Salena Casha

LOVE IS by Salena Casha

For her, love is a toilet, or, more specifically, a toilet left running, its handle soft and unanchored in her

palm. Too much give on the downstroke. When she hears it shushing, she thinks of a tornado tearing through her

mother’s house in Tallahassee. How it cratered the hardwood pine in serpentine rolls. In the 50s, her grandfather

laid and lacquered and pinned that floor himself; one of the nails went through his thumb.

When that tornado came, her mother had been in the kitchen wringing a lime over mashed avocado, her

toes anchored along a wood whorl by the toaster oven. The wind grew violent. As the air listed by her to sniff at

her skin, her hair shifted.

After that, one of the women in her church group waited until she went to refill the lemonade and said,

even the tornado didn’t want her and they’re not picky.

So for her grandfather, love was splinters in his skin and for her mother, it was lime flakes trapped under

her nails and for herself, yes herself, it was a running toilet.

The first few times, she’d left it running on accident, pressing too lightly and leaving it searching for rest.

After that, she learned how to press down on the handle just so. And then, she’d wait.

Even when he was in the walk-in pantry with the rigatoni, he’d hear it. He’d head to the door of the

bathroom and call her name. Beckon her with a finger and a thrill would go over her skin and she’d buzz around

and say oh I know I know I know. She was water in the bowl then, all burble, all chortles. Still, though she knew

what was coming—they’d rehearsed it like a play—she’d cross the carpet to him. Not hardwood. Her feet hadn’t

felt hardwood in years.

He’d pull her in tight and whisper, see how it runs and runs and runs.

Not away, even though she did that once - years before she found out that this was love - slipped from

the restaurant’s single stall while he sat at the bar, his back to her and wrists on the marble, cooling down from

the August heat. She watched his shoulder move beneath his pineapple shirt, the way his head bent down over

his phone, how occasionally he re-focused on the rows of bottles in front of him that never changed except when

After a waitress brushed by her twice with mains, she slipped out the door without telling him and her

spine shivered down into her tailbone. She sat on the granite stairs of the local Masonic Lodge and looked up at

the toenail clipping moon until he found her.

He leaned in toward her, so close, and she waited for him to raise his voice and demand to know why

she’d just left him like that. She waited for their burbles to rise up into the night and touch the sky and then

fizzle out. Instead he said,

I think it’s still running in there.

What is? She’d asked.

It took him years to tell her.

OYSTERBEDSHEETS by Ag

It’ll never be quite right. I’ll never be quite you. If I could be anything but me–I’d be the man-boy-thing I glimpse sometimes in the mirror, pubescent bag-eyed like a bug. If I could be anything at all I’d be a bird.

It’ll never be quite the same as the men who meet in the coffeeshops of novels, entwine and embrace, take off their shirts in the heat of summer as friendship and love bleed together like water, an estuary of men with chimerae like us the runoff, the silt that feeds the algal blooms and yet remains part of your ecosystems.

I want to sit at those bars, those coffeeshops. I want the sunlight to glance through my hair. I want to pass through the spaces where beautiful men walk. I want to pass them on the street, our eyes glancing off each other like pebbles thrown off a wall, I want to pass as girly and as strange, I want to pass I want to pass I do not want to pass, iambic mantra swimming through my mind, breaststroke on a summer day among the old men doing laps at the pool.

You can run your hands a million times through the silt and the fine mud in that cloudy Chesapeake water. You still won’t feel me there.

I can slip away with the best of the eels, and you’ll never feel this brackish body. You’ll never bring me to your lips for dinner. You’ll never quite get a hold of this thing I am becoming.

CUDDLES by KJ Hannah Greenberg

FIVE FEET FROM STAROM by Matt Dube

The guys who worked security at the Centrum those first couple years loved to tell my mom about it. It was easy

work, taking umbrellas and cameras. Sometimes you’d stand near the stage and push people who got too close.

Some were cops, but most were just regular guys, machinists and bus drivers and cabbies. She drew them pilsner

drafts and they told her about the drummer who smoked cigarettes on the loading dock with his roadies, or the

singer who covered himself with a shower curtain when he was outside his dressing room, “to maintain his

mystique.” My mom would have paid for the drinks to hear about these big shots come to our town, but the guys

gave her huge tips for her to listen, for believing them. . . .In 1979, boxer Fabian Mercer was hit so hard by a

misplaced right hook his left eye turned liquid in the middle of a prize fight at Mechanics Hall. Years later he

brought his one-man show to the same stage. He inhabited historical and mythical figures in a series of dramatic

tableaux, but the only one people wanted to talk about was his performance of the cyclops Polyphemus from

Book IX of the Odyssey. He removed the glass eye from its wet socket and put it in his mouth when he spoke as

the monster. He riffed around with the famous cry; “No one is attacking me” became” “No one is coming to

save me.” It was pathetic, in both senses of the word, I heard from people who saw it . . . . My mom traded a

long afternoon’s draughts for access to the dressing room of a musician she’d been following since high school.

She brought a box of chocolate covered strawberries because she’d read an interview an eon before where he

confessed his sweet tooth led him into trouble. He smiled at my mother when she came in, and put his finger in

the same biography of a WW2 general our dad had started but never finished. He laughed knowingly when she

showed him the strawberries, and he explained his diabetes diagnosis. “But don’t feel bad,” he said, “I manage

it.” He showed her a zippered leather case with a vial of insulin and a pair of syringes. He told her what to do,

and then invited her to join him. They didn’t nibble at the chocolate shell but ate several right off. The rockstar’s

eyes rolled back in pleasure, and he didn’t lift his head from the plush banquette when the stage manager came

into the dressing room to tell him he was on stage in ten minutes. My mother readied the syringe and read the

future in the papery skin of the rocker’s neck where he’d directed her to inject him. He slurred his words, but she