Unbroken Journal Issue 4

July/August 2015 Issue executive editor r.l. black layout editor dino laserbeam

Š 2015, unbroken/Contributing Authors Cover Art by Gayle Miner Unless otherwise noted, all accompanying photos are under a CC License, with the only changes being that some of the photos have been desaturated.

Font used in cover creation, inside banner, and author titles by John Holmdahl

Contributing Authors Airika Goodpasture

Karen Ashburner

Ryu Ando

Anthony DeGregorio

Kathy Steinemann

Sandra Anfang

Brianna McNish

Keith Nunes

Stacy Bustamante

Bryan Verdi

Ken Poyner

Thomas O’Connell

B.R. Yeager

Kyle Hemmings

Tom Snarsky

Candy Nalder

Mark Farley

Zach Wyner

Charles Bane Jr.

Mary Gilonne

Zain Saeed

Dalton Day

M.C. St. John

Daniel M. Shapiro

Melinda Giordano

David Greenslade

Michael O’Neill

David J. Kelly

Michael Prihoda

David Spicer

Mimi Overhulser

Everett Warner

Myrtle Yvonne

Glen Armstrong

Owen Clayborn

Glen Sorestad

Paul Soto

Hillary Umland

P.C. Newland

Holly Wotherspoon

Peter Gleason

Howie Good

Rachel Dull

Jefferson Navicky

Rebecca Dutsar

Jess Mize

Rebecca Gaffron

John Cambridge

Rebecca Harrison

John Grey

R.L. Raymond

Jon Wesick

Robb Dunn

Judith Lloyd

Robert Boucheron

This issue is dedicated to my dear friend, Tasha Haese (Mann), who passed away June 15. For three years I had the pleasure of being a critique partner with Tasha, and I cannot express what a blessing it was to know her and to read her beautiful words. Tasha was very proud of her SenecaIroquois Native American Heritage, and one of her books she was working on was based on the Iroquoian concept of the Seventh Generation. I hope that somehow her books will still get published, as it would be sad if the world never got to read them. We’ve lost a wonderful person.

My thoughts and prayers are with her family. Tasha left behind a husband, and a daughter who is twelve years old. Some of us are taking up a collection that will be sent to the family to help out with expenses during this difficult time. If you would like to contribute, you can do so through PayPal. The PayPal address to send funds to is caninelupus@aol.com – just put a note on there that you are donating to the Tasha Haese collection. Donations will be taken through July 4th.

From Tasha’s book that she was working on, Burning Sage on Cedar Lane: “May the tears be wiped from your eyes, so you may see again .... May the sadness be cleared from our throat so we may speak once more...We must clear out our ears, so we may hear more than our hearts breaking....”

Our hearts will be breaking for a long time.

by Stacy Bustamante

I once walked for an entire day. I stopped on occasion to relieve myself, or to tie a shoe, but aside from those brief and momentary reprieves, I kept the pace of my beating heart. I liked the feeling of the tall grasses as their yellow furred points passed across the palm of my hand. I would sweep my arms back and forth as I paced the fallow ground below. The yellow drifted off and cornered the sky. I liked how the heavens and the earth, as if yielding one to the other, hemmed me in. In the vast openness, the sound of my soles scraping across the dirt was a ministry to the dark, dry earth within my bones, speaking, “The ground is good. The rain will come.� I stopped to pick up a smoothed stone that had made me stumble. I rubbed its warm skin across my cheek. I turned and tossed it out of the way. And then, I continued on.

Stacy Bustamante is a stay at home mother of three who lives in Northern Colorado. She spends her personal time dedicated to refining her craft of writing. She loves the earth and the spiritual aspect of life, and these elements of existence are the foundations of her writing.

Accompanying photo by Leonora Enking

Concerto for the Left Hand

by Howie Good

Are you sad? Do you feel bitter? Then decide to become someone else. Flee to the woods and live as a bandit or as a bee with pollen caught in its fur. What a story that’d make, a concerto for the left hand, if you could just escape from yourself – a little boy who was whammed on the side of the head, pulled from sleep and whammed with a fist, a belt, a hairbrush, none of the voices downstairs ever venturing to object, as though what was happening wasn’t really happening. A tornado of fire does exist, it does, despite the scant available light.

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Beautiful Decay from Another New Calligraphy and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press.

Accompanying photo by Vincepal

Marked by P.C. Newland •Birds (class Aves) are feathered, winged, two-legged, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrates. Many social species culturally transmit knowledge across generations. The vast majority of bird species are socially monogamous, usually for one breeding season at a time, sometimes for years, but rarely for life. Most birds have an extended period of parental care after hatching. Most researchers agree that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. (Wikipedia) •Halley’s Comet is arguably the most famous comet, and last appeared in 1986.

•He was five years old in 1986, the year his mother died.

•A bead of water was used to illustrate a mathematical sub-discipline called Chaos Theory in the 1993 film Jurassic Park.

•He was confused when his mother did not move after she fell while retrieving his soccer ball from the roof.

•The first words of the Ave Maria translate to “Hail Mary, full of grace”, in English.

A bird hit his windshield once. He was driving probably 60 miles per hour. It was a small bird, like a sparrow or thrush, and didn't crack or break the glass but left a strange, white streak from the point of impact (near center) which bore straight up the middle, fatter at the lower end and trailing off like a comet tail at its height. He didn't know what caused the streak, or what it was made of biologically, but no matter the method he employed to remove it, the mark endured. It did not respond to windshield cleaner, which he applied immediately after, and any other liquid he applied would only bead and flicker unsteadily off. The stain distressed him greatly— creating in his mind's ear the sudden confused crack of the poor bird's skull as it was sent tumbling, spinning graceless over the roof and back onto the road— but he could find no way to remove it.

And so choiceless he drove on. And through sun and rain and storm and snow and hundreds of driven miles, through thousands of wiper-blade lashes the mark still remained. Each day a fixed reminder of when he watched death mere inches away. And somehow he felt ashamed.

•Windshield is a predominantly North American term. In the U.K. and Australia, the term windscreen is favored.

•60 miles per hour is equivalent to 97 kilometers per hour and may be considered speeding on an undivided rural road in most U.S. states.

•A certain type of thrush can be referred to as a throstle. One nickname for the West Bromwich Albion Football Club is The Throstles.

•Windshield cleaner is often blue in color.

•Kicking a football (soccer ball in the U.S.) in a specific way can create a spinning motion on the ball, causing it to bend, or curl.

•He placed a mark in a book next to his mother’s favorite poem called “The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth. Her favorite verse: “Hark, how blithe the throstle sings/And he is no mean preacher/Come forth into the light of things/Let Nature be your teacher” •Scopophobia is a shame-related phobia, literally, the fear of being seen.

(Wikipedia)

P.C. Newland is a writer and rural Ohio native who loves nothing so much as a drink, a good book, and sometimes to find a little money on the sidewalk. A distant cousin of Mark Twain, P.C. unfortunately inherited none of his talent. P.C. holds an M.S. in Criminal Justice and an M.S.Ed. in Counseling and still claims it was worth it.

Accompanying photo by Feans

Nowhere Good

by Judith Lloyd

The way those girls clunk together, empty tin cans in a canvas bag. There’s a kind of din about them, wherever they go. There’s simply chaos, whatever they do. One girl is always angry and one girl is always laughing. There’s a girl on the brink of tears and a girl who’s had enough of crying. There’s the girl who does what she wants and the girl who does what she’s told. They clunk up the street. They rattle and roll. They bang into each other, elbows and knees. Those girls couldn’t tell you if they’re coming or going.

Judith Lloyd is an artist, writer, and monologist who studied in the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an undergraduate. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her first publication, Read It Back, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.

Accompanying photo by dana robinson

Untitled in Five Parts

by Tom Snarsky I. Dawn chorus. Catechism. Whitethorn flower. Sunsmoke. Trick question. Fearmonger. Scare tactics. Upbraiding. Divergent series. Arachnid. Brain damage. Pusillanimity. Spurious correlation. Philter. Corporal punishment. Exoskeleton. Behavioral ecology. Bleach. Shop towel.

Morning. Indefinite hiatus. Balm. Bass clarinet. Waterfront. Contextual semantics. Bigotry.

Clean living. Cannonball. Ice climbing. Renegade. Ceremonial burial. Triage. American politics.

Railroads. Kill switch. Vacation. Music stand. Erotica. Hunting dog. Stethoscope. Freeze frame.

Inertia. Crown jewels. Syntax. Long hair. Encephalitis. Financial crisis. Doggerel. Industrial music. Wrens. Open spaces. Transphobia. Musical theater. Monkfish. Coral reef. Causeway. Hail showers. Muslin. Rain water. Dionysus. Epileptiform headaches. Rheumatism. Apollonian gasket. Wretchedness. Optimization problem. Earring. Love song. Tourniquet. Rubber bands.

Glass. The Pyrenees. Harpists. Bituminous coal. Iceland. Literary festivals. Heartwork. Richter scale. Value. String instruments. Measurement. Probability spaces. Denouncement. Rampant unreality. Conservatism. Car bomb. Emergency. Hippocratic oath. Fervor. Nail gun. Perfidy.

National defense. Hawthorns. Migrant workers. Touchstone. Weeping willow. Ballgame.

Pulmonary embolism. Distraction. National anthem. Waterfall. Brown noise. Potency. Wizened stare. Ideogram. Pressure cooker. 401k. Wrecking ball. Cascade. Biological warfare. Hammock.

Purified water. Hairspray. Howth Castle. Environment. Lego bricks. Mortar. Unheroic pestilence. Trees. Riven earth. DĂŠnouement. Garden hose. Shamanism. Fruit basket. Mortality.

Pickle jar. SpongeBob. Second amendment. Vibractance. Barack Obama. Splinters. Firm handshake. Death. Physical education. Neurosis. Cherry tree. Mercury. Lunar eclipse. Pierrot.

Go Fish. Journalism. Monthly wages. Carpentry. Brash hooliganism. Estate. Dunkin Donuts.

Corroboration. Indigenous peoples. Heartache. Triple axel. Devotion. Manta ray. Dugong.

Mythical creatures. Foreclosure. First philosophy. Speculation. Closet drama. Urbanity. Wealth management. Education. Gender nonconformity. Wallaby. Black metal. Intolerance. Climate skeptics. Internet. Acid rain. Humps. Punditry. Civilian casualties. Enormity. Class warfare.

Gunfire. Login screen.

II. Academia. Brazil nuts. Chill. Dominant genes. Elephantiasis. Freezer burn. Gerontology.

Hieronymus Bosch. Indulgence. James Joyce. Kryptonite. Left field. Magic. Nominalist metaphysics. Ostracism. Pig Latin. Quintessence. Redoubtable figurehead. Satan. Tupperware party. Unction. Various artists. Watchtower. Xanthan gum. Yttrium. Zoning laws.

III. Abecedary. Ruminative prose. Milquetoast. Hybrid Noisebloom. Masque. Video games.

Clockwork. Train station. Regent. Typewritten affidavit. Marxism. Rent control. Divination.

Lucky guess. Banshee. Holter monitor. Forgery. Circuit bending. Haberdashery. Black box.

Infinitesimal. Theoretical term. Sandbox. Car alarm. Suburbia. Wiffle ball. Demonstration. Tire iron. Pinkberry. Corporate entity. Litigation. Card game. Apparitions. Free education. Sorbitol.

Christmas ornament. Denial. Kinetic energy. Massacre. Prescription drugs. Keystone. Utter incomprehensibility. Oubliette. Downstairs bedroom. Loneliness. Bench press. Hieroglyphics.

Hive mind. Bonanza. Emotional distance. Weathervane. Magnetic monopoles. Crystallography.

Digressive aperture. Nosedive. Militant astronomy. Antiracism. Maiden thought. Cherubim.

