balcony overlooking Uriarte and Palermo. The nonsensical arguments you have only because you’re both scared of these things you’ll miss. The sadness of her paintings. The sadness of her poems. Her father the colonel, shirtless, an Argentine Marlon Brando, cooking every part of a cow on a man-size grill, him feliz and workmanlike in the glow of the asado. Looking back through her gate, one last time, every time, to know that she got in; the emptiness knowing that night is over, the serenity knowing there are more to come. Your favorite sideways glance, her eyes alight in the darkness of the movie theater. Her hair in your mouth, waking you, choking you. Finding her hair in the nooks and crannies of your room and body and clothes days and weeks after it all has ended. Her piercing look from across the boat, separated from you, fixed, as you cross the Tigre back into Buenos Aires. Brown eyes bigger than life loving a whole you you never knew and now know you could never be.

You will miss her telling you that she loves you, and her meaning it. You will question whether she meant it and then resolve that she didn’t. You won’t know which is easier to accept, having it and losing it, or never truly having it.  That is what stays with you the most. If you could be sure she was sure it did indeed happen - for a second or a year - you could be free of it. On cold nights in non-winter seasons this thought will come out of nowhere precisely to stop you from sleeping.

You’ll justify things by saying that you knew this would happen. It’s happened before with others. It will happen again (you’ll hope not, but it will). All that will comfort you are UTZ Red Hot potato chips and Sunday night classic movies on AMC a continent away. Things that are constant.

You’ll miss the assurance that everyone else is wrong and you are right. Nodding your head to appease them as they tell you it’s impossible to have anything real between a yanqui and an eighteen year-old Argentine. Being the only party to the big secret that there’s more to it than all that.

You’ll miss being the only one who believed. Well, one of two.

But these are things you will miss. Now she is here beside you, sleeping in your arms, exhaling on your neck, smiling in her dreams, unaware that the sad event awaits at any moment like a step missing up the staircase in an unlit barn. You stare up into the blackness and know this inevitability is coming, that even now you are creating it, a future you are raveling with your own disbelief.

You think that, in time, she and you will miss none of these things, and that is the thought that keeps you awake.

Peter Taylor

by

Jessica Dur

by

Michel Gauthier

by

Vasya’s Surprise

by Steve Komarnyckyj

 

Vasya’s Surprise

I
I followed you stumbling over the tussocks with my five year old’s feet while you swished at dandelion clocks in the fallow pasture with the ebony walking stick - considered by some a dandyish affectation. The water spattering into the tin bath.  Once when I was praying to the brass Christ hung over my bed he shook his head slightly as if refusing my prayers. I turned off the light to hide from his face but it was your face I saw absurdly hovering in the dark, disembodied like the moon. I tried to speak but the words turned to iron and fell out of my mouth as wing nuts, a bolt, drill bits. 

II

The shell had crashed through the thatch in nineteen fifteen and failed to explode. Now it laid its brass muzzle resting on a beam angled like a seal diving.

Forever frozen in mid-flight its tail fins caught and held in the straw of the roof. It had hung over your bed for ten years, invisible above the lacquered wood of the ceiling. As you fell asleep sometimes you thought of the shadow of death hanging over you or wondered when your father would return from Gdansk, his visits now so remote that he seemed alien in his patent leather shoes shiny as a cockroach shell, his hair lacquered into place and a pair of wire rimmed pince nez. There was a point when you hated him but now he is merely a stranger who talks to you of the joys of flying and how one day you will soar like an eagle over the Baltic. He brings your mother an amber pendant like an ochre tear but her eyes remain glazed and shiny as his hands fasten the clasp of the chain behind her neck and he kisses the top of her head gently. He leaves the next day before dawn, you hear his Praga Picollo car start into life with a noise which still sounds strange and alien. You think of its radiator grille like the smile on a Greek comedic mask. Your cat Franz named after the Austro Hungarian Emperor purrs under the bed like a finely tuned motor. As you go back to sleep you dream of bees, of running water.

IV

You cross a plank bridge which hangs from wooden posts on gently sagging ropes over the water to get to the church. There are gaps between the wood on which you step, through which you see the surface of the river opaque and brown, sometimes glimmering with sunlight, monstrous and robed in a subtle garment of silk. Sometimes the bridge sways and tilts so you find yourself hanging on face to face with a death
that resembles yourself, your reflection breaking and coagulating like globules of mercury. You look away and see a small black bull eyeing you curiously with what seems to be a state of recognition before swishing its tail dismissively, then you swing still higher and see the sky and then see the water again.
Vasya grabs your arm when you get to the other side and drags you through a clump of bushes to where the graves of a cemetery used by the colonists are gradually disappearing under weeds and grass. He and his friends have lifted the massive stone slab to one side to reveal the dark corpse of a man in the stone catacomb underneath wearing a shroud that resembles a nighty. Strangely he is not laid out flat but has been moved into a sitting position with a chair improvised from whatever stones came to hand a kind of small cairn really. His blank eye sockets stare up at you. Feeling sick you force a smile, even pat Vasya on the back. Well done.
 

Absences

by Arun Sagar

The world is filled
with Mondays
and mint
and wild grasses
at the edges of the fields.

 

People are waiting
in the city, in large
waiting rooms,
reading newspapers.
You are not here, but

 

I am everywhere,
turning the sunlight
into sunlight, that chair
into a chair, turning
all things into their names.

The Wars Against Florida

by Dan Hanna

I wish the train were here; Father’s riding it.
We’re going to Disneyland.

The station has brown boards that we walk on, and they
are wet from the rain from this morning.
I heard an old man say to the man selling the tickets
that the wood is not real wood.

Then he looked at me and said that
I would get plastic splinters in my feet if I were to walk about barefoot.
I said I wasn’t barefoot.

Aunt Rachel, who is waiting with me, says Daddy has had to change trains.
She says he will now meet me in Georgia.
Aunt Rachel says that it will be no scarier than riding on a roller coaster.
She says this knowing that it will make it easier for me to ride alone.

Mother appeared cross this morning as she helped me put on my sweater.
She said, “Florida is just smelly canals separated
by sand dunes.”
She hates Florida.
She says, “Florida is just a sandy marsh.”

I tell her it’s like a bunch of islands hooked together.
And that some of the islands are sponges.
She says I will need to be careful and hold onto Daddy’s hand.
“Walking on sponges must be difficult,” I say, “but if Daddy can do it, so can I.”
“And, he will be there to help me walk on them.”
Mother smiles and reminds me that Disneyland is different, and that I will have lots of fun.

A long time ago, She told me it was sinking.
She said this as we drove home without Daddy.
I don’t believe it is sinking; they gave us candy.

Daddy let Mommy and I onto the rides.
Then he backed away and watched as we spun and tossed.
He watched us like he had never seen us before.
Our heads were pulled left, then right, and then back again.
We pointed to him and he laughed, and then he pointed back, and we laughed.
When the ride ended, he told us to watch the fireworks. We all looked up.

