The Coroner John Salem

The Coroner

John Salem

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The Country Coroner is a very important job

He spends a lot of time surrounded by death, so the pay is naturally quite good.

Many people do not know this, but the Coroner is an elected position.

That makes the Coroner just like the President!

No, actually, the Coroner is better than the president, because the president only has control over all that are living, while the Coroner has control over the dead.

What’s that? Lonely? No, I don’t believe the coroner ever gets lonely, he is always surrounded by people after all.

God created man and gave him life, that is true, but the Coroner is free to do with death as he wishes, if he wanted too, he could dress up his playthings in funny hats, or draw mustaches on them.

Pretty sure God can’t do that….so

Now that I think about it, who corons the coroner when the coroner dies?

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Corons, that doesn’t sound right

Coronies

Coronum

Coronate! That’s it!

Who coronates the Coroner when the coroner is dead?

That’s up to the voting public, I suppose.

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Sailor

Taylor Batilo

Until that Time when the Captain had spoke, Solely, on the wind-battered deck I stood, Upon the tides, wrecked ships with waters choked, The manic winds, no man stayed nor could.

To salvage thine skin, bitter Death embraced. “My Boy, to what shambled life shall thee return?” “To that of family.” Reversed, I raced. Wretched and with grim-brow, the seas churn. With foothold on the bow, with pride and gaze, I sailed...and paced...and paced.

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breathe

Isabel Niforatos

inhale. dreams, cloud-violet, the tang of tears driving up like rain. what it tastes like

exhale. shared oxygen, comatose, sweet skin that shivers and sweats, $6.99 wine and gas station clothes: ill-fitting. it’ll stop and when it does

inhale. bus rides out, piano lessons without lesson without sound, the smacking of tongue against cosmos. endings. beginnings. stretched out skinny middles.

exhale.

exhale again.

compartmentalization

Isabel Niforatos

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she isn’t here for you but burnt, paper, receding in waves that knife & tickle your stupendously hurt feet hurtful—crunching, bone-wavering, the sickly cremation of held breath—where did she go because after all she isn’t here

& he is here but just a shell like you the stairs leading to a quiet nowhere, dusted off the twisted lemon-sour sharp of no repeatedly in 1000 refrains: no is yours for the taking the taking he took

your dreams, neatly stacked suitcases which hurt to unzip: all empty now like you the idiopathic succumbing to the ritual the dumpster notions of a life, shh, stop, enough it’s never enough

shavings of soul cluttered in your eyelashes : too luscious for crying it takes autumn to bring out depth but it’s all falling from here the crumble of human; the catastrophe of please, of prayer, and quietly: blood vessels tripping your weary legs

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A Grizzly Bear in a Nice Hotel Room

Natalie Munguia

Remember when we wrestled in the basement? All I had to do was - Tap out! Tap out!

Socks sliding across white linoleum; we were the savages of the kitchen, until I cut my head open on a desk.

See, you are the chronicle of me and now I try to chronicle me too. in red lines leaking from my hairline, stitched up with black words.

I shatter myself like glass to see which shards match yours.

I put my mosaic self together into a transient song floating through stanzas.

I wonder what words would be strung to create the tapestry of shirts with all those years woven in, hanging on mama’s drying rack.

I wonder if I know you. A grizzly bear in a nice hotel room, a facade the crumbles on the weekend.

All I know is you buy me enough food, you always have. 33

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I Am a Highway, Tornado, etc.

Natalie Munguia

Have you ever seen your mom cry? I have. She was washing dishes, facing the window, trying not to let me see.

I am the tear-tornado made of salty door-slammings.

One time I climbed the poplar tree by the fence, fell through and saw scratches down my back in the mirror. I hid them.

I am the sea of scabs trying to cover my mistakes with clots.

My preschool sold tulips to fundraise and my favorites were the flowers with fringed petals because they were beautiful broken.

I am the margins marred with broken bottles; can I offer them to you?

In fifth grade I cut my leg open playing tag. I thought it was just a bruise but when I lifted my pant leg all I saw was red.

I am the road of blood spilling out of me and spilling out of you too.

I’ve been here two decades and yet I’m still learning to walk leaving disasters in my wake as I wake wishing my head could stay on this gray pillow.

Because I am an avalanche of sweat and I’m tired of fending off nightmares.

