After the Pause: Summer 2018

After the Pause / Volume 5, Issue 2 / Summer 2018

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Art is prayer: spoken, divulged, a vessel of hope.

Editor’s Note: This issue is made difficult by a recent uptick in school violence across our country. At time of this issue’s publication, I am about to conclude my time as a middle school English teacher and the most recent violent school event took place just north of Indianapolis, where I teach. A science teacher at that school prevented the event from being overly damaging and nobody was killed, but the nearness of it drove a stake in me as I conclude this school year.

This edition of After the Pause features a poem called “Scriptures Read After a School Shooting” by W. David Hall. One aspect of the poem is a listing of every school that has suffered a shooting in the United States. We accepted it some months prior and since its acceptance it has been necessary to add multiple schools to that list. This calendar year alone, not even halfway through, has been especially bloody for students.

Listening to NPR one morning, I heard a medical examiner decry how she had never equated classrooms and hallway murals with bloodshed and crime scenes.

Those things never should have become acquainted. And I see little effort from anyone in real places of power to address the problem. Rest assured it is on students’, teachers’, and parents’ minds every night and every day. As I prepare to step away from the classroom as the semester concludes, I am left wondering which school will be next. How soon? My mind wishes it didn’t need to consider such things. What must and should be done is not an easy question to answer, though many have pitched their ideas.

As a literary journal, we feel a deep obligation to provide artists a platform of expression, especially when done from a place of seeking social justice. Art is not a stopgap. Yet we believe it is a starting point. Does it eliminate the pain? No. It is not a work of resurrection.

Back at our founding, I birthed the name of our journal from my own epicenters of pain, finding art as a means for catharsis. I still believe in art’s power and we aim to provide hope through these artworks you will experience in our journal. Yet when this issue goes live, and as I continue to read for upcoming issues, I will fall asleep every night praying that there might be an end to school violence. That of all the things we experience in our country that might inspire the art we curate, this one could be laid to rest. Far too many of our students and teachers already have been.

Sincerely, Michael Prihoda

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Contributors Lana Bella is an enigma wrapped in bacon.

Douglas Collura was the 2008 First Prize Winner of the Missouri Review Audio/Video Competition in Poetry and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016.

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri.

W. David Hall is a teacher, poet, and Iron Man fan.

Thomas Hamlyn-Harris is an Australian illustrator, animator and paper engineer.

Michael Howard is a writer and teacher living in Vietnam.

Jennifer E. Hudgens is constantly trying to be a better human and poet.

Carina Imbornone is a candlemaker from Boston.

James Croal Jackson is in motion.

Kyra Kondis is a houseplant enthusiast and MFA student at George Mason U. Jessica Lao is a junior and Writing Fellow at the Westminster Schools, as well as editor for her school's literary magazine and a top nonfiction writer/Editor's Choice winner for Teen Ink magazine; her work has also been published or is forthcoming in Evolutions, Embryo, and The Blue Marble Review.

Emily Larkin is an Australian author who loves words, pictures, imagining ways the world could end and start again, and having long conversations with her characters.

Kevin Latimer is exploring how to be human.

Cory W. Lovell is a writer and photographer based in St. Louis.

Juliet Martin is not always funny, but she is always sincere.

Andrew McSorley is a poet, and he daylights as an adjusted adult who works in a library.

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James Miller is a native of Houston whose most recent poems have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, The Tishman Review, The Maine Review, Bird’s Thumb, Straight Forward Poetry, and Gyroscope.

Mark J. Mitchell is contemplating the hermetic meaning of bridges from on top of a bus.

Mariah Montoya is a student who just wants to catch all the stories in the air.

Rachel Paige Moore is a Virginian poet most inspired by her family and dreams of the future.

Matt Morris is the author of Nearing Narcoma, winner of the Main Street Press Poetry Book Award, and Walking in Chicago with a Suitcase in My Hand, published by Knut House Press.

Suzanne O'Connell's first poetry collection, "A Prayer For Torn Stockings" is not about religion, footwear or fashion.

Kelly R. Samuels is bookish and opinionated.

Alexandra Loesser Schoen is an Artist based in Charlotte, NC. Alexandraloesser.com Instagram @AlexLaserr Mark Vogel is Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where he lives in a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons.

Jeffrey Zable still loves to write, bang on his tom toms, take urban hikes, watch Warriors basketball, and be with his lovely wife most of the time.

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Jessica Lao

Sunday Classified: Lost Items

A pair of boots. A watch. An opportunity. His focus. A key. A rolling pin. A ring. Her patience. A will. The dog. His temper. The lottery. A toothbrush. A baby. His faith. A job. Her respect. An argument. A lawsuit. His marbles. Her focus. A kid. A life. Their hope. Touch. Time.

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Kelly R. Samuels

Xerosere1

That mark there in the dry sand.

Step off from it and make another, and then start to take the rise of the dune and see the scrubby grass there. And there.

Where not before.

Wind might do that – alter. More, other elements: those wildfires that led you to email her, asking if she had had to go, packing hurriedly, the paint still wet on the largest canvas, left.

Your eyes burned and stung, just thinking of it, and you began to see them as an arid surface, too. Recalled the scratch you got that one summer as a girl, when you did what your mother said you shouldn’t: rub and rub, trying to alleviate. And all the while, a speck of glass provoking some sort of change, though not good, not positive, not going in the right direction. And certainly not in what would be called a community, an assemblage. Just your eye. Just you.

These thoughts you step off from, that lead to this and this – the charred frame, salt in the wound.

Remember: the surface must be dry for this kind of succession.

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[zeer-uh-seer] noun, Ecology. 1. a sere occurring on dry soil.