Afterward, I was tired and needed rest but I didn’t know it.
In our room, Mommy is fixing her hair and putting things into boxes.
Daddy chases me around the room like a man trying to save a boy from a burning well.
Mommy is happy because everyone is happy.

When I was eight, I thought Disney was the center of the earth.
Aunt Rachel says that it is because one day
she stood in all four directions at once
and she could not see herself.

Three Poems

by Robert McDonald

Dear November,

A spider’s made of fingers and a fanged

dose of sleep, architect and contractor
of her home,

(it is also her net,
her stage,
her friendly neighborhood noose)

all material spun
from the stuff
of herself, the spider kisses
the housefly

with a mouthful of death,
she binds and calms the struggling
moth, and caresses
the grasshopper’s bloodless
hull; her web

is her chapel, her form
a ballerina, every night
she mends
her wedding dress
and marries the attic,
the porchlight,
the unused

basement chair. 

Dear November,

Consider
a warm afternoon:
a crow

stalks the shade beneath
a sycamore tree,
picking

at some kind of meat
in the grass.  If
your soul

became a bird.
If that bird muttered
with an old man’s

throat.  If there’s a soul.
If the crow
found a treasure,

a beakful, a bone.
The soul’s search,
the crow’s

hunger.  The luck
of the scrap. The force
of the stab.

The pluck and rasp
of those black
scissors. Crows,

their voices. Crows
in the branches
like a wicked boys choir.

Dear November,

Claim this cloak
of moth wings and damp
fallen leaves.

I’m the man
become suddenly old, the man
who shivers

and stands at the curb. 
I have cast aside
all cloaks.  Finger by finger

I have taken off
my gloves. 
Tell me what

to ask
of the harsh realm
of winter.

I give my checkered wool cap to the wind.

Farthings

by Peter Taylor

If you ask why we have so little value,
it is because we are so easily lost.

We are coins cut from other coins,
a cross on one side, a mad king on the other.

First we were silver, then copper,
then nothing.

We are no longer in circulation, or legal,
but we have been here forever.

In your pocket,
you would hardly feel us.

Liftoff

by Vanessa Blakeslee

The boom of the space shuttle rattles at first light.
The astronauts stagger and squint in the sunlight.

A boy scores goals in a grassy, burnt field, returns
hours later, points his telescope in the moonlight.

A couple twirls and dips to a big band classic,
settles breathless into seats, clasps hands in delight.

A girl en pointe practices her port de bras, dreams
of one day dancing Broadway, shining her starlight.

Driving east to teach the first class of the spring term,
the poet spots the shuttle’s plumes, the blazing light.

Swedish Microverse

by Helga Härle

September sun
on the doorstep
my runaway cat

Septembersol
i dörröppningen
min bortsprungna katt

Candlelight —
the room shrinks and grows
with every breath

lågan av ett ljus
rummet krymper och växer
med varje andetag

 

(“Candlelight” published earlier in The Heron’s Nest)

 

Helga Härle

by

For a Walk

by Carand Burnet

for Nicol Allan

We reveal ourselves
underneath thin birch leaves
that toss like flattened sparrows
So many indecencies- it is fall
and the children core then
swallow the sun
Though other things begin:
drafts, plans, purposes,
no more history miscounted,
no more compasses or half-opened doors
Take me to where she left this morning
so gently
To the right our dismantled geography
construction workers
open   and   seal the earth
At every minute even more than that
sea glass light gives way
The static cold against the chest
lie down only once into it
Down the street the oaks
only bundle-up in red
And finally the noon wind
diagrams and charts each street
too strong to set aside

 

 

The miraculous dumpster

by Noah berestizhevsky

I have finished. He wasn’t much but I still feel bad. He really shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have taken her. He knew she was all mine. She had the nicest legs anyone had ever seen, strutting out from beneath her majestic hips. We always went to the movies and she would always say, “I better not have popcorn butter on my thighs at the end of this.” Ah, she was a doll. One night we sat down at the porch of her mother’s, as the sun was coming down, and her neighbor, drunk, probably just done with his dirty woman, walked by and said, “Boy those are some fine legs!” I got red real fast. I would have ripped his throat right out had she not put her hand on my thigh. She knows how I get. I just leaned back and dug my nose into her beautiful, short, brown hair. She always smelt like summer, and her eyes shone like the sun, melting me in my seat. But that bastard took her away. Not the drunk, the drunk kept walking, yet when one leaves there’s always another to pick up the shovel and dig out my guts. It was on April fool’s day, the day dedicated to the only fool in the world, me. I see her through my half closed eyes that night; I was drunk and stumbling my way up 3rd Ave and there she was the accessory of somebody’s wallet. My heart nearly stopped, I don’t think it ever got its right beat since then, and I sobered up in a flash of red. I ran right up to them. He was handsome, and tall, and smelt of whiskey and her breath. I didn’t even say anything; I just grabbed her by the arm so hard I felt her veins try to hide away. “You’re hurting, you’re hurting!” She slurred, the whore. The handsome man just walked on past, another step and we would have been in a tug-o-war with a screaming rope in between. He stopped and smiled at me and said, “Alright, take her, I got what I needed.” He squirmed out of her grasp and she fell to the ground, her arm still in my fist. She didn’t scream anymore, just sucked in her lower lip between her front teeth. We went back to my apartment, and as she stumbled in I collapsed and hit my head on the counter, really bad too, I could feel it. She came up above me, her hair dangling and touching my nose just a little, enough to tickle it, but she no longer smelt of summer and I threw her hair from my face. “Are you alright? You alright?” She said in a pleading voice. I asked her “I forgive you. I know you are weak hearted. Just tell me where to find him.”

She stood there, in the middle of the room, purse dangling from elbow, while she was clutching her arm which was purple by now. Her make-up was all ruined and her eyes were half asleep, not shining of sun anymore, just struggling not to suffocate under her eyelids, and she told me everything. She told me how they met weeks before at the bar she worked, how they’ve been fucking every time I was away, how she might be pregnant, how she didn’t love me anymore, how I always hurt her, how it’s my fault, how I wasn’t good enough in bed. She was still talking when I left and headed straight to the bar. I could see him through the window, he was sitting there, smiling, and four thighs were rubbing up against his and he was buying drinks for everyone. I went around the corner and sat next to the dirty dumpster beside the bar. I felt like crawling into the dumpster and living like the roaches I find in my bathroom sometimes. I always envied those roaches. No bills, people, whores, alcohol. Those roaches, man, they lived like kings. And they will outlive us all. The door to the bar opens and I hear the laughter and cries more distinctly. A pair of black boots cross my eyes and when I look up he’s there looking down at me and smiling. He was holding a 50 dollar bill between his fingers, “I guess I owe you this for the girl.” He stood there for some time, not knowing what to do he let the bill fall into my lap. I looked at the bill; picked it up, stuffed in my pocket and when I looked back up at him he was walking back to the bar. I still feel bad; he was quite a handsome guy. He sure had broken a lot of hearts, but he tore mine to pieces. I left him in that same dumpster. I didn’t even bother to put his feet all the way in, and I left my gun there too. The people came running out of the bar and I just kept walking, feeling the fifty in pocket, and grinning to myself at the profit. As I walked on up to the apartment I saw her running down, she ran past me. I turned to see her gather with the rest of the whores and crying over the dumpster; their free ride was done, I took their happiness and replaced it with mine, but my happiness was grim, it was just a rectangular piece of paper that will get me through the day.

