Vol. II, Issue I - December 2014 by The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society

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THE RAIN, PARTY, & DISASTER SOCIETY IS A WORKSHOP-BASED ONLINE LITERARY PUBLICATION THAT STRIVES TO GIVE REPRESENTATION TO NEW IDEAS AND THOUGHTS, TO CHALLENGE THE READER, AND TO QUESTION COMMONLY ACCEPTED OPINIONS, VALUES, ETIQUETTE, AND IDEAS. WITHIN OUR PAGES, YOU MAY FIND: WORKS THAT TACKLE HOT-BUTTON ISSUES, WORKS PRESENTED IN A STYLE THAT IS OUT OF THE ORDINARY, WORKS THAT PRESENT THE READER WITH A QUESTION OR DEBATE, AND WORKS THAT BREAK MAINSTREAM RULES WITHIN THEIR GENRE. ALL OF THE PIECES YOU FIND ON THIS SITE HAVE BEEN THROUGH OUR WORKSHOP PROCESS, DURING WHICH THE RP&D EDITORIAL STAFF WORKS CLOSELY WITH CONTRIBUTORS TO HONE THEIR VOICE AND HELP THEM TO PRODUCE THE BEST POSSIBLE WORK FOR YOU, THE READER, TO EXPERIENCE.

TO RESPOND DIRECTLY TO A WORK YOU SEE FEATURE IN THIS ISSUE, USE OUR CONTACT PAGE TO SENT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF. YOU MAY ALSO WRITE YOUR OWN REBUTTAL AND SUBMIT IT FOR PUBLICATION IN A FUTURE ISSUE.

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Table of Contents

Pg 4. - PUTIN ON THE RITZ, Kim Peter Kovac - WHO SAID, Ae Hee Lee Pg. 5 - SPIRITUAL HELP, Mitchell Grabois Pg. 6 - MOTHER PLANTS A SEED, Valentina Cano Pg. 7 - VISION, Krista Farris Pg. 10 - SOMETHING PRECIOUS, Vanessa Raney Pg. 12 - MARCEL, Alex Sobel Pg. 14 - JIMMY LEGS, Reeves Stockard Pg. 15 - THE INVISIBLES, Kayla Pongrac Pg. 17 - WITHOUT A BUTTERFLY, Jordan Rizzieri Pg. 19 - BALLISTIC FUGUE, Ashley Parker Owens Pg. 20 - THE ATOMIC DOG AND THE TABBY RAY-CAT, Kim Peter Kovac Pg. 21 - FROM (WHOM), Robin Shawver Pg. 22 - WRITE OR DIE, Nicole Yurcaba Pg. 24 - A STUDY IN STUDYING ABROAD, EUROPE’S FARTHEST SHORE, AND COMING INTO YOUR OWN BODY AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME, Bee Walsh Pg. 26 - WEAPON OF CHOICE, Krista Farris Pg. 27 - VFW, Mitchell Grabois Pg. 28 - AN EPISTOLARY SHORT STORY, Adam Robinson & Dmitri Bailey Pg. 29 - BUT, Ae Hee Lee Pg. 30 - FIVE MINUTES WITH THE AVERAGE VOTER, Adam Kane

Pg. 32 - EDITORIAL STAFF Pg. 33 - CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

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PUTIN ON THE RITZ Kim Peter Kovac

homophobic laws –   so what’s with all those pictures   with bare chest and bears?

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WHO SAID  Ae Hee Lee

the smoke fleeing from cigarette   butts next to the roadside resembled sighs?

Dunno.

But if there is sadness in this world   it must be because our hearts are as tender   as worn-out ballads.

Would you give up a kilo of lilac   for diamond knives?

Maybe.

Don’t maybe me.  Let’s carry that precious burden   through and deep and above

until all is blown away,   until the last piece of paper   dissolves like wax resigning to flame.

I pray.

SPIRITUAL HELP  Mitchell Grabois The Statue of Liberty rose before me as I climbed from steerage, as I would later climb subway stairs to my job in the garment district. The green statue in my blurry vision was a monster, like the ones my son would create in the movie industry. At that point, I’d never even seen a movie but later, here was my son, making monsters. I shrunk from the statue. Some burly Italian pushed me forward onto Ellis Island. I fell and tore my only pair of pants, already worn and frayed and dirty from riding on top of the train from Rumania to the ship in France. It was not a graceful entrance to America. It was, I later learned, Chaplinesque. I was, like Chaplin, a tramp with a funny hat, wretched refuse yearning to breathe free. The Statue seemed to tilt and fall over like a special effect in one of my son’s movies. It was only me, sick, sentenced to quarantine for eight weeks, already a criminal, and I hadn’t even done anything. I never made much money in America, but my son made a boatload in the movie business. But my grandson didn’t give a shit about money, and he had the Jew-itch. He decided to return to “his roots,” a laughable concept if you ask me. But there you are. No one heard from him for a long time, but lately I got a letter. Dear Gramps, Painted white with blue stripes, Stars of David on its sides, the bus left Tel Aviv. I was already asleep, my serotonindeprived brain anaesthetized with hashish and codeine. Time/miles passed. The bus hit a pothole large enough to shelter a terrorist on the lam, and my lolling head hit the forward seat’s chrome bar. I awoke, disoriented, itchy, nauseous, dry-mouthed. Not yet realizing that I was a holy man, I’d been looking for a mentor and settled on a man named Morris Mordes. His dated New York hipsterism appealed to me but, ultimately, my destiny set us against each other. Morris Mordes (the man I’d chosen to be my mentor, to fill the vacancy my father had never inhabited) and I stayed on a kibbutz. I worked hard, stopping to wipe my brow and look out at the summit where Jesus had given his Sermon on the Mount. I weeded crops, inspired by His love, though I was still a dark, denying Jew. I don’t know why the State of Israel admitted Mordes, other than the notion that hard work in the Holy Land would redeem any Jew. Mordes didn’t work hard. He’d always been a slacker and malingerer, and the proximity to Jesus’ mount, David’s Tomb, Mary’s Well, meant nothing to him. For Mordes, the return to the Promised Land was just another ineffective rehab. On days off we hitchhiked to Afula, the nearest Arab village, sat in a restaurant with high cement walls and a slowly rotating ceiling fan, dragged scraps of pita across a muddy sludge of hummus and tehini, and sipped Arak until the room whirled around us, whirled us out across the road to a pharmacy where they dispensed cough syrup heavy with codeine, no prescription needed. Mordes grinned, revealing yellow teeth. We wove our way out of that dusty town, passing the cough syrup bottle between us. I was always aware, somewhere down in my cranium or my heart that if my father had inhabited his life, I would never have considered spending time with Morris Mordes.