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Rachel Paige Moore

Someday

Someday the world Will make all sorts of Sense and you and I will hold each other And laugh and cry And finally see How beautiful It all was And that we Only needed Each other’s Extra Pair Of Eyes

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Kevin Latimer

& God Says

birds sing while their mouths fill with the flower’s sweet nectar — oh, what a song. a little black boy sucks life out of his mother’s breast. we crown that boy a king — king king, that nigga a king until we don’t. until he not. until he writhes all over the floor, police boot on his back. they pull his eyes back with they fingers far from the root of everything, all the way until the stem peaks out; blood stains the subway floor —

man, what a last breath. there’s nothing alive in it no more; no more love no more hope no more veins pumping blood into that black boy’s skull — no more black boys.

God, spare those black boys. spare those kids those artists those kings — those black boys. yes, even the dumb ones / even those little kids with the sun in their mouth / and a pistol in they hands / even those kids / yes those kids / the ones that be shovin’ kids in the lockers/ even those kids / the ones with childhood on their brains / & a gun in they backs.

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Kevin Latimer

you ain’t be twenty-four forever

We’ve all met Junior inside some trap house on a Friday night (we all have, don’t lie) & we’ve all ended up with sticky tongues licking raised bruised bumped ribs the color of Egyptian proverbs

please, slither down my throat like last night's dinner / like alcohol like like not on the floor, please.

Oh sweet 3am disease Oh sweet face, the color of yesterday’s lunch. This is domestic abuse. Avoid that sweet swan song of death. Please, it’s too early for that lie in grass, where the taste of brown & earth inside your mouth make way for vines to scrape teeth & settle inside bone making a new you / in penance or in the morning after - I say, throw up those sins, nigga.

Let that spirit out —

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Alexandra Loesser Schoen

The Romantic

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Mark J. Mitchell

The Lesson: Second Amendment

Lie to history, they told us.

We rested heads on little desks.

Pretend your sins are pure exploits and faith spares blood. So they told us while resting clenched fists on small desks.

Take, they said, all you want. Exploit your false history. They told us to rest. Ignore your books. Your desk is a throne for sin. Our exploits matter. Theirs don’t. You can trust us to protect your rest. These desks aren’t there to hide the exploits history lies about. Let us rest behind you. Just keep your desks clean. Pretend our sinful exploits save you. Our lies are sure, they told us.

We rested easy. Little desks were safe and guns wouldn’t explode.

Never your kids, they told us.

They lied.

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W. David Hall

Scriptures Read After a School Shooting

Our Book of Genesis Reads Thus: And it came to pass that God did tempt us all (as he did Abraham), saying: “Behold, here I am, Thy Second Amendment (so sacred It should be the First).”

And He said, “Take now thy son, thine only son, thy daughter, thine only daughter thy both son/daughter, they neither son nor daughter “And go with them unto the Land of the Over-crowded Common Core Corrupted Private Public High-End Underachieving Suburban Bussing Charter Choice To give them over as burnt offering.”

Obediently, we rose, (as Abraham did) day after day, early in sleepless morning, saddled our little soccer players in SUVs, Yawned lunch money at bus stops.

And we place our children unto the altar outlined in chalk on blackboard (As Abraham did Isaac).

Our Book of Exodus Reads Thus: Fire Alarm: Ready Aim Fire. Alarm.

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Our Book of Leviticus Reads Thus: This is the book of the generations of sacrifice in the day that Man created God in the likeness of AR-15; silencer and bump stock and background check he created them, and called their name Columbine; And Columbine lived since 1998 and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Heritage; and begat Deming; and begat Fort Gibson; and begat Flint; and begat Lake Worth; and begat Fayetteville; and begat New Orleans; and begat San Diego; and begat Santee; and begat Williamsport; and begat Parkland; and begat Granite Hills; and begat Lew Wallace; and begat Martin Luther King, Jr.; and begat Appalachian School of Law; and begat Washington; and begat Conception Abbey; and begat Benjamin Tasker; and begat University of Arizona; and begat Lincoln; and begat John McDonogh; and begat Red Lion; and begat Cleveland; and begat Case Western; and begat Rocori; and begat Ballou; and begat East Greenbush; and begat Randallstown; and begat Bowen; and begat Dover; and begat Red Lake; and beg at Harlan; and begat Campbell County; and begat Milwee; and begat Roseburg; and begat Pine Middle; and begat Essex Elementary; and begat Hillsborough; and begat Shepard; and begat Duquesne; and begat Platte Canyon; and begat Weston; and begat West Nickel Mines; and begat Memorial; and begat Henry Foss; and begat Centennial; and begat Virginia Tech; and begat SuccessTech; and begat Miami Carol City; and begat Hamilton; and begat Louisiana Technical; and begat Mitchell; and begat E.O. Green; and begat Northern Illinois; and begat Lakota Middle; and begat Central; and begat South; and begat Henry Ford; and begat University of Central Arkansas; and begat Dillard; and begat Dunbar; and begat Hampton; and begat Harvard; and begat Larose-Cut Off Middle; and begat International Studies; and begat Skyline; and begat Conway; and begat Discovery; and begat University of Alabama; and begat Northern Illinois; and begat Deer Creek; and begat Ohio State; and begat Mumford; and begat University of Texas; and begat Alisal; and begat Kelly Elementary; and begat Marinette; and Aurora Central; and begat Millard South; and begat Martinsville West; and begat Worthing; and begat Highlands Intermediate; and begat Cape Fear; and begat Virginia Tech, and begat Harwell Middle; and begat North Forest;

