Crack the Spine
Literary magazine
Issue 138
Issue 138 February 11, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine
Cover Art: “The Fool” by Lisa Jay Lisa Jay is an artist and writer living in Houston Texas. She graduated from Stephen’s College with a BFA in Fine Art, and spent a semester studying at Oxford University before entering the Master’s program in Art History at University of Missouri, which she didn’t finish. She was then uniquely qualified for her long career as a cocktail waitress. During this time she developed several dubiously useful skills: private pilot, black belt in Kung Fu, world traveler, mother, and collector of small and obscure object so no real value. She hopes to someday learn to laugh without ruining her makeup, and actually make money for her art, a novel and crazy concept.
CONTENTS R.V. Scaramella Friends w/ Lemon Bars
Ross Knapp Necessity
Leslee Wright The Case of the Disappearing Water s
James Shrader You Are Here
D. Ferrara
Lucille
Holly Painter Good Vibrations
Erik Allen
Elegy to the Plank Page
R.V. Scaramella Friends w/ Lemon Bars
I’m like, really? Lying in bed, I made It was too thick, too much tomato. She myself one promise. I will not go on an online date ever again. Tonight I will close both of my accounts, okay, all three of my accounts. There will be no late night wondering about whether or not Mr. Green Eyes ever messaged me back. All of my passwords must be forgotten. Why do all online dates become this? Why do I let them become this? Boring sex yields the most random thoughts. I’ve never liked the word colloquial. He never wants to wear a condom. Every time it’s an issue. How can a droplet of his sweat become so cold against my collarbone in so short of a distance? My mind kept wandering, wondering. I was trying to stay in the room, trying to focus. I kept thinking about lunch the previous day. An image of Cynthia eating that BLT kept prying its way back into my head.
has a weird way of chewing anyway. Her bottom jaw makes a full revolution, cow-like. She was confessing. While we were married my ex had hit on her. More than once. She didn’t know how to tell me. She apologized wearing a tearful expression that failed to produce tears. His lips were moving. Was he saying something that I needed to answer? No. No, he was just repeating some bedroom mantra, like he does. Next door the lawn guy edged the far side of my driveway. Could it have been oneish already? I needed my phone. Why was this taking so long? Maybe if I talked back at him he’d cum more quickly, but every phrase that I invented threatened to make me giggle. You cannot laugh when a man is on top of you and naked. That is dating rule #7, I think. He came? He laid his
head near my shoulder. No more movement and he finally closed his dizzy eyes. Cynthia was still confessing when I stepped from the shower and dried my hair at the end of an empty bed. In the kitchen I found him, refrigerator door open, rummaging. With a half-gallon of milk hanging from his thumb, he aligned my jelly jars from their randomness. “Are there any lemon bars left?” he asked after noticing the expiration on the milk, twisting off the cap, and smelling it. “Lemon bars?” “Yeah, the ones you made last weekend? For your dad, I think?” I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them. “Who’s been making you lemon bars?” I asked. He made eye contact, then looked back into the fridge, his wheels quickly turning. “I mean we have this thing. Whatever this is, friends with benefits? I’m just curious, that all sounds very domestic.” He
opened cupboard doors until he found a glass. During the silence I forced a playful smile. “Maybe it was Leslie,” he finally offered, “or maybe Kat? She bakes too.” “Any other possibilities?” I wondered. For a moment he seemed to consider the question, but then shook his head no. And now I stopped myself. Why would I want to know this? We’ve never even been to dinner, or attempted a regular, real date. He seemed to have noticed the dingy grout between my floor tiles. I asked what it might cost to replace it. For some reason pretending that I can’t live with it for another five years. He knows about these things sometimes, but now only shrugged his reply. “Bottom shelf,” I told him. “Sorry?” “Your lemon bars are on the bottom shelf. On a green plate covered with foil.” He stuttered a step toward the fridge, but then stopped himself. It was becoming late, and I wanted to get
back. I headed for my bedroom to get dressed. When I returned down the hallway and peaked into the kitchen, he was already gone. And so where all of those lemon bars, I mean, really? All of my passwords must be forgotten.
