Category Archives: Prose

Grace Smith

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Sadder and Deeper

I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.

In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–

Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.

On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.

At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.

The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.

She Says She’s Sure My Soul Mate’s Out There

I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.

By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.

In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories

didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.

It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.

Astrology for Small Potatoes

Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.

Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.

Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.

Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.

Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.

Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.

How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?

Flying

Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.

I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.

I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.

Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.

Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast

to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured

by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.

Grace Smith is a writer and teacher. Her poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.

Kylie Hough

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Prognosis Uncertain

This monotony rampant in the suburbs. The constant hum of electric drills and the wringing out of Op Shop cocktail dresses. It isn’t the way I imagined I would go. I light a Red Head and watch it fizzle to black. With my butcher’s knife, I slice and dice my way to the dog park. Someone swing high ahead of me and look back smiling on the upturn. Bring your philosophy and your poetry books. I am an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight. I have the potential of a hand grenade and the attention span of a clown fish. By day I scrub toilets. Boats power past, a tabby meows at a magpie. At night I talk with moving shadows. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you. I act like silence, breathless. To be heard is so close to being loved, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. This is not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands. My liver poisoning someone else’s blood. Trevally in a tidal wave. I am two hotels away and freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water. The tunnel of light after the feeding frenzy. A shark shaped shadow slips through the lip of a wave and I dash from the seashore. Surely someone will notice I’m playing at opposites. Somebody maybe wants to dance with me in the dunes.

Diary of a Dead Poet

The kale tastes like cardboard smells and I’m telling you, I’m trying. You stand under a deluge of cold water ripping into you like road spikes because it’s good for your immune system. Or something I can’t put my finger on that jabs like an uppercut to the jaw. I pick Aloe Vera from the garden and smear it on my skin under a pre-midday sun. You spoon magnesium into a plastic glass and watch me swallow until there’s nothing left. But the baby girl, initiated into this patriarchal prison. I don’t tell you about my dream. The one I have where your nervous system shuts down in the middle of the night and despite outside attempts to bring you back to life, you can only watch from your position on the ceiling of Accident and Emergency. Get on with it, you say, and I run around the neighbourhood in circles until I’m stopped by a man who asks me to Cocktails and Dreams. Because it’s a club, Love, and you know you want to. You’re looking down on your fitting body in horror now, two-one-shock, limbs flying, me—smiling. I’m someplace else and I’m telling you, I’m trying. But when you’re already dead, there isn’t much you don’t have to smile about.

No Place Like Home

I have this idea for a story. In it, there are two people. There is you, with your broad chest and your muscled arms. There is me, with my perky breasts and my dimpled smile. It’s a story of high school sweethearts and Disney endings. There is this castle made from yellow bricks set amongst rolling meadows of daisy and clover outside a township that glimmers green and gold. Surrounding the stronghold is a mote filled with angry alligators looking to chomp men who hurt women, children and other domesticated animals. I live in the top chamber on the thirty-fifth floor at the end of a spiral staircase you climb with the force and passion of a steed half your age. There is a white mare I feed oats to in the stable. It necks with a black stallion. The same one you ride into the sunset, me on my white horse galloping beside you. Side by side we journey, toward everything bright lights, white-picket-fences, kinky sex, two-and-a-half-kids, safe jobs, a fixed mortgage, Prozac, bullshit and banter at TGI Fridays, tantrums and track marks, rehab, unemployment, cutbacks, setbacks, climate change, Smirnoff, despair, sex trafficking, glacial melting, and grass-filled-billies smoked Saturday nights which morph into Monday mornings. And it’s lovely. And it’s wonderful. And it’s all we hoped for. Except it’s not. But we don’t mustn’t can’t. Instead, the story ends. Back it up. Reel it in. Edit. On a Sunday morning in Spring, light streams in on a gentle breeze trailing through curtained windows. Blueberry pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice are served in the super king by adoring, impeccably-behaved, A-grade children with white teeth and sparkling eyes. A kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.

Kylie Hough writes on Yugambeh land. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and long listed in Room Magazine’s 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest. Kylie received a 2021 CA/ASA Award Mentorship, was a finalist in the 2022 Page Turner Awards, and shortlisted in the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her stories, essays and poems are published in literary journals OyeDrum, Litro Magazine, Posit, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others.

Sean Ennis

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Vouchsafe

This dog was abused, I think, and that gave it a shitty personality. That’s the correct cause and effect, right? Otherwise, the story of the dog is much sadder and I’m just trying to cheer up Grace. Her long sadness had broken, and she appeared, bath bomb-radiant and pink, excited to attend a movie? I cannot stress the deep dejection she had previously felt—don’t say wet blanket—and moods are a type of muscle, stronger with use. I’m not an expert! But I told Gabe to go pick some flowers while Grace and I talked about the type of story we’d like to see told. Because we had never planted any flowers, Gabe came back with some handsome weeds, and no one fussed about the difference if there was one. It was a new day, but fragile!

