Unbroken Journal

F

by Georgene Smith Goodin

Heads bang and fists are raised in rock ‘n’ roll’s three-fingered salute. The Eagles are ready to soar. Drums beat and guitars churn, bluesy, but not yet blue.

Staccato bravado from youth gone wild births rhythms that scare and scar. Dancers sprawl on the floor, soldiers in a war for which they were never armed.

Three bass-laden booms silence the room before the launch of an atonal dirge.

Sporadic rings and occasional chirps from a pocket or blood-stained purse form the last gasps of hope from those who don’t know their fears are a part of the show.

GEORGENE SMITH GOODIN’S fiction has appeared in numerous publications, and has won the “Mash Stories” flash fiction competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the cartoonist Robert Goodin. When not writing, she is restoring a 1909 Craftsman bungalow with obsessive attention to historic detail. To become vicariously

covered

in

paint,

visit

her

blog,

Goodin’s

(goodinsfolly.blogspot.com) Follow her on Twitter, @gsmithgoodin.

Folly.

by Matthew Smart

The sound of the TV from the next room reminds him that he should go to bed as should his wife. The sound of the newsfeed gave up hours ago, defaulted to infomercial desperation. She's probably asleep or else she's much more interested in new meat grilling technologies than he expected. Last time he checked she was a vegetarian. He's been surfing the internet for the latest updates but nobody seems to be posting anymore. The TV reverts to static hiss in the other room, a sound he hasn't heard in years. He's been sitting in front of the computer all evening watching his twitter feed, expecting something else to happen and it inevitably did.

She's been trying to watch reality TV all evening watching things happen, and it did too, right on queue. Until the interruptions made that reality feel less real. He wonders how she can sleep at times like this. Wishes he could too. Humans are amazing at ignoring the amazing. He used to try to cook the occasional meal. She was grateful for him trying. But not now, now he never tries and she never thanks him. They both prefer it this way. They are divided by yet another slash mark, a

fraction line underneath a fraction line underneath a fraction line reducing them straight down to the earth's core. That is how he sees their relationship. Fractured beyond understanding but also with very deep roots. What's amazing he thinks is how quickly we can have reporting crews onsite. That is the miracle of this age.

The giant net is strung overhead, just waiting for the lightest tripwire to snag so it can fall. Nobody knows where the next calamity will hatch so we monitor even the slightest brood for oddness. Everything is always falling apart. The center isn't expected to hold, not for long. We don't build anything to last—why would we? His bed is built for two but hardly anyone sleeps there. He slouches deeper into his office chair and hits refresh again, he feels bad. They seldom eat together anymore but that vegetarian jab was uncalled for. He regrets his meanness. He retracts his post. He knows her beliefs just as he knows when she occasionally strays. She knows his, and knows when he doesn’t himself. She strays, as does he in his different ways. The world is going to shit and panic according to the news feeds.

And he follows some pretty reputable names. It sounds like the apocalypse. He wonders when she'll wake up and notice. Or if she'll head up to bed, or if she’ll run out the front doorway, faintly lit by the oncoming fires.

MATTHEW SMART lives in a part of Michigan often overlooked by amateur cartographers. By day he works as an information technology analyst.

In his evenings he writes poetry, fiction, and computer code. His writing has appeared in Vestal Review, Rawboned, Smokelong Quarterly and elsewhere.

by Ron Gibson, Jr. On the edge of me, this light is hard to read when censor marks blight, broken trails disappearing beneath shifting shadows, and I swim, unseen, for the surface calm protects me from me. * On the grand opening of my skin, the world will hear all the unheard.

Musicologists will chase down notes like black nuclear snow, never to preserve the true melody. For the song will tangle the teeth of ivory. For the song was not a song, but actually the inverse of thunder. Rolled onto player piano, they will hear the tumbling hum of dead air. * As a boy, night and I did not agree. I would leave my bed of airless space, each night doomed to die a thousand times, as I swam in zero g back to life. I would wake to the dawn of mother’s TV—nighttime soaps framed in smoke, and she would say, ‘Go back to bed.’ Go back to die. So I went away to my makeshift nest of blanket. My cheek burned against bosom of drier machine; its rhythmic hum held me throughout the night, telling me to shush. * Morning offered itself, in quiet plea, a small bird, in my ear, and in me rose heat, as I rose from tangled plain of blankets, new inside cold.

Sunless day played November’s song—an old song, whose melody has made the rounds on windows, in gutters, on skylights. In me, my heart conducts control, steers flesh where I want it to go, so I did as I do, and you did as I say.

Another morning inside a storm, together, listening to poetry from the skies, in my voice. I read you to life, so you may touch heated lines that enter you, in your ear, a small bird from William Stafford to you from me by way of a hawk, a talon, an electricity that steals your voice, as I take and take all I want, all you give, all that is. * When you came, you went. When you went, you came, and I could not find you, for the stars had reclaimed.

Your body went worldless, your mouth went wordless. All you spoke came staggered gasps in calming hush. * On the ridge, from this great height, all appears manageable below. All lights stab through dark, lifelines breaking distance. Hocus pocus unsaid, this dark remains under my hat, a small bird. I will claim you were a dream. That you were world within words. That you were the space where air goes to sleep. That you were the body within the hush. That shush between the staggering gasps of loneliness that kills the lights on the way out.

RON GIBSON, JR. has previously appeared in Pidgeonholes, Cease Cows, Maudlin House, Sick Lit Magazine, Word Riot, Exquisite Corpse, Spelk Fiction, Soundzine, Alien Mouth, etc‌, forthcoming at Story and Picture & Ginosko Literary Journal, been included in various anthologies, and been nominated twice for a Pushcart. @sirabsurd

by RL Raymond If you walk with the wind at your back, your ashes will carry much farther.

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

A Collection by T.L. Krawec

The people reach the desert at noon and try to drink the sand. While it crests like waves in slow undulations it is not water and the people spit it out. It is bad, the children repeat, I will not put it in my mouth. The people are still crossing when the next noon comes and there is nothing else to drink. The leader asks the sun for help until staring at it blinds him and he starts jumping to the sky, shouting, pointing, for there is blue up there and that is the water that the gods grant if only the tribe can reach it.

The President is pale. He shakes for his people. He dedicates each drop as they pull it from him and says it is for the victims of a country which is at war with itself.

When he is empty the nurse opens the curtain and men in black drag away his husk. Photographs drop out of his pocket from his kicking, signed by someone else's hand, and they show a time when he used to look alive. Now he is bleached bones covered in canvas and a beachcomber could haul him home in a storm with one good arm. The wind picks him up and he knocks against a window like a party balloon: the men in black stretch up to catch him and mutter We'll need a new one soon. The President is pale but he is battling: come and get your piece before he forgets how to live, he is shuddering and shaking but he makes a rattling like there is still something deep inside that he could give.

He had found the single perfect song and listened to it three hundred and ninety two times with each ear pressed against a speaker. They bled. When he left the house to proclaim that God had come to him as a bassline in Electronic Dance Music he soon discovered that he had no keys, he had no pockets to keep the keys, he had no clothes to keep the pockets. And he did not have his ID; he did not know who he was. So he cooled his head against the glass of his patio doors looking into the room where music still preached and shouted who am I, God, who is this vessel you took for your own and now leave empty.

T.L. KRAWEC doesn't know why, but will still let you ask.

by Ken Poyner I took all the qualities that I thought made up my citizenship and gave them to the mermaid I was secretly in love with. She organized them, and began to apply them to rattling the waves and dividing the sea into houses for the finned and houses for the unfinned. She mocked the water and the chastened spray bristled me longingly, cautiously. I watched amazed, wondering why this was something I could not do, and understanding my love was but lust, and my citizenship conditional.

KEN POYNER’S latest book of short fictions is "Constant Animals", and his next book of speculative poetry, "The Book of Robot" is due out in early 2016.

He has appeared in "Poet Lore", "Analog", "The Blue Collar Review", and hundreds of other places. He has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes, and not won any. He has one wife, four cats, two fish.

Two Prose Poems by Anne M. Carson

Salvo Montalbano doesn't think like other men; his mind is lithe, elastic. He sees odour as colour—brownish yellow streaked with fiery red assails him in the sick woman's room. A manly swoon stops him in his tracks when intuition kicks in.

Metaphor is real and lived. Synchronicities appear with the force of revelation. A spider-web takes him back to Ovid’s Arachne, letting him crack open the investigation of the kidnapped girl. His chair is on the balcony, by the Mediterranean where he swims to rid himself of grime. He sits at a cloth-covered table with Sicilian fare—fresh bread with giuggiulena, pasta and Trapanese pesto.

Food, like deep, case-solving thougTht, is best savoured alone; life-affirming triumph after dirty politics, daily doses of the worst that humans do. When he

wants company there's Livia and the joy of making love after they have whetted their appetites by squabbling again.

Comrade Doctor Siri Paiboun is loyal, principled—reluctant, sole Coroner of the Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic. His morgue has few chemicals, rudimentary gear. Autopsy skills acquired on the job from an old charred French textbook propped on a music stand while he cut and sawed. His mind has four dimensions instead of the conventional three. The fourth opens to the spirit world; ghosts of the murdered dead visit him in dreams to give cryptic, telling clues. His chair is a log on the Mekhong’s banks, shared with Politburo buddy Civilai. They share lunchtime baguettes, thermoses of tepid tea, joke exuberantly about corpses, guffaw at the Party’s expense. Crime is political and Civilai is Siri’s source of Government gossip, his sounding board. Occasionally they get fall-down drunk on cheap Vodka the Russian’s use as bribes.

ANNE M. CARSON is an awarded and widely published Australian author.

Her poetry collection, Removing the Kimono, was published in 2013. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize. She is a Creative Writing Therapist and poetry teacher, now looking for a publisher for Massaging Himmler: A poetic biography of Dr Felix Kersten. www.annemcarson.com

by C.C. Russell Outside of us, there were visions—an orange sort of aura over the range. Third sunset since you last slept, your eyes a stranger to themselves. You threw your hands out in a wild sudden gesture, flapped them across the sky; encompassing.

“This,” you said. “All of this.” And then you fell silent, the evident depth understandable only to someone as stoned as yourself. The irrepressible urge to describe everything in succinct movements, as few words as you could afford.

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.

by Howie Good 1 Because he has been pinned, unpinned, repositioned and pinned again, he thinks he’s turning into a god, and that’s what baffles me and why I choose sleep, hoping to escape from people tattooed with words like “imagine” and “remember,” only to encounter someone laughing for no apparent reason.