Ross Knapp Necessity
The castle alarm bells ring, shrieking day’s massive assault; eight thousand pound eyelids, hazy fuzzy light in the sky; with that sound comes the fury, nearly smashing the glass of that smirking modern sundial; face fuming in rage, spirit smoldering in dysphoric disappointment. Another creak of the hardwood floorboards , another adjusting crack of the bones and joints as feet begin to shuffle across surfaces for the day, another distant crack of the whip, not today, still should clean cut that stubble I suppose though, shape up soldier, piss out that gin, clean those teeth, chug that coffee, throw on those clean clone work clothes, slam that door, fasten that seat belt, today or tomorrow, speed into that traffic jam, blow that money at the casino, leave that last note, cock that sexy black Glock, show that sadistic boss, piss on the dismalness of it all, finding a sad glimpse of glam at last, was that a millisecond smile? Too late hateful room of popcorn chomping Holly. Click-click-bang--brains.
Leslee Wright The Case of the Disappearing Water He froze each of his wives in turn. First a s cubes chuckle in his glass, cracking with hole in the ice, then a chute of black water. The body slips home like bone to socket, and how he longs to follow, to tuck the glaciers over his head like a slumbering cap. The funerals bring wreaths of snow, and him the only mourner, all eulogies lost to lungs and their vapor. He knows that when the epoch thaws they’ll wake in the garden they came from. All the floods will be tamed to a trickle, and the towers flattened to rubble, each brick and beam knocked loose from the offended heights. Fresh words will pepper the earth, right and remembered. Come summer, he can’t bring himself to binge on popsicles. They drool down his wrist in hot sunset rivulets, and the wooden sticks always catch on the panic crouched at the back of his throat. Ice
the mirth of wife number one, and mist chases him down the ice cream aisles. Neapolitan was the name of his sixth wife’s lipstick. Butter Pecan was his fourth wife’s hair. He doesn’t dare to look up at the wintering sky, that aloof eye, a perfect blue prickled over in frost. When it blinks, he’ll hide. When it cries, he’ll swim for his life.
James Shrader You Are Here 1 In front of an apartment building in brutal August sunbaked Orlando, cicadas worrying their legs in a soundtrack of suspense, of what comes next, holding down the arms of an hysterical, quivering, beautiful girl as she tells you you have no soul. Against your better judgment you returned to retrieve whatever files your computer might still hold, expecting this person with whom you lived might not be home, just a quick drop in, download, and out, except that you are wrong. Last night everything you own fell from the unlatched hatch of your wagon as you drove drunken, headlights off, palm heel mashing the steering wheel horn through the sheriff streets of northwest Orlando, what the locals call Crime Hills. Retracing the blackout route this morning you collected all the debris, the delirium detritus of shoes and socks, a briefcase and tennis racket, assorted posters
and papers deposited along dirty beaches where asphalt crumbles to roadside grass, every turn spreading material arcs of your life into the street. The one thing you never find, just one week from the start of a graduate-level writing program, is an accordion file folder filled with everything you’ve ever written, all the napkin poems and loose leaf scribblings and undergraduate failings, gone forever in the night. So now you are here, returned with new flame in tow—whom you must remember to check for scratches—back in the idling rust-red wagon, sweating in the sun and restraining a girl whose mind is gone to rage, to heartache, to the ebb and flow and wake of choices you make under a moon that doesn’t care.
2 In an uptown Dallas parking lot, actually on the pad, supine like a body for someone to find, maybe a woman in expensive stretch pants walking her toy dog, or a finance man in fancy shoes about to cross the street, obscured only slightly by a waist-high hedge. You come to like a corpse re-animated, first a flicker of finger, then hand, then whole limbs floundering on the crumbly, grease-splotched parking lot. Maybe you kick your car, the car you suddenly remember bailing out of in the night. The door handle you yanked like an ejector seat lever, pulled like a parachute cord, the petroleum pad you tumbled onto like your car was rolling forward, not simply spinning out of control. The sun is up but smoldering behind the giant Crescent Court building, a half-parenthesis wedge of windowed arc like a sail, a shield, a buttress against the building day that soon will fail. At first you don’t know how you got here,
what day it is, what city, which life—you never know at first, context gathers and mounts gradually in gutshots of shredded visions, echoes of voices burst. First you text your ex a thousand miles away something unnerving enough she will actually respond, then you drive across town to lightly knuckle the bedroom window of the one you’d left not three days prior and she doesn’t answer because she’s not alone. Next morsel of backstory revealed remembers your first morning in that Victorian had also been interrupted by the window raps of a ghost, her antebellum bed warmed not with our new lust but maybe another’s memory not three days cold.
