Poetry
How We Love by John Dorroh
1.
The unplanned baby who springs from exposed seed,
when all conditions favor germination, how we fear
new leaves unfolding from its delicate stem, tickling
the undisturbed uterine walls, mitosis the vehicle
of involuntary cascade, budding exponentially,
an unstoppable force like tsunami, unleashed fury
of cells & tissue, genetic residue rubbed into sweet cheeks
& tiny fingers that clutch onto life until it cannot be denied.
2.
The kittens who fall from the sky into the folds of old barn,
behind corrugated steel walls, in midnight breath, one by one,
arriving like waterlogged immigrants into a mapless canyon
of odds: the wise owl smelling uncontested victory, mama cat
establishing boundaries, sheltering babies like fierce thunder shield.
She pit-pads into dark gray morning for respite, her instincts
telling her the people who lie in ruffled beds inside the white house
will give them what they need when she leaves them unattended.
3.
The red fox Lab puppy who bounds up seven kitchen steps
in the middle of a Midwest snowstorm, announcing his presence
with swishing tail, licking everything in sight, upsetting
any facsimile of balance. He is already in love. He is born with love
& shoots it out like blue electricity. There is no insulation from it.
Only if you are dead does it fail to agitate your synaptic universe.
Lord Fairfax the Snapping Turtle by John Coggin
This king and queen of suburbia already jeweled
their crowns with the fat grift of crashing crypto,
hexed their boredom with a football field’s worth
of computer and TV pixels, and shaped their lawn
into an immaculate green toupee. Why not more?
Time to buy the kids a cute piece of prehistory:
Fairy, the little snapper hatchling for Christmas.
The bottle opener jaw. Tire tread skin. And Dad’s
promise it would grow no bigger than a quarter.
Fairy lived a lordly life in the bedroom terrarium,
eating, growing, crawling, and growing some more.
Celebrity of backyard barbecues, biting smoke salmon
in half in front of the neighbors for shits ‘n’ giggles.
But suburbia couldn’t stomach the newly christened
Lord Fairfax—a sixty-five-pound pet frothing swamp
bile. Off his throne, into the retention pond he went.
The steel clamp jaws. Skin primordial. Like lava folds.
Cold blood that survived ninety million years in mud
and obscurity before the warm blood of civilization.
High Beams by Ellen ZB
Many poets depict extreme pain as something you see
before you feel, like how you only hear a hit deer shriek
once the car’s headlights are retreating. That isn’t
accurate, though. It’s actually the opposite. You feel the
pain immediately and you feel it everywhere. It seems
sourceless - everything is sharp and bluish and wet, and
splintered, and slit. The pain pinballs in your chest like
an arrhythmia. You can’t tell yourself, hey, hey, calm
down, because extreme pain overrides the part of the
brain that holds the metaphorical pencil and loops
graphite into letters, into words. The only word that
exists is no, because it’s written so deeply into the
brain’s neural pathways that it doesn’t require work to
conjure.
It’s like that for the deer, too. You want to think the deer
doesn’t feel much, because you want to think of your car
as a neutral object, but your car is a UFO and the road is
an old farmer’s cornfield. The deer’s pain-blasted pupils
are swimming in blood. It doesn’t react immediately,
because, I mean, you try pushing out a yell when
everything’s so cold it could be frozen. You try moving
off the spaceship’s pathway when you feel like a collection
of snow-cone shards held together with fear.
Beneath the Carnival by TJ Prizio
One day the moon will be upside down.
You’ll wonder if completeness is imminent
like nerves hiding behind the eyeball,
before the sky is overcome by clouds
painting you with reflected pretty lights.
Your brother will tell you
he’s “getting into tea,”
turning down dissolving cotton candy.
Do you see in the rainpuddle
shimmers of that place
we once lived?—
a question that will rise to your throat
like angelic bile, for you to swallow.
You’ll seek creature comfort, curling up
in the chest hair of an old carny resting in a teacup,
but he too will set you on the grass,
the weight of you now too heavy.
Why have you forsaken me?
Then open the shell of your head
allowing the dense material to melt
all over the ground.
It’ll alter you—
no, it’ll age you—
when you find in the demented tunnels
beneath the wet sod you seep into, love:
a sticky overflowing mass
that consumes your world.
Later she will hold you steady,
smiling through a bagpiped
“Entry of the Gladiators”
as the boy of you is buried.
A Letter to Ba by Mads Nguyen
I miss the rotten smell of fish sauce.
sweet but salty—I might as well wash
down your tangy comments with vinegar.