There are, of course, multiple frameworks available to choose from. I am not sitting. I’m trying to pet the dog even though he doesn’t like it. I feel that if I can just keep the dog from barking, the situation will resolve. Otherwise, all is lost and we’re back to the beginning, the bottom.

“This one sounds fun,” Grace said, and I went with it.

“Grace!” I said.

“What?” she said.

I was so happy I felt like buying presents, but then again that thought occurred to me that I am the cause of all of Grace’s misery. I’m becoming more non-profit. Last night was not my best meal. What movie?

Gabe interceded. “Pizza,” he said.

Eighteen months later, we came home from the movies and the dog is still growling. It’s a hustle keeping Grace—up. Which is to say, keeping up with Grace. It’s the movies where she regained pleasure, and so we’ve seen everything we can in English. Even so, there is that horror that it might return, that darker Grace, and contagious. We have this pass that lets us walk right in and the carpet is, of course, red. They know our order. I’ve read the disease is life-long and I still plan to find out, though these tip-toes on the sticky floor, my own swirling anxieties and obsessions and occasional tics. And poor Gabe watching the whole time, seemingly happy if fed, growing like a weed. He approaches the window of onset. We must be invited into his room.

To think, Grace recently championed the installation of a “Slow Children At Play” sign on our street when just last year she used that funny word about herself, lugubrious. Worse than that. I had been imagining the family breaking up like a band, sadly working on our solo projects because of creative differences. Now, she’s thinking civically because the cars were coming by so fast. She’s even thinking romantically: a matching bra and panty set. She still removes my hand but the progress is undeniable. As for my own mental health, I’m cruising.

Sean Ennis is the author of Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West) and Chase Us: Stories (Little A). More of his work can be found at seanennis.net. He lives in Mississippi.

Erika Eckart

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Sight

She needed a break from seeing it: the one daughter’s drinking, the one daughter breaking her hand on the other daughter’s face, the vodka-filled water bottles, the strategically placed puke buckets, the grandbaby turning his sleeping mother over on her side like he had been taught, etc., etc. So she squirreled away a few dollars to stay at a cheap hotel. She felt guilty about leaving them, but also if she didn’t remove herself she would do something dangerous. She couldn’t see it anymore, couldn’t see her baby she made with her body asleep in the snow. Well, technically she didn’t see that, the police just described it to her, but you get my drift. She was watching her creation destroy herself and there was nothing she could do, (believe me she tried all the things) but watch because she didn’t have the heart to do what the books said and put her baby out on the street. What she really wanted out of the hotel was the hot tub, to close her eyes in, to shut down completely in. And she did ease her body into the almost painful water, and it did feel so good the temporary reprieve, the halo of steam obscuring her sight, but lurking in the water was a single-celled organism which squirmed into her eye. It was a desperate grasp at relief, both her plunge and the parasite’s. It curled itself under the doorway that was her eyelid, embedded itself in the fleshy tissue, and started feasting. She came home with one eye shut. Disoriented. Nothing was better. The one daughter was unconscious in a grocery store bathroom. And the doctors couldn’t figure her eye out. At first they thought it was a trauma, then a bacterial infection until an eye specialist determined that, no, that’s a living thing in your cornea, preparing for its departure to your central nervous system. It was painful, an anvil in her skull, but the closed eye wasn’t empty. Instead, it offered a different vision. In it, she saw her daughter sober, happy, apple-cheeked, riding a fucking horse, lisa-frank style, walking down an aisle, white dress, a trail of babies, so clean. In the other open, still-operational eye, the daughter is running up a hill mostly naked, it is cold out, she is warning the neighbors about hallucinated phantoms. The mother wanted to close both eyes, to give up, and if the medicine didn’t work she’d die with her happy baby emblazoned on the backs of her eyelids. And this is how she figures the light works, the one you walk toward, the glowing embrace that protects us from knowing it’s the end, the calming fiction that gives mothers permission to let go, to pretend it’s all going to be okay, they can fend for themselves now, no need to be there to turn them on their side so they don’t aspirate.

Prepper

She had been through lean times, (I mean when weren’t they?) but she means when there really wasn’t enough to fill the cavities in their bellies. She watched them fight over crackers, for dinner once prepared a box of Jiffy muffin mix with nothing but water and split the rubbery yield among 5, garbage picked the contents of a gas station dumpster after a fire made everything technically unsellable, wept when her children reported they did not eat their free school lunch. It is a mother’s job to feed her children, and when you can’t something breaks in you, your mind is a scramble/frenzy/war always hustling to turn nothing into calories, bulk, something to chew. So later, when the foreclosure notice came/the light bill was unpayable/ the children now grown with full bellies struggled to work/live, she protected them the only way she knew, gathering food from dollar stores and food pantries like a magpie on speed: cans of potted meat, boxes of tuna helper, obscure jarred frostings, all past their sell by date. Much of it was boxes of dust: dehydrated corn syrup, ground to sparkly flint, gelatin, stabilizers, MSG, flecks of green. When reconstituted with water it transforms to the equivalent of stacking all the furniture against the door. She fashioned her stores into fortress walls, flanks of soldiers, a watch tower, a moat, stocked all the cabinets, a storage room, an extra freezer, every pocket of space filled with insurance that it won’t come to that again. In the end, there was enough to eat, but everybody was hungry for something else: affection, work, revenge, alcohol, some of it surely grounded in that earlier time of want, but there is no feeding it now, the statute of limitations is long past. Afterwards, her cupboards remained full, but she couldn’t throw it out–it was a keepsake, a relic, an obsolete fortress made of highly-processed corn, long covered in moss, trees growing on the inside, admired, but useless, but still proof of how hard she tried to cushion them from want, how well she did her job, just look.