3 In a red brick and terra cotta courtyard, three stories of windows and wrought-iron porches, the flames of faux-Spanish lanterns writhe faintly facing a fountain that sounds like rainfall. From here you can walk to work, to the gym, to more than a dozen bars, hotels, restaurants and upscale shops, the opera. The heavy gated entrances of your apartment complex clasp shut with magnetic certainty. You can take a trolley farther uptown amidst the mixed-use residential piazzas or south into the glass and mirrored towers of the city. You can fetch your car from the vertiginous parking garage and spend afternoons in the tight throats of cross-town traffic, pulsing along like peristalsis to community college campuses in the immigrant suburbs. Try to teach students from five continents,
or Mexico, how to effectively utilize rhetoric when it’s articles they don’t understand, the use of the. Drive home in darkness and headlights but first visit your friend in his penthouse perch in a converted warehouse where his girlfriend paints her nose raw and her hands bloody. Ragged and red-eyed, bloodshot and bone weary, from above you watch the meted, orange glow of streetlights in a Texan winter storm make a scale model of my world, ridiculous, flickering muted in a snow globe.
4 In a Vietnamese laundromat adjacent to a hair and nail salon, a liquor store, a Vietnamese market, a health clinic and a chain grocer where the packaged food is displayed in the boxes it was shipped in, one side each bladed open. In the wintry, Central New York parking lot little children stop to watch you. Extended families emerge from minivans in comic numbers as if from clown cars. Inside a continuous chatter and clang affords you a pleasant anonymity. After several visits you can maybe make out thằng Tây, or trai Tây, what the mothers call you, which also makes you feel hidden. Sometimes a small face stands before you as you read, or write, watching as though you might do something extraordinary. You’d like to stomp around like Frankenstein, like Godzilla, scatter the smiling children. But you sit, eyes in a book, ears in the metronomic din of this bustling place, and imagine disappearing.
5 In a health clinic on Buffalo’s East Side, where the streets are named for states, shop windows are made of plywood, the doors particle board. You are given numbers and seated before a dated, dramatized video about venereal disease. Here a complete stranger will examine you, hold you in her hands, scrape your urethra with a metal swab that looks like an art deco microphone, take blood, prick you with a three-toothed pin, hand you a cup and point to the bathroom down the hall. An old sign tells you this building was a fallout shelter in the fifties. A place to hunker down. Now you slink past the elevator, toe down the emergency stairwell, make haste along the evacuation route dotted like the meandering line of youthful miscreance in a comic strip.
6 In a Vincentian University’s liberal arts building, stitching the classroom with slow steps—heel to toe, taking your time, let’s call it laconic—as your students work on something, maybe a vocabulary quiz because they’re bored by language. When you arrive upon the In Case of Emergency placard above a row of white light switches, there you are: a red dot in the northwest corner of a brick building beside the Niagara Gorge. “The apathy is palpable,” you say finally to the class, who in listless groups take turns at the front of the room practicing and projecting research methods for a hypothetical persuasive paper. One girl, a theater major, asks: “Do you want us to stand up here, right now,” she says, “and actually learn about this?” The model issue is incentivizing education. “No,” you say. “I’d never ask you to do that.”
