flashglass 2023 by Glassworks Magazine

glassworks

a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing

flashglass2023

flashglass flash Volume IX 2023

MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING PROGRAM ROWAN UNIVERSITY

All work in flashglass originally appeared as digital content at RowanGlassworks.org The staff of Glassworks magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program, and Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department. flashglass, a subset of Glassworks, accepts flash fiction, prose poems, & micro essays See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials. All other rights remain with the artist.

EDITOR IN CHIEF Katie Budris MANAGING EDITOR Cate Romano COVER ART “Fabric in the Light #4” by Christopher Paul Brown Glassworks Issue 25 COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT Katie Budris Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program Correspondence can be sent to: Glassworks c/o Katie Budris Rowan University 260 Victoria Glassboro, NJ 08028 E-mail: GlassworksMagazine@rowan.edu Copyright © 2023 Glassworks

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The Principal and the Sea Kathryn Reese

You straighten your tie. Tap your fingers on your leg, breathing in the scent of basketballs, sweat, and a mix of aerosol antiperspirants. When you step on stage, you still have to remind yourself to feel your feet, look at a point just above their heads, reach into your own chest to gather your voice. You still begin with this seasick belly, after so many years. After all these years the kids are still rocking their chairs back, balancing on two legs. The kids are still chewing gum. The girls still wear their skirts too short and their shirts too low. You have given this talk so many times that, once begun, you only notice half the words. Responsibility. The Reputation of the School. Call their behaviour “appalling” because that word tastes so round and sour. List the recent breaches. It no longer matters if the breaches are recent or not, list them anyway, using your stare to tip those chairs down to four legs, to silence those whispers and to stop those insolent jaws, gum under their tongues. Now you have their attention, turn to Consequences. Your eyes roam the room. There—those girls. The dark haired one with a dragon charm on a string tucked beneath her collar. She flicked her fingers, opened her hand. You have had her in your office three times this week already. Watch. The golden haired girl beside her, feigning attention. Uniform correct, shirt buttoned all the way, skirt of appropriate length. The quiet one. The one called upon when a good influence is required to show a new student around the school. Your speech doesn’t pause as you watch her stealthily tear a page from her book. You allow her to fold it, using her nails to form sharp, precise creases. You wait. You watch her hand reach across, into the dark-haired girl’s lap, linger just moments too long. That precise moment when hand on hand enfolds that paper—crack her name like a whip from your mouth. She jumps, blushes, panic across her face. Name the dark-haired one, too, call both forward for public reprimand. One saunters, one creeps. One glares back defiant as you rant, the other stares at your shoes. See how close they stand. Sometimes as they fidget the backs of their hands touch. Demand that crisply folded paper.

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Unseal it. Two hands have written—you have your proof, your weapon. Return the note with a demand: Read. Read it aloud. Before the whole school. Now. Read your confession of love, your intimate betrayal, your plans to crash the weekend party. Read. Golden-hair first. You hand back the paper—too late, notice her hand grasp the other girl’s as they turn. Too late notice her chin rise and her feet turn roots. Too late notice they smile, the energy surging, not from one to the other but summoned by both— A deep inhale. Parted lips and eyes that rest closed, then— dust motes dance in sunlight, turn to fairies that war for gossamer thrones, chalk dust deserts quenched by teardrop rains flow rivers pigmented, pink, blue, yellow, acorns thrown in gutters sprout, root, crack open these halls and the crows that feast on lunch scraps gather to sing… Your hand is at your tie, rocking it loose. You cannot breathe and swallow this magic, you cannot speak to stop them. Dark-hair takes the page, grips her charm, reads: and the forest is filled with bears and fish that climb out of the stream and sing, mushrooms rise from the rich, dark loam bearing gifts for the butterfly king, a storm arises, raining stardust and snowflakes that catch in the canopy… They pause, breathe. Only then do you notice the sobs of weeping schoolboys. You have melted to your knees, your tie discarded. and the sea carves mermaids and kelpies from rock, and driftwood forms bones and seaweed makes flesh, these scarecrows make fire and dance with the tide— [cont.]

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You have kicked off your shoes, you notice now your mismatched socks, your sleeves rolled askew, you notice yourself swoon… still they go on: silver gulls cry: your sadness, your sadness— summon you inward, call your soul deep… Your mismatched socks, your abandoned tie. Your jacket strangely scented with salt. Your flesh surrendered to a faraway sea.