The pull of the water

My boy wants to watch the creek carry its burden–watch garbage gather in the current and be pulled against the rocks, watch the water travel in indirect swirls when it dances over the jagged bends. When that’s not enough, he throws leaf carcasses and wood chips and discarded bottle tops on one side of a bridge and then quickly runs to the other to watch them be pulled by the flow. Each time his act has the effect he hoped he hops up and down in place, overjoyed. He wants to be closer so we walk down the bank to admire the pull of the water up close. Suddenly, he pushes himself and his puffy coat into the metal fence, separating us from the water and tries to scale it. He needs to throw himself in, to be the thing dragged by the current and pulled under, to dance against the rocks. I anchor myself on the wet ground and hold him back; he wiggles. Everything is slick, the whole world a smooth, wet surface with no traction. It is impossible to create enough friction to keep upright, so I shift my weight and we fall back, away from the water, a panting, still-struggling pile. A stranger comes and asks What are you going to do when he’s too big for you? My boy writhes on the wet ground; I’m pinning him, begging, explaining, promising, praying the stranger will walk away. It feels unsustainable, the pull of the forces, a seam about to burst somewhere in my mind or my stomach or the space time continuum. I start scream-singing “this little light of mine,” scaring the stranger away and startling my boy out of his mania, and I remember hanging from the ceiling in the school cafeteria little paper mâché planets with signs explaining how long it will take their light to get to us, and how comforting it is to know someday it’s coming, either the light or the current to carry us away.

Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is a High School English teacher in Oak Park, IL where she lives with her husband and two children.

Maureen Seaton

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Muse Theory Inspired by Dennis Hinrichsen w/a Woman Stopping along the Highway

—O Ruth Stone

there’s been nothing in this crazy world before or since like the words
that barreled down Route 80 the year I drove to see my friend
in Somewhere Pennsylvania // not the Lower East Side
w/the clawfoot tub in her kitchen & the river rats beneath her sink
or that pink neon // flashing P-O-E-T // in her bedroom window—No //
There I was alone w/all that // sound // not words at first //
trusty 4-cylinder beneath me // Holy Truckstop—Holy Open Road
stretching to infinity // & suddenly there were lines & lines of words //
trains of words—crazy winds of unwanted words—no thank you—not now—
old buddy—old muse—can’t you see I’m driving // words out of the blue
words straight from the horizon where light begins // where if you wanted
to be quiet w/a hat pulled over your ears // or wrapped in a silence
even multitudes could not pierce // you couldn’t // no // you were that

astonishingly open

Muse Theory w/Chemo during Covid

 

I am shaving my legs even though I am in perpetual quarantine and everyone I see and love is on zoom and even if they weren’t on zoom but sitting right beside me they wouldn’t care if my legs were hairy but last week when I went to the ER with vertigo of all things how dumb is that I was so embarrassed when they put a gown on me and my legs were hairy although not as hairy as they are ten days later you can imagine and honestly I was sitting here thinking about writing something for my group tomorrow with the prompt they thought up last week which is to write about something you love in your house plus with the extra added prompt of after a poet you admire so I thought of Dennis Hinrichsen again with his unusual punctuaton although Holly already pointed out that Dickinson used a lot of dashes too but still I said all those double slashes or forward slashes as this definition from an online Punctuation Guide gives us // The one inarguably acceptable use of the slash in formal writing pertains to poetry. The slash, with one space on either side, indicates a line break // I like that even if I don’t agree with it because to me everything is arguable not that I argue a lot or even a little actually with anyone but doctors but I do love to argue with my oncologist who is a head with a body attached to it my therapist says which may be true so I have to be careful I use my whole body when forced to make decisions about what kind of chemo I’m going to have and whether it will make me lose just the hair on my head or both of my eyebrows and all my body hair which brings me full circle to these legs which are in dire need of shaving at the moment dash double slash period

Though they be mad and dead as nails

—Dylan Thomas

They never did find Mary
in her musty unreliable tomb,
but I know they will surely

find me in mine. If only
someone had told me I too
should remain a virgin I might

have slipped from my grave
one night to fly out and away
in my luminescent body

smelling pure and sweet,
not fucked at all, the way
the scrappy nuns warned us

from our biblical beginnings
that messing around with boys
would be the death of us

and they were right, oh God!
Now here I am, tarnished
as a sad old silver gravy boat

and doomed to die like any
unlucky unclean creature
who couldn’t wait to have sex.