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and begat Chardon; and begat the Episcopal School of Jacksonville; and begat Oikos University; and begat Hamilton; and begat Perry Hall; and begat Normal Community; and begat University of South Alabama; and begat Banner Academy South; and begat the University of Southern California; and begat Sandy Hook; and begat Apostolic Revival Center Christian; and begat Taft Union; and begat Osborn; and begat Stevens Institute of Business and Arts; and begat Hazard Community and Technical; and begat Chicago State; and begat Lone Star College-North Harris; and begat Cesar Chavez ; and begat Price Middle; and begat University of Central Florida; and begat New River Community; and begat Grambling; and begat Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ossie Ware Mitchell Middle; and begat Santa Monica; and begat Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy; and begat North Panola: and begat Carver; and begat Agape Christian Academy; and begat Sparks Middle; and begat North Carolina A&T State; and begat Stephenson; and begat Brashear; and begat West Orange; and begat Arapahoe; and begat Edison; and begat Technology Magnet; and begat Hillhouse; and begat Berrendo Middle; and begat Delaware Valley Charter; and begat Widener; and begat Purdue; and begat South Carolina State; and begat Los Angeles Valley; and begat Rebound; and begat Tennessee State; and begat Eastern Florida State; and begat North; and begat Salisbury; and Charles F. Brush; and University of Southern California; and begat Georgia Regents; and begat The Academy of Knowledge Preschool; and begat Benjamin Banneker; and begat D. H. Conley; and begat East English Village Preparatory Academy; and begat Paine; and begat Paine (one day later); and begat Georgia Gwinnett; and begat John F. Kennedy; and begat Seattle Pacific; and begat Reynolds; and begat Stellar Leadership Academy; and begat Indiana State; and begat Albemarle; and begat Fern Creek Traditional; and begat Langston Hughes; and begat Marysville Pilchuck; and begat Florida State University; and begat Miami Carol City; and Rogers State; and begat Rosemary Anderson; and begat Wisconsin Lutheran; and begat Florida; and begat Frederick; and begat Tenaya Middle; and Bethune-Cookman University; and Pershing Elementary; and Wayne Community College; and begat J.B. Martin Middle; and North Thurston High; and begat Jacksonville; and begat Southwestern Classical Academy; and begat Savannah State: and begat Sacramento City; and begat

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Delta State; and begat Harrisburg; and begat Umpqua Community; and begat Texas Southern University; and begat Tennessee State; and begat WinstonSalem State University; and begat Mojave; and begat Lawrence Central; and begat Franklin; and begat Muskegon Heights; and begat Independence; and begat Madison: and begat Antigo; and begat UCLA; and begat Jeremiah Burke; and begat Townville Elementary; and begat Vigor; and begat Linden McKinley STEM Academy; and begat June Jordan; and begat Union Middle; and begat Mueller Park Junior; and begat West Liberty-Salem High School; and begat University of Washington; and begat King City; and begat North Park Elementary; and begat North Lake; and begat Freeman; and begat Mattoon; and Rancho Tehama Elementary School; and begat Aztec; and begat Forest City; and begat Wake Forest; and begat Italy; and begat NET Charter; and begat Marshall County; and begat Sal Castro Middle; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas; and begat Forest High; and begat Santa Fe High; and begat Noblesville West Middle: and begat-Fatal and critical and stable and non-threatening created he them, and blessed them, and called them angel called them hero called them untimely during their news cycle.

Our Book of Numbers Reads Thus: Once again, they assemble, all of Congress together, as they have done every day after the begotten, to declare their pedigrees by House and by Senate of their Founding Fathers, to puzzle out the Trigonometry of Modern Day Education: sin(α) = freedom, cos(α) flesh, tan(β) = future before bullet forever shatters blackboard.

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W. David Hall

Imaginary Numbers

1. Calculate the amount of kilowatt hours (kwh) required for Susanna Thatcher to dust small-town sin from her Converse hi-tops in order to rise to Her Full Potential (HFP) with pre-MIT hopeful precision.

2. Divide the kwh from Question #1 by (Nobody Wants A Black Girl Acting all Uppity). Explain to Susanna.

3. Susanna let Harrison Walker dribble free throws with her boobs after prom while she angles for a new tomorrow. At a constant rate of selfpity, how much foreplay does it take until Susanna surrenders her dreams?

4. Study the figures below, then solve the following:

a) True or False: Susanna’s pee proved positive. b) Harrison swore never-ending devotion by gunning down 10 red paper stars at the carny booth, taking a 14 kt. glassdiamond ring as grand prize. How many stars did Harrison have to shoot before Susanna stopped wishing upon them?

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c) Reconsider your view of the diagram, Susanna, and Harrison. Now answer the question: True or False: Susanna’s pee proved negative. d) Harrison flashed New Testament AAA Trip-Tiks to New York, Los Angeles, Orlando. Harrison flashed Old Testament ads for twobedroom apartments in private school districts. How many revisions of their future did Harrison have to make before Susanna disbelieved in God? To complete the second part of this exam, please study the following theorem: Susanna ballooned to plus size, but the baby didn’t. Harrison Junior, curled up in her womb like scratch paper after a Calculus test, had to be cut out.

5. Solve for Why Doesn’t Life Get Better (Y): Y= (“Why my son, God?)(The generational lifespan of futility)/(“If he lives a year, you’ll be lucky.�)

6. Explain the following: Harrisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kmart middle management paycheck < Susannaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;And what can I get for you gentlemen this evening?â&#x20AC;? deflation. Be sure to check your answer for accuracy.

7. The human body has 270 bones at birth. Combine Harrisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corrupted DNA with Susannaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s off again-on again gin-and-vodka epidural. Subtract from 270. Explain how Harrison Junior became a marionette of bone-sharp angles and perpetual dependency, groaning for M&Ms 1, 2, 3 through his breathing tube.

8. Harrison retreats into the outer limits of The Travel Channel. At a constant rate of 48 minutes per episode, how long does it take for Susanna and Harrison Junior to become Ancient Aliens?

9.