All the windows of the bus were open. I cursed myself for forgetting my water bottle in the station. Dazzling sunshine illuminated the window rivets, which were the eyes of intrusive bugs. I was sitting on the broad back seat, rubbing shoulders with an Arab workman with a bristly moustache. I could feel his hard muscles against my soft shoulder. On my other side was a middle-aged woman who wore a flowered blouse and held a green plastic shopping bag on her lap. The workman ignored me. I wondered if he hated Jews for taking his homeland and laying on theirs, but the woman saw something in me. I knew it when she lay her hand on my arm and I turned to her. Her eyes were sparkling and filled with tears. She was the very first of those who appealed to me for spiritual help.

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MOTHER PLANTS A SEED Valentina Cano

My mother once told me  I was pretty but not enough  to be on a magazine.  She had finished flipping  through a shellacked mixture   of fashion and money,  and was staring at the teenage girl  on the back cover.  She flicked her eyes back at me,  sitting seal-like on my chair.  Waiting for any excuse to clap.

VISION  Krista Farris

I. The transition between the blue of the sky and your eyes is seamless. You gaze out as the boundless air breathes you in. The azure traverses peak after peak unbroken cloudless horizon and crumbling mounts alienate earthly life. You are perfectly at home. Disarming the silence of sandrock, deserts, and basins of salt. II. When I wake the music streams out the window onto the blinding metal roof then dissipates to steam in a puff. Foresight

is as much blessed curse as this lovedrowning selfish will. Then what is there but the sweat slicked roof on which poor souls cannot tread without some mystic religious chant   Ooh-ah that lets feet pitter pat with ease across the guttered edge until falling onto the pin-cushion crab grass below softened by a pile of pigeon fluff? Already your presence is so felt. III. In the silence of tomorrow I have said everything. And you are monk-like

Still Alone In your underwear Internally bleeding with Your books Your business Your life Precious You are Dying

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with me.

SOMETHING PRECIOUS Vanessa Raney

The first time I heard the question, “You’re not a mother, are you?,” it was said by my Croatian house mother whose home I’d shared for almost a year. That conversation signaled a turning point in terms of how her family saw me since, while explaining why her daughter denied me Mia’s drawings, which she’d created using my materials, she said that it was normal for some mothers to not want to share their children with strangers. Some context, then: Earlier in the day I’d been outside focusing on my sketches for an art poem series I wanted to enter for a chapbook competition. Because of the dimensions required, I inserted two boxes on one page (in landscape format) so that I could focus the drawings in smaller spaces, then printed several copies to work with. Soon after, 10-year-old Mia saw me and asked me what I was doing. I told her: Trying to draw a canyon with overlapping sea water. Thinking she could help, she offered to show me how she would create the scene and took my paper and pen. When she was done I thanked her and, within a few minutes, she returned to make a portrait of me on the left-hand side that turned out somewhat garish since my body, which was behind a doghouse, gave the overall effect of a jack-in-the-box. Then her grandmother, who was removing laundry from the pull string, became the inspiration for her next drawing on the right-hand side. Sure, I noticed that she didn’t put any face lines on her grandma as she did with me, but when Mia finished I exclaimed to her Nona to come and see what her granddaughter had done; and we all laughed. By this time, Mia was committed. On the next page she turned the left-hand side into a web with a hungry spider (indicated by the vocative “Njam!” which is similar to our “Yum!”), a bug and a bumblebee. Below the bottom line of the box – thus choosing, for the only time, to literally go outside the box – she added a frog that demanded to the arachnid: “Daj mi muhe! (Give me the bumblebee)!” Keeping her focus on nature, Mia then drew a colorful interpretation of the seasons on the right-hand side. This she managed with the simple addition of facial expressions on the trees. Her other drawings included a boat with what at first appeared to be a cross; but, after asking her if it was a cross, she added lines to better reflect an antennae. There was also one particularly detailed drawing that included many animals (a cat, bird, worm, tortoise, squirrel, and other things), a tree and nest, grass and flowers, a yawning moon with cap, and, finally, a frowning sun which she explained was sad because it was going away (an interesting way to describe a sunset). Yet, I don’t recall when Mia began to ask me for suggestions on what to draw. What I remember clearly, though, is that once I suggested a forest and she said it would be too hard; so I asked her for a bridge with a loving couple. Then I watched her, seeing how smartly she used the shape of the bridge to make the torsos, legs and feet, with big lips on both figures to show they were kissing. I remember the yawning moon saying, “Ooooh kako slatki!” which translates to, “Ooooh how sweet!” This experience between Mia and me created a unique memory. For this reason, I wanted to preserve it and, since she used my paper and pen to create her drawings, I had planned to keep them; but I also made copies of the original drawings to share with her grandmother.

Then later, while reflecting more on Mia’s drawings, I had an inspiration for ekphrasis which would’ve involved me writing poems or short stories in response to the images she’d created. Because I felt that it would make for a great chapbook, I wanted to ask her parents’ permission to collaborate with her, as Mia was still a child. So I sent an e-mail to her aunt first, as she understands English better than her sister. Then, when I saw Mia again the next day during lunch, I told her my idea and, because of her enthusiasm, said that I’d talk with her parents about it. Her Nona, though, was also there and, for whatever reason, decided to ask Mia’s mom about it without telling me; while I don’t know what was actually communicated, she told me that evening that not only did Mia’s mom say no to the project idea (and note that I was okay with this), but that she also wanted the original drawings back so they could be thrown away (and this I didn’t understand at all). Possibly, Mia’s mom feared that I would use the drawings anyway; but I don’t think she’ll ever understand what she actually took from me – and that was a precious memory that the images would’ve evoked many years later when I would be, for Mia, a dim ghost, as she’s old enough to remember me but young enough that, unless I made some vital impression on her, she will easily forget. As for me, I had connected with Mia as an artist, and the experience we shared had been inked into her drawings: of laughter, feeling part of a family, and the strengthening of a bond between us. Still, I won’t pretend to know what a parent feels; I’m not one. Nor will I accept that jealousy wasn’t part of the decision that made me give back the drawings, the reason I won’t tell Mia’s family that I still have one bad copy of the page with the spider and seasons. You see, when I made copies of the drawings as a keepsake for Mia’s grandmother, one of them cut off of the words at the top. That’s why I’d made another copy with the page switched around so that it would capture everything, keeping the bad copy as scratch paper since I still had the originals at that time. Only later (after I’d given back the originals), while looking for something else, did I find it again; and seeing it made me almost cry. So while I’m not a mom, I do know what it means to have something precious taken away – and maybe that’s what I did to Mia’s mom without intending to: reminded her that she isn’t spending enough of these early years with her daughter to even be inspired by her. I wrote this to keep a record of what my memory could hold, which is why I talked so much about what Mia drew since, one day, I may have nothing left to remind me but this one bad copy. Of course I know that it shouldn’t matter so much; but that day was also one of the few times I’d felt closest to knowing what it would be like as a mom. That sentiment, thus, more than the actual experience, maybe explains why I felt so sad about giving back the drawings – because I gave away more than I wanted to.