Western canonicity. Wool. Dog bite. Reptile. White light. Bouillabaisse. Ice floe. Harbor. Peach mango. Meatloaf. Detached retina. Support. Divorce papers. Renaissance. Tim Horton’s.

Wavelength. Marcel Proust. Potatoes. Piano keys. Gazpacho. Las Vegas. Diaphanousness.

Tropical Skittles. Saints. Imperfect conjugation. Departure. Drug dealer. Hamlet. Shameless plug. Suburbanite. Fresh fruit. Agreements. Trade routes. Transportation. Political intrigue.

Steak. Federal governance. Islands. Melting pot. Blender. Mixed identity.

IV. Zenith. Young people. “Xanax.” Waterfront property. Vaseline. Underwater trickery. Thomism.

Sacred places. Rhododendrons. Quotation marks. Parentheses. Ovoid planets. Nexus. Monty Python. Lemonade. Komodo dragon. Judaism. Iggy Azalea. Hecklers. Golf course. Fabulism.

Enigmatic people. Dissatisfaction. Carrion crow. Bathsheba. Animal Crossing.

V. Debris. Seven trumpets. Rumination. Un flâneur. Guitar. The Yankees. Plexiglas. Perforated edges. Bismarck. Horticultural diatribe. Power. Loose homotopies. Definition. Nonconsensual amputation. Containment. Deaf fish. Oceanography. Wiggle room. Gerrymandering. Whose Line. Whispers. Opportunity gap. Cosmogony. Black Terrific. Mylar. Holding cell. Cough.

Carpal tunnel. Endings. Clerical error. Hypersexuality. Capital punishment. Digression.

Anthropic principles. Murder. Chaos theory. Mathematics. False monoliths. Degradation. A party. Supervaluation. Chinese cities. Wharf. Higher education. Throat. Chimney hymnal.

Protuberance. Indie gaming. Coal. Tarot cards. Wind. Heart disease. Fluoride. Selective impermeability. Margarine. Final portfolio. Nipple. Transfer yard. Firs. New Hampshire.

Portents. Exceptional heights. Ogive. Dive bar. Panama. Jupiter’s moons. Whist. Nondemocratic regimes. Caresses. Natural gas. Candle. Reckless grandiloquence. Mesmer. Hoop dreams. Grandeur. Strip club. Troubadour. Thoughtless anachronism. Pewter. Experimental drugs. Board. Ill-defined success. Perusal. Life plan. Rationality. John Locke. Overture. Ancient Egypt. Error. Cabaret Voltaire. Innocence. Hedge fund. Futility. Macaronic verse. Lifeblood.

California girls. Landslide. A softening. Peculiarities. Robert Creeley. Hiccup. Heat death.

Figment. Boltzmann brain. IngĂŠnue. Clock tower. Porphyry. Dresser drawer. Domesticity.

Unexpected guests. Bourgeoisie. New coffins. Neoplatonism. Coarse fabric. Faulkner. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Home. Coffee cup. Tyger. Sexual attraction. Hybrid. Uproarious comedy. Panther.

Duct tape. Pornography. Fine china. Spain. Dating website. Spouse. Quantum locality.

Stubbornness. Day drinking. Priesthood. Granite quarry. Daydream. Ineradicable myopia.

Applause. Clean streak. Beginning. Holy water. Sustenance. Diet pills. Russia. Pickup truck.

Gills. Computer virus. Futurology. Daffy Duck. Mycenae. Cable box. Warmth. Disney movie.

Decoration. Hypnotic susceptibility. Turquoise. Blown glass. Holiday. Street sign. Galaxies.

Elective Affinities. Physics. Observational terms. Incidence. Cheese plate. Waif. Middle age.

Vocalists. Broadway musical. Tragicomedy. Arrest warrant. Fugitive. Heat wave. Omen. Dawn chorus.

Tom Snarsky is a Noyce Teaching Fellow at Tufts University in Medford, MA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in After the Pause, Shadowtrain, Otoliths, Cricket Online Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Braintree, MA. Accompanying photo by U.S. Army

Categorically Unsafe

by Rachel Dull

Danny is a boy, which makes him categorically unsafe. We met at Jill's 17th birthday party where he talked about sex and drugs from personal experience and was louder than anyone with whom I would voluntarily associate. He clutched at my arm while offering me a swig from his flask, making it clear he didn't subscribe to the idea of 'personal space' and was willing to share saliva. At that moment I decided we should be friends. I would use him to free me from my worldly ignorance if he agreed to let me love him unconditionally. “How have you survived this far in life without being eaten alive?� Danny asked. But he left the party with my number on the back of his hand and I knew our mutual education had begun.

Rachel Dull is a professional data manager, classic over-thinker, and zealous friend. At last, her creative writing degree from the University of Michigan Residential College makes sense, though the math minor still does not. Her work has previously appeared in Hoot Review.

Accompanying photo by Anthony Easton

by John Grey

Candles in mirrors reflect endless scenes of drifting patience. We could have donned blue, fought in the American Civil war. Could have struck our brother dead. But our deliberate gestures say, manage what you can. Have six kids if that helps. Sometimes the ones that hold us don’t even register. How do I know who arranged for me to be here?

Each night, breath leads to an evacuation - the wind sees such things yet still miscarries.

Eyes grab onto faces turned. Sight resorts to nose against window. On the sidewalks, feet trample down rust.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Rockhurst Review and Spindrift with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Big Muddy Review, Sanskrit and Louisiana Literature.

Accompanying photo by Tanel Teemusk

Filmmaking

by B.R. Yeager

It was five years and two weeks when we filmed. She was the dead woman and I played her husband.

I tip the Ziplock and drizzle a shotgun-red halo around her forehead’s perimeter and only a little makes it into her hair. She slipped—cracked her head on the hardwood, the bottom of her boots caked with ice and slick. (What we already shot).

The aperture shifts and it’s behind my shoulders and I mock tears over her body. Later, I’ll make her spirit rise with opacity adjustments and overlays. She will move through her kitchen (my parent’s, really) and hesitate over a picture of her and her husband (a photo of us—the real us— from a year before, holding half-sour pickles at the Brimfield Flea Market). She will walk through the house and through plate glass into snow (freshly fallen—not in the storyboard but it works). She will walk through the snow and lie between two maples, holding in a quiet place— all quiet and grey. She will lie and close her eyes and fade and drift apart from This Place and be gone and be quiet and grey.

Everything preserved I see, in milky BBC hi-def. Everything more or less how I imagined.

The dead woman laughs and I wash strings of blood from her hair. We kiss and eat leftover mashed potatoes and stuffing. We depart the house she died in and drive back to our apartment, studded tires gripping iced concrete.

B.R. Yeager lives in Western Massachusetts with messed up teeth and a shitty disposition. His work has appeared in FreezeRay Poetry, Mixtape Methodology, and is forthcoming from Cheap Pop, Pidgeonholes and Cartridge Lit. http://bryyeager.wordpress.com Accompanying photo by Porsche Brosseau

by David Spicer Excuse me, while I kiss the sky ~ Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze

Come on, you spineless wimp, Delia bullied. You said you’d do anything for a poem or a woman, so here’s your chance. You talk the talk, now walk the walk. If you will, fly into the sky and almost die. At that, in a snazzy blue and white jumpsuit, a helmet with Merwin’s face on it, and a backpacked chute big enough to stoop any man, turquoise-eyed Delia tromped to the open door of the plane. I’ve changed my mind. I’m afraid of heights, I said. Oh, I’ll be dipped in shit, come on, if you’re comin,’ Poet, Delia taunted. Without hesitation, she jumped out of the small craft, yelling Kayabunga, Tuffy! I knew I had chased a woman to Arizona. In the sky to almost die, I jumped out of the airplane like a spineless wimp.

David Spicer has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Now, Ploughshares, Yellow Mama, Bop Dead City, The Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere.

He is the author of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks. He is the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis with his wife and two Maine Coons.

Accompanying photo by Jotam Trejo

The New Crossing Guard

by Thomas O’Connell

Hermes is feeling a little down today. He has let himself get discouraged. Nobody said it would be easy adjusting to the recent restructuring, the company cutbacks and current backlash against nepotism. He is easily frustrated by the sluggish children; groggy in both the mornings and afternoons, shouldering their heavy backpacks. His once nice shoes are wearing out, now held together with electrical tape. The children make fun of his hat. They don’t appreciate the stream of cars he steps in front of for their sake. They are indifferent to it all, the weight and momentum of the automobiles as well as Hermes’ delicate fingers sliding a pencil from a boy’s backpack, where it sticks out of a half zippered pouch. The poor dolt will not have a clue until second period when his civics teacher lays a pop quiz face down on his desk. The boy will have to take a dime down to the school store to buy a replacement, while Hermes strolls home tapping the pencil, little more than a nub actually, against his palm.

A librarian, as well as three time Pushcart Prize nominee, Thomas O’Connell’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Elm Leaves Journal, Caketrain, NANO Fiction, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and The Los Angeles Review, as well as other print and online journals. He also happens to be the 2015-2016 poet laureate of Beacon, New York.

Accompanying photo by Guian Bolisay

by Mark Farley

The morning after the sex, she put her socks on first. That bothered him. He’d enjoyed the sex.

Without it, life had been a funeral. But he didn’t like to think he’d had sex with a woman who put her socks on first. The socks were black. There was nothing wrong with black socks, but he didn’t think they should go on first because there would always be a moment when she was naked apart from the socks. It looked wrong. As if she was grounded in night-time. But which night? The night before? He remembered the night before, but did she?

He wondered if she had enjoyed the sex.

She watched him as he dressed. He put his socks on last but she didn’t look pleased.

Mark Farley is a web developer in Swindon, UK. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Saturday Night Reader, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and fiftywordstories.com. He blogs his creative writing attempts a http://mumbletoes.blogspot.co.uk/ Accompanying photo by the awesome Craig Sunter, used by permission.

by Airika Goodpasture

Bright lipstick that’s worn off from the night before, when my hair might have been curled and pretty. When my jeans weren’t quite so torn, and my panties fit just a little bit tighter, this cigarette burn wasn’t on the sleeve of my faded jacket, and I had two earrings; not just one. My socks wore snug against my feet, safe inside my dark brown scuffed lace-less boots instead of being lost somewhere between sheets, only to be found when the maid comes to his apartment, cleaning the filth he is too damn lazy to clean his self.

Those other girls didn’t know what it meant to wake up hours before him, sneaking out, never leaving a number, or a thank you note, not once secretly hoping “this could be the one.” There never was “the one,” I knew this, only the next one. Smashing bottles and cigarettes against walls and cement floors, and bright red lipstick smeared across mirrors.

Airika is a current journalist for The Weekly Sun in Sun Valley Idaho. She has been a freelance writer for more than 10 years. She is also an avid fly fisher and wine drinker.

Accompanying photo by Katie Tegtmeyer

Electric Starfish

by Brianna McNish

Ipsa wears lipstick the color of Electric Starfish, tonight her bun held together by the broken end of a toothbrush, hair clips she stole from her mother’s jewelry box, you who she pulls from the party like a dollhouse toy covered in rain. You dream of her with the lights off, crawling in bed like entering the pit of a nostril, down to the mouth of the blankets aerates with the smell of midnight coffee. For any matter, what you never expect is the stolen underwear. You’ve seen the pattern before. Torn white fabric taut around her crotch, glimmering in stars and polka-dots, this time with the elastic band pushing enough onto her hips that when you pull it leaves a pink bruise. For good measure, you turn the nightstand lamp on, where, both swimming free from the blankets, Ipsa’s underwear has the name Hana Hana Hana etched over and over again on the elastic band-Why’d you stop? she asks.

Why stop? The house screams like a lost thing, with bodies, with men diving into the scent of open-rose perfume, men grinding on women or vice versa, music crawling into their skin, in their lungs, until they were breathing the cigars littered in paper towel ashtrays, and then she has the nerve to ask why stop?