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Historical Graffiti #4 Hannah Rodabaugh

Sometimes you destroy what you love. You sign your name on the world around you. You mark it until every flower, its every petal, is stained with your name. The icy pink orchid is patterned with your voice like grainy lines of Morse. The birds wear your colors. You’re the first dawn trembling with red-gold light, the first word spoken inside the first voice, the stars’ slow movement eclipsed by your skin, the moon’s slick pattern of slanted light smearing the earth beneath you. You’re everywhere, and the world is too small for you. You’re everywhere, and you’re grasping onto the one thing you can crawl inside of. You write it down. Everywhere the earth fills up with naming like the cold scent from underneath the cedar limbs. You know each separate color, each tiny part, now that you’ve classified it, given it a tiny heart to beat. Still the earth keeps leaving you behind; it keeps replacing you. You’re buried or eroded by time’s slow sickle. The pattern of cruelty is to give you a creation that also removes you, how memory always repairs. Your efforts to make a deep impression goes unrewarded. The future won’t look at you with the same eyes or won’t look at you at all.

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Sometimes, If You’re Like Me Colin Bonini

this will bring you to your knees. A place where there is no language, because to pray is never to speak but to hold your palms open and hope for them to fill with what the world sees fit. And it is never a new tongue, however much you crave it, but sometimes it is the ridge of a collarbone. Slim, curving wrists. On your knees, you keep your eyes closed, and full is not the word you’re looking for, but flood comes close. You lean your head into the warm sway of another’s waist, bent-necked, and kiss the salt from their skin in solemn, methodic rows. They don’t speak, and neither do you, because your tongue is all you have and it has never been enough to explain that if god were a moment, it would be this moment. The one where you’re on your knees, hands flooding, heart shivering, head bowed to your lover’s stomach on the floor of their apartment while the oven timer goes off and off and off and neither of you moves to silence it because they’ve reached down, taken your face in their hands, gently pulled you up, deemed your tongue a not-useless thing.

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Sorry for Ruining Everything Melissa Boberg

When I told you I didn’t mean to ruin everything, all you said was it’s fine. I’m really quite mad at you for that, because I already thought that I had really fucked it this time but to know that you thought that, too, was just, like, enough to make me willingly institutionalize myself. For like three whole months I never asked you what this was because I already knew: this was your dentist tongue and how it straightened my teeth one by one and reminded me to floss when we were finished and this was your doctor fingers around my muscles and you made them pop like cereal and this was how you never drop anything you hold but when I dropped my ice cream cone on the floor of your car you let me share yours, instead of getting mad, and usually you’d be mad but that day, you were just like, you idiot, and I was like, that’s me, I’m the idiot, I literally would have gotten the word idiot tattooed on myself. When you sucked the rum raisin out of the tiny triangle left of your cone, you told me that you had a cold and didn’t want to kiss that cold into me, and I was like yeah, it might look weird if we were both sick and I didn’t kiss you even though I wanted to drain the rum raisin out of your tongue like we were reversing a vaccine. I told the nurses at the clinic about how I want to get my teeth into every part of you. They had pitiful eyes and they were like, He sounds lovely, and then they were like, You have chlamydia.

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Learnng to Heal Ourselves Jim Ross

My grandson Ben took on the role of healer early on. At 18 months, he saw Daddy fall, turn purple, and briefly die of a v-fib. After Daddy came home from the hospital, Ben regularly took daddy’s blood pressure, listened to his heart, and measured his oxygen saturation. As he became more aware of the imminence of death, Ben became more alchemist/healer than doctor. At four, he had invented reincarnation. At our first get-together, as part of the gradual lifting of restrictions, almost six-year-old Ben told me he had the power to make me young again. He placed his hands on the back of my neck, sang some healing words, and told me, “In three days, you’ll wake up younger.” Before seeing Ben again, I got my pandemic hair axed and mowed my beard. When we saw Ben again two weeks later, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, “It worked.” He then started a round-robin conversation about what animals we would each like to come back as in our next lives. Mommy picked a giant tortoise because they live longest. Grammy said a whale. I said I’d spin the wheel. Ben said he plans to be human next time, too. The next afternoon, six of us—Ben and his twin Bella; four-and-a-half-year-old Mikey; Mommy and Daddy; and me Papa with my walking sticks of us—drove to the C&O Canal towpath for a walk. Grammy stayed home, tuckered out from Ben’s efforts to make her young again. The towpath’s surface consisted of small gray stones with mixed-in shell fragments—nearly ideal. Almost immediately, Mikey tore ahead. Mommy laughed, “At least I know where he’s going to be when he stops.” Mikey’s feet ran out from under him. He began crying when he hit the ground. We sped up to see whether he was hurt. Mikey had skinned a knee and there were hints of blood. Mommy picked up Mikey to console him. Ben stepped toward Mommy, placed his cupped hands over Mikey’s knee, and began singing, “Heal up Mikey, heal up Mikey” to the tune of “Tender Shepherd.” Mikey quickly quieted. Ben removed his hands, inspected Mikey’s scrape, and exclaimed, “It stopped bleeding!” Mommy sat Mikey on her shoulders but when he couldn’t sit still, put him back down.