After Movimiento by Octavio Paz, translation by Eliot Weinberger

His Verse is Like a Machete

Alena Coleman

Song for José Martí

Mi verso es como un puñal says the poet-revolutionary to Jimmy Kimmel My verse is like a dagger.

Later in New York, the poet-revolutionary smokes a cigar in the dry season and Smokey the Bear is on Today screaming, and the poet-revolutionary holds up his hands to the camera, fingernails swarming with ink and blood and blows the smoke from his lungs “la culpa no es mía.”

No fault of mine, no fault of mine, But the fault lines are hiccuping, heaving the Atlantic Red-Sea style, And the poet-revolutionary is holding his dagger to his breast— a star-crossed lover of liberty growing a Moses-beard 35

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and a cigar ember catches in a cane field— Santiago, Guantánamo, El Cobre—

blood turns to sugar turns to blood

What a transfiguration! what a spectacle! The poet-revolutionary is a magician too! and he holds out his dagger plunges it through his hand— gasp! how? why?— the audience laughs as he shows them his palm, stigmata free. a trick! a fake! it’s just paper! and the audience laughs

and on the hill outside Palma Soriano the Spanish are laughing too as the poet-revolutionary holds out his dagger watches it turn to ink and pulp in the rain, as the poet-revolutionary falls backward, and keeps falling, falling, into an unmarked grave.

But the Bronze Titan is already rolling a cigar on the flat of his thigh, and there is a snake of fire

slithering from Santiago to Matanzas, and Smokey the Bear asphyxiates.

Then the mambises tear a thousand pages from the poet-revolutionary’s spine, and fold them into, not daggers, but a thousand machetes—

blood turns to sugar turns to blood. 37

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Stasis

Alena Coleman

Three Tanka for Early Spring I. I hold pond water in my mouth until it warms, hot as saliva, then let it slip through my teeth and crash on beer bottle mud. II. The wind smells like rain and cigarettes as it rolls against split lips, swirls on tongue, slip-slides into lungs, and rustles my redbud bones. III. At the graveyard woods daffodils and dogwood ring their sacred bells, hum their melody of color. All their ashes now ablaze.

The Moth Prince

Joseph Carper

Text Across the barren plain that knows no sound but for the moaning buffet of the wind and rustle of the battered swaths of grass, there tow’rs a streak of black against the sky.

Three thousand feet of stone as dark as pitch remains the only structure left in sight, concealed with twisting vines adorned with thorns that guard the tower’s solitary guest.

Within the tower’s highest chamber sits a figure scrawling symbols on a page, stopping now and then to wipe the dust that’s fallen from his iridescent wings.

His eyes creep toward the thin slit in the wall through which the faintest moonlight percolates and falls upon the heap of pages piled deep atop the gnarled wooden desk.

He gathers them into his wooly arms and starts to bind them with a strand of twine, but not before he spots a mass of black conglomerating on the pale horizon.

The swarm of moths assembles into form 39

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then plunges down like lightning from the sky. With shock he looks and finds their hopeless prey illuminated by a torch’s light.

Before the victims have a chance to scream, the moths surround and tear their skin to shreds, and where the victims once had life and blood, a pile of bones and heaps of dust remain.

The moth prince murmurs words of rev’rent mourning but ought not spare the time for decent prayer. He has a task to do and cannot stop lest all the future never come to pass.

He takes the bounded pages down the stairs and raps upon an ancient wooden door, which opens to reveal an endless pit that holds a pulley system filled with tomes.

And opening the tome that’s on the top, a future year inscribed upon its spine, he slips the pages in and ties them taut, another year secured for humankind.

Returning to his desk to write once more, a shadow falls upon his wrinkled face. He stares aghast at what has filled the frame: the pupil of a herculean moth.

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A Man Drops a Dessert from the Dining Hall and Nearly Falls on His Ass

Joseph Carper

A blur in my peripheral vision. An incredulous gasp, filled with an entire day’s worth of clogged shower drains, forgotten homework, and “House Lo Mein,” mixed with the tin squeal of a door hinge.

I glance lazily at the scene unfolding, as one might glance at an obscene image carved into a library desk.

There it is.

A raspberry cheesecake tucked neatly into its black dish, suspended in the freezing air.

Then the desperate attempt at athletic ability, the game-saving catch in the bottom of the ninth. Onlookers spectate with bated breaths.

The dish has completed a quarter turn now, so that the red jelly absorbs the light of the lamppost and glows like a fluorescent goldfish.