D. Ferrara Lucille
Lucille studied her latte carefully, wondering if it were cool enough to sip, as she listened to the slightly off-pitch voices in the freezingly air conditioned coffee shop. The singers were young - maybe twenty, a little more - yet their clothes came from thirty-year-old racks. Paisley pants, Indian prints, tie-dyed shirts, a little sundress of sheer cotton. Enough pieces and patterns for six outfits draped the two. Jesus sandals - flat pieces of brown leather, hanging for dear life on the big toe. Though they were part of the 1990’s, playing at the hippie era, these throwbacks had chosen their songs, too, from the sixties - though these kids had to sneak glances at a chunky song book. Did we? I know all these songs now - did I then? All from Lucille’s adolescence, all folk ballads, rife with deprivation, with wandering, with needs. Did these kids know anything of want? Had they ever been away from home except for summer camp and weekends at Grandma’s? Had they ever lacked anything more than the latest Barbie or G.I. Joe? The young woman left her partner, still singing, to walk to the counter to sugar her iced drink. Lucille avoided looking at her, focusing instead on the Florida sunshine whiting out the storefront window. Her mother, Jean, sat quietly - a woman of few words and bottomless grace. Lucille could not decide whether to welcome or resent the singers’ intrusion on their quiet moment. On this obligatory spring visit to her parents’, Lucille had hardly spoken ten sentences to her parents, allowing her husband to converse in his easy manner. Even alone with her mother, Lucille spoke little.
It was Jean’s birthday. Never a dutiful daughter, Lucille was congratulating herself for remembering in time to take her mother shopping. Bloomingdale’s. Saks. Burdine’s. Lille Rubin. Wherever her mother wanted. Deep inside, Lucille knew that these stores were her own choices: her mother, raised in the Depression, did not care for extravagant stores. Lucille could not resist examining the goods, calculating the markups, evaluating the store displays. Absently, she’d press Jean to select more items than the older woman could use. Aside from a weakness for the latest in skin firming lotions, her mother had modest taste. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound to save a wretch like me Lucille glanced at her mother, as if the batik’d duo were now singing – appropriately - to Jean. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see. Judy Collins. Joni Mitchell. Joan Baez. Women of strength, women of desire, women of grace. Like her mother. Not like me. Lucille shifted position, nudging the bright shopping bags with her toe. The bags were full of the bounty her mother supposedly wanted. Elizabeth Arden. Estee Lauder. Georgette Klinger. All real women, Lucille thought. All self-made beauties, with a flair for marketing. She herself was real enough: no beauty overweight, pale, too tall for “cute”, not tall enough for “elegant”. Too impatient for make-up and hair fuss, too broad beamed for the tiny chairs in the trendy coffee shop. Not like me. I can’t be bothered. Never could. It was a matter of generations, but also of temperament. Lucille could never sit quietly, waiting for the world to come to a decision. Lucille moved, Lucille spoke, Lucille did. Not always right, but always certainly. At forty-four, she had achieved some things: a
business, a home, new, if not luxury, cars. Never too much, never enough to inspire envy among her bridge club companions. Bridge, she snorted silently. There had never been cards in her parents’ home. Her husband had suggested the game to encourage her to meet people on a social basis. Quick with numbers, she had learned the game on a subliminal level - it soaked into her instantly. Impatient with the slower players, irritated by their clumsy bids and inability to count cards, she had alienated them. Occasionally, she would be asked to fill in a four, but she knew that there were groans at the mention of her name. Had her mother said something? Gaining in volume what they lacked in talent, the singers were now too loud for the coffee bar, for the afternoon, for the delicate tracings of song they hadn’t quite memorized. The louder they sang, the worse they sounded - especially the girl. Her whispery soprano made a game try at the melody, but fell short of the harmony. The boy knew five major chords well enough, and strummed absently when the songbook required others. No, her mother was silent, breaking off a tiny piece of the lemon scone that she would insist on taking home wrapped in a napkin. Overpriced pastries were emblematic of the Nineties: Jean could scarcely swallow, as if calculating what percentage of Lucille’s three dollars and seventy-five cents she chewed at any given moment. Not that they were poor. Jean and her husband had done well by their standards, provided well, raised fine children, retired in a modest way. There was enough for Lucille’s father to join an unfashionable country club, to golf with his amiable sons-in law. Lucille and her sisters had never experienced want or deprivation under their parents’ roof.