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No sooner had Mommy put Mikey down than Bella tore ahead with Mikey close behind. As Bella turned to see how far behind Mikey was—a no-no for runners—she tripped and fell. She too had skinned her knee. After inspecting the scene, Ben cupped hands over Bella’s knee and began singing, “Heal up Bella, heal up Bella,” again to the tune of “Tender Shepherd.” Bella rapidly quieted. Nevertheless, Daddy picked up Bella and carried her on his shoulders. When we reached the water pump, Bella wanted down, and Daddy cooperated. Ben pumped consistently until water came. Everyone splashed in it and drank their fill from their cupped hands. We walked the rest of the way to the tunnel. To quash plans in the making, Mommy read aloud a sign, “Do not climb on the stairways on both sides of the tunnel entrance because they get slippery.” The tunnel had no lighting, but it was a bright day, so we could see using the diminishing light behind us. And, at the far end, roughly a mile away, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Because the ground surface was uneven, there were inevitable puddles. We turned back when Mommy felt unsafe going further without flashlights. Mikey had already taken off his puddle-wet shoes and socks. Once we reached broad daylight, Mikey began barefooting the towpath while availing himself of every puddle. Bella whimpered, so Daddy restored her position behind his neck. Mikey stopped and complained he hurt his left foot. Mommy found a blister on Mikey’s heel and put him back on her shoulders. I accidentally planted my left walking stick in front of Ben. He didn’t notice, tripped, went down hard, skinned a knee and elbow, and began to cry. Mommy put Mikey down. I said, “Ben, remember, you can heal yourself.” Sitting on the ground, Ben cupped hands over his knee, singing “Heal up Ben, heal up Ben” to the tune of “Tender Shepherd,” stretching “Ben” into two syllables, without tears. Mommy said, “If you’d like, Ben, I can carry you.” Ben shook his head, “Mommy, I got this.”

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Roadside

Janine DeBaise The spring nestles beneath old shade trees that edge a farm field. It’s a remote location, but for decades, locals have been parking in the dirt turnoff and filling jugs with the cold, fresh water that runs out of a single pipe and into a shallow stream crowded with daylilies. Our family camp has no plumbing, so every couple of days during vacation, we drive to the spring. When it was my turn to make a water run, I made my teenage son, Sean, come along. Sean had grown over the last year, passing the six foot mark, but he was still the same quiet, gentle kid he’d always been. He brought his Rubik’s cube, and the clicking sound filled the car. Sean’s not much of a talker. When Sean and I pulled up, a car was already parked beside the spring. An elderly woman stood at the back of her car with several plastic gallons of water at her feet. She fumbled with her keys as she opened her trunk. “Go help her,” I said to Sean. He didn’t look up from his Rubik’s cube, but he nodded. I yanked the crate of empty jugs from the trunk, set them on the ground, and bent down to pick up the loose caps that had fallen. The car door slammed as Sean got out. I glanced up at the sound, and the woman turned. Even from my awkward position, crouched on the ground behind the car, I could see her face. She looked terrified. I looked behind me. A narrow road wound uphill through fields of timothy and daisies, a few roadside trees splashing shade onto the pavement. Cows in a far field chewed contentedly in the sunshine. But the woman wasn’t looking at the farm fields. Her eyes, wide and frightened, were on my son as he walked towards her. Sean’s long dark hair was pulled back with a ragged bandana above scruffy facial hair. He wore a black t-shirt and black pants, neither of which had been washed since we arrived at camp. Sean isn’t a smiley person; even when he was a child, he always looked serious. He is tall and strong, and—I realized suddenly—fairly intimidating.

