Camroc Press Review

Gary Hardaway

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 06:00:00 +0000

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Monet painted the haystacks over and over,

in different light, from different vantage points,

as if to discover and record

every haystack ever raked.

Rothko explored horizons,

blurring figure and ground

by omitting the figure.

No peopled landscape there.

After thirty, Bach concluded the Variations.

He could have pictured the shared notes

another hundred ways

and not exhausted the possibilities.

Closest to God, the artist,

who knows how many ways

the simplest elements can re-arrange themselves

but lacks the time and devotion to capture them all.

Self Portrait with Google

Some days, you just want

to stay at home and Google yourself

to find out who you are and what you are

because you can’t remember.

Try it with and without

middle name or middle initial.

Try different keywords.

Maybe, amid the electron residue,

you will find enough of yourself

to remember your self by.

Maybe you will come to recognize

the odd, haggard figure in your mirror.

Things I Will Miss Once the Apocalypse Is Done

Sonorities of large bore well-tuned V8 engines.

Soft fingertips and palms,

clean fingernails,

Ibuprofen tablets

downed with potable water.

Alacritous computer screens flashing

through bits of the world.

The warm stream of a showerhead

splashing away a winter nap.

Bacon sizzling.

Abundant eggs over easy.

The scent of fresh cut grass.

The idiot sense of accomplishment

mowing the lawn can bring.

The whispered whoosh

of cool conditioned air in August.

The flair of artificial light.

Photographs of food on Facebook.

Complex British costume dramas on PBS.

Inflammatory edits of the news on Fox.

The aroma of coffee brewing.

Gluttonous satisfactions of Thanksgiving

and the glittering excess of Christmas.

Unsolicited email offers

of chemical peels and electronic cigarettes.

Cigarettes and butane lighters.

Reliable clicks of date and time.

Music played by professionals.

Junk mail and postcards,

mail delivery of any kind.

The sound of machine-washed clothes

tumbling in the dryer.

Beer, wine, and intoxicating spirits

safe enough and good enough to drink.

Anything like a clean, well-lighted place.

Last Poem

At some point

in the locus of points

it will be true. When

the heart stops

caring enough to squeeze

pallid blood through

or the voice that wants

to be inscribed

forgets the sounds

the vowels make

or the shapes

of the consonants.

Some one

must be the last.

Why not this one?

Work by Gary Hardaway has appeared in Silkworms Ink, Connotation Press, Olentangy Review, Arlington Review, Blue Fifth Review and other fine places. He lives in Texas and has earned his living as an urban planner and architect.

Antonia Clark

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Women at Graves

If you want to learn

how to go on, study

women at graves,

the way they stand,

backs to the wind,

and how acceptance

settles like a fine mist

in their hair, a light hand

on their shoulders.

Their eyes hold what

the rest of us spend

our brief lives seeking:

an intimate knowledge

of earth and sky, why

they persist, together

yet apart, how a tilting

wing slices the air

at the precise point

of balance between them,

where the swallow goes,

what the crow knows.

The Departed

They gather to recite

our names, a tribe

of peaceful people

who make their home

along the riverbank,

subsisting on the promise

of fish, on the quiet

of late afternoons, when

long blue shadows move

across the endless grass.

They wait for us to tire

of our busyness, to grow

weary in our bones.

They're filled with longing

for us to give in, join them,

but patient as stones.

Antonia Clark's poems have appeared in Anderbo, Apparatus, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Softblow, and other fine places. Her work won an Editor's Favorite Award at Camroc Press Review in 2012. She loves French picnics and plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.

Tina Barry

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Peonies

Not far from our new house in the country sits another house, a glorified trailer with an overstuffed flower garden. I drive past and wave enthusiastically to the owner, red-faced from his labors, who returns the gesture with equal zeal. Early in the evening, I decide to visit my neighbor. I choose clothing carefully: a flowered blouse, perfume. I’m not sure why. Besides the wave, he isn’t attractive: wispy strands of black hair barely stretch across an oversized head. A droopy stomach over droopy shorts. I find him beside his house, in a shed lit with a single bare light bulb. I’m here for the peonies, I say. We look at each other for a long moment. Up close, his nose is blunt. A fine white scar divides the bottom lip. Peonies, he says slowly, as if I’ve uttered the correct password.

Table Talk

My mother tells her friend on the phone about my father’s latest misdeeds: he’s lost money at the track, meant for my brother’s tenth birthday party, a no-big-deal family thing at a diner, but still. Her voice gets screechy as she talks of the boy he was caught fondling in the bathroom of a bowling alley. The worst part: the dumb schmuck doesn’t even bowl. I don’t need to hear the flat “ah-has” and “hmms” of the listener to know she’s not interested. Mother sits at the dining room table, legs thrust underneath, a filmy nylon nightgown brushing her knees, her calves dry and scratched. I’m stretched out beneath the table watching her feet rub together like another pair of fussing hands.

Chanukah

David’s car is packed with so many stuffed animals it looks like he’s robbed a zoo. At his ex-wife’s house, he opens the car door, wrestles out a full-size tiger, and drags it across the snow-covered lawn. It takes 20 minutes to fill the den with damp toys. Laughter shrill, smiles too wide, his daughters roll atop the plush mountain of new pets. They hope this year’s performance will convince Dad to stay. Last Chanukah was such a failure.

Tina Barry’s short stories and poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, Lost in Thought, Elimae, and other publications. She enjoys good meals almost as much as great writing.

Nicholas Cook

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 06:00:00 +0000

We Disappear

There's desire and then there isn't. "You know in the beginning of books," he says, "where it reads, 'This is a work of fiction,' like we didn't already know?"

His things are arranged neatly on the floor. "This one goes." he says, then, "This too." Things I'll never see again. He presses his body flat against the wall, asks if I see him.

Light bounces around before hitting my eye. "What is enough and what isn't?" I say.

The Ghost

The ghost smokes a cigarette. Behind walls no one can see him. He stays quiet. He was once asked, "Why this lifestyle?"

He gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A wrong number. "Thanks for calling anyway," he says. His bed is small and wedged between two walls.

A draft wakes him. He feels the presence of something alive and human-like on the other side. "Hello?" he says.

The woman calls the ghost to bed. She opens her blouse. He leans in. All sensation left years before. He hovers silently.

After he died, the ghost was given a pack of cigarettes, an old Nokia, an address written on a Post-it.

Nicholas Cook lives in New York.

Tom Hazuka

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Pedalphiles

Our cycling club’s name was definitely not my idea. But Pedalphiles has some of the best riders in the state, and even more important, it has Jenny Porter, so when they invited me to join I didn’t think twice.

That’s a total lie. I’ve thought about it so many times I’m sick.

I was molested for two years as an altar boy. I’m one of the damaged kids finally paid off by the Church (somehow I still have to use that capital “C”) after years of stonewalling in court, but no amount of money can erase the taste of that man of God from my life.

I’ve broken the ice with Jenny, though it’s melting slowly. Being on the same team is a start, not a solution. After all, of the dozen altar boys at Saint Succotash’s, Father Creepysmile only targeted me. Creepysmile said I was special, and through him Jesus loved me even more than my parents did. Since my parents didn’t love each other at all that sort of made sense, no weirder than some of the gospel stories Creepysmile read during Mass.

Creepysmile always closed his eyes as he lifted the Host toward heaven. Ringing the altar bell after the words “This is my body, which will be given up for you,” I’d think of other times he’d close his eyes, panting and groaning until he croaked a choking sound like he was being strangled. He’d give me a few dollars afterward from the collection basket. He’d remind me how much Jesus loved me, and that I shouldn’t share our special secret with anyone but God.

Of course, God already knew.

I debate about telling Jenny. Could I share my life with a woman who doesn’t know? Crazy question, maybe, considering I’ve shared nothing with Jenny so far except teammate-style pleasantries, and smiles and high-fives after races. Yesterday’s high-five, though…I swear she maintained skin contact longer than usual, longer than for anyone else on the team. Or was that just me holding on to something that wasn’t there, holding on to nothing?