“I should have known,” you say. This comes out sexier than you want. The woman isn’t Hana.

You wonder if she tears open the zipper of her jeans if Hana would come crawling out the middle, like if those panties were really stolen from the casket. What are the chances another girl, another girl you’re kind of into, will have the same torn pair?

Ipsa looks nothing like her. No, her eyes hook around a deer snout sniffing for a hand to hold, probably with freckles on her lungs, her teeth--my god, her teeth--extending over her lips like a pregnant belly. You wonder if you saw her before at the funeral. Maybe this girl saw you hanging over the casket and snatching a flower from Hana’s plasticized hands, and followed you upstairs into the bathroom, where you stood there rolling the flower like a joint behind your ear in a way that might have made Hana spat with giggles to the night air, to finally stop crying.

Even so, Ipsa cries because you pull at her underwear to thumb over the bruise so hard she rattles like shattering dinner plates and the music doesn’t stop--not until Ipsa’s crying is drowned under the weight of swaying bodies. You don’t either. You kiss her here and here and here, not until you can taste the bone of Hana’s underwear, the smoke and honey swallowing your lungs whole.

Brianna McNish is currently a high school senior from northern Connecticut. Her TV and movie reviews previously appeared in The Young Folks; she currently works as a columnist for Shameless magazine and an editorial intern for The Blueshift Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Misty Review and Crashtest. She interns at the Mark Twain House, where she tries to channel Twain’s literary awesomeness to assist organizing future writing events and programs.

Accompanying photo by Magdalena Roeseler

For This We Are Plentiful

by Peter Gleason

These walls haven't changed since 1981. With the right frame of mind, it can feel like walking into a time warp, but when you hang around here often enough you'll notice the changes. The elders are dying and our skin is loosening, so we keep on fucking and hoping that these little animals will grow to replace us.

Peter Gleason lives in New York City, where he enjoys writing words and music in his free time. Some of his fiction has been published in Writing A Thousand Deaths and In-flight Literary Magazine. Learn more about his other work at Crumpled Kingdom.

Accompanying photo by [AndreasS]

by Karen Ashburner

I walk through the kitchen on my tiptoes, eating pizza from a plate made of glass I bought from the thrift store. It was one plate of six and now there is only this one in the world and it lives with me but not by choice. I go outside and it's cold. I come back in and it's raining and still nothing has changed. You still live on the other side of America. We make arbitrary rules for one another to prove we care: you are not allowed to call me beautiful; I am not allowed to tell you to stop.

Five years pass and nothing changes except the length of my hair and how poorly I read and the diminishing number of plates in my cupboard. My hair gets longer and then shorter and more blonde and then long again and I am able to read less and less and yet I have more books.

The letters become more blurry the harder I try. The paragraphs make sense but the sentences are an incoherent mess. Spaghetti noodles. Pizza sauce. Chewy vitamins. All of it living on the other side of America. Marlon Brando's star, scuffed from chicken nuggets. The stupidness of Hollywood movies. The audacity of tourists to ask, "Are you on drugs?" The genius of book readers to ask, "Are you gazing at your navel again?" Tomorrow I will post more pictures for you if I wake up. Tomorrow I will fall in love just a little bit more and then regret telling you about the one plate I have left, how it hangs on a string at my window like the moon in a poem

by Pablo Neruda.

Karen Ashburner lives and works in North Carolina. She has publications in or forthcoming at Burrow Press Journal and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. A list of her publications can be found at www.karenashburner.com You can follow her on twitter @sweetrocketsky.

Accompanying photo by Matt E

Bad Neighbors

by Sandra Anfang

Forget that they leave their trash cans at the curb from one Thursday to the next. That the porch light burns 24/7. In three years I’ve never glimpsed their kids, though the sweet retired teacher, the chatty one with white hair upswept like decades-old spun sugar, says they’re adorable. My lover hears the Chinese woman shrieking at her teenaged son every morning at six. I’ve never heard this opera, seen her only twice. The poet and his wife—the woman with no body fat—live across the alley. They bring me garden gloves, Wisteria, care for my cats when I’m gone. They make up for the rest. Still, weeks go by between sightings. I wonder if they’ve left the country, taken a fellowship in Provence.

I suppose I’m a bad egg, too. (There was that block party I was going to organize, ‘til it dropped off the list.) Though I live here, my real home is this ghostly life, this penance for dwelling under vulture’s wing, coyote’s howl, turkey’s bluster. Bring me the manure-festooned air, the musky milk of lanolin, the slow accretion of black soil under my fingernails as the weeks break apart and fly like endless pieces of sky.

Sandra Anfang is a lifelong poet who began to write daily in the last couple of years. Aside from a few workshops here and there, she is mostly self-taught. Sandra hosts Rivetown Poets: A-Muse-ing Mondays, a monthly poetry series in Petaluma, and is a California Poet-Teacher in the schools. She self-published four collections of poetry before beginning to submit her work. Her poems have appeared in the The Shine Journal, Poetalk, San Francisco Peace and Hope, West Trestle Review, and The Tower Journal. In 2014, she won an Honorable Mention in the Ina Coolbrith Circle Poetry Contest, a First Place award in the Maggi Meyer 35th Annual Poetry Contest, and inclusion in the Healdsburg Literary Guild's From the Heart Chapbook (2015). Sandra is inspired by the natural world and the common threads that bind us together.

Accompanying photo by Chris Dlugosz

by C.C. Russell

I want to remember those moments as a boy that I see these pictures of. The Millennium Falcon toy I’m flying around in my Denver Broncos shirt, the tent in the springtime. I want to be able to say to them: Yes, that is the childhood that I lived in, this is what I remember also. You are not mistaken.

C.C. Russell currently lives in Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and two cats. He holds a BA in English from the University of Wyoming and has held jobs in a wide range of vocations.

His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rattle, and Whiskey Island among others.

His short fiction has appeared in The Meadow, Kysoflash.com, and MicrofictionMondayMagazine.com, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions.

Accompanying photo by martinak15

by Robert Boucheron Walls, roofs and battlements of a medieval castle are printed on sheets of heavy paper, printed in color with hints of shadow, detail of wood and stone, and green plants growing in the cracks. The colored shapes have white tabs printed at edges, letters and numbers, and instructions in German. The gist is to cut out the shapes, fold them, glue them at the tabs, and glue the three-dimensional pieces together.

Ritterburg is the name of the castle. Is it a real place? Where did this paper kit come from? A German company called Schreiber-Bogen Kartonmodellbau sells similar kits, for cathedrals and castles like Neuschwanstein and Caernarvon, but Ritterburg is not in the catalog. Someone probably gave it to me for Christmas or a birthday. Grandparents give me presents that are beyond my age—books on archaeology, a wrist watch, a model of a clipper ship to assemble.

A boy ten or twelve years old, I study a picture of the completed castle. The printed sheets recall the dress patterns that my mother buys. She pins the paper patterns to cloth, then cuts paper and cloth in one stroke with shears. She sews the pieces together on her electric sewing machine, which whirs and has a needle that moves as a blur.

Our family moves to Schenectady, New York in 1966, and the paper kit goes with me. Soon after this event, perhaps while unpacking, the printed sheets resurface. Am I ready? Midwinter, the season of ice and snow, is a time for indoor activities, board games and crafts. I find a large pair of scissors and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue-All. I sit at the kitchen table and start to cut, slowly and carefully, holding my breath for fear of cutting wrong.

My father sees me and offers advice. Use an X-Acto knife for some cuts, and work over a scrap of cardboard. Fold along a straightedge. Use straight pins to hold a joint in place until the glue dries. Wipe the excess glue before it dries. The pins leave tiny holes that are scarcely noticeable. Glue sticks of balsa wood here and there for stiffness.

The clear, dry glue peels from my fingers like skin. The liquid glue is white and creamy and smells like sour milk. The bottle has a picture of the head of Elmer the Bull, who is somehow related to Elsie the Cow, both of whom live in the Borden barn. The glue is non-toxic.

Do my father and I work on the paper castle together? No, I tell him that I want to build it on my own, and he retreats, secretly wounded. He works in the garage, where he has a shop full of machinery—a table saw, a jigsaw, a drill press, and a lathe. He brings me a small metal tube with one end sharpened, a

circular punch. The diameter of the circle is precisely that of the printed machicolations, the little arches that overhang the walls. Instead of trying to cut them with scissors, I can use the punch and get the job done faster.

Even so, the job takes many hours, spread over days and weeks. I have a history of building cardhouse towns that use a dozen decks of playing cards and sprawl over the carpet. They require a steady hand and a long attention span. But the paper castle tries even my patience. The geometry is complex, and the folded and glued pieces accumulate slight errors that make them hard to fit together.

Or impossible? One last joint will not close without twisting the whole out of shape, so I leave the tab unglued. It does not occur to me to cut outside the lines, to adjust the printed shape to the reality of construction. This lesson will come years later, when I am an architect.

Ritterburg has a gatehouse with a drawbridge, a lower keep with a stable, a transverse ramp, an upper keep, three or four square towers, and a curtain wall. The upper keep has a manor house and a chapel. All the buildings are connected, and they all have stone walls and steep slate roofs that make for a spiky profile. The castle rises from a crag on sloped foundations, a defensive feature called the glacis. The model is about eighteen inches long and twelve inches high. I keep it in my bedroom.

Ritterburg plays tricks with scale and detail, suggesting more than it shows, like a stage set. And it teases—a massive stone structure lodged in a flimsy paper object that weighs a few ounces. There is the added marvel that I made it.

The paper castle follows me to college, where it stays in my dormitory room, and then from apartment to apartment and from city to city. Each time I move, I dust it, put it in a cardboard box or carry it by hand, and install it atop a bookcase or refrigerator. I live in small apartments, and the castle takes up space. I expect visitors to notice it and ask about it, but they never do. I never tell its story. I never photograph it.

In 1988, at the age of thirty-six, I buy my first house, a tiny cottage with a huge yard, mostly in back.

Thrilled, I move at the end of May. I find a sloughed snakeskin, a good omen.

The house comes with a detached one-car garage built of concrete block and a barbecue in the back yard, also built of concrete block. The barbecue resembles an ancient altar, out in the open and askew, or mystically oriented to the sky.

On a warm spring day, I place the paper castle on the rusted metal grate of the barbecue. No one is around, so I say nothing. I strike a match and hold it under the gatehouse. Flames quickly engulf the model. In a matter of seconds, it burns to ashes and a few charred curls.

The sacrifice is pleasing.

Robert Boucheron is an architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His writing appears in Aldus Journal of Translation, Bangalore Review, Cerise Press, Cossack, Conclave, Construction, Digital Americana, Gravel, Grey Sparrow Journal, IthacaLit, JMWW, Lowestoft Chronicle, Milo Review, Montreal Review, New Orleans Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Origami Journal, Poydras Review, The Rusty Nail, Short Fiction, Slippage, Virginia Business.

Accompanying photo by Kurt Bauschardt

by Kyle Hemmings

She was losing her pigeons and paper wasps. Even nested words within Russian glass jars.

Mother kept feeding the abandoned goldfinches peanut butter and ad hoc phrases. For a while everything stayed a dullish green-brown. In family photos, we tried to trim Sonja, resize her to us but she turned away, leaned toward fragmented boats. I told mom and dad I'd even lower the horizon if it would help. Then, tin-nose fascists started interrogating from door to door. Their head counts were incredibly biased, included the recently dead, the richly departed. Sonja flew east without a trace of soft bone. I tracked her for years. At night, her messenger pigeons pecked at my spine.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Your Impossible Voice, Night Train, Toad, Matchbox and elsewhere. His latest ebook is Father Dunne's School for Wayward Boys at amazon.com. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/ Accompanying photo by [AndreasS]

A Brief History of X

by Glen Armstrong

The unknown can only exist in the context of the known. Like an unripe berry, green against a prevalent red, the unknown cradles its otherness, for its x factor is fragile. The cradle, that is to say the berry itself, gives itself away, easily defined by size and shape. Green equals red to a blind man. But listen. Stay open to the mystery muffled by this bush full of ruby colored fruit. If the green berry were to be picked and eaten, if the green berry were to poison someone, what bizarre and unexpected dreams might taint the victim’s blood when husk dissolves and the liberated x starts marking everything but the spot?