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In a flash, I saw the elderly woman’s perspective. My sweet, gentle son—the kid who had never even been in a fist fight, who never went fishing because he didn’t like killing things, who helped classmates with their math homework—looked to her like a threat, a menace, a danger. Quickly, I stood up, so that the woman could see me. At the same time, Sean stopped walking and said in his shy way: “Do you need some help?” Relief spread across the woman’s face. Sean lifted the jugs of water, one at a time, and put them gently into her car. The woman, still flustered, said thank you, and she drove away. Sean carried our crate of water jugs over to the pipe that gushed spring water. He picked up an empty jug, rinsed it, and held it under the water. “That woman was afraid of you,” I said. He shrugged. “I get that a lot.” He spoke so softly that I could barely hear his words above the gurgling water. His hair hung into his face as he screwed the top onto the water jug and reached to grab the next empty one. “I hate the stereotypes people have about teenage guys,” I said, loudly. Sean looked up, shaking his hair out of his face. “It’s worse for women,” he said. “Because they have legit reasons to be scared.”

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Fetal Pigs Danielle Shorr

I’d heard of frogs, rats, but never this, at least not until they were set before us on the lab tables, ready for our exploration. We dissected fetal pigs in biology junior year of high school as part of the public-school curriculum. There was no option for an alternative assignment. I was no vegetarian, but the experience made me give up my weekly carnitas for a month. That week, I came to class suited up for surgery, or nuclear attack. I didn’t want to smell something I might not easily forget. The creatures looked like little pink dolls wrapped up tightly in their plastic wrapping. On the third day of dissection, my lab partner mistakenly cut into the large intestine, sending its contents soaring. Someone else in the class passed out. When we were finished, the remains were discarded. I couldn’t tell you what general knowledge requirement this fulfilled. To this day I still don’t quite understand the purpose. Were we supposed to learn something we couldn’t by textbook or simulation? What was it that cutting into flesh was supposed to teach us? Whatever the reason, it was lost on me. The animals had been bred for us to cut into and there was no great outrage. No one stood outside the building with signs in protest. No one offered up graphic images in hopes that it might stop us. The pigs were fetuses, almost fully developed, but nobody prayed over them. At the planned parenthood by my house, the church groups rage in droves. Life is sacred from the start. The protesters don’t know that they don’t perform abortions at that location, and perhaps they wouldn’t care. A billboard in my town notes the early development of eyes and toes, both of which the pigs had, too. The reasons why and when people choose to care are inconsistent. The reasons aren’t really reasoning at all.

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Run

Crysta Garcia it is summer 2022. we have ipads and airpods, watches that can detect your breathing and health, call 911 when you fall. dogs communicate with buttons, colorful pills take your pain away, boxes light up with loved ones miles away. it is 2022 my grandmother tells me she had more rights than i do. than i will now. she says it’ll be like before and denounces the men that made this happen. it is 2022 and some people tell me i’m silly for saying i don’t want a bunch of mini mes running around and i ask them where will they run? with a recession coming down the street and a mother who picked teaching, inflation too high for raises to meet, where will the children i am told must come out of me, run? besides their school with code reds, lockdowns and intruders carrying military grade weapons to use against their bodies, i notice no body is safe and i ask where will they run? it is 2022 and my grandmother jokes about returning to her home country. she says she had more rights than me.

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When I Hold a Conch Shell to My Ear, it Tells Me to Come Home Katee Fletcher

seven My feet are small enough to be swallowed by sand when I walk by the tide. We woke at 5:30 when light whispers sunrise. Face swollen like a raft, I shimmy sweatpants over my ankles and put on my polka-dotted blouse. Her ashes are held in an urn that is ornate because she loved ornate things like costume jewelry and impression glass and ceramic figurines. All her life she wanted to swim with the dolphins; feel water smooth against her body. So my uncle waded me into the water and we poured her slow into the waves; our tears dripping to the sea like rain and the water washing us with goodbye. eight My childhood was ruled by water that matted my hair and salted my stomach. No one has ever loved me like the sun on the Chesapeake Bay. Days that left me freckled and flushed for nights stroked with firefly butts. When we were young and violent, we used to rub their luminescence on our clothes and say “we’re glowing.” I liked being dyed different. On Sundays in Sam’s pool, we’d swim until our hair turned chlorine-aquamarine. To shimmer like mermaids, we stretched hair-ties around our ankles and rolled our bodies like fish. Our nails were pink like scales and goggles were glasses that stretched plastic walls into sea-kingdoms. twelve I’m craving ham & cheese sliders on a boat that smells of sunscreen and potato chips. Mayo is a luxury so we eat them dry while my body sinks into plastic chairs and I stare at jellyfish tentacles that remind me of cotton candy. Sand grits my fingernails while I search for sharks’ teeth. Brackish water: my fountain of youth. I jump portside to let small waves lap my body. I jump portside to let small waves settle me silent and swallowed. fourteen Canoes crochet through weeds and foam and we become explorers. After eight pm we go braless and smoke wet weed that makes us gum-grin and giggle. We speak in riddles and skinny dip. Our mouths like vaults; each tooth a safe rooted in gums stuck to secrets and saliva. Our tongues lusting to speak half-truths, we avoid lockjaw by gossiping about our first blowjobs and how we can improve. Mascara drips below our eyes and makes us ominous in the dark but we’re too afraid to be barefaced. Wine coolers hidden in sweatshirts, we drink to: Miley Cyrus, summertime, and the flavor of fourteen.

