The Rusty Nail, March 2012, Issue 1

CONTENTS Editor’s Note........................................Page 2 On the Decay of the Art of Lying

by Mark Twain.......................................Page 3 When Spring Comes Late

by Howie Good......................................Page 6 Heart Problems

by Howie Good......................................Page 7 Girls Don’t Fish and Other Lies My Father Told Me

by February Grace.................................Page 8 Wish List

by February Grace.................................Page 9 Remember

by Gabriel Goodrick...............................Page 9 Editor Snores Through Everything The Monster

by R. W. Haynes..................................Page 10 hart crane’s last lover His Room At Arles

by Christopher Woods.........................Page 10 Proper Grammar

by Adam Strong...................................Page 11 Bloc Party I Will Follow You Into the Dark

by J. Bradley........................................Page 12 Mounting the Quilting Bee Disintegration Oh, Montana

by J. Bradley........................................Page 13 Five Poems

by February Grace...............................Page 14 Athanasia

by Oscar Wilde.....................................Page 15 Séance with the Putting Green

by Matthew Dexter...............................Page 16 Night Swimming

by Chris Castle.....................................Page 17 Midlife Crisis

by Mike Berger.....................................Page 18 Music Outside A Roller Rink

by William Cass...................................Page 19 Indefinite Divisibility

by Neil Ellman......................................Page 20 Fainting Into the Crowd Shell

by Anthony Ward.................................Page 21 Into a Snow Globe Feeding the Neighbor’s Cat I Was Eating a Pickle Red-Winged Box Elders

by Katie Hoffman.................................Page 22 The Unofficial Docent byJan Wiezorek...................................Page 23 Dreamy Embrace Concealed Hearts

by Ron Koppelberger...........................Page 25

11

Proper Grammar

by Adam Strong

14

Five Poems by February Grace

1

Image: nuchylee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I should submit this To “The Rusty Nail.”

ISSUE 1 | 2012 | MARCH

First, I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who made this first issue of “The Rusty Nail” possible. It’s an exciting time for writers, given the rise of independent publishing and what is going on with the traditional publishing model.

The industry is being turned on its head and we here at “The Rusty Nail” are thrilled to be a part of it. By default, you are all part of it, as well, and for that you have our thanks.

Second, one of the most common questions I’ve gotten since we started this little venture is, “Why is the magazine named “The Rusty Nail”? Personally, I don’t feel the name is that odd, at least not in the arena of literary magazines.

Apparently, it is vogue to apply enigmatic titles to these types of publications, “Phantom Limb,” “The Rumpus,” and “Sucker Literary Magazine” being prime examples. I do agree, however, that “The Rusty Nail” name does evoke curiosity and for that reason I am more than happy to answer this question here. We decided to use "The Rusty Nail" as a name for a variety of reasons.

1.) The magazine is based in Idaho and these little buggers are everywhere. One can't drive down a road without seeing an ancient fence careening around someone's property, a thousand little nails of rusty poking out accusingly. Sometimes they're even on the road, which I can prove from the fact that I had a flat tire a few

THE RUSTY NAIL? SOME ‘SPLAININ’ TO DO weeks ago, caused by just such a culprit (true story).

2.) It largely explains the type of material the magazine is looking for, in a lame, artsy kind of way. For example, one of the goals of the magazine is to give authors and poet-types a place to exhibit their work without the often sterilizing influence of traditional publishing, which can be very picky about what it accepts or cuts and chops what it does accept in order to make it more palatable and/or more lucrative. Not to say we plan to accept a bunch of crap, but sometimes there is good stuff out there that simply isn't mainstream (translate, "boring" or "harmless") enough. Maybe it simply doesn't conform to a certain standard, such as rhyme scheme or form or whatever. “The Rusty Nail” would like to present material that is raw, "rusty," and gives the writer a chance to express exactly what they want to say, without the fear that some editor is going to change it all around because he/she thinks it's better that way. We aim for artistic integrity.

3.) We just thought the name sounded cool.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Poetry - We accept many different types of poetry.

There isn’t a strict length limit, but we do prefer poems that contain fewer than 30 lines. You may submit up to 5 poems at once.

Short Prose - There is no minimum word count for prose, but we do ask that it be kept below 2,000 words.

You may submit up to 2 pieces at a time.

Book Reviews - Between 200-500 words. You may submit up to 3 reviews at a time Artwork - We accept illustrations, cartoons, and visual art of other forms.

You may submit up to 3 files at once.

Craig A. Hart, Editor

THE RUSTY NAIL POCATELLO, IDAHO RUSTYNAILMAG@GMAIL.COM

WWW.RUSTYNAILMAG.COM

2

CLASSIC WRITER

MARK TWAIN “ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING” Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption— no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become to me to criticise you, gentlemen—who are nearly all my elders—and my superiors, in this thing—if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than fault-finding; indeed if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, the encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shred a single tear. I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. [It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and to give illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished me to beware of the particulars and confine myself to generalities.]

careful and diligent cultivation—therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools—even in the newspapers. What chance has the ignorant uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per—against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.

Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain —adults and wise persons never speak it. Parkman, the historian, says, "The principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity." In another place in the same chapters he says, "The saying is old that truth should not be spoken at all times; and those whom a sick conscience worries into habitual violation of the maxim are imbeciles and nuisances."

It is strong language, but true. None of us could live with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so—and this ignorance is one of the very things that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude.

No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances—the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without 3

MARK TWAIN “ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING” built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

In a far country where I once lived the ladies used to go around paying calls, under the humane and kindly pretence of wanting to see each other; and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying, "We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out" —not meaning that they found out anything important against the fourteen—no, that was only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home—and their manner of saying it expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now their pretence of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they had been less lucky with—was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is sufficiently described as a deflection from the truth. Is it justifiable? Most certainly. It is beautiful, it is noble; for its object is, not to reap profit, but to convey a pleasure to the sixteen. The iron-souled truth-monger would plainly manifest, or even utter the fact that he didn't want to see those people—and he would be an ass, and inflict totally unnecessary pain. And next, those ladies in that far country—but never mind, they had a thousand pleasant ways of lying, that grew out of gentle impulses, and were a credit to their intelligence and an honor to their hearts. Let the particulars go.

What I bemoan is the growing prevalence of the brutal truth. Let us do what we can to eradicate it.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie.

Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The man who tells a lie to help a poor devil out of trouble, is one of whom the angels doubtless say, "Lo, here is an heroic soul who casts his own welfare in jeopardy to succor his neighbor's; let us exalt this magnanimous liar."

An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth— a fact that is recognized by the law of libel.

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie— the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all. In that far country where I once lived, there was a lovely spirit, a lady whose impulses were always high and pure, and whose character answered to them. One day I was there at dinner, and remarked, in a general way, that we are all liars. She was amazed, and said, "Not all?" It was before "Pinafore's" time so I did not make the response which would naturally follow in our day, but frankly said, "Yes, all—we are all liars. There are no exceptions." She looked almost offended, "Why, do you include me?"

"Certainly," I said. "I think you even rank as an expert." She said "Sh-'sh! the children!" So the subject was changed in deference to the children's presence, and we went on talking about other things. But as soon as the young people were out of the way, the lady came warmly back to the matter and said, "I have made a rule of my life to never tell a lie; and I have never departed from it in a single instance." I said, "I don't mean the least harm or disrespect, but really you have been lying like smoke ever since I've been sitting here. It has caused me a good deal of pain, because I'm not used to it." She required of me an instance—just a single instance. So I said—

The men in that far country were liars, every one.

Their mere howdy-do was a lie, because they didn't care how you did, except they were undertakers.

To the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made no conscientious diagnostic of your case, but answered at random, and usually missed it considerably. You lied to the undertaker, and said your health was failing—a wholly commendable lie, since it cost you nothing and pleased the other man. If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with your hearty tongue, "I'm glad to see you," and said with your heartier soul, "I wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner-time." When he went, you said regretfully, "Must you go?" and followed it with a "Call again;" but you did no harm, for you did not deceive anybody nor inflict any hurt, whereas the truth would have made you both unhappy.