Corona

Why do they treat the dying for the dead?
—Sonny Nordmarken

Dear Sonny, Your question about the dying and the dead has come to me in a text message, which may mean that a word or words have been changed in the journey. Aureole. Aurora. Antibody. So it’s possible you haven’t noticed that the preposition “for” is an unusual choice or that your question “Why” might also be expressed as “How”. 1. A circle of light around a luminous body, especially around the sun or moon. Bloodlet. Borialis. Bacillicide. Since you sent the text from Texas and I’m in Colorado, maybe a word jumped latitudes along the way. Circlet. Carnivorous. 2. A circular chandelier in a church or a castle. Corona herself felt a sense of imprisonment, but no desire to sing. Perhaps I should answer the question rather than going around and around. Disc. Disk. Wondering whether or not it was auto-corrected between Houston and Boulder. Ecliptic. 3. A part of the body resembling or likened to a crown. Facula. Flame. Corona, in the act of upturning a leaf, started and drew back her hand. Gyre. Hoop. So I think they treat the dying as the dead because they fail to see that the dying are not dead. Halo. 4. The trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the center of a daffodil or a narcissus. Icy. Iced. They think the dying are actually dead, in other words. As Corona caught her breath, they turned and stared. Joule. Krypton. Light. 5. The rarefied gaseous envelope of the sun and other stars. The dying are alive, pure and simple. Meridian. Nimbus. Orbit. And what did Corona seek in the kitchen garden? Perimeter. Periphery. Quark. In fact, the dying are perhaps more alive in their dying than any living person might be. Revolution. Ringlet. Radiance. This means that any time someone treats a dying person as a dead person, that someone is committing an injustice. Sphere. Stadium. Tongue. As to why someone might do that, I have no idea. 6. The petal-shaped fringe around a virus. “Then we ought to go straight back and set them free,” insisted Corona. Umbrella. Vortex. Or maybe the world simply continues to be witless in ways that involve the dying and the dead. Wreath. Zodiac. Just once I would like to feel as safe in the world as you make me feel, Sonny, whether I’m dying or not, and for that I will always love you, no matter what, how, or, in this case, why.

Note: “Corona” was written in the style of Susan Griffin’s abecedarian, “Erosion,” in Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her. The “Corona” quotes are from the novel, Brother Copas (1911), by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), a British writer who is mainly remembered for The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900.

Maureen Seaton has authored two dozen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—recently, Undersea (JackLeg, 2021) and Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019), winner of the Florida Book Award for poetry. Her honors include Lambda Literary Awards for both Lesbian Poetry and Lesbian Memoir, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, Illinois Arts Council Grant, Society of Midland Authors Award, and the Pushcart. She was voted Miami’s Best Poet 2020 by The Miami New Times.

Elise Houcek

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Whose Shirt Was Surely Fleece

I gave up all my charms. Now, on Friday nights, I go to the grocery store and my charms are the soupboxes, the people I see when I look around. I go with my boyfriend and buy him a little treat, something bubbly but uncaffeinated, something with tropical packaging. DO I MEAN DEATH IS MAKING US GET INTO KIDS’ STUFF? Kind of, but not really. Its aspect ratio is kiddie, but the pixels themselves have much more sheen. They let things slide off of them, like a plate, the plate on which I serve dinner to the children I’ll never think of having. Sometimes I wonder if this is the real cause. That it’s not just death’s fault? That I might actually live in the world again, go out to parties, etc? Our bubbly water could be caffeinated. Cruel trick that all cool women will have to face. All women whose faces lag and lapse over the pixelated cart BECAUSE THEY HAD SOME BRIGHT IDEA. MOMMY TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT! Mommy showed you curdled drinks! But I was too young, a baby who was already a baby. That’s enough, I thought, and went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, since I was the child and the mind of the child at once, since I was just a touch away from snuggling bliss. Mentally. Physically (I looked down at my cart, then at my boyfriend, whose shirt was surely fleece). I told him I wanted us to consider this a date idea. I wanted him to consider that I had come up with this idea and what that meant for us. I had a sneaking suspicion that he himself was into the tropical treats idea, but I learned as a child that men aren’t into sticking with.

“Guarding”

Another evening walk with him in this frenzy-ornamented town. Another lapping lag while on the sidewalk as my blood huffs to get the baton around (too much coke, too much sugar in the break). We pass, among other things, a statue of a lion, who guards the right edge corner of the small white house’s driveway. The statue of the lion is weirdly shaped, as in it’s got its legs folded under it, as in, it’s lying down. I wonder if the lion’s posture is contingent on the kind of home it plays in front of (mine certainly is)–when I’m at LEE’S, all my back can do is lie down and breathe, since it’s not random that they have those things. This house is random, too, but not the words I sent to you while noticing that lion, or that that lion sent to us in the space between our recognizing. “Guarding’s” the word. Guarding’s got fur. As in it came to us in the space between. As in it deputizes the Land of Nod(t) (furry, sleepy children nodding out with the gesture of a paintbrush amidst granite spires, sighing, the gesture of a mouse–baby blue snuggie… baby pink…). So you were saying the lion was doing not that, v lax in front of the port-style house with its trinkets parked in the loading belt. Also, the lion was granite, and so didn’t have any fur. I wondered, or was wondering, after you pointed to the lion weirdly not-guarding his home, his friends (might as well have pointed into the air) looking for the word to describe his failure NOT what word should be filling in the gap but whether it was worth mentioning at all. Whether you were worth it, this breath. Plus, I wanted to save it for myself. I discovered it, I unearthed it in its real beauty, which was not its clicking into this particular question but its clicking more generally.