Lucille had to go abroad to be hungry, dirty and lost. Impudent, rebellious, during college, she had hitchhiked through Europe. The 1960’s had exhausted themselves. The 1970’s were, as yet, undistinguished. Theoretically, she had been in classes in an American-funded school, sleeping in a dorm, guarded by vigilant house mothers. Classes, however, were not as structured as in the United States. There were bank holidays and holy days. There was time to wander, to imitate the lives described in folk songs: wandering, rambling, free. No one expected her to telephone home and no one called her - calls were too expensive. A letter each week would suffice - brief, breezy, completely positive missives on pre-paid pale blue areo letters. A bit about classes. A word about the other students. Nothing about the grinding routine of rising at dawn to lay out breakfast to defray tuition. Not a sentence about the strange foods with bitters, sours and coarseness that choked her. No descriptions of the scornful French, Moroccan and Algerian students. Instead, there were glowing reports of the croissants, pastries, crepes, quaint local costumes and the walled city, with a complete absence of words like “lonely”, “scared” and “homesick”. She remembered the first time she had known real fear - lost in the Pyrenees, hitchhiking to the Riviera, with a whining boy from Arkansas, who clung to her as if she knew the way. A song flew into Lucille’s mind from that first trip to Europe. The Arkansas boy, who had depended on her, even as he sighed for a willowy redheaded French girl, had brought the record, an LP. Their student hostel had a record player - a small square suitcase with a built in tinny speaker. There were only two records: James Taylor and Edith Piaf. Too American to appreciate Piaf, the students played James Taylor’s album constantly, reverently protecting it from scratches and skips.
The singers warbled unsteadily, imitating some CD in their collection, phrasing awkwardly. They might never have heard a vinyl record, she considered. More customers wandered in, uncertain or annoyed about the singers, but anxious for lattes, cappuccino, brownies. Most were older, seventy, eighty. The songs meant nothing to them. They had never worn tie-dyed shirts or Jesus sandals. Sansabelt pants. Hush Puppies, Selbies and Easy Spirit footware, maybe Naturalizer sandals. Reeboks filled their closets, with Ecco for the more affluent. Jean nibbled again, savoring a fleck of icing. In a moment, Lucille knew her mother would carefully place the almost whole scone into a paper napkin, saving it for tomorrow’s breakfast or lunch. Old habits... After numerous harsh words from Lucille, Jean had finally stopped saving her left over coffee to drink at home after dinner. Still, the older woman would look regretfully at the remnants of their drinks. “It’s too good to waste,” Jean said softly. So softly Lucille read her lips as much as heard it. Lucille wondered whether her careful mother knew how wasteful her daughter had been with her life. Hasty to grab an advantage, heedless of fallen opportunities. There had been threads of a deeper potential - some talent for singing, for painting, for writing - lost in the rush toward something. Money? Maybe. That and the security it represented. At first, she had pretended she was above such things: she worked to support her artistic inclinations. In the best traditions of almost artists, she handled the cash register in a store, selling art glass on consignment from slightly more successful almost artists. She watched its owner lose interest in commerce,
wanting only the friendship of those who could create. Slowly, it had seemed, but actually in only a few months, she became the indispensable manager, then the heir. Buying the business for much less than it was worth, she had worked hard, expanding into wholesale, mail order, specialty items, and finally Internet commerce. The artists that the former owner had nurtured found their work replaced by cheaper creations of peasants from Africa, Guatemala and China. The business exploded. Jean tucked the ends of a napkin around the scone. Mechanically, Lucille snapped, “Just leave it, Mom. There’s lots of food at home.” Her mother smiled absently, repeating the mantra, “Too good to waste, darling,” slipping the bundle into her flea market straw bag, folding her hands over it, nodding as if the music made sense to her. The boy and girl were indefatigable - leafing through their song book to a Buffy Sainte-Marie lyric, an Arlo Guthrie