Add some sugar to this salted liquid—
like adding I love you before
pointing out my many flaws.
I’d like to think the things you said
were not a representation of our culture,
but rather of you and your outdated opinions.
Nước mắm—both a fish brine and
a dipping sauce for all the food you’d make.
Much like its pungent taste,
your disappointment in me
is often all I can remember.
I know food is your love language.
You care in a way that is practical—
bringing me watermelon when I’m sad
and reminding me to drink water.
My love language: words of affirmation—
everything I longed for and
everything I never got from you.
Nowadays—
I eat ramen for dinner.
Use instant rice.
Kiss girls.
You don’t hide your judgment,
so I don’t call you anymore.
I do miss you, though, Ba.
I just don’t know what to say.
Crow Magic by M. E. Silverman
In hidden places no human can go, crows collect lost laughter. They
scoop away all the chortles that slip through cracks of
conversations, the mirth that glows like teasing fireflies. They
listen for the chuckle that has the cadence of moths dancing on
evening primrose. They search for discarded titters with traces of
first rain after long dry spell; the one that catches in the throat upon
discovering free seed in a feeder; the one that echoes found coin.
They gather the forgotten guffaws that carry to the top of tree tips
that sounds like lonely coyote. They collect left behind squirrel
snickers, the winged-flutter snorts, the discarded chainsaw cackles,
and mealworm hoots. This is the secret life of crows. One day,
when no crow knows hunger, they will release every last laugh,
cascading down like slow rain, a reward of grins and giggles better
than first cut grass of Spring.
Wallpaper by Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
My wife and I spent a weekend peeling off the bedroom’s
wallpaper. A domestic adventure. My opened beers getting
warm on the drop cloth covered table. The cats begging
to enter and sniff the fumes of the paper dissolver.
The room smelled of jet fuel, overripe mangoes,
bicycle tire patch glue. (The end of desire
must smell like all this too).
Tell me three things about being young and in love:
what lows, what highs, does anyone know
they are lost when they are just snapping
and folding the t-shirts that came out of the dryer?
Remember a swamp is much more than big grass and bugs.
Which actor would I select to play this scene? They
need indifferent eyes and strong fingers that don’t cramp.
How long can anyone guide a plastic spatula
over a wall you may sleep next
to for the rest of your life? Turn the music
up louder. The night’s plans have yet to be invented.
If you work long enough the nights and days run
together and your wristwatch or the clock on your phone
just mocks you. The numbers becoming a list crumpled
and placed in a pocket of dirty jeans.
Never forget how to prepare for
the happy. I conclude for this job it is fine
wearing your dark glasses indoors. No one wants
to become the person with enormous blood shot
eyes looking through knife throwing fumes. The air
tasting like the floor of a bus station bathroom.
But what makes you happy is this
the walls only go up to the ceiling.
Explosion of Atoms by Katie Bowers
Some of the stars scattered across the sky tonight might
be dead, might have already fizzled out, and here we are
gazing up at them, staring with awe and wonder, admiring
particles of dead stars, but we know this, know that any star,
at any moment, could be gone forever, and we're endlessly
prepared for when one of them blips out. Plus, there's so
many, who’s going to miss that one? What do these far-off
maybe-dead stars do anyway? They're just an explosion
of all of our forming and reforming atoms. Yet there is no
climactic sense of grief, no grand come-down, because it
already died, death already happened, and we've known that.
I'd waited for weeks for someone to just say it—some nurse,
some doctor—to just say the words. I spent so much time
with the sentence “I think my mother is dying” building up
and expanding inside my throat, worried that if I said it out
loud it sounded morbid, sounded like I wanted it to happen,
as if I was saying, Let's just get this over with. I only wanted
to be prepared, to know
when to expect the not-so-sudden
sudden explosion of atoms.
The New Lessons by Charles Malone
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”
—Robert Haas
I’m trying to find all the metaphors for possible
that aren’t egg or flower bud
symbols that have bodies like children
who are exchanging one set of teeth
for another, O, that they won’t need them
to bite the hand of a parent
or lover, is the prayer,
I’m not a prayerful person
while hopeful, my hope has limits
even in my full grown mouth
with mostly original teeth
the mouth is a boney limit. Is it only
experience, repeating experiences
that limit our thinking?