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has a new chapbook titled Set List (Bitchin Kitsch,) and two more scheduled for 2015: In Stone and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit and Cloudbank.

Accompanying photo by [AndreasS]

Relativity

by David J. Kelly

My perception of time keeps changing as I grow older. That’s not to say that time itself is changing, but rather that time is changing me. I am a prisoner of the continuous present, as I have always been. In short, I cannot escape “now.” I can imagine the temporal landscape around me, but I’ll always be looking at the universe from one given current, or another, within the swirling, pan-dimensional ocean of space-time. Sometimes my standpoint seems very small indeed. The closer I examine the confines of my time frame, the smaller I find it to be; a minute, a second, a tenth. If I stop to consider each hundredth of a second, as my watch relates them, I soon grow giddy with their procession. That’s when a change of perspective is required; a moment to wonder at the sheer vitality of life. Suddenly, keeping pace with an incessant stream of split seconds becomes an incredible feat. It’s no surprise we age and tire; it’s a wonder we last so long.

specks of dust motionless in the storm’s eye

David lives in Dublin, Ireland. Despite a scientific training, he has a fascination with words and the music of language. He enjoys writing Japanese short form poetry and has been published in a number of print and online journals.

Accompanying photo by Tuncay

Alone, Uncoiled

by Zack Wyner There's a spring in my body that uncoils when I enter an empty living room. This isn't a secret. People know this about me; people whom I love and people who love me–no less so because I sometimes feel safer when they're not around. This condition isn't static. Crises, for example, have a way of altering my biochemistry. The need to communicate or reassure or be reassured supersedes my desire to hide. Joy, exhilaration, or just inexplicable good cheer–these fickle few often desire good company as well. But, when life is gliding along as it does, slicing the surface of time like some streamlined kayak that leaves behind a few ripples, followed by a stillness more terrifying than the placidity that preceded it, then even love's company can tighten that spring.

There's a character in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 who's stayed with me, a soldier who actively pursues boredom in order to stay his demise. While absurd, there's something in his logic to which I'm sympathetic. What I believe he seeks–what I likewise seek–is a corporeal connection to time. And good company has a way of severing this connection. Suddenly it's bedtime, or Sunday or Memorial Day again, and we didn't see it coming because we were too busy being happy, or trying to project happiness, or figuring out a path back to happiness, or doing whatever it is we're doing when we're focused on we.

I spent too much of my life as a single person. That's what it is. In my bachelor days, I used to tell my friends that I needed a minimum of six hours alone time after work to read, think, breathe, drink. Not to get drunk on words or bourbon, but to savor. My friends would laugh, say I was crazy, but, to me, anything less than six hours wasn't time at all, it was tomorrow. There's safety in the act of savoring, in its deliberateness. And how am I supposed to savor when I'm laughing at your jokes? Don't get me wrong– and this is where my wife and my good friends don't get me wrong–I love your jokes. I love to laugh, and even more, I love to make you laugh. But the moment we–in that clumsy, desperate way that we do–try to extend our laughter beyond its natural lifespan, it vanishes.

A friend of mine has this terrible habit of telling me–right smack in the middle of a good time–Man, this is awesome, and, Man, we should do this more often, tightening that spring right up, making me want to scream. Because it ends the time, the good time that was, the time that's now past. Because he has to comment. Because he has to look forward. Because he can't savor. I think to myself, here I am, sitting

right beside you, and already you're faulting me for staying home tomorrow. I think, if I was alone, I'd know better than to be off somewhere else. Fuck it, I think–as I sip my bitter beer and check the clock on the wall, set ten minutes too fast–at least we're not rehashing the past, clinging to what was.

Looking back is a tough habit to break, on par with smoking. I know from experience. I was a nostalgia prodigy, so gifted in the art of romanticizing the past, I managed to squander four years of college; I guzzled that sweet pain caused by the longing to return home by the gallon. Then along came that Berkeley girl, the one who danced, the one who admitted–one breezy night on the beach, as granules of sand stung our pink cheeks–that I was just a bit too sad for her. Her words were not the kind of words I wanted to get used to hearing, nor were they the kind of words I'd expected. I'd expected her to fall in love with my melancholy. I'd expected all of them to. I'd expected them to try to cure me of it, and I'd expected their failures would make me ever more beguiling. My belief had been, we desire most that which dangles just beyond our grasp, because this act of reaching out, of trying to capture something and hold it still, mimics our relationship with our youth.

When I used to tell my friends that I needed a minimum of six hours alone time after work to give my worries the slip, I was operating under the belief that happiness was impossible as long as I was preoccupied with what came next. I might have been onto something. But those days are gone, cemented in history. My time is no longer so much; my time is no longer my own. So how do I proceed from here?

How do I wake up every morning without resenting the loss of the space that I once so jealously guarded?

If step one is recognizing that you–all of you still here with me–have made the same sacrifice, step two is welcoming you inside the pale shade of my afternoons, cultivating the belief that seconds lost are also seconds gained, and clinging to human connections like epiphanies.

I hope to rediscover a truth which bolstered be throughout childhood–that those moments in which I find myself connected, through love to others, root deeply inside my body. They reside someplace nearer, even than bone, to my core. And I expect this truth will bring great comfort. I expect that the more willingly I share my laughter, the more intimately I will know the stillness of family. And I expect this stillness to be most profound within those moments in which I loosen my grip. I hope, as I surrender my precious solitude, to discover the art of savoring anew, and connected, uncoiled, lose myself to time.

Zach Wyner is a writing coach for elementary, middle and high school students, and a writing workshop facilitator for incarcerated youth in the Bay Area. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and lives in Oakland with his wife and stepdaughter.

Accompanying photo by Andrei Niemimäki

Two Poems by Michael Prihoda

We drove up to Newport and you told me about that time your little brother, at the beach, got stung by a jellyfish but later found a sand crab and held it, briefly, before it snapped a claw on his finger; he cried at both incidents but later your mother bought him ice cream and you watched as he licked it, slow but fast, always disappearing (looking back you found solace in not having anything then); the whole day all you did was watch and sometimes I watched you but not always, and for your brother, the day ended about even in the way of good/bad.

I told you I would pick up Matt from soccer practice and not to worry because Kendra didn’t finish dance until 6:30. You were going to make supper, something out of the Mesozoic era, family time like an exhibit at a history museum. I learned a lot just by looking at the faces of other parents waiting, frozen in time, their expressions like vegetables in a too-large saucepan.

Tonight we will eat food and I will tell you it tastes good just to say something.

Michael Prihoda is a poet and artist living in the Midwest. He is founding editor of After the Pause and his work can be found in various journals in print and around the web. He loves llamas and the moments life makes him smile.

Accompanying photos by Ian Livesey and daniMU

by Mimi Overhulser

It showed itself last night by the light of the last grave moon ‌ for a time it drove over and back and over the gravel drive. Upstairs, I made myself a ghost. The bright ash torpedoes from the chimney pipe arced over the junk of the yard. The crunch in my head stopped. The car door opened then shut. Pressed to the wall of the window, I waited, eyes fixed to the ceiling. I heard the bed sag. Sigh. I was afraid. Its shape asked if it should go. I said no.

Mimi Overhulser earned her MFA at Virginia Tech. She has been published on-line in The Mississippi Review and 42Opus. She creates and performs evenings of poetry and instructs a series of poetry workshops, Accidental Acts of Love in New Mexico where she teaches at Luna Community College in Las Vegas.

Accompanying photo by Donnie Nunley

by John Cambridge There is a place in my mind where I often go—the path to the lake.

My wife and I have moved away from harsh Manitoba winters where we experienced icicles forming on gnomes' noses in early November, and late March winds blowing sideways snow— often piling four foot drifts on fields and roads alike. Where the intervening months saw weeks of minus thirty weather which cocooned the timid and froze the brave; where the wondrous spring of pussy-willows, warm breezes, and yes, even dandelions, also sent hordes of bloodsucking insects to eliminate any hope for joy of an outdoor evening.

To embrace, rather than battle, nature, we built a cottage at Lake Winnipeg: the sixth largest lake in Canada and the eleventh largest fresh water lake in the world. The lake itself was not the reason we built near its shore, for it is an unforgiving lake: its prairie tranquility often shattered by sudden squalls with twelve foot waves; its few months of water-temperatures-above goosebump-range precluded us swimming; the winter sport of Ski-Dooing across the frozen surface, not a pastime we desired.

The solitude and the nearness to nature provided our weekends' respite. Yet, it is not the experience of escape I remember. It is one particular morning in the fall. I had taken the back steps, walked only a short distance, and stepped into a different place.

I looked up. Fog hid the tops of nearby spruce and poplars. Trees farther away were dim images, and beyond that, nothing. Thick fog, towering fog, miles and miles wide fog, rare on the Prairies—a land more accustomed to thunder storms and blizzards—stopped me on my early morning walk to the lake. On a path so familiar I could have walked it in total darkness; the wall of whiteness stopped me—not disoriented but awed.

I felt middle-of-the-cloud wetness on my skin; saw miniature beads of mist form on the sleeves of my jacket, and a leaf, hanging close to the path, held at its very tip, a droplet of coalesced moisture. Everything around me was immersed in a profound dampness greater than rain.

Yet, it was not the condensation on my skin, or the appearance of the woods that caused me to linger. It was the silence. Total silence; absolute silence. No friendly chattering of chickadees, no strident squawking of jays; the always-communicating crows were hunched, black smudges of stillness. No wind soughed through the trees; the golden leaves of the trembling aspens stood transfixed. The entire woods, bathed in an opiate shroud, paused as if it would be sacrilegious to utter a sound. Three short wavering warbles of a loon hovered in the air. It came from nowhere and disappeared into nothingness. The call not answered, and silence persisted.

As I drew short, shallow breaths, the tangy scent of over-ripe high bush cranberries saturated the ether. The smell, intensified, magnified, as if each drop of floating dew captured the berries' essence and carried it in pale-pink, wraith-like ribbons through the forest. I closed my eyes and savoured the familiar odour, listened for sounds of leaves that didn’t move, or birds that didn’t call, and animals that didn’t stir.

I stood for only moments, my senses enraptured, my soul entombed, unaware my memory had captured it all, for I can still smell the tang, feel the dampness, and hear the abyssal silence.

John Cambridge is retired and he lives in British Columbia with his wife.

Accompanying photo by Benjamin Watson

THE BROTHERING SPELL

by Ken Poyner

I could build a boat to take all the people away on the water to a new, less worn land. It would have to be a magic boat, one into which all the village could fit. Each person in the village, arriving at the boat, would shrink: first to half his or her size, then to the size of a matchstick. As each arrived, I would watch that person gargle my magic and shrink: then I would pack the person in a box; with soon all the people side to side, and in several boxes. I would load them in the boat mechanically until every family were loaded and I was the last of the village with size. I would push the boat into the currents and then go into my village, carrying in my arms the same magic that made the people small. A hungrily happy magic, a magic that sees nothing but its task. I would use that magic to make the village small and then I would sit: my people adrift as matchsticks, my village a huddlestone of dust, and I would ask myself how else could all my effort have ended, what closing did I expect to my mongering spells?