I think that all this courteous lying is a sweet and loving art, and should be cultivated. The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, 4

MARK TWAIN “ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING” But that was not all lost. Before I was half-way through she was in a carriage and making thirty miles an hour toward the Jones mansion to save what was left of Willie and tell all she knew about the deadly nurse. All of which was unnecessary, as Willie wasn't sick; I had been lying myself. But that same day, all the same, she sent a line to the hospital which filled up the neglected blank, and stated the facts, too, in the squarest possible manner.

"Well, here is the unfilled duplicate of the blank, which the Oakland hospital people sent to you by the hand of the sick-nurse when she came here to nurse your little nephew through his dangerous illness. This blank asks all manners of questions as to the conduct of that sick-nurse: 'Did she ever sleep on her watch? Did she ever forget to give the medicine?' and so forth and so on. You are warned to be very careful and explicit in your answers, for the welfare of the service requires that the nurses be promptly fined or otherwise punished for derelictions. You told me you were perfectly delighted with this nurse —that she had a thousand perfections and only one fault: you found you never could depend on her wrapping Johnny up half sufficiently while he waited in a chilly chair for her to rearrange the warm bed. You filled up the duplicate of this paper, and sent it back to the hospital by the hand of the nurse. How did you answer this question— 'Was the nurse at any time guilty of a negligence which was likely to result in the patient's taking cold?' Come—everything is decided by a bet here in California: ten dollars to ten cents you lied when you answered that question." She said, "I didn't; I left it blank!" "Just so—you have told a silent lie; you have left it to be inferred that you had no fault to find in that matter." She said, "Oh, was that a lie?

And how could I mention her one single fault, and she is so good?—It would have been cruel." I said, "One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the results of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet-fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound asleep for the last fourteen hours, leaving their darling with full confidence in those fatal hands, because you, like young George Washington, have a reputa—However, if you are not going to have anything to do, I will come around to-morrow and we'll attend the funeral together, for, of course, you'll naturally feel a peculiar interest in Willie's case—as personal a one, in fact, as the undertaker."

Now, you see, this lady's fault was not in lying, but in lying injudiciously. She should have told the truth, there, and made it up to the nurse with a fraudulent compliment further along in the paper.

She could have said, "In one respect this sicknurse is perfection—when she is on the watch, she never snores." Almost any little pleasant lie would have taken the sting out of that troublesome but necessary expression of the truth.

Lying is universal—we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then—But am I but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot instruct this club.

Joking aside, I think there is much need of wise examination into what sorts of lies are best and wholesomest to be indulged, seeing we must all lie and we do all lie, and what sorts it may be best to avoid—and this is a thing which I feel I can confidently put into the hands of this experienced Club—a ripe body, who may be termed, in this regard, and without undue flattery, Old Masters.

• • •

5

BY HOWIE GOOD

“WHEN SPRING COMES LATE”

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing.

All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplan ding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red He is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including most recently The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers from Flutter Press.

1 Unintelligible voices gushed out when I turned on the faucet.

The previous tenant had left all kinds of tools in the closet. We would have sold some of them on Craigslist if we knew what they were called. Men in orange life vests bobbed past our window. It was impossible after a while to tell one worried face from another. The birds that could still fly could only fly short distances. You said it must be because the ground needed something to do.

2 You went looking for a place you couldn’t quite describe.

Nobody was sure if it was merely coincidence that celebrities marry only each other or somehow related to your absence.

By the time you returned, your friends had already passed through the fifth stage of grief. You set about with tacks and a hammer to repair the damage to the flowers.

3 The Kama Sutra advises, The thighs are used like a pair of tongs. I am torn that I may heal.

Read more by Howie Good on Page 7

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HOWIE GOOD HEART PROBLEMS 1 I watch for the warning signs – bats and owls taking flight and the light of day wearing a dirty green raincoat.

2 Something knocks twice upon my heart without entering. If this were a movie, the police would ignore me when I told them what I knew or at least suspected.

3 A snow of petals falls from the trees. I wade in up to my waist. There isn’t always that great a difference between a funeral and a carnival.

4 In one instance, I hid the baby under all the debris. Not everybody could tell that I was being ironic.

5 Brown-and-white cows drift toward a red barn. You call it “Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1.” Sometimes what look like stars to the naked eye are really only planets.

6 In New York City, even lovers travel underground. Girl with acetylene green eyes, why wait? The going always seems so much longer than the coming back.

7 Night and day seldom start on time. I appear in other people’s dreams, regardless.

8 A dying rocket tumbles into the parking lot behind the diner. On another day, it might have been a poet committing suicide for attention.

9 The leaves are bordered in black. You fuck me so hard that tyrants and martyrs stand in the rain along the funeral route sobbing.

10 I myself enjoy the ungainly spectacle of machines on fire, and when I wake up on the floor, it’s officially summer and next to a big pile of sunglasses.

7

“GIRLS DON’T FISH AND OTHER LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME” Walking up and down the aisles of the K Mart store, I had a single purpose in mind. I knew what I was after.

My mother asked if I was sure that I didn’t want another doll. I nodded. I had dolls enough already and besides, this was a purchase that I hoped would accomplish something.

We looked over the selection and finally I saw it.

Yes, that was the one, if it wasn’t too much money, and to go with it yes, please, I’d like that small extra item too.

Thank you.

I remember my mother making some remark like 'you and your imagination' but in this case imagination had little to do with why I wanted this particular item from the Sporting Goods department of that store.

I wanted it because I thought maybe if he saw me with it, he’d change his mind.

My father used to say if he had a son, he’d take him fishing.

The same father whose work boots outside the door made me nervous and terrified the dog. The same father I saw most often as the top of a head poking out from behind a newspaper, a dark silhouette cast by the light of the large, fish-bowl television screen. A red-faced blur as he stomped, screaming, out the door. A backhand upside the head in the middle of an ordinary supper, for no apparent reason.

“If I had a son I’d take him fishing,” he said, so many times that I finally decided that even if the imaginary poles I’d made from hard cardboard hanger tubes and yarn weren’t enough, if my practicing endlessly with the board game that had magnetic fish in a container to ‘catch’ with a cheap plastic hook wasn’t enough, that seeing me proudly holding this new fishing rod and reel from K Mart in my hands with the little, so-real-youcould-almost-feel-the-slime-on-it rubber fish suspended at the end-- tiny lip pierced through by the hook with my own hands-- might. Then maybe he’d see that as terrified of him as I was, I still wanted him to take me fishing.

I was even willing, I thought, to face my fear of worms if that was what it took.

I remember taking that pole and dangling the line over the edge into the “cove”, that’s what the small, sunken part of the living room had been called on the builder’s plans for the house. That was where the fireplace was, not a natural one but the gas- fueled imitation that burned on endlessly without fumes or smoke. The blue-orange flames used to fascinate me as they licked up over artificial logs that would never be consumed by them.

BY FEBRUARY GRACE

That cove was the same architectural feature that caused me so much pain, as I tripped many times up its one steep, cement-backed step and invariably broke my toes. After awhile, they stopped taking me to the doctor for it.

That room within a room was also where my father’s stereo resided. I remember the day he brought it home, spent the afternoon muttering curses as he tried to wire it up. As I wandered around the room, trying to read words on the sides of boxes taller than I was, I wondered aloud what the ones on the side meant. They were in another language. Japanese, I realize now. At the time I knew enough to understand that they weren’t English because I had been reading for years already.

My father took his rough, work-weathered hand and drew a finger along the first line of text. “It says, 'children are not allowed to touch this stereo'.”

I hung my head, ashamed. It actually said that the box contained a turntable, and bore the logo of the manufacturer.

My father also told me, when I asked him about his mother, that he didn't have one-- that he was hatched from an egg.

Years later after I was grown my mother would still bring that up and he’d always shrug and say, “It was true in a way.”

That sums up everything my parents ever taught me about reproduction.

It took several attempts over more than one day to get my father to notice me, standing there, meekly swinging that sticky, unnatural fish over the edge of the railing and down into the cove on my fishing pole.

When he finally did, I smiled at him. Hopeful.

Longing. I wanted him to look at me for once and see the daughter he had instead of the son he did not.

Finally, my mother even ventured to suggest that perhaps he might want to take me somewhere nearby and let me try it out for real.

“She would never bait the hook," my father replied.

"Girls don’t fish.” He disappeared again behind his newspaper.

I took the fishing pole to my room and put it away.

A few years later my brother was born. A son, at last, just what my father had waited for.

My brother is now in his thirties. My father has never taken him fishing.

To this day, I still hate worms.