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MARCEL Alex Sobel

I wanted to be with Marcel for as long as I knew him. I never thought it was anything beyond lust, but that I was being too generous to myself. It was a more sinister longing. He was a beautiful man with an easy soul, the kind of person that goes through life without realizing that the world doesn’t revolve around him. From the moment I met him, I knew he didn’t understand real empathy, real understanding. I’ve never been ugly, but I’ve also never been prom queen-level, and there was something about Marcel that I wanted to destroy. I thought I could scrape away some of his perfection, maybe even pass some of my own imperfections onto him. I had plenty to give. I met Marcel through my friend best friend Lizzie, who also spent a night with him. He’s a weird one, Lizzie said, after, sounding like she was convincing herself of something. After sleeping with him myself, I wondered if she was talking about the actual sex or the fireflies. He was a giving lover. Almost too much so, never taking any pleasure for himself. I wonder if he knew my secret, was punishing me for being so manipulative. I tried to look down to see where is hands were, but it was too dark, everything below his shoulders hidden by the bed. I imagined him on his knees, and wondered if they were calloused, if his body carried any evidence. Afterward, we sat up in his bed, the sweat dripping down our back. Right back, Marcel said, creeping out of bed, still unclothed. He returned wearing striped pajama pants. In his hand was a mason jar filled with fireflies. I tried to guess how many of them were inside, but it was impossible to tell. They lit up in intervals, so it was impossible to count them, to know which ones were lit and when. Lightning bugs, he said, and I nodded as he set the jar on the nightstand next to his bed. Can’t sleep without them. Make me feel like I’m in nature. You can’t sleep without bugs next to you? I said. Not just any bug! Lightning, only! Can’t sleep. No winks. Not one. What do you do with them in the morning? Oh, dump them. Get new ones tomorrow. Marcel fell back onto his pillow with no attempt to get under the sheets. I mimicked him, but kept my eyes open, watched the bugs in the jar, wondered why they illuminate their bodies when they do. It can’t be meaningless, it can’t be random. Even in their jar prison, there has to be a reason. It has to be worth the effort to try. How do you sleep in the winter when there aren’t any fireflies out? I said, but he was asleep. Marcel? I said his name again. And again. And again.

I decided to leave before he woke up, take the jar with me. I had done enough damage already, mostly to myself. I thought about why I had slept with him and felt disgusted. I had to get out, take the jar with me, save the bugs from giving their lives just so that Marcel could sleep through the night. I’d take the jar, open in up once I was far enough away to know that Marcel wouldn’t catch them again the next night. They probably wouldn’t last long in the wild, but I had to give them a chance. And then when it was done, I’d never speak to Marcel again, never say his name. Marcel? I said again. Marcel? Marcel? I said it because it felt good, because I could do it without consequence. Because it he woke up, I would get my answer, and if he didn’t wake up, he’d never even know I asked the question. Marcel? I asked one last time, and waited for a sign either way. A sign that would let me go.

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JIMMY LEGS  Reeves Stockard

Jimmy Legs in a constricting pose on a flattened mattress with her knee caught between her teeth, she rumbles up the sheets, four fingers and a thumb closed in a fist. She snaps her toes to a rhythm, a crawling beat up the burned walls, up the smoke stained Nipple Light on the ceiling. Behind a pair of scotch taped glasses are eyes claimed to be upside down, an optic nerve as thick as a pencil, an iris assumed brown, but actually a grey, a dark grey, an almost black. The pupil fades into the dark and you can never tell what she's really looking at. Jimmy Legs is not anything you'd assume. The way we toss half-formed lumps of people into boxes so they can try to find shape. Your inability to do so for her makes her a being without a box. Imagine the relief of stretching without fear of slamming your elbow on a cardboard corner. Jimmy Legs knows, and she’s even mobile while sleeping. Jimmy Legs is out in the deep dark, out past the working street lights and paved paths. Her heels sink into the mud, strands of tall grass scratch her naked calf, her thighs burn while wrapped secure around the base of a tree, face pressed against soggy bark, dribbling of soaked leaves plop to the dirt. In this rain, the trees open their mouths and release a moaning. They rearrange her thoughts, creating crushed folds of underdeveloped ideas under scolding eyes that just hate us. They tell truths that sound like lies if the little person inside has died. Jimmy Legs is tragic, a dry throat wheezing through puffs of nicotine, gently pounding out beats on the last book on the tallest stack of books seated on the floor of the room. She’s resting, unwillingly resting on thoughts that screw her perception, her usual desire to veg-out with the rest of us. The thoughts cake up her pores, rub out in flakes on melted bars of Irish Spring, turn to scum on the side of the tub. I’m left with the gushing blood of the bite in the arm I tried consoling her with, the shattered spikes of wood sticking from the door she broke while slamming her way through it. She’s wasted another moment where something could be happening, and the restless twisting of her ankles makes me nervous. Jimmy Legs could go anytime now …she could go now.

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THE INVISIBLES  Kayla Pongrac My mom had pinky-promised me that if I agreed to go shopping with my Aunt Sara and her son Ian, she would take me to the movies later that evening. When Aunt Sara pulled into our driveway in her creaky sedan an hour later, I jumped into the backseat, buckled my seatbelt, and nodded my head when Aunt Sara asked if I was excited to help Ian do some back-to-school shopping. I lied. Ian and I had never been the closest of cousins because he often hurt my feelings. When I tried to pretend to be his sidekick ninja earlier that summer, for example, he pointed and laughed at my attempts to punch and kick the air. Apparently there was a right way and a wrong way to defeat The Invisibles. Ian, only and lonely child that he was, considered public education a punishment rather an opportunity. That made shopping for back-to-school clothes a hassle for Aunt Sara, who thought that my coming along would make the experience a little more survivable for all parties. From one department store to the next, Aunt Sara and I scoured the racks for shirts and blue jeans while Ian rode the escalators until we summoned him to a dressing room. He emerged from each new outfitting with his thumbs pointed toward the floor and twice claimed that there were bugs crawling inside the shirt collars, which sent him into uncontrollable itching frenzies. We left all but one department store empty-handed; in Sears, I found a nice tank top for myself. It was even on sale. On our way back to the car, Aunt Sara threatened to send Ian to school in one of his father’s old Halloween costumes (a rock and pop hybrid of sorts: Elvis meets Michael Jackson meets—somehow— Ozzy Osbourne). Ian shrugged his shoulders. “Why can’t you be more like your cousin Lindsay?” Aunt Sara asked while lighting a cigarette. “She found something she liked today.” Ian remained silent, but I watched as he made a movement suggestive of snapping a horse’s reins, instructing the animal to giddy up. As if his mother didn’t already know how badly he wanted to leave the shopping mall. We were halfway home when Ian leaned over and whispered into my ear, “You’re the biggest jerk I ever heard of.” I thought about whispering something back, maybe telling him that I hoped his homeroom teacher would take away five of his recesses that school year. Instead, I asked Aunt Sara to turn up the volume on the radio. When we arrived at my house, my mom made the mistake of inviting Ian to the movies with us. When Ian agreed to go, I refused to join them. My mom insisted that it was too late to send him home with his mom; Aunt Sara had already sped off in her car, leaving a trail of cigarette butts behind.