This is my confession, gentlemen, it’s not much but I guarantee it’s the truth. Not that it matters, but I do feel bad. I walked back to the dumpster after and threw the bill in with him; the whores climbed in one after the other after it, the dumpster has a dozen pairs of cracked high-heeled shoes sticking out of it. It was the most miraculous dumpster I ever saw.

The Girls

by Jessica Dur

When I met him, Dennis was laughing.

I cracked a joke about older men hitting on younger women and he chuckled as though his own hair weren’t turning stringy and sparse. Like he wasn’t knocking on the door of forty, back pockets stuffed with regret. Then he offered to fix my headlight, and neatly wrote his phone number on the back of my hand.

The next morning I told my therapist: “Guys in their 20s just bore me. I need someone with wisdom, someone intriguing.” Then I went home and took a shower and sent his number down the drain anyway.

He called a week later. I never asked how he found my (unlisted) number. Would I like to go to that socialist meeting down in the Mission? “I’ll pick you up.”

I looked like an escapee from the Juniors section in the mall, too-tight jeans and too-shiny boots. “Wow, you look bitchin’ babe.” I liked that he said it, but not how. In the basement meeting, his eyes lingered over a porcelain red-headed socialist. Later he grinned, moved his folding chair closer to mine, let our knees knock.

Next morning I left his house on a cloud of embers. He said something about “the girls” coming over to soak in his redwood hot-tub. I fired up my Volvo with the new headlight and drove straight to A-1 Oil Change. I wasn’t going to let him do too much for me.

“I like the way he takes me seriously. He actually responds to what I say. And I guess I like that I have power over him, too,” I told my therapist, when she asked why I chose someone sixteen years my senior to start dating. “For the first time, it feels like I’m the one in control.”

I didn’t even notice his arms until he took me out for organic non-dairy pizza. “So did you get into some kind of knife fight?” I smirked, like violence was hot, like fighting was foreplay. I felt like a naughty kitten clawing at a calm retriever. His hurricane smile had a still eye. “I picked up a heroin problem a few years back.”

My head hissed.

“But don’t worry, that’s all over with now. That was another life-time.” 

By our fourth date I noticed that his eyes were fluent and I translated sadness. “What are those pills you take?”

“I need them to sleep.” Also, his house hummed all night long.

I asked my therapist: “Isn’t that pretty common around here? Don’t lots of people grow pot?”

Saturday night trimming party at his house and I stupidly wore lip gloss and a silk tank top. The kitchen seethed wet and green. The usual soft pink lighting hijacked by mean fluorescents. The table crowded with scissor-wielding girls. They stared at me, flashed gun-point smiles, then went back to their sticky sculpting. Dennis patted my head and disappeared. His rabid energy confused me. I stood at the sink and filled a cup with water. Then I dumped it out and did it again.

Told my therapist: “These divas were not part of the bargain. It’s creepy, almost like a harem. He even dated one of them!”

She made eye contact. “Do you still feel powerful?”
 
I must admit: I tried.

When we went to parties, I pinky-fingered the Ecstasy like he showed me, sipped the hard stuff. I asked the girls about themselves. I learned how much they made (25 bucks an hour) for trimming. Dennis sat in the corner with one of them, usually giggling. I locked myself in the bathroom: water, cabinet, towel, magazine, mirror, pose, stretch, flush, (finally) unlock. They were happy to share their sugar daddy, as long as everyone got an equal lick. I knew they hated me for my bite marks.

“I blame them,” I told my therapist, when she asked why I felt trapped and unhappy.

In fact, right after it all went down, the severe head-aches, the MRI, the news (did he call me first?), the pre-surgery meetings, the unblinking anesthesiologist, the seizure, the blood, the coma, the plastic tubes, the rotting breath, the horror, after the doctor answered “Not in my career” to the only question that mattered, after the stream of visitors, the girls with their crystals and mantras, after the unplugging, the beeping, after the final breaths, after all of it, it was the girls I felt betrayed by, the girls who looked away, the girls who left me aching all alone.

The Cemetery of the Elephants

by Michel Gauthier

As soon as he started the uphill walk he realized he was too fast again, a habit he had not been able to control despite years on the slopes.  There was no hurry though.  There never was, and definitely not this time.  He slowed down and forced himself into a slow pace.  Even so he was short of breath after a few steps.

The path was meandering through pine trees.  The soil, still gorged by the rain, gave a rich smell of humus.  Patches of sun had found their way through the tree cover, warming up the shoulders of the old man. 

As always he resisted the temptation to look back and measure the ground already covered.  He knew he would be disappointed.  He had hardly passed the first bend in the path when his panting became more than he could sustain.  As always, he gave himself the excuse of looking at the scenery to catch his breath.  He could see the other side of the valley through the branches; the light green of the grass, the grey rocks, the blue sky and the white, white, lonely clouds.  Birds were singing.  His heart rejoiced briefly as the breath came back to normal.  The pain in the chest was still there, though, ebbing back and forth with a life of its own.  Funny to say that this portent of death had a life.  He had a tired smile at his wit.  He started walking again, making sure to maintain an even slower pace.

It took him an hour to get through the pine forest.  He had stopped only four times to catch his breath and rest his aching legs, which he considered a success.  The place he wanted to reach was now visible.  Above the grassy slope, rocky outcrops looked like the towers of a timeless citadel.  There was a crag up there, with a crevice facing the sun.  That was the place.  Another hour to go.

Out of the shade of the trees, the sun was stronger and he discarded his windbreaker; he would not need it from now on.  He drank the rest of the water and, still conscious of the uncorrupted mountain, wrapped the empty plastic bottle in the abandoned garment.  From above the tree line, the eye could catch the distant ranges, some still capped in snow.  He felt his soul breathing, much better than his chest.  He moved again, careful to be slow and save the last sparkles of his energy.  The pain ebbed forth and he waited a minute to let it pass.  He considered sitting down but fought back the temptation.  He may not have been able to stand up again.  He put a foot forward, and then the next.  And again.

There was perspiration on his forehead, the drops unhurriedly following the wrinkles of his face.  The slope was steeper now and the puffing got out of hand.  He stopped, his legs trembling under him, his head spinning.  He sat down, facing the sun.  A red veil descended on his closed eyes.  The world shrank into the bright screen on his eyelids, the warmth of the afternoon sun on his drying face, the unrelenting pain and the approaching peace.  His mind drifted back to the crack in the rocks, up there, tranquil and peaceful, waiting for his body.  He suppressed the appeal of lying down; here or there were not the same thing.  The choice was there, not here, on this empty slope. 

From his sitting position, he turned to one side, half kneeling, trying to stand again. The pain was now blinding him, a grey veil canceling all other sensations.  He made a last effort, his confused mind jumbling old beliefs.  Tough guys don’t dance.  Nor do they cry.  Nor do they give up. 