Calculate the algebra of raising a son alone using the following formation: (Harrison Junior)(the number of his physical mental learning challenges)á (by the number of phone calls to WIC) â&#x2C6;&#x161; â&#x20AC;&#x153;đ??ź đ?&#x2018;&#x2018;đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;â&#x20AC;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;Ą đ?&#x2018;&#x201D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;Łđ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;&#x17D; đ?&#x2018; â&#x201E;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;Ą. đ?&#x2018;&#x2021;â&#x201E;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x161;đ?&#x2018;Ś đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; đ?&#x2018;¤đ?&#x2018;&#x2019;â&#x20AC;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC;đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x201D; đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;?đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;Ą.â&#x20AC;?

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10. If Harrison prays at the temple of Central Station at 9:15 am, then ascends on the 10:45 to Memphis, how long will it take Susanna to fractal until she becomes imaginary?

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W. David Hall

In Praise of the Black Ghostbuster

for Leslie Jones

“And why is Leslie Jones’s character, the only nonwhite Ghostbuster, also the only nonscientist?”—New York Times, July 18, 2016

Let us praise the Black Ghostbuster Called also Harriet Tubman New York Subway imprinted as underground railroad Dispersing blackblood diaspora Daily news turns green slime to rage red.

Our science: to suppress the fury within Let us praise the Black Ghostbuster Called also Harambe, 17-year-old gorilla shot dead protecting white child as her own Harambe, Kenyan rallying cry to care, to pull together, to Answer the who ya gonna call Chest stay-puft with power, with pride.

Our science: Swahili shadowed Let us praise the Black Ghostbuster Called also Kindred Descendant of Ruby Bridges, lone girl, books clutched to chest like Proton pack to back, her imagination an equal education her weapon against the Slimer-green National Guard escort.

Our science: the separate and the equal Let us praise the Black Ghostbuster Called also chauffeur

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Lead of pit crew for Diamond Reynolds racing team Driven when cop-stop turns Corolla into Ecto-1 hearse Slip from neutral if only you would cooperate to foot-to-floor apocalyptic our 4-year-olds will always look criminal.

Our science: riotfire deflection just trying to get home So let us praise the Black Ghostbuster Let us praise the black ghosts Let us praise the black Let us praise Let us

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Thomas Hamlyn-Harris

Mullumbimby Mist

About the comic Peter Pissant has done a commendable job of overcoming the first-world trauma of growing up with a funny name, but when a blueish-green colour paint swatch triggers a series of interlocked memories, Peter is forced to face his demons - broken bones, Gouldian finches and the ghosts of high school wankers.

Mullumbimby Mist is a short comic, exploring colour as a trigger for memory. As a semi-autobiographical work it draws on personal experience and examines how memories stack inside each other like Russian dolls. For Peter Pissant, these interlocked memories have coalesced into something unsettling and traumatic. Similar to people experiencing synaesthesia - it is impossible for Peter to unravel the relationship between his disjointed memories and sensory impressions.

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Suzanne Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connell

Sexual Hygiene

His cigarette glowed in the dark like a sore.

We were waiting to consummate our marriage.

Friends said be patient, but for how many days?

We were lying on our new bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, hoping they would spell out sexual instructions.

Above the ceiling, the sky fell away to reveal an orgy of stars.

My husband slept in his clothes: heavy work shirt with cargo pockets, pants, belt and socks.

I had never seen him naked.

I wore the filmy blue lace peignoir my grandmother bought for the wedding night.

I checked out books from the library on sexual hygiene.

I studied the diagrams of male and female organs.

I considered the suggestions on what husbands like: feminine attire, frequent showers, makeup and good grooming, soft tones, hot meals, inquiries about his day.

But those books didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help. I needed a handbook on hydraulics, or better yet, geometry: How do I make two curves fit together?

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How many sides are there to an angle?

How do I circle the square?

He smoked. I breathed it in.

It was the most intimate exchange we had.

We might still be lying there, staring at the ceiling in our mismatched outfits if he hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t decided to leave me, travel to New York City, become a jazz saxophonist.

He didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to play the saxophone but he told me that didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter.

It was a time of great possibility, he said, and anything could happen.

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Suzanne Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connell

Crevasse

Some days in the fall, the walls, like human skin, get thinner.

On these days, the membrane between the living and the dead stretches, as if the skull of a lost one is pushing through.

Across the open air, the so-what-ness of trees by the vacant lot serve as reminders of more stable things.

No one wakes up one morning and thinks this is the day I will fall out of love.

Erosion, drips of water on solid rock, crevasse and canyon, drip and drip and carve, until his sleepy eyes persuade me no longer.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like this.

When people ask me what happened,

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I tell them it was fall, it was life or death, it was the dripping water.

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Juliet Martin

all i have left (for) is you

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Juliet Martin

how i feel right now

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Juliet Martin

strain

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Juliet Martin

why am i always cleaning up my shit

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Cory W. Lovell

Terms & Conditions

"This country's a motherfucker ain't it?

Might as well move to Illinois."

- my next door neighbor

transgender black mothers won't have the chance to raise their sons instead blown the fuck away with no investigation pending & poorly attended protests (click yes or no) 10 year tax breaks billions in deferred road maintenance will secure some high paying jobs for young white folks (email confirmations will be sent) security clearance and coding experience required to ensure positions guaranteeing Metrolink usage will not be necessary (one month free trial with credit card registration) drones delivering groceries will be indistinguishable from those collecting metadata on "bad hombres, inner city carnage, and thugs" (Donate to MAGA Reelection Council of St. Louis County) young Muslim mothers who slipped through

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the cracks will witness surrealistic consumer critique (customers who bought this item also bought Clifford the Big Red Dog) high intensity drug trafficking areas will be systematically depopulated in time to meet increased demand of subdivided single unit smart homes (Alexa, play 'Our House' by Cosby, Stilts, Cash, & Cum)

state representatives who advocate political assassinations and public lynching will corporately coddle with magnanimous erotic zeal (you can make an extra $400 a week working from home!) old growth trees, like ideas, will be downed by private universities seeking convenient parking for millennials enamored by the trend of 'diversity' (premium membership grants access to TV hits of the late oughtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s) pneumatic tubes of hot air and bovine excrement will link similarly impoverished hot spots for increased exchange of naive ideology between perpetually adolescent middle management (By clicking Agree you are accepting the terms as stated)

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Matt Morris

Very Bad Flowers

People resemble flowers— if you squint, Ezra observed at the station. He was in the early stages of his derailment, psychologically speaking, for a rational person would have questioned said comparison.