It’s not small talk material, that’s certain. Starbucks (which I’ll suggest for our first date, once I raise the courage) isn’t the place for that sort of revelation. I should probably wait until after we’ve had sex, until we’ve made that commitment to each other. I’ve heard the third date is when that usually happens, but I’ll be careful not to rush things. If it takes till the fourth or even fifth date, that’s fine with me.

I wonder if she’s had many partners. “Partners” sounds like a business transaction, but saying “lovers” makes my heart hurt.

I do love to pedal, though, joyfully pumping with Jenny as we climb together, breathing hard, feeling the whole bad world fade as her face, contorted with lovely effort, smiles for me as we hit the finish line. I’ve never felt so close to anyone, and I’d pray, if only I still could, that words will be my savior and someday come to rescue us.

Tom Hazuka has published three novels, and his short stories have appeared in Chariton Review, Florida Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, and other fine places. He has edited or co-edited six short story anthologies, including Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Funny and A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith. He teaches literature and fiction writing at Central Connecticut State University.

Rachel Mangini

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 06:00:00 +0000

I STILL HAVE DREAMS IN WHICH I CANNOT SCREAM

I plan to tour the country and have packed toothpaste, wool socks, a flashlight. Women plead, be careful. Men say, take a gun. There are two of us, I say. We have mace. No, men say, a gun.

I’m ready for school, first grade. My mom is dressed for work. At the door, we see a hand sweep the dashboard of the van. My dad. But my dad left a half hour ago. Then his face fills the scene, not my dad. Nose smashed beneath a woman’s stocking. Smudged out face. Horror face. Our four hands pushing against his two furious hands.

I’m touring the country because I want to see the cities, and the parks. I want to eat too many donuts in Portland and hike up to meet mountain goats in Montana. I want to drive across the continental divide four times in Colorado. In Utah, I want to get my tent gritty with red dirt. We sleep out many nights. Warm nights in busy campgrounds and cold nights when every place is just about to close. We do not take a gun. Our house is made of mesh.

I’m only five so I fit in the triangle of space behind a forced-open door. He has pinned me there, dragged my mom down the hall. I cannot hear anything but thudding and closeness. I feel the weight of air in my ears. My screams are a hiss.

We have no money. We cannot be careful if careful is sleeping every night in a Hampton, instead of on a stranger’s couch. We meet two guys traveling like us, but on bikes. It’s great they say, we stop and sleep wherever. I tell them it is not the same for two women, and these young men from Southern California cannot understand. Listen, I say, you don’t have as many holes to penetrate. And one of them is tall. I point that out. They laugh. Take off their shoes and dance in bare feet. Watching them, I think, maybe I’m wrong. There are still people who want their money, and snakes.

Even at home with the deadbolt on, when I wake at night, I am afraid. You’re safe, my girlfriend says, go back to sleep. I love her, though I know she is wrong.

It’s eight months we are gone and not often I am scared. Once, in a campground near Sonoma, I go to the showers and there’s a man in a blue truck parked outside. He’s putting on clean socks. I do not like his eyes. I lock myself in a stall and won’t undress until I hear him leave. Later, his truck is circling the sites. On his second go round, he stops and asks, what’s it cost to stay the night? He is looking, not listening. Despite myself, I wish for the gun. I’d do it, I think. I hate the feel of it, heavy and cold in my palm. I’d shoot him just for looking.

Rachel Mangini's fiction has been published in JMWW and Smokelong Quarterly. She could tell you camping in Sonoma Valley costs forty-eight bucks a night, but it is posted right there on the sign.

Sheldon Lee Compton

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 06:00:00 +0000

The First Heart Attack, or What Happens to Your Daughter When You Die for a Little While

There is no happiness found here. It was a dove darkened by honesty, by fear. Should you need happiness, find it elsewhere inside your mind. It is in this place where all things can be honorable and right. It is here where light turns outward.

While the skies moved over parts of the world unseen, my little girl sat on her bed. Here's what I imagined under the sky's clouds

I imagined her legs crossed. Her eyes downward. I imagined the air in her lungs as life and hope and hoped myself it would give her peace from inside in a way she couldn't find outside.

I imagined her best clothes worn to see me so I would know she wore what I bought for her, so I would be happy. I imagined her drawing smiles for me on large paper across the bed while the sun died in her window.

I imagined her hurting and with no one to tell. My imagination killed me first, then I died a draining gray death.

But she loved me, her stepmother. In that space made by trauma. Her frozen eyes loved me while her mouth twisted in red and purple, in an anguish not wholly defined. She loved me in this way with her eyes and her sad mouth, and when I told her I loved her and to tell the kids I loved them she said she would, and I like to think she did.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of the story collections, The Same Terrible Storm and Where Alligators Sleep, and the novella, Brown Bottle. His work has been widely published and anthologized. He edits Revolution John and is an associate editor of Night Train. He survives in Eastern Kentucky.

Tricia Dower

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 06:00:00 +0000

For Veterans Day

Tues, Nov 21/67. A ball of cells no longer than a minute has taken root in me. Virginia Woolf is screaming from her grave: You’ve ruined everything. You were supposed to refuse to breed. Ron is puffed up with blessing-from-God talk, already following me around with a pillow. God had nothing to do with it. I missed a pill.

I know the moment the zygote burrowed into my uterus, despite Ron calling it a romantic bit of retrospective prognostication. October 22nd. We were watching TV, gripped by images of protesters clubbed with rifle butts, desperately hoping our dear friend Carl wasn’t one of them. I had belly cramps, chalked it up to an imminent period. Never thought of implantation. Invasion. We saw blood splash onto steps, heard “Link arms, link arms” and screams of pain. Carl said he’d be carrying a sign saying “Do Not Ask For Whom The Bell Tolls” but we couldn’t spot it among the tens of thousands of protesters there. He called next day to say he’d been tear-gassed and dragged by his feet. My heart drums as if I’ve had ten cups of coffee. The doctor says that’s normal.

Tavis bursts from her in a bloody, briny-smelling torrent—no less extraordinary than Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. It’s July 8, 1968, and the country is in shock. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are dead. A hundred cities still lick wounds from spring riots and not even Walter Cronkite believes in the war any more. “Forgive me,” she whispers when the nurse lays seven pounds, six ounces of slippery baby on her chest as gently as she might a soufflé.

Tues, Dec 2/69. We watched the first draft lottery on TV last nite. They had the gall to open it with a prayer. Numbered slips of paper in plastic capsules like cluster bomblets determined who’d get drafted. A Congressman pulled the first from a deep glass jar: 258. It corresponds to September 14. All guys born on that date between 1944 and 1950 almost surely will get called up next year. Imagine thousands of September fourteeners across the country feeling kicked in the gut, their wives or mothers too stunned to cry. Tavis’s birthdate was the 13th drawn. Though they’re not drafting seventeen-month-olds yet, my heart stopped for a second. The whole scene was coldly businesslike. There should have been women in black weeping and wailing and on a big screen, footage of soldiers stepping on landmines, babies getting shot, villages burning.

Tricia Dower is a dual citizen of the US and Canada and cannot watch scenes of war without tearing up. She’s the author of Silent Girl, a collection of stories inspired by Shakespeare, and two novels: Stony River (available in Canada now, in the United States fall 2016) and Becoming Lin (to be released in Canada March 2016). She lives in Brentwood Bay, BC.

Christian Bell

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Music

Muse

You know the story of Calliope trapped in a room. Ideas hit you like a murder of crows. At first you marvel at the multitude. Soon, they shackle you to the wall, peck and peck until you are wounds. Calliope, hair torn and clothes askance, laughs a song, hope turned to despair.

Museum

We stood side by side, looking at the lutes through the glass. You said, split avocados. I said, ancient rock guitars. We knew the hands that once played them have long been dust. I saw your reflection in the glass, a silhouette in charcoal. I reached for your hand but it wasn't there.