melody. It didn’t matter that their voices were feeble, even with the microphone. Didn’t matter that their tone was pallid. They were singing the songs of an era they had never known, nostalgic for times they had never lived through, unaware of the power the songs contained. Lucille had waited too long: her latte was cold, the cinnamon chalky on the bottom of the cup. Her mother waited silently. Lucille saw, as if for the first time, the spider web of fine lines on her mother’s face. For years, Lucille had wondered how her mother had kept the wrinkles at bay. Golden toned skin, soft elegant hands, flat stomach - her mother’s body had stood her in good stead. Lucille’s figure had been lost long ago, her flesh sagging progressively. Maybe all those face creams do something after all.... Sighing, Lucille rose, deliberately leaving the last of her biscotti, watching her mother eye it sadly. Oh, mom, she thought, if only you knew how much I had left
behind - you might forget the goddam cookie. As an afterthought, she dug a dollar from her wallet and stuck it in the singers’ jar. They smiled grateful, if surprised, that a dumpy middle aged woman responded to their efforts. Mother and daughter left in silence, walking into the blinding afternoon. The coffee shop had been tacked onto a strip mall, a profitable afterthought. In her business travel, Lucille had watched similar places spring up all over the country, yet, here, in South Central Florida, land of snow birds, she would not have expected extravagant coffee to be popular. Waves of similarities had passed over the country - over the world, erasing the unique with a McDonald’s, the unusual with Wendy’s. Lucille felt no regrets for the past, she valued the ability to find an Arby’s anywhere. Where Dairy Queen ruled, could Starbuck’s be far behind? Jean slipped into Lucille’s peripheral vision. “The coffee was excellent, wasn’t it dear?” Lucille nodded. “It’s nice that coffee shops are coming back, with good scones. Like the tea shops when I was young. They’ve been gone for such a long time.” Jean continued, softly commenting on how sweet the scone, how scones were showing up everywhere nowadays, as if echoing her daughters’ thoughts. Lucille listened without hearing, lost in the rhythm of her mother’s voice. The gentle cadence brought her back to the Pyrenees, the Arkansas boy, weeping in the shed they had found one night during their wanderings. She had held him closely, hardly noticing as he moved his hands under her shirt, then into her jeans. When he entered her, she had been as distant as her mother’s home in Ohio, listening to Jean admonish her on how to be a lady. Had he been a virgin? Probably. She certainly was, and felt unchanged, after he
rolled off her. He was awkward and apologetic and had never seemed to have touched her in any way that mattered. Later, there had been terror: she realized that she was pregnant. Alone, in a strange country - the Arkansas boy had gone home long before - the director of her school had found her refuge in a small private hospital. There had been an examination, a hard-eyed doctor who had been incomprehensibly old, perhaps as old as she was now. The sympathetic nurses brought her to a room with other girls. Muttered whispers - unnecessarily soft, as her French was inadequate to truly comprehend her predicament - wavered outside the ward. Lucille nodded “Oui� to any question whether she could understand or not, then gratefully sucked in the sweet air that put her to sleep. When she awoke, she accepted her pain as a well-deserved punishment. She had told no one - there was no one to tell. After her year abroad, Lucille returned to Ohio. Everyone commented on how well she looked, how her French had improved, flowing easily over the lessons in college classes. After obtaining a useless degree in French literature, she continued her education in real business. She had been lucky in love. About the same time she had noticed her loneliness, Walter had wandered into the store to buy a gift for a lady friend. The gift, carefully chosen and exquisitely wrapped, had never been given. Lucille had found it on a closet shelf, after she moved in with Walter. The lady friend forgotten, Walter had returned every day to the store, buying far more art glass than he could afford on his teacher’s salary. It was Walter who had listened to and encouraged her plans to buy the store, expand the business, go into mail order. Her ambition had swept him along, swept him in, until he had let go of any part that resisted her.