2 As the eye continues to evolve over weeks, months, years, orphaned baby mice rain down on the bright orange roof of one of the last Howard Johnson restaurants, almost like malicious e-mails that offer warm greetings from Uzbekistan, where mountain, tree, bird, sky, masked and bare breasted, sing again, dance again, draw new cartoons.

3 Just before dark, all the deer that had caromed off cars on previous nights suddenly reappear along the road, some with severed spines, others with a crushed skull or a mangled leg, and that’s only one theory.

4 The light isn’t great and so I don’t actually see a blood sky and napalm babies and the woman with hacked-off breasts, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t come along with a machine and, seeing all that for the first time, the small holes at the corners left by pins, get down on the floor and play with the dog.

HOWIE GOOD’S latest poetry collections are Bad for the Heart (Prolific Press) and Dark Specks in a Blue Sky (Another New Calligraphy). He is recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

by Zachary Bos やゝ年も暮

(Bashō)

‘Gradually the year drew to its close...’

(trans. Keene)

I WE DISEMBARKED AT THE SUBWAY stop closest to the beach. Like ritualists we walked from the underground station into the open air, into the winter seaside sunshine, passing from unimpressive afterlife into the waking world, from tomb to lambent promenade. I said this aloud and you laughed, warding off with a playful swat my pretentious patter: Devil, get thee from me. Arms round waists we walked from subterranean dark to seafoam and bladderwrack, to the boardwalk bleached in light thin in this season, like oil paint cut with naphtha to serous translucency.

Hands in each other’s back pockets, pretending there was something greater before us than my betrayal and your rage. Seeing you with the last shreds of petal-colored sunset glowing through your hair, your sloe-stain lip shade, some feeling shuddering in the recesses of my heart.

II WE SHIVERED IN THE WIND whose wide mouth blew over the flat water and through the two of us standing there while the waves spit salt upon us, while we walked along the grey strand and flirted and idled, exiles from life for an afternoon. What romantics we are, I said. Your reply was torn away by the wind, but not the quirk of your mouth as you said what went unheard, the kink in the fierce strip of poppy red. Painted on, of course; beauty is something someone bestows on you, you’d said or quoted, but a girl who’s smart won’t make it hard. In the early evening dark, the lights of oncoming planes lining up like round pearls string on a cord, or like notes climbing down a musical staff—ta, lam, sad, fa, mim, ra, dal. Planes

carrying people away from Boston roared up and away from us. We wouldn’t have much time before it got too cold to bear or too dark to see.

III WE COMBED TWILIGHT FOR TREASURES. I pointed out a lonely sandal half-buried in the flotsam at the tideline. You laughed when I asked: Did they have socks on the ark? Sure, I said: Pairs of them. Your mouth opened widest when you laughed, your tongue waggling like a living clam when it opens its shell and contemns the shrieking gulls, you can’t have me, you can’t get me. A dance called the solmizated shimmy, defiant protest gesture of the bivalves. You never were one of those oyster women, champing and slobbering on a piece of grit until it pearls over. You laughed and I gleaned. When I stopped to pick through the sea trash, thinking to take away an unbroken jingle shell, you forbid me to remove it: people who take shells are vandals, you said. There are laws, or should be. Thou hadst lived still in my sighs, I read somewhere. Me on my knees, you standing, declaiming.

IV WE TOOK OFF OUR SHOES and watched the planes switch places at the airport across the water. I recalled aloud when once you took my pants off the floor and wore one leg as a skirt, your waist smaller around than a priest’s neck. That waist you wrapped always in vintage fabrics; the coats and capes you wore, with fur collars, a lady’s wardrobe. Your beating marble heart, your marmoreal manner, maja del tarot, maja desnuda. In the murmur of the combers, we heard all sorts of promises and warnings. I thought at the time I was in the early stages of some attractive kind of madness, hearing these things, seeing fragments written on every surface, seeing pure shapes beneath the arrangement of every group of objects. Lines connecting the spots on my skin, inviting you to trace them: leopard, you murmured, comforting. The dark unfurled, a round moon regnant.

V WHAT EARRINGS WERE YOU WEARING when we walked on the beach that once?

Ebony, mother of pearl and fire? Which zodiac sign did you wear, chimera-tamer?

If you are hungry go and catch a conger; what fish is larger than the whale or longer. I say these things and don’t expect anything to come of them, being too proud to ask you to take silly questions seriously. I adorn myself in selfconfidence, sing the rhythm of the waves, our paddles keen and bright, flashing like silver, and you say nothing, hug legs to your chest, rock against me. When your necklace broke, several pearls lost themselves in the beach grass. These grew with no hand to check their progress, and grow their still, practically native, rearing to monster height without a bloom. No one owns them except the earth, by claim of finders-keepers. Si tu m’apprivoises, nous aurons besoin l’un de l’autre.

VI YOU ARE TO ME UNIQUE in all the world. It was easy to believe then that the spontaneous questions were as important as the ones worked out in advance. (“If you wanted to send a Christmas card to a turtle, what address would you use?” La Casa de las Tortugas, Départment T.) Were there parasites on the ark? Sure there were, you’d said, two of each kind, and pairs of radiators, and pairs of jars of jam.

Funny queen of night-blooming Eros. Funny muse of hedonic errors. The waves speak your names—sueño de sirenas, queen of teeth, all the others—in their language of ebb and flow. A world of paper, and a sea of ink would scarce suffice to hold them all I think. The sound of a piece of paper scraping along the one beneath it as it is turned over is the sound of the sand skittering back into place when a wave recedes and leaves its shining trail of foam.

VII WE JOIN INVISIBLE IN LAUGHTER. Funny punner, mujer pajaro. Muse of the dilemma of desire—to want is not to have; to have is to be free from want. As autumn goes he spares neither lily nor rayonnant rose. Time shall spoil and scatter

shred by shred the clothes you wore and ruin the pages you wrote. Hope’s eye is fixed upon a star above the polar fire as far as thou art sunk into dismay. Where has she gone that can thither steer the way? Far from here and then, swallowed by the winds’ wide mouth, the waves’. What do we? We must haste to the shore. The winds do rise, the waves begin to roar; enough of roaming on the foaming main.

We can let our voices quaver when we have reason to, when cuttlefish march out of the sea to conquer us. We don’t deserve less. Let the ether tame us to sleep. Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace. In the city glare the stars we see are rare.

VIII WEE WISE OCTOPI ARE READING our ephemera and private messages, from their mudstone terminals patched in to undersea cables crisscrossing the seafloor between every major city. They comb through our accounts, laughing—see the bubbles breaking the surface?—at our infidelities and perversions, and sharpen their polytropos pikes. We don’t deserve more. We walked on. When was it, our walk? Near the city but not in it. Near the water, but not in it, nor to it. Along it, skirting the scalloped margin of salt and sand. It was a night for hypotheses, for futures framed in ‘if’ and in ‘if only’. If a king offered you a golden cup and a ruby bowl for a single night of love, you could only refuse: “Rather would I sleep with a servant, who is at least a comely man.” Opposites attract, therefore you are a mistress. Who misses you? Embraces or defaces you, confused memory?

IX WORRIED GEESE GABBLE AND HISS. My defects attracted your virtues but could not be touched by them. We grope on the intricacies. You sat on the sand occupying a space whose center was in my chest or loin and whose circumference of anguish encompassed acres of my life. Let no one unlearned in geometry enter here to comb your hair; Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare. Let me crown you with a branch of star-leaved gumtree, carved into a thorny wreath. The only ornament for you, you’d say, or said; better than any branch of monkey-puzzle, than any stem of ebony or coral or star-gazing lily. You’d wear it on all occasions, heedless of the

thousand natural shocks costume is heir to. I come to in the moment. When I stoop in sudden surprise and run you clumsily into the dark water, I expect the ocean to be grateful, to be glad, but the facts of the matter intervene: you pushed me away: unlaughing, like we’d never held each other close

ZACHARY BOS is the Publisher of Boston-based Pen & Anvil Press. His writing has appeared in publications including Clarion, The Christian Science Monitor, Bellevue Literary Review, Literary Imagination, and Found Poetry Review. Growing out of an interest in nature poetry, plein air writing, and humanism, his recent work is focused on the development of a poetics of secular wonder. In April 2015, he was awarded first place in the Boston University Religion and the Arts Initiative Poetry Competition.

by Santino Prinzi I want to finish the puzzle but there’s a piece missing. I’ve made my own, trying to force it where it doesn’t belong, bending the cardboard into this shape and that. I put one edge of the piece in my mouth and let my saliva swish and soak. I try again; something’s lacking. I wedge it in. Please stay in place, where I want you to belong. It’s not a perfect picture. Our pieces don’t fit together—I clutch onto yours. I’m not prepared to let go.

SANTINO PRINZI is an undergraduate student at Bath Spa University studying English Literature with Creative Writing. His flash fiction has been published both online and in print, including the 2014 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Eating My Words, the 2015 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Landmarks, FlashFlood Journal, Short Story Sunday, and others.

Check him out atwww.tinoprinzi.wordpress.com.

by Scott Thomas Outlar

One life is all we get, eh?

Sweet. That's all I bargained for when I came here. Got the rough patches out of the way up front in the years when I didn't know any better. Played five aces once the pot got fat. Holy roller screaming hallelujah in the midnight silhouette. Now it's a lounge act until the grave yawns. Once the flip has been switched even the pain becomes fun. No cause to ever get upset or bent out of shape. Wouldn't look good on the final scorecard. Wouldn't weigh well against the feather.

Judge me now. Judge me here. Judge me later. Judge me six ways to Sunday.

Judge me with your perfect, sinless, righteous decree.

The truth is not a wave. The truth is not a fire. The truth is not an arrow.

The truth is an Apocalypse ... an unveiling of what has always been.

There is nothing left that I need. All that remains is a primal desire.

All I want is everything ... hope that's not too much to ask ... to seek ... to find ... to take ... just to give it all away ... to know the bliss of nothingness ...

SCOTT THOMAS OUTLAR survived the chaos of both the fire and the flood...barely. Now he spends the hours flowing and fluxing with the tide of the Tao River while laughing at and/or weeping over life's existential nature. His words have appeared in venues such as The First Line, Harbinger Asylum, Yellow Chair Review, Dissident Voice, and Belle Reve Literary Journal. Links to his published works can be found at 17numa.wordpress.com.

by Charles L. Crowley I dug up my time capsule, and then shook hands with my seven-year-old self.

Together we looked at old pictures of us—you and me—and were reminded of your sunflower dress ... my overalls ... and the way we couldn't smile without showing all of our teeth ...

I stood there—days ago—brother.

Today I fumble with my sunglasses while trying to keep the car steady, headed forward, down the straight arrow highway that may lead me home eventually.