• • • 8

FEBRUARY GRACE WISH TRIP Hayden’s small body conforms to my own as I fumble with the lock. The door releases, revealing a room too fancy for someone like me.

I’m a man who works with his hands, every single day. Not the kind who belongs at a hotel where they turn down the blankets and leave chocolates on top of the pillows.

Overheated, exhausted, I fight for the last few steps. It is my strength alone we depend on.

“I’m not tired,” he mumbles. I wish he’d just stayed asleep. Jostled back to awareness as we bumped down the steps of an overpacked Disney bus, I knew he’d fight sleep now. His thin, pale arms dangle around my neck, sticking to sunburnt skin.

“Tomorrow is another day.”

He exhales a long, slow sigh. His head, too heavy for his skinny, rag-doll neck, drops back onto my shoulder. His fading eyes disappear beneath the brim of a tricorn pirate hat.

I hope that he will remember this day of dreams and happier things. No doctors. No hospitals. Just us.

I hope that I will too.

I set him down on crisp, fresh sheets. Tiny fingers lose hold of a shopping bag. Factory made plastic gems-- his favorite souvenir-fall one by one, raining artificial color in dim illumination across the carpet.

“My treasure!”

GABRIEL GOODRICK REMEMBER

“I’ll keep it safe for you.” Toxic tears and drops of sweat congeal and catch fire. They burn my eyes, age my face, and obscure my grieving vision. “I promise.”

When your burdens so heavy you’re ready to drop When every fiber of your being yells at you stop.

Remember those whose hand you hold; How you’ve inspired the timid to become bold.

When the waves of life crash over your boat When it seems like you’ll sink; you can’t stay afloat.

Remember the kindness that you let show Remember the light that helped others to grow.

When your feet are weary and in need of rest When you are so tired quitting seems best Remember the people who’ve seen your grace; The soft spoken word that lit up their face.

When people you love can’t reach through the haze When the pathway of life seems to end in a maze, Remember the friends you helped to achieve Things that they couldn’t even dream to believe.

9

EDITOR SNORES THROUGH EVERYTHING People like you sleep like fucking slugs, Slobbering yourselves stupidly asleep, Dumb heart pumping more Morphean drugs To wash away wisdom, one clean sweep, And then you wake up. Here you are Staring at this (“Howdy!”) like a landed fish, And you can’t wake up, you’re still too far From painful consciousness, and all you wish Is loveliness rolled in warm oblivion.

So I’m throwing you back, O fat and slack Catfish of dormant, deathly hibernation; If that’s your life, you can have it back, So it doesn’t matter if you miss a call To tell you what secret was written on the wall.

THE MONSTER Before I was caught and sedated in this cage To objectify sad transgression, I saw the world in a cold, detached rage And pause and motion expired in succession.

The tides of words turned in cycles, so No droplet signified more than another, Evaporating into mist or merged below In the motive mass of the fundamental mother.

Recollection scatters all these spoken years To show there is no worthwhile escape But acceptance of falsity as it appears And this freedom, in its own peculiar shape.

How wise of you to put distance between Yourself and the monster you dreamed you had seen.

CHRISTOPHER WOODS

R.W. HAYNES

hart crane’s last lover after he was finished speaking with others, he began talking to the sea, slowly at first, in almost a whisper. soon, though, he felt distant from the land itself. he left Cuba, just as he had abandoned Cleveland. there was nowhere to go but across the Caribbean to somewhere new, his only friends the whitecaps measuring his journey. in the end he needed another lover, and this time only the watery depths would do, their rhythm, their gentle touch, the way they never tire.

HIS ROOM IN ARLES In a letter to Theo He explained how his room Could be understood In colors.

On another size 30 canvas Walls became a pale violet, Doors lilac Bed and chairs butter yellow Linens lime green.

The window also green, sealike, Suggesting rest, sleep, A room full of everything And nothing, all at once.

His eyes were tired.

He chose to see his room in tints Flat as prints from Japan.

But outside, Through the sea-green window, A world was rolling in Like an ocean-borne Beowulf.

Always nearing, Gaining on his every resolution.

10

ADAM STRONG PROPER GRAMMAR Adam Strong is a father of two, a high school digital arts teacher, and is currently entrenched in his first novel, Bella Vista. He lives in Portland, OR.

Dysthymia is what the doctor said I had. Said I would feel this way until I went on

he hasn’t listened to since High School, when he was a loner studying physics.

medication. Said that some people never know they even have it, they just think that life is extremely difficult. Said that Dysthymia is a mild form of depression.

Mom and all the sunlight she used to have gets covered up by the cloud cover, by my Dysthymia and the dull-grim ache of reality. But she wasn’t always like that. Before she came home every day with grey looking skin after spending eight hours under two massive fluorescent lights, before the endless depressing phone calls, she was bright. This was before six years of social work sapped all of that warm out of her.

It’s not bad all the time. I have good days. I have bad days. I have days where I want to lock myself in a room and not see anybody. Some days the grey sky ceiling of Vancouver is a mind state I can’t get out of. Sometimes my thoughts are the clouds keeping the sun from coming in. Sometimes my Dysthymia is too much too deal with, other times I know I’ll be okay.

Sometimes I get stuck on what she used to be like, my Dysthymia plays these memories back to me on a steady loop, an afternoon of my eighth birthday repeated on a fortyfive record. Mom with long hair lighting candles on cupcakes, Dad playing ukulele. Mom with her flowery skirt and smiles.

Another thing about Dysthymia is how I get locked into a thought, a needle in a record of a song I can’t get out of my head, a song that drives me crazy until I hear it again, until I play it just the amount of times to where my brain is satisfied.

I have no control over it.

Dysthymia does that, makes you focus clear and hard on something. And these days, the grey and the questions of who my parents are turning into and how I fit in are all I can ask, over and over.

Sometimes these thoughts last a day, sometimes a week.

Days and days where the cloud cover switches between big and pillowy to walls of grey.

What’s the word Mom always uses? Exacerbate. I looked it up. It’s a verb. It means to make a problem or a bad situation, or negative feeling worse. Exacerbate, as is Dysthymia exacerbates depression.

Dysthymia.

Depression.

Exacerbate. Proper grammar and punctuation, that’s what people judge you buy.

My family is too pre-occupied in their own issues to really notice. When Dad found out what I had, he said I was pampered too much.

“What you need is discipline,” he said, “We’ve been chasing after you with a diaper ever since you were born, and now look ‘atcha.” Dad runs those last two words together to show he’s a real people person, salt of the earth.

I know all this and still I don’t go on medication. My friend Tommy went on medication. Prozac, lithium, MAOI inhibitors, they all do the same thing, life without ups and downs. You lose the lows but you lose the highs too.

Dad went to college. He knows what depression is. But the guys he works with on the job-site, they make him not speak correctly, not like the way I was raised.

I’m at the dinner table waiting for a dinner that will not come, with Mom still under those twin fluorescent boxes and Dad making fake catcalls to women walking by his job-site.

Drinking beer when only wine will do.

“Proper grammar and punctuation,” Mom says, “that’s what people judge you by.”

I’ve seen the therapist. I’ve got the prescription in my hand.

Norpramine. An anti-depressant. Maybe a prescription is currency. Maybe I’ll do something else with it. A forged signature, a healthy dose of Vitamin C. A little bit of what Mom used to have. Sunshine. A big shot of it in my arm right under my shoulder. Maybe that’s what I need. A little inward sun.

There’s something about Dad and not belonging. Not being comfortable with being in charge, of the job-site, of anything where he has to show people what he knows. So he pretends.

Dad tries on a personality that just doesn’t fit but he wears it everyday, regardless. My Dad and his fancy engineering degree can’t seem to figure out the balance most people do.

Dad the people person. My Dad, who drinks beers with his co-workers at the bar down the street from the job-site after work when he is a wine drinker. The same Dad who pushes his classical record collection back in favor of the rock and roll

(continued on the next page)

11

ADAM STRONG

POEMS BY

PROPER GRAMMAR (continued from page11) My doctor’s handwriting is illegible. How would they even know if it was altered? They still don’t use computers down at the Pharmacy down the street from my house. I could walk down to the store on the corner with the prescription in my hand. I could write it out for inner sun. Use the essential vitamins god gave us to make us better people.

Lose the lows, but lose the highs too.

