Vol. 3 Issue 9, "20/20"

Vol. 3 Issue 9 New York London Hong Kong Philippines

20/20

New Reader Magazine March 2020 | Vol. 3 Issue 9 COVER IMAGE

Tyler Spangler

CREATIVE STAFF Managing Editor

: Kyla Estoya

Associate Editor

: Aira Calina

Layout Artist : Iain Yu Feature Editors

: Sarah Eroy, Frank Go, Joi Villablanca

Editorial Assistant

: Rio Lim

Writers and Production Staff

: Neil Gabriel Nanta, Celina Paredes, Regie Vocales

Jazie Pilones, Patricia Luardo, Keith Ayuman

Jarryl Ibrahim, Rey A. Ilejay

Publicists : Kota Yamada, TJ Delima Researchers : Rosielyn Herrera, Marjon Gonato, John Paul Vailoces

CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Christine Tabaka, Winston Derden, Bill Arnott, D.R. James, Stephen Schwei, Nancy Bonazzoli, Zoey Collea, Harris Coverley, Michael Lee Johnson, John Grey, Dave Barrett, Alex Prong, Dona McCormack, Lauren Harkawik, Matt McHugh, Raymund Reyes, Dean Grondo, Avital Balwit, Jon Kemsley

MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Laurence Anthony laurence.anthony@newreadermagazine.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

subscription@newreadermagazine.com www.newreadermagazine.com Phone: 1 800 734 7871 Fax: (914) 265 1215 Write to us: 100 Church St. Suite 800 New York, NY 10007 ISSN 2688-8181

All Rights Reserved

Editor's N O T E

Fact: I’m the friend on page 29.

Two years ago, I was fired from this writing job I had in a local lifestyle magazine. It was a huge slap in the face and I remember holding back tears from my chief editor when she delivered the news.

That moment ruined my whole writing dream. It made me doubt my entire decision in life and think that I was not good at doing that one thing I believed I can do. I fell apart and my self-esteem went down to zero. I honestly wanted to isolate myself from the people— including my family and friends—who witnessed what I believed was a complete waste of time and effort.

So I did; I traveled to an island I haven’t been before and worked there as a receptionist. For six months, I stayed there, “looking for myself”. Apart from my horrible bosses and strange colleagues, the entire experience I had was fun. I met a lot of awesome people from different regions of the world. Up until now, we still keep in touch and I miss them. One of them was this beautiful French woman.

Every morning she would show up in our restaurant for breakfast and I’d always make sure that she gets her coffee right. Every now and then we’d exchange conversations. One day she mentioned that she was a musician, which I thought was pretty cool. I was starstruck.

She passionately talked about music and how she’d see things with wonder. Before she left, she gave me a copy of one of her albums.

She took out a pen and started doodling on the cover, explaining to me how everything and everyone is connected. Then she wrote the words: poetry is everywhere.

Fast forward to now, I’m back in the city. And since that tropical getaway, I have been obsessing over observing things. I’d write things down and find silly descriptive words for everything I see and—predominantly—how certain things make me feel; be it something pleasant, or something that’s not. I make sure I write down every emotion continually gushing over me and every gust of contemplation I would often have. And I enjoy reading these out

loud to people. I love how they would agree (or disagree) and say things like, “I thought of that, too!” or “I feel the exact same way about [this]!”

I read something the other day about how you know an animal has self-awareness when they begin to recognize themselves in the mirror. It was meant literally because it was a science book, but metaphorically, I’d like to think that the mirror in that context was another animal of the same kind. When we see the differences and similarities we have with other people, that’s when we’re truly aware of who we are. There might be times when you feel as if you’re inside a box and every time you make a “wrong decision”, it suffocates you or makes you feel like you’re being watched by so many eyes, pressuring you to do things perfectly, without any mistakes. I have this friend who occasionally has panic attacks and I asked him how he overcomes it. He laughed and answered, “I just tell myself that I’m having a panic attack.”

Recognizing yourself is difficult, dear reader, but when you get a glimpse of who you truly are, it’s cathartic.

We wish that the curation of literary works and art pieces we have in this issue will make you see beyond what your eyes can perceive. In the past months—I’d like to say that January was the longest and worst Monday of my life—from U.S and Iran being on the brink of war, to this pandemic that we are yet to conquer everyone was in a universal rollercoaster ride. I say this because it’s true and it has been like this since the dawn of time; what’s happening to you is happening to someone else. We are all connected.

We are all unique in our own ways but somehow we’re all the same.

And I hope you see a little piece of you between the pages of this issue.

Cheers!

K

Contents Feature

New Reader Media

Featured Bookstores

12 Contributor's Corner (Poetry): Bill Arnott

08 Hand Selling and Championing Authors:

06 Shades of Pemberley Bookstore

FRANK GO

14 Contributor's Corner (Fiction): Lauren Harkawik JOI VILLABLANCA

18 artPOP KYLA ESTOYA

28 miss match:

Curiosity, Contrast, and Connection with the 'Other'

Indie Bookstores and the Blind Spots of Amazon

REGIE VOCALES

10 Malaika Horne SARAH ANNE

124 To-Read List NRM takes on the challenge of bookmarking emerging voices in the indie publishing world, presented in random order.

Title Wave Books Chapter2Books

Writer’s Corner 132 Events, Conferences, Etc.

AIRA CALINA

Fiction/Flash/Prose

Poetry

39 Beneath This Noise, Another

34 The Past Falls Away

DAVE BARRETT

48 Wet Socks ALEX PRONG

57 Exposed DONA MCCORMACK

65 Joey Button LAUREN HARKAWIK

75 Uptalk and Vocal Fry MATT MCHUGH

84 The Birthday Boy RAYMUND P. REYES

95 The Jogging Enthusiast DEAN GRONDO

104 Sasha AVITAL BALWIT

115 Gyppos JON KEMSLEY

81 I. RAN.

Reality Sets in

Sometime

ANN CHRISTINE TABAKA

ZOEY COLLEA

42 The Perfect Bouquet

88 Prudence

Breaking Girl

Shadow Puppets

Take a Little Time Without Worry

To Write the Sky

WINSTON DERDEN

52 The Itsy-Bitsy Dream Catcher Wander Gee Billy BILL ARNOTT

59 Sliver of Time Moon Lovers Blank STEPHEN SCHWEI

69 Butterfly Solipsism Since Everything Is All I’ve Got Atop Mt. Harvard, May 1976, with a line from Major Jackson D.R JAMES

NANCY DIAMANTE BONAZZOLI

98 Nothing Falls New A Hollow Mouth After the Jungle HARRIS COVERLEY

109 THE UP AND THE DOWN COUP DEAR AMERICAN GOTHIC JOHN GREY

118 Tequila Open Eyes Laid Back Dance of Tears, Chief Nobody MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON

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Featured Bookstores

Shades of Pemberley Bookstore 126 S Broad St, Albertville, AL United States Website: https://shades-of-pemberleybookstore.business.site/

Shades of Pemberley is a new and used bookstore that was 5 years in the making before finally opening.

The owner, Brandi Atchison, was working on it and desperately wanted to press forward with it, but God kept saying "not yet". Then one day in late October 2017, he received a phone call from a lady who owned a building in a city called

Title Wave Books 2318 Wisconsin St NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico Website: https://www.titlewavebooks.com/ Title Wave Books is a quirky and cozy bookstore located in New Mexico. It is a bit off the beaten path, but worth the finding. This bookstore has had four owners since its opening in 1994, starting as a homeschool curriculum store and then blossoming into a full-fledged bookstore carrying all genres. They still specialize in educational materials, though.

Current owners, Liberty Goldstein and Leslie Gulley, bought the store in 2015, when it was in danger of closing its doors for good. Being homeschool moms themselves, they felt the need to have something to put their hands to as their own children were graduating and moving on. They couldn’t stomach the idea of this amazing resource for homeschool families disappearing. They wanted to keep the legacy alive, so they bought it. Title Wave Books has since become what many call the “Cheers of bookstores” because when you walk in the door, they know your name... or soon will.

Aside from dealing in books, the store also adopts out cats through Cats Around Town, a program of the Animal Humane of New

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Mexico. So far, they have seen 27 cats placed in homes since they got involved with the program in July of 2019. They see it as a rewarding alternative to having a bookstore cat.

Liberty and Leslie strongly believe in supporting their community and shopping local to bolster the local economy. They do consignment with many local authors and makers. They also carry tea from Vampyre Tea Company, a local tea-maker who currently has 20

New Reader Media

Jasper—which was about 80 miles away.

A man she had rented the building to had opened a used bookstore then left it. She was trying to find someone to take the books.

Brandi immediately jumped on the offer.

Shades of Pemberley opened its doors for business on Dec 19, 2017. When God says it's time, he will provide the way. Since opening, they have more than doubled the inventory of new and used books. The bookstore features a local authors' wall that they proudly display Alabama authors' books on, which has grown tremendously since opening. The response from the community has been nothing short of wonderful. Shades of Pemberley is looking forward to a long and prosperous future in their hometown.

Chapter2Books 226 Locust St, Hudson, WI United States Website: https://chapter2books.indielite.org/

Brian and Sue Roegge opened the store in 2011 in downtown Hudson,WI. Brian had been running a St. Paul credit union for the last 25+ years.

Sue was a teacher. Both were and are avid readers. When Brian's credit union merged with a larger institution, he was looking for a new career.

There was nothing either one of them wanted to do more than open a bookstore. They found it so exciting choosing their opening inventory and designing the store. Everything went smoothly except for some technical glitches here and there. “We're a general interest store selling new and used books, gifts, toys, and games,” Brian mentions. "We offer frequent book signings, events, and children's programming like story time.”

Chapter2Books is located in the beautiful downtown shopping and restaurant district of Hudson, WI. They are a year-round dynamic community located on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The area attracts day-trippers from all over the area, and is a vacation destination for families due to being on the St. Croix River.

Their current inventory includes over 5,000 new titles. They host events all year, for adults and children. They have a vibrant monthly poetry group and a book club that's been meeting for 7 years. They also engage the whole community in a month-long summer activity for children.

They have hosted some notable authors over the years but also take pride in the support they've always offered to local and self-published writers. Some of the notable authors include: Fredrik Backman, William Kent Krueger, Kyle Mills, Kate DiCamillo, Jason Reynolds, W Bruce Cameron, Austin Kleon, Lorna Landvik, Homer Hickam, and Temple Grandin.

unique and flavorful blends. There is often a fresh pot of tea available for customers to sample. And there is always coffee available, as everyone who works at Title Wave is a coffee lover.

Visit for a cup and a good book, leave with a new favorite place to be.

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Featured Bookstores

HAND SELLING AND CHAMPIONING AUTHORS: Indie Bookstores and the Blind Spots of Amazon REGIE VOCALES

Ying Feng Johansson

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New Reader Media

I

n today's generation, it is almost by default that people would consult to Amazon for the next best read.

It has centered itself as the largest and number one provider for our literary thirsts. However, before its ascension into normality, the biggest contributing factor to people’s literacy was human interaction. Even in this digital age, it still stands as such. Being social animals by nature, communicating is where we find support, comfort, and—most especially—entertainment.

After considering different small business possibilities, Sue Roegge, a former teacher, and her husband, Brian, settled in opening their own bookstore in Hudson in 2011, Chapter2Books. One of the main reasons why they chose to open a bookstore is that the trend of indie stores was, and still is, rising and thriving. In fact, the reason why stores like these exist and continue to flourish is because they offer all the same e-commerce options Amazon is providing (pre-orders, online shopping, etc.).

They contribute to the local community in certain aspects such as paying taxes, supporting local fundraising efforts, and becoming members of the town’s chamber.

Sue emphasized that by running a bookstore in the community they could work with schools, libraries, and even other local businesses. "Bricks and mortar store owners pay taxes,” she added.

In an interpersonal scale, indie bookstores have an edge in the industry: the personal connection they cultivate.

“We bring authors to town for events, we give discounts and freebies, and we take author events to schools and partner with libraries,” she enumerated. She pointed out that her personal favorite reason is helping reluctant readers find a book. “Other than the milestones of Brian and I raising our two kids, I grow more in love with him every time he connects with a grumpy pre-teen in the store.” Brian loves being in the store every day, interacting and inspiring kids and adults to try some book he personally recommends. He loves getting feedback from them. He has long conversations about books and reading with everyone who comes in their store.

Indie bookstores have an edge in the industry: the personal connection they cultivate.

“People are continuing to open stores.

The trend is on the rise. I think people who open stores have had a lifelong love of reading and it’s a dream to own a bookstore.” And like any other ventures, running the bookstore certainly has and will always have challenges. One obvious element is nature itself. “I don’t have answers for some of them. For example, winter slump.” These of course cannot be avoided. “And yes, Amazon is our biggest challenge. The automatic linking to Amazon drives me crazy. Not enough people know indie stores are perfectly capable of selling online, pre-ordering, etc.,” Sue deplored.

Perhaps in order to cope with this is by raising awareness to teachers that bookstores have a lot to offer.

In the case of e-commerce, authors are opting for electronic copies of their pieces and people are purchasing online. Sue tells

NRM that authors come to their store hoping to be hosted an event for, and/or to sell their book. “We encourage [authors] to find alternate publishing platforms other than Amazon, like Ingram IPS, etc. I am 100% in on local bookstores. My true belief: cheap is not cheap. There is value in valuing what your local store offers you. This may be anecdotal but I know there are plenty of people who have never or are now turning away from their excessive Amazon purchasing.”

Bookstores like Chapter2Books are also general interest stores selling new and used books, gifts, toys, and games. Poetry groups and book clubs often meet inside these nests. And who doesn’t love book signings and story time? Want to open a bookstore?

Definitely do it! Sue added that storeowners should also be ready to sell sidelines along their books, which also cannot be avoided.

“Steps to press on: continue outreach and partnering locally, use social media to get word out that people can order online from us, do what small businesses do best while increasing online presence, and network with other indies.”

Indie bookstores are not just thriving, they are way ahead because of their appeal for personal connection. They are able to fill in spots where online stores lack, and much more. After all, indie bookstores can do what they cannot: hand selling and championing authors.

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Featured Author

M a l a i k a

HORNE INTVW BY SARAH ANNE

NRM: When did you fall in love with writing? Did you always want to be a writer? Which writers influenced your style in writing?

Malaika Horne: I fell in love with writing after falling in love with reading. Mother Wit is mainly about my mother’s love of reading & how she foisted it on us. We lived at the library and were surrounded by books at home. After attempting to write prose, I found out how difficult it was. Reading others, who were much more proficient, influenced me to write better.

NRM: What was your creative process in writing Mother Wit? How long did it take you to write it?

MH: The creative process was trying to tap into my memory bank and trying to remember the stories my mother told us about how to really make it in American society. Flora Dell Horne was a raconteur or story teller. Without these stories I probably wouldn’t have been able to write a book. It’s mainly a book about Flora’s stories. It took me ten years to write. First, I would put it down for months at a time and pick it back up—I was so determined to write about her exceptional parenting skills.

Second, it was rather emotional for me as I realized even more how hard she worked to secure our future.

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NRM: In writing your books, are your themes or style consistent?

MH: I’ve only written this book. Journalism is more my avocation where I was able to sharpen my skills and hone my craft.

My themes in journalism as in the book concern women’s rights, civil rights, and the empowerment of people.

NRM: What do you think is the role of a writer in society?

MH: I can’t say a specific role. I can tell you that most writers want to influence; to get the word out about an important point, knowledge, skills, etc. It's more about readers reading the book than readers buying the book.

NRM: Are you working on something else right now?

MH: No, I’m still pushing this one. But I do intend to write other books.

NRM: What is your message to all aspiring writers out there?

MH: Read as much as you can. Read all types of materials, such as literature, newspapers, even technical writing. Tap into your style and your passion to keep you going. You must be a self-starter and have the commitment to finish whatever you started out to do.

Contributor's Corner

Bill Arnott FRANK GO

NRM: Tell us about yourself.

I see simultaneous beauty and lunacy in most things.

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Bill Arnott: Like most writers, I started writing when I was young—poetry, lyrics, and fiction, all of it awful. As I grew up (somewhat) and went to university, writing became a means to an end—essays, reports, and case studies. But a writerly lifeline persisted by penning brief, inspirational messages, reminders of the strength and capabilities we all possess. A buddy spotted my scribbles, scattered over a bulletin board on post-its and index cards. “That’s a book,” he said. Which I hadn’t considered.

So I bundled my little empowerment into an offset print paperback, called it Wonderful Magical Words, and selfpublished it. To my delight, it was a Canadian bestseller. Sales raised money for

Make-A-Wish Foundation, granting wishes to children with life-threatening illnesses.

Everything about the project felt good.

Except the writing. Ten years after the book I began to find my voice—that lovely process of aging and no longer giving a shit that tends to result in authenticity.

NRM: What’s one thing unique about you?

BA: Each of us can say everything we’ve done has led to here, making all of us unique, and for that reason, very much the same. Which I like. Being collectively individual. To answer the question directly, however, I’d say I see simultaneous beauty and lunacy in most things.

Poetry

NRM: What and who inspires you to be an artist?

BA: It simmers in all of us, boiling over in some more than others. I’ve had fun spending an increasing amount of time in that space, allowing creativity more off-leash time. I find I’m inspired by a growing number of individuals. I posted on Facebook heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s fueled my creativity—from prose to poetry, spoken-word and song, written and performed—individuals who’ve inspired, coached, mentored, and kept me on track during this journey. The list of amazing people was enormous. But if I was forced to choose three individuals who’ve inspired me to achieve more than I otherwise ever would have, it would be librettist Bob Devereux, songwriter-producer Michael Averill, and poet Evelyn Lau.

NRM: What was your dream career before you became a writer and a musician?

BA: In all honesty, this was it; being a full time author and musician. I don’t have the solid gold house or amphibious rocket car I once imagined, but dreams can in fact come true.

NRM: What is a G chord to you?

BA: I’m glad you specified chord, not string.

Musicians refer to home—the root key or chord of a song. You can imagine countless home analogies and metaphors—returns and departures. For me, a G is possibility, a blank canvas waiting for you to slap it with colour, your own stylized hue, which is an empowering, burdensome blessing.

NRM: What’s the purpose of your Viking travels?

Zealand, and buddies gave us a pair of rubber duckies for the trip. As an homage to the gift-givers, I started taking pics featuring the ducks in various locales, as though they were the travellers. It became a playful Instagram share—pure fun, no promo.

Their monikers—Blue Hugh and Yellow Lou, #TheTravelDucks, seemed obvious.

I never did learn where the colorless third duck named Dew wound up, and hope he doesn’t feel left out. You can find them @billarnott_aps.

BA: I was looking for inspiration for a follow-up to my travel memoir Dromomania, and had my Eureka moment when I first learned the word viking originally meant voyaging (more or less). One would go a-viking, traveling the world to effectively “write their saga.” I’d already visited a swath of Scandinavia, so with a few more years of research and targeted travel, I was able to experience, first hand, most of the northern hemisphere in the footsteps of some of history’s greatest adventurer-explorers.