Should there be an accident or storm or heart attack, I, perhaps, wouldn't make it there. But, today, here and now on this road, I have yet to experience such a phenomenon.

Today I fumble with my sunglasses while thinking, if the solar center of our system sustains us, then why does it also cause us so much harm?

Slivers of light will seep through the dirt crusted over my windshield, somewhere, months from now. The seat belt buckles will glisten and our ghosts will be reminded of the days we spent separate–our bodies, time capsules for the others we’ve loved …

Why are you so far down the road away from me?

Why hadn't I left that box—those pictures—buried?

CHARLES L. CROWLEY lives in Pasadena, California. His work has previously appeared in the West Wind literary journal and The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles. When he's not reading or writing, he's watching Hesei era Godzilla films or playing shows with his band in dive bars and clubs.

Two Prose Poems by Kyle Hemmings

You'll recover from her pomegranate lies. You still unpeel at the touch. Tossing in her bed like another stray dog, sweet canine shelter for animals shedding skin.

Gluten will not unravel the night. So you stay hungry & speechless. Her meager hand-outs, her breasts that taste slightly vanilla and not-forgetful. She says she heard a rumor that an ex-boyfriend is dying of cancer. You begin checking for lumps in the rind, in the core. You suggest he should stick to raw vegetables. It won't cure, but it might help. Not funny, she says with indigo killer eyes. When the old lover returns, becomes the still life, her best anorexia, you're lonelier than a blown kiss.

Could she have been an 80's Blanche DuBois serving finger food and tapas to over-aged punks? Transplanted to Delancey Street, snatched into another decade but still time-sensitive, finding a myriad of fast exits and wings, still no cure for ingrown toenails. One lover found the clap. He never believed that she had beaten Spina Bifida as a child. Or even had it. She applied at Wendy's, MacDonald's, a bar on East 3rd that served the sexually ambivalent. Only. Certain questions were left blank. Birthday, uncertain. Horoscope: You're late on Wednesdays. Closest relative: a neutered cat that freaked in mirrors. One boyfriend in make-up, no fixed address, called himself Flat-Billy. After double-shots of everything but what's to keep you here, they trekked for 60 blocks at 3: a.m. believing themselves to be Odysseus and Margaret Mitchell. They found that God was empty of heart but had a good pouring hand. When it rained, she always received a good tip.

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/

by Dalton Day Aubrey Plaza goes through her day & sees two people.

One of them is in their car, singing as loudly & badly as they can, using their hand as what Aubrey Plaza assumes to be a microphone. But, after thinking about it, Aubrey Plaza decides that this person is singing into a ghost whose littleness makes it difficult to hear.

One of them is walking down the sidewalk, holding a parasol in one hand & a bouquet of yellow flowers in the other. With no one else in sight, Aubrey Plaza watches this person smile as they move forward with a strength that only the parasol & the bouquet could afford them.

Aubrey Plaza stands outside that night, staring at the moon until it becomes the sun. Does it become the sun? Are they two separate things? Does this make Aubrey Plaza the Earth?

No. This makes Aubrey Plaza Aubrey Plaza.

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.

Two Prose Poems by Keith Nunes

no one has died around me today, I'm lucky, in this corner of a V-shaped valley aside a mountain death comes by accident or lost cause, rarely by intent, we are moving in the kitchen as though no-one is dying anywhere, she is baking a cake and I'm playing absentmindedly with the bichon, we are in another realm far from the mayhem and slaughter, it's like watching boys play football in the backyard but I've got swollen glands so I can't take part and the boys get into a fight and I think—

why is it that I don't care enough to go out there and break up the brawl? the cake is baked and the mouth is full and the dishes are done and somewhere in the corner of my eye, in the corner of the room I see little boys squabbling over a man's head but the head is pulverized and it's in my hands

the sense that I've done wrong, the nervous look at expectant faces running their thoughts over me, on days without sun the way is unclear and I drive my bones into walls that weren't there yesterday when the saturation levels were low, I glance at the face that grew up with me ... that has not developed into me, I should look more like Iggy Pop or Tom Waits but there I am—unscarred, untrammelled, what do you do when you don't belong to you? layer on a little more chili I guess

KEITH NUNES (Lake Rotoma, 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 and increasingly in the UK and the US (Straylight, Aji, Unbroken, Blotter, Shot Glass, Blue Monday Review, Allegro, Strong Verse) 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.

by Jefferson Navicky

at the decline of the Ottoman Empire, in some far flung border province, alone, with dogs and images, and who would have recorded testimony of rumors, of theosophy, rivers, moving pictures, women, violins and oddly strung instruments, of enormous open ears and hands, and the whispers of white animals disappearing into the hills.

Wondering if, when that monk died, I was on a train with an open newspaper, sitting on the left side as cattle streamed by.

Thinking of the Cable Car Cinema near the river that allows the eyes an education, thinking of an extent of sun off the building next door about which I know absolutely nothing, of a violin that plays so finely regardless of location or master.

Wondering what it would be like to clap the hands together to see if it is possible to trap the sound of palms.

Remembering the beautiful animal you were, sleeping in bed, your natural habitat, with your white fur and rounded hip like a flag, and how you imitated that animal, purring, how you burrowed into the modest space of sleep, shamelessly, with such joyful abandon like a monk into the furrowed hills surrounding his monastery.

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.

by Rachel L. McMullen “The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” – Carl Sagan

There he is, the solar deity. He tips his hat to the evening, and later lets loose a slight, knowing grin when the night can no longer stand its ground. He sits in the morning garden, praising the soil, touching the trees, licking the love of the earth.

He moves at mass, pulling his weight with the congregation, calling himself “Day.” He speaks the universal language, tense and progressive when he must bow to his humble satellites. He acts as a main sequence star, a giant to the dwarfs found on the Walk of Fame, strutting and streaking across the celestial dome. He works the inner rim, tucked under the minor arm of Orion, wrapping his neon fingers around the hunter’s belted waist. He serves as an interstellar medium, predicting the rise and fall of humanity in the light-years to come. He stands in his wake, shining and glowing, bursting on the scene unless he is feeling under the weather. He reflects the yellow-green, spanning the spectrum of continuum, burning until the light goes out. There he is, the absolute magnitude, the stellar G2V, the cosmic microwave, the galactic center.

RACHEL L. MCMULLEN is a teacher, freelance writer, editor, and poet. Her work can be found in Oracle Fine Arts Review, Three Line Poetry, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Random Sample Review.

by Jess Mize Genuine smiles are like indie songs on the radio. Few and far between. Songs on the radio are like reflected suns. Mirrored discs and metrics bouncing back to the beam. The drums. The drums. The drums. Swelling vibrations that flow along with staccato heartbeats. One can do without anything else excepting music. Music is the acupuncture. Music that is like love. Synchronous wavelengths. Dance, dance, dance. Words can never make up for what you do. This is the planet of sound.

JESS MIZE is a blonde-haired surfer girl from South Carolina. Her favourite author is Stephen King. She loves to drink and she loves her man. Vampire Weekend three albums in stores now.

by Mike Jacobson

Stupor. An exaggeration. Lengthwise it could not be determined, but likewise it was promising. Lightness of touch when appropriate.

Half-stoned, he turned to her. As it speeded up, he caught sight of everything out of the corner of his eye. Everything, the totality of what mattered. Matters, to this day. His eye encompasses elephantine figures, excellence of bowing, unbelievable.

The other half sober, never stupefied, she rises to the occasion. Just as far as the eye can see, she chides him about his, and therefore, her sobriety. This is now getting to be a major problem, she could hear him thinking, being exquisitely careful not to let her in on it.

But she could never agree with him about this particular instance. She could never have, could never have had, any semblance of concord. Control she can have a semblance of, that is what she has forever been sure of. Concord, not.

Could they have been a musical duet, they would have been by someone modern, even contemporary. Their dissonance leading to a life full of interest, eventful, with children. The children having grown up and moved away, left them wondering about the last movement.

A fixed glass. In the sense of being made by a master craftsperson, making it as solid as the air around them. Their four lips on the rim stood for something amazingly significant. They have, each of them, a perfect understanding of where this has been going. And when it gets there, arrives at its destination, it will put on old Latin clothes.

They can declare happiness; are we to question them.

MIKE JACOBSON is a former independent film-maker who has several films in the Film Makers Cooperative catalog. For many years he has been writing prose pieces, some of which may be categorized as fiction, some as very short plays, while others can’t easily be categorized. Mike has made his living writing fundraising appeals for a variety of non-profit organizations. He is married, with a daughter and three grandchildren.

by Charles Hayes Romantic and sympathetic in its genre, a perfect stand in for the cold and the dead that someone, somewhere, must have loved. Some smidgen of peace it may bring and peace it must keep with them that mourn, their hands clasp away from the necks of those who pipe its tune.

But the dead are more than deaf to its call, the majesty of bursting bombs in air as o’er the ramparts the romantic, gallant, heroes serve up the day's conquest for the suits at their well laid tables, a place far remote from the stretched and curled ones, never hearing the anthem that pied them to their end, as it laid those tables fair.

Memorials, as the day, are also done, folded flags to bosoms held, shuffled steps to somewhere beyond the blurry vision of it all, go those who will know the dirge anew and never tell.

*Taps first appeared in cc&d magazine Vol 259 Nov/Dec 2015

CHARLES HAYES is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. His writing interests centers on the stripped down stories of those recognized as on the fringe of their culture. Asian culture, its unique facets, and its intersection with general American culture is of particular interest. As are the mountain cultures of Appalachia.

by Rebecca Gaffron Another surge. Selfie. Nothing’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Today try coffee cups and kids. Kids and puppies, attention grabbers every time. So this is your life.

Another surge. Selfie. Look bone-cut and sexy all at once. Fuck lingering doubt and second thoughts. True love ended. Separation, divorce. So it goes. Another surge. When the words dry up grab your phone. Your pain tolerance? Neighboring roof lines at dawn. Selfie. Artsy shots of counters and carpets equal just how close you are to losing it. They say male selfies indicate sociopathy. But you know that.

Another surge. Walk the line. It’s all my fault. Nothing’s my fault. Cling a little harder to that temporary something. It helps keep your head above water. Babble about what it all means. Another surge. Selfie. See that crazy around the eyes?

Spring is coming but nothing will change. And yes, we suck for letting it happen.