Still on his knees, he placed his hands flat on the ground.  The pain reached a new level.  A bright flash in his eyes obliterated any remaining determination, and his body rolled in the soft grass.

Sidney Bending

by

Gabrielle Soria

by

Microverse

by Sidney Bending

fence leans
towards the neighbours
who never wave

Swedish Microverse

by Öyvind Helgesson

The fog horn sounds
On the misty moor
a lantern dies

 

Mistluren tjuter
I dimman borta på heden
slocknar en lykta

 

thaw
in the rain gutter
a chickadee bathing

 

snösmältning
i takrännan
badar en talgoxe

 

Conversation with the Sun in February

by Laura L. Snyder

Sitting in a chair facing winter sun,

I will not ask Why or How long

will it take to heal? I will only say,

Joy. Small sounds like Ahhhh and Ohhhh

escape without thought. My eyes

are slits. After winter’s gray and black,

the blast of gold light is shocking.

Behind closed lids, sun paints red,

shapes of green amoebas swim.

My bald head is warm beneath a purple

wool hat, as are the shins of my legs

where sun penetrates denim. Slumping

further, I give in. Bed can wait. Even

the uppers of my Birkenstocks are toasty.

Convalescence is so slow. My energy

comes in small packets. How do you

burn across space to bless me?

Swedish Microverse

by Jan Dunhall

My punctured finger
leaking blood –
will spring be late this year?

Mitt stuckna finger
blodet sipprar -
blir våren sen i år?

 

 

Linoleum floor
I finger my queue number, high
Every door closed

Linoleumgolv
Tummar mitt nummer, typ högt
Dörrarna stängda

 

Jan Dunhall

by

Swedish Microverse

by Iréne Carlsson

drifting far into the woods
the lilting anthem
of the ice cream truck

långt in i skogen
tar sig melodislingan
från glassbilen

Swedish Microverse

by Daniel Gahnertz

foggy bridge
a tram
floats

spårvagnen svävar
bron
i dimma

 

 

the cat rushes
after a toy mouse
I pretend to throw

katten rusar
efter leksaksmusen
jag låtsas kasta

Al Ortolani

by

Microverse

by Al Ortolani

three a.m.—
    coal train hauling
        night from my sleep

 

early spring morning:
    sparrows peck sunlight between
      patches of snow

 

 

little moon—your light
  in the graveyard
  on the widow’s hands

Swedish Microverse

by Iréne Carlsson

Buzz of the fly
drowning
in Vivaldi’s “Autumn”

Flugans surr
drunknar
i Vivaldis Höst

Mira Desai

by

Mestiza

by Gabrielle Soria

My Lola says two cups water for every one and a half cup rice and I measure. I measure carefully—I tap the plastic black measuring cup hard against the Formica and watch the rice seize and settle, seize and settle, until it lies flat, beaten. Then I dump it. I dump the water in on top (Two cups! Two cups!) and I swish my fingers through the grains. Lola tells me Over the sink! and I move, my fingers making tsunamis in the rice cooker bowl. The water drains, white as milk, and we fill it up again, still swishing, swirling. It drains again, and Lola says Yah, okay, good, and takes it from me. Her fingers are gnarled and brown—browner than mine, but then, I am only half Filipino. Her tongue can make the quick clacks and ngs of Tagalog, but she can’t say the Fs of English. She calls me her pipty percent pilipina girl, and I grin. She is old. Her feet have walked the dusty roads behind caribou flicking tails, and her eyes have seen the low swoop of American bombers, silver-bellied above Tacloban Bay—but that was many years ago, when she thought she would care if her boy married a white woman. Now she has me, her mestiza girl, and when our fingers are both in the pot, rustling through the grains of rice, you can see that my fingers are knobbly like hers, brown like hers, moving like hers. Ready to eat, like hers.

Dan Davis

by

Molly McGravey

by

Ashley Varela

by

Carlie Daley

by

Here on Business

by Sarah J. Sloat

Another Vespa needles my nerves.
This whole street, this district
stinks of luxury –

and even the rain
is sick of Italy.

Christa Pagliei

by

Scott Duke Kominers

by

Heather Minette

by

Her Heart Is Going Home

by Heather Minette

She’s smiling so hard her eyes are squinting.Because she’s going, because she’s going, because she’s going! She’s on her tippy toes now.

Where is she going? She’s going where the sky is a blue that can only be described as Barcelona blue. She will drink coffee in plazas at wobbly tables with her hair down and curly and careless because Barcelona is her unconditional and has been since she was lost and found there within her heart when she was nineteen.

At the wobbly tables, she will be writing letters and thoughts, and holding the thin air in her lungs longer, breathing Barcelona. A Spanish boy with a sharp jaw line and messy black hair will ask her for un cigarillo and light it and then ask her where she is from. She will tell him the world and smile, and by her Spanish he will guess she is Venezuelan, and she will shake her head and smile some more. When he leaves, she will be by herself again but not alone. She will be surrounded by characters in her book, old women talking about the weather and children chasing pigeons and a lazy waiter asking her if she needs algo
mas.

Where is she going? She’s going to the deep blue of the Mediterranean, that took her breath and heart and tears that afternoon when she was twenty, standing on top of a mountain on la costa brava. The
mountain top where she saw France and breathed in the sea and felt so small and so big all at once. Where she felt like she could reach the sky and sing and God would hear her. The Mediterranean where she lays on the beach and the sand brushes right off and the water is so cold that going in waist deep makes her feel like she’s gutsy.

She’s going where she walks to el café, where she will buy un bocadillo con tortillas de patatas and the man that serves her will call her cariño and she will tell him that’s what she calls her
son. He will talk, his accent will be heavy, she will have a hard time understanding him. He will know and speak slowly and sweetly and make her feel so very young.

She’s going where she will drink canned beer that she buys from the men in the streets after eleven p.m. Where she will go from plaza to plaza, meeting musicians and other wonders, talking and laughing, smoking and
drinking, singing and living. Where she will sit in circles and someone will sing a Dylan song with a Spanish accent and she will smile so hard her eyes squint because she is surrounded by constant reminders that she
is across the world, but her heart is home.

She is going where walking down the street is like seeing a million masterpieces all at once. Where clothes hanging from lines on terraces are a painting not yet painted and looking up at the clouds between the
beautiful buildings is a photograph not yet taken. Where walking down the street is stopping in her tracks and looking around and breathing deeper and thanking God for the overwhelming beauty around her and within her and the freedom of being alive.