NRM: Can you tell us more about your travelling ducks?

BA: My wife (Deb) and I left work for a four-month-stint of travel around New

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Contributor's Corner

Lauren H A R K A W I K JOI VILLABLANCA

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Fiction

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Contributor's Corner

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lauren Harkawik: Sure! I grew up in the suburbs of Albany, NY. I studied dramatic writing at Purchase College in Westchester, where I was immersed in a community of artists and imagination-lovers like me.

Purchase is where I met some of my best friends and my husband, Garret Harkawik, who’s a documentary filmmaker. Garret and I lived in LA and then New York City before deciding, kind of on a whim, to give rural Vermont a try. I don’t like to say we were escaping, per se, because we loved New York and it offered us a lot by way of personal growth and culture. It was more like we were pulled toward Vermont (what’s that saying? “The mountains are calling and she must go?”). We were seeking creative air. I started working as a freelance writer, Garret as a freelance filmmaker. We were

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making our own schedules and had all the time in the world. Now we have a four-yearold, and our time is less bottomless. I also started working as a freelance reporter for my local newspaper, which has opened up a lot of new worlds for me in terms of getting to know my town and the people in it and using my communication skills in new ways.

Where did Joey Button originate? What was your creative process when you were writing this?

LH: I was doing some freewriting one day and the image of a little boy running into a monster in the woods, and then telling his parents about it, came into my mind. I started a draft then—this was about three years ago—and I had thoughts that it should be a long adventure tale, with Joey Button going into the woods with his pals to find

the Big Thing. But I was never quite sure where it should go, and I kept putting off working on it.

But the monster kept popping back into my imagination. Fast forward, and I found myself another couple of years into adulthood. I was deep into some really intensive thinking about my identity as an artist. When I was in college, I was constantly engaged in the creative energy of my own muse. As an adult, it’s hard to hold onto that. Art versus “real life” is a tension I’ve struggled with myself, and I’ve also seen my friends and husband struggle with it in their own ways. It’s like we’re all trying to get a glimpse of our own elusive Big Things.

As someone who works for a living and is raising a little kid, I’m constantly chasing moments of artistic fulfillment. It examining that, versus my art life as a student, the

Fiction

lead to the idea of Joey Button/Joseph Williams losing sight of (and then eventually rediscovering) his Big Thing. And that coalesced into what the story is today.

When I sat down to write “Joey Button” in its current form, the scene of postretirement Joseph rediscovering the Big Thing and then breaking out in laughter really anchored me. It was inspired by the laugh of a close friend of mine, the stopmotion animator Evan Curtis. When he finds something funny, he bursts into this incredible laughter that just breaks through whatever clouds are hanging over your head and forces you to laugh with him. It’s like he’s overcome with joy and then you are too. It’s different but equally powerful to the feeling I get when I’m really onto something creatively—all I can focus on is the creative momentum, and I’m dancing in my seat from the joy of it. Joseph Williams seeing the Big Thing again is his version of that feeling. Evan’s laugh was playing in my mind as I wrote that last scene.

There’s a used bookstore I love to write in—it's in a big old gristmill on a cliff that overlooks a waterfall. It has desks throughout it and a great little cafe. It’s like a writer’s dream—there's books and nature and natural light and this amazing energy stored in the dust of every corner of the place. Once I’d figured out how I was going to tell this story, I went there one morning with the intention of writing Joey Button.

The air was just right and it poured out of me in one sitting. And when I got to the laugh, I felt this great catharsis. This piece had been on my mind for years, all while I was struggling to stay in touch with my own muse as adulthood was invading my space.

When Joey Button saw the Big Thing again, I kind of felt like I had, too.

If you had a five-word message to Joey Button, what would it be?

LH: Keep looking, you’ll find it.

Who were your early influences?

LH: Roald Dahl is who inspired me to become a lifelong reader and a writer. In second grade, my teacher read us “The BFG” and “The Witches." “The BFG” was

the most creative thing I’d ever heard. The way Dahl plays with language in that book is just unparalleled. And then there’s a line in “The Witches” that floored me. I still think about the experience of hearing it for the first time. The narrator is describing who might be a witch, and says: “She might even be your lovely schoolteacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of cleverness.”

Reading it, my teacher smirked perfectly.

It was like a deadpan smirk. My class gasped, and I remember actually getting goosebumps and then tears in my eyes as I realized what a reaction she—coupled with Dahl’s writing—had elicited from me and my classmates.

Dahl deals with magic a lot, but what really tickles me about his writing is the way he conjures new ways to look at every day things—like my teacher, for example. Sure, she wasn’t a witch (I think), but she still showed us a new side of herself that day, and I always saw her differently after that. Even amid the magic, Dahl’s writing is grounded in reality in a way that is so tied to the dayto-day human experience, and as soon as I was introduced to it, it made me see things in a different way. That’s something that I’m always chasing when I’m reading—what is this piece of writing going to make me see in a way that I didn't see it before? And it’s something I’m always trying to create in my writing, too.

Does being a reporter play a big part in your writing style?

LH: This is such a great question! I hadn’t thought about this, but yes, it 100% does. Reporting has taught me to witness things—a town board meeting, a day at a dairy farm, a hearing—break the experience down to its details, and turn them into a story. I’m always asking myself: who said what, what did it mean, and how does all of that relate to the bigger picture? I think taking that narrative approach to “normal people"—aka the people in my community—has gotten into the fiber of

my writing in subtle ways. I find myself tapping into details that feel like they’re asides but are amusing and poignant to me. For example, when Joey Button sits idly when he first sees the Big Thing, and a series of people walk by. They don’t ultimately come back or play big roles in the story, but they create the tapestry of his reality of that memory. I find the same thing when I’m reporting. Sometimes the story is one big headline, but a lot of times, the story is a tapestry of details that capture the mood of an event, or the thinking of a particular group of people in a particular moment in time.

What is one memory from your childhood you’ve always wanted to share to the world?

LH: For me it’s not so much a memory of a singular event as it is a series of sounds, sights, and feelings. And it’s things that might seem mundane. Like, after school, my brother and I used to lay on the floor in our living room and watch "Batman: The Animated Series” while our mom cooked dinner. For all intents and purposes it was ho-hum. But the feelings that are wrapped around that memory are huge. They’re what life is made of. I’ve never felt so content or comfortable; it was this bottomless feeling of safety. And of course, I totally took it for granted. There’s a lot we don’t realize we’re experiencing as children: that comfort, but also wonder; fear; fearlessness; invincibility; curiosity. They’re these deep, huge feelings that we don’t even realize we’re having, and that I really celebrate now that I have the perspective to see how special (and fleeting) they were.

Would the eight-year-old Lauren be happy to meet the today-year-old Lauren?

LH: I hope she would! I hope she’d be heartened to see that I’m still up for laughter and fun, and I hope she’d be heartened to know that everything turned out great.

I have a family I love, a great little dog, a house on a hill, and time for writing. I can’t really ask for more, and I’d like to think she wouldn’t, either.

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Features

BY KYLA ESTOYA

Your friend invites you to attend an art show.

You, a writer, who likes to be classified separately from artists, agree because like literature, art resonates a sense of storytelling that you love—it just does it differently. You’ve been to a lot of art exhibits in the past but you still haven’t learned the art of dressing up. A few hours before the exhibit, your anxiety grows especially after finding out the event is going to be a big one. So this thought prolongs the decision-making.

After mixing and matching a few outfits, you finally decide what to wear. You take one good look at yourself in the mirror, and then you leave. You show up to the venue with your phone mindlessly (and awkwardly) clutched near your chest because beneath your calm face, you’re frantically looking for your friend. He didn’t reply to your last message which is why for the third time, you tell yourself to relax.

It’s a good thing that most of your friends are artists; they somehow convinced you that being surrounded by art brings comfort. There were numerous instances when you’d fall in love with an art piece and you would playfully describe it. This became a fun game you’d play with yourself. You start walking around the gallery, making sure to get a glimpse of each art piece, and you let your own thoughts amuse you. A few moments later, you find your friend’s artworks but no sign of him being there. You look around and you can’t find a familiar face. You check your phone again and still, no reply. Just when you decide to make your friend’s artworks your last stop, you see colors popping from the corner of your eye. You turn to your left and you feel one of the rarest feelings you’ve had with art—entertained. And no offense to your friend’s works—you think—but this piece literally speaks to you because it explicitly says CHILL OUT MAN. Curious, you draw closer to the work.

There, you dive into the world of Tyler Spangler.

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Arts and Culture | USA

Features

There is merit to being extremely straightforward in your art, I believe.

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Arts and Culture | USA

T

yler Spangler—who describes himself as an obsessively curious, colorful, and passionate person—earned a degree in psychology, only to realize that all his life he was (and still is) madly in love with art. His work has evolved from being primarily collages to exploring typography, image, and pattern. I didn’t meet him through any art exhibit but I like to think that that’s how I found him. I discovered one of his works on the web a year ago and since then, my obsession has grown. The concept of his creations reminded me of those of the famous and the late John Baldisseri’s.

“I’ve had middle school and high school teachers organize projects based on my work,” he says. He also mentions that during those times, teachers would have their students make pop art pieces or artworks resembling his own, “which I think is awesome.” He spent a lot of time exploring certain elements in creating collages to the point that he became addicted in producing artworks. He even made a 440-page book featuring his own artworks that were products of his own life experience, more particularly through the product of his music taste and living near the beach. Most of his early works revolved around abstract art mainly because he loved the ambiguity of it. “It leaves more open to interpretation and also exhibits a unique view of the artist,” he adds. “There is merit to being extremely straightforward in your art, I believe”.

Eventually, he earned money through freelancing and tried getting as much clients as he could. His creative process involves a lot of improvising; and while he likes planning and making sure to be organized, he admits that sitting down and experimenting with all sorts of designs does the trick. “I used to want to keep adding to a design, but in recent years I have begun to enjoy taking away. While I still love dense patterns and bold colors, I like to balance it out with less elements in a design.” A few years later, Tyler took a big step in his career by getting bigger clients like NIKE, SAMSUNG, HERMES, and COACH—among others. He enjoyed the fact that most of his bigger clients had given him a lot of creative freedom, one of which even offering to pay him 50% more than he quoted—which gave him more confidence in his work and helped him know his worth as an artist.

But apart from Tyler’s commissioned works, his vast collection of personal artworks is the reason why, to me, he’s conspicuous.

For years, he developed a habit of documenting his thoughts and feelings and making them beneficial to his craft. “I realized that it might be useful and possibly entertaining for other people,” he says.

He would take notes about his own experiences and contemplations; sending messages for people, like most of us, who find themselves doubting most of the time. He takes these notes and transforms them into multicolored, fun, and chaotic visuals. “It’s pretty cool that my schooling came in full circles to my original career plan. I feel very grateful to be able to integrate the two disciplines together.” During his high school days, there weren't much people talking about anxiety and other mental health issues. “I never really understood much about it even while I was studying psychology in 2008. It wasn't until I had my first series of panic attacks in 2014 that I began to understand what anxiety felt like.”

Other than supporting himself financially with his art, Tyler also wants to create awareness by brightening the world physically and intellectually through his works. His craft doesn’t just encourage people to pursue an artistic adventure, it addresses an important message. The greatest artists aren’t necessarily great because they said something no one has ever said before. Nor do they have any access to some sort of “divine knowledge”. Artists like Tyler are hailed great because they are capable of expressing themselves freely at any given moment despite what other people might think. And with that, he’s not only sharing what’s inside his mind—he’s also speaking on behalf of the thoughts and emotions shared by many of us.

When we look at his works, a small part of our anxiety fades away.

It’s evident that in the generation we live in, ruled by the internet and social media, things that interest and intrigue us are easily shared.

Even though our attention span is short, messages that hit us with a certain truth leave us with something to ponder with, or simply remind us that we’re not alone when it comes to thinking these certain kinds of thoughts.

You hear your friend calling you from the other side of the room. You look back at Tyler and thank him for showing you around his world. You bid him goodbye and walk towards where your friends are. And you don’t need to announce it, but you know that Tyler’s works were the highlight of your day.

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My schooling came in full circles to my original career plan.

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Arts and Culture | USA

Website: tylerspangler.com Shop: www.shoptylerspangler.com

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match

Curiosity, Contrast, and Connection with the 'Other' AIRA CALINA

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Arts and Culture | France

I

was greeted by a list of French words. Apart from painting titles and flower names, I do not know a lot of French. I clicked on the very first song on this artist’s popular list, which, incidentally, was the only phrase I understood. It was Au revoir. Pretty ironic for a gateway song, but without any expectations whatsoever, I hit play.

Next thing I knew I was eight uninterrupted songs deep, and endowed with an understanding no method of translation could ever grant me.

The songs were—at least to me—different, but oddly familiar. I would describe some of the instrumental elements to be very light to the ear, like bright xylophone sounds and smooth and trilly guitar tones—almost comparable to background tracks played at massage and spa places. Those would’ve made for proper stops for the songs, had it not been for what made up their other halves. The ear-easy sounds were paired with heavy but calming beats and vocals methodically harmonized to produce eerily inviting chants. I must say I normally would only hear this kind of vocal expression in ultra-experimental tracks or songs with a very select few audiences, except that it’s really not. I doubt it would take a refined listener to get the vibes the songs are going for, although any music buff would surely see their charm.

It’s like in each of the two parts of the tracks—the instrumentals and the vocals—are subparts comprised of presumably contrasting but surprisingly congruous details. For some reason, that pairing I would’ve called a mismatch under different circumstances tugged something in me and pulled me deep into that beautiful intricacy.

I found myself helplessly stuck in that wonderful labyrinth of a spiderweb.

“Listen to her,” a friend said on chat along with a link to a Spotify profile.

Without so much as a thoughtless scanning of the words, I clicked on it.

When I am afraid of not having the means or the courage to continue when it is necessary to plan for new adventures, it makes me angry to be so anxious. But as you can read me, . . . I have overcome my fear again.”

In the same way only a spider can produce such flawless meandering, that music I was neck-deep in could only be produced by one artist. Her name is Ottilie [B].

Growing up in the south of France doing year-ender shows with her family, Ottilie is no stranger to the performing arts. She started writing poetry and songs at a very young age, and even had a hobby of recording sequences on her old cassette set, taking after those she’d hear on the radio. That was her norm, so it wasn’t much of a deal then, when it came to deciding what she wanted to be. One day, in music class, she sang Marie Miriam’s L’oiseau et l’enfant, and an

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Despite what I have experienced as failures or frustrations, there have also been such beautiful surprises! I find myself lucky, and I thank life, the beautiful encounters on my way!” awakening started within her. “By singing that song, I had my first chills and it seemed obvious,” Ottilie muses. Right then, she had realized this was going to be her job.

In the years that followed that very moment, Ottilie has gone on to explore her own style and approach, and as she matured and grew in years, so has her list of influences. Like her music, the names she mentioned as having been her inspirations were diverse and widereaching. The dynamic list includes poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert and classical composer Mozart (particularly Queen of the Night). Also thrown into the mix are the soul and hip-hop sounds of Nina Simone and The Fugees, respectively; the rock tones of Elvis Presley, Serge Gainsbourg, and Nina Hagen; and psychedelic rock and new wave artists, Janis Joplin, Rita Mitsouko, and The Doors.

All those artists and many others, albeit varied, proved to be exactly what she needed to model from. The same way she was inspired, she hopes to be able to instigate in her listeners that thirst to be creative and self-expressive. In fact, she often gives workshops that she also finds absolutely essential to her.

So far, we’ve hashed over two facets of this one-woman band’s character, but that’s not even half of what makes her so exceptional.

Ottilie loves to travel. In fact, she and that friend who introduced me to her music (let’s give her a name: K) met when they both were travelling. Now, that’s living the dream right there, but while a lot of us would travel to take a break, Ottilie does so because she loves the vulnerability it brings about, which directly influences her creative process. “Every journey is, for me, a very concrete way to approach a spiritual state of availability and creativity; to put myself at risk,” she says.

These factors are apparent in Ottilie’s creations. She says she likes making unlikely combinations of sounds or textual materials not necessarily made to meet each other, and describes her music as being made up of singing and world voices, new technology, poetry, quotes, recordings from her meetings and travels, and, my personal favorites, desire for dialogue and strangeness.

Ottilie’s music is definitely different, although that’s something she’s very humble about. In fact, when asked to talk about its eccentric nature, she goes, “You think?” She says she still feels “locked in” at times, but I personally think that owes to her very welcoming nature in that she’s open to any and all ideas if it makes her craft any better.

To say I managed to keep a straight face getting that for a response would be an outright lie. That unintended obliviousness to one’s own talent always gets to me. It shows their raw honesty and where their heart is in creating that they need not set much time prettying up their image. In fact, the artist-public relationship that most—if not all— artists wish to achieve and immediately go for didn’t initially sit right with Ottilie. “Ideally, I would like the public to have a space where they can find themselves in what I give them to perceive.” Of course

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that eventually came to her naturally as time went by, but that fact just further shows why she’s doing what she’s doing: she truly enjoys it.

Apart from her divergent influences being stamped onto her works, so much of herself also makes up her craft. “My flaws, my doubts [are reflected on my music], but also my curiosity and the fact that I seek contact, the connection with the ‘other’, and my greed too.”

Like any of us, Ottilie has gone through some of life’s worst. The news of her child’s genetic disease made her rethink pursuing her career. From the moment she gave birth, she went on a 3-year break and took the time to care for her daughter. But as in any hero story, she has since come back even bolder than she was to begin with.

The age-old maxim “the show must go on” has never rung truer for Ottilie. “When I am afraid of not having the means or the courage to continue when it is necessary to plan for new adventures, it makes me angry to be so anxious. But as you can read me, . . . I have overcome my fear again.”

Ottilie has since matured even more—both as an artist, and as a person. “I have more and more pleasure to be on stage, I also look for how not to compare my work with those of other artists’, or to wait for a return that would make me more legitimate.” At this point in her life and career, there’s things she wants to do but can’t exactly decide what to go for first: create, sing, or invest in projects.

What’s sure, though, is an exciting brand new album that’s already in the works. “<3” (yes, that’s what it’s called), set to come out within the year, features “new transformations” and a collaboration with cellist Olivier Koundouno, along with a super involved technical and artistic team. “I seek to include more audiences, [like through] FM broadcasting, the participation of those who wish to participate, and music-light interactions. Talk about what connects us to life . . . question our means of communication, [and discuss] our need to be connected and the languages that flow from it.” She will be launching an online subscription for the album, which fans—both old and new ones—can watch out for on her website, ottilieb.com.

As grounded as she is, Ottilie admits to having seen all these great things happening to her. “Despite what I have experienced as failures or frustrations, there have also been such beautiful surprises! I find myself lucky, and I thank life, the beautiful encounters on my way!”