Mom and Ian left without me. While they were gone I sat in my bedroom and imagined Ian holding a bag of popcorn on his lap, wiping the butter and salt all over his irreplaceable garments.

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WITHOUT A BUTTERFLY Jordan Rizzieri

It’s been over a year now. Over a year ago, after beginning to experience anxiety and panic attacks the likes of which I’d never had before, I saw a doctor. That doctor ordered blood tests and an ultrasound of my neck. A week later, my doctor called me to say there was a growth on my thyroid and I should see an endocrinologist. I didn’t even know what that was. The doctor I was referred to did a fine needle aspiration of my thyroid nodule. Has anyone ever held a needle to your throat and told you not to swallow, to hold still? All of a sudden your mouth fills with saliva and you feel a desperate need to squirm. Again, one week went by before I heard anything. This time I was referred to something called an otolaryngologist. I was sure they were just making things up now. This doctor was the first to use the word “cancer.” “Papillary thyroid cancer,” is what he called it. He drew a picture that looked like a butterfly on the back of my file and showed me where my cancer was. Then he drew a neck around the butterfly and explained how in a month they’d put me to sleep, make one (hopefully small) incision and take my butterfly out. Then he gave me a stack of paperwork and told me he’d see me soon. A year later, my butterfly is gone. I am back in the radiologist’s office for what is to be the first of my annual ultrasounds. As I lie here with cold blue gel dripping from my throat back and down onto my shoulders, my mind reaches for the memories of life before. What did I feel like before the anxiety that has lasted long after they took my butterfly? How did my boyfriend look at me before he beheld me in all my hospital glory: gown opened in the front, tube draining blood from my incision, oxygen mask on my face, medically-induced sleep still in my eyes? How did my father sleep at night beside my fretful, Alzheimer’s-ridden mother before he considered my body could grow poison inside it? I stare at the typical pock-marked doctor’s office tiles of the exam room and the dots twist into the faces of my family and friends. All of the people who reached out to me, who offered their support, they smile at me softly. But their brows furrow and their faces turn away. I can hear myself grasp for the words to explain. “I’m not just tired, I’m exhausted.” “I’ve gained all this weight.” “My whole body hurts.” At first, people hear “cancer” and they pray for you. But as events unfold, and people’s assumptions of the dramatic, the near-death, the month-long hospital stays and the feeding tubes never come true, they dismiss reality as something less. I was lucky. “Totally encapsulated,” I heard my surgeon say on the day he removed my stitches. “Zero remaining tissue,” from the endocrinologist as she prescribed the initial dose of medication I will be on for the rest of my life. I should have been thrilled; my doctors were pleased. But those around me turned that joy to shame. “It wasn’t really cancer.” “Not that bad.” “Less of an ordeal.” “Had me worried it would be worse.” I was outwardly angry, but internally embarrassed. Now in my examination robe, with the lights dimmed and the clicking of a mouse and computer keys the only sound as a wand moves through the blue gel, that shame has gone. My anger has dwindled with it. People view the world in narrow parameters: the death sentence of stage 4 breast cancer, or the long road to recovery in stage 2 lung cancer. But this word, this “cancer,” cannot be defined how we see

it in the movies or on TV. For those of us who have been through it, the medical ordeal may be limited, but the scars that remain are forever. My neck looks roughly the same. My scar is small and clean. I usually don’t notice it in the mirror. Inside, the scars are huge and ugly and I see nothing else. I don’t know what my body is doing at any given moment. Is it working against me? Am I a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off again, bigger and more horrific than before? Though my diet remains unaltered, the weight still piles on. My joints are not used to carrying so much and I ache with every step. I grow tired so quickly. I can sleep for upwards of 10 hours at a time and still wake up exhausted. My mind races constantly, anxiety forcing horrible concepts to the forefront of my thoughts. “Am I dying right now and I don’t know it?” “How long before something else goes wrong?” “What if I don’t live to be old?” “What if the people I love have vicious diseases growing silently inside them?” I sweat and shake and cry until the thoughts subside or are interrupted. There are those who see this change and try to hold me tightly. My boyfriend rubs my back and makes me laugh. My aunt sends me notes of encouragement. Some friends who live nearby invite me out. But in the cold exam room, I turn my head to the computer screen and search the image for something that doesn’t belong. Something growing, trying to hurt me. Instead, all I see are muscles moving softly like rolling waves as I swallow and breathe. The wand moves and a dark circle appears. Is that a growth? A nodule? A grenade? “This right here is your left lymph node,” the technician whispers, using the cursor to indicate the dark spot on the screen. I stifle a whimper. It’s been over a year, now, since they took my butterfly. I didn’t know that removing something so small could change you so much. The side effects of having “not really cancer” have lasted longer than I could have imagined. From the outside, I appear a whole person. On the inside, a piece of me is missing, and I can never go back to who I was.