REBECCA GAFFRON 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

by Daniel M. Shapiro Since the smog stole their light, her dog has had no use for eyes. She had sneaked her tools in his chew toy, wrenches rolled on drivers. She told them the urns were Mom and Dad’s ashes. They didn’t check, didn’t see the inner frameworks. In the last days of alliteration and rhyme, she had learned lefty loosey, righty tighty. There was no mnemonic for altering the shape of gravity. She would turn all the pendulums to metronomes, set them at 90 beats per minute. Time would become currency. Anyone who needed to flee could buy a small piece of allegro or presto to skip past the powers’ permanent andante. She needed to tweak the portion size so days would not end early.

Ultimately, she would like to turn magnetism into reins, slow down the turbines, clear the skies. She would return light to its proper speed, set the blinders on fire. *Title is a lyric from “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz (#3 on Billboard Hot 100, 1986)

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.

by Myrtle Yvonne

Spare me the romantic gestures, spare me the cliché love note on a tissue paper, the lame confession on the bathroom wall, the tree trunk with our flamboyant initials carved on it. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to be involved with him romantically. All I want is our constant enthusiastic exchange of stories—both of his hands holding my right hand in the back of the car under the soft night colors, his awkward hugs that keep my monsters at bay and his tiring arguments. I do not need someone to test love with—with our eyes blind-folded, mouth gagged, to test humanity’s endurance by getting in a tub and having the other pour the shower right in my face and call it sacrifice. I don’t want to test love anymore for love is always acquainted with sadness and fear.

I just need someone whom I can hold hands with, someone whom I can find and appreciate the grace in every flaw and dark corner of humanity with and still, despite of it all, respect the blood and salute the devils that are my past selves for being brave.

MYRTLE YVONNE is a pre-med 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

by Sarah A. O’Brien You taught me to drive with a beat-up Honda Civic and a shit-ton of patience in high school and mall lots. Parallel parking was your favorite; you had me learn the language of the steering wheel, flirting with faultless turns. The whiskey breath barely bothered me, and we’d laugh over the occasional carcass on a side street.

One night soon later I’m licensed to speed toward Emergency, her ribs broken, gaze more vacant than the parking lots. Liquor cabinet lacking but a bottle. Of course, I downed the whiskey, but replaced most with water so don’t worry—you won’t notice, and might possibly neglect to hit her next time you label life insufferable sober.

SARAH A. O’BRIEN earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Providence College in May 2015. For the past year, she has served as Managing Editor of The Alembic. Sarah’s work has appeared in Every Writer, The Screech Owl, Snapping Twig, Copley Hall of Art, and Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery. Follow her adventures: @fluent_SARAcasm.

by James Santore I saw a little boy today. Tiny chunks of alabaster and big brown eyes. He was chasing a pigeon on Haverford Avenue. I saw a woman too. Candlelight spirit that shone for that boy alone. She looked at me as if to say, “Do you see this? How cute is this?” I moved on—and passed the Outer Space Club, and the Oasis Lounge, and the Famous Bar. And Mr. C’s Love Lounge, too. African hair braiding and crumbling, colorful stucco Jamaican holes in the wall selling Jerk chicken and Oxtail.

I saw in my mind another little boy. He’s two. Tiny chunks of alabaster and spheres of rich indigo. Hands flush on the glass door, watching his daddy drive away. I saw a woman with him too. Face full of sleep with lips dry as she kissed me goodbye. She looked at me as if to say, “You think your job’s hard?” And I drove off and saw the horses, the farms—the suburbs squeezing in. And there were Malls. And hair salons, and pizza joints that sell handcrafted beer, and bottles of Barbera.

JAMES SANTORE is the author of numerous poems and short stories. He was brought up and educated in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern New England. After years of drifting throughout the United States, he has returned to his hometown, where he resides with his wife and four children.

by Catherine Zickgraf Sears sent boxes of her grandparents’ new home up the tracks from Dover, Delaware. Men dug a hole, cemented its sides against bugs and dirt. New wood bored in the wall made cellar steps—still stable now as three generations later she surfaces into the living room, warm basket in arms, lasagna in oven, their first awaking from his nap. When he’s fresh in his high chair and green beans steam on Grandmom’s range, her pulse jumping, kitchen door hinges will soon sing open.

He always knows his heart belongs at home.

CATHERINE ZICKGRAF has performed her poetry on stages in Spain and Puerto Rico—yet homeschooling her boys inspires her the most. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, [Pank], Bartleby-Snopes, and GUD Magazine. You can find her at http://caththegreat.blogspot.com

by Julianne Neely 1 There are imports right now in your living room. The television has seen things your eyes would melt from. The couches were beaten, dragged, held prisoner of free enterprise. They finally found a home and now you sit on them. Walls move and paint cackles. Watching it is like watching a girl walk up the stairs. The curtains are opaque and seem careless. Look what’s outside or don’t. He loves you he loves you unconsciously. The ceiling fan hasn’t spun in years. Thank your lucky God for that.

2 Before I begin the day, I always perform a ballet with my fingers. Although, Thumb can never lace up its pointe shoes. What is? The pith of this floor. And what’s the point? Of a baby seeing an odd contraption, touching, and then living in space forever. I took all the pictures out of their frames and placed them on the ground. You step over them like air. I take it as a compliment how you’ve begun mistaking me for furniture. A girl on television just thanked God for making her an artist. I turn it off. You say I thought that was nice. Hasn’t the television been through enough?

JULIANNE NEELY, 22, is a recent graduate from CUNY with a degree in Cinema Studies and English Writing. She is an intern with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, as well as, has freelance worked for Sesame Street! She plans on pursuing an MFA degree in the fall of 2016.

by Dorian Rolston Each night before tucking himself into bed and feeling for the shudder and pushoff of dreaming, he stood tall as he could, puffed out and barefoot, in front of the mirror, and looked: looked at the wet-glass surface over his eyes, looked at the water-color white and blue and yellow and orange spread together and sucked into the holing black, looked into the black through the plane window at cruising altitude of about 30,000 feet when this is your captain speaking with a strong tail wind on a nonstop flight, looked into his looking-into reflection clouding over puffed out clouds, and saw stars. The eyes of a champion, his coach had told him, or had told his mother who had told him, or had told him to scold him for not seeing them, or had him just to scold him, and now he saw them, saw stars. Each night he picked up his racquet, the wearing-thin over-grip unraveling its cirruswhite wisps over its paled-blue cloth over the high-strung racquet, the worldwearied cracks and chips and scuffs and bits fraying the edge of the frame of the

racquet, the tight jagged grid mapping the yellow-dot hits in old-ball fuzz across the sweetest spot of the racquet, and swung. The swings carved the air around him until the emptiness was familiar and picked up—picked up stick speed, picked up air mass, picked up elements of surprise in quickening gasps, picked up the shuddering timber of propeller, picked up the pushing-off of aloft, and let go. Each eye on the ball, he heard himself think, watching his toss pause midair, blink.

DORIAN ROLSTON is writing, including, but not limited to, other things.

by David Spicer

I hear noise from the attic. This happens at night when I’m in a dreamlike state. I credit the sounds to mice, squirrels, or raccoons. I hope there aren’t any, but the noises grow louder. Two dark mornings ago my wife and I awoke when the windows in our bedroom shook. Somebody was banging against them. I couldn’t discern who it was—the image was foggy, ethereal. It moved quickly up the outside stairs to the attic. The next morning I walked to the attic. It was neat though dusty. I noticed that the small white flowered chair had an imprint on the cushion, as though someone had been sitting on it. A box I had kept behind the small clasped door had been retrieved and upturned, resulting in letters strewn by the chair. Somebody had been reading secrets locked away for decades. We didn’t have guests except perhaps for the rare small animal that managed to intrude. Then I noticed the initials JJ had been carved into the small table by the chair. We didn’t know anyone with the initials. Since we believe in ghosts, my wife and I have concluded that the ghost of Jesse James or Jack Johnson is the nosy culprit. It could be both, stealing each other’s thoughts.

DAVID SPICER has had poems published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yellow Mama, Bop Dead City, unbroken, riverbabble, Chiron Review, 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, Tennessee.

by Tina Francis

My daughter, lithe and teenage with her finger on the pulse, has begun trying to fathom what I know about sex. Her expectations are low. But I jump into the waters of advice where they seem most clear: it’s better if you like the person, I say. Which is good advice, unquestionably, in a general way. Just not in Wuthering Heights, which is lying on her bed right now, or in any of those songs that creep out under her door, or any film I’ve recently suggested. Or even, if I’m put on the spot, as advice I’ve followed in remembering special body parts and moves out of no attachment to their owners. What of the mousey man I detested from the start while staggered by his afternoon proficiency, or the girl with the pierced tongue to whom I had nothing more to say? The lovely Buddhist who prod and twisted so hard that liking him counted in the end for nothing? There must be a portable lesson here somewhere; perhaps one about bodies liking what bodies like. But what kind of lesson is that? Certainly no news to a thirteen year-old Instagram queen, sexuality declared in advance as her version of preference pure. If this must be raised to a lesson, listening to one’s body has perhaps less to do with sex than with the importance of hinging the mind generously to its alternates. Whereas in other lexicons we struggle—to say, for instance, I like soft white bread, bad poetry and sleeping late—speaking of sex allows the utterance: oh that, that was good, that was good, even when the claim makes no larger sense whatsoever. Here is the body as a thing to be reckoned with, the recalcitrance and non-complicity of the

flesh gift-wrapped by a long history, so finely that we might even take it along to a gathering of the politically incorrect. Or choose to leave it behind. Lesson two falls just as quickly into pieces; sex should be, I say, among equals. I am thinking, though: you will hardly need this advice because every institution you enter will explain how not to coerce, to overpower, to use one’s privilege or sobriety to press, say, a body very much younger or drunker than yours against a desk. Especially: how not to be that body. Yes and yet and yet. Almost every spark of courage that has carried me into political gatherings, foreign lands, ancient universities and modern conference halls has come from feeling their natives unexpectedly exposed to me. A basket of things ripe and abundant spread at my feet could not have been more generous than lovers’ minds feeding me a fullness fuller than mine; made more vulnerable to me in the lying down. You will be told: do not sleep with your teachers, or your boss. But how lovely it was, aged seventeen, to switch from the badly tattooed arms of my fumbling peer, into those of my employer, so much my senior than he died before I’d finished loving him. Or to find myself with someone whose books I’d read in awe; to run in my sleep adrift among the pages of her mind. You will be told that being a woman is a thing that allows you to say no, but not how lovely is the coming of the quiet yes with which the most unequal deals are sealed. If there is equality, it comes out of turn; distributed within the circle where one finds oneself with different things to give. I do not say one can live like this: it was sex you asked about. Which leaves honesty. Also good advice: not to lie to those with whom one has sex. And yet, where have I learnt more about dishonesty than from being amongst the coupled ones? Consider the creakiness of the promise, the one described by Hardy as having a strangeness towards which crowds turn a blind eye while friends undertake to love forever as they love now.