J. BRADLEY J. Bradley is the Falconer of Fiction at NAP. He lives at iheartfailure.net.

Maybe we’re all working hard to be someone we are not.

My trying-too-hard-to-be-a-man-of-the-people Dad, my well-meaning social worker mom trying to keep in her inward sun and losing after a hard day of crack addicts and homeless people. I see the way her brow gets more embedded into her head, the wrinkles, cracks and fissures from all she sees throughout her day. Maybe a little inward sun would do her some good too. Dad could use enough sun to make him shelve the rock and roll, quit the construction business and go back to being his normal engineer self.

Bloc Party The softest wall sleeps next to me on weekends, freckles tagged all over her shoulders like mall fountain pennies.

Every time we see each other, she shakes away more bricks; the guards start forgetting their AK-47s.

Inward Sun, Norpramine.

That morning on the way to the pharmacy the way the sun hits my chin is like the first day of Summer, wall to wall blue sky. Inner sun and warmth on my face. The little bell that goes off when I walk into the pharmacy. The lady with glasses and the long white coat, almost smiling. I hand her the prescription with my doctors real signature right next to my imitation. She drops two sets of pills into two little bottles. Take four times a day, with water.

There’s less to climb, more cracks to hold hands through. I still keep away YouTube clips of Ronald Reagan.

Inward sun is the big letter N emblazoned on the pill.

Nopramine. You lose the lows but you lose the highs too.

Maybe not. Maybe this is my inward sun. Vitamin C, Norpramine. You take the good with the bad. I walk home with both of them in the bag from the pharmacy.

These days my thoughts leave me alone now. I’m cut off, but I’m not suffering. The sentences still go 45 rpm, in my head, but they are just words now, one exchangeable for the other. And the clouds are flattened out into an always grey with occasional sun breaks.

I Will Follow You Into The Dark I think of your name like hands beating against a partition of ice from underneath Lake Michigan.

Dysthymia. Depression. Norpramine and Vitamin C. Inward sun. Exacerbate. Proper grammar and punctuation, that’s what people judge you by.

I rust ice picks, drain the battery of my cellphone. My arms cordon off the shore: nothing to see here.

• • •

In a million years, some of you will be swallowed or polluted, like candle wax waiting to start. (find more J. Bradley on page 13) 12

MORE

POEMS BY J. BRADLEY Mounting The Quilting Bee

Disintegration

It took 427 rib cages to realize I had a problem.

I’ve allocated enough money to recover a toy Hess gas tanker, a hidden bottle of lighter fluid from Goodwill.

Fingering each one like an instrument sounded great; Carrie was a woodwind, snored. Miranda a punctured accordion. Natalie, a chalk board cello until I could make magazine letters out of the sounds and write ‘I-wish-I-missed-you’ ransom notes.

While you slept, I took a picture of you, placed it behind the wheel in the cab.

You’ll never see on the whiteboard my theorem of Michael Bay’s Gas Tanker, the tired anticipation of adjusters.

Patterns are only good for quilts and clothes.

Some people scratch them out with pencil, others with fist into bone.

I threw away all the throats I collected, dust blanketing the boxes until the time came where I finally believed in writing that perfect Valentine’s Day poem.

Oh, Montana I want to pluck the flowers growing from your arm, clutch the bouquet using only my teeth.

So many leaves fell under my fingers you could hide all 427 rib cages beneath them.

I’ll toss it down my throat to see what will wake me first: the middle school choir of your name or the phantom migraine of your fingernails.

When I’m not running away from childhood, I’m falling back into it, editing out surprise emergency room visits.

Patterns are only good for quilts and clothes.

Some people scratch them out with pencil, others with fist into bone.

When my ex-wife said “thank you” to me for being in her life, I wasn’t sure how to react, then you guilt mugged me to say it back.

Every love poem I write is a hand holding an oversized pair of gold plated scissors quivering to cut the ribbon stretched in front of the cinema world premiering our eventual ending.

I’ve been only able to hold onto someone once for more than eleven months.

One day, I’ll get this right, forget all the evidence, give the finger to the galaxies and scars I borrowed.

The ending is under constant revision.

I undo each thread in this pattern recognition.

13

FIVE POEMS BY FEBRUARY GRACE Tug of War I am the wishbone pulled between two stubborn, equal wills One forever holding fast, Other sways to and fro

The Winter That Wasn’t Last fall I begged Mother Nature for her mercy plead I could not bear to brave the cold again to see her ice and frost the world in powdered sugar or sifted flour gently falling from her hand I was never supposed to be back here in Michigan

Autumn Song There is no time but spring, said she all others are just longing exists no hour save twilight -stars to hold me until morning There is no life but love, said he -too meaningless a thing the moon can only mourn as I for she who dreams of spring Over endless oceans deep veils of cloud-mist shield the dawn from tears of autumn skies dead leaves beneath her yield

I was never meant to see more snow at all

'Tis spring for him at least, thinks she on rambling walks he'll roam sunlight falling o'er his face as would my kisses, were I home.

It should be summer for me there that someplace other

Unrung

and I'd go blind from tears should glaring brightness fall Now I wonder, as I watch the evening weather reviewed, forecasted in the dark on blinking screen if She didn't just this one year deign to listen and spare one soul her darkest nightmarewinter's frigid sleep

the muse fell silent, tied of tongue hard wrestled down to frozen ground long battle lost, before begun or deafened by the aching sound of lover's songs still on my lips heart under siege, I swirl around denying hope of sweetest kiss sworn promises of joy, profound hot brine of tears will render blind in glare of brightest bridal lace most hopeful eyes that once were mine a shattered life denied, replaced, plans and maps and whispers shared shrill resonance of light undone souls mingled with such secrets bared and bells that cannot be unrung

My marrow leaks from thinnest cracks unseen, unfelt, unknown what ever would become of me should one or both let go?

Souvenirs Six months since touching down on that last runway roar of engines trace of jet fuel makes me shake small suitcases sit undisturbed just where I left them to breach their zippers desecration of a grave buried there still in mind that life I dreamed of left behind and boarding passes jagged, torn in half Melbourne, Sydney, LAX then finally 'home' to what was left though the word had long been stripped of all its meaning I know no matter how much time elapses since what was and is the sight of suitcases will always make me sick

February Grace is a writer, poet and artist who lives somewhere that is far colder than she'd like most of the year. Her other interests include singing, science fiction, and singing songs about science fiction. She blogs at Pitch Slapped www.februarywriter.blogspot.com and flits about on Twitter @FebruaryGrace 14

CLASSIC WRITER

OSCAR WILDE “ATHANASIA” To that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught Of all the great things men have saved from Time, The withered body of a girl was brought Dead ere the world's glad youth had touched its prime, And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid In the dim womb of some black pyramid.

But when o'er wastes of lily-haunted field The tired birds had stayed their amorous tune, And broad and glittering like an argent shield High in the sapphire heavens hung the moon, Did no strange dream or evil memory make Each tremulous petal of its blossoms shake?

But when they had unloosed the linen band Which swathed the Egyptian's body,--lo! was found Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand A little seed, which sown in English ground Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear And spread rich odours through our spring-tide air.

Ah no! to this bright flower a thousand years Seemed but the lingering of a summer's day, It never knew the tide of cankering fears Which turn a boy's gold hair to withered grey, The dread desire of death it never knew, Or how all folk that they were born must rue.

With such strange arts this flower did allure That all forgotten was the asphodel, And the brown bee, the lily's paramour, Forsook the cup where he was wont to dwell, For not a thing of earth it seemed to be, But stolen from some heavenly Arcady.

For we to death with pipe and dancing go, Now would we pass the ivory gate again, As some sad river wearied of its flow Through the dull plains, the haunts of common men, Leaps lover-like into the terrible sea!

And counts it gain to die so gloriously.

In vain the sad narcissus, wan and white At its own beauty, hung across the stream, The purple dragon-fly had no delight With its gold dust to make his wings a-gleam, Ah! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss, Or brush the rain-pearls from the eucharis.

We mar our lordly strength in barren strife With the world's legions led by clamorous care, It never feels decay but gathers life From the pure sunlight and the supreme air, We live beneath Time's wasting sovereignty, It is the child of all eternity.

For love of it the passionate nightingale Forgot the hills of Thrace, the cruel king, And the pale dove no longer cared to sail Through the wet woods at time of blossoming, But round this flower of Egypt sought to float, With silvered wing and amethystine throat.

• • • Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was born to successful Dublin intellectuals and took to the lifestyle with ease. He wrote in varying forms during the 1880s, but in the 1890s became one of London’s most popular playwrights. His play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is considered by many to be his masterpiece. Wilde was imprisoned during a strange twist of events and consequently wrote his well-known poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, in 1898. It turned out to be his final work, as Wilde died penniless in Paris two years later at the age of forty-six.

While the hot sun blazed in his tower of blue A cooling wind crept from the land of snows, And the warm south with tender tears of dew Drenched its white leaves when Hesperos up-rose Amid those sea-green meadows of the sky On which the scarlet bars of sunset lie.

15

rope-wrapped logs in their vaulted kingdom. Grandpa putted, dust in the urn on the mantle. On his desk, yellow legal pads were filled with obscenities or diagrams of inventions that he hoped would save his life.

Grandma was peeling shrimp, sucking oysters and lemon wedges in the steam of broiled mussels. She was soaked in sweat and hot paprika and her armpit hair was reeking of onions. The windows were littered with ornaments that stuck to the glass. The kitchen island was full of sand dollars plucked out of the Pacific Ocean with her toes.

A bird feeder attached to a golf ball was swaying. The orange moon hung low. The oysters were burning and the stars spun sideways. A baby was crying in the distance, somewhere upstairs. Sirens from an ambulance and fire truck were rattling the teacups they never use. The echo and the oysters and the pot of burning oil the only resolution.

Séance with the Putting Green

by Matthew Dexter Grandma scraped the marijuana from between the keyboards with her fingernail, rubbing it against her hairy nostrils. One of the dried-up leaves got stuck in the coils and I could see it spinning in the steam. We were dizzy from champagne. Grandma brushed her fingernails into the laptop speakers as if she were panning for gold dust. She was staking a claim in the debauchery of her favorite grandson, the one with the new baby and her investment in his submarine business (the submerging kind not the sandwich).

Grandpa was drinking vodka and tonic playing miniature golf on the living room carpet. Mariachi blasted from the ceiling speakers. There were seven generations of spiders in a cobweb mansion in the corner. It is too high to reach those

• • •

A Light in the Parlor photo taken by Christopher Woods 16

an hour and not jammed up in some office and lighting up as an escape. The snap of the lighter was sharp in her fingers and sounded almost like a faraway gunshot. First mine and then her own, the smoke trailing up and not even close to touching the stars. She smiled, the way she did when she was revealing a secret and told me to close one eye and follow the plume of smoke. As I did, she told me to concentrate, to watch the smoke melt the stars. After a time, my eyes blurred with concentration and the stars smudged against my eye, until everyone was sweating. Like frost from the leaves of a tree, she whispered, pulling me back to her, so the dripping stars were against my back.

We lay in our heat, our midnight heat and talked about the future. We planned like it was a far off thing and almost unimaginable. When Vicky spoke her voice was slow and languid, as if she could never quite shake the last drift of smoke from her throat; but it was tempered with excitement. I watched her as she explained her dreams and I believed every word she said, even the ones I knew would be impossible. Her voice was the sound of accelerated youth, from eighteen, as we were in that moment, all the way through to her twenties and beyond; her pitch changing with each hope and fear, until she settled on a time that was beyond her dreams. Even as she lapsed into silence, I could still hear her, somehow, as if her body pulsed and sparked with the ideas that she spoke of. It felt to me as if she was as alive as the ocean at our feet, coursing, rippling and brimming with life. I put my fingertips onto the flat of her stomach and felt the fizz of her body, the mystery of her skin. She was unknown and unknowable in that second and as I found her looking at me, her eyes were as much those of a stranger as they were everything to me; the way it was when you’re utterly helpless against the way you feel about someone.

We finished our cigarettes and pulled our clothes back on.

Her dress was tight with the seawater on her skin and looked for all the world as if she’d been caught in a summer shower and not the sea. My shirt was clinging against my body, too and the tattoo on my chest seemed to pour out of me; Vicky ran her thumb against it and smiled at it, as if seeing the colours for the first time. Her hand slipped down and back into my hand and we walked away from the water, back up the sand to the path, barefoot all the way back to the truck, the asphalt prickling against our feet and bringing us back to the world while pushing us further away from the ocean. We climbed back inside and looked down to the beach. It felt impossibly far away already, as if the last few hours had happened to different, better people. It was a sadness that comes from knowing a moment, just one moment, was perfect. Vicky slipped her hand onto my shoulder and I turned the key, the ignition kicking into life and killing the silence with a choking roar. Her hand stayed on my skin and she smiled to me a final time before slipping away into sleep. I drove on, stealing glances at the ocean as it fell away, her fingers still on my skin, even as she slept. All I’ve ever wanted, I said out loud, all I’ll ever need.

Night Swimming

by Chris Castle

I

t was Vicky’s idea but then anything good in our lives always was. We pulled off the side of the road and wandered down the path until we reached the ocean.

The sea looked as dark as oil and if weren’t for the reflection of the stars that peppered the waves I don’t think I would have made it in. While I weighed it up, Vicky had already slipped out of her dress and into the sea. For a second the moon caught her, turning her silver and perfect and everything I ever wanted. After that, I followed her in; what choice did I have?

The water was a lot warmer than I’d imagined and after a while it felt good on my skin, like I was safe. For a while I watched Vicky under the stars and she moved so naturally, it looked to me as if she’d been born in the water, like a mermaid in a kid’s book. By the time she swam over to me it was as if she glided and as she wrapped her arms around me all I could think of was grace. It kept rolling through my mind, as she drew her hands around my neck, as she gently brought me close, to her lips; grace.

We went as far as we could go, past the buoys and out so far that I could see the car sprawled messily on the side of the road. It looked as if it had been dumped rather than parked. I glanced over and told Vicky and she laughed, the water rippling and trembling with the movement of her body. The sound of her carried and that was when I realised everything was silent. All there was to hear was the lapping water and her body pushing against the tide. Everything is here, I thought. I spun round and faced her and saw she was still smiling, the last of her laughter almost subsiding. I launched myself over to her, my heart full and pumping. When we came together it felt as if we had collided, like stars or comets.

Afterwards, we swam towards the shore and as the sand gave way to rocks under our feet, Vicky’s hand took hold of mine, steadying us both. Out of the water we came, that feeling of warmth slowly leaving us, so the breeze touched us first around our throats and then drifted down. As the last of the ocean fell away at our feet, it felt as if I was losing something until Vicky’s hand pulled tighter in my palm and all that warmth came rushing back, re-igniting me tenfold, as if the ocean was inside her skin and no longer behind us on the seabed.

The two of us lay on the sand, looking to the stars before facing each other. Our breath came first as a sensation, like the late night breeze, on our skin and then after, as a sound, like the rolling tide. On another night, if there had been cloud, or the prickling noise of rain, it could have felt like we were the only ones left earth. But instead, with the silence and the sea and her hand in mine, I felt as if we were the first two people in the world; before strangers, before traffic, before technology. All that remained was her hand in mine and nothing else. Everything I need, I whispered into her hair, as it nestled on my cheek, everything I’ve ever wanted.

We rolled onto our backs and split our final pack of cigarettes, Vicky declaring it was the last pack she would ever smoke. It was how she wanted to remember smoking, she explained to me, somewhere perfect and as a compliment to

• • • Chris Castle is an English teacher in Greece and has been published in various sites and magazines.

17

Midlife Crisis

by Mike Berger Terribly out of shape and bulging around the middle, I didn't like what I saw in the mirror.

The final event of the year was the monster course. The trail was on a mountainside laden with rocks branches and water hazards.

To make matters worse, my best friend was as skinny as a fashion model. He ran every day.

Ten miles along, my knee began to scream. It shot pains up my leg each time my foot pounded the ground.

He watched what he ate but his secret laws he ran the marathon, and was really very good.

Somehow I managed to finish, but was in the agony as I struggled to my car.

Wanting to take off the extra pounds, I started to run. I was surprised when pounds came falling off.

The doctor poked and prodded, and gave me a shot of cortisone.

I never knew what pain was until I got that shot.

Entering my first five K run, I did quite well. Most of the race was easy but the last half-mile was hell.

The old doctor smiled at me and told me I was the fifth marathoner he had treated this year.