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BALLISTIC FUGUE Ashley Parker Owens

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THE ATOMIC DOG AND THE TABBY RAY-CAT Kim Peter Kovac

After Eugene Field’s ‘The Duel’, better known as ‘The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat’. The atomic dog and the tabby ray-cat   side by side on the desert floor sat;   'twas half-past twelve, and (what do you think?),  neither one had slept a wink.  The face-off would continue very late   and neither knew the ultimate fate   of this centuries-old unholy spat.   (I wasn't there; I just relate   what was said by the heads of state.) Atomic dog juggled a bomb with joy,  tabby-ray-cat shouted, "it’s not a toy” -   the air was littered by the dog with glee ,   with jagged chunks of radioactivity:  the presence of plutonium in this place   changed the color of the cat’s sly face  from striped-tabby grey to mottled like koi.   (Never mind: I'm only telling you   what CNN intones as true.) The U.N. Inspectors looked very blue,   saying there was nothing they could do.  But the atomic dog and tabby ray-cat   feinted this way and juked that,   employing every tooth and claw   In the awfullest way you ever saw-   and, oh, how the fins of the bomb flew.   (Trust me please, despite my rhymes;   I write a blog for the New York Times.) Next morning where the two had sat   they found no trace of the dog or cat -  and some folks say unto this day   that Russian thugs stole them away.  But the truth about the cat and pup:  atomic dog’s bomb blew both of them up   and leveled the country totally flat.   (The hidden spy-camera told me so,   and that is how I came to know.) Repeat verses 1-4.  Repeat verses 1-4.

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Repeat verses 1-4.  Continue for, oh, a couple thousand years.

FROM (WHOM) Robin Shawver

garments stay with us, you said this, as if, you had, learned it, at someone's knee  as if, you had a family  I, didn't know, you had, a family

I didn't know, any of us had families

syllables need companions, seemed apt when we met

street lights missing and rifting people pushing into cracks and all the buildings had openings left wide on the places in between

I didn't know you had a brother  listened to 'new country' with him on your way – places – in the car  I didn't know any of us had brothers, going places in cars  as we each – seemed, on a mission  alone and then with each other  alone  and then with each other

there was no sheet or flag flat lining in the wind  to let a person know different  to let a person know we had brothers or you  had   a brother

you and I sat on a pinched balcony along a side street of a side street chased by all these other streets late one night or early morning in Bangkok listening to heart beats

I didn't know you wouldn't tell your brother

being there – phased out and with each other, made something of us alone  we didn't speak of knees or distant cross country rides, ashes marching down dirt bypasses  nothing seemed massive enough to make sound  the air so dense  as if, the primordial soup had emerged, to re-make according to whim  to who had a family, 'back home'  with these names and creases

WRITE OR DIE Nicole Yurcaba

The brightest flames burn quickest, and so it goes with bright ideas: Midnight. I have to be up at 6 AM, but I am lying in my flannel-sheeted bed, writing. Journal spread open across my knees as I sit Indian-style amongst fluffy bear-adorned pillows and bear trackpatterned comforters. Pen in hand, I press the gel-ink roller tip to the beige-colored page. Watch the black velvet flow onto the page—small rivers bending, winding, turning—to form letters. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Pages. Filling pages. Pages composed of thoughts, dreams, fears, quotes, research: It’s cold, but too late for hot chocolate. What scares the hell out of me is gaining a pound after eating a few M&M’s and two pretzels. Dwayne says, “It would take me two weeks to name all the stupid things you do in one,” and I realize he’s sarcastic out of brotherly love. Music. I’d flip on the slim-lined black Acer laptop to play music. Dad would hear it, at midnight, and wake up and come bother me. Hank Williams III. Ol’ Hank Williams III. “Lowdown” is the best Hank III song. “Crazed Country Rebel” comes in at a tight second; “5 Shots of Whiskey” at third. His new album, “Damn Right, Rebel Proud” is amazing. “I Wish I Knew” and “Stone and Alone” are two songs I can’t stop listening to and play over and over and over and over. Waylon Jennings. Johnny Cash. George Jones. Ernest Tubb. Jimmy Martin. Alan Jackson. Brooks & Dunn. George Strait. Tammy Wynette. The Grascals. AC/DC. Enya. Johnny Paycheck. David Allan Coe. Led Zeppelin. Robert Plant. Allison Krauss. Metallica. Flogging Molly. Why is it that the only time I ever really use the Acer laptop is when I’m typing papers or drowning in music? Journals. I don’t need to buy any more journals. Thirty-four of them rest on the oak bookshelf, filled with thoughts, dreams, quotes, research. Little rivers, smooth black rivers, bend, wind and turn to form letters, words, sentences paragraphs. A dozen more sleep quietly on the shelf, not yet enlivened with the rolling black river’s touch. What thoughts, dreams, quotes, research will fill their empty pages? Hardcover. Paperback. Spiral-bound. Leather-bound. Regular composition notebooks . Mossy Oak ducttaped. Sticker-decorated. Taped beer labels. Scotch-taped love letters. Pictures of: dogs, cats, bears, whales, dolphins, guns, deer, squirrels, Hank Williams III, Dwayne. Chinese fortunes plaster inside covers, along with sketches of Dwayne, Hank Williams III, squirrels, deer, guns, dolphins, whales, bears, cats, dogs. WRITE OR DIE!, the journals scream, WRITE OR DIE! Midnight. I have to be up at 6 AM, maybe earlier. Depending what time Roscoe and Lulu wake me. We may trudge into the woods for a round of squirrel hunting. I am lying on my flannel-sheeted bed, journal spread open across my knees. Amongst fluffy bear-decorated pillows and bear track-patterned comforters I sit, Indian-style. SIT LIKE AN INDIAN!, elementary school teachers used to scream, and I wanted to look at them and scream I’LL SIT LIKE AN INDIAN BECAUSE I AM AN INDIAN, ONE-EIGHTH CHEROKEE ENTITLES ME TO SIT CROSS-LEGGED. I may have worn a feathered headband to school that year; I don’t remember. Pen gripped tightly in right hand, I press the gel-ink roller tip to the beigecolored page. Watch the black velvet flow onto the page—small rivers bending, winding, turning—to form letters. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Pages.

WRITE OR DIE!, my overactive mind screams at midnight, WRITE OR DIE!

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A STUDY IN STUDYING ABROAD, EUROPE’S FARTHEST SHORE, AND COMING INTO YOUR OWN BODY AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME Bee Walsh

Dear July 2009,

Given the choice between South Africa and Ireland, I made the decision based on relative distance from Australia, probability of getting kidnapped, and names of poets and tragedies from the country that I could list.

Airborne and fleeing to the other side of my world, the only answer I could give if asked what I hoped to find there was, “I’m looking for something.” When you travel in half distances, you get both closer to and further away from as the same time.

Handles on doors were a hand higher than where they were at home. I didn’t know how to order an iced coffee. Ruins of temples were older than my country in it’s entirety. And from July 3rd to July 4th, that which I was able to even consider as possible shattered.

Morning classes and evening detours, July, you were wet in a thousand ways. I took you in through the mouth, I took you in on toast, in tea, while it was dark; I took you in wordlessly and expertly and over and over again.

Forward, I moved only forward. From home to market, from market to rainstorm, from rainstorm to library and back again. Learning the roads, learning the language, learning an identity still not wholly understood. A people on their own.