For the most part, it was a good marriage. Walter was kind, soft-spoken and patient with her difficult moods. There had been no children. She had understood the mutters this time, as they spoke of clogged fallopian tubes, infections, inflammations and barren ovaries. She and Walter had tried, too late, to force the issue, but soon gave up, never sharing their emptiness with anyone, not even each other. Did Walter know that the boy from Arkansas had stolen his chance at immortality? No, that wasn’t fair - the boy, his name lost in the haze of years, had no idea and deserved no malice. She had never spoken to Walter of him how could she? The boy was inconsequential. She was responsible: her mistakes, simmered in years of striving, had boiled over into the void. Jean had reached the car, and stood on the passenger’s side waiting for Lucille to open the door from within. The sun bounced ferociously off the gold toned roof, blinding them both momentarily. Lucille was seized with an urge to confess - there, across the roof of a rented Buick - to cry out all her pain in a torrent of need. She wanted to grab her mother’s frail form, engulfing it in her too large arms, to be washed free of her sins and forgiven her evil - such a long past evil, but so hard to absolve. Forgive me! I will give you no grandchildren. I will not reward Walter’s patience. I have lost the moment - lost it so long ago that I can hardly recall why. “Lucille?” Her mother’s voice was worried. “Is there something wrong, dear?” Lucille stared toward her mother, who had disappeared in the sun glare. Tears welled in her eyes. As she lay her cheek on the hot car roof, she felt a touch on her elbow. Her mother was beside her. “What’s the matter, darling?”
Uncontrollably, Lucille sobbed, hands flat on the burning roof. Her mother held her waist, holding the daughter who stood head and shoulders above her, trying to soothe the child lost in the woman. As she cried, Lucille knew that she would not tell her mother what was wrong, for confession would only bring pain to one who did not deserve it. Somehow, they opened the car’s back door. The women awkwardly squeezed on the edge of the seat. Jean touched her daughter’s cheek. “My baby,” she whispered gently. After a moment, the image this phrase inspired slid the women into gales of weepy laughter that – despite the stares of passing strangers – went on for a very long time.
Holly Painter Good Vibrations I’m impressed by her vibrant dress sense And the golden hue of her hair in the summer Her voice is soft and lovely when she utters niceties Her fresh, intimate scent wafts in my direction It turns me on like a seismograph She resonates so pleasantly In my heart, mind, and groin With eyes closed, I feel connected to her Her mouth moves in the gentlest way And when we make eye contact again She joins my flowering fantasies It turns me on like a seismograph She resonates so pleasantly In my heart, mind, and groin I am overcome by happiness Astral projected somewhere incredible The sensation cannot be described I don’t want this to end Let’s echo forever In this synesthetic dream
Erik Allen Elegy to the Plank Page
Do not think of this journal as a series scrolling marks that invite the world of blank pages that are, in fact. a series of hurdles. That is simply not true. The blank page is an imperfect thing that longs to become perfect by the stroke of a pen. Each corner and line of the pages fit so perfectly in their sheath until examined, when it becomes apparent that the pages are an ill fitted chorus. It is only through the arrangement and gesture of the composer that voices can come together as a singular harmony and perhaps even climb to cathedral heights. The line of the page is an obstruction to the world. The corners shun the organic curves of nature. The white rectangle rejects its surroundings, it bounds, away propelled as though it were a bird's wing on the air. To extinguish such a harsh impracticality, the page must be covered by the
and expand upon the beauty that can be found in it. This feather light monolith built to replace stone tablets that hold its age on its etched surface is truly a brilliant creation. Those stone tablets now all lay on the ground marking the millions deceased who have harken this very era. So do not cast a pitiful eye onto the unmarked sheet that millions have stained with their life’s blood, scratch and knife with your own blood, if you must, upon that sheet. The blank page appears to be clean and virginal, but on close inspection it is filth and disease. Lead smothers the false perception of cleanliness and ink drowns the slow infection that works into the finger tips and settles on our minds. The disease preserves snow covered fields with the crusts unbroken. It is a disease of the mind
that keeps boats tethered to docks and anchored firmly. When the ores mercifully break and the tide takes you adrift in open waters to float without the line of the shore do not cast away the gathering loneliness. Embrace it as a brother and as a guide. I ask you can a blank page be praised, loved or even hated? Can mankind spill it's devotion on it whilst leaving it blank? Can a torn page even be considered when compared to the ashes of a burnt book? The ashes can be dusted into a cupped palm and spat into, use this ink to create a new script furthering the beauty and obliterating the blank. Can a blank page be measured to the body the same way a symphony can? Both take up the same space. The body heaves and the page is ignited. Let not the voice of doubt still your hand nor the imperceptible visions of rejection halt the progress of your crawling fingers. Strip the shackles of the unknown and breath life into every
unforeseeable moment. The blank page is not a mystery, the blank is neither void nor an expression of the absence in which one can cast their un-lived dreams. It is blank and remains so until you courageously take forth the hammer and strike the anvil molding the invisible into a tangible wonder. Mystery is not woven into the wood fibers of the page but is woven into the lines that carve our bodies. If you believe that to be true, do not let those four walls condemn you, stand true and struggle and bleed, die with your hand gripping the remnants of your final act. If that blank rectangle is the door to the world beyond then you will walk willingly through with your back un-arched and the ash of the earth still on your hands.