Music

Her sound drifted through the window like the aroma of cooking curry, enticing to the wandering palate. He walked by, hearing the soothing viola notes, his vanilla clothes brightening to fruit salad mélange. Stay and listen, as the world marched, deaf grays hollowing out the remaining ears.

Muslin

I am lost in hammered leaves and crunchy steel. My mouth wrapped in finest muslin. Scream and it's lonely music, beautiful.

Muzak

You thought, I've never actually heard music on an elevator before. You wonder, maybe I will when I die. You pray, I hope it goes up, and the music is good.

Christian Bell lives near Baltimore, Maryland. His fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and JMWW Quarterly, among other publications.

Kevaughn Hunter

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Him and His Father

At the window, I watch strangers walk by in heavy coats, bent against the wind in the afternoon gloom. The room is empty, its only light a small candle on the sill.

I think about my father. Of course, she hasn't gone to a better place, but what else did I expect from him? So simple just to have stayed quiet, to have not blurted out that I'm an atheist. What difference does it make? A better place. I could have given him that.

The candle is guttering. And what do I do now, Mother? What do I do now?

CP

Kevaughn Hunter spends his nights up in the stars, and his mornings hiding from the oncoming cold. His muse is his youngest sister and her love for life.

Daniel Romo

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Topography

I lie (down) as if the bed is more casket than mattress. As if the stillness of my body is symbolic of my psyche. A mournful soul evaluating the remnants of this marriage. I hug the edge because I don’t want to touch her. The mattress is a Posturepedic frown. My body forms one corner of the mouth; hers forms the other. No bodies rest in the middle, merely sham pillows that serve as show. It’s open and free, a queen-size fossil—pre-resentment. The mixing of skin and bone has become as foreign as our first kiss. I stay for the kids. She agrees that’s best. We still share a bed, but little else. She recently called my parents to wish them a happy 40th anniversary. My dad told her to just wait until she was celebrating the same. I look at other women and want to fuck them all. Not because it’s been half a year, but because every month I feel less like a man. I stopped ending my day with praying because I feel like a fake, unworthy of asking God for anything. Our vows are attic cobwebs no broom can reach. The dust is what’s left of our dreams. Each night, we drift farther away from one another. My left leg dangles off the bed in an act of surrender. She flips through late-night cable, pretending not to notice.

Father and Son at Starbucks

Dad sits at his table and I sit at mine. He drinks coffee, dark like rotting and I drink tea, more like fading. We wear casual attire in our unofficial office. Here, we are at home in our work. The scene is reminiscent of catch in the backyard. Only there is no game tomorrow to practice for and no cheering from the bleachers. He waits for his clients to meet him. I wait for the barista to call my name for a refill. I don't know if he had the stroke yet or if this is a dream lamenting the use of the left side of his body. A memory created to commemorate a patriarch's life of productivity in order to distract me from the unfamiliarity of seeming him so reliant on his family's hands. My mom lifts the spoon to his mouth and he grimaces as if chewing is a new experience. Like each bite is a breath he has to practice to take, with no guarantee he will ever master it ever again. I'm sitting beside an unused bedpan, so I know neither one of us is where we want to be. He squints and struggles to recognize me, and I, him. I tell him to close his eyes and rest and I do the same. The aroma of coffee has been replaced by the scent of sterilization. Wires and beeps lack the character of blenders so I squint hard as if it's a Monday morning. Dad and I are sitting at the same table. We read the paper like we did each morning before he dropped me off at school. We learn that last night our favorite ballplayer went two for four, and we understand that fifty/fifty are odds one can never take for granted.

We are loyal fans

who know the game of patience,

the length of bases.

Daniel Romo is the author of When Kerosene's Involved (Mojave River Press, 2014) and Romancing Gravity (Silver Birch Press, 2013). He is the Head Poetry Editor at Cease, Cows and Co-founder/Editor at Wherewithal. He lives in Long Beach, CA and at danielromo.net.

Rebecca Gaffron

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Of Matter and Antimatter

Faces emerge. My attackers still exist in the coruscating chaos of nightmares. You, accessory to horrors I have learned to live with. And her. Perpetrator. Biting the hand that fed her. Painting my body blues and greens with her teeth. I wake already scrambling from the bed, reduced to fear, intent on escape. This has become my reality. I tried to wear the bruises she gave me, that you let her give me, like medals, a reminder of how much I was willing to do. To erase the snap shots of watching as you enjoyed having her. I tried to scrub the sleazy feel from my skin and soul. Resigned myself to never completely healing. I struggled to be strong, the way you told me to be. The kitchen variety wouldn't work, so I got myself a good quality drywall knife. I started with the marks closest to my heart. Stood naked, blade in hand, ready to slice away the filth. Bleed myself clean. But oh, lucky me, turns out I was strong. I dug deep and suffered through.

Arianrhod

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young? Or beautiful? I am so much more now than years ago. More waist, more jiggle, that's true. But better booty and fuller lips too. Can't you feel the power in my laugh and the way I move? I have learned to rage. I have learned to weep and wail. And to shine. I have grown so full of difficult, delightful, engaging luminosity that slim simply won't contain me. I know the value of my bitter-sweetness. Embrace these curves sculpting pleasure's songs. My creases spill genuine feminine – a strength of softness. See truth in my eyes. The girl is gone. Woman now, lovelier for my broken, imperfect places.

Rebecca Gaffron is part Appalachian mountain girl, part chalk roads journeyer. Either way, she has a habit of playing with words and spinning tales. Her writings can be found in a variety of journals and books including her first collection, Honest Lies and Imaginary Truths, and at her web site rebeccawriting.com.

Andrew Stancek

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Hedgehog

Aquila scratches her shoulder and calls me a hedgehog. Takes me a minute to decide on a reaction and then I’m insulted.

Sure I’ve been called worse. The three years of wedded bliss never were. The first year mostly good. Second, kept busy. The last year’s been the shits. We thought we finally hit sunshine and balloons, and I’d be a damn good dad. One Saturday morning I brought a baby crib from a garage sale, hardly used. She showed me samples of wallpaper for the small room.

At least we didn’t have to have a funeral. This couple down the road, it wasn’t even born but it was so many months, they had to bury it.

Yeah, so, we’ve been seeing fat Ms. Cinna, no pictures of happy children on her wall, and she says she’ll help us with this little hurdle. Me, I keep emotion inside, don’t need to pay good money to be told. Aquila has a temper. She storms and I take it.

So in the last few months, no matter how honey-flowing Cinna is, Aquila has called me loser, asshole, and sometimes I slam the door and sometimes I try to talk her out of it. This hedgehog shit, what the hell is that? I wouldn’t know a hedgehog if its brains were squishing under my Michelins and neither would she. Is she calling me road kill, is that it?

When I feel like a volcano, I’m told I need to breathe and visualize. The first thing I visualize is a knife, stuck right to the hilt. Then I ask, not even gritting teeth, what she’s talking about.

She hoots, stretches her arms like she’s about to fly, and says, “Hedgehog.”

It’s Friday, coming onto midnight. I worked overtime, get home beat and my wife starts taking off her clothes, calling me rodents. She’s not been in the mood ever since when, so it’s weird, but I shuffle towards her after that blouse and bra come off, and she looks at me like I’m a turd she stepped into.

I shift back and watch. I sleep like a baby and don’t get frightened when I’m awake either, been told I must be the one person alive with a clear conscience. Aquila says it shows I’m an unimaginative cold prick.

Aquila’s naked, muscles ripple, breasts jiggle and skin gleams, irises orange, jives, chitters a high-pitched uh-HU.

I’ve laid off the liquor; it’s berry juice in my glass. Her screeches pound and echo through the dark rumble in my head as her body changes. Her ears spring tufts, eyes narrow, face turns tawny, speckled with black. She grows barrel-like, loses her neck, sprouts feathers. Her feet are feathered to the vicious talons.

