Note from the Editors
7
Chris Ward The Void
8
Sarah Goldstein from Fables
10
Holly Amos Nightlight teeth leave a body this way Tuning Forks
13 14 15
Maria Williams-Russell Carrying Water Last Night the Fan Whirred in the Window Before the Storm
16 17 18
Carrie Chappell Corner Store
19
Marika McCoola The Thief
21
Sarah Sloat Dictionary Illustrations
22
Ben Merriman Mouse Bells
24
Christopher Hellwig The Fat Mother
25
Dan Kaplan The Bulk of Interference The Poles and Scenery +
26 28 29
30 31 32
Jennifer Arcuni Verge: outpost Double-bright Verge absence: level
33
Michael Bazzett The Mirror
34 35 36
Dean Young Sometimes a White Veil Angel of Erosion Emptying Arc
37
Travis Brown I Had a Silver Soul
38
Kristine Ong Muslim Living with Ezra
39
Amanda Bales The Fauna in Oz
41
Marika McCoola The Traveler
42 43 44 45
Ricardo Pau-Llosa Land of Nod Man Milk and Honey Man Fool-For, Slave-For Man Calling Disciples Man
46 47 48
Gale Thompson Bewitched Suspended on a Rigid String American Bones, Dear Friend
Barbara Perez A String Theory Severing the Corpus Callosum Axioms
49 50 51
Marika McCoola Why Must You Smile Like That?
52
Dan Chelotti I Love You, Max Jacob Fuel Pump
53 55
Robert Krut The Hospital
57
Jennifer Tseng Kindness
58
M. Bartley Seigel This is what they say, they say This is what they say, they say
59 60
Austin Tremblay A Year Winter Carrying the One
61 62
Nate Pritts Throttling
63
Marika McCoola It Happened on the Day of the Party
64
Stacy Kidd Pulse
65
John Peck 67 Headlines II: Single Lust 69 Headlines III: Hen on Ice Marika McCoola 72 Oh Really? D. E. Steward 73 Diembir Paige Taggart 78 from To People Who Sometimes Read Christopher Janke 81 [3] from blepharism Mark DeCarteret 87 A Holiday from Ourselves Marika McCoola 89 Really? Sonya Arko 90 One-Act Play 92 contributors’ notes
Note from the editors Where there’s smoke, there’s a spark. And where there’s a spark, there’s a shift. A meteor breaking apart in the atmosphere is sparks flying out of your barbecue. At this moment perspective is at play. At every moment. Everywhere. A change in focus can mean a change in attitudes, ideas, meanings, intentions, dynamics, and lives. Perspective is a strange beast, and we (the general “we”) love tinkering with it. It’s said that our only constant is change. Shifting is more accurate. We are constantly shifting. And if you’re following, then sparks are absolutely everywhere. Just for kicks and completely out of context, here’s Jung: “This moment is critical because it possesses a high energy tension which, when the unconscious is already charged, may easily ‘spark’ and release the unconscious content.” This moment. Unconscious content—oh the places we could go! We hope you enjoy the sparks compiled herein.
—The Editors
7
Dan Kaplan The Bulk of Interference I have been in a good mood recently but not really. W hich is precisely it. Every year the trees are heavier, like they know something and haven’t been away. For most of us it is the same time every day, when we draw the shades. Arriving there with bouquets in each hand for we can’t remember what. The bulk of interference comes from chemistry and the elements and what follows us around in combination. The sky was dreaming cloud cover and we were the ones staging it. As if put upon. Never accounting for what is seasonally adjusted. For the thirty thousandth time, a person said, go feed yourself. And was close. The trouble with patterns is how they appear years later.
26
Kaplan
Floral and chainlink coming to mind. W hen the background pushes forward and we with our feet halt the throw rugs and reach for the tumblers. In our spaces, what lives undetected. The left lung a touch smaller than the right, for example. To make room for the heart. W hich sounds worse than it is, it is true. You can and always have heard the highway from here, just realized. W hich changes things. If one can picture cargo en route, which can be sad. And the slopes, though I wouldn’t go that far.
Kaplan
27
Ben Merriman Mouse Bells There was a jeweler who, by chance, could not practice her trade in her native Caribbean, but was instead forced to open a shop in the northern marches of the Dakotas. During the winter months her shop nearly always stood closed, for she could not brave the cold and wind. She sheltered in her old, drafty house, where she had only the mice for company. To keep her skills finely honed during the winter months, she began to fashion tiny cuffs, on which she hung tiny bells, each laboriously tuned to a different pitch. She trapped the mice, and affixed a cuff to each, so that for a time her house was filled with subtle and wandering music. She spread crumbs throughout the rooms. During the day, while the mice hid, the jeweler would catch only the occasional, crisp note. At night the concert began, and over the Plains wind she could hear a trill, a play of notes, a wobbling and dissolving chord. She fell asleep thinking of warm places. In time the mice learned to walk splay-legged, and the bells ceased to ring out. But by then the first crocuses had begun to push up through the Earth.
24
Merriman
Austin Tremblay A Year Winter It was a time in my life when everything came to my fingertips, and any thread connected to the past frayed like the bottom of a thrift store jacket I wore so much it was almost like real love, the light I lost shoved inside a trombone bell, as I walked under trees that sometimes looked like they were weeping and then they were weeping, and it stuck to my sleeves like cockleburs, small as mustard seeds, rondure in my mouth, the hard telling that’s hardly palatable.
Tr e m b l a y
61