My birthday is December 24, 1988. But it is also the summer I memorized the names of houses instead of street numbers to find my way back the next evening. In losing, in landscape, I left parts of myself behind.

In the past five years, I have purposefully sabotaged the hearts of others in fear of losing my place in time, July. A dog-eared page in a book lent to me by a stranger, I am always coming to you. Of all the things I am no longer, not one of them are you.

I traveled to Cork City, Ireland in the Summer of 2009 (as you may recall) to fulfill the Study Abroad requirement of my International Studies degree. My intention was forget the 87 year old recipe for handmade pierogies I had committed to memory, to write four excellent essays on

The History of Irish Post-Colonialism, and to grow out my blonde hair. That summer, you, instead had me put serious thought into emigrating, had me attempt to drink 80 bags of tea in one month, and had me ruined as a way to come into my own body as if for the first time.

I was eleven arms and legs, warm lemon water, pepper wine, and a goddess after the sun went down. I think I have, at times, hated what you turned me into; a clear remembrance of the self I had been. I think I have, at times, been this way all along.

This is the same letter I have written the last ten times and will continue to write until surely I have driven myself mad. I got back to school in the Fall with the idea I’d be able to return to Cork in December. I was wrong. I have often been wrong more often than I have been right, I blame you.

Saudade. Sehnsucht. Mono no aware. Weltschmerz. It seems every language but mine has given it’s people a word to describe missing someone or some place to which you won’t return, so much that you suffer a form of death. I have suffered a form of death.

It is almost July 2014. My blonde hair has grown out. I am four years out of college. Every day, I am both the happiest and the saddest I have ever been. Also both the oldest and the youngest. You will never read this. I did not sleep with that English professor even though they thought that I did.

If you knew me, you might like me. I have longer legs. I have longer vowels, longer stares. I speak of you fondly, like a good Sunday in late August. You were monumental in my development as an adult, I tell people when they ask. I tell them I found what I was looking for.

We both know that I did not, but as most things are I’m sure, this is just another lesson I am to learn. In the way I learned about Europe’s Farthest Shore. In the way I learned how to barter goods for services. In the way the world’s second largest natural inlet

still seemed larger than any place I’d ever lived. In the way I let my bra drop to the floor even when I didn’t want to. In learning how to want to. In coming home to my body. In making a home of you, July, a cold hand on sunburnt skin, I was looking for something.

All the best from my place in the ocean,  Bee

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WEAPON OF CHOICE Krista Farris

A deck of cards was lethal in her 10 year old hands;

The Queen of diamonds coldly stating I’d live without gems   yachtless in a two bedroom something  digging for change  in the creases of a rotting couch.

A King of Hearts drew his suicidal sword-  glaring from where she’d placed it next to a yearbook page,  promising one like him would rather die than be this close  to a hang dog face like mine.

Her veil of hair swung when she flipped the ten of clubs  and affirmed I’d stagger through the gauntlet of a   life filled with fights to settle flat  like the cards on her bed.

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VFW Mitchell Grabois

We pushed our cheeks together in the darkness of the VFW Hall. Your cheek was hot, always flushed hot. Earlier that day I’d bought you a turquoise ring at the antique trader next door. We were thirteen, with absent parents. After sex in your house, I smoked one of your father’s old cigars. Every day you made up a different story about what had happened to your father, what happened to your mother, what had happened to you, what had happened to me. Family services were lax in those days, in that place. They accepted our stories and never bothered us again. I was a thief. I stole enough for both of us. I knew kid stuff would not stick to my record. I could make a new start later. That’s what we both told ourselves. And later, it worked out. We became buskers. Music lacks boundaries. If a musician won’t travel, who will? Busking was a fun life for a young man with a sexy young partner. A little comedy, a little fire-eating, song writing and singing, you on the zither. Drones also lack boundaries. I plucked a twelve-string guitar. Now my sensitive fingers are on the controls of killer flying robots. Like a juggler with bowling pins, I can throw them any-which-way, or many directions at once. Far flung enemies deserve air mail gifts. Someone will catch my colorful pins.

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AN EPISTOLARY SHORT STORY Adam Robinson & Dmitri Bailey

A musical offspring of free association, lost rambling through gray streets and red-brick palaces. Accelerating, losing speed through holes of pockets, picking up lost time from shallow potholes, it glides formlessly past storefronts and glowing marquees. From hollow brass tubes it flows like the very cosmos, a divine clockwork perpetually sustained by the bonds of all conscious entities--or just reinforced by snide remarks in dingy gas station restrooms--

Baton Rouge: THE ORIGIN of modern man, standing so proud and holy, arms crossed over chest, eyeballs glazed with lust.

People as places as feelings as things, that dissolve into something one could have loved without understanding, and loved prior to their own deliquesce; like the atonal makings of an artist you've never heard of and never will, a stream of consciousness that makes little sense to anyone (dubious even to the pen that writ). Takes form as an outline, a discordant response to a rhythm, a cigarette smoked down to ash, dust wafting the stale air of an empty bar. A something that much less glides, but limps and falters. Settles itself by the gutter and waits in the cold.

Shimmering lichen in the folds of great minds, fog drifting in through cracked sedan windows, a migraine efflorescing somewhere within the region of one's optic nerves. To the left, you will see the only sanity you will ever need, locked tight in plastic bags and stowed beneath mattresses. To the right, in its more common form: orange bottles with safety lids, sterile syringes, long probing fingers, and monotonous reassurance. Lie back and disappear into the subtle waves of androgyne door-steps or broken branches tugged furiously by relentless eastern winds--and again, like ancient pyrotechnicians.

Across time and landscape, a tide rolls over transitional formlessness; coats cold stomach in warm. One with the gutter, becomes one with the muse; and following several clinks and the finality of a crashing, the muse becomes one with the gutter, too. Shimmering, lost and laid waste to. A purgatorial love triangle made possible only by blows to the mind and blows to the ego. Shadow tastes a grimace on his lips, tongues broken flesh because he thinks he deserves that pain. A shudder, a wince, and a whisper; writes a poem on his palm with a manifest finger.

Words like tom lace, crystal, shattering in the cold light of an abandoned amphitheater at dawn, as we walk--palm in sweaty palm--toward the subway station. A morose realization unfolds on the surface of floor tiles, fractaling through the establishment, piercing your mind, commanding an immediate break between mind and body--demanding your full attention, closing your fists. Scores of men marching down the main road. An orchestra just below the cracked pavement. A bent, torn cigarette shared by two strangers who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time but, through

some belligerent act not revealed to the audience, found each other one evening at the edge of a cemetery.