Ken Poyner has lately been seen in “Analog”, “Café Irreal”, “Cream City Review”, “The Journal of Microliterature”, “Blue Collar Review”, and many wonderful places. His latest book of short fiction, “Constant Animals’, is available from his web, www.kpoyner.com, and from www.amazon.com. He is married to Karen Poyner, one of the world’s premier power lifters, and holder of more than a dozen current world power lifting records. They are the parents of four rescue cats, and an energetic fish.

Accompanying photo by Massimiliano

Sorry About Last Night

by Jon Wesick

In retrospect taking you to my mother’s funeral on our first date may have been a wee bit excessive. In my defense I was so excited by your profile that I couldn’t pass up this final chance for you to meet mom. I’m sorry my brother asked how much you charge per hour. Honestly, I don’t know what got into him. Your miniskirt and Ugg boots looked perfectly presentable. The dry cleaner should be able to get the vomit stains out of your blouse. I guess I’m not used to drinking.

It was compassionate of you to drive me home. In my fragile state I suppose I let my desire for closeness overwhelm my self-restraint. The surprise I’d planned didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. When you stated that you loved animals on your profile, I thought it meant all animals.

The clerk at the pet store really should have told me he hadn’t fed the boa constrictor in months.

That’s on him but I don’t blame the snake. From its point of view a woman’s nipple looks a lot like a mouse’s nose. On the bright side they’re doing miraculous things with plastic surgery these days. Hope you have health insurance.

After deep reflection I realize our misunderstandings are due to a lack of communication. I’ve resolved to be more open and honest in the future. Once you get out of the hospital, I hope you’ll give me another chance.

Host of the Gelato Poetry Series, instigator of the San Diego Poetry Un-Slam, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, Jon Wesick has published over three hundred poems in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Pearl, and Slipstream. He has also published over eighty short stories. Jon has a Ph.D. in physics and is a longtime student of Buddhism and the martial arts. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest.

Accompanying photo by Krystian Olszanski

Sleight of Hand

by David Greenslade

It’s an old trick but many of our celebrities still do it – shove a roman candle in through one ear and pull it out the other. Here conjuring tricks, sleight of hand, legerdemain are a sign of intelligence. Figuring the trick out doesn’t matter, just have a go. Being able to perform a repertoire of light handed deceit is a sign of being properly conditioned. Mentalism is, however, forbidden as, despite knowing that life’s an illusion many people fall for psychic flourishes.

Magic dust, ectoplasm, tears of milk etc. disturb the population. There is little irony in impoverishing one’s family for a magic tulip as many celebrities still do.

David Greenslade writes in Welsh and in English. He currently lives in Wales after long periods of work in Japan, the USA, eastern Europe and the Middle East. Recent books include Ibtisiam al Habsi and her Zanzibar Court, (Ministry of Heritage and Culture, Oman) and Rarely Pretty Reasonable (Dark Windows Press, UK). He is a prizewinning essayist and short story writer with work translated into several languages and is widely published in UK literary magazines.

Accompanying photo by the author.

by Mary Gilonne ‌ so she found a new place to stand, leaning against a metro bill board. Then this guy, the one who had walked off in the cool slick of night, the one who left her saying that quietness cooled the chain of moments on his tongue and he needed more than yoga mats and Berlioz and why had the sunflowers died it must prove something, appeared at the tunnel end just like that, signaling with two hands as if he was swimming through air and all the people parted to let him through. Moses, she thought, and Cecil B deMille, half expecting a thunder of Roman horses on the rails, mosaic roof tiles splitting to let in the divine shock of sky, and then she heard him, like his voice had inhaled a helium balloon, weightless and ethereal as an angel. She thought he called her name, but even later would never be sure. What marked her was the blood, unforgettable, she imagined the Red Sea like that, every wave of it.

Mary is a translator, living in France near Aix en Provence for many years but originally from Devon UK. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Teignmouth prize and has recently won the Wenlock International Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in several online publications Snakeskin, Word Bohemia, The Screech Owl, Clear Poetry , I am not a Silent Poet ... and is forthcoming in The French Literary Review.

Accompanying photo by Giuseppe Milo

Hell, Yes

by Dalton Day

Aubrey Plaza is standing in a parking lot when a V of geese flies overhead. Hell, Yes. She whispers. The pause is important. Hell isn’t just a place. Hell is a weapon. Hell is what these geese are bringing to somebody. Maybe they know it’s coming. Maybe they will be caught off guard. The only certain thing is that Aubrey Plaza is getting into her car, & she is driving home, where she will wait for the glorious news that will soon be wrought.

Dalton Day is a terrified dog person & MFA candidate in The New Writer’s Project. He is the author of Fake Knife & the forthcoming TANDEM, & his poems have been featured in PANK, Hobart, Gigantic Sequins, & Everyday Genius, among others. He helps edit FreezeRay Poetry, Souvenir Lit, & can be found online at myshoesuntied.tumblr.com & twitter.com/lilghosthands.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of pieces featuring Aubrey Plaza. The first can be found in our May/June issue. Be sure to watch for Aubrey Plaza in future issues.

Accompanying photo by Gidzy

by Owen Clayborn

From the House at K_______

I remove spiders’ cloth from the ceramic something that Lyla says is for burning oils on light bulbs and open the window in my room - the room I claimed for myself as soon as we got here, let in by Old T, as I shall call him: a swarthy, weather-worn man, tall and almost as broad as his accent, a cowboy hat on his head and worn black boots with the steel toe-caps shining out on his long Irish feet.

I notice the little box of junk is gone from the wall where I left it. Maybe it has fallen in to the road, in which case I should go out and pick it up; maybe it has been taken, in which case I should have put a For Sale sign on it.

Soft mattress backache slack-mouthed sky spits feeble rain everything is grey.

I really must start my writing. A red tractor churns down the lane from the farm on the rise that I can see from my room. The study. From the study I can see a farm. It is mottled egg blue and cream, so that I cannot tell if it were originally one colour or another. It is both. It was both. It will be both. It is a Zen farmhouse. Yesterday, an old bathtub miraculously appeared in the field across the road. One minute it wasn’t there, the next it was. It is a Zen bathtub. Why should I speak of Zen? Because there is no word in English for it. No word that means yes no maybe shut-up speak up no-one is talking everyone is talking, all at once. An old crow falls like a leaf in to the lane.

I really must start my writing.

Dogs Roaming A walk, not quite two hours. I wandered for miles, trying to find the road to ----, but to no avail. I found the main road, and that might have brought me to it in under an hour - half an hour, perhaps, but the traffic is wild on that road, the speed limit being 100 kmph, and no little path to walk on. Here the drivers no longer saluted me but veered somewhat dangerously to avoid me and probably looked at me as if I were mad. A back road, then, but it meandered for many miles.

Probably it led to ---- eventually, but by such a higgledy-piggledy route that I gave up on it and crouched under a bridge for a few moments, watching the river and imagining falling in to it.

Back to the house - I must call it something; there is a sign by the front door saying Dogs Roaming Free Enter At Your Own Risk, but that hardly seems appropriate, especially as we have no dog. I’ll just call it the house for now. Hello? I call. No-one in. I hang my hat and coat on the hooks in the hall. Sit down and write in the study. Time for a cup of tea. Lyla is out shopping with her mother, one must assume.

Lightning spits, left-right one white elephant. above: trundle of thunder.

Did I mention the horror? Ah, the horror, the horror…I am in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere without a penny of my own and this country is strange and the house is strange and Lyla’s fine, she has family and friends here, but I am mad and experiencing some kind of enormous, creeping horror. Fuck it, I still haven’t put the kettle on. Or written anything. First: finish unpacking. Then write about the land that was nowhere, my diatribe.

I shall have a cup of tea, and then I really must start my writing.

Probably Just Shit A big palm tree in the front garden next door, one of the first things we see as we awake in the morning and look through the net curtain at the day. I think Lyla is also experiencing some of the horror. But it will pass. We have just moved to a new country and will need some period to settle down, considering of course the stress that we had gone through before coming here, and indeed in travelling itself. I told some part of that historical stress to fuck off today when it unexpectedly called and asked where its cat was.

The smell of dung from the farm. The pussy willow in the front garden looks like a child in need of a haircut. Of course it won’t get one. Its branches will just grow and grow however they

choose. I put a wind chime in its hair. The birds like to perch in the tree. They sing all around.

The bullocks low at the end of the lane. In the fields at the bottom of a garden, a small green tractor sprays something on the fields. I hope it isn’t some chemical muck. It’s probably just shit.

Hailstones on the lawn hop like limbless white rabbits with nothing to do.

I am surprised by tapping at the window. I hold my breath at 1.13 in the morning and listen. It is rain. Or hail. It sounds cool and refreshing and I am thirsty and Lyla is meditating, making a space in the bedroom and maybe asleep as I sit in the front room and write, turf smoking on the fire by my naked feet and I will finish the glass of milk that Lyla has left unfinished on the mantelpiece. I will have another cigarette and tomorrow I will write about the land that was nowhere because I want it finished within the next couple of days and I want to write something else, and I can be writing poetry in the meantime, no matter how surreal or pretentious... But now I don’t care. Now I just want to drink milk and smoke.

I have given up on writing.

Owen Clayborn is a British-American writer of short and full-length fiction, as well as poetry.

He currently lives on a rainy island in the North Atlantic.

Accompanying photo by Kelly Sikkema

by Kathy Steinemann Nothingness surrounds. Pain squeezes body. Cold banishes warmth. Blanket rubs and chafes.

Harsh light torments eyes. Bitter taste sickens. Dizziness abates. Sweet smell tickles nose.

Soothing voice murmurs. Softness presses lips. Pleasure satiates.

Mother’s milk is the elixir that sustains life and suckles the soul.

Provenance is composed of eleven five-syllable sentences. It is based on the premise that there are eleven senses: pain, temperature, touch, sight, taste, nothingness, smell, hearing, balance, pressure, and pleasure.

Kathy Steinemann has loved writing for as long as she can remember. As a child, she scribbled poems and stories. During the progression of her love affair with words, she won multiple public-speaking and writing awards. Her career has taken varying directions, including positions as editor of a small-town paper, computer-network administrator, and webmaster. She’s a self-published author who tries to write something every day. Please visit her at KathySteinemann.com.

Accompanying photo by Gregory Bodnar

by Michael O’Neill

We all imagine our granddads as cowboys, as heroes. But cowboys rarely lived to 90. In fact, the average lifespan of a cowboy was three bullets, which is 38 in cowboy years. I’ve traced a map of empty shotgun shells leading a path back to my grandpa’s memory. Each one a little warmer than the one before until I pick up the last one in the line. I press it to my ear and listen to the sound of years rushing by like so many speeding trains.

My grandpa worked on the railroad for 50 years and when he retired all he got was a handshake.

But that was after handshakes had fallen out of fashion. So he basically got a wave goodbye.

There was no parade. There wasn’t a tickertape to be cut. His savings ran out in 2 years and entitlement checks are the only thing keeping him from swallowing bullets.

Did you know, every time a trigger is pulled, a family is rewarded life insurance money. What a system to treat death as a lottery where the only winners are the ones who must sacrifice a family member before drawing the lucky numbers.

I’m perfectly fine with the smell of rusted dimes scratching off a one dollar ticket. I know I won’t win big but at least my granddad can live to old age. And he can count the blisters on his railroad hands and I’ll keep picturing him as a cowboy and both of us can stop counting bullets.

Michael O'Neill is a fiction and poetry writer residing in Chicago. His work has appeared in Nanoism, unFold Magazine, Literary Orphans, and the Journal of Microliterature, among others.