There must be alternatives,
like if we stopped hurting and hunting each other,
there might be thoughts
perhaps older than the old ones
as old as 4th grade
hopefully we don’t have to go back farther
to small mouths that can shape hope
say words like galaxy
or atom, which once meant future
and is now about disassembling
dissociating, the electron thread is pulling us back
from the lovely naivete I want to build.
my animal by Harley Chapman
lays on his back,
offers me the cushion of his heart,
the lullaby of his chest.
he does not know fear
like I know fear, by the mouthful,
faucet open wide.
the dull ache of morning
passes him by unremarkably.
no list digs its staples into his eyes.
I try to learn a return
to cycles, another schedule
waxing acidic on my tongue.
I cry over things
that may or may not happen
& my animal splays himself
like a fish
awaiting gutting.
afraid to ask my question,
I sit quietly & observe
the way his spine untightens,
the way a cheek can fold
unselfconscious,
glorious proof of life.
still I try to smooth
every blotch of me, press back
the years & laughter.
my animal thinks I am silly,
I know we are different
breeds of tame.
Killer dainties by Mark Dunbar
“Those who feasted on dainties perish in the street.”
—Lamentations 4:5
Ah,
but what else do I have
save this bending of the knee,
this weakness for supplication—
this brave conviction that the spirit will not
unravel at its own pace,
that fire is not a gall upon the temple,
that what made your chestnut eyes
has not put the pox upon me,
that the grand symphony is not at last
a bleeding out, an echo of its absence,
the not ruin, the not shadow, not pallor,
that energy does not slip into
an endless open wound, the whetstone
weeping for the edge tool, that
the melody descending is not
a token flamboyance,
not a debt to surrender,
alms stranded like broken spokes,
not implacable tongues preening
nor tribute to the sound of tributes,
not an ancient spangle masquerading as need.
Prose
The Problem is the Geese by Lillie Lemon
“The problem is the geese,” Sam says.
He lifts his beer, his hand rooted with scars and calluses. He works for the Parks Department, and the scent of gasoline-powered mowers and fresh cut grass wafts off him. I pluck at the pilling on my sweater; the bar is warmer than my office. I make the trek from the coast, but it’s not too far for Sam, who lives on several acres of land he’s been cultivating for a decade, tucked away in the golden hills of Carmel Valley. A young artist plays guitar in the corner, his music not quite country and not quite in tune. His tip jar has a five dangling out of it to draw more to the cause. There are ten thousand ways Sam and I are different, but when it comes to beer and live music, we are the same, and sometimes that’s enough.
“Thing is, the geese stop here on migration, and most of them keep going south.” He holds two fingers out in a peace sign, and floats it: the V formation of geese in flight. “But for whatever reason, sometimes they stay. Something in their compass is broken.” He taps a finger at his temple, as if we might also be lucky enough to have a similar needle in our minds, pointing the way home.
I can picture the park, the one right on the water in Monterey, where geese chase runners and dog walkers and leave tracks of egg-white dung like horrible gifts for the unwary shoe. The grass there is wetlands green, the earth soft and moist from years of goose shit, so rich as to be mud. The geese find home in a place where people choose to live out the last of their days, where the dead-black Monterey Canyon lays scarred and concealed just off shore, just out of sight.
“They nest all over the place,” Sam continues. His eyes are peacock blue, nuthatch blue, not a hint of goose brown. He peels the label off the bottle a little at a time, a nervous habit. “In the spring they give us spray cans of gasoline. We strap them over our backs. We spray down the eggs.”
I imagine them lighting the nests on fire, the way I imagine Guy Montag lighting stacks of books ablaze in Fahrenheit 451, hating it and loving it. It was a pleasure to burn.
“No, no,” Sam says. “It’s not like that. Eggs breathe. They get oxygen through the shell. Gasoline coats them. They suffocate.”
I wonder about this for a long time, the wooden back of my stool suddenly uncomfortable. I lean forward and wave down the bartender. My mother is waiting for me at home, her adult daughter now her caretaker. I’ve been alone since eighteen and I moved two
thousand miles to get away from her, but two of her children have died already. So she frets. She worries. But I think I can spare time for one more drink.
I grip the cold brown neck of a fresh bottle and imagine a mother goose returning to the nest, day after day, her babies already dead. I learned recently that birds speak to their chicks while they’re still under shell. That mother hens have different chirps for different eggs, names they retain after the chick is born. It’s why chickens can count. To keep track of their babies.
I read somewhere that a goose is one of the most intelligent birds on earth. She paints the world into detailed memory, loyal even to the sick and injured among her family. How long does it take her to realize her babies are dying? Will she learn that the smell of gasoline means death?