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sixteen The first time a boy saw me naked was on the water’s edge. Ripples reflected midnight black like the sky and my nipples were hard from June’s breath. I eased in slow and once beside him, he held me bare like that. Our bodies compressed like a whole moon, I kissed his neck while the stars rained silent glitter around us. twenty-three I have been washed in pools and rivers and Atlantic blues. I have been salted and chlorinated and smoothed by riptide. My feet have grown big enough to sprint and I know I am not a mermaid. I am seaweed and river rock and muck of the bay. I am at the beach and a dolphin’s fin breaks the waves so I say hello to my grandmother and let her know my life is ruled by water, so one day I will join her.

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Not Such Happy Days Hibah Shabkhez

Here are the fuming chairs of a round table made rectangular by gilt-edged name-plates. Here is the world that promises sanctuary to strangers like me, that promises to live and die by the truth. Here are the words that arrest you, first when this world makes that promise and then when it breaks that promise. Here is a pen, announcing and denouncing things, until the fingers holding it are twisted in the darkness by shadows with muffled footfalls. The pen is your pen, the fingers are your fingers, but you cannot / will not / must not tell the story thus; so you say instead: here is the pen that ... The pen stops, hovers over a blot for one flicker of the guttering candle, then rises and moves away from the page. A massacre vanishes from history.

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Right Now Hibah Shabkhez

You turn away from the screen. You half-shrug. Time for a cliché to cut the tension, guaranteed to make everyone grunt and shake their heads in pseudo-profound melancholy. This has happened before, you begin, it will happen again. Suddenly she’s shaking your arm, yelling at you to shut up. Who cares about before, who cares about again? She screams. It’s happening to my sister, damn you. It’s happening right now. Everyone squirms. Everyone glares at you, as though you had flown the plane, had pulled the trigger, had dropped the bomb that pulverised her sister’s neighbourhood in a land far enough away that no one really cares, even when - well, even now. All over the world, someone is shaking a sputtering stranger, screaming, it’s happening to my sister, damn you. It’s happening right now.

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Plagiarism Pays

Gracjan Anthony Kraszewski “Literary Mimesis; or Plagiarism Pays.” Karen Craft. Product Description: It’s only cheating if you get caught. We’ve never been caught. What we do is you. We do your style. You send us sample copies of papers you have actually written in the past. (We require a minimum of five papers and two weeks to plan our approach). Ideally, please and thank you, send us your packet four to six weeks in advance of your essay’s due date, adjusting accordingly for difficulty and length requirements. We charge 0.09 USD per word ($450 for a 5,000w. paper). Our employees are frustrated, MFA holding novelists sick of rejection on the open market who’ve made a nice living for themselves in this peculiar industry catering to lower-level undergraduates— those from money/ of money/with money (to burn) at elite public and private American universities. These people, our “fixers,” possess an uncanny ability to sound like you, fast, getting you the grade you need while saving you valuable party time that would otherwise be wasted in writing papers. We scrupulously avoid even the hint of foul play, hiding all misbehavior from schoolmarmish professors. Disclaimer: We do not guarantee good grades, only authenticity. If you’re a D student, we will make you sound like a D student. We save you time writing papers you don’t want to write, WE ARE NOT MIRACLE WORKERS. Plus, consider, lowkey and just straight up FR: if you are a D student and we turn in an A paper for you that kind of, like, um, ya know, defeats the whole purpose of our service. It’s like some scumbag election fraud specialist who deserves all he gets in terms of fines and punishments and punitive reparatory measures measured out to the final inch and centimeter deciding to stuff six hundred fake ballots in one mailbox as if the people picking up the early voting would take this and nod, ‘sounds good, looks like 600 voters do live at this address.’ Idiot. We are not idiots. Here’s a two-pronged, AB sample from one of our best, ‘007,’ writing for the aforementioned D student on the following topic: The Secession Crisis during the American Civil War. Look and see for yourself how effortlessly 007 is able to sound like a student who barely passes via two distinct styles: first, the classic jackass frat moron and, in the B sample, the over-eager virtue signaling present-imprisoned speech puritan. *Option C included for the rarely ordered but elite-pricing ‘true F’ paper.