Semordnilap

Pressing the bulb in the corner of my eye, a bird got caught in a snare, a flare, skittered, then I lay back down and thought I would never get up again. Then I lay back down into the white of my bed’s turf, down through the square of it, the plane, then down again, through the sheets of clouds, the elevation changing, turbulence-sans. I would never return to work again. Would that be a change? Or would it be anti-change? Inertia? I preferred to think the latter, to feel dead momentarily, though still fuzzy. Here from my Saturday-morning casket I watched various phenomena of the eye play in front of me like seeds in the air and a giant red bar of light. Like scenes in the air. Like deconstructed tableaux. How do I do that. I recall the people who have used the term, summon/re-imagine them in my mind like ancestors traveling in a great backwards-flowing line. Xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. The act is noble of itself and light enough to sustain Semordnilap. Is that my name? I do a lap around my sea-bed backwards and upwards-facing, arms outstretched. The names of teachers, mostly, come to me, the names of all my dead teachers. They fall into my open mouth like gently dropping fruit and taste, mmmm, like cherries. Cherries mixed with cream, so less red than pink. O yeah, xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. They’re trying to teach me something. To unteach? Every time I swallow another one, the scenes I watch in front of me on the bed become more and more meshy, less opaque. But no sooner than I think the word MESH, someone whispers YOU GOT IT, then I’m dead.

Elise Houcek’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in NOMATERIALISM, New Delta Review, The Comstock Review, DIAGRAM, Prelude, Afternoon Visitor, Always Crashing, Action Books Blog and other journals. Her poetry chapbook, So Neon Was the Rope, was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse and will be published by Osmanthus Press in 2022. Her poetic novel, TRACTATUS, is now available for preorder from Spuyten Duyvil. Find her at elisehoucek.com.

Marvin Shackelford

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Drawback

When the waters receded we saw the statuary of those who came before. Their rounded helms and long hair appeared ahead of square stone shoulders, robes and armor, the pedestals bearing names in half-recognizable script. They stared grimly at us. The deep bay had swallowed them, grown murky with years of commerce, and kept them hidden. We didn’t swim there, didn’t fish unless we had to, grew ill if we ate our catch. We crossed the hills to other, quieter waters, knew the surrounding lands better than the sea. We weren’t the warrior sons and priestesses’ daughters who took this place by force and sealed it in stone. We were a disappointment. Among the paving stones and marble fixtures our fathers preached of gods forgotten, debts owed and paid, and our mothers wept for children to keep them in their dotage. To throw oneself unknowing into the void, they promised, held the greatest riches. They began to step down from their plinths and pillars, knees stiff and breaking, and fell into their own shadow. Sometimes it takes starting over, they whispered. Storms bring fresh water, and blood runs freely over old roots. Disaster presages glory. All about us the world rose and darkened. We wanted to believe them.

The Deep Threatened

In room seven of the ER a teenage girl screamed red-faced at a man—too old, scruffily bearded, to be a boyfriend but too young to be her father—who showed no signs of wakefulness. In six a man in tribal regalia stood alone, face painted, and the overhead lamp, that elbowed device in place for surgeons or nurses or whoever worked mightily in times of need, threw his shadow across the wall in the shape of a bird, a phoenix or dragon or something else built of smoke and fire, of hope and loss.

The door to five was closed, locked, but someone the other side bleated like a sheep. In four a woman lay snoring loudly, a rhythm to her breath suggesting the tremulous ringtone of an older phone. The boy in room three sat bare-chested and ate slices of pear, apple, grapes and cherries, from a white-lidded container. The nurses spoke quietly of an infestation, roaches or spiders, something legged and unseen in cluttered space.

In two the curtain was pulled tightly around the bed. A woman sat just outside it, a large book that might have been a Bible spread-eagled on her lap, and reapplied her lipstick. She blotted her mouth on the rim of a coffee cup and turned to stare into the hallway. She didn’t speak.

One lay empty. A custodian worked to remove a broken clock from the wall, its glass blackened and smoky as though it had suffered a sudden surge of power, or been struck by lightning.