Her eyes are hooded when she measures me. Her screech clearly says, “Hedgehog”. I pat my soft underbelly and my hand hefts the heavy Grand Canyon paperweight. Hedgehogs don’t understand the movements and velocity of rocks but I know exactly what to do.

Andrew Stancek's work has appeared in Tin House online, fwriction, Necessary Fiction, Prime Number Magazine, Blue Five Notebook, and many other publications. He’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Howie Good

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Imaginary Landscape No. 1

This is the last country not on any map. Here the moon resembles a plucked eyeball. Here, as per his deathbed wishes, Kafka’s papers would have been burned. Here the elderly trainee wiping down the tables in a Burger King with a filthy rag is a former Nazi death camp guard. Here the names on street signs have been redacted. Here the faces of close friends become blurry, encrypted, almost unrecognizable. Here sailors mutiny though still on land. Here I try without success to ignore the shriveled birds infesting a black wrought-iron tree.

Imaginary Landscape No. 2

The population of the ghost town has quickly doubled. It can be hard for newcomers to distinguish sunset from the fire organ, a steel frame with innumerable outlets for flames of different intensity, color, and heat. This is the fish of my dreams, you say, pointing at a vaguely familiar mountain, now glimpsed only from an agonizing distance. The bones of your father and mother have been incorporated into its architecture after rehabilitation of their questionable purposes. Why ask me how I am? You’re the one overwhelmed by electronic exposure to the rest of the world.

Imaginary Landscape No. 3

It has always been a museum. This is not a secret. Admission is free, but the exhibits are tenuous, devoted to accelerated destruction of the past. Visitors, arriving alone or in pairs, journey down escalators that link enigmatic galleries of erased pictures – a seemingly infinite number of empty frames, blank canvases, and vacant easels. At the lowest gallery, they discover new galleries under construction.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4

The suicide hotline rings with infuriated doggedness. It’s why I avoid lingering, but even if I take a bus somewhere, the sense of harmony and resolution isn’t much. The dark blue sky has been painted and scraped to the point of collapse, pinned, unpinned, repositioned, and pinned again, whatever it takes, slivers, puncture marks. Later, safe and asleep in bed, an anthropologist of my own childhood, I hang a poison apple (is that a bite taken out of it?) back on the apple tree.

Imaginary Landscape No. 5

Bodies, waxen, full of imperfections, visibly hostile to their usual occupants, disappeared through a quaint door into the cool of minimalism, and still later, spider webs papered over the windows, the all-too-real effect of absence. There wasn’t time to launch a whole new investigation, complete with men in stark white jumpsuits drilling through the floor. It occurred to me that maybe history was a series of conspiracies after all. So I pressed my eyes shut, the dark dotted with forgotten computer passwords and modern antiques and many fewer stars than I remembered there being.

Imaginary Landscape No. 6

It was approximately like love, our bodies strident in combination. The turmoil was irresistible. Then came night, or its equivalent, stirring the stricken leaves. Apparently, this is how the historical Romeo and Juliet died, accompanied by whichever tree, the beech or the silver birch, sheds its leaves first. Language itself is a kind of treachery. Why perhaps the dog’s ears quiver. You and everyone else have begun to suffer the effects. There are two things that happen. One has something to do with spyware. And as the night grows colder, and it comes time to go, the flap-flap-flap of winged skulls.

Imaginary Landscape No. 7

An ivory satin bridal gown. Oh, how bourgeois! It’s kind of hovering, like a figure on a cross, with you in front of it. That’s who I want to stand in front, you, not me, encircled by a feeling of being watched, while a waterfall on the scale of a metropolis evolves, rife in truncated limbs and torsos.

Imaginary Landscape No. 8

The apparent emptiness provokes anxious suspense. We repeat our attempt to interrupt the stillness and quiet. It can become tiresome, all this point, counterpoint. Dammit! We must rid ourselves of the idea of poetry if we’re ever going to create a poem, something that might mean something. But, for now, we wait outside the gates, exhausted fugitives jammed up against each other and subtly lit by a small piece of nocturnal sun.

Imaginary Landscape No. 9

The trains are mysteriously out of order. Such buildings as survive lean sideways. It must be some new kind of virus. That would also explain the relentless spiral of hallucinations against an abysmal backdrop of hypocrisy and genocide. When did aggression become the only sport? The game continues into the night, but, in the morning, there’s nothing in the paper about a chain of thunderstorms moving through an abandoned world.

Imaginary Landscape No. 10

The older couple that stopped me as I walked to my car asked how to get out of this labyrinth. One of the high school kids hanging around the parking lot raised her hand. Without waiting to be called on, she said, “Anything to restore mystery.” She meant Shark Week on the Discovery Channel – in effect, a desperate and savage use of architecture. I expected a giant snowflake cut from plain white paper next. It wasn’t, and there was no why, just some pathetic strings of barbed wire abruptly dropped on an imaginary border and allowed to continue forever.

Really Real

I wish you a face torn & bent & swarming with filth & flies,

for all I suffered when suffering was all I could do,

just a little boy, whammed on the side of his head,

pulled from sleep & whammed with your belt,

none of the voices downstairs ever once venturing to object,

as if what was happening wasn’t happening,

wasn’t really real, blank signs, spinning clocks,

the ruined colors of my tie-dyed heart.

Howie Good's latest books of poetry are The Complete Absence of Twilight (MadHat Press), Fugitive Pieces (Right Hand Press) and Buddha & Co (Plain Wrap Press)

Casey Hannan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 05:00:00 +0000

WEIRD VIDEOS

You teach me to drive on roads that sometimes end in tobacco. Today, the road pauses on a dog. He appears before I can stop.

Three bumps.

I look in the rearview mirror and see he's not a dog at all but a raccoon. He runs into the grass even though I thought I'd killed him for sure.

"Mom," I say.

"Keep your eyes out there," you say and point to the spotless road in front of us.

You don't blame me. No one's blaming me, but you say you found something weird on the family computer.

I sit at the kitchen table and scream in my closed mouth. There's a desktop folder where I keep pictures of men kissing each other. I deny myself anything stronger, though lately I feel like kissing might be the strongest stuff of all.

"Videos," you say.

I hold a pencil like a cigarette and exhale relief. I've been sketching the raccoon I hit and getting it wrong. He looks like our dog.

"Not you? That leaves your dad and the dog."

You whistle. The dog ticks across the hardwood. You squat so you're nose to nose, and you say to him through sudden tears, "What do you want to look at kids for?"

Tonight, there's no moon. I take the dog for a walk. He barks at every cricket.

When we return, Dad's in the driveway smashing the computer with a hammer and you're in the living room tearing pages from a mystery novel.

I console myself by sharpening pencils in my room.

You and I try to watch a movie, but the dog gets sick during the previews. The vomit's black. The dog shivers. He drags his fur through the vomit to get warm. He's dead when we stand up.

You light a vanilla candle. I wear grocery bags as gloves and lift the dog into a cardboard box. You say you'll scrub the oil from the carpet while I dig a grave out back. As if I've done it before.

I find Dad smoking in the woods at the property line.

"At least I never touched you," he says.

He tries to touch me now. I hand him a shovel and the dog in the box. He darts forward, kisses me on the cheek, and says goodbye.

In a dream, a rattlesnake bites me. Its fangs break off in my skin. I wake up before I can discover if I'm the first person whose blood defeats venom.

We have pizza for breakfast. You pick off toppings and throw them on the floor for the dog even though the dog is dead.

"Shit fire," you say when you remember.

I draw a cartoon of Dad holding a raccoon like a baby.

You cover your mouth with both hands. If you're crying, you're crying somewhere I can't see.

"It's OK," I say.

But it's not OK.

We're not OK.

Our blood is jelly, and we're dying faster than we can ever heal.

--Editor's Favorite Award, 2015

Casey Hannan claims to have had eight epileptic seizures, but he might have had more in his sleep. Snakes often bite him in his dreams. If you're looking for him, lift up a rock or a log. Failing that, try casey-hannan.com.