Accompanying photo by Paul Harris

by Keith Nunes My grandfather was made in Portugal, like the high-grade port except he liked cheap brandy and plenty of it, he liked women but not so much my grandmother as women who wore bright red lipstick and fishnet stockings, my grandfather liked to gamble on the horses going by all the publications he left lying on the kitchen table and the people he rang every morning, he was fond of showing me and my brother some discipline although grandmother said he didn't know what the word meant, my grandmother took me and my brother to live in South Africa because we had no parents because grandfather crashed the car in Lisbon and they didn't escape, grandmother told me grandfather died in Oporto in a lonely dingy room with his mouth full of cockroaches and a bottle of aftershave dripping down the bedspread.

Keith Nunes (ex-Melbourne, now Tauranga, New Zealand) was a newspaper sub-editor for more than 20 years but he now writes to stay sane. He’s been published around NZ (Landfall, Takahe, Trout, brief, Poetry NZ, Catalyst) and increasingly in the UK and US, was highly commended in the 2014 NZ Poetry Society international poetry competition and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives with artist Talulah Belle and a coterie of nutters.

Accompanying photo by Anne Worner

Don’t Talk to Strangers

by Glen Sorestad

I’m sitting in my car, motor idling, a back alley in the downtown area, a winter day, temperature minus 15. My wife has dashed into an art shop, unique for its back alley entrance and complete absence of parking, so I am illegally parked, looking suspiciously like a getaway car outside a bank. Waiting –suspicious or not. Good thing I have all outward semblances of a harmless geezer. I notice a small child standing outside a nearby building, at a back door, trying to turn the door handle. He has appeared there quite suddenly, an apparition -- no one was there, then this child: perhaps five or six, a tee-shirt, bare head, he looks about ready to bawl. I get out of the car, an icy wind grabs me, snow gusts swirl. I walk over, ask him if he needs help -- stating the obvious, I know. The boy shakes his head and re-tries the door. His expression says, “I can’t talk to you. I don’t know you.” I ask him how he got out here, and where his parents are. He’s not eager to listen either. “Where’s your Mom?” Lucky, I’ve had three sons and eight grandsons.

I‘ve seen this scenario many times in different forms, though my telling this poor young boy won‘t make him feel any better. He’s done this to himself, he knows it, it’s written on his face.

“She’s inside the store,” he says. I bang on the door loud enough to summon occupants of a crypt, even a rapt shopper. “Does your Mom have a phone with her?” He nods again, his eyes becoming teary. Another Samaritan arrives in the back alley with a jacket to enwrap the little boy who is beginning to shiver noticeably. “Do you know her phone number?” He looks like he’s

about to lose it, but he manages to blubber it out and I dial the number, an out-of-province one, on my cell phone. A woman answers. “Are you missing a little boy?” “Oh, shit!” is the response.

Moments later an adjoining door opens, not even the same one I have assaulted with my gloved fists, the wayward child is pulled inside by an older sibling, the door closes behind him. The mother makes no appearance. Life goes on. Snow drifts over the moment and then it, too, is gone.

Glen Sorestad is a much published poet who lives in Saskatoon. His poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals, anthologies and textbooks, all over North America and in many other countries. His poems have been translated into seven languages. His latest book of poems is Hazards of Eden published by Lamar University Press(later this month).

Accompanying photo by Steve Johnson

by Daniel M. Shapiro

The recessed attacked the act of defiance, throwing rocks at his name on the big-city marquee.

All that was left was S E E WIN D. Most of them had been kindled by the spell, the cult-speak rhetorical question: Are you still free? He had sent sound waves beyond allowable frequencies, bleats of synthetic lambs that seduced, prehistoric memes. They bought positivity pressed into vinyl and plastic whenever they saw a chance. Dancing alone, he had poked a hole in stock markets, shiny thin ties poured into a wormhole. When he returned from exile, not a line appeared in his face, greased love coiling around the ravages of nostalgia. Some would cross the de facto picket line, toss three figures to ticket takers, remark about the voice that hadn’t swallowed a single IOU, the voice that stayed in it for the fans.

*Title and “Are you still free?” are lyrics from “Valerie” by Steve Winwood (#70 on Billboard Hot 100, 1982; remixed version reached #9 on Billboard Hot 100, 1987)

Daniel M. Shapiro is a special education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh. His book of celebrity-centered prose poems, How the Potato Chip Was Invented, was published by sunnyoutside press on New Year’s Eve 2013.

Accompanying photo by David Terrar

by Melinda Giordano

The moon had been in Pisces. For several days it was a slim crescent, providing just enough light for the starry fish to swim in – breathing in the radiance, the austere, pale light. The luminous curve did not lie on the left or right side of the capricious satellite. It was on the bottom: a drink that will become larger as the moon grows full and generous. Pisces splashed in the glowing ocean as the astronomers waited, marking its orbit across the arid night sky. Like hooks, their numbers and equations would pull the fish from their tranquil sea, trapping them in a net thrown across the galaxy. And when the mystic trawl drags them from the bright water they will lay gasping against the sky. Stars and planets will swirl around fins and gills, edging against scales – glittering like a diamante skin. There was no bait that could lure the fish from the moon’s pretty shores. They swam throughout the night until the moon became filled with light, forcing Pisces into the dry darkness. Sprawled in constellations, the fish wait – for the waters to recede, giving them a chance to slip once more into the moon’s shining waves.

Melinda Giordano is from Los Angeles, California. A published artist and writer, her written pieces have appeared in Lake Effect Magazine, Scheherazade’s Bequest, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Whisperings and Circa Magazine among others. She is also a regular poetry contributor to CalamitiesPress.com with her own column, ‘I Wandered and Listened’.

Melinda is interested in many histories: art, fashion, social - everything has a past - and anything to do with Aubrey Beardsley.

Accompanying photo by Robert Payne

by Anthony DeGregorio

In the distance, there is a scream, or maybe it’s just someone singing. The woman in the house behind the one I grew up in often sang in the early morning, or deep into the evening, accompanied by a raging fire contained in a barrel of leaves and twigs she’d angrily raked that afternoon. She really belted it out in a trained operatic soprano, albeit her arias often strayed into madness, the shrill piercing the blue air like misfiring neurons pricking a brain. Her husband was a musician, a trumpet player I think, downtown in New York City. He later left her and their three (or was it four?) daughters. Once they invited me to a special dance at their special music school and my heartless parents made me go. (They even sent official invitations which were frightening at first for some reason I don’t recall.) I was like 10 or 12 or something and I had to wear a jacket and tie, a humiliation foreshadowing adulthood if there ever was one, and easily the most bizarre event in my young life to that point.

No, this is definitely screaming, I think. (I hope it’s not singing.) And from the same direction, another neighbor is trying to turn over the engine on his mower. Each attempt, each growl of gas and spark plug, grinding metal till it kicks in to a steady storm of whirring blades warming up to cut every trace of grass in their path. He rides that thing like it’s a Cadillac, making majestic turns around his trees and low stone wall. Needs oil (or something) though; there is a squeal like

chalk on a blackboard. No, I think it’s really bad singing going on somewhere out there.

Nobody could scream like that, all off key but still searching for a note just beyond reach, just out of human range.

From another house diagonally across the street, a voice with a heavy New York City accent asks if someone is insane. “What’re you crazy? It’s summer time, man. Sum-sum-summertime.

You can’t just take a shower every three or four days like in winter.”

The mower is idling now, the engine misfiring and missing its beat; the rhythm erratic, dying till it stalls. In the relative quiet, a plane begins its descent for an airport well north and west of here. The cat jumps when thunder breaks the clouded calm. I am so thirsty, but if I drink any more iced coffee I’m pretty sure I’ll kill somebody.

Anthony DeGregorio has a master’s degree in Writing from Manhattanville College where he teaches expository writing for the Education Department. In another life or two (or three [via the not-so-parallel universe of simultaneity]) he worked in various capacities for the Department of Social Services for far too many years. Prior to that, back in the Middle Ages, he lived in Houston and various towns in Vermont, and assembled eyeglasses, built stairways to nowhere in particular, concocted drinks for the thirsty, made pizza for the hungry, and generally ranted about anything. When a friend was asked, “Is he like that when he’s alone?” the friend replied that he didn’t know as he had never been with him when he was alone. His work has been published in a few dozen journals including the Perfume River Poetry Review Ars Erotica Issue, Muse Literary Magazine, and Common Ground Review, and on the Feathertale and The Whirlwind Review sites.

Accompanying photo by Ava Lowery

by Myrtle Yvonne When you first came in my life, everything was unusually quiet. You were like a ball of warmth that perfectly fit in my own space. But I am not used to tenderness and gentleness. People have always entered my life like crashing meteorites – always loud, always thirsty, always demanding for somewhere safe to land, for something ardent because they said that my innards are like a labyrinth. So full of mysteries. Their eyes are always curious why there are little countries on my back, why does my touch burns, why do my wrists look like statues collapsing? So they make their way in, passionately, like elementary kids on a school trip. They explore every street, every destination of my body like a museum. And I always make holes for them to land on. They put their sorrows and regrets in it and I cultivate those and grow them into flowers to give them. But after a while they always leave. Exhausted with adventures, perhaps. And when they leave, it’s always quiet. Only the door closing and their light footsteps can be heard.

When you first came in my life, everything was unusually quiet. I was confused at first but you showed me that quiet isn’t always leaving. Sometimes it’s a beginning of something better. I would burn all my countries for you.

Myrtle Yvonne Ragub is a medical student who writes in her spare time. She believes that The Turkey Farm can’t accommodate us all. Her blog is at: theegreywolf.tumblr.com Accompanying photo by Flavia Brandi

by M.C. St. John

She started the game at the diner counter, through the window to the dusky street, snow skirling, people passing by—two chatting women right then. Who are they? she asks. Them? No idea.

Sure you do. It’s Claire and Joyce, the lesbian arsonists out on the lam from Joliet. Don’t you read the news? He rolls his eyes and she runs a finger around her saucer, picking up sugar. Oh come on, she says, play along.

A young punk in Joyce glasses waits at the corner. They watch him go. Then he says, Claude reads poetry in eight languages, including braille, and works at a sex shop in Lakeview. Yes, yes, that’s the spirit. She swivels on her stool, grinning.

Before sipping he says, And them? She spies the bearded man holding hands with a tall girl drifting past. Lenny and Carla, retired circus performers on their way to a bar mitzvah.

What about her? Clearly she’s dressed in black, he says, to mourn the death of Ms. Bippy, her Pomeranian. The poor dog got its mouth around the nozzle of a helium tank and pop … no more yippies from Ms. Bippy. Poor Ms. Bippy, she says.

He sips his coffee, swallows: There are so many people to make up stories for. One day, she says, you’ll write them all down and years from now we’ll laugh about tonight.

More people pass, but his cup is up over his lips and nose and eyes and still he is sipping. Right? she says. Finally, inside his cup, his voice is an echo as it comes out: You know, not everyone needs a story.

With fingers full of sugar, she points at a man with a pastry box hailing a taxi. Tell me about him. Or them, she says, those girls with the crap haircuts. Or those two. Or that guy. Or. Or. Or … He looks but doesn’t look, nods in the right places, and only thinks: I’m out of coffee. You’re in your head too much, she says. It’s just a game if you’d smile and play it. That’s what I do most of the time, he says.

The dregs at the bottom of his cup are ink blots—turning it one way makes a picture, the other way another. He says, Why does anyone do such a stupid thing?

She’s licked all the sugar from her fingers. Her tea is gone. There’s only her voice. Then tell me what you see now, she says. Right. Now. He looks up. Streetlights have come on and snow flies between the beams. The rest is dark. No one is out. Then he softens his eyes and in the window there is a man and a woman at a diner counter, side-by-side and see-through as ghosts. He lowers his empty cup and the man in the window does the same. Tell me who they are, she says. What’s their story? Where are they going?

M.C. St. John is a writer from Battle Creek, Michigan, the Cereal Capital of the World.

Though his roots are in the Midwest, his imagination has always been in the fantastic. He currently lives in Chicago where he lives, writes, and dreams.