His fingers and the dish make contact in a brief but intimate embrace, then separate barely. Like Adam and God in the Sistine Chapel. The last touch of the Creator before the Fall.

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Then the misplaced foot on a clear palate of ice. The sudden shifting of weight. An attempt at interpretive dance composed entirely of arm waving.

The raspberry cheesecake meets the concrete and explodes spectacularly.

He reaches and finds an elbow to grab onto, clinging to it like a koala.

Tragedy strikes on a February evening.

Echo’s Song

Anna Staud

The pale lake floats like glass while The forest pliés in a dew and honey affair.

You look like a god sitting there – Spring-kissed by sun, back against the willow tree.

My rivered veins and ocean eyes Course in awe, could mirror your heaven.

My lips bud open in wonder (You who are there!)

But generations clamp my jaw Steal my saliva, wring my words.

My tongue bites silence and salted tears (Look! I am here!)

As I, mute and aching, Watch you stare and not see.

You whisper an epithet of love I promptly repeat in vain.

But transfixed by your image, You drown in stolen diction.

I now refuse to echo. 43

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hark i hear the harps eternal

Anna Staud

tuesday at rehearsal she said we sounded like a choir of angels, the way our voices rang.

it’s monday now and roses suffocate the packed church draped in black and thick silence cuts like shards of stained glass.

wrapped in a white dress silk pearls ring her neck – no one expected an open casket.

earlier at the wake her parents looked so small, shaking hands with strangers as we watched a slideshow of pictures: family vacations school headshots the nutcracker – i didn’t know she danced.

outside the lake haunts each breath january shivers asking: how much pain how long did it take – there is nothing to say

so we sing

salt blurs the notes and her flute is missing,

but our harmonies fold into each empty space, each pool of loss until i hear what might be the flute ricochet with each chord, and somehow we sing louder and higher this song our gasp of hope of hurt and throbbing in f major something inside lurches within me and i think: this must be my soul. 45

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Eve

Molly O’Toole

It begins: searing salmon, sweet potato skins and cinnamon sacredly baked

And so many hands to help now, to make dough give in to heel to halve the oranges to hug from behind, to hold

And the incessant whining of the dog, sometimes guttural, like a whale’s song she has her place here too

All seven in the kitchen.

Introduction to the Carnival

Veronica Kirigios

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The carnival hits the road every spring Wheels only stopping When it’s ready to let new people in

The loneliest people have always found shelter in me

People come and go, with their Arcade rings and Sticky fingers. Planning for next year

My refuge is temporary & solitude is a friend whose hand I haven’t learned to hold yet

Edges of the tent fraying, unraveling Ever since 16 Winds never stopped pulling

alive This is how I’ve been destroyed, and how I’ve been kept

Never-ending ferris wheel lines shaking For the highs And then eyes closed at the top, swaying

All I’ve ever known is how to prepare for the comedown

There’s a vendor in the corner selling happiness Signs flashing Peddling lemons til they’re sold out

I lost the recipe for lemonade years ago, and who cares

48 I never had any sugar to begin with

Trick roping areas scattered throughout Spinning and spinning Hands trembling, lassoing heartstrings about

How many hearts have I held in my own? I remember I can only have one

Everyones bumping into one another Collide, Stick, Separate Losing things that will never be found

less I don’t know everything and one day I will know even

And there’s somebody singing in the distance Can hardly hear Because there’s a baby crying in your ear

I focus on what’s gone wrong before it can never become right

A film reel plays over and over Mistakes that have been made and words left unsaid

My skeleton, a temple of apologies, brittle bones splintering under the weight of regret

The carousel never stops turning Going round and round Horses galloping after hours

Sometimes I wish I could just get off

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Summer 16

Veronica Kirigios

Summer 16 my paper airplane sailed over blue seas Soft cotton candy skies stretched out before me, invitingly My land was still new to me then, untouched, unbroken Unexplored hills and valleys of soft flesh

We stole red lipstick from our sisters, And clambered into his car, limbs Trembling like newborn foals. No headlights,

Headfirst into darkness. He took us to the abyss, the mountainside beckoning. He’d seen 23 summers before this one--he knew How to show us a good time.