Sarah J. Sloat

by

Janice’s Sister

by Dan Davis

In the room is a woman.  She isn’t Janice, but Janice’s sister, Jill.  Right now, Jill is thinking about Janice’s boyfriend, David, whom she has loved only thirty minutes less than Janice.  Janice met David at a party, and introduced him to Jill, and Jill fell in love.  It happens.  No one wants it to, but it does.
  The problem isn’t that Janice and David are mismatched; the problem is that they’re too perfectly matched.  Janice is tall and dark, her green eyes carefully highlighted by just the right amount of mascara, her lips touched up by just the right amount of gloss.  Her shoulders are always visible to the world, even in winter (but then, only indoors).  Her legs are sleek but not too thin; she has a runner’s legs, the legs of a woman who uses them.  David is broad-shouldered, short blond hair.  His neck is thick and strong, and his chest is flat.  Jill has seen his abs; they are impressive but not extraordinary.  David doesn’t look like a movie star; he looks like the guy movie stars are always trying to be.  He looks ex-military, which he isn’t, or like a man who’s very self-conscious about what women think of him, which he probably is.  He wears casual t-shirts that cost more than you would think, and jeans designed to highlight his attributes.  He wears cologne, something dark and woodsy, and his eyes are the light blue of June skies over cornfields.
  He and Jill have had only one conversation of any length.  His voice is soft, magnetic; his laughter—he didn’t laugh while talking to her, but she has heard it on other occasions—youthful and energetic.  Jill has laughed with him, although it was a private joke between him and Janice.  Most things between the two of them are private.  Jill does not exist in their world.  At the moment, she does not even exist in her own.
  Where are they now?  She does not know the name of the restaurant, but judging by the dress Janice wore when she left, it is not a place David can easily afford.  He is treating her tonight; true, Janice deserves to be treated every night, as do all woman of her beauty, but tonight is special.  It is their anniversary.  Six months.  Jill knows this because it is also her and David’s anniversary.  After all, she met him the same night as Janice did.
  Jill has no one to acknowledge the occasion, but that is okay; she is used to being self-sufficient.  At least, that’s what her parents have always called it.  Jill doesn’t have a name for it; it is simply the way she is used to living.  If no one is there for you, you must be there for yourself.  It is logical.  So she lays in bed and stares up at the ceiling, and she holds her hands above her face.  The night-light plugged into the wall is waning, but she can still see her hands, the wrinkled skin of her knuckles giving way to a youthful smoothness that will disappear long before Janice’s does.  This is natural, in fact preferable; what a cruel world it would be if a woman like Janice lost her beauty before someone like Jill.
  Still.  That is the probable future, not the definite now.  Jill closes her eyes, lowers her hands to her chest.  She can feel her heart, beating steadily, gently slowing down.  It is like meditation, but isn’t.  It is dreaming.  It is wanting.  “David,” she says, turning the name over, drawing it out into four, five syllables.  It feels good on her tongue, comfortable.  She says it again.  Time slips away from her.
  There are footsteps in the hallway.  Jill hears but doesn’t react.  She listens as the door opens carefully, the creak of the hinges a bare whisper against his name.
  He says, “Jill.”  He doesn’t draw it out like she does.  It is short and direct.
  He closes the door behind him.  Somewhere, Janice and David are enjoying a meal that costs a month’s paycheck, and other things that cost even more.  But right here, right now, David belongs to Jill, and she to him.  She says his name again, she doesn’t stop, not even when he does, not even when he is no longer there.  She says his name for another hour, until she falls asleep as the sun trudges to duty across the horizon, but he doesn’t return.

Driftwood

by Carlie Daley

In summer the heat between my thighs would not be quenched. In Autumn I looked up through a latticework of fiery leaves hungry for new skies. In winter I felt the icy touch of my lover’s hands, hoping you were close. By late spring all hope had curdled on the cloying cherry blossoms outside my apartment window. 

Traveling to work by train through Japan’s rice fields I conjured you up. Felt you were coming. Knew your smell, your voice, the feel of your hands in mine. Many times I thought you had arrived but it was just a cunning detour. Too many charlatans paved their way to your exquisite feet. Too many things jarred for so many years and with so many lovers.

Incurable restlessness – a discontent cemented by the sharing of bed with the wrong boy. A beautiful boy with pale green eyes and dewy skin who was a long way off manhood. Who clutched me at night like I were a purse of gold, whispering hymns to my beauty yet scorning my ideas.  While I tossed and turned on our flimsy mattress, loosening the chains he had begun wrapping me in.

On hot nights when arguments filled our small apartment like steam from a pot I took off on my bike. I rode for hours along the small winding streets in the hills of Kyoto, stopping to buy a small bottle of whiskey at a vending machine and sitting on the curb to drink it without fear. Safety - another blessing from Japan.

On trains packed with the tired, masked faces of Japan’s office workers I wept. Fat tears sliding down my face, no way to stop them.  My womb lay like a dead weight inside. I dragged my feet underneath it, burning to find my truth, searching it out on every corner. I took quaint trains up hills to visit outdoor natural hot springs and lay wrinkling in hot water for hours. Knowing once again I was caught in the teeth of a dead-end relationship.

Despite my dejection, I knew Nippon was the best place for such a dying star. A place to lose yourself in glitzy love hotels, temple complexes and pachinko parlours. Never mind emotional sores festering beneath the sparkle of neon lights, they would be dealt with in time.

In a Tokyo love hotel we lay like mismatched jigsaw pieces together on top of sheets that had pressed up against the skin of an army of bodies. On a bed that flashed and vibrated, in-house Japanese porn playing on a TV in the background. Feeling the moment cheap and forced not funny as it might have been. With you we would have reveled in the kitsch, laughing at the absurdity of a place that enabled the Japanese to fuck in peace.

A week before Christmas I stopped on a corner during my evening walk and looked up, mesmerized by falling snowflakes swirling and glittering under a glow of fairy lights wrapped around the eaves of people’s homes. Yes, the future gnawed at me, but for now I could rest in this snow dome of quiet beauty.

When spring time once again burst through in my final month in Japan I walked under a canopy of cherry blossoms lining the Philosopher’s Path, stopping once in a while to eat green tea ice cream and drink iced tea. Knowing you were coming. That all I had to do was ride back to my small apartment, get naked with a beautiful boy in a tangle of cheap sheets and submit to the drift.

 

 

Barbara Biles

by

The Interview

by Christa Pagliei

And what about the women Johnny?

“Ah. First there was Elizabeth.
Well I loved her, but she was a genius
unfortunately so she had to go off to college
got herself an MRS degree. Lives in Wichita
with a rich proctologist. Got a letter from her a few
years back. Runs the local women’s club.
Better for her, she never woulda been happy here,
too much sky, not enough vinyl siding.
Cynthia, now she was a sweetheart, all wheat colored hair
big blue eyes that reflected everything.
But I was too young & she was even younger
& I had too many moral shortcomings to look up to.
Becky was a waitress, the first of many redheads.
We were happy outside of town.
I got a job at a piano bar, made a little money.
We found a little apartment, paid first & last.
Thought maybe I’d found paradise.
Paradise by the way, is a cup of black coffee
& a piece of apple pie with American cheese
whenever you want it, for free, & a pretty girl
in a blue uniform brings it, slides
it on the table with a wink with the promise
of more sweetness later.
She got hooked on dope.
Ran off on me. Closed the door on that chapter.”

And is it true that when you were born, your parents were in the circus?