Brad Rose

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Luck

That’s the fastest escalator I’ve ever ridden. I’m not afraid of heights. As long as they’re indoors. Looked through the plus-size department, but couldn’t find anything I liked. There’s a 7 billion dollar market in Halloween merchandise. That’s what the paper said. You’d think I could find something without horizontal stripes. Took the elevator down. I only go down in elevators, never up. I told Justine my luck really isn’t luck. It just looks that way. That’s why I keep my money in a paper bag. Looks like an old lunch. And those killer beeps. These days, they’re everywhere you go. No getting away from them. I’d wear earplugs, but I left them at church on Sunday. Pastor said we’ve all got a calling, but asked us to turn off our cell phones during the service. Said he didn’t think the Lord needed interruptions. He smiled when he said that. I turned mine to “vibrate” in case one of my kids got into an accident. Justine—she’s’ the prettiest darn thing—said she felt like playing poker after church. Some days you just feel it. We went to the Orleans and played a few hands. The place is clean. Mostly locals go there because the atmosphere is friendly. It’s low stakes. I didn’t trust the dealer, though. He looked like my parole officer. I think he was wearing a wig. I hate wigs on men. Of course, you can get used to almost anything, if you concentrate. Like those ventriloquists. They’re great concentrators. Hardly move their lips. And those dummies; it’s not easy with someone else’s words coming out of your mouth. Like that time in court. Sure, I knew I was an accomplice, but I didn’t plan the thing. I was just the driver. Didn’t even use a stolen car. Probably should have. Jack was the one that said there was a lot of money in there. Jack’s so smart. At least he thinks so. But what good did it do him? Got an even 20 for arson of an occupied structure. Thank goodness everybody got out. The place burned down in about a minute. Everybody got out. Everybody, but one. That’s what I call real luck.

Afternoon Rendezvous

The temperature crawls through the room.

I swallow you, like a glass of water.

On the floor, our deserted clothes rest comfortably

as a sleeping husband recovering from a cardiac event.

Your unattainable beauty, un-caged,

feral eyes, empty as a desert.

I swim through this deliberate amnesia,

this moment of fire forgetting flame.

Outside, the rain, a felled forest,

buildings, glistening bayonets,

I vow to keep our secret hidden from the gods.

Who would tell them? you ask.

Who would they punish, if they knew?

Before ‘The Three Dancers’

In the front yard,

sunburned, shirtless,

Picasso mows the blue grass.

The petulant scythe shaves close

the lawn’s picture plane.

The cloudless sky

is the color of a window.

In the mind’s eye

three figures writhe

against the curl of feral velocity.

He pauses,

& with an ice-white cloth,

daubs his damp brow,

stoops low toward the earth’s fresh cut scent,

wonders,

What color are these weeds?

Brad Rose was born and raised in southern California, and lives in Boston. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2013 recipient of a Camroc Press Review Editor’s Favorite Award. Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Review, Monkeybicycle, MadHat Lit, and other fine publications. Links to his writing can be found at: http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com/ His chapbook of micro fiction, Coyotes Circle the Party Store, can be read at: https://sites.google.com/site/bradroserhpchapbook/ Audio recordings of a selection of Brad’s poetry can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1

Jake Walters

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 05:00:00 +0000

How to Bury Your Lover

First, you will need a shovel. The size and form of the hole will be subconsciously determined by the types of feelings you still have for her, lying secret in your heart. If you still love her and respect her, it will be big and deep, well-shaped, even, neat. The bottom will be level, so she lies flat. You will cross her arms, kiss her knuckles. Close her eyes. Other holes are made hastily, earth crumbling into them, falling into the darkness of the grave to make her pillow. I know those types of holes well.

At any rate, the digging is the easy part. In certain ways, you began digging it as soon as you first saw her; she smiled at you, you began speaking, and sometime later, a week, an hour, years, your lips met and it was soft and kind and already you were forming the hole for her. And she, for you. So you have had time. And when the end comes, it comes in bright colors and garish noise, and you dig on pure adrenaline, scooping out wet dirt and tossing it wildly to the jungle of tombs surrounding your latest work. Lower her in, or dump her in, or kick her in. No matter how you do it, you will feel empty afterward. Now the hardest part: filling the grave. No coffins are allowed, nor are any type of protective layer. You must make her dirty. You owe it to her to sully her, and when you’ve filled the hole to the brim, you must slam the shovel down into the earth like you are trying to crush diamonds or memories or hearts.

I tell you these things because you have come across me digging tonight. It is a private act you have caught me committing. If I had heard you coming, I would have run, hidden behind another grave or a tree, or jumped the fence and never turned back. And then where would I be? Once the hole has been created, it must be used. So let us stand here and survey my work. You see its shape is perfect, almost artful. You see the earth is soft here, not for my comfort but for hers. She is an angel I never deserved. What an affront to the heart it is to destroy something not because it is not good enough for you, but because it is too good for you. I am going to lie down now. I am going to close my own eyes. I am going to think of her. I am going to wait for the moon to go away. I am going to ask you to fill this hole for me.

White Like

When I was a boy I had a classmate named Henry who was retarded. I suppose that’s not the right word for it, but it is the right word, sure enough. He sat through classes looking out the window, clutching a stuffed frog to his chest. The frog’s name was Greenie. We used to ask Henry how it was spelled—with ‘ie’ at the end, or with ‘y,’ but we were really making fun of him because Henry didn’t know any letters at all. He couldn’t have spelled his own name. We used to ask him if his mom dropped him on his head when he was a baby, and he just grinned back at us. Sometimes we asked him if he ate lead chips for snacks. He had awful, crooked, dirty teeth. Then, one day, we took him into the woods. There were five of us, plus Henry, so we joked we were five and a quarter in number. We laughed and patted him on the back and made him feel like he was our friend. Then one of us told him to take off his pants and climb a tree. He smiled for a moment, looking at each of us, and I could tell he did not want to do it. Like he felt it was wrong. I started to feel bad, but I couldn’t show it. Henry pulled his pants and skivvies down. They bunched around his ankles. His legs were white as amnesia and reminded me of pears, the way they were shaped. He started to cry, noiselessly. One of us picked up a stick. I won’t tell any names. He started to approach Henry.

Henry watched him coming and then a voice, powerful and low, came from behind us: “What the fuck are you doing?” We spun around and there was a man with a shotgun. He racked it: ca-chack! Two of us—I won’t tell names—wet ourselves. The man came up to the boy with the stick. The man had a bushy, white beard. “Take your pants off,” he said. The boy started crying, noisily. The man was smiling. The gun was pointed in the boy’s direction. Not exactly at him. Close enough. The boy took off his pants.

Sometimes I wish my mind was white like amnesia, too. Not because of the specific things I’ve seen or even because of the things I’ve done, but because the weight my life has added to the world has been negative. My sum is less than zero. Killing myself is not enough to balance the scales. Forgetting would be a blessing. Sometimes I wonder if Henry remembers—what we did to him, what he witnessed. And do you know what proof I have I’m going to hell? I hope he does remember.

Jake Walters lives in Transylvania and has been published in many places.

Amorak Huey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 05:00:00 +0000

ALL WEATHER WANTS TO BE SOME OTHER KIND OF WEATHER

A boy lies on top of his sheets in Alabama,

his skin glazed with sweat and wonder.

The late-summer air is soup, swamp,

tongue. The boy suspects he was kidnapped

as an infant. Suspects he does not belong,

here or anywhere, has no home to return to,

and if once he had some other name

it has long been forgotten. The darkness

is a promise. The quiet is a promise.

He opens his eyes. Closes them.

And for the rest of his life

he will pretend there was a time

when he was comfortable in his skin –

a season that was not about waiting

for the wind to change–

a moment unshaped by hunger.

36 MONTHS IN WASECA

Three years of noise, all bang, clatter and howl. Three years to realize you’ve spent a lifetime dreading the wrong things. The worst imaginable takes turns with nothing you can’t handle, same as all the other months. Tell everyone who listens you trusted the wrong person. This is the only possible mistake.