This woman thrives in the diversity of things, and makes something that surpasses mere sense-making through her great talent and undeniable authenticity. She’s a creative artists of all disciplines can definitely take a life lesson or two from. I am grateful to have been introduced to such an immense showing of humility and greatness, and the perfect balance that seems to be her main ingredient in almost everything.

Ultimately, I think Ottilie [B] is and was all of us at some point in our lives. Whichever way we play with the contrasts we’re dealt with will be up to us, and that, dear reader friends, is the beauty of it.

Arts and Culture | France

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The Past Falls Away ANN CHRISTINE TABAKA

I seek alliance with myself.

I hold a hand out to the past.

Ghosts scorn the gesture, digging heels deeper into granite tears.

Vacuous faces with downturned eyes march along a gate of deceit.

No truth escapes raspy voices of lost souls, on their way to gray clouded perpetuity.

I have a vision, I want to be free.

Standing against the singing wind, palms outstretched.

The past falls away, I shed my scales.

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Poetry

Comaniciu Dan Dumitru

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Reality Sets in ANN CHRISTINE TABAKA

On the outer edge of reality, I planted my dreams.

What seed should I sow, to resurrect the image of what I want to be?

Salt air and harsh winds have corroded me.

My hands no longer weave the silken thread.

I fought to the end, but lost the beginning, when you were by my side.

Soft words and hard kisses, vanished with the arid soil of despair.

Logic refuses to move forward.

So, off I walk, poppy seeds in hand, colorful dreams tripping off my palm.

I see the edge become clear.

Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry. She is the author of nine poetry books and has recently been published in several micro-fiction anthologies and short story publications. Her most recent credits are: Burningword Literary Journal; Muddy River Poetry Review; The Write Connection; Ethos Literary Journal and North of Oxford. She lives with her husband and three cats in Delaware, USA. She loves gardening and cooking.

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Poetry

Comaniciu Dan Dumitru

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Fiction

Beneath This Noise, Another DAVE BARRETT

S

aturdays, April through September, Priscilla Mep sold honey out of a booth at Pike Place Market in Seattle. MEP APIARIES HONEY: from the Bees of Thomas and Priscilla Mep, P.O. Box 533, Cedar River, WA, 98017. Blackberry. Huckleberry.

Fireweed and Wildflower Honey. The 1, 3 and 5 lb. jars were stacked in a neat pyramid atop an old card table: with fresh cut ferns and daisies on either side: and several dozen backup jars in an old wooden LOGGER’S DYNAMITE crate at Priscilla’s feet.

The Meps were retired: Priscilla after 25 years as an elementary school teacher for the Cedar River School District, Thomas after 35 years with the U.S. Forest Service. They had one child: a 42year old son, a Professor of Entomology at the University of Iowa, recently divorced. No grandchildren.The Meps had raised bees on their five acres of land since the early days of their marriage, but it wasn’t until retirement that Thomas’s hobby morphed into a fullfledged cottage industry.

It was noon, the first week of May, and business was brisk.

Priscilla’s booth was at the north end of the market, midway between the two fish markets, with big warehouse windows opening on Elliott Bay a quarter mile below and plenty of foot traffic. Thomas was due to relieve Priscilla at the booth at 12:30, but already Priscilla knew he would be late. Today was the opening of Chinook salmon season.

Thomas and a few of his V.F.W. buddies were meeting at a nearby Elliott Bay pier to “throw out a plug or two.” But Priscilla didn’t mind, really. The truth was Thomas was a shy man: painfully so at times. And in their business, as in life, the people side of things had fallen largely upon her.

Priscilla was glad she’d worn her Pendleton wool jacket today. In spite of the clear Seattle sky, and 70-degree heat, a steady stream of frigid air had been blowing down the rows of market stalls all morning. It chilled her long elegant hands, and caused her to bury them deep into her pockets when she wasn’t shuffling jars or exacting change from an old tackle-box she’d converted into a makeshift cash register. And she’d just hoisted the tray of the tackle box to make change for a twenty-dollar bill when she caught a glimpse of them.

Her new Cedar River neighbors.

The young couple from Montana with the adorable three-year-old daughter. They lived across the highway from the Meps—at the end of a long old gravel road—in a tiny two-bedroom rental house fifty

Liubomir Paut-Fluerasu

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yards from the river. They’d moved to Cedar River in September of last year. Priscilla had welcomed them then with a gift of MEP APIARIES HONEY and a bouquet of mixed wildflowers.

Priscilla finished her transaction, then pushed her steel-rimmed spectacles off the bridge of her nose. How strange seeing her new neighbors here of all places—35 miles from Cedar River! They’d just made a purchase from the Italian fish market. The father was making his little girl laugh pretending the butcher-wrapped package he was carrying was a live fish biting at her knees. Mom was in the lead, the little girl atop her Daddy’s shoulders, getting back at him by mussing with his hair. Priscilla had watched them from her kitchen window walking the river road just so: the little girl commanding her father forward like a child atop an elephant. Priscilla had visited just that once. She’d meant to visit again, but had been sidetracked by so many things that winter, including her son’s devastating divorce.

Her neighbors were past the Korean fruit and vegetable stands now. She thought of calling out to them by name, but then realized she could not recall their names! Smiling in spite of this, Priscilla waved one of her thin arms over her head to gain their attention.

Then, with a start, Priscilla saw—or knew, ssomehow—that they had already spotted her. Yes. It was plain as day. Not by how they were looking at her, but how they were not looking at her: repositioning themselves in the crowd so their backs were turned towards Priscilla.

The little girl’s beautiful brown eyes had met Priscilla’s own beautiful brown eyes for a brief moment—only to look away as Mom and Dad veered further and further away from Priscilla’s booth.

Priscilla was stunned. Unconsciously, she lowered her arm and rested it upon her chest. She watched her neighbors feign interest in a Tie-Dye clothing boutique across from her own stall. When an appropriate amount of time had elapsed, the young parents shuffled their way back into the mainstream of the Pike Market throng, heads lowered, a flush of embarrassment on their faces.

All the while, the bright-eyed child had smiled and jabbered away—oblivious to it all. *** Sunday. A day later. Priscilla had been up late the night before, thinking over the incident at the Market, trying again and again to come up with a rhyme or a reason why her neighbors had snubbed her so. It made no sense. They seemed like such a pleasant couple.

Priscilla remembered the day she had welcomed them to the Cedar River community. The young father had been out in the tall grass of the side yard rinsing out a 5-gallon glass carboy bottle he’d used to make beer with a garden hose. The young mother and child were in the front yard, their black shiny hair held back in matching blue bandanas. They were building an “apartment house” for the child’s imaginary friend “Chiswick” out of old cardboard moving boxes.

Mom had invited her inside for a cup of Iced Tea; told her how excited they were to be in Cedar River; how her social work job in the nearby Tahoma School District had already started and her husband was hoping to land a job any day now as well. Though the couple’s furnishings were simple, there was richness to their household that

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transcended their lack of material possessions. There was homemade bread on the kitchen table; an old-fashioned hand-crank ice cream maker in one corner of the living room; no television or hi-fi stereo, but a whole wall of books, and a small table littered with the child’s finger paintings and drawings. They had both seemed so pleased by her visit: the young mother sending her home with a half-loaf of bread (after Priscilla’s staunch refusal to accept a whole); the handsome young man, over and above his wife’s embarrassment, good-naturedly promising to save some bottles of beer for her and her husband when fermentation was complete.

The couple had, point-of-fact, reminded Priscilla of Thomas and herself when they were first starting out.

Priscilla was filing bills of sale at the kitchen table, staring at the back of Thomas’s gray crew cut head as he sat watching the Seattle Mariners baseball game on TV. She’d taken up the matter with Thomas over breakfast. But he’d hastily shrugged it off as another example of city folk rushing out to the country to escape their city problems, only to bring their city problems with them. When Priscilla countered that these new neighbors may even have come from the country to find jobs they had not been able to find in Montana, Thomas had countered: “Then why don’t they just go to the city directly!”

It was while Bruce Battlefield, the Mariners announcer, was pitching an ad for THUNDER CLAP POTATO CHIPS that the answer came to Priscilla. Money. Of course. How silly of her to not have recognized this earlier. Her new neighbors were such frugal people—making their own bread and beer, hanging their clothes out to dry on a line. They must have misconstrued her gift of the 1 lb. jar of honey as a financial ploy to establish new clientele. With a flush of shame, Priscilla remembered handing the couple her business card as she left their home and, worse, reminding them that MEP APIARIES HONEY was now on the shelves of the local IGA supermarket.

Priscilla pushed her paperwork away in disgust. Even before she had talked it over with Thomas, she knew what she would do. It had been years since her and Thomas had invited anyone other than a relative or an old friend to Sunday dinner. What better way to break the ice and make her neighborly intentions plain! Thomas would object, of course. But she’d soften him up to it. It would do everyone a world of good. Surely her new neighbors hadn’t made many new friends—coming all the way from Montana. And Thomas would benefit most of all. He was pulling ten-hour shifts in front of the tube nowadays. If it wasn’t for their blessed bees, Priscilla didn’t know what she’d do with her dear old dear old man. *** Priscilla crossed the Cedar River Highway without much difficulty, just a little sand and gravel kicked up from a passing dump truck.

Fortunately, today was a Sunday and Priscilla did not have to deal with the unending chain of commuter traffic going back and forth from Greater Seattle to Cedar River. New homes and subdivisions were going up so fast Priscilla could scarcely recognize the landscape anymore. The local population had doubled in the last year alone—

Fiction

and was slated to triple within the next five. Priscilla and Thomas, and several of their neighbors, had put up a stink; had petitioned for better land use law and zoning considerations; but, in the end, they’d backed off when they discovered just how difficult it was to fight the County and the Developers—let along rally local support from locals reaping quick profits from sale of their lands.

Priscilla gathered branches from the ferns that grew up from the drainage ditch on both sides of the arterial road. The ferns were for the daisies she’d picked for her new neighbors from her own front yard. She was in no hurry now. It was too beautiful a day for that.

The sky was a stellar blue. A light breeze from the river fluttered the new yellow leaves of the big Alders that flanked Priscilla’s path. By all means, Priscilla intended to appear casual when she arrived at her neighbor’s doorstop. No free samples. No business card. Just out for a Sunday stroll . . . and, oh, by the way . . . next Sunday.

Priscilla’s pace slackened as she approached the end of the arterial road. It was not unusual for her pace to slow here. The river landscape was its most striking now: the denseness of the trees and ground cover creating a home for bald eagles and river otters, foxes and, occasionally, a stray bobcat or mountain lion. Snoqualmie Indians had played cedar drums in a longhouse along this bend of the river. The longhouses and Indians were gone, of course, but a sizable grove of old growth Red Cedars still remained. In the fall, sockeye salmon still spawned in the shade of these giants.

But it was something else that slackened Priscilla’s pace this morning. Something seemed distinctly out of place. For a moment, Priscilla thought she’d walked in too far.

Then, rounding a row of blackberry bramble tall as her head, she spotted her new neighbor’s mailbox: the one painted up with sunflowers and farm animals. No. This was it all right. Third set of mailboxes after you crossed the highway. And there was Preacher Reynolds’ goat—staring at Priscilla from behind the barbed-wire fence in the adjacent wood lot. And it was then, as Priscilla walked past Preacher Reynolds’ long line of locust trees, that she saw it.

Smelled it, first. Smoke. Thin curling gray columns of it rising behind the eight-foot wall of blackberry bramble that blocked her new neighbor’s house and the adjacent stand of old-growth Red Cedars.

“No! Not the cedars!”

Priscilla was furious. She threw a rock at Preacher Reynolds’s goat to stop the animal from following her. She’d smelled the smoke from the moment she’d stepped outside her own door, but hadn’t even suspected it might be coming from this stand of Cedars. These brush pile fires had become such a common occurrence in the Cedar River community over the last year: bulldozers shoving trees and brush and roots together in one big pile—then setting fire to the whole works without even bothering to sort out the low-grade Hemlock and Alder wood. More profit in getting the houses up fast.

Her new neighbor’s rental came into view as she rounded the last hedgerow of blackberry. And there was the WEYERHAEUSER CONSOLIDATED HOMES construction trailer on the smoldering ruins of the cleared out lot next door. Beside the trailer a large sign that read: FUTURE SITE OF CEDAR GROVE ESTATES.

“Greedy animals!”

Weyerhaeuser—the timber giant—was branching into the booming home building business now that the big forest cuts were on the wane. And the gall of naming the new development after the very thing they’d destroyed.

“Cedar grove estates!”

Priscilla was so overwhelmed by the devastation that she had not even noticed the new red sports car parked up on the grass of the young couple’s side yard. She hadn’t noticed that the tire swing hanging from the big alder in the front yard was gone; hadn’t noticed that where a small garden plot had once been a satellite television disc now stood in its place. Not until after she’d finished wiping her smoke-irritated eyes and had already knocked on the front door of the house. . .

The door opened. A smiling young woman Priscilla had never seen before appeared in the doorway, holding a Cellular phone against one ear, motioning Priscilla to wait. She was wearing a short white dress that accentuated her tanning booth tan, and had her hair teased up in the latest fashion. Rap music was blasting inside the house. And beneath this noise, was another noise. A strange wild whirring sound.

A moment later, Priscilla located the source of this sound when a thick-set, bare-chested young man Priscilla had also never seen before poked his smiling head out the bathroom door, holding a blow-dryer to his curly head, yelling, “Who is it, baby?”

But neither of them ever found out.

Priscilla backed away without a word, leaving the mixed ferns and daisies on the sill of the door where she had dropped them. *** When Priscilla returned home, she found Thomas snoring lightly on the couch, the Mariners losing (again). She turned down the sound on the TV, and then covered Thomas lightly with the Pendleton throw blanket he’d bought her when they’d first moved into their beautiful Cedar River home. The blanket’s thinning wool made Priscilla smile remembering how their neighbor’s little girl had carried around a frayed and much worn infant’s blanket she called her “Scrubby”. When Priscilla had asked the young mother why her daughter called it a “Scrubby”, the mother had told her it was because it was an old blanket—her old blanket—and that “old blankets are best, of course!”

Priscilla kissed the top of Thomas’s head lightly (so as not to wake him), and then wandered off to the kitchen to see if there was enough baking powder left to make biscuits for dinner.

Dave Barrett lives and writes out of Missoula, MT. His fiction has appeared most recently in Doubleback Review, Hobart, and Quarter After Eight. His novel—GONE ALASKA— was published by Adelaide Books in August of 2019. He teaches writing at Missoula College and is working on a new novel.

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Literary Work

The Perfect Bouquet WINSTON DERDEN

I’d like a bloom that says, “This is a tentative opening, but hopeful,” a stem that says, “I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

Blossoms that say, “I’m hypoallergenic, “quite safe to be around.”

Maybe more than a few of those.

Ferns and greenery, full and lush — baby’s breath may be presumptuous.

No arrangements with thorns, I bleed easily, should the flowers be returned.

And, please, perhaps for later, an additive for the water that won’t let buds decay.

Winston Derden is a poet and fiction writer residing in Houston, Texas. His poetry has appeared in journals including Blue Collar Review, Big River Poetry Review, Barbaric Yawp, Soft Cartel, Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Ekphrastic Review, and numerous anthologies.

He holds a BA and an MA from the University of Texas, Austin.

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Denys Kuvaiev

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Denys Kuvaiev

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Poetry

Breaking Girl WINSTON DERDEN

What chaos within sent you to the psychiatric ward again, my little box of horrors?

What corrupted love darkens your psyche?

Cracked on the inside, bending not your nature, have I asked you to explain what you’re afraid of understanding?

Does that sharpen your appetite for another fistful of pills?

Then I won’t repeat the question.

Your emotional jiggle de jour doesn’t much matter.

It’s a rolling state of crisis to distract from abandonment, fear, anger.

How casual the emotional brutality you use to stave off loved ones, to hurt before they hurt you, when all they bear is caring.

And what power, that weakness of emotion encased in rigidity of will that drives you, frightened little girl at the controls of a woman, who hides her eyes and thinks she goes unseen because she cannot see.

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Literary Work

Take a Little Time Without Worry WINSTON DERDEN

I’m carrying an empty beer keg up marble steps. A businessman with a briefcase holds open one of the double doors and says, “Where are you going?”

I am slightly incensed by his question.

I answer, “To the train station.”

Inside, the white marble floors look gritty and worn. I realize I do not have my wallet, that I left the hotel without it, that I don’t recall where I was when I last had it, perhaps at a restaurant table. I think, Go to the next city, book a hotel room, come back for the wallet. I think that’s stupid.

I can’t remember the name of the restaurant.

I can’t remember the name of the hotel. Surely that will come to me.

It doesn’t.

I remember instead three empty beer kegs need to be washed out, I then consider a woman who once loved me wants me back.

She has multiple identities.

I’m not sure where she left me.

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Denys Kuvaiev

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Wet Socks ALEX PRONG

lcrms

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Flash Fiction

A

week ago one of those Amnesty International activists stopped me. Normally, I have a strategy for avoiding them. I put my headphones in and cross to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. This time, I turned the corner of Peace Street and walked right into one of them. I knocked her pamphlets all over the wet pavement, and even though we hurried to pick them up, they were still tragically soggy when she went to restack them.

Stacking my half of the drooping pamphlets on the table, I could see the words CASCADE OF STRUGGLES, fuzzy from the moisture. Feeling terrible for ruining her handouts, and almost positive that I had hit her hard enough to form a bruise, I apologized and feigned interest in her cause.

“I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Can I hear about the cascading struggles? Tell me about this.” I gestured to the wet stack of papers.

“It’s okay,” she raised her eyes from the wet pamphlets, “People probably just throw them away anyway. I’m Alice. Do you actually want to hear? It’s okay if you were just walking past. I don’t want to take up your time if you aren’t really interested.”

Alice looked like a child in an adult’s body. Her gaze was vaguely bored, her hands were now both clasped around her reusable water bottle, and her mouth seemed like it was trying to blow bubbles from gum even though she wasn’t chewing any. I was thankful for the easy out, and I took it.

“I’m interested, but you’re right about me being in a rush. I promise I will give it a Google when I get home. Here, give me one of those,” I said, grabbing a pamphlet by the top left corner where the ink had not yet run, “I promise I won’t just throw it away.”

She smiled, but the smile seemed to stop at the corners of her mouth, not touching the rest of her face, not nearly making it to her bored eyes. She didn’t say anything. I turned to go, tempted to crumple the struggles into my fist, but not wanting to get wet ink on my hands.

When I returned to my house later that night, the struggles had dried and I could now properly crumple them without getting my hands dirty. I tossed them in my recycling bin, but it made me uncomfortable to look at them sitting on top of last night’s pizza box.