“My folks had the kind of love story you dream about.
My father was an acrobat, my mother was the bearded lady.
They’d talk after the show around the fire, drinking with the clowns
& at first she just made him laugh but after a while he realized
he kept thinking of her pretty voice & nice figure.
& how kind she was to all the animals, even the ornery old Russian
circus bear who would drink beer & was addicted to cigarettes.
She was the only one who could calm Sergei when the last bottle
was empty. So finally one day he told her that he loved her
but that the beard was, as they say, a deal breaker.
That was her livelihood though, & she was notoriously clumsy
so juggling & acrobatics were out of the question.
They hit upon the solution, she went down to Shotsies Ink
Parlour & in three months time she was a tattooed lady,
they were married, & I was on the way. Truly one
of the great romances. Till death did part them.”

We can get you anything you want Johnny, just sign right there.

Leaning back in his chair, still slouching
he adjusted his hat, jiggled his foot.
“Christ.”

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Poetry

| Christa Pagliei

Christa Pagliei is the daughter of a locksmith. She grew up in northern NJ, graduated from the University of Vermont and is one of the founding members of the Burlington Poetry Society. She lives in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

The Last Time I Saw My Father

by Molly McGravey

Through a dirty window down by the docks I thought I saw my father seated at the bar. I hadn’t seen him in a while. His countenance had changed. The skin below his eyes now formed two swollen half moons. His nose had grown bulbous, his skin the texture of tree bark. He held a whiskey and water in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. His clothes were wrinkled, but clean: a button-up shirt a quarter of the way undone, and blue jeans. His feet were perched on the metal bar of the woman’s stool who sat next to him. They were talking, laughing.
      The woman looked nothing like my mother. She wore her red hair down in loose curls, her lips were thickly lined. I followed the black seam of her pantyhose as it ran up the back of her leg, and eventually disappeared beneath a short black skirt.
      The woman brushed her hair back with a fair-skinned hand. I thought I saw my father steal a look at her bare neck. I couldn’t be sure. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.
      She uncrossed and crossed her legs again. My father handed her a cigarette. She placed it between her lips. My father hunted around in the pocket of his blue jeans until he produced a lighter. I gave him that lighter when I was ten, a silver Zippo and a “J” for John. He reached over and lit her cigarette. She French inhaled, and then drew the cigarette away from her mouth with two slender fingers. She placed a hand on my father’s knee. He smiled at her, ashed his cigarette in a cheap plastic tray, then signaled the bartender for another drink.
      What I’ve never understood was why my father chose this bar in particular to haunt. I always expected that my father would haunt people rather than places. He has much more apologizing than drinking to do. My
father would say that an apology without feelings of remorse would be a second act of deceit. What he never saw was that this second act was made unavoidableby the first. This moral code kept my father from giving . I was more like my mother, I gave too many.
      I watched as my father and the woman slapped the bar with open palms and tossed their heads back. His cheeks and nose were flushed. He had become increasingly brave with each drink; at the moment he was exploring the woman’s stockinged thigh with a hand so cunning it betrayed him.
      I could tell the woman was losing control by the way she had slung a heavy arm around my father’s shoulders and caressed his back. She leaned over; her hair fell forward. Once again my father’s hand flew into the air. Another drink for the woman who was not my mother. He was getting drunk. He was probably already there. I couldn’t tell anymore, it was always difficult, an art.
      A couple minutes passed, and then both my father and the woman clumsily began to put on their coats. She opened her purse, took out a bold shade of red lipstick which she applied while my father paid the tab. They rose from their stools. He escorted her through the bar, steering her wobblingframe by the small of her back.
      I went over to my father’s vacant stool and sat on it. I swiveled around to the counter and tried to make eye contact with the bartender.Someone took the seat next to me. An older man came over wiping his hands on a damp rag. The bar was loud. I had to yell.
      “Whiskey and water.”
      “That’s what your dad used to drink.”
      “Like father, like son.”
      The bartender cleared a couple of dirtied glasses. “That’s what they say. Is Jamison alright?”
      “That’s fine.”
      The bartender abandoned the rag on the counter and turned to a wall of bottles, grabbing the Jamison, he began to pour.
      I looked down at the ashtray beside me. It was filled with cigarette stubs. Every one branded with a pink ring of lipstick.  The bartender slid the glass of Jamison across the counter, he braced himself with a hand and stood back a moment, “How’s your mother?”
      “She’s doing alright. Complains about the cold and her arthritis. I don’t think she’ll stay around here much longer.”
      “I think I’ll end up in Florida someday. What about you?”
      “No, I think I’ll stay here for as long as I can.”
      The bartender nodded, “Well it was nice talking to you, tell your mother I said hello.”
      “You, too. Yeah, I will.”
      I’ve never tried to talk to my father. I am afraid of what he might say. I don’t know if he would recognize me. I would like to have one last drink with him. Maybe, take a drag off of his cigarette. We would laugh over
some lewd comment he would make and I would place my hand on his shoulder, just to see what ghosts are made of.

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Fiction

| Molly McGravey

Molly McGravey is a first year teacher of English in Springfield, MA, USA. She is originally from New Hampshire but after attending college in Western MA, fell in love with the place and the people, may never leave. There is something eerie and beautiful about the place. It is desolate, its inhabitants desperate, raw and without pretences, harshly candid in their comments and conversation. Something distinct has been preserved in its remoteness, and McGravey’s desire to capture and name this something is part of what compels her to write.

Microverse

by Scott Duke Kominers

  edges of daylight
  a bed large enough for one
  and her shadow

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Poetry

| Scott Duke Kominers

Scott Duke Kominers is an economist by moonlight. His work has appeared in Modern Haiku and tinywords.

Mike Sauve

by

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Bios

|

M. A. Schaffner

by

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Bios

|

No Regrets

by Barbara Biles

  Calvin always asked, “No regrets?”  Now I use it as my mantra.  No regrets, no regrets, no regrets.  Like that, over and over and over.
  I met him over the radio.  By day he was a psychologist.  Had the mustache and beard but looked more like Lenin than Freud.  I didn’t know what he looked like, of course, when we first hit it off.  After my evening shift at the hospital I needed to wind down so I tuned in and there he was moonlighting with his mellifluous voice, kept low key for the midnight crowd.  He seemed like God’s gift to the intricacies of jazz, especially swing and gypsy, describing propulsive or languid rhythms.  (He claimed to have been somewhat of a gypsy in his younger days, following bands across Europe before settling on Freud.)  But his analytic take on every composition, referring to dreams or unconscious associations, was all speculative.  Bullshit, really.  That’s the reason I got involved in the first place, not realizing he was a real psychologist.  I called in to protest his comment that clarinetists have an oral fixation.  I am proof against that falsehood.  I explained my stint in the high school band.  Also, that I had never sucked my thumb, never bit my nails.
  He said that I had a seductive voice.  Then he put me on hold while he spun a Django Reinhardt anecdote for his listeners.  It was, for me, surreal as we arranged our rendevous with My Sweet playing on the radio.
  This is where we first met in the flesh.  Spiros has always been my favourite place.  Reminds me of the Mediterranean, not that I’ve ever been there.  Calvin gave me DH Lawrence’s The Virgin and The Gypsy to read and said I should try to use my instincts and intuition more and not be so uptight.  I guess he still thought himself part gypsy and I guess he thought I needed a new kind of education; to be saved from certain small town constraints, just as Lawrence’s spell binding Gypsy transformed the oppressed and virginal Yvette.  Though the Gypsy was older and married he was free spirited, kind of like Calvin, and he saved Yvette’s life from a deluge and while enduring that flood she learned to “be braver in the body.”  She stopped obsessing about him as well.
  In the end water was a factor.  They pulled Calvin out of Lake Windermere (he was on vacation).  Somehow, the driver, his wife, jumped out just in time but Calvin’s door apparently jammed.  There was an on-air memorial service so I did feel a part of the farewell.  They had an archival bit with Stéphane Grappelli and played “Django’s Tears” and compared the percussive sounds of the guitars and the diminished arpeggios to Calvin’s irrepressible love of gypsy jazz.
  And I have my mantra.