And there at the entrance you shucked rainwater from your pink umbrella. The fountains of the deep threatened to swallow you. The parking lot filled with men beating at the side of our ark, all the sinners of every life I’ve lived seeking shelter from the night. I asked if you were sure we were doing the right thing, if it was necessary, if in the morning we’d look back and say, Well done, well done. You didn’t answer. You handed me your coat and walked into the far-away lights of the emergency-room hallway. You walked against the arrows painted up and down the shiny linoleum. You walked until you disappeared in a storm of scrubs and cords, carbon forms and diagnoses and promises, wise men and laughter, and I waited.

 

The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail

The third living pope declares himself without smoke or ceremony in Palestine, Texas. Enough is enough, he says. Suffer the little ones no more. He was a Baptist coming in, but no one minds. He begins to bind on earth what he expects of Heaven: Communion drops to every fifth Sunday and baptisms to confessions of faith, but the line on divorce stays about the same. The Sunday-school teachers and ladies in the nursery keep a very neat signup sheet and travel in pairs. He ordains deacons and elders with wives and families, and they all carry guns. They pray without repetitions around a folding table on Wednesday nights and on Thursday go to the stockyard. Fridays they eat catfish and attend high-school football games. They watch from deep in the stands. We’re looking good, they say. Awful good.

The third living pope drawls out Hebrew names, and his prayers carry a twang. Occasionally he wonders aloud what the keys he’s taken hold from Saint Peter are actually supposed to start. He pictures Heaven like a cherry-red Mustang and Hell its fuel tank, launched into the backseat when it’s struck just right. He carries quite a few thoughts about that false white horse that’s coming, its rider and overall towing power. He reinstitutes excommunication and inquisitions the flock, the church discipline let slide so long. He puts his foot on down, but not everyone’s convinced. A few folks try out the Lutherans, some give the Methodists or Presbyterians a look, but mostly they just quit church altogether.

The third living pope promises all will be well. He preaches on Sundays, morning and night, at volumes alternating between calm and angry. He says who needs Latin when you’ve got the King’s good English. He says to watch anybody with a crystal cathedral or a Cadillac or too crooked a smile, but he likes to lay on hands and anoint with oil. There’s a time and a place for the washing of feet. He starts growing a beard. Once the cameras fall away and the letters of rebuke, the calls to cease and desist, peter out, he spends more time at home. His wife bakes cornbread and beans and says maybe tomorrow a roast. He wears out his Bible, fills it with fresh ink drawing the line leading from him back to Christ. It’s shorter than anybody thinks. At night he calls his children and tells those that answer to watch the blood, follow it close. Perilous creatures unnumbered roam this earth, he says. The lion and thief come. At least we’re better than that, he tells them. We’re better than that.

Marvin Shackelford is the author of a collection of poems, Endless Building, and a couple volumes of stories and flash forthcoming from Alternating Current Press and Red Bird Chapbooks. His work has, or soon will have, appeared in The Kenyon Review, West Branch, MoonPark Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He resides, quietly, in Southern Middle Tennessee.

Rebecca Pyle

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Cartoon of Goodness

She ran a service called Holding You Close. You didn’t know who was going to come to her house, you didn’t know who at all they would be. They were people who admitted they needed someone to hold them close. Some of them asked if there were men available to hold them close and she referred them to Brosnan. Brosnan would hold people close. Brosnan was a sort of god of kindness. He always stayed distant from everyone as he should, of course, and he was also constantly, constantly, cheerful, as she should be: but she tended to moroseness. She was holding strangers, but to her, they were a someone else, whom she held for half an hour; or for fifteen minutes, if they were really budgetary, or frightened about being close.

She was married, and had three children, all in school; she had a husband, who was a good employee and always being promoted, in the aerospace industry. Thus his job was a mystery. Why did anyone want to do anything in outer space? Outer space just wanted to kill you. It would kill you somehow, was the law of averages. Unless you had extreme backing, extreme luck, extreme in-the-right-place at-the-right-time luck.

She thought of the holding bed as a place that was home base, to which frightened almost-astronauts returned. When you were in your mother’s womb you were an astronaut, really, tethered by that line to your mother; when you were dying, you were the astronaut letting go of the space station, its meals, and its comforts: you were drifting off forever, and others would take your place.

She kept the sheets and blankets very sweetly laundered. That was part of her job, that they be unusually sweet, not cruelly sweet, as hotel linens were, over-laundered at the hotel. She put sweet orange oil in the rinse. Something to make her clients feel new.

Most of them, of course, were men. They were men who needed to feel safe. They had come to this big city, Seattle, to be successful, but everywhere people had family, dates, lovers, friends. Not they. They were just busy with their damned jobs. They needed to feel loved somewhere while they lay down. She would just barely touch the edges of their hair, stroking their heads, and she would nod to whatever they said. They wanted to feel included in something that was lazy and pure and not a work project. They wanted to see someone’s head up close to theirs. And they were idealists, she told herself, or they’d have someone to lie next to them. They could have found someone. But they didn’t want just anyone. Not yet. They were holding out for the perfect one.

Back to the one she imagined. He was unhaveable; he was too fine. Or he did too poor a job of trying to be fine. He didn’t have to bother. He was very good at what he did; but yet he wasn’t good enough. What was his problem? He was almost a cartoon of goodness.