Feeling the exhilaration of finishing the race, I told myself that I wanted to run a marathon.

He said it would take six weeks or more for me to heal. At my age

Running every other day with my friend, we put on a lot of miles. I realized I had a long way to go.

I would be much better off giving up running and go to chasing blondes.

Little by little, I pushed out the distance, I ran until my legs quivered and my lungs were on fire.

• • • Mike Berger is an MFA, PhD. He is retired and writes poetry and short stories full time.

He has been writing poetry for less than two years. His work appear in seventy-one journals. He has published two books of short stories and seven poetry chapbooks, He is a member of The Academy of American Poets.

I entered my first marathon and did better than I had expected. In my age bracket, I came in seventh.

After that I bought some running shoes and loose fitting running togs. In my next marathon, I came in third.

18

Music Outside a Roller Rink

by William Cass The movie theater’s old doors were made of oak. Rain fell in big drops in the muck that had formed in front of the ticket window. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, yet the evening’s gloaming had already begun to descend.

Bernard was sixty-seven years old, about the same age as the theater. He swept and mopped its aisles, as well as the floors of the grocery and department stores nearby in the small town center. He also picked apples and wormed in season.

He lived in the basement of the theater in a room where discarded seats were stored. He had one of those to sit in at his table and another by his bed. They were made of red velveteen material that had worn bare on the cushion. Bernard also had a radio, a hot plate, a small television, and a bed.

There were two electric ceiling lights under tin shades, a cupboard, and a bookshelf that held a clock, some magazines, and a fishbowl with a goldfish.

The road the theater was on was made of dirt and gravel.

It was narrow and rutted with potholes, just down from the main blacktopped street. After the theater, the road angled out to the river and the expanse of woods where there was a sawmill that used the river’s water. A park with swings, grass, and a small cement pond with late season ducks perched across from the theater. The grocery and department stores, a few other businesses, and the post office were within sight around the corner.

Bernard stood inside the warm lobby next to the ticket window leaning on a broom. He watched the rain add to the puddles in the muddy road through the open doors. Miss Donohue was watching the same thing inside the ticket window. The curtain between them was ajar. There was a light on over the refreshment counter in the lobby, and another in the ticket window. The matinee had started a long time ago, so no one was buying tickets or snacks; there weren’t many people who came on a Sunday afternoon, and there was no show at all that evening.

Miss Donohue was a bit older than Bernard. She had been selling tickets for thirty-six years. She was a big woman who wore imitation pearl earrings, polka-dot dresses, and black shoes with thick rubber soles.

“It’s dark early now,” she said looking out through the ticket window.

“You’re right,” Bernard said.

“I can’t remember it getting so dark this early in October, can you, Bernard?”

He shrugged. “No, I guess not.”

The rain had begun to lighten. In the warmth of the lobby, droplets of condensation had formed on the bottom of the ticket window. Bernard was aware of the smell of popcorn and the heavy, sweet aroma of Miss Donohue.

“When was the last time you went up to Lubec?” Miss Donohue asked.

“Oh, I go up there an awful lot.”

“Yes, I know. When did you go last?” Miss Donohue was rolling tickets in a big spool on her lap, but she wasn’t looking at them.

“Well, I went up there last week,” Bernard said.

“Where did you go?”

“Well, I went out to the point.”

“It’s been years since I was out there,” Miss Donohue said.

“Was it raining?”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Bernard. “Seems like it was somewhere along, and the wind was sure blowing. It was blowing the waves around and my trousers back against my legs. That’s how windy it was.”

“Good Lord, why did you go up there if the weather was like that?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Did you do some clamming in the marshes?”

“No, I didn’t. I just went up there for the day.”

“How did you get up there this time, Bernard?”

“Well, I took the bus. The northbound from Bangor.”

“To the lighthouse?”

“Yes, and the lighthouse is working. That light is strong.”

“Did you collect some shells?” Miss Donohue looked away from the window and at Bernard for the first time.

“No, I just went up there,” Bernard said.

Miss Donohue turned back to the window and they resumed their study of the rain. Puddles had become large enough that some were beginning to join.

Bernard looked across the street to the park where a teenage girl swung on the swings. She had her head back and appeared to be trying to catch raindrops on her tongue. From the light of a streetlamp, he could see that she was wearing a white dress with flowered print under a blue cloth coat and that her knees were muddy. Her brown hair hung stringy, wet and slick against her head. She seemed to be smiling with her mouth open and the rain hitting her face.

“Look at that,” Bernard said.

Miss Donohue followed his gaze. “She’s going to catch cold. I’ll tell you that much.”

The girl hopped off the swing, picked up a paper bag, and walked over to the edge of the pond. She squatted next the water, took bread crusts from the bag, and tossed them in an awkward motion out among the ducks. They began dipping their heads furiously into the water. The girl put the bag and her hands between her knees, and covered her lower lip with her upper teeth. After they’d finished with the bread, the ducks, as if in flight, swam aback around the outside of the pond, and a few pigeons crept onto the bank and pecked at crumbs that had scattered there.

“Who is she?” Bernard asked.

“The plumber’s daughter.”

The girl stuffed the wet bag into her coat pocket and stood up. She walked over to a little bed of dying flowers next to some trees. She picked a few small, orange chrysanthemums that had passed bloom.

“Where does she live?”

“They used to live by the Catholic church, but after her father was killed, her mother moved them out of there.”

“Her father, the plumber? She’s Bud Simoni’s daughter?”

“You remember, he was hit by a truck last year near those taverns by the factory.”

“Sure, I heard about that.”

19

“No,” one of the boys said.

There was a pause as they regarded one another, and the low sound of their muffled laughter followed. Bernard watched the girl shaking and laughing into the boy’s chest.

“No, we sure don’t,” the boy holding her said loudly.

Bernard watched them laughing quietly across the alley with their cigarettes glowing dimly in the soft darkness. He pushed back through the door into the theater and turned off the small, high, shaded lights along the walls. He slid the cardboard under the stage and walked back towards the lobby where he sat in the second seat in the last aisle. It was quiet; he could scarcely hear the rain on the roof. But, he could hear well the sound of the organ music at the rink across the alley, jolly and hopeful. He thought of Miss Donohue, his basement room, and the girl. He thought of the years behind him and those ahead. He sat very still and looked for the broom in his hands, but couldn’t see it in the darkness.

“I don’t know what he was doing down there,” Miss Donohue said. “Maybe he was doing something he shouldn’t have been. It was late at night.”

The girl left the park along the road. She walked past the stores and the police station holding the flowers in her hand.

Her face was down and the rain fell on the back of her head.

“Why don’t I go and have her come in out of the rain?”

Bernard asked.

“No, let’s leave her alone. She’s probably going home.”

“She can’t be fourteen years old.”

“That’s all right. We’ve all been that age once. I was.”

Bernard looked at her sitting with the roll of tickets like a heavy weight in her lap. They watched the girl walk down the street in the rain, with the quiet rhythm of it on the roof, the hum of the clock over the refreshment counter, and the murmur of soundtrack from the movie inside the theater.

They said nothing for several moments until muffled noise rose from the theater and people began to emerge through the exits talking. Some were laughing because the movie had been a comedy. Miss Donohue walked up the little staircase behind the ticket window to the projection booth.

Bernard waited for the theater to empty and then turned out the lights in the ticket window. He left the little lamp over the refreshment counter on. Miss Donohue came back downstairs and pulled the curtain to the ticket window. She put on her raincoat and locked the lobby doors from the inside.

As she had every night they’d been together over those many years, she said, “Goodnight, Bernard.”

They nodded to one another, and then Miss Donohue went out the front doors, closed them, and shook them hard to be sure they’d locked. Bernard pulled open a corner of the curtain and looked through the ticket window so he could see her open her umbrella under the awning. He watched her walk across the road to her car and drive away. He leaned into the ticket booth until he could no longer see the red glow of her taillights.

Bernard went into the empty theater and swept all the rows to the middle, then swept everything up to the front. He swept all the trash onto a thin cardboard, an old movie poster that he kept under the stage. He pushed open the back alley door and threw the trash into the blue dumpster outside.

It was full dusk, and he could smell the rain. The air was cold and full of its thick, dank odor and of the mud. Across the alley behind the roller rink, he could see the girl who had been in the park and two boys standing under the dimly lit landing of the roller rink, smoking. One of the boys had his arm around the girl, and she was laughing, huddled close to him.