Hard to deny that sex sets its own expiration date and cannot be promised or easily made anew, and yet we celebrate. And so we have lied: used false names on hotel

registers; been caught and said it wasn’t that. Said we wouldn’t and continued, or said we would and found we couldn’t. Could one have done it otherwise? Not if it’s sex you want to know about. It’s somewhere in all that lying it lives, sometimes threatening to give the hue of dishonesty to other things perfectly true in their own lights. The man with whom I drink wine in foreign cities who would gladly leave me with a bottle half full if he was called home: I know and am glad of that truth in which sex can hardly interfere. To your father, I have vowed to tell the truth and found out over time how truth-telling can become just telling; just words after all, barely touching what is true, too much when all is said and done.

The author has not provided a bio.

by Glen Sorestad

Enroute from Houma to New Orleans we spot a roadside stand selling Satsuma oranges, so I pull over, stop the vehicle, get out to stretch my legs and have a look.

I say to the woman vendor, I didn’t know you grew Satsumas here. Her eyebrows shoot skyward; her expression says: Did you drop in from outer space? Yes, we sure do. On old sugar cane fields. They’re the sweetest oranges anywhere.

Somehow, though I’d never heard this before, it makes an odd kind of sense, doesn‘t it? Wine lovers know terrain has more to do with taste and quality than any other single factor. I climb back into our rental SUV with a bag of fresh-picked Louisiana Satsumas from the land of sugar canes and my tongue is already tuning in to the music of mandarin orange with cane sugar, anticipating.

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.

by Nooks Krannie When he lightly touched the wool under her jaw, she froze. She knew what this meant, so she traced his hand carefully along her jaw line. ‘I can’t hide anything from you, nothing, just like a jellyfish that holds a garden of every known lick, in perfect harmony, inside it’s stomach, trussed to corals in every movement’, she laid it bare. He grazed with his palm, the arrow that split like wheat, resting, growing, like some story of forever, behind her neck in soft flesh. They stared into the mirror that stood as painfully crooked as the first day, first sweat in lips, in cotton sheets, above the gurgling sink. They stared deep into the crooked mirror and small eyelashes quietly rested after a lifetime of work, residue in a feel-less, yes, unfeeling mix, in charcoal and saffron, equally. They stared and wondered of jellyfish, wondered if jellyfish could sense the shape of toes squirming in moisture, in together, in accumulated loneliness.

NOOKS

KRANNIE

is

a

girl/person

poet

from

Canada.

She's

half Persian/half Palestinian. She likes being called Nooks. Her words have appeared in Alien Mouth, Wu-Wei Fashion Mag and Uut Poetry. She loves a lot. http://nkrannie.tumblr.com/

by John Grabski

Emanuel released the breath from his lungs, pressed his back against the flat wall, the brass button of his denim jacket scraping the polished granite behind him. He turned his neck, flattened his stubbled cheek to the cool, gray stone and inhaled smoothly as he sidled along the tower’s ledge. A pigeon, baffled to see him at cloud level, tipped his wings and abruptly changed direction. Its concussive flapping muted the city’s hum. His eyes caught a flash of yellow as the morning sun glanced from the roof of a taxi twenty stories below. His breath stopped short, stunned by the reality of the taxi and the distance between them. He closed his eyes and swallowed. Adrenaline clamped vice-like teeth around his vertebrae then shot to his brain where the mercurial impulse paused to rake fingernails across amygdala’s chalkboard. He shuddered. A pulse of urine rippled down his thigh.

His hands, searching, pressed the wall. His palms, wet with sweat, slid across the glassy surface. Fingers, fully outstretched, grew moist and bulbous at their ends— like ten amphibian cuplets seeking a vacuum. The tension, ever so slight beneath his skin, was a comfort he’d never imagined. But that did little to quell the terror, for he could not shift his weight behind him—he could not steady his balance. On the wall the comforting words were chiseled, ‘Custos Terrae,’ Protector of the Earth. But the heart of the sentinel stone was as lifeless as its ethos was stoic and unforgiving. The slightest forward bend and Emanuel would rocket down the face of the tower, lips galloping a backwards snuffle at two hundred miles an hour.

Descending horizontal, he would peer through each passing window, longing for a look of compassion or a kind gesture. Instead, their faces would grimace, reflective of shock or pity. A woman polishing a four-bay toaster, the eyes of a round-faced

child lost in her artwork of fog on glass, portraits unreeling frame by frame by frame. Each floor, a lover, a friend, a mother, a child. It is said that in man’s final moments the eyes spill forth a lifetime of colorful words—the emotional kaleidoscope’s failed attempt to escape. It’s starburst, eventually falling in on its own black hole. But now, he could only envision his eyelashes blinking uncontrollably while the wind viciously snapped his hair. Trapped within the walls of his skull there echoed a metallic scream, a tone so familiar in dreams. But this is no dream, he thought soundly as a tiny spider approached his face. How does it grasp the polished surface? He regretted climbing through the window in a childish fit of rage. He would hurt Elena by hurting himself—a spiteful act that would end with her begging forgiveness. But he had not fully considered his actions, had not contemplated the binary promise, the utter finality of zero and one.

Nor had he measured his chances alone on the ledge. The cold, dead rock offered no quarter, no middle ground, no allowance for revision or change of plans. He had leapt to the ledge with his heart fully committed yet his mind languished behind—the latter knowing little about matters of love. Again he shuddered; his frozen pose plumb and straight as the wall behind him. The spider, content with her findings, scurried to the open window. Disregarding his balance he dashed behind her and with a final lunge leaped over the sill to safety. Inside, Elena sat round shouldered in a chair beside the stove—her sinewy hands cradling her face.

“Manny,” she sobbed. “He means nothing to me.” Emanuel paused to acknowledge her presence. Without a word he stepped into the washroom for a shower, shave and a finishing splash of bay rum. Afterwards, he turned to the mirror and carefully studied his face. He drew a breath, threw back his shoulders and uplifted his chin. The silvered glass reflected the portrait of twenty-six year old Emanuel Ethan Altora, a man that would not work his usual eight-hour shift at the bottling plant that day for he would stop off at Josephs on 55th where the tailor

would fit him with a new white shirt. Later he would surprise her with flowers and an invitation for oysters and chardonnay. His heart, not his mind, always finding the way.

Wounds breaching the heart Wash clean as mother of pearl Sorrows fall away

JOHN GRABSKI is a runner, writer and poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Harpoon Review, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Eclectica Magazine and Cyclamens and Swords. He is hard at work on his first collection titled Into the Vertex. Excerpts of his published work can be seen at www.GRABSKIworks.com or find him on Twitter at @GrabskiJohn

by F.J. Bergmann after Liviu Georgescu You, rising through parted waters, grow like pain in the beautiful light.

Illumination is the instrument that fractures on your arms and legs, scorches your feet, burnt, burning. The prism of silence gives birth to the celestial spectrum of music. Across the continuum, a field of oleander and thistles the color of trumpets surround the ruins where embellished memories linger like glass tears scattered on your face. There is no season like the present, no reason to count the broken dead.

Leave me; abandon me to my verses before my astonished flesh evaporates in the cold air, my metal bones dissolve in the rivers of vacuum, my soul disappears in the emerging sun. I am pouring light through a sieve made of paper where words swirl on the sheet like gold dust. I have already forgotten the past. I walk toward the embrace the future holds for me.

F.J. BERGMANN writes poetry and speculative fiction, often simultaneously, appearing in The 5-2 Crime Poetry, Black Treacle, North American Review, Postcard Poems, Pulp Literature and elsewhere, functioning, so to speak, as editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.

by Prerna Bakshi Will my body be buried or burnt on a pyre? I ask this in a hushed voice. As I lay there dead, lifeless, will kalma be recited or mantras be chanted? I ask this in a hushed voice. Will the mourners be arriving dressed in all black or will they mourn me dressed in all white? Will they claim right to ownership, will they fight, will they hold knives to each other’s throats over my cold, inert dead body laying there motionless, all exposed, mouth wide open, like it wishes to scream, eyes to the skies, as if asking the heavens to intervene. I ask this in a hushed voice. In a hushed voice I ask, when they come to take away my body, will they divide it into pieces, rip it into half? I, then, say resoundingly, what difference does it make?

Aren’t they doing it already?

Liminal dawn— between night and day… envy of both

PRERNA BAKSHI is a Macao-based sociolinguist, writer and translator.

Her work has previously been published in over two dozen journals and magazines, most recently in Whirlwind magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Misfit Magazineand Peril magazine: Asian-Australian Arts & Culture. Her fulllength poetry collection, Burnt Rotis, With Love, is forthcoming from Les Éditions du Zaporogue. She tweets at: @bprerna

by Ivars Balkits I get a midnight message—I get it. A newspaper in a thrift store, yellowed, “The Last News.” A pile of those newspapers on the glass counter by the register.

Articles about panic, disaster, storms. I thought the tract was new and that it was on beige paper. Instead, it’s old and yellowing. Teen gangs carrying switchblades and zip-guns and defending turf. Beatniks, disregarding the unfolding apocalypse.

Part of a ship’s crew disappears. Disappearances all over the world, described cleverly: stock market crashes, traffic pile-ups, factory production at a standstill, fatalistic Hollywood cocktail parties, soldiers in South Asian jungle camouflage, wondering about the suddenly missing-in-action. Suddenly many missing materially, physically. Graves empty. Maternity wards bereft. One half-tone pic depicting a screaming mother. It is one I recognize from protests against the American War in Viet Nam that appeared in a New York daily newspaper. Male though, not mother. A shaggy-haired man in Central Park protesting the war. It’s the one on which I based my Day Glo painting “Scream.” I propped up the painting in the opened trunk of my car and drove around Yonkers. As a kind of maybe art statement?

The tract masquerading as a newspaper is about the last minute, the last second.

It’s “The Last News,” about the urgent Now of the 1960s. I can believe it ended then. I can believe the disappearances happened then.

IVARS BALKITS has most recently published poetry and prose in several anthologies and on the web sites for Otoliths, Thirteen Myna Birds, OccuPoetry, ditch, Silenced Press, Merge Poetry Journal, and Counter Example Poetics. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014.

Two Prose Poems by Shane Vaughan

We stood at the cliff-face with nothing but air between us and the Atlantic and I told you that here the sea etches itself onto our faces, like we don’t wrinkle we ripple, as an ocean puddle sketched onto skin, and you said the same but different, said where you’re from the Adriatic drifts to the Mediterranean in slow scoops and the people scoop with it from one nap to the next, and there the sea’s etched, also, but less rippled more taut, stretched not sketched, like the water is glass at four in the morning, that magic hour, and you feel you could walk on top if you only had the courage to dip your toe in.