I opened the pizza box and put the struggles inside, but I could still see them through the square holes that had previously been home to a garlic and a chipotle cheddar dip. I took out the whole bag of recycling and put it on the street even though it was only a quarter full and the garbage truck had just come the morning before.

After returning inside and catching up on Facebook, I scrolled onto a sponsored ad for Amnesty International’s Cascade of Struggles Campaign. No kidding. I clicked on it.

The Cascade referred to the structural way in which technology companies abuse human rights globally. Further research. The struggles were everywhere. Female sweatshop labourers in China, telephone help center workers in India. Further research. Before sweatshop workers in China could assemble raw materials, they had to be mined. Actual children mined coltan in the Congo. Profits from selling coltan funded the country’s civil war.

I closed my laptop. It was 4:28am and my eyes were stinging.

The campaign was urging people to go without their Macs and iPhones for 48 hours and use that time to write to Apple urging them to reconsider the structure of their production line. “To Think Differently.”

It was Friday when I collided with Alice, and for the next week the struggles continued to scuffle around in my conscience. I decided to travel to my cottage a couple hours north of Raleigh for the weekend to reflect and to write my letter.

Truthfully, I could have used 48 hours without technology anyway. It was relaxing despite the rain all weekend. I reread some of my old books that I had left up there, I made use of the old record player, and I carefully wrote my letter. I thought about Alice and wondered what she would think if she saw me there, heatedly writing to Tim Cook, citing Amnesty’s reports, really getting into it. I hoped I could find her on that same corner when I got back in town. Maybe she would even want to go out for fair trade coffee with me or smash some iPods at the Apple store in an act of protest.

On my way back, the rain was coming down hard. Pouring really.

The storm must have been the reason there was nobody else on my side of the highway, although the northbound side seemed to be strangely busy to the point of standstill. Maybe they had all just read about the struggles and needed some time at their cottages to think.

When I got into town, the wind was so strong that I had to fight to open my car door. My legs were drenched up to the ankle, and I was cursing the weather, because I was pretty sure I had no clean socks left. I was supposed to do laundry that weekend, before I had decided to go on my little retreat. Before heading inside, I noticed the absolute greyness of the sky, like someone had forgotten to open the blinds. My neighbor had had an American flag attached to his verandah, but it had detached and was now lodged between the branches of his poplar tree. I shivered and closed the door.

I untied my soaking Converse and pulled them off with my wet socks still stuck inside. Grabbing a blanket and a bag of Ruffles from the cupboard, I sprawled on the couch and turned on the news that I was craving after 48 hours of radio silence. The image on the screen was an aerial shot of the highway I had just been on, with all those cars jammed up bumper-to-bumper going north. I choked on a chip, seeing my lone car on the southbound side of the highway, going the opposite direction to every other car. The tagline across the bottom of the screen read: “Mass Evacuations as Hurricane Matthew Targets North Carolina.”

Alex Prong is a bartender, fern enthusiast, and writer. He prefers writing pieces that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction: autobiographical fiction or fictional memoir, for example. He enjoys finding newer and truer routes to the truth. He also writes poetry and comedy. He tends to ascribe cosmic significance to trivial events and people—you can find him sitting at a kitchen island, wearing cabin socks and lingerie, and writing erotica about the (fictional, or not) woman who delivers his mail.

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nuarevik

The Itsy-Bitsy Dream Catcher BILL ARNOTT

Sun peers from horizon sparrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two-note song day breaks, a promise of heat sensory start of summer

Solitary thread to guys wire, rope, and anchor line high to low, starboard to port rudimentary pagan cross

A spin, a spindle, a strand knit, purl, reef and square cloven hitches, granny knots embroidered into a matrix

Moist morning air jasmine, lilac someone mows a lawn crows carry on, conversing

Between guy-lines, connectors a structural frame takes form glinting silver, sunrise dew subtlest vibrating thrum

Working toward a center unseen an octet weaves as one, this trapping trapeze an open mouth net yawning airborne weir

Outside our front door something new unfolds artisanal architect construction underway

Alchemic straight starts to curve turns to round, the touch of fly-tied fibers cinched in solidity

Commenced, concluded, completed a hunter-gatherer space in time. Yet all I see is a catcher of dreams and wonder what wonders it holds

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Poetry

Wander BILL ARNOTT

nuarevik

I think I could wander this way the rest of my life – a small knapsack, sneakers, an old Navy CPO shirt, khaki pants, a small knife, a bottle opener, a nail clipper, a pencil & pad, a book, all I have...

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Writing Across the Landscape Pull of pack on shoulders obligatory hug, assuring reassuring strain, a tethered thread of DNA, taut hawser to the shore, familiar tidal ebb and flow, familial weigh the anchor ​nothing weighs so much cast off, if/when, you dare take care, to dodge the shit laid down, piled high, for you and any passers by, it gets into your hikers’ grooves where nothing gets it out, except passing of time, emptying, empty clear-mind clarity, and grit from scuffled, shuffled, miles walking walking away, away toward a something else, something imagined better, something new from tattered, clothing dropped into a roadside bin, don’t look too far, into the depths, the dark sewn patches, healing scars, a solitary burned out star that trails comet-like across crepuscular sky the crunch of well worn shoes on gravel fades away

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Vancouver author, poet, songwriter Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of Dromomania and Gone Viking. His poetry, articles, and reviews are published in Canada, the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. Billâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s column Poetry Beat is published by the League of Canadian Poets and the Federation of BC Writers.

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Poetry

Gee Billy BILL ARNOTT

Billy wore a brace, around his neck held G-harp into place, a chord he loved, three notes he'd play, or four on special nights, occasionally the house half full, instead of full-on empty playing on E the band would say with grins and snorts awaiting the next off-ramp and a fill.

Yes G was Billy’s home, more often than not where he’d return, harp nestled into key like an heirloom quilt in eider down swelled with pride in cold, cold weather. Now at the end of a particularly ponderous, wanderous song those vague and directionless sojourns Billy seemed so fond of – recollecting liquor, lovers, ride alongs and endless songs that meandered, smoke-filled as memories, mementos, mired in his mind tugging, times gently, others acerbic sharp on the hackle-back of every neck, the brace, a coiled chain link shackle, holding him in place, next to a G the band, the stage, the half-E-fully-E-beer-soaked room with a server who knew everybody’s name, she’d hum the tunes and touch their arms, not sexual like, just a kind of touchstone, lifeline, in the midst of the storm of everyday.

And she would go about her way, tending to everyone while Billy and his bandmates they would jam and stray but always they’d come home to stay in the womb-like warmth of Billy’s G, he’d bow his head toward his harp, close eyes and disappear into the music, movement, fill his lungs with love ... and he would play.

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Kedsirin Suthamsakul

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Flash Fiction

Exposed DONA MCCORMACK

T

he man inside the moon stretches his mouth wide and screams midnight light out into the what-should-be-black. The waisthigh grass reminds me of wheat, the way it sways and smacks Louis’s hips, right at the bone where he’s vulnerable, where only I see him bare.

We come out to these cabins this same time every year, when the grass has grown high, and the leaves have started to turn. Louis arms himself with one of his pills, for courage, to endure check in.

He needs the pills to get through most things, these last few years.

I worry he’ll take too many and I’ll be left standing over his corpse, wondering if he meant to die or if he forgot the time of day and which dose he was on. In the small office, ticking bear clock with moving eyes on the wall, neither of us looks at the other when we pay the desk clerk for our usual cabin, the one by the river. They rent to us even though they know who we are.

My husband’s bare chest above his jeans, the night clings to his upper body, the starlight collects in his soft, black hair. He holds his arms up and out to his sides. The hair lays flat against his skin and glows silver. The wind brings me musk and Speed Stick, notes of his body.

We feel alone in the park. Ever since our son Jack died of complications from lead poisoning six years ago, we often find no other guests seeking the shelter of a relaxing riverside cabin. Before Jack died, we spent every summer weekend here and the place was always busy. When the local health officials turned up no evidence of lead anywhere on our property, we suspected our favorite vacation spot.

The tops of the grass whisper against the sensitive underskin of Louis’s palms. He wiggles his fingers. Once. Then again. As though sensing the air. The movement of the grass. The texture of the wind within it. He stares up at the sky and the moon lights his skull up blue.

Blue. The water from the river remained blue, when we filled the test tube—from the one nearby lab we could afford to hire for tests. They found lead and a dozen other forms of industrial run-off, including copper, which gave the water its color. Once we received those results, the news picked up the story. Local news. Our son existed again, for a few news cycles. The cabins lost most of their business. The stories about Jack and the dirty water still appear first, if I search the cabins in my phone. And yet, every year when we return, we don’t, as we expect, find the land paved or grown over. We rent our cabin. Stare at the blue river. Louis walks the field.

I follow him, halfway across the stretch of grass, when my husband spins and staggers towards me. “Candice?” The wind grabs my name and cuts it through the blades around me, beads of sound bouncing toward the river. Louis spins and stares around wide-eyed. He keeps his hands out, palms down, hip level, as though keeping his balance.

I reach him, and he says my name again. “Candice.” His expression melts and drifts. My stomach sinks when I think I know what he’s done…

Every year, we come back here. To try to say goodbye. So Louis can try to say goodbye. I said goodbye at the funeral. I come to seek forgiveness. For not needing what my husband does. For being satisfied with merely knowing the lead didn’t come from our home, that it was not us who poisoned him.

I place my hands on Louis’s shoulders and try to meet his eyes.

He won’t. Even when I exert subtle downward pressure on his body, he glances everywhere but my face. Tears run down his cheeks. “Ah, God, Louis, how many did you take? Not the whole bottle?”

Louis turns his ear toward me. His expression crumbles. Tears squirt from his wide open, staring eyes, black out here in the moony night. He guffaws. I jump and my heart thuds a few beats. “Didn’t take my pills. Except my prescribed ones. Not a whole bottle.” He grimaces. His cheeks wrinkle and his eyes, full of the moon, crinkle.

“Won’t have to. Won’t have to come back here anymore, now I can’t look for him everywhere.”

He stares toward the river across the field behind me. His eyes drift against the too-moon-blue current. He doesn’t withdraw from my hand when I hold it an inch from his face. As though he can’t see me.

As though he’s been exposed over the years, here, to something that’s leeched him blind but given him the perspective he needs to finally locate Jack in the blue water and leave him there.

Dona McCormack & her hubs & loving service human, Michael, hunt the sun & manage disability in Northeast Ohio. Sometimes, those become the same effort! Dona writes Realism & Weird Fiction & insists she’ll finish her thesis collection in 2020. (She already got the M.A. in Creative Writing; she’s just a turtlewriter!) She’s a 3rd place Reflex Flash Contest winner & has stories in several journals. Visit Dona at @DonaWritesInsta & http://DonaMcCormack1.wixsite.com/donawrites.

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FIODAR HUSEU

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Poetry

Sliver of Time STEPHEN SCHWEI

Acorns are gone, swept away.

People in graves marked for the 1800s had no idea what the 21st century would be like.

And I’ll never see the 23rd or 89th or anything on the horizon.

But the sky is still trembling blue, exasperatingly blue and trees line the roads like they very well might have even in that time.

This doesn’t feel like an 1800s cemetery.

It’s carved out of the city and could remain a secret source of boiling over blue skies and mating butterflies, masking and elongating time.

I’m here for only the faintest sliver of time, while thoughts and ideas and comforting blue skies traverse the eons.

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Moon Lovers STEPHEN SCHWEI

Why did I ever tie my lover to the moon?

Entangle him in all its phases.

Now its ascendency is his face, its slow rise his and my history.

Just a sliver in a cloudless sky as we began with tender hopes.

A thousand triggers on a thousand nights.

Promises of celestial guidance.

As it slumped on its back lazily, we grew comfortable and in love.

Growing and brightening each night towards the full moon in all its glory.

We struggled with distance and separation musing if we saw the same moon as our gaze fell upon it in unison from two different earthly continents.

Some clouds, some clear nights, it cycled many times before we faded.

He escaped its snares, and embarked on a new journey.

The bright moon remains painted with his smile and my tears.

All I want now is for the forever moon to return to its still beauty.

Stephen Schwei is a Houston poet with Wisconsin roots, published in Wax Poetry & Art, Beneath the Rainbow, Hidden Constellation, Borfski Press, and New Reader Magazine.

A gay man with three grown children and four wonderful grandchildren, who worked in Information Technology most of his life, he can be a mass of contradictions. Poetry helps to sort all of this out. www.stephenschwei.com

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Poetry

FIODAR HUSEU

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FIODAR HUSEU

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Poetry

Blank STEPHEN SCHWEI

I

As you stare at me without recognition, shape, or meaning, I wonder where you have gone – a fanciful flight?

Or a formless reverie?

Somewhere you’ve visited before, or an unfamiliar land each time?

So far, I’ve escaped the pain and vicissitudes, the ignominious episodes and lowlights.

My memory still captures you in the highlights.

We still live together, side by side.

II

My decline began long ago.

My memories are blacklisted, banned. I can’t find them anymore.

I didn’t know, I still don’t know, there’s an expiration date on our life memories.

If you see a glimmer, pretend it’s recognition.

I want to be with you, but I’m drifting, out of control.

Don’t blame me.

I didn’t leave you.

I hate to blame my brain.

I know you do.

III

It’s good to have you with me, if you’re there.

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Natali Myasnikova

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Flash Fiction

Joey Button LAUREN HARKAWIK

J

oey Button didn’t know how long he’d been peddling his bike when he saw it, but whenever he’d recall the moment, he’d remember that his legs were tired, so it’d probably been a while.

It didn’t matter, though. What mattered was what was in front of him.

It was the size of three men: two standing next to each other and another standing on their shoulders. In other words, it was wide and tall. It had fur, which was a purplish gray. Too gray to be called purple, too purple to be called gray. It had big blue eyes, tremendous yellow teeth, and—this is very important—it was smiling. Though Joey Button could imagine such a thing being seen as ferocious or intimidating, he himself was not in the least bit scared. Because it smiled, and it waved, and then it ran away.

Joey Button—who was 8 and was not really named Joey Button, his name was Joseph Williams, but his mother called him Joey Button—stopped peddling his bike. He kept himself on its seat but lowered his feet to the pavement and stood. His legs felt like rubber, but that was the least of his worries. What had just walked past him, so calm, so friendly, waving like it wasn’t a monster, or a beast? If it hadn’t been standing right there in the fur, Joey Button was certain he would have thought it was a made up thing.

After a long time had passed—cars drove by, a woman dawdled past pushing a stroller, a dog ran by and a few seconds later, a man ran by calling, “Bowser! Bowser! Come get a treat! Stop running!”—Joey Button decided that he should go home. His mouth was dry and he wasn’t sure what had happened but he was sure that standing there with his bike between his legs wasn’t clarifying anything.

On the ride home, he chastised himself. Why hadn’t he chased it?

He had a bike, for Pete’s sake. He could have gone fast enough to follow the thing. Where was it going? The forest, he imagined, but

then where? Did it live in a colony of other Big Things? Did it have a Big Thing wife, and little Big Thing children?

At dinner, Joey Button distractedly ate his dinner. His parents exchanged looks. “Are you feeling okay, Joey?” his dad asked. He nodded, but then he took a bite of spaghetti and dropped it all over his striped shirt. The one with the white and yellow stripes, a distinction to be made because all of Joey Button’s shirts were striped.

His mother said he liked striped shirts, but really that’s just what was in his drawer.

“Joey Button!” his mother said, with a unique blend of admiration and admonition. “You’re ruining your favorite shirt.”

Joey Button looked up from his plate and, smiling a thin, shallow smile that looked more mature than an 8-year-old would commonly muster, said, “Mom, Dad, I have to tell you something.” His parents exchanged another look—this one a look—and blinked at him.

“I saw a monster today,” said Joey Button to his parents.

He described what he had seen in detail. The purplish gray fur, the height of two men, the width of two men, the tremendous teeth and the smile, not ferocity. His parents, who were intelligent people but not exactly artists, laughed a little, like the way adults laugh when another adult says something they mean to be funny but it really isn’t that funny. And then his mother said, “Finish your spaghetti, sweetheart.”

Joey Button, unlike his parents, was an artist, and so he quickly went to his room and drew the Big Thing in great detail. He hung it on his wall. When his parents saw it a few days later, they shook their heads and laughed, like, “Oh, Joey Button. What a character.”

1,569 was the number of bike rides Joey Button would estimate he took to find the Big Thing. He always tried to replicate the same circumstances. He’d ride till his legs started to feel rubbery and then

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he’d go to the spot where the bike path crossed the park and he’d look in every direction to see if he might see any gray, or purple, or purplish gray. Sometimes, his friend Clay would come with him.

He’d told Clay about the Big Thing shortly after he’d seen it. He never knew if Clay believed him, but if nothing else, Clay was a good sport, and he played along just fine.

It took about three years to take that many bike rides. Sometimes it was two in one day. Then one day, he didn’t take one.

This wasn’t the result of a decision he made. He just slowed down, or got distracted. He really didn’t know what happened; he wasn’t thinking about it, which is the point. Then over time, the time between the bike rides grew, and then he stopped looking in every direction for the Big Thing. And then one day he didn’t think about the Big Thing. And then another day, he forgot about it. But the thing about forgetting something is you don’t know when it happens, because you don’t remember the thing ever existed. So the details around this part are very fuzzy. But at some point, the Big Thing went from being an obsession to being a memory to being nothing.

Then a great number of things happened to Joey Button. He had his first kiss. He finished middle school, then high school, then he went to college and got a degree in art. He got a job drawing pictures of nature for textbooks. It was what his father called "a good, stable job,” and he kept it for his entire career. He had his first love, his first marriage. He and his wife moved to the city to be closer to his office, and then they got divorced. He stopped being called Joey Button, because his mother died. As Joseph Williams, he found a new wife.

Her name was San. He took care of his father until he died, and then he and San moved out of the city and back into his parents’ house.

Then he retired from textbooks and San got him a drawing table and set it up by a window in the attic.

“Draw what your heart sees,” she said.

This was an admirably poetic assignment, but Joseph Williams was tired, and he would’ve preferred if she’d just told him what to draw.

He sat and stared out the window and saw nothing but trees.

Trees.

How many trees had he drawn over his career?

After not very much time at all, he threw his pencil down—the beautiful one that San had bought him—and grumbled as he rose to his feet. His legs felt creaky like they always did after sitting. He got downstairs and heard San fiddling about in the kitchen. In her own retirement, she’d taught herself to bake bread, and now there was bread everywhere. Not wanting her to know he wasn’t using the drawing table she’d given him, Joseph snuck outside. Not knowing what to do with himself once he was out there, he opened the garage.

It was still filled with his parents’ stuff. Stuff he’d thought maybe someday he’d want to use. An old tinseled Christmas tree collected dust in the corner. His father's tools lay lined up on the workbench.

Behind some snow tires, two bikes were propped up by their kickstands.