Accompanying photo by astonishme

Harold and the Purple Crayon

by Holly Wotherspoon

Mother Teresa. Those coconuts; fall and kill sleeping babies in their strollers for fuck's sake and Spain with its ugly civil war and all civil wars and self-portraits of motherless children like mine; tiny unrecognizable Rorschach blots in one forlorn corner - and the girl. Collecting her father's gray, coarse hairs in a matchbox one for each time so at least she - SHE knows what is good and what is evil. I plot to steal all of their colouring books paint in the right, true translucent colours of a genuine rainbow not a false one and then I'll find a magic purple crayon to draw myself climbing the palms to pick them clean and take in the great unwashed at my b&b and wordlessly extinguish the father slow-like, no explanation. The sobs collect in the catchment basin overflow like sewage or honey and it's not like you asked me but the rusted faucet has its handle broken off and it’s pouring out honey from the honey bucket like nobody’s home.

Holly Wotherspoon is an adoption attorney living and writing in the rolling hills north of San Francisco, after returning from an extended sojourn in the Pacific Northwest. She is a poet, naturalist, and irreverent art tour guide. A member of River Town Poets, she studies poetry and reads her poems around the North Bay area. Her previous publications include incredibly boring articles in legal journals as well as a thrilling prose poem forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review.

Accompanying photo by m01229

Deep Blue Yonder

by Ryu Ando

Old Man Hideki, retired salaryman and master-builder of ships in glass bottles, lay there halfnaked on the tatami mats, his testicles hanging out like shriveled orbs floating atop sea-foam, and staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling. By the time Toru got into his father's room by punching holes through the shoji panels, it was too late. They pressed the old man's eyes shut and carted him away on a stretcher still clenching tweezers in one hand and a tiny white cloth sail in the other.

But the smell of model glue couldn't mask the strange stench of brine. Perhaps it was the summer heat, blocking ebbing tides and unreliable moons that trapped the scent of stillborn ocean. Toru, however, was more confused by the look he saw on his father's face. Gentle morning light, quantum hammer, striking the mirror. But that face seemed less etched, younger even, than he'd ever seen it, and the crags around his father's mouth that had always pointed downward into dark valleys of anger and roiling menace were now gone. In their place was the trace of a smile: Forthcoming. Arisen. Toru didn't realize until later -- so much later in fact that it was at the end of his own life with his own son, a real son of Yamato rising in the east, now grown and staring into his fading eyes -- that the smell of brine accompanying Old Man Hideki had been real. And it promised great depths from which only the madai and ika and tako -- of late, just pieces of well-manicured flesh presented to him on miniature plates -- could have returned to tell of the tale that placates the soul and points it back to its placid blue surface.

Ryu Ando is an academic librarian who lives and works in Los Angeles. He specializes in digital libraries and Japanese literature and writes speculative fiction at night, right when others are heading to sleep.

Accompanying photo by Orin Zebest

Beta Love

by Jess Mize

Enthusiasm for taking back the means of production…open up the avenues of sound and see what else is out there. Electronic art. The rave. Alien activity. Wavelengths of vision, space, sight and sound. Mollie is the drug of choice. A happiness I didn’t even know existed. Shaman mysticism. You should do it too. We took a small sample of hallucinogenic drugs. There are no laws that you can put in a book to prevent something that fantastical. Up for seven days looking in the mirror and saying who the fuck are you? Whoa, you look like little caterpillars. I’ve never understood how flowers grow. Just listen and be reborn. The world has become so miserable. Photic-flashing and auditory sound. Wave cycles per second. Beta brain states.

Jess Mize is a twenty-eight year old blonde-haired surfer girl from South Carolina. Her favourite author is Stephen King. She loves to drink and she loves her man. This is the first time her work has been published.

Accompanying photo by GollyGforce - Living My Worst Nightmare

by Charles Bane Jr.

Dear Richard, It is dawn here on a Saturday morning in Florida, where I'm never cold. I can write as now on my terrace in almost every weather. And I'm visited throughout the day by many birds and once by a fox who clambered up and who I fed and watched sunning himself as I typed. I was far away, in the deeps of the unconscious, vast and ablaze: in the morning it mirrors the fortunes of the world, and it's open -lighted like the Globe. I climb its sheerest face and stand before creation everlasting, unfolded in a circle about a single star. I can only stay a short time before surfacing in a stream. When I return, my wife is making lunch. I return at night when the house is asleep.

I find words in the dark for the use of which I'm prepared to fall and though I thought once that I sensed some shadow in a room where I'd stopped and worked all night , I know it's no one greater than myself in the mirror of another cosmos neighboring ours. It is the same poetry that connects the two. It was a poem that was the singularity that strung galaxies like lyres, and in all poetry is a repair and inexhaustible tenderness identical to the one who reads.

Fingers of light appear when I'm finished working and my wife is awake, asks if I'd like to go out for coffee and I say certainly.

Charles

(Letter to Richard Wilbur first appeared in The Mondegreen)

Charles Bane Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor ) , Love Poems ( Aldrich Press) , and Three Seasons: Writing Donald Hall ( Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University ). He created and contributes to The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, and is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. http://charlesbanejr.com Accompanying photo by fusion-of-horizons

by Candy Nalder

I’m drifting through a Monet of wildflowers. Wisps of red and purple brush against the tips of my outstretched fingers. The summer breeze carries cries of joy across the rolling ground and returns with murmurs from the sea.

The temperature drops, the wind shifts. A cold current catches me and lifts me high over the edge of a familiar cliff. Black and blues collide on the distant horizon. Eyes closed, I breathe in the quiet between the breaking of waves, the silence between strokes of paint.

I awake to the night. Swirls of yellows and oranges paint the sky, a visual cacophony illuminating the small village below. The glow of the lights courses through my veins.

Time is melting in a far-away place. I’m roaming a composition of a desert beyond the memory of the city. Feet sink into the soft brown sand, white water froths around toes.

A deep voice cuts through the solitude. “Excuse me, Miss. The museum will close in five minutes.”

My vision adjusts to a grey man speaking.

“Miss, you can come back tomorrow.”

Born into the concrete-grey world of socialist East Germany, Candy (ˈsændi) Nalder grew up in the colourful metropolis of Berlin. She now calls a small New Zealand town, nestled between the lush greenery of two national parks, home. Candy has degrees in journalism and communications. Over the years, she has worked as a journalist, marketing manager, graphic and web designer. She has also sold ice-creams, gained an orange belt in Aikido, and surfed the perfect wave. Candy is the mother of a 2-year old explorer and looks after four chickens and a cat.

Accompanying photo by Dustin Gaffke

by Robb Dunn

My climb is steep. Every inch earned by perseverance.

Momma-lady holds me back. With each extra step I overcome, her hand rises to pull me back down. Her instinct. Her nature.

I will start again.

A new height. A new victory. Another setback.

I pinch my face and raise a single defiant finger skyward before my scowl. A warning. How dare she try to stop me. Surely, as a woman, she understands the importance of the climb. Mommalady smiles as her wrinkled white haired daddy-man chuckles. They speak in tones I understand, but their words are meaningless. Momma-lady cannot fathom why I work so hard. Wrinkled daddy-man thinks I am determined.

If he only knew the half of it.

I wait for them to engage in their distractions.

Again, I ascend. Higher.

And suddenly she looms before me once more, an embracing barrier. So kind. She would protect me. I touch her face. I will tell her someday. I cannot tell her today. I know she loves me. I love her so. I climb for her. For us. I will tell her. Someday.

I stand beside her as she holds my hand. I look up at my summit. I will reach it. On my own.

The boy-men make their game look easy. They shout and run and hit and win. Beating other boy-men. My daddy-man teaches them. Standing proud. Momma-lady watches them from behind a fence. Proud.

My chance – I ascend as she watches them.

Ever higher, beyond my best. I am in rare air. The summit closer than the base.

The incline beneath me booms and quakes. White haired daddy-man passes by so quickly. He carries the boy-man who steals my time and stomps his feet when I fight back. They sit at the top, smiling. Self-satisfied. So easy for them. Such a trial for me. I will show them.

Boy-man shouts at Momma-lady. Her attention had drifted. She pursues and the incline booms and shakes again with her determination. She can climb easily when motivated to try. Yet I have reached man and boy! I pound my hand on the cold flat surface they occupy. I proclaim to the universe that I have arrived! The barrier shattered. Summit undenied!

Until she swoops – scooping with the gentle talons of feminine grace and the smell of spring potential.

We descend.

Again.

She takes me to my expected place. Rakes my hair and binds it with bows. She pats my bottom and kisses my cheek. I sit beside her and in my silence, I smile. I have reached the summit once.

It can be done.

I will climb again to take my rightful place.

Someday.

In 2013, Robb gave up twenty years of corporate life in order to twist reality into odd bits of fact and fiction. He's much happier now, albeit a little nostalgic for the weekly rib eye steak.

Medium rare, please.

Accompanying photo by Donnie Ray Jones

Instagram Poem #7

by Rebecca Gaffron

Wipe off my fingers, sticky from having to play both me and you. I’ve become an abscess. I should’ve had it pulled, the root of all evil, before the pain reached this horrible crescendo.

Before life distilled to a hydrocodone haze of nightmares that jerk me back to semiconscious.

Something’s crawling on me. I try to brush free, frantic from the feel of formication. Oily recollections. Your fingers sticky from having played both you and her.

Rebecca is fascinated by sea-green spaces, words, and men who behave like cats. She is a sometimes writer whose stories and poetry occasionally turn up here or there. She can be found at: www.rebeccawriting.com Accompanying photo by Stefano Montagner

Lies He Told Me

by Rebecca Dutsar

Those jeans look really good on you. I read your essay and thought it was really good! No, you don’t have a small butt. I really like your family. Yeah, Shakespeare is really cool, such a genius.

I got all A’s last semester. Coffee shop at 4? Sounds like a good plan. I’m pretty inexperienced.

Your friends are awesome, we should all hang out sometime. I don’t think I could bear losing you. I love you. You’re so talented. No, your hair is fine, no need to brush it out. I miss you. I’ll meet you in ten minutes. Thanks for the tea, I feel a little better now. You’re the only one I want.

Her? No, she’s ugly. You’re the best kisser. I have soccer practice at seven. When I’m with you it’s like the rest of the world goes blank. I’ll be away for the weekend. That’s crazy, it’s not like I can fuck my dog, so of course I like you better than her. Come on, love, you know I’ve always got your back. Her? No, we are just friends. I love you. I really like you. I need you. It’s not my fault that I don’t have the time to see you. You’re the only one I want. I promise. I can’t meet you for dinner, I’ll be at my grandma’s house. My phone died so I couldn’t text you back. Don’t cry, I can’t stand to see you hurt. Of course I care, I care so much. I would do anything for you.

We really should spend the weekend together. I’m sorry I had to cancel our plans. It was an emergency and she is a friend, that’s just what friends do. I’ll call you in a few minutes. Holding hands doesn’t count as anything. Yes, just a friend. I promise. I miss you. I was drunk, I couldn’t control my actions. There was no service, I couldn’t text you. I’m going to bed early tonight. It was only a few times. I was so tired. I love you. It was just with that one girl. She reminded me of you. I thought about you the entire time. I’m home alone. You’re so beautiful in the morning.

It’s not like I have feelings for her. I needed something to remember you by. I miss you. You mean so much to me. She started it. I wasn’t thinking straight. You were better, you were always the better one. I loved you the whole time we were together.

Rebecca Dutsar is a 20-year-old from Newtown, CT. Currently, she is a junior at Ithaca College where she is majoring in Writing. She is the Editor--in-Chief of a campus wide publication, The Mirror Magazine. She enjoys drinking tea while begging her friends to send her writing prompts. Find her on Twitter @beccsdutsar.