It’s the lines you draw, when you stare from my eyes to my past, drawing shapes of what was and is and how all this is some sort of sick joke where we collide into each other and talk about how it’s all meant to be, how all those lines have run themselves dry, how they’ve balled into a point, into a full stop full, full of so much more than myself, like I’m a cup and you’re the water flowing over my rim. Hold into me, sweetness, I’m a shipwreck and you’re the ocean swallowing cargo and all until we scrape the earth again, pressured by the press of water’s weight, painting lines in the sand with muddied hands, watching the sift of shape, until barnacled, bereft of time, asking only how, and we will say it was the fault of lines.

SHANE VAUGHAN is a writer of poetry, prose and plays. He has been published in Cellar Door, for which he won Best Prose, The Useless Degree, winning Best Flash Fiction, Roadside Fiction, winning a slap on the back from comrades. He has a serialized novel on JukePop Serials, runs an event called Stanzas for emerging writers, a theatre group called Cannibals Not Canadians, a music podcast called #KantKopeOrchestra and works for the Munster Literature Centre, where he makes coffee and tweets about poetry. He is currently writing a play and has a zombie love story coming out Halloween, 2015.

by Matthew Schmidt I caress the calcified knob of your knee. Solitude reigns in the sparseness of the room. A wooden stool abuts your bed. I read quietly, the words abscond in my throat, unsure where they will sequester themselves. It is in these moments that darkness hides under the turned page. Once when tablets were etched with words the darkness clung to the edges of the letters. To pass away from a time is to place yourself anew. I continue down the fragile shin, the skin smooth again in age, tight around bone, yet slack in the calf. Trace the line of mobility. You seem to say that the world you walked was sharp, divided, and upright in stodginess. Well, I can only wonder at my ideation since the lips of your mouth have not parted in months.

I’m tracing the lick back to the estuary looking for brackish secrets. What has the light filtered through? Take the lines on a hand, where do they slip to? As I slide off the shin onto your ankle I have an abstruse vision. I won’t lapse until I reach your sole. Tell me about the time you climbed the apex of the birch on Grandma’s farm and looked over the ridge.

MATTHEW SCHMIDT holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He will begin working toward a PhD in English at the University of Southern Mississippi this fall. Recent work has been published in Down in the Dirt, The Missing Slate and Small Po[r]tions.

by Miles Varana A bum asleep on a bus or huddled by her shopping carts beneath the nearest overpass. An insomniac slumped over an ashtray in the brightly lit window of an all night diner. 2 men drunk in the parking lot of a Wendy’s, just off work from the medium-late shift at a plastics factory and about to go home to their wives in the Bronx. A recently separated cab driver with a doctorate in philosophy, who once during grad school wrote an essay with the moderately corny title “Rock On and On: the Complex Influence of Eastern Thought Upon Contemporary Western Music,” who is slightly but not unattractively overweight, who between 1976 and 1979 was considered by many of his peers to be among the most skilled Ultimate Frisbee players in the borough of Brooklyn, who sometimes watches sitcoms, driving his taxi and quietly contemplating the imminent death of a relative. 3 pseudo-Kerouacs wandering the streets in a raucous pack, smoking joints and searching for prose. A stockbroker and sometimes amateur clown, on her way back up from a belated taking out of the trash, about to skin her left knee on the stoop and soon to partially resolve a mid-life crisis.

MILES VARANA is currently the co-managing editor of Hawaii Pacific Review. His work will appear in the upcoming November issue of Yellow Chair Review and the December issue of The Bitchin’ Kitsch. He enjoys rainy days, midnight hikes, and imbibing copious amounts of sushi. Miles lives with his girlfriend, Alana, and their pet bunny rabbit, Cameron.

by Zebulon Huset

The Bar The last sliver of ice struggles vailiantly to remain in existence in an abaondoned glass, chasin the little red straw. On the bar by toothpicks, limes and olives, there are coasters with the 1980’s Budweiser logo. Counting Crows on the jukebox, cracked red vinyl barstools and dim lighting to hide the dust that’s settled on the regulars, day and night; the same songs. The same silence.

The Photographer The ashtray brimming with butts: brown and white, gray ash accumulated on the bottom. It’s a photograph, gritty, emotional, of the grutty emotions he feels, or thinks he should feel. Used up and discarded, smashed, snuffed out; angry apathy from all angles. Nothing is alive in the picture. The next in the series is an empty pack, and an empty bok of matches. Head buried under his camera’s black cloth.

The Side Street Her car on the side of the road, reflecting dusty red back at the man in the moon, making him angry, and he reflects that back. Eyes narrowed, the stoplights all turn yellow, then red and black. Streetlights flicker, then are pinched out like meager matchsticks in the hand of something larger, and implausible. By morning they will be back with their boring brilliance.

The Waitress The “n” blinks its non-confidence from the orange and once-bright-red sign.

Through the large windows no one looks out onto the deserted street. In a booth, the prematurely wrinkled waitress sits alone in the well lit, empty diner, book in front of her, a cold-coffee stare at the same page for hours.

The Cemetery Crassly hewn rocks slant shadows at the unmown grass, long, hunched over under the toil of carrying the evening’s dew. The slabs: misaligned in child drawn lines of the non-meticulous, the cheap. The oak blackens clots of midnight sky, globs of nothingness. Gunshots go unheard by any but the impervious triggerman, speeding away from the warm body in a nondescript car.

The Painter The clouds have been siphoned of color and lie like a ceiling cast over the water.

The lake’s blues, too, have gone to gray, a choppy mass of desaturation. A painter by the lakeshore, still, his head bowed and canvas untouched, unbrushed. Until he plants paint on the plane, he is not a painter, but only a plain man, sad at the loss of his blues, listening to the melancholic sounds of single keys struck discordantly on the player piano of his artistry; a sad man unable to catch the rhythm, and jump into the lake.

The Bus Stop Cars slide by the unoccupied bus bench. Shivering little girl sits on the curb in a faded raincoat. Hand-me-down, holes-in-soles sneakers. She stirs a puddle with a broken off car antennae, absorbed in the transient art of rainbow oil swirling the

surface. It will rain again soon, and the next bus is an hour away. Just as the swirls spin something spectacular into her world of lack, the perfect surface is pocked repeatedly, like gunshots tearing through the canvas of dream, waking the dreamer from sleep, and slapping them back into the cold rain.

ZEBULON HUSET is a teacher, writer and editor in San Diego. He is obsessed with the netherland between flash fiction and prose poetry, as well as the haiku's 'murican brother the American Sentence. He posts near-daily writing exercises at his blog Notebooking Daily, he moderates a private subreddit for serious writing workshopping and although he was once nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he is the recipient of zero Pushcart Prizes. He did receive an honorable mention for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 2015 for his story "Being Memorable". His writing has recently appeared in The Portland Review, The Southern Review, Harpur Palate, The Roanoke Review, The Cortland Review, Spillway, Westview and Third Wednesday among others.

by Heath Brougher An alien whose lungs are opened and exposed and unfurl when he takes in a breath then roll back up until the next breath is needed. He is dying. His hands are held down to let him suffer off to an eternal sleep or transformation of energy. Noisy protest. Noisy grotesque. There are no chains made of metal. Only the chains of human fingers allowing this injured being to move on in sentience into the Universe to somewhere it likely doesn’t know as home.

HEATH BROUGHER lives in York, PA and attended Temple University. He recently finished his second chapbook, with two others on the way, as well as a full-length book of poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yellow Chair Review, Of/with, Mobius, *Star 82 Review, BlazeVOX, Main Street Rag, Lotus-eater Magazine, Van Gogh's Ear, Otoliths, Icebox Journal, Eunoia Review, Stray Branch, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Gloom Cupboard, MiPOesias, Third Wednesday, Inscape Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

by Charles D. Tarlton

1

A lifetime of changing seasons are stored in my head as if simultaneous one with the others. Red leaves show up on the winter trees, snow falls in the flowerbeds though it is July, and now that one special day dividing summer and spring, and afterwards everyone complaining. watching the river wondering why there’s no end to it

2 I imagine Picasso and Matisse with their portable easels set up alongside one another on the beach at Antibes. Picasso paints the ocean so it looks like a flowerpot. Matisse makes a window in the clouds. It is a crucial moment in the history of painting; nothing will ever be the same. in these abstracts no idea of yellow lilies

3 It was the first morning that spring came knocking on the door, demanding to get in. It was very early and the sun was fully up, the light tumbling over and running around the clothesline and the birdbath in the yard. We threw windows and doors wide open, took our coffee out on the porch, and waited, for what we didn’t exactly know. at the open window I was certain those were bird smells CHARLES D. TARLTON is a retired university professor who has been writing poetry and flash fiction since 2006. He lives in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.

by Daniel Finkel Jack woke in spring, head poking through phlox and trillium among the wreaths of cabbage and of squash, coiled towers above the fragrant loam, when the air was still cool and mist lay on the land and rains brought the heavy scent of many types of sage. He grew, his broad face crisped by a warming sun. His flesh was the burnt sorghum and the wheat, threshed and re-threshed, plowed, watered, beaten, sunned, blown stiff by the breeze into wild threads of honey. Summer blew in, a swarm of locusts that boiled through the distance, creeping over field and country,

coating the world with its great dryness. Jack shone and sweated through that first and only summer, plotting out the inward labyrinths of his mind while sipping deep drafts of subterranean wine. One night autumn came. She flew below a lemon moon, her bones cold, dead fingers of wood that scraped on quiet air, hoping for a spark to light the darkling season. Now was the time of harvests and of harvesting.

The promises of spring made a full and hearty marrow for this long midnight, lit by the red moon, lodestar of autumn’s country. And Jack, Jack was king of it all! His head was plucked, the ribbed polyp reaped of flesh and bone, till he was strung as a banner above the bristled hay and swathed in rags, his smile so freshly cut, his eyes still wet with glistering blood, a shovel in his fist and a fire in his brain. He frightened. And in frightening found no joy. The jackdaws made fine bedding from his pungent flesh and he, a creature of lightning and straw, dust and thunder, was grateful, and thanked them for the company.

DANIEL FINKEL is a writer from the Philadelphia area specializing in speculative

fiction.