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1. “The North was, like, nah, dis bullshit, yeah? That the South was, like, bein’ all unconstitutional and shit, yu-heard? Like, peep this, did we the people, the United States of America make somethin poppin or no? Did we all agree we be ride and die no matter what back in 1776 or no? The North was like, nah, hole up! Yeah, of course, you make a country, you make a Union, yo, for the purpose of being together forever, like a marriage and no, I mean no one, nah, gets married while at the same time being like we probably gon get divorced. And so the North was obviously tight in their arguments. The South did not, nah, never, they had no right to do like they done did.” 2. “Within current paradigms of historiographical analysis a propos the rebellion of patriarchal, sexist and racist slaveholding white men what is often unfortunately overlooked is the intersectional and overt sexism and oppression of female-identifying citizens in the Northern United States of America. Abraham Lincoln is patient zero in this regard. If they, Lincoln, really cared about equality and egalitarianism why, in the wake of their belated Emancipation Proclamation regarding of African descent African-Americans in America following the anti-pacificism, potentially pandemic seeding protest at Antietam did they not also (politically) emancipate female-identifying citizens? We can sadly see the portends of this gross oversight during the entitled white cisgender toxic male revolt of late 1860, early 1861.” 3. “So, huh, the war. Civil. Kay. I, my TA, Jenny, bro, right, amirite tho? I remember her saying last week son it was like in the 1830s no wait the 1380s. Prof, she was also talking about hitting the club all weekend w/ her boyfriend Chad at the club. Also TBH I was on the bong a bit too much the last few days and my dog ate all my edibles, so…but don’t worry it’s all good. Okay. Abra-hammered Lincoln (get it?) once upon a time…” Profit: $320,100.00

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Sunrise on the Farm Holly Day

She walks down the road, numb, oblivious to the rasp of burnt grass against her skin. Who knows what happened at the old farmhouse far behind her, its windows like black eyes, watching her walk away? It could be a home she is walking away from, full of loving parents, family members who meant well but just didn’t understand her dreams, could be something worse, a childhood home, but full of dark memories that were all too easy to leave behind, could be a stranger’s house, some place she woke up in, abandoned in a basement or tied to a radiator, her captor off on errands for just long enough to craft an escape, it could be even worse: her own home, her husband, dead on the floor, either because she did something or something happened to him, a heart attack, a hammer to the back of his skull, an accidental fall down the stairs, a push. Is that blood on the hem of her calico knee-length dress, the thin cotton fabric catching and trapping the dried burrheads as she walks? Is that a knife in her hand, used to cut herself free from ropes with agonizingly slow and careful determination, used to strike out at her captor, her husband, her lover, with unexpected fury and force? Or is that just her purse, clenched tightly against her side, containing a single bus ticket with an unreadable destination, a handful of bills, a phone number and address scribbled on a wrinkled scrap of paper?

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The Sister of My Oldest Friend Dies from Lung Cancer Laurel S. Peterson

I’m out walking and crying for my friend’s loss and about how hard it was for her to watch her sister slowly disappear, and how the last time I saw my friend, when we had dinner in New York with industrial chic tables and large glasses of wine, she said, we treat animals better than we treat the dying, and all I think about is death: when I wake up, when I fall asleep, when I’m working, and I know what she means and I cry for myself and for all the losses around me, and the people driving by must wonder what’s wrong with me, if they look up from their own problems—and why should they?—and I turn into Lakota Oaks, the conference center that’s going to be a school but used to be a monastery, and you can see the monks’ graveyard at the top of the hill from the long beautiful pond around which I now walk the remaining stations of the cross, an unbeliever amidst the incomprehensible universe, and I think: the universe is big enough to hold my grief without getting hurt itself. I don’t have to carry it all, and the man who was running the trail in the opposite direction passes me again, saying, beautiful day, and it almost is.