Joseph didn’t remember the last time he rode a bike, and it wasn’t quite warm enough out to enjoy a ride, but he felt a flutter in his

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heart as he moved the tires aside and wrenched his dad’s old bike out of the spot it may well have been sitting in for several decades. He walked it to the driveway and felt his left leg wobble a bit as he threw the right one over the seat and hopped on. People like to say that riding a bike is not something one can forget, and perhaps this is true, but the first few pumps on the pedals, Joseph was sure he’d fall over.

Once he hit a stride, though, he felt wind in his hair and he let out a giggle—a boyish, childish giggle—because he couldn’t believe what he was doing.

He pedaled for what felt like forever, though he wasn’t sure how long. Then suddenly, his thighs began to burn and he stopped dead in his tracks. They say you can’t forget to ride a bike because of muscle memory. The burn in his thighs reached right up and grabbed his heart and squeezed it and suddenly, quite literally like a wave crashing onto shore, Joseph Williams looked up and he saw something he hadn’t seen in 54 years.

It was the size of three men: two standing next to each other and another standing on their shoulders. In other words, it was wide and tall. It had fur, which was a purplish gray. Too gray to be called purple, too purple to be called gray. It had big blue eyes, tremendous yellow teeth, and—this is very important—it was smiling.

It didn’t wave. Instead, it winked, it put a hand over its mouth to stifle a giggle, and then it ran away.

Joseph Williams pedaled faster than he ever had in his life. He followed its direction until he reached the woods, and then he got out and ran. His heart was pumping blood so fast that his chest was heaving. He had a dry ball in the back of his throat and he couldn’t catch his breath and he felt more alive, more excited, than he perhaps ever had in his life. He ran and ran and ran and—eventually—he came out on the other side of the woods, where he saw a grocery store and began to laugh uproariously, because he couldn’t believe he’d followed a Big Thing into the woods and run far enough that he’d ended up at a grocery store of all places.

He laughed intermittently as he trudged back through the woods, this time slower and more aware of the crunching of leaves and sticks beneath his feet. When he arrived back at his bike, he shook his head a bit and thought maybe he’d just go back to being Joseph Williams again. But as his feet started pedaling, he knew. Joey Button had something to draw.

Lauren Harkawik is a fiction writer and essayist. Her work has been featured in publications including Sweet Tree Review, Turnpike Magazine, and PULP Magazine. She lives in Vermont, where she works as a rural small-town reporter. She’ll write a book about the life of local reporters, someday. Until then, she’s busy writing short stories and essays while attempting to master the arts of bread baking and mothering—equally timeless, challenging, and fulfilling pursuits.

Literary Work

martm

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Poetry

Butterfly Solipsism D.R. JAMES

A butterfly’s flapping over Costa Rica, it’s sometimes hypothesized, can initiate the chain that leads to tornados in Toledo, hopping and ripping the heart from every-other quotidian home.

Or maybe its deft stretch-and-glide might instigate a violent Mississippi’s surprising rise beyond its otherwise stolid realm—the dainty queen behind that vast rebellion.

So I suppose I could blame this monarch that reigns today’s thermals, that just licked six purple puffs in beach grass then juked my breezy mind, for the nicknamed waves of catastrophe predicted to sweep the sleeping Gulf, the nightly news even proving it via weather patterns green-screened before the stocks and sports. Instead I’m turning a grateful face toward the nor’easter breaching the stony coast of my brain: when it rattles shutters to sash to rafters I’ll be unlatching the deadbolts, throwing open the windows, readying the musty guest bedroom of my heart in welcome.

—First published in A Little Instability without Bird (Finishing Line Press, 2006)

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Oksana Alekseeva

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Since Everything Is All I’ve Got D.R. JAMES

Eighty-eight degree cicadas. A cat who knows to wash with those luffas we call paws. This morning’s lacy light, which also moves the leaves.

Squirrels, not a slow-twitch muscle in the lot. Cilantro, basil, parsley in little painted pots. Clock with its tick-it, tick-it, like a rhythm, like a tiny cycle. The safest story behind whatever, like the whether this or that: Garage door? Sycamore? Extension cord?

No, only a chair on its own, cobweb in its corner. Yes, just so: a pure urgency for more silence, less chance to become unlucky. Grass, branch, dismantled fence, emblems all, for sewing on the sleeve between one’s lumbering sorrows and one’s existentialities. The local birds anxious and aboard their feathers.

Herons, somewhere, hungry in those shallows, working hinges we call elbows. Needles, maples, manic ant hills, the clouds I’ve noticed, the clouds I’ve let get away. Gray but expanded asphalt, dark black in the cracks and crescendos of kids skidding, the littlest always last, the largest largely never. Heart forever conscientious, so clever under cover.

Mother twitching while also shrinking.

Wall and popping nozzles during early morning sprinkling. Lists of lists, reminders to remind. Beach at the end of every westward road.

Stairwell, bike rack, barbecue utensils.

Tail on the string on the bamboo chimes, waving in what we will call the wind, which simply isn’t visible but stirs its island song out over lawn, curb, manhole cover, over everything, which is all I’ve got.

—First published in Since Everything Is All I’ve Got (March Street Press, 2011)

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Atop Mt. Harvard, May 1976, with a line from Major Jackson D.R. JAMES

You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter.

—Henry David Thoreau The summit staged a glimpse. The West became a canvas. When I’m dispersed, it draws back.

That chalked terrain: peaks pleated, engraved, cockedpinched infinity, fabric embroidered with the white flares of lingering snowpack.

I thought, how else might I conjure heaven?

My mind’s museumed, hammered facts, haloed proofs, disturbed forever. Imagine them clenching fists at infringement. They’d had god’s licensed niche: the jig was all but up.

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, MI. Poems and prose have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals (including New Reader Magazine #7), his new chapbook, Flip Requiem, releases in Spring 2020 (Dos Madres). https://www. amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

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Oksana Alekseeva

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Flash Fiction

Uptalk and Vocal Fry MATT MCHUGH

"Oh my god, I'm, like, so over people's crap, you know!"

For the love of heaven, will you shut up, you whiny little twat!

On the inside. Out loud, of course, I say, "Oh, I know exactly what you mean."

"People are just so selfish. I mean, Jenni was supposed to tell Sapphire about Lina's premiere, right? And then, like, the morning before Lina gets a call from her agent who's all like 'Hey, what's going on.'"

Good lord, that voice! The drawn-out vowels. 'Like' peppered in every other phrase with a froggy croak. And the ascension at the end of each sentence, as if everything were a question. A twenty-fouryear-old supermodel who talks like a toddler with a two-pack-a-day habit. Does she think it's sexy? Does she think of anything but the last post she read on her phone? All I know is we've been driving for nearly three hours and if this doesn't end soon I'm going to aim the Jaguar hood ornament at a telephone pole and floor it.

"And now Lina's getting all pissy and texting Mom. Like, leave Mom out of it, you know! Oh my god."

It started innocently enough. Crystal had to be in Las Vegas by sundown and—her beliefs to the contrary—she's not quite worth chartering a private jet. So, I volunteered. I've been a production assistant on Model Home for three years. Not the first time I've had to play chauffeur, but first crack I've had at Crystal's custom XJ. It is a magnificent beast, I must admit. Purrs like a kitten, roars like a lion, sprints like a cheetah. It's a bit surprising she bought it, being as she hates to drive, but it's a brilliant status symbol.

"I mean, seriously, if Sapphire can't be bothered then, like, why should anybody care about her stupid things, you know."

I nod and say 'Oh?' and 'Uh-huh' at the proper intervals—even toss in a 'No way!' I've picked up listening to Americans—but inside I'm screaming. On set, I don't have to interact with "the talent" very Boyan Dimitrov

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much. I mostly just keep tally of crew and equipment, sign for the catering, and take notes for the script supervisor. Yes, there's a script supervisor on a reality show. Shocked, are you?

"It's not like I don't make sacrifices for her all the time. Last year I had to fly back from Miami on the red eye for that Santa Barbara cruise or whatever. And I friggin' hate boats! Never again, you know? It's like, oh my god, really."

There was a segment on some news magazine show about the degradation of speech in America. They cited two particular terms: "uptalk" — raising the pitch of the voice at the ends of phrases; and "vocal fry" — a kind of throaty growl used to trail off words.

Together, they spread a plague of retrograde maturity among young women who demeaned themselves by talking like infants at school or on the job—and all because of the corrupting influence of Crystal Cashima. Oh, she wasn't blamed as Ground Zero for the disease, but she was declared its most notorious carrier.

I glance over and Crystal's lost in her phone, biting her lip. She's already gnawed holes in her sweatshirt cuffs and poked her thumbs through. She has her legs tucked up under her in the passenger seat.

How does she even do that? Made of rubber, the girl is. Me, I can barely sit up, my whole body stiff from the long drive and the stress of Crystal's chatter.

"Sometimes I wish people would just, like, grow the fuck up, you know?"

Says the poster child for infantilization!

"I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of catty bitches."

Take arms against a sea of catty bitches, and by opposing, end them!

"Oh my god, I just want to get away from these people trying to make me feel like shit."

In the show about uptalk and vocal fry, they had a clip of Crystal saying "Oh my god!" that they ran backward and forward, sped up and slowed down, to illustrate the point. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh. My. God. Ohhhh. Mmmyyyy. Gahhhdd. We passed that clip all around the crew. A few of them had it as a ringtone.

"You're, like, the only person who's, like, consistently nice to me."

Scratch...

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I said you're the only person on the show who's decent to me."

"Me?" "Yeah, it's like everyone's always mad, telling us what to do. But you're always, like, please and thank you—like, sweet all the time.

And I love your voice, like, your accent. Where are you from again?"

"I'm from England," I answer, starting to feel like a total cow. "A place called Gloucestershire."

"Gloss-tur-shear," she says carefully. "Is it nice there?"

"It's lovely. You should visit next time you're in London."

"Oh my god, you're going to totally hate me, but I've forgotten your name. It's Mary Ann?" "Miriam," I answer. "But that's what most Americans call me." I exaggerate an accent, "Mairry Yan!" Bless her heart, she giggles. A pretty ripple of sound.

"You know Sonic Tommy?" she asks.

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"You mean the DJ who does the parties?" I picture the spotty kid with nose rings and ginger dreadlocks who's only skill seems to be turning up the volume.

"Uh-huh. We've been working on, like, some music. Can I play you something?"

I cringe. I grip the wheel as three hours of frayed nerves beg for silence. But, of course, I say, "Sure."

"It's, like, a song about my life and stuff. It's called 'Golden.'"

Crystal fiddles with her phone and the Bluetooth touchscreen in the dashboard. Screechy thumpa-thumpa music blasts from the custom sound system. I can feel the roots of my teeth actually thudding with the bass. I'm just about to ask—politely—for her to turn it down when it cuts off.

"Sorry, that's not it."

She keeps scrolling. In the moment of blessed quiet I'm trying to think of some way to ask if we can listen later when a guitar riff begins to play. It's a gentle acoustic strum laced with deft fingerings, and it draws me instantly.

"That's Tommy?" I ask.

"Yeah. He's, like, really good."

A voice comes in, a low breathy vocal:

Hey little girl

See you shine

Can you smile

All of the time

That's it... now you look lovely

Hey mama Look at me I'm what you always Wanted to be So please... can you ever forgive me

"That's you?" After I say it, I realize how insulting my incredulous tone is.

Crystal just shrugs, gives a little smile. "You know how the Beatles don't, like, sing with their accents? It's kind of like that."

People love the way you shimmer

When you're wrapped Around Their Fingers

You'll never tarnish, you'll never fade Each time you're melted down and remade So long as they remember your name Then you're golden

I watch her from the corner of my eye as she listens. Her lips move in tiny fractions, silently rolling the lyrics. She rocks her head with the rhythm, eyes nearly closed. It's such a given that I hardly notice anymore, but, my God, the girl is stunning. An otherworldly beauty.

Flash Fiction

Hey boys Gather round I promise I won't Make a sound Tonight... you can do all the talking

Hey girls

Raise your glass to me

Get drunk on your Jealousy

And then... you can laugh as I'm walking Crystal stops the music.

"Oh my god, it's, like, so embarrassing!"

"You wrote that?" Again, my insulting incredulity.

"Just the words."

"That's amazing! I mean it, that's a wonderful song. You should release it."

"Yeah, right," she replies. "Hey, you hear about that dumb bitch model thinks she's a singer? Like I need that."

She wipes under her eye with a bunched-up sleeve. I don't know what to say. We sit in silence until, as if a gift from merciful heaven, the Las Vegas exit sign comes up.

"Oh my god, it's, like, about fucking time!"

We get to the hotel at six-thirty, greeted by a gaggle of photographers and a panic of promoters. There's been a mistake. We thought she needed to be on site at seven for a nine o'clock show.

Turns out, there are two shows: seven and nine.

We're ringed by guards built like refrigerators and bustled down into a basement dressing room. The whole time two predatory agents snarl at me about contract penalties. I call Crystal's manager and, literally, play telephone to relay their demands and negotiate a treaty. Not twenty feet away, a dozen pairs of hands strip Crystal down to her underwear then start strapping her into an outrageous metal bustier with chains and leather, a cheesy sci-fi dominatrix getup. They stuff her breasts into the frame and spray glittery make-up over her eyes. She's zipped into thigh-high boots and crowned with a shiny dome helmet. She looks ridiculous.

No! I want to say. She can't go out like that! You can't do that to her!

But, I say nothing. I'm just some peon assistant. Perhaps a spineless traitor.

I’m shoved out the door and someone hangs a VIP pass around my neck. I find my way to the auditorium and take a RESERVED seat near the stage, not caring who it was reserved for. The thumpathumpa music kicks on and skinny little girls start teetering down the runway. Coat-hangers, I've heard them called, and they seem to me all knees and elbows, draped with outfits designed to make them look as vulnerable as possible. Their faces are blank, save for a classic deerin-the-headlights void in the eyes.

"Crystal Cashima!" booms an announcer. She's the only one called by name.

And out she comes.

She is not all knees and elbows. She is all boobs and hips, the dangly metal plates on her body ticking like a sexy metronome. Every step manages to hit the beat, one hand at her shoulder as the other swings, militarily precise. I've heard the term "fierce" tossed around— and it's always struck me as rather stupid—but I can think of no better as she stalks like a panther in heels I couldn't even stand in.

She reaches the end of the runway and locks into a pose, the goddessqueen of the space Amazons. I get chills.

She looks down at me, our vision connecting. She rolls her eyes just a tiny bit. I hear her voice in my head: Oh my god, is this, like, so lame or what?

She pivots and is off, her bum swaying hypnotically in a chainmail miniskirt.

"Aren't her fifteen minutes up already?"

I look behind me to see two elderly but impeccably manicured men in matching white suits lean together, raising their voices clearly above the music.

"Honey, the whole famous-for-being-famous thing really needs to run its course!"

To my left, two twenty-something girls are jabbering.

"She's on TV, like, twenty-four hours a day, isn't that enough?"

"Seriously, you can't go anywhere without being subjected to her, you know?"

"I can't stand her whole baby-talk thing. So annoying."

"It's all part of the dumbing down of America."

"Totally."

"And what's with that get-up? Who's she trying to be? C3P-Ho?" "Oh my god!"

They practically double over in laughter.

According to the schedule, Crystal will be out again in four minutes and thirty-five seconds in a completely new outfit. Three more times in this show. Then everything again for the show at nine. Then back to L.A. tomorrow. This titanically beautiful woman who's been on television since she was seventeen will spend twelve hours in front of cameras recording her every word for a nation that loves to hate her voice—and hide the sad, sweet songs she'll never let anyone hear.

It's like a nightmare.

Oh my God.

Matt McHugh was born in suburban Pennsylvania, attended LaSalle University in Philadelphia, and after a few years as a Manhattanite, currently calls New Jersey home. Website: mattmchugh.com.

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Comaniciu Dan Dumitru

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I. RAN. ZOEY COLLEA

I hid in the arms of trees for a few short days and then The tide rolled in with boats made of flesh But no one pulled me up from the water and no one Rescued me from the fluctuating air that seized my body from an enormous pull and spit me out Backwash on the shore I asked for my mother but they had branded her Dead and alive I still was and awake I still had a tiny piece of something like Life in me and so I begged my feet to run and I begged for the sun to stay a couple more hours Just in time for me to disappear and drip so far down that they must Give me planets for eyes Because I am that large

Zoey Collea is 18 years old and is currently looking to publish her first novel.

Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a freshman at Bard College in upstate NY.

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Sometime ZOEY COLLEA

Comaniciu Dan Dumitru

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And I fell like dead foliage to the floor If my mother opened the screen door, to let the dogs inside or the bugs out, she would have known, without a doubt That her daughter is happy and somewhere safe I would go to that place Where I miss nothing and fate is fate and the trees bend without snapping and the world quakes but doesn't break For if I might think too hard about it, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d probably throw it out and not mind it at all But the bittersweet taste is just beginning to take as the telephone wires no longer lead home and I no longer hear the car tires on the crush shelled driveway Away, away, away I go without warning Maybe I'll resurface when the tide goes back out Sometime when I'm ready to float and not sink Or become color, not blacked out ink I wonder if they miss me as much as I already miss them I wonder if they know I love them I wonder if they've heard all the things I've never said Because moving out doesn't mean moving on But this time it may I've left so many times it's starting to not hurt as much But this one is for me, I leave it untouched And I hope they understand that Because when they're sitting on the couch and watching T.V. I hope they know I haven't deserted them for something better, for something bigger Because hopefully I'll come back and they'll realize I left for them, for him, for all of us Because sometime is sometime, sometime from now Sometime when I can no longer hold onto it anymore No more, more, more It festers like a sour sore And whines like an unnapped child I cradle it now and lull it to sleep I love them even when the sometime comes I love them through fights and misery and sobriety I love them through all things All the sometimes and they love me I know it I hope they understand.

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THE I BIRTHDAY BOY RAYMUND P. REYES

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t was my birthday.

When Kathy was alive, we would order a steak dinner in Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Incontro, a fancy restaurant two blocks down from our apartment.

Kathy died three months ago so this year I went by myself.

Fiction

Darya Zhuravleva

The waitress served me a big slice of carrot cake with thick cream frosting and a tiny lit candle on top because I told her that it was my birthday and that was why I was there. It was on the house, she said.

I didn’t know why I felt the need to tell her. Perhaps for her to take pity on me—an old man dining alone and on his birthday, too— and in a sense, make her share in my misery. I even told her about how my wife recently passed away, in response to when she asked as to why I was by myself. She was sorry for my loss, she replied.

She waited until I blew out the candle and insisted I make a wish. It sounded corny for people my age to still be making wishes, I said. For what could people my age still wish for? A painless death?

I was touched by her thoughtfulness, though I knew that after she had served me she would move on to her next customer, maybe listen

to another sob story, and when her shift was over, go home, think of her own problems, and totally forget me and all the others she served tonight. At least I got a free cake, I consoled myself.