While it seems obvious to us that humans aren’t the least bit like plants, that crossing the line between flora & fauna is unnatural, it didn’t occur to Ezra, the fascist, that he was wrong.

Bombs rained down, in & about his black bowed head, scattering the crowd as Ezra, cross-legged on a shaded bench, Il Popolo spread under his trousers to keep his backside clean,

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was unmovedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; or maybe he swayed like a tree of sorts, leafless in the sudden gust that accompanies all such historic things blowing up.

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Mariah Montoya

Caught Between

You are born heartless, and without a brain.

Your body, pinkish and covered in birth mucus, lays limp in a pile of cracked, dry leaves. Your mother tears the umbilical cord with her teeth and rushes home without you; she shouts for help. Father and Grandmother and Older Brother and Auntie and Cousin immediately bring her supplies: red ochre, thread, buffalo bones, mollusk shells, feathers. With these, your mother fashions you a heart. She braids the supple materials together. She cracks a bone and uses the thin, sharp fragment as a needle for thread. She splatters the heart with paint and weaves beading into its sinews. She pricks her finger with a porcupine quill, squeezing blood onto the entwined material. Then she places the completed organ in a leather bag for safekeeping.

In the bag, your new heart starts beating. You awake in a pile of dry leaves. You cry.

But it is a brainless cry. You still do not have that other missing piece, and your mother, falling back into a relieved and exhausted rest back at home, does not yet have the energy to retrieve you or build a brain. Instead, a social worker from the city hears your piercing cry and hurries to the courthouses, saying, There is a wild child among the leaves over yonder. It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a brain. She gets a contract signed, one that allows her to provide you with what you need.

The worker creates your brain while your mother still pants from her efforts, quite oblivious of this exterior help. She gathers gold, splintered wood from a railroad track, black oil, and smooth plastic to construct the neurons.

She melts the ingredients in a pot atop a stove, swirling the bubbling brain liquid with silver tongs. Once cooled, she finds a teacher to whisper words into the hardened lump in order to educate the brain. Then she places the brain in a bank for safekeeping.

Two government officials arrive at your motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house to announce that the State has created an integral organ for her baby. The child, they say, must

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move to the city in order to use it, since the brain will burst into ashes if it strays too far from its place of origin.

Your mother weeps. She cannot build you a brain if you already have one.

When the officials leave, she returns to the pile of leaves and gently carries you home. You cease crying. You nurse. You enjoy her warm milk and the sound of your heartbeat in the leather bag in the corner, until, a fortnight later, it is not quite enough for you. Your heartbeat falters. You cry.

Grandmother suggests taking you to the city, where you will be closer to your brain.

Of course, your mother cannot bring the heart with you, since the heart will crumble if it strays too far from its place of origin. She carries you to the city and hands you over to the social worker for two weeks, until, in the arms of a stranger, you wail, missing your heart. Thus the social worker returns you to your mother, and Mother spends the next five years lugging you back and forth between city and hills. You cannot survive long with only a heart before your little body burns with an innate need to reunite with its brain.

Conversely, you cannot long endure city life before your heart calls you home.

You grow up. You learn to trudge back and forth, back and forth. You wish you could build a house of bricks and fur somewhere in the middle, where you might fully belong at last, where both heart and brain might thrive in harmony. You decide, when your belly swells and water leaks between your legs, to give birth between places. You choose a spot littered with dry, cracked leaves, the city to your left and the hills to your right. You squat. You cry.

Your baby, caught between worlds like you, slips out heartless, and without a brain.

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Lana Bella

Leave

You are telling me about ocean and thirst, about the age of us landlocked in chiaroscuro Damascus. The air around us talks itself hoarse, turning from saffron and etching into me, flaunting you its Syrian gold in halflight. Reclusion draws down to the old city, haunting your brown skin as though the hymnal sun knows you by the space of a thousand mosques.

Wake an artifice of wind, our fingers rent comfort from the fever of years filling our house of dust, as mouths of the dead sip sorrow from our cupped hands, dreaming us back to bright bits of sail crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

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Thomas Hamlyn-Harris and Emily Larkin

I Revolt in This Mad World

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Thomas Hamlyn-Harris and Emily Larkin

Reconcile Truth

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Kyra Kondis

My Motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mother

& this is what I remember: once you lived by the railroad tracks & the walls shook when the train blurred by. On Halloween you let me wrap patio furniture in duct-tape to make it a mummy & in the summer we walked Bandit, your too-chubby collie-mix, sometimes even into nighttime & he barked at the wildflowers & I picked them & wrapped them in soggy paper towels & we all waited for heat lightning to purple the black sky.

Your house was never your home for very long. You used to keep ceramic frogs in all your yards.

You used to make breakfast meatballs out of sausage and breadcrumbs. You left a hole and we covered it up. I am not interesting enough for you now. We are not enough for you now. My siblings have never made patio mummies.

I wonder if you look sometimes at wildflowers & heat lightning from your next house wherever it is & think about how we all have to make choices.

uu

Kyra Kondis

Hit Man

The first time, I wanted a reason, presented to me like a plucked bluebonnet—beautiful.