The Dying Plane

But it’s also in us, he said. Our majesty. Never let anyone take that away from you. Not even a giant airplane or all the wind and sky and stars in the world. Royalty really is in your head. It was an exalted speech from an air steward. Accidental poetry. Our majesty, she said. She blinked, gratefully. She felt tears working their clever foxy ways out of her eyes. In her handbag, or her pocketbook, as it was more humbly and gracefully called, was her address, her car keys, the names and numbers of people who might still know her, who might understand the amnesia of being a year away, if they had once done such a thing, if they knew the red-velvet-dressed great sweet bed of geographical amnesia. Those, mostly, would be older men, fading out, who’d gone to war. She should choose a city, soon—choose and start up in a huge, numb city in America, the number and awfuller the better, something to fully trap her and keep her. I could—write a book, she’d begun trying to say to the air steward, he with his crisp white shirt and his vest of darkest but brilliant, radiant navy blue. But he had disappeared to be kind to others, to distribute more majesty. When she woke, she woke to unbeautiful but not unimportant noises. The plane was dropping at a terrible rate, a measurable rate by Brits in due time, from the miracle and mystery of the crown of a thing called black box, which would reveal why their plane was falling out of the sky toward the waiting swallow of sea: descent, she could not help thinking, almost a tailored match to her despair; the drop of the plane was the almost comic diagram of her grief about returning to a home she did not want. She was England’s, she was Covent Garden’s, she was in St. James park in a striped-fabric folding chair; she was the Norse-named towns ending in by, the raven-wing swell of dark hair in young British men’s hair left behind by Roman soldiers; she was the frenetic repeated steps of step-dances danced, as if carving the ground, by the Irish. She was the English. She had wanted it all to be hers, her truest mother and her father forever, King Lear with his true wife who loved him and found him on the moor; so, when the plane came to the water it was the right pain to end things, to end her failure to establish herself in some way in that place. Her only pain-flicks of regret she had, in the few moments she had to have them, were the dull awful regret that he, who must be in his house that smelled like lemons, would never know she was his; and, of course, her honest doubt she was. His. But she’d borrowed him for a while, in her head, to pretend he wanted to love her, understand her and hold her and keep her—even now, somehow, his great arms, able to hold her, catch her, now.

Pushcart nominee Rebecca Pyle’s writing appears, or is about to appear, this cave-dwelling year, in Festival Review, Cape Rock, Gargoyle magazine, In Parentheses, Honest Ulsterman, Litro USA, Terrain.org, Gris-Gris, Kleksograph, Common Ground Review, 15 Bytes, and in an anthology to be published by Grattan Street Press in Melbourne. Rebecca is a visual artist, too, her artwork to be in or on covers of numerous art/lit journals in 2021, Blood Orange Review, Gris-Gris, Cream City Review, Madison Review, Rappahannock Review, and JuxtaProse among them. Rebecca’s mumbly-peg life of arts & letters is conducted in foothills in Utah, just above Salt Lake City’s valley. See rebeccapyleartist.com.

Ian U Lockaby

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Hand Tool

The sides of the well collapsed, vegetable and anxiety farmed all up the sides of the water source. Deep inside the well, a hand, a handing tool. A hand dig too left out in the rain will rust a while. The grin grips the pressure systems and the meteorologist moans. The meter is the motor, depending how you look at it. All utility must be watched, if it is to be utility rust. They hand you a tool. They charge you for it.

May 22

We take them down, slide the hour sharp right through the green tangle of feet, watch them after noon wilt against the dirt against the sun and against the dream of it— tidy plotted earth to harvest and harvest again. Wilting in the sun against the dream, here with my wit— I true the greening difference. I don’t understand that difference.

After lunching on the shade of the vine maple, the thought of yourself is going back to the field, leaving from leftover shade, having had your fill, but realizing you weren’t going back— it was the thought of you—you’ve ready said it I’m saying it again.

We’re going down to the beans and spinach—scuff them up. Shuffle your green and wilting feet. The work’s not over it’s under you. Rising up in to and through you. Rest your head against the dream awhile, harvest your feet.

A Demonstration

Suppose a demonstration is required of the worker. The labor being inside itself to begin with, mostly. What you will eventually eat upon is a table, which holds the leaves once held by hands, once inside themselves. Dust in the field is washed off before you table it. By who is not who you’re harboring, but who is harboring you.

To speak of the dibble is to reference an inside. When there is an inside, there is a dibble outside. Taking the weather in the weather’s times. To speak of the dibble. To nib with the dibble is to wear the long red gown of the weather. To follow the tails of the gown through the field crowded with seeded bread, and rows, is to dibble with toes, the labor of it.

Wellness

In the well we farm for the sides of it, from a depth of sides we up and up the farm, the hefty sides, the hefty farm. A depth of wellness has much to do with the green side of things. When the well collapsed we were welling with anxiety and vegetable, vegetable anxiety. An algae swelled. There’s water in the well, well, well. Water in the well and the well’s collapsed. To drill the well requires a well, on the green side of things, a gathering up the hefty sides of algae-well.