Bernard could hear their muffled voices and the taped organ music coming from inside the roller rink. He watched the ashes spray out in the murky light as they flicked their cigarettes.

“What a shame,” he whispered to himself.

A car crawled by slowly in the alley with its headlights on.

The headlights in the rain swept over the young people who stepped away from the glare. The young people crept closer together in the rain as it passed and continued down the hill towards the park.

Bernard waited until he could no longer hear the car before he called, “Hey, how about some hot chocolate over there?”

The three of them looked over at once. Bernard stood holding the cardboard in the rain.

William Cass has had thirty-four short stories accepted for publication in various literary magazines and anthologies.

• • •

Indefinite Divisibility

by Neil Ellman (after the painting by Yves Tanguy) There is nothing so divisible as the mind left and right hemispheres divided infinitely into cells and molecules bits of plastic, metal parts and flesh the debris of war on Armageddon’s field empty, matterless space where the soul should be but where it’s not when men become what they forget.

Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey. His poems, many of which are ekphrastic and based on works of modern art, appear throughout the world in such journals as Alba, Anastomoo, Bone Orchard Poetry, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths and the Camel Saloon, among others. He has also published six chapbooks of ekphrastic poetry.

• • •

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Letter Box, Bellville photo taken by Christopher Woods

Anthony Ward Anthony tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including South, Word Gumbo, Perspectives, Crack the Spine, Shadow Fiction, Message in a Bottle, Snakeskin, and Blinking Cursor amongst others.

Fainting into the Crowd I see light traveling towards me Sound becoming distant The surrounding space Enclosing my mind The complexion of my brain Withdrawn of colour The crowds overwhelming me With their concern While I surrender to the inevitable And let myself go The ground toppling towards me As I cower above

Shell I love listening to silence The percussion of it drumming my thoughts When everything sounds as if it’s coming from a distance As it travels through the night Where I see nothing but darkness The universe stretching as far as my imagination Making me a singularity Observing the space around me Enclosing with reverberating pangs of conscience Echoing my vacant heart The emptiness that bellies within As my life drains from me And all that remains is this vessel to carry me.

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Katie Hoffman Into a Snow Globe Feeding the Neighbor’s Cat

I assumed he’d been electrocuted once— sawdust eyebrows on a kiln-baked red, surfacing blood, snaky veins, the moment before one more knock, an accidental elbowing, a slipping off the road, a falling into fog and snow.

I’m kneeling on the kitchen floor, counting moon reflections on the tiles, restarting every time I blink.

Inside a snow globe to hold in your hands, to shake and to wind up until it croaks and you crank it up again.

Christmas lights blurring across the glass sphere, a dazzling, a drifting, a hammering around.

The cat sits on my back, kneading, tail curled over my hip.

My back shifts under her weight, my skin tightens over the bulbs of my spine.

I try a kernel—stale, sticks to my teeth.

She jumps to the floor and sits with me for a moment, then jumps on the windowsill.

I follow and tap on the glass.

I Was Eating a Pickle

My nails are moon slivers, as though the moon could be peeled apart.

I tear the nails off, drop them on the counter.

I was sitting on the wire fence of vines behind the apartment building by the trash bins when you called my name, and I was eating a pickle, so couldn’t respond.

I pick up an energy flashlight from the door-less cupboard, click it on to a dim yellow light with a red halo.

The cat leaps toward the wall of light, looks at her paw, touches it again as it fades.

I’d like to be a ruby-throated hummingbird fanning at my window every morning to breakfast on the hanging spider plant’s pink flowers.

You’d be a starfish, lying in sun-awe or shooting along the waves, mulling about on the sea-floor, gem-tiles radiating the ocean lights.

I could never re-grow a limb like you or contain a second stomach.

Red-Winged Box Elders I would like to call them red-winged blackbirds but they’re more like fingernails and eyelashes that flew through the air and into the carpet.

Instead of containing the sun, of containing tree sap, the flit inside from wall to floor to blue and white striped shower curtain to lamp shade to the floor again where they beat their legs against nothing until the stillness gets to them.

I have two thumbs and that’s enough.

The vines have grown hands—velvet maroon leaves whose edges brush against my knees.

I am currently an MFA student in poetry at the University of Washington. I have published poems in magazines, including: Studio One and Whistling Shade. I enjoy drawing and mixing images with written poetry, and I am currently working on a yetto-be-published blog involving this practice. I also write nonfiction and drama.

Snowglobe Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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through. No wonder the middle-school boys yearned for another field trip to Blue’s Edge Cemetery.

Bertha Bombshell was admired by some, forgiven by others, and judged unmercifully by many. The latter group, including the likes of Mrs. McDoven, wanted Bertha removed from the cemetery, the town, and their memory all at once.

Bertha’s bawdiness was one strike, but another was her acidic tongue. On more than one occasion she was said to have spoken foul words to passersby. She would adjust her behavior, as necessary, to calm the offended party and offer trinkets from her handbag—a polished agate or a shiny schist—as a parting gift.

Some, like retired groundskeeper Old John, said she was a disgraced schoolmarm who had once sold lewd art at a gallery in Rounders’ Junction. “That kind of talk went with the territory,” he said at the Copper Kettle Bar’s Friday Fish Fry. Old John wore his cotton plaid shirt and picked his teeth between comments. “Her figure, of course, kept me going back to Blue’s Edge more often than you’d expect for a retired man,” he said to his mates along the bar. Chuckles passed along from fellow to fellow even down to the last stool. The bar’s grandfather clock sounded out the quarter-hours, but laughter covered them up.

Was there any wonder that things went amiss as soon as Bertha’s open sandals touched Blue’s Edge sod? The town’s reputation was a stake. By tradition, the cemetery was named for the V-shaped spruces on the angular field. A castellated gatehouse, now on the National Register, was built after the Civil War, with its turrets and round towers making a proper entrance for mourners down through the years and into the present.

If one Society woman had tilted her dessert plate at forty-five degrees, she would have approximated the pitch of the cemetery land as it rolled down between Clory River on the north and the southern end at limpid Brandt Pond. The cemetery was a point of civic pride.

During one of his return visits to catch a glimpse of Bertha, Old John, with his sharp attention to lawn-keeping, first noticed the irregularities. A number of angel statuettes on several gravesites had gone missing. Some families complained that their plastic flowers were taken. “In all my years I have yet to understand how anyone could disgrace a family plot,” Old John said at the bar. “There must be a basement in hell for such a thief.”

Mrs. McDoven herself took umbrage when two bronze vases were pried from her father’s monument, only to show up a week later at a local antique dealer’s barn. “I’m certain those were the ones,” she said.

The angels of grief were not only sorry for the dead but also wept for the abuse thrust upon the living. Fork tines rattled in disgust against the dentures of the Society women as they ate German Chocolate Cake and repeated the vulgar tales of Bertha Bombshell.

Bertha could not have known all that was spoken about her, but as her time in town moved from week to week, it was easy to see why she relied on drink to soothe her sensibilities against the unfriendly. For all the gossip, Bertha had a surprising command of subtle artistic appreciation, literary allusions, and actor-like flair, even when her speech was slurred. Her tours, as she called them, offered insight and provided her a few dollars from the gullible.

As summer came no one would doubt that things were apt to reach a steady boil, and Mrs. McDoven was determined to win out in the end. “How can we cater to a Bertha Bombshell

The Unofficial Docent byJan Wiezorek She slipped from tomb to tomb like a stripper. Bertha Bombshell was a discourteous moniker for the late-middleage woman who considered herself more vivacious and provocative than anyone of her years had a right to be. The alliterative title stuck. She was wearing her familiar yellow chiffon, a flowing scarlet scarf, and woven sandals on a warm Wednesday morning in late spring.

Fidgeting inside her generous, floral handbag, she adjusted the bulky contents that sounded like stones settling upon themselves. Bertha took time to admire her own handsome features and red lips in the reflective pond before making her rounds. When she spotted an unsuspecting couple or a solitary mourner, she sauntered over, dew-footed, for her first approach.

“Good morning,” she said to the man and his wife who were placing geraniums at the base of a tiny monument.

“Hello, there,” the man in a tan leisure suit replied. “It’s a sunny morning.” His wife, in green and feathers, nodded and turned her torso three-quarters away.