SO THIS IS WHAT WE’VE COME TO

We are seagulls walking in a mall parking lot.

Miles from water, we scrimp

and squabble over popcorn kernels.

We are consumers dropping crumbs.

We build candy houses,

indulge sweet teeth.

We rot. We begrudge. We lure

companions with our kisses.

We invent enemies.

We are orange cones,

blinking lights, warning signs.

We wait for the month to end,

we demand payment,

threaten, persuade, prizefight.

We square the circles,

slip the knots, unlock

the tiny clasps of a brassiere

with our teeth. We flesh,

feel, forge. We spread

and touch and tender.

We morph and metaphor.

We pluck and glance

and angle away. We storm

and long and appetite.

Someday we will learn again to fly –

the surface dropping away

beneath our dangling feet.

Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is from Hyacinth Girl Press, and his book, Ha Ha Ha Thump, is available from Sundress Publications. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Cincinnati Review, The Collagist, Quarterly West, Stirring, and many other journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.

Leah Givens

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 05:00:00 +0000

ALL YOU NEED

I want nothing more than to dissolve under sheets, so quiet it's a secret even from the cat who sleeps in another room, oblivious; I have the bed all to myself. The fan goes on, soft, circulates the hot and dissipates the light sweat rising to the surface. Just enough to keep warm but not uncomfortable. And the noise, calming, the noise of sleep, dreams, of a plane long since taken off and drifting in the sky, through downy clouds, nighttime, above cities and countries. No one knows where and no one cares.

Time drifts by too and we all sleep, the engine murmuring that we'll arrive sometime and it will all be okay. That things will be different there and the new will be enough to last us a while, to distract us from the solid lump of pain in our chest, breaking it up with great breaths as we gaze at tall buildings, the sun in our eyes, exotic trees lining the streets, the air smelling of street carts selling things we've only read about in guidebooks and laugh to find out truly exist. Like New York hot dogs or Turkish kebabs or just pretzels near the subway—things you shouldn't eat, wouldn't eat at home, but nothing like that matters anymore; it's all here to experience.

One day after the next, each day is fresh. No matter the place, look all around, point out the dogs, play in the fountains, try to read the neon signs. Everything is free even when the adults complain about the fees for the museum and the amusement parks and special beverages; you're happy with lemonade and a park bench, anywhere in the world, it's all the same. A little dog walks by, eyes just your height. He recognizes you, you him, and you give a smile; that's all that you need in the world.

The plane ride back will be fine, and you can do it again on the other side. Your parents might want more, they may hold your hand and drag you from place to place and store to store, but if only they'd sit on this park bench with you, sit and watch the birds and the children playing, the sun fluttering in the long grass, ask what you want for lunch, peanut butter or honey toast, no matter if it's healthy, that's all you need in the world.

WHEN THE END TEMPTS

The cat is the problem. She knows she has my devotion, regardless of whatever world crashes around us. I could be homeless, hopeless, and I would sob even harder when she climbed into my lap, her paws gentle probing question marks: what is the matter, and can a purr not cure it?

And then you laugh through tears—no, you laugh and cry now that something so pure-hearted and beautiful could love you. She is perfectly made, stripes aligned by some cosmic design, eyes like fresh-washed grapes, full and lustrous, pink tongue ridged like a hilly landscape. How can I be so honored that a creature, not even understanding my words to her or my language (unless we allow her certain powers) will sit in sympathy, try to comfort me as she knows how? It is a blessing beyond understanding.

The cat knows you won't leave her. For long, at least. You take a trip to visit your sister, hand the spare key to a friend who's visited time and again. You pack quietly, hoping she won't notice as you fold clothes, stuff socks into the corners of a worn suitcase.

Once she hears you're going, your peace is over. She bolts across the floor, claws scrape-skating the parquet like old brakes on ice. Then she unleashes her howl, a deep-throated yowl, a primal call in a cello's range. As if in pain, as if in mourning and so out of sorts her brain has lost control of its body, leaving her limbs racing and her mind terrified.

True, your humanness means you risk naming her animal urges with words for our emotions. But when she slides to a halt and stares at you, eyes wide with anxiety, awaiting your next move, you have no choice but to take your place among the starry-eyed who see a soul in every creature. This creature, if not all of nature.

You won't say it because everyone says it—"My pet is the best”—plasters hackneyed bumper stickers, "Best Friend on Board" or "All My Kids Have Paws." No one can know, really know, the soundless comfort, the speaking without words.

Until you see they do. A dog refuses to leave its master's coffin during the long military ceremony. An elderly woman describes a new childhood after being gifted a kitten. "I learned to play again," she says simply. You imagine the river of wrinkles on her cheeks as threads of string in which a tiny calico finds endless joy.

Leah Givens has lived in St. Louis for ten years and enjoys almost everything about it except the inhumane winters. Jobs throughout her lifetime have included church-dinner dishwasher, medical resident, clinical assessor of Alzheimer's study participants and freelance photographer. Some of her work can be found at www.leahgivens.com.

Judith Quaempts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Sisterhood

Brakes lock. A car screeches to a stop. A door opens, a woman darts out, almost falls, begins to run, sandals sliding, slipping in the gravel-coated strip beside the road. A man leaps from the driver's seat, leaves the car cantilevered in the street and runs her down. On my porch I huddle, mute. He grabs her hair, spins her around. His fist shoots out. She sags, a rag doll kept on her feet by his hand in her hair. I don't yell at him to stop, or threaten to call the police. No, I sit frozen, afraid to move as he drags her back to the car, pushes her inside, and fishtails away. What I remember is the silence as the violence unfolded, how not once did the woman cry out. She knew how this would end, knew as I did−no one listens to our screams.

St. Rémy

I sit at a sidewalk café in St. Rémy near Monastere St. Paul where Van Gogh spent a year painting the views from his hospital room. Those paintings are now in the Louvre. Across the street the open air market has closed. Gone the stalls of colorful cloth, scented soaps, rich cheeses. Gone, glassy-eyed fish on beds of ice that caught the light and shot rainbow prisms into the air. In the town square traveling troubadours sing of love. My waiter pours white wine, adds bread and olives to this cloth-covered table. I nibble and sip, wonder why love songs sound more poignant in French.

You would have loved it here, would have repeated how the light was everything you hoped, would have sketched madly, visited each place Van Gogh painted, your face alight with wonder and plans. I pretend you sit beside me, your hand stroking mine, your thoughts far away, dreaming of home, of scenes you’ll paint to rival Van Gogh’s. I still have your paints, your empty canvases. One day I’ll pass them on.

--Editor's Favorite Award, 2015
CP

Judith Quaempts lives in rural eastern Oregon. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Buddhist Poetry Review, Persimmon Tree, and other fine places.

Amy Schmidt

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 05:00:00 +0000

DECADES AFTER THE CANCER TRIUMPHED

I took a small bell of heirloom crystal

from its place high on a mahogany shelf

and watched it slip from my hand

and shatter like ice, un-melting

in the stale heat of a July day. I tried to hear

its intended song, small melody of sound waves

obligated by law to vibrate around the room.

But the law cannot accommodate a lie

so I stood in silence over the scattered shards,

my hand cupped in a worthless grasp

of air, the object after it is gone.

In the same amount of time it takes

for a human cell to stutter and stray

from its proper path, the bell was transformed

into garbage fit for a broom and pan.

Foolishly, I still listen for your voice

believing I have not forgotten its timbre, its way

of saying my name.

EULOGY, BELATED

You are the ghost

inside my spine, the snow-covered

lake disappearing into a snow-colored

sky, the grains of rice

a mouse stashed in the pockets

of my sweater but forgot about.

I’ve been forgetting you

for twenty-four years now,

systematically removing

your memory with

the blunt end of time.

Tell me, what of the blank page

my mind will soon become?

What is there to think, if not you?