He watched the amber liquid spill over the rim, Sliding down my throat like a showman’s sword Crossed fingers behind his back, he took my trust

City lights, twinkling stars, hiding and seeking in his eyes Ink black pools, wretched & wondrous A flurry of moths threatened to spill out of my mouth Led me to a hiding spot so good, I couldn’t find myself

His mouth was bourbon and menthol cigarettes His pawing hands promised adventure--or was it danger?--

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My memory is a grainy film reel, the fuzzy details burned in my brain

My cross swinging like a pendulum before me, then hitting my chest, echoing the sound of “mea culpa, mea culpa” His bragging body, breaking & entering & releasing pollution. An eruption, an interruption: I watched a blade of grass fade to grey.

He gave me a cigarette. For my time. I walked back to the car. A watermelon between my thighs. Curled into the corner of the passenger seat

In the car he treated better than me: Don’t slam the door (but he shoved my legs wide) Don’t lie like that (but he held me down) Don’t make a mess (but he made me feel dirty)

Hours scrubbing the feeling off of my skin, Rorschach test of bruises I thought it looked beautiful and then cried The examiner called. He said I lost my mind.

Testing

Rachel Hartmann

I stare at the paper with a perplexed look Back and forth as pencils dance around the room The page in front holds secrets in printed ink Symbols, equations, and long words unknown The page seems to move as the black melts Too many numbers sink onto my desk And spill across the floor I try to scoop them up, but they are too fast The paper is blank and I feel my mind spin I hear the clock ticking away But what does time matter when the numbers Are puddles on the floor? 51

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Genesis 2:22

Hannah Tonsor

Maybe Eve is foreshadowing Of little girls being told not to eat She reached for one apple And we crumbled into rice cakes And constipation Our stomachs hurt Self-discipline Is a diuretic Now our kidneys are raisins The looking-glass a laxative Our mouths Their own litigators When we die we’ll meet The dead guys in the ground And see their figures And wish we’d decay sooner You called Eve a bitch So we’re trying not to be

My Grandfather’s Attempt at a Pittsburgh Praise Poem

Chelsey Boyle

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The Steel Mill stacks spin gentle whips of clouds— Heaving against the grit lodged in my pipes, I stagger against the slippy smoke of the coke that thins the air, reeking of rusted eggs.

For Roberto our radio roars: “Arriba” — My joints chipped up like ham from wrestling liquid iron, Still blazing with the gunfire Pinkertons smelted from unions past. Their valor dried up with Carnegie’s carcass.

The Youghiogheny whispers like a dream— Dark and foggy is fifth avenue at noon, Street lamps slice through the smog Blurring churning rivers of sewage and sludge.

Your steel embrace is where I need to be— Our forge closed that January. Now just rust. My praise poem still needs finished, But nothing in this city has rhymed since.

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cinema paradiso

Caroline Kranick

to see your eyes light up with passion your hands fly in an agitated frenzy, articulating through movement the words your mouth cannot find, grasping wildly at straws and strands of your hair, mind moving faster than lips

it could be about cars or trees, the theory of relativity or the five o’clock news. perhaps it’s something I find mundane as the chipped beige paint of the waiting room wall, or maybe the things that make your heart quicken do the same to mine —

it’s just good to know that there are still people who care about things, that there are ways to bring back that childlike spark thought to be stolen so long ago

Sinking

Noah Cha

To sink until

you reach the bottom

of an hourglass

you had no intention of turning over

Pulling threads from the fabric of time

Until your pillow fort becomes a townhome 55

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PROSE

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On Time and Thanksgiving

Taylor Anthony Batilo

Like the fine and myriad dust particles that invite themselves into visibility when passing through a golden ray of light that pierces the glass windows of a well-lit abode, the concept of time seems to suspend our very being, exactly. Its gaze cuts through all it observes — our actions and desires. It lays aside our origins and differences to remind us of our humanity. It lends us cause and galvanizes us to immediate action, betraying fools that resist its inevitable course. As a towering and august tree which touches the heavens in the springtime and shouts memento mori in the winter, time is ever-changing and comes in as many outfits as any wealthy wardrobe can attest to. It is as elusive as a crafty fox when summering on distant and white-sand beaches or dilly-dallying fancifully as a young child. It is slower than rush hour traffic when holidays are overmorrow and nothing of substance can be done or those fun times have ceased to abound. It is quicker and more witty than the experienced thief when it comes to snatch away blissful memories and good-willed people. It is a beginning, and it is an end.