And all's well the ends well, croak the bones of dead poets, withered and toothless in their unmarked graves. Withered and toothless by the gutter alone, watching the kids smoke their cigarettes and wishing you had one of your own. Precious head lain on the damp of a dusk-graced sidewalk, thinking back to the night where it all fell apart. "I took a drink and went to sleep. Broke the concrete to move a little more freely." One last glance at an empty palm, a sob and a whisper and a last proclamation: "This is the way the world ends, Eliot. Not with a bang, but a full stop."

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BUT Ae Hee Lee

If eloquent words are to fancy party dresses  as algorithms are to businessmen,  what is the deeper  tangent  of here, of now, of a common life?

There must be more to  a furious gleam of white sparkling on one’s glasses  than a scowl of annoyance

there must be something else to  a hovering piece of spring snow  than a sneeze

because when I send my kisses to silence,  he answers back   with a profound tilt of his chin,  which meaning I don’t comprehend,  but.

FIVE MINUTES WITH THE AVERAGE VOTER Adam Kane

After every national Election Day, there’s always one person (sometimes me) on social media, who opines on the importance of exercising our civic duty to vote, how that’s more important than red or

blue, or who ends up winning. There’s a thought that, by waking up 15 minutes earlier and going to the middle school down the street and chatting to the little old lady and wearing our stickers and going about our day and maybe tuning in to see what Brian Williams has to say about all of this, we’re somehow more evolved, more refined, more civilized than our fellow planetary citizens who revolt violently when their leaders start to fail them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing that we’re not throwing rocks at one another on Election Day; but does that really make us the more advanced citizens? Or in the age of endless campaigning, has civic pride evaporated into something we only pay attention to on the first Tuesday in November? So are we more evolved, or are we so punch drunk that we just don’t care anymore? The wonderful thing about our civic responsibility in the USA is that, in our voting precincts, each ballot is only counted once. We can argue about free money and campaign finance for days, but each vote is one point. It’s simple. But it’s also maddening. I’m relatively well-informed on the issues nowhere near some people - but the one point I award my candidate of choice is the same one point that the guy with the Confederate Flag stickers on the back of his rusty pickup truck gets, or the guy posting pictures of his ballot on Instagram. Who get their political “facts” from rewritten Far Side cartoons that their buddies post on Facebook. Scary, right? And lest we think this is a new phenomenon, Winston Churchill, who has been dead nearly 50 years, said it much more eloquently than I ever could:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. I’m reminded of an odd realization I came to on October 24, 2011. I was watching Game 4 of the 2011 World Series. The Texas Rangers were the home team, facing the St. Louis Cardinals. As is the cliche in televised sporting events, the broadcast cut to a shot of the owner of the Rangers, who happened to be sitting alongside the former owner of the team. This was only significant because the former owner of the team also happens to be the immediate past president of the United States, one George Walker Bush. There he sat, guest of the owner, in a ballpark and state where he was very popular. Home territory. As I saw him give a wave and thumbs up to the assembled masses, I thought to myself, “I don’t really have a problem with him.” I was watching the game by myself, and so I had no one to share in these thoughts with. But some time later, I saw him on television again, this time while I was with a small group of similarly minded people, and I expressed this thought out loud. I was met with shrugs and similar reactions. Now that he’s not speaking to us from the Oval Office, Bush 43 seems different: he paints, he writes books, he goes to the occasional ballgame. He seems relaxed and likable. And so we forget. And this happens every two years. Every midterm election is a backlash against the party in the White House, except for 2002, when the events of September 11 were still fresh on everyone’s mind. After years of shutdowns, sniping, and out of touch talking points (all of which were supposed to go away after 9/11, and again after the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords), doesn’t this all feel a bit like a holding pattern? Remember back in 2011, at the State of the Union? Representative Giffords was recovering from being shot in the head, and as a mark of solidarity and respect, the members of Congress picked members of the opposite party to sit next to during the speech. It was so made-for-tv, so calculated. But it would’ve been nice if the members hadn’t completely forgotten about it. And a year

later, she’s recovered enough to be there, in the halls of Congress, to hear the President deliver his next address. Hers was the biggest ovation of the night. And after she resigned her seat to focus on recovering, her seat was redistricted, erased from Congress entirely. Any hope of a legacy of civility and cooperation was long gone by that point. I don’t know what any of this means, but I know that I’m frustrated just about every two years. The government exists because we the people empower it to do just that, and we’re remarkably illogical. The approval ratings of Congress is frequently polled at less than 10% - more than 90% of adults in this country think one of the branches of government is doing a lousy job on a consistent basis. But what happens when voters have the opportunity to send a new Congress to Washington? We don’t. Thieves get rich and saints get shot. It’s like the paradox of the innocent man on trial. It’s easy to think, “Well, he’s sitting there, he must’ve done something wrong.” Our Congressmen are sitting in Washington year after year, they must’ve done something right. (Meanwhile, Americans across the board consistently approve the job the congressmen in their own district are doing. In other words, everyone in Washington is terrible except the guy I elected.) I guess what I’m saying is this: we’re pretty dumb when you lump us all together. I don’t care what side you’re on, we’re better than all the finger pointing. We’re better than the constant campaigning. We can do better, but we have to want better.

So yes, the most important thing is showing up on Election Day. But showing up should mean more than sleepwalking to the polling place and collecting your sticker. We get to hire the people that make decisions about the potholes in our roads, about national parks, our military. About our money. This isn’t a popularity contest. We’re not voting for the king of the prom. If we’re really better than those parts of the world that revolt violently rather than hold elections, let’s prove it. Next time is only two years away.

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Editorial Staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Jordan Rizzieri is the 90's-loving, extremely tall founder of The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. After a having brief love affair with Western New York, Jordan now resides on Long Island, NY. She holds a degree from SUNY Fredonia in Theatre Arts (aka lying before an audience) with a minor in English (aka lying on paper). Jordan briefly experimented with playwriting (The Reunion

Cycle - 2011 Buffalo Infringement Festival) and her mother's primary caregiver for over two years. She has been running a caregiver's blog on her experiences since 2011, as well as publishing essays on the topic. Now, Jordan spends her daylight hours arguing with her boyfriend's cats and at night takes on the identity of Pyro & Ballyhoo's sassiest critic, The Lady J. When she's not watching pro-wrestling or trying to decide what to order at the local bagel shop, she is listening to Prince and writing letters to her pen pals. Feel free to contact her with questions about the Attitude Era, comic book plot lines involving Harley Quinn, The Twilight Zone and the proper spelling of braciola.