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Preservation Julie Holston

On my birth announcement, my mother wrote my full name in green ink next to a black and white infant photo of my disembodied head. My two middle names are those of my maternal and paternal grandmothers, since my parents did not want to choose one and offend the other. At the bottom of the announcement, my mother has written “She is a doll!” I’m in the process of remaking my baby book. Sometime in the 1980s, my mother collected all the old family photos she had and distributed them into adhesive albums representing each of my brothers’ and my respective childhoods. By the late 1990s, “scrapbooking” had become a verb in the English lexicon. Craft stores exploded with scrapbook supplies, and it was announced that everybody’s old picture albums with the sticky-back pages were slowly poisoning our family photos. Our matte and glossy prints needed to be rescued from these toxic books and preserved in acid-free, lignin-free environments before the images disappeared completely! My baby book is one such time bomb. As I use a piece of dental floss to carefully extricate the photos from the book to remount them in an archival safe album, I’m getting increasingly irritated at my deceased mom for her practice of closely cropping the photos around the people. The book is full of imperfect circular photos and little people-shaped cutouts, leaving unseen any possible contextual information in the background that might create a fuller picture of my life, such as a house we lived in or an exterior landscape. She wrote notes in the margins such as “In the house on the golf course” or “On a trip to Lake Powell,” but I question the usefulness of any of those identifiers without the visuals that would have given them meaning. It’s frustrating to try to reconstruct my own history when I can just see the corner of a sofa or the toes of someone’s foot next to me, toddler-sized, on the floor. I want to be grateful to my mother just for making the baby book. I should be content to have these photos of me at different ages, some including her, my brothers, and our pets. As far as I know, there is only one photo that was ever taken of my entire nuclear family, and thank goodness, she has not cropped that. It is a 2x3 color print of me in a baby stroller with my brothers squatting on either side of me, and my mother and father are standing behind me with their hands on the stroller. My mother is looking at the camera, my father and my brothers are looking at me, and I am looking at my oldest brother, who is making me smile. It appears to be a casual, pleasant family moment. I have no memory of my father, who died when I was a baby, so images and stories are all I have to go on. My mother always painted a rosy picture of him as I was growing up, and it would be many years before I would learn that what was going on in our lives was anything but harmonious.

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Apparently, my father’s sister knew there was discord between my parents, but she loved them both and chose not to take sides when they battled. When I asked my aunt for more of the details that had always been muddied for me, she said in her slow and gentle way, “Sometimes two people just aren’t meant to be together, you know? What’s important is that we remember the good, and with a breath of kindness, we blow the rest away.” I can see in the picture now that my mother and brothers seem to form a protective triangle around my stroller, while my father is off to the side, just one hand on the handle. If my mother had cropped this photo, it’s possible only his hand would be left. Perhaps her penchant for cutting out the backgrounds of photos was her breath of kindness, erasing any visual cues that would tattle on the pain. By cropping and saving the people, she was choosing to keep the focus on the good. Probably she was just trying to fit more photos on the page.

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A Baptism Jillian Law

The lake was always still on Sundays. Almost like God had commanded it, just in time for his baptisms (or so my father would say.) I didn’t like to watch. The Church left a bad taste in my mouth, even then. The grape juice stained my teeth, and the cracker felt stuck in my throat. I choked it down like I would the hymns I sang with my sisters. “How great is our God, sing to me how great is our God.” (In my experience, never that great.) The girl that day was tall and blonde and ready to be ruined. She didn’t know it yet, but she would be. Her white dress trailed the sand by the lake; I could see sand clinging to the hem, her ankles, working its way between her toes. My father led her there. He led all of them there. I wanted to scream or shout, but I left my voice behind in the pews. Instead, I stood there quietly. I didn’t like to watch, but I did. Someone had to. The girl smiled. She had the look of a lamb unknowingly climbing into a lion’s mouth. My father guided her into the lake. I imagined his hands felt like battery acid. She didn’t know. They never knew. He gently dragged her in, shoulders first. He pushed her down until she was in the lake up to her neck. Then, slowly, joyously, he shoved her face underneath. He didn’t stop until she was still. No one had ever survived a baptism.

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Heat Advisory Jenn Powers

I want to know what love is. There’s a place within me where sun grasses grow from damp wood, a small pocket of sunlight at the bottom of a marsh. I wander through sticky things, fluffy things floating around me in the heavy heat—dandelion seedlings, spider web threads, translucent wings flashing indigo, and monarchs fluttering low to the ground in search of fruity milkweed. But there’s also nightcrawlers burnt to a crisp. And poison hemlock clutching the shadows. And goldenrod being choked out by the guard rail. I step around smashed glass on the side of the road glinting like emeralds. I almost want to touch it, lick away the blood. The muggy air becomes laced with exhaust from a passing truck that pulls over to the side of this hometown road. The wind picks up. The air turns cooler. And a dark storm cloud inches its way across the sun, blotting out the heat, however briefly. I eye the truck, lingering by the curb. All I know is what love is not: a black snake, up ahead, coiled in silence.