Yet, with all that time strips us of and digs out of our pockets, it remains a faithful and diligent child of the human race. As children are born of love and togetherness, time is born of a need for organization, control. Time, a fair and demanding drill sergeant that marks off our trips and tumbles, keeps the trains in locomotion, schedules in order, and happenings

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happening. It bids us stand down as we dread the 8 a.m. class come morning or become puzzled as to where the weekend wandered off to. However, with its cruel cadence and temporal tempo, time remains ours to command — given the right tools or, perhaps, watches. We can narrow down, it seems, the varied faces of time to two recurring scenarios. On the one hand is “time well spent.” It is a crowning achievement and prized possession and a concoction that appears to be a chimerical mixture of time spent in the company of friends, family, and loved ones and time spent towards “getting things done.” On the other hand, lies the wasting away of time. Perhaps, this familiar friend comes as the struggle against the meandering afternoon that lazes around and gobbles up productivity like the quickest of quicksands or the moments where, in fact, you are the meanderer as the result of a wrong turn being taken and an impossible paucity of maps. However, these two, diametrically-opposed faces seem only but prominent cast members of any lived-out life. They characterize the ups and downs of it all, the march on the well-beaten path or the sojourn far off the same. What appears most apparent, however, is that recent events have moved all of us to reconsider and rethink how we come to terms with these two companions and how, indeed, we spend our time.

The pandemic has really quite been a sort of global stick-in-the-mud, a ruthless and omniscient figure that has had its way with the zeitgeist of this generation. It has upended the social norm, played beautifully the role of the “iceberg” that has sunk both established economies and budding businesses, and sequestered many of us into our own personal groundhog holes. More than all of this, I suppose, the pandemic has placed an extreme, diamond-forming amount of pressure on our notions of spending, keeping, and cherishing time. The brightness of the

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mornings seems to melt and mush together with the lazy river of the afternoon. The luminescence of electronic screens has become so familiar, so ingrained, so nauseous and sickening. I think that the latter face of time, its “wasting away,” has been defining this past year, in spite of our disapproval. This viscous and amorphous time-fluid that has swept us up and flushed us down from 2020’s start to its end has seemingly reduced us to sedentary spectators of Mother Nature — humans, more than ever.

I am brought back to Art History at Westgate Elementary. An intriguing class with an even more intriguing account and array of artistic events that ran the gamut from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to Picasso’s misshapen shapes. It was, perhaps, Salvador Dalí’s surreal and ubiquitous masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory, which struck such a powerful chord with me as a child. As a student, a fervent adherent of due dates and deadlines, seeing those stopwatches flop and melt under the sun’s severe heat and amidst the cape-curtained coast captured in the picturesque background appeared a breaking of the rules. How could time, something so mighty and majestic, be reduced to the stature of something like a wet rag being dried out in the open air? Maybe, I thought to myself then as I think to myself now, such an abstraction of time points to the fluid relationship between time well spent and time wasted away. Perhaps, both must be cherished as children born of the same flesh and blood, patches of the same fabric. And maybe, just maybe, given the relative nature of time and its many heads and faces, we are called to realize that a universal constant remains in those around us, those that keep us warm in their company against the cold, unforgiving, and endless march of time.

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Yet, clearer than what this pandemic has led us to cherish is its pressing admonition and unabashed highlighting of what exactly we lack as a society. Whether it be broadcasted via popular media or played out realtime in the game of life, the bins of race, color, nationality, sex, and religion seem more prevalent and more separated than ever. Notwithstanding those divisions, however, we have also crossed paths with the barrier of distance and of the screen. What once were joyous gatherings with hugs and embraces are now events bound together by a singular hyperlink and the lens of a camera or, perhaps, demarcations measuring six feet and empty chairs marking the in-between. What is hoped, however, is that this time of distance, separation, and isolation, makes, as they say, the heart grow fonder. Let us give ourselves time to reassess the time we lend others and analyze to whom we give that time. Let us grow in appreciation of the time we are given and the individuals that accompany us through these “downs.” And, if we come to a ditch in the road as we have now and feel like mere cogs in the machine of time, let us say we might as well enjoy the ride while we’re at it.

When we round the turn and all is said and done, maybe, just maybe, there is a time and place for getting things done and meandering around aimlessly. It is, after all, the journey which gives luster to the destination. This is the inescapable duality of time and its nature. Sometimes incessantly important, sometimes an afterthought. The concept is so important, in fact, that I can do nothing but defer to the words of the character Chidi Anagonye on the show The Good Place:

“This is what we’ve been looking for since the day we met. Time. That’s what the Good Place really is — it’s not even a place, really. It’s just having enough time with the people you love.”