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Fiction

| Barbara Biles

Barbara Biles lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her most recent publications were in The Toronto Quarterly and The Antigonish Review .

William Farrant

by

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Bios

|

Kirsty Logan

by

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Bios

|

Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa

by

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Bios

|

Vanessa DeSantis

by

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Bios

|

Suzanne Lunden

by

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Bios

|

Tobi Cogswell

by

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Bios

|

Louie Crew

by

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Bios

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Shane E. Bondi

by

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Bios

|

John McCaffrey

by

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Bios

|

Sworn to Observance

by Sarah J. Sloat

Even the dust has a life of its own
lying under the radiator –
mostly stagnant, although
it must stir, busy building
a swath of silt.

A piece of thread is swallowed;
a piece of thread may serve
to measure this long silence.

I sit nearby in my saint suit,
no intention of action.

With a finger sometimes
in the dust I draw a circle
to see how God enters into it.

 

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Poetry

| Sarah J. Sloat

Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, but now lives in Germany, where she works for a news agency. Her poems have appeared in in Bateau and in Third Coast, among other publications. Tilt Press published her chapbook In the Voice of a Minor Saint in early 2009. Sarah keeps a blog at The Rain in my Purse .

Emma Gustafsson

by

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Bios

|

Timothy Charles Anderson

by

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Bios

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Angela Ford Johnson

by

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Bios

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Laura L. Snyder

by

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Bios

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Kristin Roedell

by

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Bios

|

Jamieson Wolf

by

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Bios

|

Richard L. Provencher

by

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Bios

|

M. Marcus A. Lopés

by

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Bios

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Bee Season

by Carolyn Scarbrough

Here, among the hedge of tiger lilies
are a few obscene long throated lilies, garishly
large, each with a lipstick pink star center spayed

wide.  The fraying sea of tiger lilies
are practically conservative.
A fat bee enters a tall long throated lily

there by the overgrown garden, by swim suits
hanging on the line while the children
play. We know it can’t continue

much longer, pretend the sea of late nights and
unstructured days will continue.
Sarah tells Jack

with all her nine year old authority
that she is to be in distress and he
is to rescue her.

He throws back his thin preteen
shoulders and saves her over and over again.
I imagine the bee

stumbling out, drunken, imagine
the future man in the boy, trying
so diligently to be a proper hero

and the future woman
in the take charge maiden
throwing back her blonde head

calling save me, save me,
as she is carried to the picnic table castle
of her choosing, laughing deliriously.

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Postcards

| Carolyn Scarbrough

Carolyn Scarbrough has published in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, Conduit, Connecticut River Review, High Desert Journal,   Minnesota Review, and The Southeast Review. She has an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, works as a pediatric ICU nurse, and is the mom to five kids, two dogs and the cat. Basically, she says, she writes despite all the reasons to not write, much like a willful child!

Henry Kearney IV

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Bios

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Florida

by M. A. Schaffner

1.  The Homeland

Along the line of trees the jays and hawks
expel metallic cries.  Songbirds flutter,
beating the leaves for smaller fare.  At times
a Pileated Woodpecker explodes
into a note of Archaeopteryx.
These are the basics.  The pig pen, junked cars,
chicken coops, and manufactured homes
on sandy alleys leading to hard roads
are grace notes grown too loud, off-key, and long.
Not evil and uncaring – only us, and what
we need for building nests and marking out
a small space to bellow our lonely songs,
display what plumage we possess, and pass
as much as what we can learn to what we love.

2.  The Threat

Every year since then we pounded the nails
deeper into our cross, soaked rags with gas
and bound them round with barbed wire – got matches,
lit smokes nonchalantly while discussing
post hole diggers and pulleys.  Now we raise
our pride like a defiant flag, only
burning like they would if we could fix them
in the lynching eye of a hunting drone.

That’s what you get when you mess around here –
vengeful rednecks who can fix anything
or break it, and don’t really think causes,
only blood and wrathful justice.  Like those
with no more sense than to blow themselves up
sober, if you can believe that crazy shit.

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Poetry

| M. A. Schaffner

M. A. Schaffner has poetry recently published or forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review , Magma (UK) & Stand (UK).   Other work includes the collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels (Word Works, 1997), the novel War Boys (Welcome Rain, 2002), and the memoir Good-Bye to All This (PBGC, 2009).

Being a Writer

by William Farrant

I know I can write because my mother told me so when I was twenty-two. Leaving home that day I bought a tweed jacket, one with leather elbow patches. Soon I became an effete cognac drinker and had several children with my third wife. Selling a kidney afforded me the rent for a small shack on an unpaved lane in nineteen-thirties Limerick, Ireland.
  I sit in the attic now, empty bottles of cognac stand like pawns around my desk and typewriter. Looking out the window with a wine-tipped cigar at my lips I see a crow fly by with a chicken carcass; it lands on a once functional latrine. It’s quarter after four, deep autumn. I finish my current thought, cross the room and lift up a floorboard. I pour a cognac, and then remove my jacket, roll up my sleeves. I return to my desk, set down the tumbler beside my copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

My wife and children are downstairs preparing dinner. What to make with one tomato and half an onion? A fire burns in an oil drum on the back steps, the wood retrieved by my oldest son from a condemned building a few blocks away. My wife says he needs new shoes. I say, “What would Dickens think?”

The cigar rests in the ashtray I took from the Artbar in Berlin. I went there to collect material, experience. It was a good trip, the inheritance well spent. Smoke plumes rise, twist towards the rotting roof.  Staring at the blank page I cross my legs, recline, hold my chin with my hand. My posture alone could win literary awards.
The dampness of the room gives me a shiver as I light a candle. From case I remove a violin. I play Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor.
It begins to rain, its patter in time with a faucet that leaks and the rhythm of domestic arguments from below that echo up the stairs, these the sounds of my daily accompaniment.

To live life you must become the life. William Farrant said that. To quote the French, I am “Je ne sais quoi.” Surrounded by the misery of others and my conception of my own brilliance I am the part. Success is so close. I can smell it.