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Contributors Melissa Boberg writes fiction and poetry. She is from the tri-state area and currently works for Boston and Philadelphia Magazines. You can keep up with her at: www.melissaboberg.com Colin Bonini is a writer from San Jose, California, and a current MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Under Review, The Adroit Journal, Wig-Wag, and elsewhere. Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle. Janine DeBaise has published in essays in numerous magazines, including Orion Magazine, Southwest Review, and The Hopper. Her poetry includes the book Body Language and the chapbook Of a Feather. Her academic writing focuses on environmental and feminist issues. She teaches writing and literature at SUNY ESF in Syracuse, New York. You can find her at: www.JanineDeBaise.com Katee Fletcher’s passion for writing and fascination for language has forever guided her path in life. Her work has been published in Colonnades Literary & Art Journal and the Mulberry Literary. Recently, she won the 2022 Harold Taylor Prize for her piece “August’s Morning Breath,” which can now be read on poets.org. Currently, she is based in the city of Boston while pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Crysta Garcia is a teaching artist born, raised, and based in New York City. As an educator, she has had the pleasure of working with Community Word Project, the Aspen Institute, WriteOn NYC, and other organizations that provide arts education to various school programs. She is a 2022 graduate of The New School’s Creative Writing Program, and now holds her MFA in poetry. Julie Holston is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with backgrounds in creative writing, theatre, and music. A native of Arizona, she now lives in Minnesota with her wife and orange tabby cat. Her writing has appeared in Brevity Blog and Five Minutes, and she is currently working on a memoir and a family history. Gracjan Anthony Kraszewski is the author of three books, the Civil War history Catholic Confederates (Kent State, 2020) and two novels: The Holdout (Adelaide, 2018) and Thermonuclear Mirth: The End of the World But Not Just Yet (Arouca Press, 2023). Fiction has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Nashwaak Review,

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Wilderness House Literary Review, New English Review, Black Bear Review, The MacGuffin, The Scriblerus, and Eclectica Magazine. Jillian Law is a second year MFA student at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies dualspecializing in fiction and non-fiction. Currently, she is working on a memoir that explores the contrast between the stories we tell on social media and the stories we cannot see from those posts. Her work has been published in MU Journal, MU Voices, and Prose Nouveau. She is also a bookstagrammer (@theresidentbookworm) with a growing following of over 1,000 and a freelance book reviewer at Booklist. Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor whose poetry has been published in many literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line) and Talking to the Mirror (Last Automat), and two full-length collections, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? and Daughter of Sky (Futurecycle). She has also written two mystery novels, Shadow Notes and The Fallen (Woodhall). She is on the editorial board of Inkwell magazine, and the Norwalk Public Library Board, and served as Norwalk, Connecticut’s, Poet Laureate from April 2016 - April 2019. Jenn Powers is a writer and artist born and raised in the woodsy hills of northeastern Connecticut. Her fields of study are creative writing, Gothic literature, and nature/environmental writing. She’s a self-taught visual artist and photographer, which she’s been involved with since she was a child in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Her work has been anthologized with Kasva Press (Israel), Running Wild Press (Los Angeles), and Scribes Valley Publishing (Tennessee), and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Kathryn Reese lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science. Her writing explores themes of nature, spirituality, myth and the possibility of shape shift. Her poems are published in Neoperennial Press Heroines Anthology, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal. Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of three chapbooks, including We Don’t Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals, a collection of ecological elegies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Camas Magazine, Horse Less Review, K’in Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She’s been an Artist-in-Residence for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. She teaches English at Boise State University and writing at The Cabin Idaho, Idaho’s only literary center. Her website is: www.hannahrodabaugh.com Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding research career. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, plays, hybrid, and

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interviews in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Writing publications include Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Lunch Ticket, Manchester Review, Newfound, Ocotillo Review, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. Text-based photo essays include: Amsterdam Quarterly, Barren, DASH, Kestrel, Ilanot Review, NWW, Sweet, Typehouse, and Wordpeace. He recently wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim and family split their time between city and mountains. Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Zin Daily, London Grip, The Madrigal, Acropolis Journal, Lucent Dreaming, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her. Learn more at: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez Danielle Shorr (she/her) is an MFA alum and professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing at Chapman University. A finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction and nominee for The Pushcart Prize in Creative Nonfiction and Best of the Net 2022, her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Driftwood Press, The Florida Review, The New Orleans Review, and others. Follow her on social media: @danielleshorr

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