TO SARAH, GIVEN AWAY

Snow has fallen many times

since the night you were born.

(Is that the right word

to describe what happened?)

each flake is different, but this is not—

that, my thought, as I opened wide

as a milkweed pod in changing weather.

Someone grabbed

your tufted head, coaxed you

from me or me from you

(pronouns are interchangeable here).

Your downy shoulders, hips

and finally your feet.

Out through the narrow

of a cave (I was impossibly dark, I admit)

into the startling cry of light.

Mostly, that was all.

The clock on the wall, the puce drapes,

stained sheets replaced by new,

dropped ceiling tiles

with an impossible collection of pinpricks,

constellations of thin regret.

Amy Schmidt’s work has been published in The Florida Review, Profane, Ruminate and Calyx, among others. She has been a finalist for the Janet McCabe Poetry Prize and a recipient of an Arrowhead Regional Arts Grant. She homesteads in northern Minnesota where snow is a given and sun is a gift; she lives there with her husband, daughter and bloodhound.

Julie Ascarrunz

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Running

He runs down the hall toward the fire door. In the last several weeks since he came here to live, he has lost more than ten pounds. His jeans low-ride with Depends peeking over the top. Normally, frail as he has become, he shuffles along. But a woman is pressing the bar on the fire door. It screams. He runs toward her, shouting, "Hey!" My brother and I don't know if he is running to stop her, or to help her escape. My father's hands are purple from all his pounding on the door to be let out. There are two nurses on duty. Or LPNs. One runs into the hallway just as another man stands from his wheelchair in his continuing attempt to enter a room that is not his. He topples to the floor and cuts his arm. The second nurse runs to the phone to call 911. They cannot pick him up until someone verifies they did not push him. The blood runs down his arm; his face has no affect, no registration of pain, or people. My brother runs after Dad and takes his elbow, leading him back. The alarm wails. There are about fifteen people sitting just the other side of columns demarcating the common room. They watch reruns of a crackling fire on the big screen TV. As my father enters, one man growls at him. Dad growls back. He touches a woman on the arm, gently. She snatches her arm away and snarls, "Don't touch me!" I tell the nurse I am amazed by her. She says it is just her job. Asks if we are ready to leave. She has to take us as we don't know the code to get out. Dad follows to the memory unit door. The alarm is still sobbing. It is Thanksgiving.

Julie Ascarrunz teaches in Colorado, where she earned her MA. Her two sons have almost survived their teens and are in college. She recently adopted a hermit crab named Lemonade.

Jane Flett

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 05:00:00 +0000

CURE FOR SICKNESS

Bring all of the cushions in the house into bed. Bring extra blankets. Bring fleecy things that feel like the skritchy patch behind cats' ears to stroke against your cheek. Brew all the coffee. Brew strong coffee, the kind that makes you shudder. Find your hipflask, the hipflask you filled with cheap scotch and took to the party and forgot about somewhere in the giggles between vertical and horizontal behaviours. Choose a mug that pleases you. Make it a large mug with a thick handle and a broad lip to rest your mouth upon. Fill it with 4 parts coffee to 2 parts whisky to 1 part honey. Return to bed. Pretend your bed is a slow ship sailing through all kinds of make-believe oceans. Pretend you are beset by pirates and crows. Drink the coffee. Cough lumps of brown phlegm into all your tissues and scatter the bed ship with crumpled white clouds, some kind of sky beneath you--imagine your bed can fly. Choose books that you have read at least four times or those that have at least seven sex scenes. Feel sorry for yourself. Keep spitting. Read old emails from lovers who are distant enough to make you grin. Compose imaginary missives saying "I love you stop I always loved you stop Let's make a blanket fort makeout post behind the bang bang mountain". Make a blanket fort. Hide inside the blanket fort from the detritus of your life. Realize that, in fact, your life is not in detritus--realize that your life is, in fact, full of sweet candy opportunities like scattered shards of mother of pearl. Play pretend anyway. Recall the bed jacket she gave you and dress yourself in padded glamour and long for a gold bell with a bright tinkle to summon all the things your heart desires. Turn off the internet. Turn on the trash. Write daydrunk words with a woozy honeyed head. More coffee whisky. Cheese toasties. Believe in mustard as a cure for all the things that may ail you. Surely anything that makes your tongue tingle will salvage 90% of your wayward health. When you still don't feel better, pretend you are Balzac swooning with consumption. Bring a hand-held mirror to your face and blink your eyes wide; look aghast and ashen in your pallid cheeks; sigh. Declare today an island in the midst of all the waters of living, or a pond in the midst of all the sandshores of life. Wallow as long and as loud as you feel fit. Keep ringing the imaginary golden bell and wait for something to show up and wipe the afternoon's dirt from your boots. Keep drawing the barricades and stay safe, stay warm, inside. Give yourself to the soft sweetness of illness or fight it like bears. Do you really want to fight bears? They will maul you, my sweet; they will rip your skin from your bones. Play dead, my sweet. Lie still, and wait for the bears to leave.

GLITTERSHOT

(a.k.a Mashnote to Melissa Broder)

Let us play galaxy spy, she says, and I am smitten kitten by her words. I would like to promise an eternity of us in nursey dress up, hair pinned like dressage ponies, corsages made of meat. Standing on the thirteenth floor diving board, are you ready sweet cheeks? I'm going for the triple flip. Arse over tits over head heels wonderbra. Holler and a scream from the get go, because this so-called pool is a concrete chasm and my skull has a date with the deck.

I like the girls who put a k on magick, shelves of voodoo glue and cosmic brain powder, velvet sacks of lipstick in seventy shades of mink. Together we're aloha and ten degrees of trouble and eleven types of fancy and twelve step programmes that end on the bridge. The bridge? The bridge. The motorway bridge with its smudged night, green light blue light autobahn, automated screaming, I like these girls, the cracks in their necks smell like mine.

You're so pretty when you're unfaithful, so come on over and try my fishnet filth for size. You're geometric. Static reverb. Your bottom lip's a burst red ball and I want to bite it and watch the blood parade. I'm a silk scarf between two fists and if you've got a neck I'd like to wrap around it and tighten and wait for the...

Kiss me. We're in the back of a cramped car, a Cadillac, mint princess mobile, we're in the back and skating down the autobahn, puncturing holes in the smudged light scarecrow skies. This night is kicking in, the green light blue light, let us play galaxy spy. This is a love letter to your collarbone and your crucifix and your cleaver, this is a mash note to your cunt of meat and glitter. This is a confession to your booth.

Can we play catholic girls with skinned knees and scattershot? Will you be the sick sad man behind my dark pine wood and let me giggle and hair twirl and hara-kiri some truths? Lips like gypsy caravans left too long in one place, let's lip like nomads, let's give them lip, the ra ra teacher and the squalid authority. Tell them that they can stick it and run with hearts like meringues, light and brittle and sticky. Can I put my hands around your neck and feel you dissolve into wet sugar and gack, can I kick you, will you kick me?

Every inch under this white skin is a hello bruise tattoo waiting to turn. Take your sack of clementines and wallop me merciless and take your crimson fingernails and scratch a seam down my back and take your pretty pink cleaver and hack it open and let my fluffy white stuffing show. And the spill of pound store plastic rubies and the black soot and the road dust and the ooze of thick blood and the side of meat. Whatever is in there, let it out.

ARE YOU LIVING, OR JUST EXISTING, SWEETHEART?

Are you living, or just existing, sweetheart? Do you count down the long days of the week as if they were hard granite rocks you had to chip away from a broken cliff face; do you cast them off as if they were trials and not just your life? If you were to come across a brown buckled suitcase in a copse in the darkness of the woods, would you open the lid and marvel at the contents, or would you walk on by, concerned about bombs?

Have you, in the past week, created something out of your own scrabbled hands and sent it out the world as something, just something, that perhaps you have to offer? A cake, a song, a poem, a letter, a lesson? A thing, any thing, that did not exist except in fleeted thoughts and smudged memories, a thing that you gave form to and spat out? What about the last month, the last year?