Forbidden. On my mind: spring, early, before the daffodil stems point nakedly up at the wind and ask it for a second chance. Before anything is capable of ugliness. The poppy blooming on my collarbone, a portrait of blue blood purpled under pressure. Love, or perhaps pain—does it matter?—budding red behind sorrowed hands. Crumpled in my floral sundress, I reached until there was something to reach for. Never mind that I alone cultivated it. This was the first time, so forgive me— I did not yet know that the seasons don’t change the earth.

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Kyra Kondis

Sometimes I’m Everything All At Once. I’m In Durham

and I’m leaking whipped cream between fingers clinging to an Elmo’s Belgian waffle like a losing Carolina fan clings to his last breath, while outside, the streets cannot decide which blue to be. I’m in Clarendon considering veal piccata from the Italian joint next to the nameless gas station two blocks from the seventh stop on the orange line that sneaks through the city until the city is just the wind whistling through a half-hundred American flags around a half-marble half-granite slab. I’m drinking Airborne in Dallas and peeling petals from a tulip that died three days ago but that I can’t let go of because I picked it myself in Pilot Point from a field with the colors of a Crayola ninety-six box (with four bonus fuchsias) and the tunes of a camera shutter ticking along to battery fans and faint Dutch pop songs as if they were all meant to exist together from the start. I’m eight and my face has chipmunked from Larriland peach-picking and I’m twenty-one and trying not to eat pit fruit because I know what it

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does to me, but I’ve been out all day driving alone through the hot, flat ambush of Interstate-35 and there’s a nectarine sitting in my roommate’s backpack begging me to ignore this one,

tiny, corporeal part of myself—

xx

Kyra Kondis

Derivation of a Tumor

For a minute, (let’s say T = 1) stare at X—don’t stop— to make up for the beauty you’ll miss when you blink.

You, the function.

What is f(X), when: X = sunsets, stretched across space like fabric?

X = baroque golden-hour skylines?

X = green fingerprints of just-mown-grass juice on pavement?

X = pink morning cirrus clouds?

X = daffodils finally opening towards the sky?

You’ll need this one day while you’re waiting in a mint-walled room, still as dead air and wearing a gown the color of crab mustard that opens in the back and lets in a little too much breeze, and there’s a balloon swelling up inside you and pushing your organs around like a bully in the schoolyard and you want it to be gone but a scalpel scares you just as much as implication—

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it is then, staring down the barrel of an eight-inch needle (sterile), you might remember you arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t so good at math.

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Mark Vogel

When football no longer has meaning

Inside the car cocoon, the assault is real— funneling cars encroach, all heading to the stadium, thrilled a line has been crossed—as if a hyena freed from a cartoon emerges from shadows, throwing off a soiled habit, ready again to believe in the game.

Broken—the autumn rule that says an October work week in the last days of precious dew should scramble in eagerness toward the weekend, that Saturday should be private and free, and lead to clean layered Sunday scripture.

Without permission, fat buses and cars with streaming flags have dumped crowds dressed in black and gold. Showers have cleared, and the town throbs with insistent bass.

The red orange fall has been dirtied with sloppy football happiness that gleams too bright in sunlight smelling of beer. Hours before the game hordes already choreograph a communal orgasm.

As oohs and ahs echo through the hills,

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rebellion feels futile. Yet, as clouds race, an opening in stalled traffic appears, and so quickly in this Carolina blue, a smooth road leads to dark trees and peace, to quiet lands whole worlds away where humble animals can again be individuals.

Where un-herded, with clear eyes, I can breathe calm.

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Douglas Collura

Among Stones

for Marek Edelman

He of the two hundred and twenty Jewish ghetto fighters—most died starving, shot, burned alive—escaped through a sewer maze, fought more, became a heart doctor in red Poland, reached somehow ninety, and said that the Jews who chose to die destroying Nazi attackers (ghetto fighters’ goal: seize the terms of death.

In that sense, a highly successful uprising), were no more heroic or worthy of reverence, than the Jew standing naked at a pit’s edge, all the lost naked below, all the lost universe above, stars swallowed in their frigid light, teeth chattering an unbroken code, knowing, fully knowing, the bullet was about to arrive.

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Douglas Collura

Did It Shine?

for Primo Levi

Our Special American patriot Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State, 1940s, built a paper wall that kept two hundred thousand Jews from mucking up our pristine shores.

Trainloads routed into darkness. One type of man. Your Lorenzo the bricklayer, another.

The bread he smuggled to you, the soup.

Would have been hanged. Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect anything back. Never said why. Silent.

Writer, how did you read that rareness?

As something inside he had to forge, preserve? A bridge from deepest him to deepest you? A light? A recognition?

In all that unfathomable darkness, a birth?

ddd

James Croal Jackson

Olive Garden

On the way home from my first Passover with your family we stop at an Olive Garden in flyover country, where the waitress tells us Happy Easter and, when you tell her we forgot but still want angel hair, she jokes her last table mistook pesto for alfredo. Sometimes people confuse one god for another but never their own, and food is oursâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; Jesus rising with the dough of endless breadsticks descending like ten plates of plagues, first-born bastards in baskets we need no hunt to find lest our mouths become black holes absorbing absurd sanctities of tradition. Separately, the Garden was where our families would gather on intermittent nights to write our own Haggadahs or speak sins of rock stars or mysteries of faith. Afikomans for truth, perhaps, but instead of matzo an endless bowl of a salad of words in which we always beg for more forgiveness without really wanting that.

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And the waitress, before engaging the simplest rotor, asks us to say when to end airstrikes of parmesan and it does not matter when we do.

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James Croal Jackson

Human Light & Loudness

Raccoons are afraid of us, as we are.

We walk handin-so-many-other-hands.

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a neon magic to our universe, turtles creeping up the interstate.

Laughter echoes.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s okay.