But she was attractive, the waitress. I noticed her, a fact which surprised me. I had stopped paying special attention to attractive young girls for, I don’t remember how long a time now, except to think that they would have been as old as my daughter if I had kids (or granddaughter if I had married early). But that night, I was especially aware of how the waitress caught my attention. It was like the very moment when Kathy died and I felt, more than the grief, relief and an unburdening, a lightness I was not expecting. It surprised me, too. After Kathy exhaled her last breath—with me by her bedside and holding her hand—my first thought was that, at last, I could also move on from my own suffering of having had to witness her die a little each day since the first diagnosis of cancer. Meanwhile, this new surprise was the fact that at fifty-six, I felt the burning again.

Just when last week I had declared to Randy and Greg, close friends from work, my opinion that sex is overrated. They reacted with laughter and protestations.

Her name tag said Lily. So when Lily the waitress bent over to serve my order of steak and salad, I glimpsed a little cleavage, a shadow of a hollow on freckled milky white skin, and from there my gaze moved downward, and then sideways to the curve of her back, the shape of a round ass, and further on, smooth legs peeking out from under the short red skirt and white apron of her uniform. She was nineteen, she answered when I asked her how old she was. A freshman in the nearby university and working part-time at the restaurant. I saw Lily not as the daughter or granddaughter that I could have had, but as a possible bedmate. Perhaps it was the real reason why, out of the blue, while she was smiling down at me, patiently waiting for me to complete my order, I blurted out to her that it was my birthday. So she would pay me special attention, even out of pity, but some attention for me, nonetheless. And if I had worked harder at her, I believed she might have given in to my advances.

When I was younger, I could turn on my charm and make women fall for me. The waitress falling for the customer is the stuff of cheap paperbacks and yet, if you must know, it did happen to me in real life. I hit on a waitress and married her. When I first met Kathy, she was serving tables at an Olive Garden restaurant. She wasn’t an ordinary waitress, of course. She was working shifts while pursuing a degree in microbiology (but I wouldn’t know this until much later).

It was lust at first sight. This is embarrassing to admit now but that was how it began.

At twenty-six, I was bold and fresh and game. So were my friends, Randy and Greg. That night we worked overtime on tax reports and decided to have dinner at the restaurant across the office before proceeding to a bar five blocks down the road. Kathy served our table.

She looked sexy in her uniform: white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and an apron tied around a slim waist. She was very much covered but all the more did it tempt the imagination, especially since her body had those curves which strained through the silky fabric each time she moved.

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Greg let out a wolf whistle when Kathy approached with a bunch of menus in her arms. He thought she didn’t hear the first one so he did it again. This time she cast him a sideways glare. I scolded my friend. Tsk, tsk, that’s being disrespectful to a pretty young lady, I wagged a finger at Greg.

You should listen to your buddy here, Kathy admonished in a good-natured way. She smiled at me and gave me extra glances each time she came back to our table to serve, which drove my two companions to tease me mercilessly.

Before we left the restaurant, I wrote my phone number on a napkin and inserted it along with the check. I merely took a chance. I didn’t think she’d call back. Then again, perhaps it helped that I was what you’d call the attractive type.

Later on, each time the memory of our first meeting would come up during talks, Kathy and I would remember to thank Greg for being such a jerk that night. Greg stood as best man in our wedding.

In fact, he and I stayed in the same accounting firm and after he got married to Chyna, we developed a weekly ritual of visiting each other’s houses every Saturday for dinners. I actually invited them to keep me company tonight but they were out of town. Their eldest, Greg Junior, just got engaged and they were to meet the girl’s parents for the first time. They promised to host a belated birthday party in my honor on the weekend, though.

I saw my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. The image that glowered back at me was enough to douse any illusions I had started entertaining, and any desire that Lily might have summoned with her presence there in front of me. I was old and the mirror, even with the restaurant’s soft lighting, could not conceal this truth. I comb the hair from the sides over to cover a bald spot on the crown, but that isn’t enough to hide the shiny pate peeking through the strands. It is also as gray as my thick eyebrows. The wrinkles that line my forehead turn into ridges when I frown. Laugh lines etch the corners of my mouth even when I don’t smile.

Taking care of Kathy had accelerated the aging process for me.

While the cancer sapped her health and vitality, it also took its toll on me who served as her personal nurse throughout the ordeal.

Kathy’s mother came in the mornings while I went to work, but I spent nights with my wife and she moaned in pain most of the time and needed something—had to take her medication or go to the toilet—so I wouldn’t get enough sleep. My hair thinned further, I lost weight, as if my body decided that it was unfair that only Kathy suffered the side-effects of chemotherapy. The deep circles that developed around my eyes became permanent. It took Kathy three years to succumb to the disease and when she finally died, I looked as if I had had cancer, too.

Yet before I saw myself in the mirror and the reflection betrayed me, I recognized what I felt. It had been so long I thought I had lost it, but on the night of my fifty-sixth birthday, I felt it again: desire.

I desired her, Lily the waitress. I wanted to share in her youth. With a young girlfriend, I could feel young again. Some men I knew who had young mistresses kept using this excuse in justifying their illicit affairs. I could never comprehend this reasoning, but right then,

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I got it. When I blew out the candle on the cake, I wished for a windfall. I wished I would win the jackpot in the lottery, something which I had been hoping for ever since I was in college and bought my first ticket. These men past middle-age who had mistresses had money—or wasted whatever they earned on them. They lavished their young women with gifts, perfumes, and clothes, and paid their rents and college tuition. At my age, I thought, relationships have to be bought. Love and youth are free only when you are young.

Unfortunately, I could not afford a young girlfriend at the moment if I had to buy her things. All my savings had been wiped-out from Kathy’s treatments. I was starting all over again. I had planned to retire at sixty, but I knew I had no choice but to keep working until I reached the forced retirement age of sixty-five if I were to have enough to live by in retirement.

Would I remarry? A week after the burial, my brother asked me the question. In fact, almost everyone who talked to me, hinted in passing of the possibility of my finding another mate, this while expressing their condolences. Kathy had not been buried yet and I had been asked by a relative, a cousin twice-removed, if I was thinking of getting into another relationship soon. It felt as if no one believes that an elderly man can make it in life without a woman.

After dinner—of which I could not finish half of the salad although I ate the slice of cake to the last crumb because Lily brought it especially for me—I asked for the tab. I took my credit card out of my wallet, slipped it inside the little bill folder and gave it back to Lily the waitress, intentionally grazing her hand with mine when I reached over to hand the folder, but just ever so slightly so she would not notice any malicious intent behind it.

While waiting for the receipt and my card back, I looked over to the bar beyond the restaurant area. A woman, in her late forties by the looks of her, was drinking by herself. I could find someone like her instead, I mused. A more approachable and realistic goal.

I decided on staying longer and moving to the bar. I contemplated buying her a drink. I could cheer her up. She looked glum, staring into space while sipping at a glass of what looked like orange juice.

While I stared at her, praying that she glance at my direction, a man—between forty and sixty, it was hard to tell in the dim light by the bar area—came in from the entrance door and walked toward her. Her eyes lit up when she saw him. She stood up, the man put his arms around her and gave her a quick kiss on the lips.

My eyes followed the two as a waiter led them three tables away from mine. Closer, he turned out to look my age, with even more wrinkles and a paunch. I stared at their hands. She wore a yellow band. So did he. Married, I deduced—or each one married to other people.

Could you please fill-out our survey form, sir? It was Lily the waitress. She was back, handing me a pencil and a small sheet of paper along with my card on a serving plate. I went through the checklist: service, food, ambience. On the lines at the bottom where I was supposed to write my General Comments and Suggestions, I wrote: Happy birthday to me. I thought of writing down my phone number, too. Perhaps it would work again as it had decades ago. But

Fiction

who was I kidding? If I were twenty-six and looked the way I did then, I supposed Lily would have been flattered. Just as Kathy had been that night we first met. A fifty-six year old man giving those kinds of hints to someone who could pass off as his own daughter, however, is what is called a DOM. Dirty old man.

I left and drove home.

I surfed on the Internet before retiring. It had become a habit which I picked up after Kathy got sick and she wanted me to keep her company. I stopped subscribing to newspapers and magazines and simply read stuff online. I had also learned to keep track of blogs on my interests, astronomy and finance. I even opened a Facebook account. I looked up some people on the social website, to see whether they had updated their status or uploaded new photos. I had been stalking their pages. There was my first crush from childhood, Marilyn Dominguez, now Marilyn Cruz with two children and five grandchildren. There was my high school girlfriend, Lydia Vasquez, now Lydia Macasangit. There was another ex-girlfriend, Josie Kabacungan, now Josie Stone after she married a Canadian. Finally, the cheerleader who didn’t even know I existed but which was my reason for attending pep rallies and games in college: Julie Manzano, now Julie Manzano-Rivera. All of them had gotten married, and remained married. I prayed that their husbands would die soon.

When the clock struck midnight, I turned off the computer and went to bed, although I knew it would be a while before I’d fall

asleep. In the darkness I imagined Kathy there beside me in bed.

We were younger and there was sex almost every night—which later turned to once a week, and then much later, every other week, and then once a month, until it dwindled to occasionally and rarely. I wished I would feel her there when I reach out. No, not the fat and wrinkled woman that she had become before she got sick, shrunk, and died, but the young woman with the smooth skin, whose hair smelled like flowers, and held conversations about nebulas, cloning, and Oprah’s latest guest. I missed her.

Raymund P. Reyes currently lives in Ottawa, Canada. His fiction and poetry have been published in Your Impossible Voice, Dappled Things, Carbon Culture Review, The Transnational, and in various literary journals and anthologies in his native Philippines.

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Prudence NANCY DIAMANTE BONAZZOLI

On the drive today I passed a baby fox splayed over dirty pavement, his fur’s strawberry highlights reflecting dawn light.

My heart’s reaction benumbed by living, I didn’t stop.

Wasn’t curious enough to meet his glassed eyes nor compassionate enough to pray over him.

The moon tipped last night, sloshed her brilliance all over my tiny trailer’s walls.

I squinted, shut out radiance.

Still, our city hasn’t burned.

Our family all came home last night.

That it only happens to others is a story we tell ourselves for we, who have time and peace enough for poetry, speak of our privilege to friends who share it.

The wisdom of foresight might have saved the fox; we, who are awake enough to read this now, perhaps might yet weep.

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Vitalii Arkhypenko

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Vitalii Arkhypenko

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Shadow Puppets NANCY DIAMANTE BONAZZOLI

Past midnight, I sit, your writhing pain fracturing my courage.

Gathering my wits I shape my hands create cinema in silhouette:

Palms together, three fingers stretch donkey brays

Fingers shift, elephant’s trunk rumbles grief

Thumbs press together

butterfly flutters disappears

empty sky.

Your glazed eyes widen before dropping the curtain closed, setting our smiles adrift.

What am I calling forth from these shadows?

If it’s any consolation, a star sings that same question to the sky before burning— the waning refrain of its dirge.

Nancy Diamante Bonazzoli is an Oregon poet, writer, and Zen Buddhist Minister. Nancy is a past winner of the William G. Doody Memorial Prize for Poetry, and her debut collection, Absolution, was published in October 2019 by Luminare Press. Some of her works are in various journals, including The Stray Branch, River Poets Journal, Ars Medica, and Blue Moon Literary & Art Journal.

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To Write the Sky NANCY DIAMANTE BONAZZOLI

Outside my window, quail, heads crowned in inked apostrophes bob tentatively; my pen above this empty page.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to make healing read healed, hard to write about what breathes beyond this hill.

Far from news of impeachment trials, DACA kids, Syrian refugees, shot-up schools, fires swallowing citiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; my quiet mountain refuge.

In the distance I hear trees felled for their bodies like young women defiled on dark city streets, glimpse snow angels lying face-up, abandoned in the shadows of a field.

As quivering beaks release mouthfuls of song before sunset finishes bleeding, stars unite to write the sky full of hope.

Vitalii Arkhypenko

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Marcin Jucha

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Flash Fiction

THE JOGGING ENTHUSIAST DEAN GRONDO

O

ne sunny Saturday morning, Dennis Turner exited his home on Magnolia Drive dressed in sweats, a Royals shirt, and tennis shoes. He strode down the four broad steps into the yard. It was a fine morning, nearly perfect temperature, with a nurturing sun tucked in a far corner of the light blue sky.

He meandered off the pebbled walkway and onto the perfectlytrimmed fescue carpet. He verified that the ancient maple at the front of the yard had not spotted the immaculate lawn with sticks.

Glancing back at the house, he admired the attractive colonial. He smiled, thinking what a fine property he owned.

Dennis studied the quiet street and the neighboring homes. He was not a man who went out in public much. At least not like this, clad in running garb. Suddenly embarrassed over the bald spot creeping through his once thick dark hair, and his clothes and the hidden belly paunch, he fought the urge to go back into the house.

He had once been thin and fit and he wasn't at all now. God, how he hated getting old.

Dragging feet like a child, he forced himself to the sidewalk. There were people about and Dennis quickly scanned the neighborhood.

He spotted Mr. Hamm's skinny frame balanced on a ladder across the way and Juliet Chambers in her lascivious outfit, bright pink today, scampering with her two daughters down the block. There was a mower going, the whir and whine peppering the air with inordinate mechanical sound. John Harper cutting that monstrous blue-green lawn; he would be at it all morning.

Cheery voices rang out from the maroon house across the street and Dennis saw the Yaakov boys tearing after one another through the yard. The youngest boy had a toy the others wanted and they all had a shoving match around the concrete stoop. Then the three children sank down onto the steps and fingered the prize equally. The middle boy stuck up a hand and his yellow shirt sleeve fluttered. A chorus of tiny voices shot into the air, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hi, Mr. Turner!â&#x20AC;? Thoroughly embarrassed, nearly mortified at being seen out there that way, Dennis tossed up a limp arm and studied the ground around him as if he were searching for sticks. When he looked up again, the boys were no longer interested in him.

Dennis wondered why he hadn't taken the trouble to buy regular jogging clothes. There were plenty of places to purchase suitable exercise apparel, but his intention to do so had fallen into that pigeonhole of ideas that seemed only to fester with procrastination.

And now he was standing out there in front of all his neighbors looking like a fool. An itch pricked at his hairline and he frowned.

He swiped a nervous hand at the perspiration that stained his forehead. It wasn't hot yet, he had not even left the yard, and he was sweating already. He wondered immediately if maybe he hadn't caught a bug somewhere and if he could be coming down with a cold. Huffing in a breath, he waited for a sneeze that wouldn't come.

His face was warm though and there was that sweating. Wouldn't it be ironic if the first day he began his jogging routine he had a cold and the exercise landed him in bed? He would be sore and miserable and achy for an entire week if he did have a cold starting.

The sensible thing would be to wait until this cold passed. His eyes roved around the bright green lawns and the pristine homes; a sigh came. It was a fine day for jogging. But Dennis was a grown man with responsibilities like work and bills and he couldn't afford to give in to his desire for exercise, not if it was going to land him in bed like that.

Indecision gnawed at him and he wondered if he should go back inside. Or tough it out and risk catching pneumonia or God knows what? The choice was obvious and he reluctantly wandered back toward the house.

There was absolutely no sense in risking his health. Or his reputation. Dennis would go out that very afternoon and pick up an appropriate outfit made especially for jogging. He wanted one of those wrist pulse monitors too, like all the serious joggers wore. Then, when he was healthy and feeling spry again, he would hurdle the gap from indolence to good health wearing respectable sports clothes.

What had he been thinking about going out dressed like that, and on a day when he was suffering from a cold?

He glanced at the lower windows of the house, at his kitchen window. That beige valence was drooping again. Maybe he would see about fixing the stubborn metal rod once and for all, since he had the whole day ahead and nothing much to do. There was a good idea.

He hesitated at the steps. Here he was dressed outdoors and he was going back in. Now he would have to change clothes again with nothing to show for all that trouble. Spying a small twig next to the porch steps, he smiled. He bent and snatched it up. At least he had accomplished something that morning. Twisting the tiny stick in his hand, he went back inside the house.

Dean Grondo is an OTR truck driver. His work has appeared in Aurora Wolf, The Arcanist, and other publications. Dean's obsession for reading non fiction provides him with ideas for sci-fi stories.

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Nothing Falls New HARRIS COVERLEY

A jammed thumb Is not the same as a broken one Although it can hurt as much Lost love is not the same As love unrequited But the pain is just as real It is the season of decay Scuttling human endeavour The rust hangs heavy on the walls The dust gathers in the corners The toothbrush bristles pull apart A piano slowly plays somewhere Outside is the perfect day For mistaking a crisp packet Blown by the wind For a crawling rodent

sirylok

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Harris Coverley has had poetry most recently accepted for Better Than Starbucks, The Oddville Press, Bard, Awen, Star*Line, and Scifaikuest, amongst others. He is also a short story writer, working mainly in the fields of weird and speculative fiction, and has stories published or forthcoming in Curiosities, Planet Scumm, and The J.J. OutrĂŠ Review. He lives in Manchester, England.

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sirylok

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A Hollow Mouth HARRIS COVERLEY

Are you better now?

Oh, what a pity...

You really must come and visit When you get better of course Don’t worry about the bill We’ll get the bill We know you’re good for it And don’t worry about the tip I’ll get the tip (As always) You really must not worry yourself It’s only money Money isn’t everything Did you sort out that loan by the way?

Oh, what a pity...

Well, plenty more in the sea Finance that is Another drink?

Oh dear, we don’t want that, do we?

Going so soon?

But you haven’t finished your...

Oh, oh, I see What a pity...

But please, you must come back soon As soon as you can We miss you always Sorry, what was that?

Oh, what a pity...

Well, that’s how it goes That’s the way it always goes In cases like that (So I’m told) Hmmm?

No, I don’t know about that I can’t really help you there, I'm afraid Well, goodbye Give her my love I miss her so dearly Oh, really?

Oh, what a pity...

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After the Jungle HARRIS COVERLEY

The cat in his plastic cone scratches fiercely at the locked cat flap, desperate to go out, but forbidden to do so.

He has just had his nuts off.

They knocked him out, twisted â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;em up, and lopped â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;em off in broad daylight, and I was the willing collaborator, the instigator, the Vichy-Quisling official who let the Nazi doctors occupy his body, change his destiny.

He stops scratching and looks up at me.

His eyes ask: Why? I look into those eyes and I understand the truth: between us two the wrong beast has been castrated.

And then he howls a high, knowing groan and goes back to scratching at the flap, his cone dragging against the door.

I grab my own balls and whistle a tune.

The cat has paid his price for entering human society.

When will I pay mine?

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sirylok

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Sasha AVITAL BALWIT

FIODAR HUSEU

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Fiction

My phone buzzed.

"Sorry man, something came up, I won't be coming over tonight."

"What's her name?" "lol how'd you guess. It's Helena. Fuck, Elena I guess. The brunette from karaoke."