Are you living, or just existing, sweetheart? Do you catch yourself ever finding it an effort to while away the hours? Do you understand the world “while” used in this context? Or are hours, to you, a sparkling gift in purple ribbons that the world has bestowed upon your eager hands?

What if I was to say to you that, if you desired, I could double the time in a working week: would you leap up and grab my palms and look askance in wonder? Or would you take for me a charlatan and a cunt; would you be disgusted?

When I say “dinner” do you ever, even momentarily, think of calories before you correct your stupid self and dream of feasting? Do you ever call yourself “your stupid self”? Are you nicer to your friends than you could ever conceive of being to you? What about dread, do you understand what I mean when I speak of this and self loathing?

Are your hangovers painful? Do you ever wonder if you'd be a better person if you could get over hating yourself on a hangover, or, contrarily, do you think you're not hard enough on yourself and if only you were then you could finally get something done?

Is “getting something done” a notion that makes sense, or would you turn to me and laugh in a full-bellied kind of way and say that all of life is doing something, and something is something that you've already done?

Are you living, or just existing, sweetheart? Do you rely on lists? Are there things at the end of the day that still need to be crossed off and do you judge yourself on these unscored instructions? Is there a better place waiting or is this the best place? If I had a fast car with a low slung door and I said, “Let's just leave this all, let's get in and go”—would you? Have you ever thought about escaping? Or are you already there?

Jane Flett is a philosopher, cellist, and seamstress of most fetching stories. Her poetry was featured in Salt’s Best British Poetry 2012 and her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio, awarded the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Find her at http://janeflett.com

Misti Rainwater-Lites

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Please Date My Son

My son is not pathetic by any stretch of the imagination but he just got out of a classic co-dependent situation with a meth addict stripper. Those are two years of his life he'll never get back. He is now living at home with me (Dad) and his mother. He is gainfully employed at Burger King but don't think because he works in a fast food establishment that he is obese. I assure you that is not the case and I'll provide photographs if you seek proof. He is taller than I am and he's 26 years old so he still has all his hair. He was never addicted to meth, thank Christ, so he also has all his teeth. No piercings. No tattoos. Very clean-cut, amiable, well-dressed. If you decide to date my son you will find that he mostly goes around in khaki slacks and Ralph Lauren shirts. He does shower and he does wear deodorant and body spray from Bath & Body Works. My wife works there and she gets a remarkable discount. Well, so why am I posting this ad for my son? As his friends say, my boy doesn't have much game. He's a bit of an introvert but don't get the wrong idea and think that he has serial killer tendencies. To my knowledge my son has never harmed or killed animals and he is not a purveyor of porn, online or otherwise. He does play video games on occasion but not the violent ones that feature ubiquitous bloodshed and senseless carnage. My son does attend a Baptist church three times a week but I've never seen him spit his beliefs in someone's face and pass judgment. As I mentioned previously, my son did love and provide for a meth addict stripper for two years. He never once referred to his girlfriend as a "loser" or "skank" or "slut" or "whore" or "bitch," at least not to my knowledge. He went so far as to purchase his girlfriend a promise ring from the Fingerhut catalog. Thankfully, he never went so far as to have her name inked on his skin. In short, my son has heart and soul and class and he is gainfully employed. He's just a bit shy so I'm placing this ad hoping that some worthy young woman (please be white or Asian...no offense to other races, but those are my son's aesthetic preferences...also, please be reasonably attractive and have a pleasant, congenial personality...will help if you believe that Jesus died for your sins...thanks!) will respond with sincerity and enthusiasm. Responses that do not include photographs and credit scores will not be answered. Thanks.

Lime Sherbet Punch in The Balls

We were feeling warm and fuzzy at the family reunion picnic. It was at the duck park so that was nice. Someone spiked the lime sherbet punch with vodka so we loved each other harder than usual. Soggy apologies abounded:

"I'm sorry for reporting you to the IRS. I'm sorry you got audited."

"I'm sorry for fucking your boyfriend. It wasn't any good."

"I'm sorry for abandoning you at Six Flags. I was mad at Papaw."

"I'm sorry for killing your pet rabbit and making you eat rabbit tacos."

"I'm sorry you were conceived. I was stoned and the candles smelled really good and it was raining and I was drinking pink champagne from the bottle and listening to Captain Beefheart."

No one knew where Jimmy was. Bobby thought he saw him driving his motorcycle to Burrito Bitches. Mamaw said that was impossible. Jimmy's license was suspended two years ago. Angie still loves Jimmy after all the shit he put her through. Everyone except for Papaw thinks Angie is an idiot.

"She's a sweet gal. You can tell she really loves Jesus," Papaw said, his face reddening when the cousins started talking trash.

"You just like her 'cause she reminds you of Tanya Tucker circa Glen Campbell," Tiffany said with a snort.

Then everyone started throwing up in the grass and things weren't so warm and fuzzy anymore.

In Between Kerens & Ennis

On the drive from Kerens to Ennis I turned on the radio to avoid conversation and looked out the window. All those lonely boxes stuffed with electric light and sick people, people self-medicating with Cheetos and cheap pizza and Twinkies and Funyuns and Snickers and Pringles and microwave popcorn and beer and wine and Jack Daniels and Jesus and YouTube and Netflix and barely legal Asian cutie pies and allergy medication and cough syrup and romance novels and celebrity gossip magazines and video games. Did any of the prisoners in those houses set back from the highway for privacy ever dream of swimming in starry lagoons and kissing someone addictive, of flying lonely around the world to see Ireland or Spain or Greece just once, of staring down into the Grand Canyon and screaming FUCK YOU! I EXIST!, of being anonymous in Las Vegas for a week and not going anywhere near the Strip, of riding a Greyhound around America and taking photographs of slices of cherry pie and roadrunners and pay phones, of doing something impossible and brave and stupid for someone they love better than their goddamn Hummel collection, of writing the story of their life and sending it to Larry Flynt? Did any of them wonder about the world beyond Bed Bath & Beyond? No. They are all protected by their lack of imagination. Those who imagine either leave or blow their brains out. There is no middle ground, no happy medium on the highway from Kerens to Ennis, Texas.

Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo, a novel. Her latest full-length poetry collection, Sangre de HA HA, is from Paroxysm Press. She lives in San Antonio, where the weather is crazier than she is.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 05:00:00 +0000

À La Carte

Slick

is what it seems like at first. They’re friendly and free with advice: a touch of baby oil in the right places gives you shine and makes it slide. G-string rather than thong. Heels improve on bare feet. It doesn’t matter what’s on top. It’s not on long enough to be scrutinized. More is not more.

Emblems

come in all shapes and sizes: Pasties – with and without tassels. Beer bottle labels the bartender soaks off, dries and sprays with glue. Every bar needs a gimmick. Pornographic cards. Lewd cocktail napkins and tape. On customer appreciation night, sets of hands.

Calm

is what you thought you could be while doing this to supplement your small scholarship and pay your tuition.

Collarbones

should be seen and not heard. Prominent enough to be admired but not sharp enough to hurt. Everyone has an opinion on your body type and what men like. They like the same thing, essentially, but if your package differs too greatly – your tits are too small or your stomach too big –, it ruins the illusion of anonymous and tips sag.

Drunk

is the objective of each evening: if you don’t remember it, it couldn’t have happened. Each grope, each pinch, each hard-on forced into to your backside, each time you’re cornered in the rest room hallway and everyone else has disappeared, like the baby oil that’s been absorbed into your skin. It was never there.

Hips

are what it comes down to in the end. If you can focus them there, like Elvis, they won’t see your face, the mask you can’t wear.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the south coast of Massachusetts and teaches at Bristol Community College. Her writing has appeared in The Raintown Review, Angle, Cleaver, The Poetry Bus, Unsplendid and Free Inquiry. She won the Poetry category for the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition in Galway, Ireland and her chapbook, Nothing In-Between was published by Barefoot Muse Press.