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On writing

| William Farrant

William Farrant is a writer from Victoria, B.C., Canada.

Skull Stomping @ American Apparel

by Mike Sauve

PITCH:  A man creates a fake Facebook persona named Tarheel Slim to “avenge the offenses against good taste” he witnesses on the newsfeed.  The stated goal:  “the denigration of rubes.”  But the man has a hard time being impolite to said rubes, until, in the real world of all places, Tarheel is unleashed in all his awesome horror.

The personal style of my alter-ego Tarheel Slim had not yet fully developed.  Tarheel’s purpose was to avenge the offenses against good taste I witnessed on the Facebook newsfeed.  I had been repressing a lot of anger over the personal content posted by my peers.  My therapist suggested a fake profile to mock the whole vast, soul-flattening, digital organism.  It seemed like a good idea.  Under interests Tarheel listed “the denigration of rubes.”  I tried to denigrate some rubes, but I didn’t know who to mock.  To mock a stranger seemed exceptionally rude, to mock a friend or acquaintance even less healthy.  Still, that’s what I set out to do.  The purpose of Tarheel Slim was to implode my Facebook ego before deleting both the account in my real name and the Tarheel variation.

The person I wanted to challenge most was among my direct competition as an ersatz Facebook humorist.  From my point of view, he was well beneath me in this regard.  He was, however, one of the few who commented positively on my efforts, his latest post had me fuming:

Booby Ericsson:  despite recent findings, advice and pleas, I’ve decided to carry on doing exactly what I feel like for every single second of every single day.  the following people/things/ideologies can go fuck themselves: Bono, morality, the PO-lease, speed limits, anything said un-sartcastically, any action done un-ironically, Travis Tritt, Karma, unsincerity, sincerity, the internet, the rye, my give-a-damn [sic]

I could manage to ignore this abominable effort on its own, but not the 17 fawning comments like:  “You are one of the funniest people I know,” “This is your greatest status, you’ve reached your peak,” and worst, “This is the most awesome thing I’ve ever read.” 

I wanted to point out that not one element of this list could be considered an ideology, that the word was insincere, and that the entire composition was sophomoric and hackneyed.  This was the purpose of the Tarheel Slim profile after all, yet poor Tarheel could only lament this injustice in ruminative paralysis.

Tarheel’s competing post—On choosing to spend a day at the beach over “Sex and the City 2”: That film is a paean to consumerism, materialism and middle-aged shrewery, or among younger viewers—imminent middle age shrewery. The beach on the other hand—it’s like an all-ages bra and underwear party—received not one comment.  I did not sleep well that night.  I considered deleting the Tarheel Slim account. 

The next day Tarheel found his voice while shopping with a friend.  I did not expect Tarheel to emerge so dramatically, certainly not in the real world anyway.  A sweat-shirt listed at $68 was on sale for $39 at American Apparel.  The cashier charged me $68.  I didn’t notice until after my credit card had been processed.  I alerted the employee to the mistake.

“Sorry, no refunds.” 
“It’s not a refund.  You charged me the wrong price.” 
“Well you paid that price.  I can’t help if the item is on sale now.” 
“But this actual item, in my bag, has been marked down.” 
“Nobody knows when that was written, you could have written that right now.” 
“Are you crazy?  What kind of two-bit operation are you running here?” 

It seemed like a crucial moment of conflict in the clerk’s confused, unhappy life.  He would not back down.  He perhaps had some kind of deep-rooted spiritual sickness.  This opposing ugliness—the ugliness of retail—released the true, terrible Tarheel in all his awesome horror.

The clerk stood on an elevated three foot stoop.  He wore a robust Hulk Hogan-style moustache for ironic effect.  Tarheel reached up and grabbed both ends of it with his thumbs, forefingers and middle fingers then tried to lift himself up.  The clerk screamed in a high tone, “What the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?”  Tarheel wanted to know.  My friend looked horrified.  She wasn’t enthusiastic about the whole Tarheel Slim experiment in the first place.  Tarheel grabbed the clerk by his long blonde hair and slammed his head into the counter, then started grinding his fist into the clerk’s orbital bone.  Tarheel punched his skull ten times to the rhythmic chant of an imagined 1984 wrestling crowd. 

Tarheel opened the cash register and heroically grabbed the $30 he was owed, playing entirely to this imagined crowd.  With a wild gleam in his eye he grabbed all the bills and threw them in the air, “Make it rain!”  he cried in jubilation.  He kicked the clerk in the kidneys.  The clerk tried to crawl away and Tarheel stomped his skull against the rich, honeyed veneer of the parquet floor. 

Tarheel’s friend, as usual, did not know how to engage in the situation, so she did what she always did, and recorded the carnage on her cell phone.

A high-strung manager appeared with a taser, hell-bent on tasing anyone he could.  Tarheel got hold of the taser without much difficulty and tased the living daylights out of the manager. 

“Anyone else want to get tased?”  Tarheel screamed. 

A hipster girl who’d been shopping for tights said, “No way, don’t tase me, please.”  Tarheel gave her a hard look, but in the end showed mercy. 

I went home and logged into Tarheel’s Facebook account.  The video titled “Guy loses it at American Apparel” was already posted and had received many comments.  Also on the newsfeed, a bleached bimbo from my isolated and television-informed hometown lamented the end of her four-year relationship.  Her most popular post had more comments than my many piquant insights from the past month combined:  “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow,” it said.  It was everything Tarheel stood firm against, some functional illiterate’s cheap attempt at Chicken Soup profundity that was blindly—yet genuinely, enthusiastically—supported by a culture of “like”-clicking cave-dwellers. 

It would have been real vicious if Tarheel “liked” this given his stated habitus.  It would be confounding, annoying, patronizing—the equivalent of an unexpected tasing.  Fortunately, I, the real Tarheel now fully personified, didn’t need to resort to online tasing.  Thanks to that viral video everyone would know and fear me.  Tarheel would no longer remain passive.  He would not be overlooked.  He would command the volume of comments his ever-expanding ego required, not by the olive branch, but by the sword.

 

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On writing

| Mike Sauve

A graduate of Ryerson Journalism, Mike Sauve has written non-fiction for The National Post, The Toronto International Film Festival Group, Exclaim Magazine and other publications.  His fiction has appeared online in in Rivets Literary Magazine , Forge , Feathertale and elsewhere. 

Writing Surgery

by Ashley Varela

On Wednesday they brought in the first-years.
They sat in the front of the classroom,
White knuckles clutching rough drafts by the fistful.
Making the first cut was the hardest.
Ink in black, and blue, and red
Spilled across the pages—
Slicing adverbs from verbs,
Amputating abstractions,
Plucking clichés from the stomachs of sentences.
When it was over the students threw their pens on the floor,
Fingers trembling above the colorful paper cadavers.

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On writing

| Ashley Varela

Ashley Varela is a graduate of Westmont College, with a focus in English Literature. She has been experimenting with poetry for the past year and enjoys documenting her daily impressions on her blog,
England Can Wait .