There is still sound with us gone.

ggg

Carina Imbornone

Lawn Chair

The chair is the stupid prize, the kind of thing they can buy for a few bucks.

Judging by their truck, they definitely can afford it. The white pickup glides up the hill. They're not from here.

The truck stops in the street in front of my porch window. I watch the birds on the wire watching with me. A boy with curly blond hair opens his passenger door. He yells like a schoolboy. Let's take the chair, he says. The other boy smokes something wrapped inside a brown cigarillo paper. The blond boy runs across a patchy lawn and breaks a painted pot. His footprints remain in the dirt. The back of the pickup is already dirty with the past trophies: a lawn flamingo, a metal table, and a statuette of Mary.

The skinny-assed boy with the sort of messy blond hair grasps the chair.

The wicker-plastic slats break under his fingers. If I'm judging him, he's not too slick. But it seems like he's thinking he can get the job done.

Fuck them, I think, shifting in my easy chair to get a better view. This is about to get good. The boy doesn't even bother to check the front door, a raw wood panel with some zones of damage and three locked bolts. They choose Milton's triple decker. Wrong choice.

Milton opens his front door with one hand. The other hand holds his shotgun. He looks like a cowboy in the doorframe. His voice carries across his dirt lawn. He's so loud I can hear him from my side of the street. You little bitches get off my lawn. Go home, he says.

The blond boy juts his jaw forward. He's sort of high, I can tell, and the danger seems hyperreal and imagined all at once. Milton props the shotgun on his shoulder. He screams something to get them away. The boy pulls the chair deeper into his embrace and starts running toward the truck.

Milton only shoots at the sky. The birds fly off the power line--they get scared. He isn't aiming so precisely but one bird falls dead. The carcass smacks the roof of the truck cabin. The bump sounds a little low and off.

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There is an awful lot of blood for the little thing, and the blood runs down the roof of the car and pools around the door handles. It sounds like a metaphor but it's not. The blood is really on his hands as he opens the car door. The engine revs and gravity drags the bird down the window shield, its body painting a faint red racing stripe on the white auto.

Milton steps forward from the door. I see him cock the gun again. I'm almost cheering at this point. My hands are covering my mouth and holding in a nervous happy laugh. He's aiming for the tires. I want to open the window and tell him to aim a little higher. I want to wish him good luck.

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James Miller

An Address to My Dead Aunt

I was told in my youth: take it down, tell it.

Here you are, at your mother’s dining table:

Do you know the word ‘opus’?

I did.

And do you know its plural?

I did.

Have we heard the one about the knives that slept every night in your parents’ bed?

Under their mattress, yes. What you would do with them? Yes. Let us imagine breakfast, your mother pulls the sharpest from the sheets, slices and slivers, fries fat in good old Lord’s oil.

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But you’re slurred out the door, no suitcase, no keys or purse or coins, ‘47 or ‘67, who can remember?

Lost for eight months, eight years, who remembers?

Every night summer ‘88 you called, rasping threats: they’re coming, two men from Arkansas, with two marvelous Arkansas shotguns.

Our landline tapped to catch your killing. The kids passed the phone around to listen.

No one knocked, no one died, not in that house.

Auntie, you know as well as we that even murder is boring, fantasy island rerun and you’re the gueststar who could not pay the hotel tab, whose chalktaste remains when we spit you out: your gamey flesh we know not how to sear on the open fire.

kkk

Andrew McSorley

Certainty

A pebble of gold plucked from my chest, or more like amber, or a raindrop, unspun and wound around your hands until they are nothing but shining metal, or more like a mirror, or an ocean.

A fool wants something they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hold or taste or fold or press into an envelope.

A fool wants these things: a river mouth, its blood in the water sigh of desire.

Happiness is the coin, not the money.

Happiness is the blanket wrapped around your waist, not the warmth.

Happiness is leaving your feet and knowing the rest.

The feel of solid ground the whole way down.

lll

Andrew McSorley

Hiking Indiana Dunes

String together lightning and free the daggered cliffs from dusk-drawn mountains.

I’m waiting on another shore for the dull lamps of morning to spread their light across this toe-raked beach. Messenger in the lighthouse canopy: See me, watch my scribbled movements along the coast – my half-emptied body carved from moss-tangled beachwood – and know I came to rest, to drag my sleep away like a leashed crown, like prayer, like birdsong.

mmm

Beth Gordon

I’m Inventing a New Language

I’ve been counting sparrow feathers for 1800 days and I’m as close to zero as I was the day I started, splicing consonants from vampire, nouns from asphyxiation, learning to navigate butter thick pronunciations of hurricane fables, jellyfish stew, hush puppies and mermaid bones. I’m telling you I have no oxygen, no saliva, no pallet, no tongue, no divine precognition to form the future syllables, gnashing of teeth, tiny slivers of glass beneath my fingernails, robotic harmonies, air bubbles screaming like hunted rabbits inside copper pipes. I’m finding abandoned spoons in black Nebraska dirt, dormant tulip bulbs, the talking rag doll my father gave me on my third birthday when he emerged from the missile silo to help me blow out candles, the lilac dust in the back corner of my grandmother’s lingerie drawer. I’m using a 3-D printer to build a labyrinth from nursery rhymes and the lingering thunder of Emily Dickinson’s burial gown, reimagined fortresses of quartz, of bloom, reading the instructions to redesign my DNA, the source of my malfunction in mitochondrial couplets, like the astronaut who returned to Earth only to discover that he was no longer his twin’s perfect genetic double.

nnn

Beth Gordon

Pisces/Aries Cusp

I fall asleep to forensic files, blood spatter fireworks and body fluid swamps, chameleon souls baptized in muddy river waters.