He

has

been

published

in The

Bookends

Review, Bewildering Stories, and Apocrypha and Abstractions, and can usually be found at his desk, with a cup of hot chocolate, imagining himself hard at work.

by Kathryn Ross

The old city was completely unrecognizable. But, then, so was everything after the bomb. Neither side knew who had dropped it, neither wanting to claim it, neither wanting to say it wasn’t theirs. “Who would drop a bomb on a city in the dead of night?” the world asked itself. Who would take so many lives, snuff them out as if they were nothing more than candles on a birthday cake? No one spoke up, no one denied, and in the confusion, the war dissolved like cotton candy in water. Within a few years the city was rebuilt as if nothing had happened, as if the people had never existed, as if the war itself was just a rumor or a myth and not a fact.

“Regrettable,” the president had said on the news the morning after when the world woke up and saw a smoking pit where a population of five thousand had been. “A tragic accident,” bleated the world leaders and the people quivered at the idea that all those souls had been lost to an accident and wondered what it all meant.

The leaders didn’t wait long to clean things up, to rid the earth of the scar of the now-phantom war. Those in high places started making plans to cover up the open grave without a proper funeral. The rubble was cleaned and the crater filled in.

Pipelines, concrete, dirt, trees—a new city was planted right over the old one. Ten thousand eyes watched as suburbs and skyscrapers sprang up like shoots of grass through freshly tilled soil and soon no one worried about the ghosts of the casualties because the casualties were with God and in a better place and everyone had already said Amen Amen Amen and forgotten the names of the people, the buildings, the streets—the city itself. New souls came to populate the new city.

New souls came to work, to live, to fall in love, to make families and inhabit the new suburbs that sat above the old ones where skeletons might have lain

underneath, watching through empty eyes. But no one thought about that and no one worried anymore because all that mattered was that the phantom war was disappearing from memory. The accident had done some good in the midst of so much bad, so much pointless villainy, and the world was better for it. The phantom war had been a wound they had to heal, a fever they had to sweat out; it had to get worse before it could get better and the bomb was the worse and the new city was the better and the five thousand were in a better place so it was okay to forget. But the world didn’t know that ten thousand eyes lay hidden, watching. The eyes saw the smoking crater filled in with new dirt. The eyes watched the skyscrapers take their first steps, saw the suburbs drawn in like stencils and the families like twodimensional stick figures created by a child, smiling by their new homes that stood over the old homes, saw their feet stand over the hearts of those long thought dead.

Ten thousand eyes saw their legacy swept under the rug and forgotten. Ten thousand ears heard the flippant prayers, heard mouths say Amen, Amen, Amen while eyes were open, checking watches on wrists. Heard the president breathe the word, “Regrettable, regrettable,” heard the world leaders bleating like sheep, “Tragic … accident …” The five thousand, still breathing, still knowing, had a secret and with it they watched the world healing, their memory fading, the people pretending—trying to cover up the scar with makeup that doesn’t quite match the skin tone of humanity. Whispers—whispers here and there of the truth, exposing the nakedness of the realities the world had tried so hard to cover up—the bomb went up before it came down. It was a last attempt at peace in the phantom war, an infant’s cry of fatigue, of pain, of a longing for comfort. The bomb went up before it came down. The city was empty when it happened. Ten thousand feet carried the weight of their owners as they evacuated, moved them through the darkness with suitcases in one hand, their children, parents, lovers, in the other. The bomb went up before it came down. The five thousand knew they couldn’t go back, knew this

was what they had decided, but their ten thousand eyes wept under the stars as they moved, carrying out their plan for the unsuspecting world. The bomb went up before it came down. The five thousand thought it’d stop the war, hoped it’d shock the world in only the way sudden death and destruction can. The world had never seen, would never see, suicide quite like this. Five thousand statements, said with one voice. The bomb went up before it came down. Lit up the sky like the dawn in the dead of night. They cried, certain they could hear gravestones cracking, their homes crumbling, pool water evaporating in seconds. Everything they couldn’t save was being destroyed and they listened, straining their ears, sure they could hear the sound of their own hearts breaking for the greater good. It only took a minute or two to go up, to come down. Then everything was blown away. The five thousand could hear the quiet louder than the crash, heard the ghosts of their lives moaning amongst the rubble. Ten thousand eyes watched their city destroyed.

“Regrettable,” they said, echoing the president, in the morning when the crater filled the air with smoke and the stink of fire. “A tragic accident,” they sighed as they moved through the world to wait and watch. “An accident,” said the phantom war as it planted a new city on top of the old one. Tears dried, hearts hardened, the five thousand watched, listened, knew: the bomb had gone up before it came down.

KATHRYN ROSS lives, works, and writes in the Los Angeles area. Her prose and poetry has been previously published in The Pomona Valley Review, Neutrons Protons, Here/There: Poetry, and The West Wind, the literary journal of her alma mater, Azusa Pacific University.

by Alina Stefanescu For Carla Family is a habit we wear inside the house in which a history hops from head to head like lice. We don’t see the lice. If we could see the lice, we could wear our hair tucked under hats as a form of modest protection. The hats would serve as a final frontier against hopping. But we don’t see the lice or the dead family members who linger in the tiny bodies of lice tell us who we are without ever knowing. They define us without having met us. They tell us without knowing and mostly through hopping. A hat could protect us against hopping but we don’t know enough.

The habit is dark and intimate. The habit is very close and familiar. Others who wear the habit are eager to point out how bad a person looks in a hat. The habit is not flattering. The habit is not flattery. We feel bad about hats in the habit.

Family is a habit we wear inside the house of sharp, pointed fingers. Inside the house fingers point with unpolished nails and every finger points in a different direction.

Despite the bounty of pointed lines created by fingers, there are no intersections where people might pause to admire the oak trees and chat. Despite the points, there is no gentle, pointillist fabric pillow which allows us to hide our faces from the faces of others who have also promised to wear the family habit. There is no place to hide our itching heads. There is no way to explain why itching, which is not a form of pain, causes crying, which is a behavior intended to communicate pain.

ALINA STEFANESCU was born in Romania, raised in Alabama, and reared by the love-ghost of Tom Waits and Hannah Arendt. She lives in Tuscaloosa with her partner and three small native species. She was a finalist 2015 Fiction Southeast Editor’s Prize, and her syllables are forthcoming in PoemMemoirStory, small po[r]tions, Rivet, and Kindred. Her chapbook, “objects in vases” will be published by Anchor & Plume in March 2016. More online at www.alinastefanescu.com

by Kathy Gee

Behind the Market Hall the roads are narrower. Department stores decline downhill through tattoo artists, betting shops and spray-tag hoardings. Office blocks stand empty—‘let with onsite parking’—overlook no entry signs. Old iron railings fence the traffic island where a tramp lay dead in his small snug camp beneath the shrubs where nobody went. Ring road arrows lead to signal lights.

We’ll leave at the sunken interchange where, every winter, fairy-lights shroud stunted trees like Christmas puddings.

We’ll pass the spacious school you don’t attend, where central reservations glow with yellow roses. Cherry blossom ices pavements. Acer fingers point to Waitrose.

Pass the chemist and chiropodist, past red brick villas, Cedars Residential Home where birds sing overtures in laurel hedges. Pass through long fat swathes of aspiration—Osborne Road, Old Manor Close and Nelson Crescent. Safety barriers are camouflaged with green-stemmed dogwood. Pillared ranches crouch well back, protected by their conifers and automatic gates.

The final roundabout leads to a village church. The newly-kerbless verge waves white and tall with Queen Anne’s Lace. We’ll curve our steps towards the distant woods and catch the sun across a field of poppies. This, my child, is what we know as ‘country.’

KATHY GEE works in museums and heritage in the UK. Since 2011 some fifty of her poems have been accepted by print and online magazines. Her first collection will be published in 2016.

by Adam Giles

The dad picks the daughter up from school and the daughter pulls a donation form from her backpack. They’re collecting to restock the library after some grade eights broke in one weekend, set the sprinklers off, and flooded the place.

“Can I get you on the weekend?” says the dad, thinking this is actually a decent opportunity to connect with her, to show her he’s not the absentee career-obsessed parent from her younger years. “Payday’s Friday.”

The daughter sighs and pulls a peach from her lunch bag—soft and bruised—and whips it against the back window where it splatters like detonated flesh.

“Put me down for twenty,” says the dad. “I’m good for it.” *** The dad and the son push a wobbly cart through the automatic sliding doors at the grocery store. Two junior air cadets in full dress uniform block the second set of automatic sliding doors. They tell of their struggles to afford the costly aircraft fuel to finish their requisite flight hours. This while employing various bodily contortions to subtly draw attention to the boxes with coin slots hanging from their respective necks.

“Come on, Dad,” says the son. “Don’t make them go infantry.”

The dad reaches into his pocket. He finds no coins, just a ten.

“Bills fit,” says the first junior air cadet.

“Yeah, see?” says the other, taking the ten, folding it neatly, and popping it decisively through the coin slot.

The junior air cadets part, granting the dad and the son entry to the produce section where it occurs to the dad that he left the grocery list on the vanity beside the toilet at home. *** Sunday morning at church, the collection basket comes first to the daughter who passes it to the son who passes it to the dad.

“Jesus died on the cross so you could watch football for sixteen weeks,” the pastor says. “Plus playoffs.”

Men of the congregation close their eyes and nod like: Preach, Father, Preach.

“Least you can do is contribute to the maintenance of The House of Jesus,” the pastor says.

The dad doesn’t even like football. Never understood the stop-and-go, stop-and-go.

It’s testosterone, interrupted. It drains him. Plus, the marble and oak in this particular House of Jesus shine like new. What maintenance is there?

The dad goes to pass the basket to the elderly woman in the feathery hat next to him, but the son elbows the dad. “Mom said to make sure you pay for our sins.”

The dad looks at the son, gauging the extent to which he’s serious. The son is unflinching. From his Sunday pants, the dad comes up with a handful of change: the odd quarter, but mostly dimes and nickels. He opens his palm and the coins rain down into the basket.

“Hope you didn’t do anything expensive,” says the dad.

The son, avoiding the issue, turns back to the pastor who’s going on about how regular maintenance, being attentive, and, more specifically, honouring one’s vows are the keys to keeping something together. This while, oddly, eyeing the dad.

Then he peps up and changes the topic to next week’s confession-a-thon fundraiser. *** The dad has his face in his hands in his cubicle when the head of the office’s social committee comes around selling 50/50 tickets. This is always awkward.

“Do I have a fifty per cent chance of winning?” the dad jokes, which puts the head of the social committee in hysterics.

Her palm goes to her chest and she calms down. “Okay, seriously, three tickets for five bucks.”

“I’m a little light, Alicia.”

“Fuck you, Doug.” ***

The dad’s in his underwear on the couch, basking in the last half hour of quiet before the mom drops the son and the daughter off for his half of the week. The doorbell rings. The dad checks the clock—they’re early. He scrambles for pants and gets the door.