“Yes, indeed,” Bertha said. “Melissa. Your daughter? I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “It’s been years now, but it never gets any easier,” he added. “I’m Bertha,” she said. The couple failed to respond, but all three nodded to one other. Bertha walked away about ten paces and stopped, her sandals scuffing the stony road. “I say,” she said back to the couple, “I’m planning a brief tour of the grounds this morning, and I wonder whether I could entice you to join me.” She waggled the scarlet scarf at the man.

He gave out a caring, broad smile, but his wife’s feathers quivered. “We can’t stay, I’m afraid,” he said.

“I understand,” Bertha replied. “However, I do want to show you one monument I hold dear,” she said, pointing up the hill. “It’s just steps away and very interesting. Won’t you join me?”

The couple looked at each other, and the man whispered to his wife until her green feathers were motionless. “Yes, for a moment, if you’d like,” he said.

The three walked upon bright green sod. Bertha scouted out any old gravestone that would suffice and recited her narration extemporaneously. “Yes, here it is. Our town’s famous actress died of brain lunacy in”—she paused to observe the date—“1881,” she said. “Here is her low and rounded granite stone—like a long, skinny pillow—that has attracted visitors since then and up to today,” she said smiling.

Bertha bent all the way down, pointing out the year and shaking her caboose right in front of the couple.

“It was a sacrilege to the memory of the departed,” Mrs. Mortimer McDoven said, her green feathers shaking.

“Bertha’s charms were unholy at best.” The ladies at the Society Women’s Wednesday Bridge and Coffee listened, holding their saucers and grinding their Wedgewood china teacups to an absolute halt.

The thought of schoolchildren leaning against monuments to learn of long-gone city fathers, gracing their delicate graphite rubbings with words, dates, and decorations on paper—and then to see the likes of her. “Simply appalling,” Mrs. McDoven said. She whispered it was low-cut and see23

McDoven, attended the service at Blue’s Edge chapel. A few schoolchildren mourned the loss because they enjoyed their tours, and Miss Bertha was an interesting speaker, the inquisitive oglers learned. Her final resting place in the pauper’s section had no view of the river or the pond.

“Naturally, I wished no harm to Bertha,” Mrs. McDoven said. The ladies at the Society Women’s Wednesday Bridge and Coffee grinded their teacups, and fork tines rattled as usual. All eyes focused on a luscious German Chocolate Cake. Mrs. McDoven smiled. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing whatsoever came to mind. The cake wouldn’t go down, either. “It’s dry,” she said.

Over at the Copper Kettle on Friday night, the men toasted Bertha. The stools were full, and the fried fish was as popular as ever. Old John said cemetery theft continued on at its present rate. He shook his head and ordered another beer.

He told an old story, but there was no need to pass it down along the bar. Most of the men left for home early. When the chimes sounded out ten, every stool was empty.

For days after the burial Mrs. McDoven sat at home and arranged two bronze vases of plastic roses. She placed them on the grand piano near her extensive angels-of-grief collection. When it was time for Mrs. McDoven and her husband to visit their daughter’s grave, she lacked the desire.

“You know, Mort, we can only have Melissa in our memories.”

“Yes.” “Let’s stop visiting the cemetery for now, dear.”

“Alright,” he said.

“Have I done the right thing?” she asked.

“There are no answers, dear.”

She fussed around the grand piano, sat on the sofa, and tried to relax with a cold compress on her neck. She thought she’d read up on the ethics of professional docents.

any longer?” she asked her ladies at the Seventy-Fifth Annual Fourth of July Luncheon and Ice Cream Social.

So it was that a group of women led by Mrs. McDoven took in Bertha’s tour one Wednesday morning in late July.

“Here, you see a statue of local landowner Jonathan Payne,” Bertha said, “sitting on his granite throne as though he were overseeing his vast acreage. What a fitting spot, as we admire the river and breathtaking reflecting pond, to end our tour of the monuments at Blue’s Edge. I thank you for joining me. If you feel inclined to offer a gratuity, I would be pleased to accept it.” One or two ladies in attendance dropped some change into the bottomless handbag.

“Now, please take your exit underneath the turrets at the main gate.” As some visitors left, Bertha felt pleased, though she knew nothing about Jonathan Payne or his place in local lore.

And that was that. She did sashay a bit too long at the chapel, she thought, but the visitors admired the stained glass and didn’t notice her enter the ladies’ room for a sneaky tipple.

She checked her bountiful, floral handbag and found the gin flask at the bottom under a small limestone.

“Miss Bertha,” Mrs. McDoven said.

“Oh, yes. I hope you liked the tour.”

“I’m here to question whether you should be here at all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It seems to me that your loitering at Blue’s Edge should be brought to the attention of the authorities.”

“The cemetery is open to the public, and I offer a free, valuable service, I believe.”

“Doubtful.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Cemetery theft has increased since your arrival, and by your behavior you discredit the memory of our dearly departed. Where did you get your facts?”

“Why, you are a vicious bitch,” Bertha replied.

Tossing the handbag over her right arm, Bertha ran full force at Mrs. McDoven, grabbing her neck in a strangling hold.

She had no right, Bertha thought. Her sandaled feet slipped uphill on the dewy grass, giving Mrs. McDoven time to break free. With a shove, Mrs. McDoven pushed Bertha backward with all her might. Under the weight of her handbag and the work of her tipple, Bertha found herself carried off-balance.

In slow motion Bertha could see her vision turn upward toward the rows of blue spruce, and back toward the clear sky. Monuments seemed to turn on themselves, and her sense of space and direction was missing, like entering the grounds for the first time and being unable to point out the way to Robinson’s garland frieze or the laurel wreath on the Hessberg mausoleum. She was ready to take a downhill fall onto the slick green sod, preparing herself for a sore back, when her head hit the chiseled corner of an upright Civil War tombstone.

The force of the fall and the density of the fixed object allowed her brain to slam into the inside of her skull. Her head hit the right spot. Her case could be one for the textbooks.

The trauma was severe, and, within a few days, a physician pronounced Bertha dead.

Mrs. McDoven, who suffered a bruised neck for two weeks, was stony and resolute. Her many friends came to her aid, serving as witnesses to Bertha’s violence. Of course, there were no charges placed against her.

Many curious ones turned out for Bertha’s burial. Old John and his cronies at the Copper Kettle were there. Even some of the ladies, along with Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer

Jan Wiezorek writes and teaches at an elementary school in Chicago. His fiction has appeared at PressboardPress.com, ShadowFictionPress.com, CommuterLit.com, CracktheSpine.com, Seeds Literary Arts Journal in Chicago, Sleepytown Press, Ozone Park Journal, TheWriteMag.com, AbsintheRevival.net, Our Day's Encounter, and Blinking Cursor. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (New York: Scholastic, 2011). Jan holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts Education from Columbia College Chicago and a B.A. in Journalism from Iowa State University. He also has studied fiction writing at Northeastern Illinois University. Jan enjoys biking along the country roads of Michigan's Harbor Country.

• • •

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Poems by

Ron Koppelberger Dreamy Embrace Cloaks of cotton and sheer skies of bespattered down, In beauties eager bloom, by the birth of salient sugars In sweet breaths of starry-eyed quest, the desire in favorite degrees of twilight passion, in tender eyes and perfumed strands Of corn silk shadow, designs of noble embrace, A wish in dreamy affection and scarlet wherefores and the Flames of amber eyes in Tempests, where the wind blows by revelations In firefly promise and sun glow Delirium.

Concealed Hearts Midday dreams of rattle pate wild and turns of essence, By dancing airs of distinction and affection, The vision of a hold found fast and silent By the needs of a remanded desire, The leafs ragged wish by the winds of a tempest In dress, tempered by the rule of crosswind clutch And real passions of vain endeavor, by the puff of a shadow gone Unto the lay of concealed hearts.

Ron is a poet, a short story writer and an artist. He has written 102 books of poetry over the past several years and 18 novels. He has published 647 poems, 643 short stories and 116 pieces of art in over 225 periodicals, books, anthologies and 10 radio Broadcasts. He has been published in many countries around the world. He has been published in The Stray Branch, The Fringe, Write On!!! (Poetry Magazette) Static Movement, Necrology Shorts and Record Magazine. He is a member of The Poet’s society, The Fiction Guild as well as The Isles Poetry Association and The Dark Fiction Guild. His art is viewable on Facebook under will806095@bellsouth.net.

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