Accompanying photo by Katie Tegtmeyer

by Bryan Verdi

My x-ray eyes take time to see inside your lies. And you lie so well. And we lie so well together.Your body pressed against mine, cradling on our side, I drape my arm over your linen waist and I kiss the back of your neck, lightly touching my nose to your jasmine fragrance. You read your stories of love, a shotgun blast of romance, they give you hope, you say. And I see your eyes move from line to line, enraptured by an old man’s words, consumed by thoughts of a younger one. I breathe in the floral bouquet, etching this very moment into the stone tablets of my olfactory; I trace finger-lines across your skin, wiping clean my prints. Ignoring the tick and the impatient tock, I close my eyes in sequence. I cannot see you when you say you’ll stay and I believe you as we lie here.

Bryan Verdi currently lives in southern California as an aspiring wordsmith and worldtraveler, hoping to establish himself as a human of value. His interests and hobbies include: philosophy, literature, biking, nutrition, culture, permaculture, and hearty laughter.

Accompanying photo by Seabamirum

by Hillary Umland

1. they want to figure out this puzzle without your looming form over their unsure shoulders. they want to work it out in their head with their mouths pursed and pushed off to the left of their faces. they want their curious and excited brain to push and turn the pieces into one empty shape or another to find the fit. they want to take their time and think it through, the process you explained and shown them for so long. let them try. let their neurons shoot off firework sized sparks of immeasurable joy and accomplishment when everything finally, quietly clicks into place because you sat back beside them to let them make all of those pieces, out of order and confused, make sense to them. alone. you held their hands for so long, explaining the colors and sizes to look for, how to divide all of those tiny irregular pieces in order to conquer the whole. and they listened. they listened to you and watched you, let your words become their mantra, sinking into their skin right down to their bones. then you sat back, stopped talking and let them grow up beside you, in front of you.

2. ask questions. especially the ones you're afraid to let slip out of your mouth and into the laps of the people who brought you into this world, who have seen you since day one, who have taught you right from wrong. ask them what they think of their children now; did they think you would end up like this? did they think you would be so independent and stubborn, or laid back and good-natured? do they see what they hoped for you? and when these people, who you are the sum of, squint their eyes into the distance behind you, past the restaurant's large window, past the parking lot, back to when you were all very young and happy, when they raise an eyebrow and say, "well, you're all definitely different people," appreciate the honesty of that statement. don't think about how sad they may be that you all barely speak to each other. that you have vastly different ideas about how to live your lives. that the way you treat each other is not how they had hoped. instead, think of how it was always going to be this way. that they raised you to give each other miles of space and privacy. they wanted independent children who would grow to be individuals, like no one else, not bridge jumpers, not followers. remember that you all had locks on your doors. closed doors, closed lives. think about how you all at least have these traits in common, then laugh. and these two people who made you, they see it too. they see how you treat the people you've chosen as friends and partners. they see how loving and kind, generous and considerate, thoughtful and patient you are with them. how you respect their ideas and opinions, even if they aren't your own. they see that they have raised people who are good to others, even if they are not good to each other.

3. once i asked my mother if having kids was weird. she said, "god, yes." and i was happy. happy because she didn't lie. there is a black and white picture of me, maybe a year old, playing with books on the floor and my mother is sitting on the couch wearing jeans and a t-shirt, her hair in a loose bun, her feet in fuzzy slippers. and my mother is looking at me, on the floor with my books and two-toothed smile with her hands cupping her small face and a look of pure exhaustion in her eyes. she started young and unexpectedly. i surprised her much later, when she was tired. “i’m your mother, not your friend, you get your friends from school.” she said.

Sleep stole her mornings from me, her job claimed our nights and mother’s days and thanksgivings. they needed her, our house needed her paychecks. i stayed in my room with books, those friends i made at school, and waited.

One night a week was ours though, piled with movies and a six-pack of tacos. I’d rub her weary feet, snuggle up next to her, my head on her shoulder, her head on mine. i told her having parents is weird too.

Hillary Umland holds a B.A.in Communication Studies from Doane College in one hand and generally a slice a cheese pizza in the other. She has been writing short stories, essays, and poetic prose since she could put pencil to paper and the scribbles became words. She continues doing so at home in Lincoln, NE. Accompanying photo by Chie

The Adoption of Rituals

by R L Raymond

There are certain traces, reminders of his past hidden amid the newness, definite lines and curves still distinguishable in the alienness. The road he walks – still unmapped – criss-crosses the denuded land, reminding him of the part in a changeling’s hair: almost a memory, just off kilter, just off.

Above in the swirl of cumulonimbus incus, the mammatus clouds form and hang – liminal – where the greys and whites and rumours of blue converge. Ahead the landscape smears, blended into horizon, smudged into sky, a place, an event, a recollection not yet revealed but whispered in the gusts blowing the dust from his boots.

R L Raymond just tells stories. Through poetry, fiction, painting, and photography, Raymond lives by his motto -- A good story is like a well-placed punch: quick, effective, and impossible to ignore.

Accompanying photo by Joan Sorolla

Red, Everything was Red

by Zain Saeed

She told me she’d burn my back with a cigarette. Little spots everywhere. “I’ll write my name on your back.” I was fucked. “Better still, my dog’s name.” Haha. I couldn’t hear her. All she could do was stand behind a window and beckon me towards her. Silently. “Do you know the smell of burning flesh? Do you like it?” I’d been watching weird porn, clearly. But she seemed like she could do these things. I should talk to her. What’s the usual for this area? She wasn’t naked, the good ones never are. There’s a few up there if you want to see.

My face was against the window. She was still staring, frowning. “My teeth are the least painful, everything else is annihilation.” Oh you eloquent little…what do you call yourself? Should I go in? 50? 100? One hundred did she mouth? “I’m leaving tomorrow, you won’t find me here again.” Fuck this. Hand me the money, Sal.

She buzzed me in. “What will it be?” She sounded different. But it’s okay. The usual. Just the usual. “What do you mean?” I mean what you always do to me, things that hurt. “I don’t remember you.” You were there when the things I said ruined things that were already ruined.

How do you not remember that? She shrugged.

Zain is currently studying linguistics in Freiburg, Germany. His work has appeared in Bird's Thumb, Eunoia Review and The Freiburg Review and is forthcoming in Third Point Press, Apocrypha and Abstractions, and others. He tweets at @linguistictrain.

Accompanying photo by Butz.2013

By My Hand

by Everett Warner

I carve your name into a tree, but on the tree is not your name. It is just one hundred of your eye shapes that don’t look quite like your eyes. This one pair looks just like your eyes but I didn’t carve those. I walk a circle around the tree, dragging my arm on the bark until my arm says your name. But it takes two lips to wrap around the sound of a name being squeezed between two spines like pressing flowers and your lips were tulips that you would press along my spine and I can't erase you but these trees speak in blood and my arms look like your eyes. I’m pulling everything inside you outside you. I carve your name into a tree, but there is no tree. And I have no knife. I just keep pressing my nails into your naked body, saying your name, your name, but you do not become a tree.

Everett Warner is an octopus living in a bucket in your basement. He is going to ink soon.

Accompanying photo by Antoine Bertier

The Planted Key

by Rebecca Harrison

Sophie dug a hole and planted the key. She smoothed over the soil. She sat among hail and robins. Days passed as she watched the earth. Her hair tangled with rain. She learned magpie chatter. She snatched feathers from winds and tried to keep warm beneath them. At night, she pressed her ear to the ground and listened until she fell asleep. She dreamed of soil sounds. When she woke, she tried to feel rose thorns in the mud. She shook frost from her hair. She guessed the names of blackbirds and snowflakes. She smelled of frozen puddles.

One day, walls grew from the ground. She ran her hands on the rough bricks and found a door deep in the ivy. She heard a hidden garden behind the walls: bee paths in lavender and daisies. She tried to open the door. It was locked. The ivy caught on her hair. She looked through the key hole. Flowers and shadows swayed in green warmth. Blossom spilled on the grass. Butterfly glint and sun drift mingled in the air.

Robins flitted over the wall tops. She counted sunlit winds.

At night, the keyhole was bright with star seep. She tried to catch it in her hands. She slept curled against the walls. They smelled of snow melt. Every day, she peered through the key hole and watched the roses and sun patches she couldn’t reach.

Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and can be summoned by a cake signal in the sky. Her best friend is a dog who can count. Her stories can also be read in The Fable Online, Maudlin House, 99 Pine Street, Rose Red Review, Axolotl Magazine, Wild: A Quarterly, Quail Bell Magazine, The Story Shack, and The Teacup Trail.

Accompanying photo by Ludo

The Third Largest1

by Jefferson Navicky

The commencement ceremony would soon take place. We ascended the wide palaced stairs that lead to the gates of the library. Lights were on inside but when we approached the front doors the gates were locked. It was an early time of night whose scientific name we’d struggled to bring to mind – not ‘twilight,’ not ‘gloaming’…Lampposts began to glow along the green as the day’s ceremonies darkened around us. We walked around the side and gazed into a cross-section of the building, down low-lit aisles of books – Chemistry, Physics and Biology most easily recognizable. We reached the rear of the building. Beyond a brick wall that enclosed the library, the green and the university, the traffic almost seemed peaceful. We realized we would never see the inside of the library. Whatever was to begin would begin without us. Of course this was disturbing, as if we were stubbornly holding to our failures, but what could we do? This was not our library. We walked through a hole in the brick wall out onto the street. A bus passed us.

Our beginnings were everywhere.

Jefferson Navicky's work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Quickfiction, Hobart, Birkensnake, Stolen Island and many others. He teaches English as an adjunct at Southern Maine Community College, and lives in Freeport, Maine with his partner, Sarah.

Accompanying photo by Jan Bommes

1

Behind only the New York Public and the Library of Congress.

Circle of Life

by Paul Soto

Max moped into my room, holding a nature magazine.

“Look at this.” His voice sounded croaky and lost, as if it were being run through a hospital intercom.

It was a picture of a water buffalo calf, helplessly dangling and probably dead, in the jaws of a golden, indifferent lion. The calf looked like Ivan the Terrible in that painting by Ilya Yefimovich Repin— shocked and sick at the realization that death is irreversible and coming very, very soon. There were tiny brown specks of blood in the grass. I thought that the lion’s irises were the most impressive detail of the whole picture. Sometimes, when you don’t spend enough time looking at photographs of large, hairy mammals with amber eyes, you forget that you’re really just a distant cousin of everything that breathes.

“Wow” I said. I don’t think that consoled him much.

“It’s just that you see that calf and it’s horrible and sad but that lion also has to eat, you know?”

The caption had a quote by the photographer expressing a similar sentiment. I don’t remember exactly, but he said something about having to detach himself from both prey and predator and not let himself sympathize with either one. He has to see that all the time. Personally, I hope the lion made the most of that calf and its entrails. Maybe one day the lion will take a perfect shit that will fertilize a tree with lowhanging pears and, as a sort of evolutionary apology, feed generations of paranoid and photogenic water buffaloes. That idea really brought out the Disney in me and I thought there’d be no better cure for Max’s punctured compassion.

“I know, man. But, hey, circle of life.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Unconvinced, Max floated out of my room and I heard him toss the magazine in the recycling bin. In a way, I think he got the point.

Paul Soto is currently a junior in the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Venezuela, calls the Rio Grande Valley home, and refers everything back to J.D. Salinger.

He hopes to develop his craft and his cooking for a few years after graduating and will then seek an MFA somewhere colder than Texas.

Accompanying photo by ☻☺

Once again, thank you for reading Unbroken Journal. As always, a huge thanks to our amazing contributors. We love you!

And a big thank you to Gayle Miner for her beautiful artwork which was featured on our cover. You can see more of her work here: Gayle Miner

If you haven’t already, check out our other issues, and be sure to check back in September when we will have a special Autumn/Halloween themed issue.

Happy Reading!