Carry one cigarette from the garden up the pass

I left because I needed to arrive. Always trying to arrive is one way to seldom do. An ever-arriving coincident with a failure to recognize it, the air of our heads conditioned to miss the particles we land on, over and over, this progress.

I left summer because fall was one way to fall away. It got cold, surfaces came unstuck. Carrying tobacco flowers in a glass jar grown from seed I’d been saving for years. I would smoke the flowers. I would save a few seeds, willing particles to land on. I would might then.

Ian U Lockaby is a poet, translator, and former farmworker. His poems have appeared/will soon appear in Denver Quarterly, Datableed, Apartment, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He is the translator of Gardens, by Chilean poet Carlos Cociña, forthcoming from Cardboard House Press, and his translations also appear in Sink Review, Anomaly, and The Canary. He currently teaches at Louisiana State University and lives in New Orleans.

Lucy Zhang

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Spear Against Shield1

A man is trying to sell a spear and a shield. He boasts that the spear is so strong it can pierce anything. He continues to boast that the shield is so strong it cannot be pierced. When someone asks what will happen if you pierce the shield with the spear, the man falls silent.

A man is trying to sell a spear and a shield because the rice fields painstakingly test his labor and patience and yield no more than a steady trickle of money. The patties sweep across all the land in sight, and a donkey trots beside one field with sacks of rice tied to its back and over its sides, ropes taut against the sag. An abandoned straw hat rests on the dirt, a speck of yellow among tiers of green terraces. The rice paddies stretch and cascade along the faces of the mountain, forming a color spectrum, the product of different rice harvesting times, and if he just looks up, he might think it a marvel of nature. The man looks up to see how many more hours of daylight he has left to sell. Customers spend much too long haggling with him and pointing out imaginary flaws in his products but he stays resolute: his greying hair and tan speckled skin from long days under the sun and wrinkles branching over his face–under his eyes, across his cheeks–fail to dull his discerning gaze, even as customers clamor for weapons. Last month, the neighbor’s son broke his leg and narrowly escaped the draft–and after the neighbor sensationalized this blessing-in-disguise tale to anyone who would listen (temporarily forgetting that the son would never walk properly again), everyone had been spooked into buying weapons, terrified of the rumored battlefields of men wielding iron swords and daggers and archers mounted on Mongolian horses. He tells the customers: if you buy both a shield and a spear, you’ll get one additional weapon of choice free. Mian fei. The magic words that drive sales crazy.

A man is trying to sell a spear and a shield. He boasts that the spear is so strong it can pierce anything. He continues to boast that the shield is so strong it cannot be pierced. When someone asks what will happen if you pierce the shield with the spear, the man responds: how about this gun.

 

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1 自相矛盾: direct translation – interacting spear shield. A Chinese idiom meaning: making a contradictory statement or claiming the impossible.

 

Playing Zither For The Cow2

The guzheng has thirteen brass strings stretched across movable bridges and a large wooden board decorated with carved lacquer and calligraphy. The musician wears bamboo plectra on four of the five fingers on each of his hands. His right hand plucks notes with such precision that even the children fighting over the last fresh zhi ma qiu, a deep-fried ball of glutinous rice flour coated in sesame seeds and filled by sweet red bean paste, stop to watch. His left hand presses the strings, producing an intense vibrato that strikes the hearts of the elderly performing their morning tai chi. He rotates his right thumb rapidly around the same note and the resulting tremolo turns the head of the farmer lugging sacks of millet to the market. He plucks another string, and a moment later, presses down to raise the pitch before finally releasing, the rapid alternation emerging as ripples, and the salesman whose shouts about discounted spears and shields goes quiet.

When the musician finishes playing, the children and elderly and farmer and salesman resume their tasks and he scoops the pile of coins on the ground into his pocket and heads to the rural side of town. He finds a soft patch of grass shaded by a tree and sits and closes his eyes. One of the grazing cows nears and snorts, waking the musician up. Upon seeing the cow walking in his direction, the musician wonders, perhaps the cow would like to listen to something beautiful, and begins to pluck notes into a song. The cow stops, bends its head down and chews at the grass. The musician incorporates Sweeps Without Bends, Two String Rising Slide, Flowering Finger, Moving Water Fu, Thumb Shake–his entire arsenal of skills. The music becomes so long and varied, it is more saga than song. The cow uses its tongue to grasp another clump of grass and bites it off.

The musician closes his eyes, thinking, perhaps the cow is too shy to show its appreciation of such musicality. And as he taps and strikes and plucks to the view of the backs of his eyelids, he wonders how long it has been since he last listened to his music.

 

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2 对牛弹琴: direct translation – to play zither for a cow. A Chinese idiom describing someone who is trying to tell something to the wrong audience.

Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work appears in Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021. She edits for Barren Magazine, Heavy Feather Review and Pithead Chapel. Find her at kowaretasekai.wordpress.com or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.