I put the phone back. I guess I'd hit up the music solo. It wasn't the first time Eric had flaked on our weekly house show date.

Everything came easy to Eric. He splashed through life with this simple joy that seemed so foreign to someone like me. Women?

Adored him. Jobs? Always there when he needed them, always easy to leave when he inevitably got bored. I felt blessed to have even found a part time job doing what I liked -- a small column on local music in the Oregonian, our city paper, while also working as a shop assistant at Powell's Books. Eric, on the other hand, managed to find enough DJ gigs to avoid a day job. He was attractive. A rough, bearded blond who seemed like he had just finished baling hay or hunting deer or whatever lumberjack fantasy his onlooker was concocting. More than that, he oozed confidence like pheromones.

He looked at men like he could out-spit, out-piss, and out-fight any one of them. I knew he had never been in a fight. He looked at women like he was taking their clothes off, and they looked back like they didn't mind.

I turned on the stove. The show started in an hour, so I probably had time for a quick dinner. Eggs and toast would have to do, seeing as that's all I had left. I threw on some coffee to complete the breakfast-at-dusk theme. Thinking better of it, I poured the remainder of the bulldog whiskey into the coffee. The concoction was truly abysmal, but would have to serve as a necessary pregame to attending a show alone.

I hated walking into the house shows the most. Once the music actually began I was happy enough to hide myself in the crowd, anonymous, just another awkward observer with a notepad in one hand and a cheap beer in the other. Everyone would be high anyways.

If I was lucky, perhaps on something stronger, no one would notice me.

I waited for the eggs to finish. I always either undercooked or burned them. Today I was determined to outsmart this crusted skillet. While I waited, I turned to watch the darkened street below the apartment. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the darkened window -- lanky, awkward. I had always struggled to look women in the eyes, let alone talk to them. I turned back to the egg.

It was burned.

I arrived at the house show at 10:30. A dilapidated craftsman in Northeast. Cars lined the street, and I struggled to find somewhere to park. I entered feeling jittery. The line of stoned hipsters on the porch scanned me up and down, but said nothing as I paid my recommended donation of $5 and entered the house. I found my cheap beer and settled myself in the back of the concert room. The band, an indie rock group called "Whale's Tears", was still setting up.

Suddenly, three girls stumbled towards me.

"Hey! You're Eric's friend, right?" began the tallest one, a pale thing with those silly spock bangs and a "vintage" leather jacket.

"Yeah, my name is Sasha." I tried to shake her hand, but she didn't seem to notice.

"Is he coming tonight?" chimed in her small friend with pale pastel purple hair.

"No, I don't think so."

"Awww. Tell him that we miss him. In fact, I'm having a house party next weekend, do you think you could give this to him?"

She handed to a flier, wished me a good night, and sauntered away with her backup dancer pals. Mercifully, the music started shortly afterwards and I was spared any further interactions.

It was that night that I started having the dreams. The first one was odd. Eric and I were driving somewhere. It was dark, looked like the interstate between here and Vancouver. No other cars were around.

We had been sitting in silence when Eric suddenly turned on the radio. I asked him to turn it down. I don't remember why, but I felt like I had to concentrate, as if something horrible were about to happen.

"Please, Eric, just turn it down."

He had only laughed. "Sasha, don't be a pussy. We are the only ones on the road. What are you afraid of?"

Just then we had rounded a curve. A curve I knew didn't exist on that interstate. There was the bridge, but I didn't point at the bridge.

I pointed the car at that sickening gap to the side of the bridge.

"I'm not afraid of anything." I turned to Eric with an odd smile as the car careened into the darkness.

I woke up and went through the day still feeling detached and shaken. I tried to toss it from my head, but I saw that gap over and over. "I'm not afraid of anything."

That next night I dreamed again. Eric and I were at the gorge. He was out on the ledge over Multnomah falls. He had crawled past the mossy fence with its rusty sign reading, "Do not go past this point."

He turned back with his boyish smile, "Come on Sasha! The view is great."

"Eric, I'm not really a fan of heights."

"Don't worry. I'll hold your hand if you want it."

He stood then. Just at the edge, silhouetted by the sinking sun, he looked like a god. And here I was, crouched in the mud a few feet behind him. I crawled under the fence and stood behind him. I put my hand on his corner. He turned to me with his smirk, "Wasn't so hard, right?"

I smiled back and pushed. I saw his eyes widening as he tumbled backwards down through the falls. His blond hair in all that pouring water looked like a flash of sun.

I woke sweating. I shook it off and headed into work. By midday I had already scanned three people's orders wrong, placed graphic novels in the poetry section on accident, and almost set off the fire alarm with the toaster in the breakroom. I told my manager I was feeling ill and clocked out. I wandered down burnside. It was starting to mist. Or perhaps it had been misting for a while -- I hadn't been outside since the morning. On 5th street I saw a homeless man shouting at pigeons. I could relate. I wanted to scream at the pigeons too, or perhaps just a lamp post, what had the pigeons done to me?

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But what had my best friend done? Yet, twice now I had dreamed of his death. I would have put it off as odd dreams, the mysterious subconscious at work, but even now, in the gentle midday light, I didn't mind the thought. I was just so colossally bored, so hopelessly average, that even murder seemed better than my usual activities.

The next Friday, Eric was busy again. This time he was heading to a Flume concert. At midnight he sent me a picture.

"Yo, is this E? Think I can take it safely?" The text was accompanied by a grainy photo of a blue pill.

I was Eric's drug guru. I had gotten pretty into drugs in my first year in college. It was necessitated out of a regular mix of experimental psychedelic experiences for "finding my true passion," and sad Adderall fueled study binges to keep the grades I needed for my scholarship. An older friend in high school from my Comp Sci class had showed me the dark web and I had quickly mastered it, as it wasn't too far off from a slightly sketchier eBay. Ever since then I had made my rounds of most substances. Eric on the other hand, while a champion drinker, didn't know much about drugs from his rather conservative upbringing on a ranch in Bend.

"Send a better photo."

He sent a clearer one. It did look like low grade typical club E. I told him it was safe.

"Thanks, man."

He had asked me a few days later if I would watch his apartment while he went to LA to do a gig. One of his old clients' birthday parties. Of course I agreed. I just had to feed his fish and make sure nothing caught fire.

"Let's do something when I get back?" He had messaged. "I feel like I haven't seen you in forever."

I had another dream that night. It was Sophomore year and I was in the student newspaper offices when Eric banged through the doors. This was how I had first met him -- he wanted the newspaper to do a write up of his band's performance. I told him that we didn't really do things like that. He had demanded to speak to the editor, and someone he had convinced Natasha to send someone. In the dream though Natasha never appeared. Eric turned to me with a grin that looked feral and his face shifted to that of a bear. He loped past me into Natasha's office and I heard a horrible high pitched screaming. Eric reemerged, a human again, with blood all through his beard.

The dream morphed again and Eric and I were in Powell's. He was begging me to leave work early to see a Blazer's game. I told him that I couldn't -- I would get fired. He turned to me calmly and said, "What if this place didn't exist? Then you'd be pretty free."

He extracted a zippo from his pocket and calmly flicked it on. He slowly approached a table laden with that month's bestsellers and lit one book. I screamed but no sound came out. Eric just laughed and laughed. The whole room was burning and neither of us moved.

I woke. It was 3am. I couldn't fall asleep so I got up and paced my apartment. My roommate, thankfully, was a heavy sleeper. He was a quiet philosophy grad student named Philip, who didn't take much interest in my comings and goings.

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I decided now was an ideal time to check on the fish. I pulled up outside his apartment. It was right on the waterfront. I always wonder how he found the place, it looked like any number of yuppies would commit murder for a location like this. He'd probably fucked the landlady -- I wouldn't put it past him. He didn't even have a roommate -- just a bunch of fish. He had originally bought twelve beta fish. I had warned him that male beta fish eat each other, but he had brushed it off saying it was just an online rumor. Sure enough, a brutal civil war ensued until one male beta, four females, and some gore and fins remained in the tank.

Dejectedly, Eric went out and purchased some more placid goldfish to round out the tank.

Now they swam calmly in front of me. I sat on his couch and considered the lights of the city on the other bank. I looked around the messy apartment and thought of its innocent owner, probably somewhere on the highway between here and LA. I'm sure he wasn't thinking of me, so why did he manage to take up so much of my head? Why had he been in my dreams so often recently? He often joked that I was in love with him, but I took that simply as a joke.

Of course at least once in college I had wondered if I was gay, but by now I was fairly certain I wasn't. Then it wasn't love that kept Eric in my dreams. I just could never reconcile that confidence, that ease with life. I was taken with it. I would give anything to have it.

Hurting Eric wouldn't give that to me -- I knew that. This wasn't some ancient Mesoamerican tradition where I could absorb his energies -- I wasn't insane. So why did I still want to do it?

"Let's do something together when I get back."

A request like that from Eric usually meant music or drugs.

Likely both. He had been pushing me to get him some cocaine. He had always wanted to try it. I sat down at his computer. It took me two second to guess his password, "Tits69", and I was on. I had downloaded Tor for Eric a while ago, but he had never taken to ordering his own drugs. He had said it was too complex, but I guessed deep down it was because he preferred that I took the risk. I logged on and quickly found what I was looking for, pure fentanyl, a potent painkiller that was the new recreational fad -- particularly when cut with cocaine. Ridiculously cheap too -- funny how accessible it was considering that about four salt grain size chunks of this could kill a grown man. I ordered 5 milligrams, far more than I would need, to Eric's address. I next ordered half a gram of cocaine.

That was quite a bit more expensive, but hey, it was a onetime splurge. It was almost his birthday anyways -- or at least that's how I could justify it. I fed the fish and then locked up the apartment.

I crawled back into bed at 5am. I woke at 12 and scrambled out of bed. My column was due at 2:00 so I quickly made coffee and huddled over my desk. I sent it in at 1:52pm. It was only when I sat back and thought of last night! What had I done? I felt like I was smothering. I stood and cracked the window, letting the icy November air flow in. I hadn't done anything wrong, I told myself.

With the right dose, Fentanyl was merely recreational. People mixed it with coke all the time and lived. Eric wanted to try coke! It was a goddamn birthday gift. No need to feel so crazy.

Fiction

Eric got back that Wednesday.

"The fish are still alive. Thanks man. Btw, did you order these packages?"

"Yeah, it's something I thought we'd try this weekend."

"Sounds dank."

I got to his apartment at 8 that Friday. I had parked my car by a bar on Ankeny, and I walked the final three blocks. Music was blaring when I knocked and it took him a few minutes to hear my knock and answer the door.

"Hey man, how've you been?" He opened the door with a wide smile. He was wearing one of those tawdry "California Republic" shirts that had the two bears fucking. If asked, he'd say it was ironic.

"Pretty good. How was LA?" I asked, closing the door behind me.

"Fucking mind-blowing. Now is this what I think it is?" He gestured to the two packages on the kitchen table. He'd left them with their labels -- perfect.

"Yeah, it's coke plus something else I thought we'd mix it with.

Get pretty wild, right? I mean you're basically 24."

"Shit man, let's do it then. Right now. Then let's head to Trio, we'll probably wanna dance. I'm gonna make myself a drink, want anything?"

"Naw, I'm fine." Idiot. You can't drink with cocaine. This kid could easily just kill himself, would hardly need any help. Eric has disappeared into the kitchen and I was left alone with the packages.

I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and opened them. I left the packages with his name on the table but put the inner bags which I had touched through his shredder.

The two tiny bags of white stared back at me. Eric called from the kitchen, "I think I'll be a heavyweight. Give me a solid amount -- I want to really feel it."

"Don't be too sure man, wouldn't want to overdo it."

"No, seriously, Sasha, I don't want to do this half assed. I want to feel how I felt on my last night in LA." "What was that like?"

"Shit man, they loved me. The venue must have had like 500 people."

I grabbed his credit card from his wallet on the shelf and put a black magazine down on the table. I slowly sliced through each of the bags.

He kept talking from the kitchen, I heard the clink of ice.

"And everyone was drunk, or high, or rolling. And they were just screaming, screaming at me 'we love you Eric!', 'Play one more song!' I even put on some of my own band's music, I know I don't usually, but these people would have danced to anything. And you know what? I put on fuckin 'Raptor', that one I wrote Junior year, and they loved it!"

I had drawn out both lines of coke now. Pretty big, but definitely not lethal -- a bit intense with the alcohol. I brought out a tiny spoon for the fen. One milligram to each.

Eric's voice wafted through the door, "I couldn't do anything wrong. Man it was intoxicating. Imagine if you became editor or

some shit, and people just begged you to keep writing, just fucking imagine because, yeah, you know it probably won't happen, but it fucking did for me man. It did."

Of course it would never happen for me, Eric. Why remind me? Of course it happened for you. Everything would happen for that golden haired adonis, every door would open to his rough but insistent touch. Whatever angel watched over him clearly had a thing for farm boys, and I doubted there was a guardian angel for awkward part time writers.

I thought about my car, far enough away. No one had seen me come. These bags? Addressed to him. The online section untraceable, our snapchats long deleted. They'd see that one drink and know what kind of kid he was -- another reckless kid trying something he knew nothing about. Another tragic overdose. If only idiots didn't do drugs. I added another milligram to his, then another. I looked at them both -- you could hardly tell.

He came through the door then. "They loved me. And while I was packing up they just kept yelling, 'Don't leave LA! Don't leave!' I think I'll head back man. If that's how they feel about me. Wow, are those it?"

"Yeah, this one is yours. You said you could handle almost anything."

"Shit man, what song should we play?"

"Drop the Game, Flume?"

"Kind of a downer, no?"

"I kind of like it."

"Alright, dealer's choice then."

I suddenly shuddered. What was I doing? I could stop this anytime. I wonder how Judas felt. Electrified, revolted, or like he wouldn't have to follow that arrogant asshole around anymore? I was frozen, holding my tightly rolled $50 in my hand.

"Come on, Sasha, what are you afraid of?"

I smiled then and put the bill to the shiny black paperâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it was done in a second. I passed it to him and he followed suit. I turned to him, his eyes going wide, and I answered, "I'm not afraid of anything."

Avital Balwit is a Portlander currently living on the East Coast. She studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She is currently writing a thesis on technology regulation about the novel policy challenges posed by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. In her spare time, she practices karate and writes short stories and essays.

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Patrick Guenette

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Poetry

The morning’s broad and yellow, enough fluttering grass for ten thousand ankles, and with a trail that leads to a lake as blue as its patron sky.

I climb the hill to shrink the valley below, turn houses to dots, and then loses below all together as trees close in from all sides.

I feel ten years’ old though I’m much older, but I drop the purpose of the day so I may fritter away my time, by the trickle of a stream, up a tamable cliff, in the presence of a wild turkey that stares at me as if it can’t believe I didn’t fly up here.

But then it’s time to leave.

Hunger creeps in.

I’m not quite the Daniel Boone who can live off the fruit of the forest.

Civilization opens back up to the growl of my stomach.

THE UP AND THE DOWN JOHN GREY

There’s the town.

And the dilapidated houses.

The sagging fences.

The beat-up cars.

Nothing that says much for humanity.

But the table is laid.

I’ve tasted the best of what the woods have to offer.

However, nourishment comes in all kinds.

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COUP JOHN GREY

High on a mountain meadow, a humpback bear rose from sunny afternoon slumber.

Its large head made a full circle of the surrounds it commanded by size and ferocity.

It began to move on, slowly at first, but deftly down an ice-carved depression.

Then its strides lengthened.

Muscles rippled under frost-tipped fur, as it propelled itself forward on long, sharp claws.

It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bearing down on prey.

No, it was fleeing, heading for the distant thick clump of alpine fur.

It had spotted two humans high on a ridge.

Its life was now discretion.

Its protocol was change.

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Patrick Guenette

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dalhousie Review, Thin Air, and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in Qwerty, Chronogram, and failbetter.

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DEAR AMERICAN GOTHIC JOHN GREY

How does it feel to be so iconic?

Have you seen the parodies, everything from Mad Magazine, Rocky Horror, to the White Stripes?

And you, stoic farmer, do you ever get the urge to grab that pitchfork and jam it in the face of every tourist ambling through the gallery?

Or, knowing what you know now, would Wood have been your victim number one?

And are you aware how time's moved on?

That house behind you was blown down years ago.

The family farm, you proclaim so doggedly, with your mid-western stare, is as extinct as the passenger pigeon.

These days, you stand for nothing but the easy artistic joke, the tawdry slanders that have you as buffoons.

Of course, the irony is, you, drab-faced man, in blue overalls and dark black jacket, you 're no farmer, but a dentist.

And you, Iowa woman, with your narrow, unseasoned lips, and hair pressed tight against your head, you're no farmer's wife but the artist's sister.

For all your imitators, you're the original imitation.

You're the joke on us.

You're the past putting one over on the future.

So hold onto that pose.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve come to expect.

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Patrick Guenette

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Olha Poharytska

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Flash Fiction

Gyppos JON KEMSLEY

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T

hey had already pitched up by the time I arrived on Monday and so I missed the drama of their forced entry. I’d been phoning round all morning for a gardener after some rather pointed remarks from both sides and I was running a little late.

“We have new neighbours,” says Mandy. “Come and see.”

I looked down and saw two enormous caravans, a large truck, a smaller truck, and a rusty hatchback with one of its hubcaps missing.

There was a dog tied to a signpost and, off in the far corner, another dog asleep on a blanket. Three or four adults engaged in a vigorous discussion and four, maybe five, children running around shoeless in the dirt.

“Mummy, mummy,” says Bob, pawing the window, “it’s the circus.”

“It’s disgusting,” says Sue. Sue is having an affair with Tony who is married. She shakes her head. “It shouldn’t be allowed.”

“But it’s not,” says Tony.

“Yes, well, it shouldn’t be. That’s all I’m saying.” Sue slaps Tony on the arm.

“Breeding like rabbits,” says Philippa, who has three of her own.

“I know, it’s disgusting,” says Sue. My phone was on the desk beside me for the rest of the day as I struggled to meet deadlines. I’d left messages with several companies but nobody was calling me back. And so it went. On Tuesday we observed our new neighbours rolling empty oil drums across the concrete to clear a parking space for one of the trucks. Nobody could remember where the oil drums had come from but there were certainly a lot of them. We looked down and disapproved.

“Where’s the pony?” asks Sue suddenly.

“What pony?” asks Tony.

“There was a pony. A little one.” Sue raises her left hand just so high.

“There wasn’t a bloody pony.”

“There was. It was on the back of one of the trucks.”

Tony sniggers. “Maybe they had it for breakfast.”

“Don’t be horrible,” says Sue. The pony eventually appeared from behind a clump of bushes and trotted over to the children to be petted. The weather was holding and the adults were busy setting out deck chairs and canopies and cooler boxes. On Wednesday we saw them swing the larger of the caravans around on its wheels to move it into the shade of our office block. The children hugged themselves and jumped up and down as the men heaved and spat and the women crossed their arms and pursed their lips.