NON-FICTION EDITOR Jennifer Lombardo, Buffalo, NY resident, works full time at a hotel in order to support her travel habit. She graduated from the University at Buffalo with a B.A. in English in the hope of becoming an editor. When she isn't making room reservations for people, she reads, cross-stitches and goes adventuring with her friends. She is especially passionate about AmeriCorps, Doctor Who and the great outdoors. Ask her any question about grammar, but don't count on her to do math correctly.

POETRY EDITOR Bee "Internet Coquette" Walsh is a New York-native living in Bedford–Stuyvesant. She graduated from SUNY Fredonia in 2010 with a B.A. in English Literature and a B.S. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. Reciting her two majors and two minors all in one breath was a joke she told at parties. The English Department played a cruel trick on her and pioneered a Creative Writing track her final year, but she charmed her way into the Publishing course and became Poetry Editor for the school’s literary magazine, The Trident. Bee has spent the past three years trying different cities on for size and staring into the faces of people in each of them who ask her about her "career goals." An Executive Assistant in high-fashion by day, you can find her most nights working with the V-Day team to stop sexual violence against women and young girls, eating vegan sushi in the West Village or causing mischief on roofs. Run into her on the subway, and she'll be nose deep in a book. She holds deep feelings about politics, poise, and permutations. Eagerly awaiting winter weather and warm jackets, she’d love to talk to you about fourth-wave feminism, the tattoo of the vagina on her finger, or the Oxford comma. FICTION EDITOR Adam Robinson is an aspiring writer and barista languidly skulking the wetland void of Western Michigan. Following acceptance in 2012 to Grand Rapids' Kendall College of art and design in pursuit of an education in graphic art, his love for language and literature was made priority. Now, an English major on sporadically perpetual hiatus, you can most often find him pulling shots of espresso, keying long paragraphs in the dark, secluded corner of a local café, or taking lengthy walks through the dense Michigan woods conveniently placed in his own backyard. Monotoned, fond of the semicolon and existentialist literature; listen closely and you can sometimes hear him beseech advice from the ghost of Dostoevsky (who tends not to reply).

Contributors

Kim Peter Kovac works nationally and internationally in theater for young audiences with an emphasis on new play development and networking. He tells stories on stages as producer of new plays, and tells stories in writing with lineated poems, prose poems, creative non-fiction, flash fiction, haiku, microfiction, and three-line poems, with work appearing or forthcoming in print and on-line in journals including Vine Leaves Literary Review, Elsewhere, Frogpond, Mudlark, and Counterexample Poetics. He is fond of avant-garde jazz, murder mysteries, contemporary poetry, and travel, and lives in

Alexandria, VA, with his bride, two Maine Coon cats, and a Tibetan Terrier named Finn.

Ae Hee Lee is a South Korean by birth and Peruvian by heart. She is currently a candidate at the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program. She also works as a graduate assistant for the university’s Institute of Latino Studies during the day and sips tea by night. You can find (or will find) her poetry in Dialogue, Cha, Cobalt, Spark: A Creative Anthology, Ruminate, and Silver Birch Press.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over six hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. You can visit and like his Two-Headed Dog Facebook page. He lives in Denver.

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time she has either reading or writing. Her works have appeared in numerous publications and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. Her debut novel, The Rose Master, was published in 2014 and was called a “strong and satisfying effort” by Publishers Weekly.

Krista Genevieve Farris loves to sweat it out whether it be on a run, in the garden or while feverishly writing. In addition to several pieces included in The Rain, Party and Disaster Society, you can find more of Krista’s recent writing in Brain,Child-Brain Mother, Cactus Heart, Right Hand Pointing, Literary Mama, The Literary Bohemian, Tribeca Poetry Review and The Piedmont Virginian. She earned a BA in English and Anthropology/Sociology from Albion College and an MA in Anthropology from Indiana University. She lives in Winchester, Virginia with her hubby and three sons. If you’d like to know more, Krista’s Artist Spotlight can be found on the RP&D Tumblr.

Vanessa Raney is an American living in Croatia and studying the Croatian language. "Something precious" represents her first attempt to capture something of her experiences with Croatian family life which she observed firsthand for about 10 months. In fact, this family has inspired a book idea which she wants to write in Croatian. Toward that ambition, she hopes to have kicked grammar's butt well enough to start the project going by Feb. 2015.

Alex Sobel is a freelance writer and musician living in Toledo, OH. His fiction has appeared in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post Online; Foundling Review; Ink, Sweat, and Tears; theNewerYork; Treehouse; and others. His articles appear regularly in The Press, a newspaper out of Oregon, OH and on the music site covermesongs.com. Follow him on Twitter at @alexsobel30.

Reeves Stockard spent the last 21 years of her life with her head turned over her shoulder as she traveled forward. Amazing how many stumps and cracks you tumble over that way, and how unfortunate to see your missteps too late. Her writing is a reflection of that. She's worked her way through two different universities and one art college without a degree or truly learning a thing that trespassing through the minds of strangers hadn't already taught her. She's managed to maintain a general existence while rummaging for life.

Kayla Pongrac is an avid writer, reader, tea drinker, and record spinner. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, Split Lip Magazine, Oblong, HOOT, KYSO Flash, and Nat. Brut, among others. Her first chapbook is forthcoming in 2015 from Anchor and Plume Press. To read more of Kayla's work, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Ashley Parker Owens is the manager of the indie press KY Story, proud publisher of thirteen anthologies celebrating the Kentucky, Appalachian, and Southern voice. Her work has recently appeared in Hogglepot, Rose Red, Egg Poetry, Boston Poetry Magazine, Quail Bell, Imaginarium, Lorelei Signal and Mystic Signals. Reach her at parker.owens@gmail.com or kystory.net.

Robin Shawver earned an MFA from California College of Arts & Crafts in San Francisco. She currently teaches and lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband and toddling son. Recent work can be found in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Open Letters Monthly. Her manuscript verbs without a past was a Finalist for Omnidawnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 2010 chapbook contest and she is the author of Double Shot Straight (Cowboy Press, 2007).

Nicole Yurcaba hails from a long line of Ukrainian immigrants, West Virginia mountain folk, academics, artists and writers. She began reading and writing at age three, and that first love of literature and words has propelled her into the arms of numerous publications. In December 2013, Yurcaba graduated from Tiffin University's Masters of Humanities program and also published her first poetry, photography, and short story collection titled Backwoods and Back Words, which is available on Amazon. She prefers to take the road less traveled, and usually exits the scene pursued by bear. You can find her on Facebook and on her website.

Adam Kane is a pop-culture enthusiast, essayist, and recovering actor living and working in Boston. You can follow him onTwitter, where he tweets about the Red Sox, Syracuse basketball and the line at Starbucks.

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