Contributors Erik Allen Erik Allen is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago with an MFA. He emigrated from Chicago to the endless landscapes of southern Idaho with his wife and cat where he continues to unravel the mysteries of prose. D. Ferrara D. Ferrara has been an active writer and ghost writer for more years than she cares to admit. Articles, essays and short stories are her continuing obsession – several publications, including The Main Street Anthology – Crossing Lines, Green Prints, The Penmen Review, Amarillo Bay, The Law Studies Review, and RIMS Magazine have fed this mania by including them. Her short story, “Then and Now” was long listed in the Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction. “Arvin Lindemeyer Takes Canarsie” was a Top Finalist in the ASU Screenwriting Contest. Her play, “Favor,” won the New Jersey ACT award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play, while “Sister Edith’s Mission,” and “Business Class” were produced at the Malibu Repertory Company’s One Act Play Festival. Three of her full-length film scripts have been optioned. She recently received her M.A. in Creative Writing, where it joined her J.D., L.l.M. and B.A, amid the clutter of her office. Lisa Jay Lisa Jay is an artist and writer living in Houston Texas. She graduated from Stephen’s College with a BFA in Fine Art, and spent a semester studying at Oxford University before entering the Master’s program in Art History at University of Missouri, which she didn’t finish. She was then uniquely qualified for her long career as a cocktail waitress. During this time she
developed several dubiously useful skills: private pilot, black belt in Kung Fu, world traveler, mother, and collector of small and obscure object so no real value. She hopes to someday learn to laugh without ruining her makeup, and actually make money for her art, a novel and crazy concept. Ross Knapp Ross Knapp is a recent college graduate with degrees in philosophy and literature. He has an experimental literary novel forthcoming and various poetry publications in Blue Lake Review, Poetry Pacific Magazine, Indiana Voice Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Carcinogenic Poetry, Blood and Thunder Literary Magazine, Tipsy Lit Literary Magazine, Clockwise Cat Literary Magazine, and The Corner Club Press. Holly Painter Holly Painter is an MFA graduate of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in literary journals in the US, New Zealand, and Australia, including the NZ Listener, Sport, Landfall, Barrelhouse, and the Cream City Review. Holly lives with her wife in Singapore, where she writes love poems on behalf of besotted people around the world athollypainter.com. R.V. Scaramella R. V. Scaramella is moving to a farm in Central Oklahoma and scribbles flash fiction in a notebook when he’s supposed to be working. James Shrader James Shrader enjoys six-word essays. He teaches writing, therefore: waits tables. He pays rent in two countries. His wife and dog are aliens. Poetry is still foreign to him. Nevertheless, some editors are saying yes.
Leslee Rene Wright Leslee Rene Wright lives in Denver, Colorado, where she writes both fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, A Capella Zoo, Bartleby Snopes, Necessary Fiction, A Clean, Well-lighted Place, Thin Air, Painted Bride Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, Prick of the Spindle, Tampa Review, Emerson Review, Louisville Review, The Doctor T.J. Eckleberg Review, Raleigh Review, Crab Creek Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and placed honorable mention in the 2013 New Millennium Writings Fiction Award. Her unpublished short story collection, “Partial Stranger,” was the runner up for the 2014 Juniper Fiction Prize contest, held by the University of Massachusetts Press.
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