“I walked past there earlier,” says Philippa, spraying herself with perfume. The perfume carries her perspiration across the office.

“Terrible smell.”

Tony frowns. “You can’t smell them from the street.”

“Okay, no, but it looks pretty smelly in there.” Philippa winks at Mandy. “Not the sort of thing you’d want to live next door to.”

“How’s your garden coming along?” asks Mandy.

By now I’d received calls from two firms both of whom were unable to offer the kind of clearance I had in mind. A third had messaged with a figure I was unwilling to part with and a note

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suggesting that I’d be very lucky to et cetera et cetera. There had been more comments over the fence and the situation was starting to wear me down. Thursday arrived without incident but the topic of conversation had not changed.

“It’s not a campsite,” says Bob, “it’s a scrapyard.” Bob works on cars in his spare time and has one up on bricks outside his house.

“Nice,” says Tony. “I wonder how long they’ll last.”

“What do you mean?” asks Sue. “Before they get moved on.” Tony shrugs. “Sooner or later they always get moved on.”

“Leaving their mess behind,” says Philippa.

“And one or two kids,” says Bob, poking Philippa in the ribs.

Mandy is back at the window. “Oh, look, something’s happening.

Come and see.”

Something was indeed happening. The adults were folding chairs and carrying them back into the caravans and the children were running about gathering up their toys. An older man with his shirt open to the waist appeared to be directing the operation. Soon all of the various items consisting a life on the move had been packed away and everyone was inside with doors and windows closed. One of the girls ran back out to retrieve a doll and then disappeared inside the smaller caravan.

“They had a fire going last night,” says Tony. “And pop music.”

He scowls. “Bloody racket.” Tony owns a large pair of speakers and an extensive collection of heavy rock records.

“Mind your language,” says Philippa.

“Your kind of people,” says Bob. “Invite them over for dinner.”

Tony frowns. “Not bloody likely.”

“Language,” says Philippa.

A couple of minutes later a blue van with an orange light on its roof trundled up a side road and onto the broken tarmac. It circled round and came to rest in front of the caravans. The window on the passenger side was rolled down as the older man with the open shirt emerged from one of the trucks. He waved his arms about and then shrugged and pointed off in the direction of the gate. The window was rolled back up and the van circled slowly back round before departing.

“Told you,” says Tony.

And then they were gone. The plot would remain unsold for the next eighteen months, by which time it would have established itself as a popular site for dog-walking and fly-tipping. And my neglected garden would come to resemble a wildlife sanctuary: ivy climbing the brickwork to trouble the adjoining properties, sparrows darting into the brambles for insects that buzzed and settled, larger creatures rustling unseen in the tall grass. I would eventually get around to having it all paved over.

Jon Kemsley has been published in Ellipsis, Ginosko, the Fiction Pool, New World Writing, Neon, and others. He lives and works on the south coast of England, listens to old jazz records, and occasionally remembers to call his brother about whatever it was he promised to do the last time.

Literary Work

kuco

Tequila MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON

Single life is Tequila with a slice of lime, Shots offered my traveling strangers.

Play them all deal them jacks, some diamonds then spades, hold back aces play hardball, mock the jokers.

Paraplegic aging tumblers toss rocks, Their dice go for the one-night stand.

Poltergeist fluid define another frame.

Female dancers in the corner Crooked smiles in shadows.

Single ladies donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat that tequila worm dangle down the real story beneath their belts.

Men bashful, yet loud on sounds, but right times soft spoken.

Ladies men lack caring verbs, traitors to your skin.

Ladies if you really want the worm, Mescal, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be confused after midnight.

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Poetry

kuco

Open Eyes Laid Back MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON

Open eyes, black-eyed peas, laid back busy lives, consuming our hours, handheld devices grocery store “which can Jolly Green Giant peas, alternatives, darling, to bring home tonightthese aisles of decisions.”

Mind gap: “Before long apps will be wiping our butts and we, others, our children will not notice.”

No worries, outer space, an app for horoscope, astrology a co-pilot to keep our cold feet tucked in.

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Michael Lee Johnson lived 10 years in Canada during the Vietnam era and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, DuPage County, Illinois. Mr. Johnson published in more than 1072 new publications, his poems have appeared in 38 countries, he edits, publishes 10 poetry sites. Michael Lee Johnson has been nominated for 2 Pushcart Prize awards in poetry.

canicula

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Poetry

Dance of Tears, Chief Nobody MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON

I’m old Indian chief story plastered on white scattered sheets, Caucasian paper blowing in yesterday’s winds.

I feel white man’s presence in my blindnesscross over my ego my borders urinates over my pride, my boundariesI cooperated with him until death, my blindness.

I’m Blackfoot proud, mountain Chief.

I roam southern Alberta, toenails stretch to Montana, born on Old Man River− prairie horse’s leftover buffalo meat in my dreams.

Eighty-seven I lived in a cardboard shack.

My native dress lost, autistic babbling.

I pile up worthless treaties, paper burn white man.

Now 94, I prepare myself an ancient pilgrimage, back to papoose, landscapes turned over.

I walk through this death baby steps, no rush, no fire, nor wind, hair tangled− earth possessions strapped to my back rawhide− sun going down, moon going up, witch hour moonlight.

I’m old man slow dying, Chief nobody.

An empty bottle of fire-water whiskey lies on homespun rug, cut excess from life, partially smoked homemade cigarbarely burning, that dance of tears.

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To-Read List New Reader Media, a creative marketing firm working in partnership with New Reader Magazine, takes on the challenge of bookmarking emerging voices in the indie publishing world. Presented in no particular order, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New Reader Mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reading list for this quarter of 2020!

The Adventures of Charlie Chipmunk MICHAEL J. RUBEL For most creatures, making one's way in the world can be hard even when life seems better than most days. It's a whole other story for Charlie Chipmunk who thinks it's downright scary. Follow along as he grows and learns through his adventures to find a mate and his place in the world.

What on Earth Are You?: In Heaven's Name RICHARD H. PALMQUIST An engaging read containing commentaries exploring personality aspects relating to God and to society. Palmquist shows how defining the inner workings of one's relationships with God and friends play a part in creating a favorable quality of life.

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The Christian Survival Guide Made Simple: Ten Tips that will offer Hope, Peace, Love and Motivation SHEENA HALL This is a timely book if you want to get a jump start on becoming a Christian Warrior. It provides answers to some of the questions we ask ourselves everyday, and features Survival Tips that will definitely have a deep impact on your thoughts and perceptions on life's different scenarios.

The Bible Bucket List PAUL KACSUR A great source of bucket list ideas for Christians, and a wellspring of motivation to start doing something for the glory of God. Read this to help you form a deeper relationship with Him!

Lord, What Do You Want Me To Do PAUL KACSUR Have you ever had that worry of coming to the end of your life without ever having asked what God wants you to do? This book filled with guides for a variety of situations when we need divine direction is perfect for you. Read on and learn to confidently ask God what He wants you to do.

Lord, How Can I Serve You Better?

PAUL KACSUR For many Christians, the desire to be better stewards to the Lord can be unbearably strong. This book written by a man of strong faith can help quell that desire and direct it to what really matters in life, and offers Scripture-based suggestions to "tweak" one's faith and relationship with the Lord.

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The Power of Goodbye: Walking Into Freedom YOUSCHKA CHARLOTTE Letting go and saying farewell are difficult things to do. This book helps in stepping out of your comfort zone and earning your wings to fly.

Motherhood: A Journey Into Your Own Heart YOUSCHKA CHARLOTTE Through the gift of motherhood, Youschka shares her journey in facing her fears and doubts and making those pain and tears worthwhile.

Who’s Pulling My Strings?: How I Learned to Free the Puppet and Feel Safe to Be Me MARDI KIRKLAND Undeniably taking readers beyond theory and showing them what it will be like to take life-changing steps and what to do when obstacles seem to be blocking your path.

Who’s Pulling My Strings? Companion Writing Journal: A Self-Discovery Adventure & Journey to Becoming Free MARDI KIRKLAND This writing journal is your journey inward to release what is keeping you from knowing the beauty that is you.

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Bye-Bye Baby on the Treetops ELIZABETH MUIR-LEWIS Terror, love, and forgiveness come together in this captivating thriller about a musician whose past, present, and future are irreversibly fusedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a dazzling narrative for any thrill-seeker.

I'm Catchinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Hell GREGORY NORMAN After Joshua Townsend experiences a life-altering event, he finds himself remembering monumental happenings in his life that all led to his current situation and molded the person he currently is.

Hell Don't Last Always GREGORY NORMAN In the second installment to the Townsend story, Norman once again gifts his readers with a story that's emotionally-stirring and suspensful, and still remarkably relevant to current real-life issues.

No More Gun Violence: The Solution DAVID Y. WEISS Having been born to Holocaust survivors, author David Weiss takes a step forward into reducing the evils of this world. This book is for those who, like him and many others, wish to be free of fear of any danger caused by violence.

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Diversity: A Reality for America, Racism Still Its Nightmare CHARLES NATHANIEL SMITH A poignant commentary that houses a true conversation about race and race relations. It teaches readers that we could live as the constitution stands for: We as a Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not one people, but all people where all lives truly matter, every day.

The Thought of Her BLAKE BAILEY An intimate recounting of travels and journeys across the world, told from the raw and honest perspective of someone who's lived the realities of fiction.

Quoting Matilda: The Words and History of a Forgotten Suffragist SUSAN SAVION Matilda Joslyn Gage had some very interesting things to say, although they weren't readily accepted during her time. Author Susan Savion has put together some of the late activist's very quotable remarks for those of us who are more open-minded, and those who'd like to expand their perspective more.

Wee Willie One Sock JOHN PETRIE Join Lucy and Matthew, two lovable cats, and help Willie look for the missing sock around the whole house!

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Reset Families: Building Social and Emotional Skills While Avoiding Nagging and Power Struggles SHARON ALLER Reset Families is ideal for parents, grandparents, teachers, and other caregivers of kids ages three to thirteen, but its principles can be adapted to children of any age.

I Suppose the Rose Knew CARMEN CLEGG I Suppose the Rose Knew is a story about a young girl around the age of eight or nine. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in front of her home kneeling at a bed of roses when she discovers one of the roses is not looking so well and it saddens her when she thinks the rose knows it's not going to make it.

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WRITER’S CORNER

Events, Conferences, Awards

ART FESTIVALS BUKU MUSIC + ART PROJECT

CHAIN OF PARKS ART FESTIVAL

Photo: Beaucoup Holdings, LLC

Photo: Chain of Parks

When: March 20 – 21, 2020

When: April 18 – 19, 2020

Where: New Orleans, Louisiana

Where: Tallahassee, Florida

BUKU is a New Orleans playground that celebrates the progressive subculture of the city. It’s a vibrant music and art festival fused with an underground warehouse party, whose anthems are originality, creativity, freedom, and community. Let go and immerse yourself in BUKUlture.

Under a canopy of mossy oaks, visitors can view and purchase unique works of art from 170 carefully selected fine artists. Enjoy local heritage re-enactments, family fun, local food vendors, children’s art activities, and live entertainment.

ART FAIR TOKYO

The Village, a highly interactive section of the festival, includes community partners and children’s art programs, where the youngest guests can participate in pop-up studios, interactive activities and various types of craft-making. On its 20th anniversary, the festival is launching a new 3D chalk art component. Guests walking in the parks downtown will be in awe of what these artists are capable of bringing to life.

Photo: The Japan Time

When: March 20 – 22, 2020 Where: Tokyo, Japan Art Fair Tokyo is one of the two most major art fairs in Japan. It was created in 2005 with one goal: connecting—be it the past and the present, or Asia and the rest of the world, in a single exciting show. It’s become an unmissable event in the Japanese cultural calendar, garnering 50,000 visitors every year. The fair offers attendees a rich panorama through time and media.

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Events, Conferences, Awards

ARTISPHERE

TEMPS DE FLORS

Photo: Artisphere

When: May 8 – 10, 2020 Where: Greenville, South Carolina Founded in 2003, the mission of Artisphere is to create a nationally recognized Fine Arts festival that enhances the quality of life and economic vitality in South Carolina. The 15th Anniversary of Artisphere was a huge success. Applications reached 952; average artists’ sales were over $9,730; attendance neared 70,000; and economic impact grossed an astounding $9.1 million. Artisphere has grown into a centerpiece of Greenville’s cultural calendar and has distinguished itself as both a national and regional destination.

RUPAUL’S DRAG CON Photo: Lara Pujol

When: May 9 – 17, 2020 Where: Girona, Spain The story of Temps de Flors is that of young entrepreneurs who decided to organize the Provincial Flower Exhibition Contest in the Resting Room of the Municipal Theater 61 years ago. Growing interest pushed them to launch an event that has now enmeshed itself with the social fabric of Gerona, and has since become the city’s largest international festival.

Photo: DVSROSS

When: May 1 – 3, 2020 Where: Los Angeles, California For three days, drag queens, artists, celebrities, shops, musicians, and fans gather downtown to experience Drag Race in person. Come see performances on the Main Stage, meet queens and celebrities, watch panels, or shop for makeup. Grab your friends and come to the biggest drag event in the world!

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Events, Conferences, Awards

LITERARY FESTIVALS TECH FORUM &AMP; EBOOKCRAFT

IBPA PUBLISHING UNIVERSITY

Photo: Yvonne Bambrick

Photo: The Independent Book Publishers Association

When: March 23 – 25, 2020

When: April 3 – 4, 2020

Where: Toronto, Canada

Where: Redondo Beach, California

Tech Forum is an annual conference presented by BookNet Canada that focuses on technology, data-driven approaches, and collaboration in the book industry. They provide hundreds of book industry professionals with the opportunity to learn, collaborate, network, and have a glimpse into the future of our industry. In 2020, integrated into the forum is ebookcraft, a conference-within-a-conference for digital publishing professionals.

As the largest independent publishing association in the United States, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) knows there are literally hundreds of book conferences you could attend this year, mostly filled with fluff that's irrelevant to small presses and author publishers. For nearly three decades, IBPA Publishing University has been the indie publishing community's must-attend networking and educational event. Why? Because their expert speakers understand how to start, grow, and succeed in publishing's new world.

NONFICTION WRITERS CONFERENCE

Photo: The Independent Book Publishers Association

When: May 6 – 8, 2020 Where: Online Since the Nonfiction Writers Conference launched in 2010, their mission has always been to take the traditional writers’ conference experience and deliver it online. This allows more people to attend from around the world, saving time and money on travel expenses. They’ve also celebrated many of their attendees and members who have gone on to launch books into the world, and shared their successes.

This event is virtual; all sessions delivered in webinar format. You can watch the live sessions via webcast, listen to the replays later, or read the typed transcripts. Plus, they’ll have some fun surprises to celebrate their tenth year. Don’t miss their best event yet!

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WRITER’S CORNER

Events, Conferences, Awards

RSJ BOOK LOVERS’ CONVENTION

BOOKCON

Photo: RSJ Convention

Photo: The Independent Book Publishers Association

When: May 28 – 30, 2020

When: May 30 – 31, 2020

Where: Norfolk, Virginia

Where: New York City, New York

The RSJ Convention is an annual book lovers' event celebrating authors of romance and women's fiction. The RSJ Book Lovers' event provides craft workshops in writing, publishing, marketing, and more. The event also provides a segment to draw attention to multicultural protagonists and cater to reader and author engagement.

BookCon is the consumer extension of BookExpo, North America’s largest gathering of book industry professionals from around the globe. The show is designed to appeal to the modern-day book lover with an appreciation for broader pop culture and where these worlds intersect.

RSJ also supports authors and readers by providing marketing opportunities to help get great books into the hands of more readers via online promotion, knowledgeable workshops, and conferences celebrating talented authors of romantic and women's fiction.

It is the ultimate fan event where storytelling and pop culture collide, offering fans unprecedented access to authors, publishers, celebrities, and creators of content that influence everything we read, hear, and see.

LITERARY FESTIVALS SXSW When: March 13 – 21, 2020 Where: Austin, Texas For nine days in March, creatives of all stripes gather for the acclaimed SXSW Film Program to celebrate raw innovation and emerging talent, both behind and in front of the camera.

Running concurrent with the SXSW Conference and Music and Comedy Festivals, attendees can take advantage of the opportunity to connect with tech and music industry experts, making the SXSW Film Festival an unparalleled experience at the forefront of discovery, creativity, and innovation.

Photo: Bad Trip by Kitao Sakurai

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Events, Conferences, Awards

Photo: Movies That Matter

MOVIES THAT MATTER FESTIVAL When: March 20 – 28, 2020 Where: The Hague, Netherlands

Movies that Matter is the leading international festival about human rights and a sustainable society that takes place at The Hague, the city of Peace and Justice. It screens feature films and documentaries, and stages debates, music, and lots more over a period of nine days.

The festival includes three competition programmes: Activist, a selection of documentaries on human rights defenders in partnership with Amnesty International; Camera Justitia, which focuses on the importance of the rule of law and the fight against impunity; and Dutch Movies Matter, presenting Dutch feature films and documentaries that raise awareness of human rights issues.

NOHO CINEFEST

EBERTFEST

Photo: North Hollywood CineFest

Photo: Ebert Fest

When: April 9 – 16, 2020

When: April 15 – 18, 2020

Where: Los Angeles, California

Where: Champaign, Illinois

A state-of-the-art experience is combined with a vibrant local social scene to create NoHo CineFest, a festival that everyone will enjoy.

Films from all around the world are programmed in the festival, making it an exciting opportunity to showcase your work and enjoy indie cinema at its finest!

True to Roger Ebert’s vision, the twelve films screened during the five-day event represent a cross-section of important cinematic works overlooked by audiences, critics, and/or distributors. Some films come from lists of possible films that Roger drew up over the first 15 years of the festival.

They also invite the Hollywood community to provide a festival experience that is fun, informative, and productive, with an exce

All the festival films will be screened in the 1,500-seat Virginia Theatre, a restored 1920s movie palace with state-of-the-art 35/70mm and digital projection. A portion of the Festival’s income goes toward on-going renovations of the theatre.

ptional networking atmosphere. It has become a must-attend event for anyone in the world of films.

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Events, Conferences, Awards

ATLANTA FILM FESTIVAL When: April 30 – May 10, 2020 Where: Atlanta, Georgia Celebrating its 44th year, the Atlanta Film Festival is the region’s preeminent celebration of cinema. The organization offers entertainment, networking, education, and professional development year-round. The festival itself is one of the largest and longestrunning in the region. It is also the most distinguished event in its class, recognized as the 'Best Spring Festival' by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 'Best Film Festival' by Creative Loafing, Sunday Paper, 10Best, and Atlanta Magazine, as well as one of the '25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World' and one of the '50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee' by MovieMaker Magazine.

Photo: Atlanta Film Festival