“Afternoon, sir,” says a lady with a clipboard and photo ID in a lanyard swaying from her neck.

Ah fuck. “No thanks,” says the dad and goes to close the door.

“Please sir, just a minute of your time.”

And like an idiot he leaves the door open a crack.

“Sir, are you aware of the atrocities being done to animals around the globe?”

The dad scratches his head, but it isn’t itchy. “Somewhat.”

“Sir, all around the globe—” “Atrocities are being done to animals?”

“Sir, yes. And I’m with an organization that’s trying to curb this.” The lady turns the clipboard around and shows the dad a laminated photo of a potbelly pig with the dramatic enlarged eyes of youth.

“This one looks fine.”

“Actually—” “Look, I don’t have anything to give right now,” says the dad.

The mom’s Toyota pulls up and the son and the daughter get out. They come to the door.

“Aww, look at him,” says the daughter, re: the pig.

“Get your big fat head out of the way,” says the son, and shoves the daughter so he can see. “You’re getting a pig, Dad?” “Awesome!” says the daughter.

“For just fifteen dollars a month, you can sponsor an animal in need,” says the lady. “Animals like Enrique here.”

“Sponsor Enrique, Dad,” says the daughter.

“Yeah, we can turn him into bacon,” says the son.

“No you can’t,” says the lady. “The atrocities, we’re curbing them.”

The daughter and the son stand on the porch looking at the dad with the dramatic enlarged eyes of youth. The mom snaps a salute out the driver’s side window at him as she drives off. And the lady in the lanyard readies a pre-authorized payment form on her clipboard, awaiting the dad’s MasterCard. *** In the glow of a late-night weight loss pill infomercial, the dad tosses back another whiskey and calls the mom. He gets her voicemail. She no doubt has the firefighter over, the one who posed shirtless (and pantless—naked, in fact, except for the helmet over his crotch) for that charity calendar. He’s so selfless. And chiseled.

“Is this what we meant when we said attentiveness forever, Shauna?” The dad fixes on the infomercial’s stream of before-and-after pictures, everyone going from sweaty hunched slobs to tall-standing go-getters, and it occurs to him that his transformation has gone in the reverse direction. “You’ve moved on, I get that. I hope you’re enjoying his hose. Never mind, that’s not funny—I’m drinking.

Anyway, you’re right: you were always give, give, give and I never gave you anything back. But don’t we owe it to the kids to give it one last shot?”

On screen, a doctor holds a clipboard and lists side effects: insomnia, dry mouth, irritability, rectal bleeding.

“Shauna, don’t make me do any more time. We can work at this, build it back up.

I’ll do anything. Alicia was a mistake. She didn’t mean anything to me. You’re the one I want to do regular maintenance on.” *** The dad sits on the bus, box of personal effects from the office on his lap. Brian had called the dad in for a meeting and said that the company “frowns upon” interoffice affairs.

“Also, Alica’s a mess,” Brian said. “She’s been fishing for compliments on Facebook for weeks.”

Mercifully, the dad has three days until he has the kids again—three days to figure out how he’s going to keep up appearances, how he’s going to sell the son and the daughter on the idea that he’s not your run-of-the-mill deadbeat, the kind of parent

who might be described in the “early years” section of a successful person’s Wikipedia page. Because it won’t be long until the book fair order forms roll in.

And if not the book fair, it’ll be class trips or the diabetes people or soccer or the homeless. And when the dad puts his foot down and says no, there is no more money, that’s when they’ll finally turn on him. That’s when it will be unanimous that the dad is the bad guy. The one they knew in their younger years.

ADAM GILES’ short fiction has won the University of Toronto Magazine Short Story Contest and been named runner-up in Sarah Selecky’s Little Bird Writing Contest. His stories have also been longlisted for PRISM international’s Fiction Contest, the House of Anansi Broken Social Scene Story Contest, and the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Riddle Fence: A Journal of Arts & Culture, The Summerset Review, and Kudzu House Quarterly. In the Twitterverse, he's @gilesadam.

by Tara Isabel Zambrano I am vacant and cold as an empty nest. No breath, only a threadbare sniffle. Air up the lungs, stuck in the throat, finally out the mouth with no human odor. My flesh is pushed inside an iron trunk two sizes too small. My hands, a pair of mismatched socks. There are missing buttons on my shirt. And I cannot find a smiley face or a wink to paste on my face.

There is no ink. Only poison to spit. The alabaster silence beneath the empty belly of my pen. A world spinning in imaginary circles hoping to take off but only resonating to noise.

I watch you walking away. The sun boiling behind the oblong clouds. Was our connection as quick as a Click? I wish it was like a letter mailed from a faraway continent, touched by hands and sweat, glued with your saliva and archived in a hardbound register. My heart stamped and marked as Delivered.

There is a sentence. The one that can be gestated. The one that takes root in our spine and grows pain on our backs, collate our imperfections. Let me write it down. Let me read it out loud. Let me bring love back even if it has gone rancid. I need its stench so I can look at the moon with the same fondness as before.

TARA ISABEL ZAMBRANO is an Electrical Engineer by profession. She lives in Texas with her husband and two teenage kids. Her work has been or will be published in Isthmus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Columbia Journal of Art and Lit. Online, Bop Dead City and others.

by Linda Wojtowick How it ended up set on a dusty brown television in the electric trailer park is strange. But maybe not stranger, say, than an amphibian rain. A bend in wind. The father crushes his cans in a homemade machine and tends the dirt-filled pails.

Under his constant hat his head is downy and small. The mother, gorgeous some years back and now puffing lowly at the eyes and jaw, is rarely home. She drives places with friends, to flea markets in other towns, to suspicious estate sales on dying farms. Their lanky child, a skittish pink boy derailed by skin, walks the roads by the old park, its ragged zipline against a muddy quartz of sky. There are fenced-

off tanks there, bulbous and clicking. A dome made of tires. He rides his bike to Bootlegger Trail, pushes apart carefully barbed wire. He navigates the anklebreaking swiss cheese of gopher holes and dandelions. He can see the wide bluffs from the field and imagines buffalo tumbling down off the blue cliffs. Screams trailing from their grey tongues and beards. He thinks of their big triangular bodies hitting the ground below, all accordion ribs and hatchet scapulas. Leg bones like shattered porches. When he is home alone, on the rare days both the man and the woman are in the world, he surveys the trailer with a dull, pinging excitement. He palms glass cats in the curio box. He upturns snow globes on her dresser dreaming candyblind of tiny storms. And there is another object, a dark apple-shaped thing with deep grooves and a narrow carved door like a craft. On the bottom an engraving: Russian 117. He did remember: One night his father took him out to the yard. He pulled air and sour beer noisily from a pale can. He pointed somewhere up and out. They’re sending Siberian tigers into space, you know. They trap them in the forest and load them into chambers like eggs. When they come for us, when they drop the bombs, I want you to take the gun and the pills and get to the cave.

LINDA WOJTOWICK grew up in Montana. She now lives and works in Portland, Oregon where she indulges her cinematic obsessions without restraint. Her wordstuffs have most recently appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Prompt, and Clementine Poetry Journal.

Two Prose Poems by Kelly DuMar

You ride the motorbike, a rental, to this good luck named beach. Your wife, a happy passenger, is craving solitude and sun and no children to mind. She lays her towel on pinkish sand and kneels. Her back against the limestone cliffs, her view is of the sea.

One other couple shares the beach and this is how it feels to be remote. In this season of sunbathing, no lifeguard is on duty to stop tourists from swimming or drowning. You watch her husband estimate his strength and stroke against the swells and current he can see. How he calculates his risk and what it costs to play it safe or venture out. He makes his choice.

On this honeymoon of beach, in place of one you never took, you watch the waves and make your guess and choose your wife, who has her beauty. You have this middle age, your towel touching hers. You choose the heated calm of easy love, the rocking, restful sound of surf.

When the swimmer out to sea starts waving wildly to his wife—for hope, for life— her screaming asks you for another choice. You calculate his strength, your stroke.

You guess the distance, know the cost. You pick your towel up off the sand and leave your wife and swim, your lifeline dragging like a weight.

From shore the wives watch how the swimmers chose and feel the cost.

A small spark may perhaps lie hid. ~ The Royal Humane Society The parchment, flown by airmail, arrives at our home in 1969. With a paring knife, my mother slits the seal of the envelope, unrolls the commendation, reads aloud the elegant calligraphy. From the Royal Humane Society, Patron of the Her Majesty the Queen. With grubby fingers we reach. No—you can’t touch it! Soon, behind glass in a sealed document frame, it appears on the wall of the bedroom she shares with my father. For thirty years, we look and don’t touch.

After she dies, when he sells the house, we pack everything for my father. Lifting the commendation off its hook, we wrap it in newspaper, pack it in a box we label for his new home with Sylvia. This is where we hang it on his new bedroom wall.

Later, when we move my father and Sylvia, this time into Independent Living, we wrap and pack and hang it in his new bedroom. Soon, when he moves into memory care, this is where we hang it for him, for the last time.

During visits we show him pictures. We like to take him on so many trips to Bermuda with my mother. We take his arm. We like to show him the commendation. With some prompting, he reads the printed calligraphy to us: “It

was Resolved Unanimously that the Honorary Testimonial of this Society, inscribed in Parchment be hereby given to DUSTIN BURKE for having on the 6th of November 1968 gone to the rescue of a man who was in imminent danger of drowning in the sea off Horseshoe Beach, at Southshore Road, Southampton, Bermuda, and whose life he gallantly assisted to save.”

One visit we find an empty hook. We look under his bed, the shower, the closet, a drawer. We search and imagine the voice of our mother, asking. How could you have hung it here? Where residents pass through unlocked doors, entering and exiting each other’s privacy with treasure they have no idea doesn’t belong to them? Look she says. Look at what has gone missing.

We call Marge, the cheerful unit director, report it lost. And Marge is hopeful. She will rescue it from another resident’s room. She will see exactly who belongs to it.

She will know our father’s name, printed in calligraphy, on a parchment from the Queen. Marge dispatches the entire staff to search the unit.

Within a few days, Marge calls to tell us the commendation is in her office—where we insist it should remain, under lock and key, until we retrieve it. We drive right over. We carry it home.

KELLY DUMAR is a poet and playwright from the Boston area whose chapbook “All These Cures,” won the 2014 Lit House Press poetry contest. Her award winning plays have been produced around the US and her poems and non-fiction are published in many literary magazines, including Lumina Online, Corium, Poydras, Tupelo Quarterly, and Milo Review. Her website is kellydumar.com