I wake at 4 am, my phone still warm on my stomach, a touchstone of sorrow that lights up with baby photographs, and I know my tears will have microscopic differences, distinguishable changes in chemical composition, from the tears I have shed for the last four years. Tonight, you taste ocean in our wine, and juicy blackberries. And kelp. You tell me everything is liquid in the end. I am a coward, celebrating his birth from 1000 miles away, my heart half-occupied with those who came before. I fall asleep to gunfire and hearts that will explode before morning. To silver nitrate and rising sea waters that will erase the lines I am afraid to cross.

ooo

Jennifer E. Hudgens

Get Down

I couldn’t put my body down— I’m drought girl/Limp-boned boy— My dimpled right ear/the blue arterial violin in my chest— Would the hyenas be thirsty/hungry then— I couldn’t break the bottle quickly enough— My Mother hated this about me.

Not wedding band/Not barbed toothed— Picked the scabs with a lit cigarette— She flipped the garbage disposal on/hands in— She’d rather lose her wrists than quit— The cut/the missing/the spare part— Part of her/of me is missing/the Man left her widowed— In love with an archaeologist/We will never marry— He prefers me docile/laughing & fat/lumped in/up— Safe/We are safe in the middle/in the blades of girth/grass— I prefer him kind/soft & sugared/bare skinned & mouth— I’ve been/become anti-gravity/not my Mother— Not the six-feet cultivated/She wants to eviscerate any sign of life— We spin like ashes/September/November & spring— Overdosed & OCD/My Mother blamed her shadow— We are all out of time/time is out of us/& it swallows—

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Heterogeneous heart/seared tongue/& I couldn’t put my body down—

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Jim Zola

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Jeffrey Zable

The Best Part

This is a poem for everyone.

One that could get published in any literary magazine.

It neither offends gays, lesbians, transgenders, straight women, straight men or animals that would otherwise be thought of as dangerous to a person’s health and well being.

It’s a poem that makes people feel good about being alive, and affirms that everything is going to be okay.

That we’re here for a purpose, and that purpose is to say good things, and do good things for each other.

It’s a poem that one would read over and over while taking a bath, or sitting in one’s car while their spouse is at the bank drawing out money from an account that has plenty of cash in it.

It’s a good poem, like good people everywhere.

And the best part about it, is that I wrote it because I want to be loved and accepted by everyone, and see it published in a magazine. . .

sss

Michael Howard

Exeunt

The sun had set about deserting the sky when he called to stop. The first word either of us had spoke in some time. I don’t know how long we’d been moving or how far we’d gone. My own knees wanted to give, lungs to burst.

And I wasn’t hit.

“God,” he panted, “dammit.”

He crumbled slowly to the ground, hand on his ribs. Scooted backwards, tried to reach a tree, gave up. When he got his breath he said: “Artful bastards.” He strained to laugh. “How many was there?”

I spat. “Don’t know.”

“Twenny?”

“Could be.”

“Any booze left?”

I found my flask and held it out. He took it and drank from it eagerly, wiped his mouth with a bloody hand.

“They got Roberts?”

“Yeah.”

“Cox too?”

“Think so.”

“Artful bastards. Reckon they’d scouts on the river.” He emptied the flask.

“Well it’s all gone to hell now hasn’t it.”

I said nothing. He shook his head and furrowed his dirty brow, looked around in the failing light. The clouds glowed like hot embers in the sky. It struck me then that I didn’t have a map. After a minute he said: “That tree’s leaves’re still green. All of ‘em. See it. Stubborn sonofabitch.

Whattaya make a that.”

“Let’s go.” I leaned forward, grabbed hold of his arm. “They’ll be through here tonight.”

He made like to stand and got nowhere. I tried to lift him but he was dead weight, rooted to the spot.

ttt

Wheezing, he indicated his pistol. “Do the honors?”

“Let’s go.”

“They’ll quarter me if they find me alive.” He indicated his pistol again, nodded reassuringly. “I’d do it fer you.”

I fixed my eyes on the revolver’s grip, careful to avert his gaze.

“You ain’t dead.”

“Ain’t goin nowhere neither. You got to move. Said it yerself, they’ll come through ‘ere. Now …” He inhaled roughly, took the pistol from its holster and dropped it in the dirt. “Before you go.”

I stood without moving awhile. Then I picked up the gun and turned it over in my hand. Brushed from it the dirt. Looked at him and met with determined eyes. Cocked the hammer. Aimed.

“Stupid sonofabitch,” he said as I de-cocked the pistol and jammed it in my belt.

“They’d hear it.”

The night descended on us like an icy black shadow. I stared into the fire without blinking, pistol in hand. He talked in circles about his old horse. How he never forgave himself for neglecting to give it a proper burial. “Weighs on me … Most understandin creature I ever knew…. Sensible too.” I hoped no one would be around to hear my terminal musings.

It took longer than I’d figured. Afterwards I went through his knapsack, taking from it some coffee, tobacco, a hatchet. Started removing his boots before I saw the holes. Then I draped him with his blanket and left him to the Earth.

That night I roved directionless among the trees. Thunder rolled around in the sky. But the rain never fell.

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About After the Pause is an online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN, featuring poetry, flash fiction, and artwork, published quarterly. We also publish a yearly print anthology whose proceeds go to charity.

We look to feature the best creative arts from new, emerging, and veteran creators. We also run a small, nonprofit press called a…p press, which publishes titles of experimental poetry and fiction.

Find us here: afterthepause.com or @afterthepause The managing/founding editor of After the Pause and its entire doings is Michael Prihoda.

Purpose We believe art is a product of life experiences, from the joyful to the heartbreaking to the absolutely mundane. Life throws pauses at us. Art follows the pause. We want to share the best art we can find and bring hope through those artworks.

Cover Art “no one can hear me” by Juliet Martin

Departure Until next time.

Copyright 2018 All rights of the material within belong to the authors.

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