I will write a poem about this. About the eggs, the gentle hands of Sam spraying down a mother’s nest, a mother who is tired, who doesn’t want to move anymore, whose broken compass landed her in soft green grass on the banks of a cold sea.
A friend will read it and chime in. “What a waste. They could feed those eggs to the homeless. Goose eggs are a delicacy.” I will tell him he doesn’t understand. That the goose doesn’t care how her children are taken.
“I’d collect the eggs,” he’ll say, talking past me. “I’d eat them.”
I’ll tell him this is a metaphor.
“Balut is delicious,” he’ll say. I’ll picture him breaking open the freshly simmered shell, the half-formed gosling’s eyes bloated and fishbelly white after being boiled alive, half-formed.
I won’t know how to tell him that the world has already eaten my siblings, their lives unfledged, cursed with trauma, suffocated by gasoline.
But I will tell him that the goose is my mother.
His responses will stop, then, and I’ll wonder if he’s decided to go to the park by the sea, brave the fury of the geese, and collect the eggs himself.
I drink my ale. Sam gazes at his bottle.
“I wonder,” he says. “If we let them go, there’d be more geese than people.” The label has come free, and he folds it neatly, a paper airplane, a flying V. “I’m not so sure that would be a bad thing.”
11 Ways Of Looking At Toilet Paper by Lee Frank
I
A mob fights in a supermarket car park. A man with a black eye and a Pierre Cardin facemask introduces his fist into the jaw of a youth with green nose rings the size of quoits. A woman in a pink polka dot dress bites and draws blood from the arm of an Asian grandmother who howls and scratches at the woman’s cheek with daffodil-yellow nail extensions.
Black, green, pink, red, yellow.
Around them, flocks of toilet paper fly- white against the blue ocean of sky.
II
A 13-year-old from Perth invents reusable toilet pads. Demand is extraordinary and social unrest so prevalent the pads bypass normal regulatory controls and are made available immediately Months later men are found sliding their buttocks along highways and shrilling with bliss. A chemical agent is identified in the pads that activate prostate glands and induce feelings of unfettered elation. But, within days, rubbing from this pad is no longer sufficient to produce the desired response. Victims can only find relief from friction on surfaces such as bitumen. Highways are closed. Urgent remedies are called for.
III
My wife and I argue. I insist our supplies are so low we’ve no choice but to reuse what little we have. She refuses.
“Leaves of the lemon trees,” she says.
I don’t back down. My wife leaves. One night, our daughter, Chloe, holds a square of toilet paper before us.
“Can’t where share this and stay together?” she asks.
IV
Pedicure fish are trained to nibble about our nether regions. Vertical waist-high baths are installed. When the tiny fish face you, they’re as thin and inconsequential as flakes of toilet paper.
V
A breeze blows a square of white paper over brown mountains. A crowd pursues it. Night falls. What price the butchered feet and heart attacks?
VI
“Be A Man, Use Your Hands” is a slogan broadcast across all media platforms. It’s soon pulled due to opposition over its sexist overtones. A new campaign’s launched. A crowd of people- men, women, children trans, non-binary- hold hands around a square of toilet paper with a black cross stamped across it.
The copy?
“We’re bigger than this.”
VII
The car park.
Fists fly, legs kick, heads butt. Packs of toilet rolls split open and are trampled or tossed to accomplices.
One sheet, torn off in the throes of the melee, flutters to land at the feet of a crow on a skip bin. The crow gargles. The sheet ripples in silence.
VIII
No food has graced shelves for weeks. The population looks the best they’ve looked for decades. Sugar-free, fat-free and exercising regularly through walks to and brawls around supermarkets, their bodies have shed the flabbiness of the good life to take on shapes handsome and beautiful, supple as two-ply toilet paper.
IX
A Facebook page claims the Deep State’s stockpiled massive amounts of toilet paper in underwater tanks for use by executive levels of government only. The Determined scuba dive to find them. In Darwin Harbour, those body parts overlooked by crocs wash up on beaches. Next to the remains, a kind soul plants sticks with squares of toilet paper skewered at their tops. Little white prayers flutter by the shore.
X
A mighty storm engulfs the internet. A dove flies in its face- my email of love for you-white as toilet paper.
XI
Handshakes are out. People, unsure where their counterparts’ hands have been, disavow the age-old custom. Civility suffers another blow. Martial art classes with full PPE gear are booked out for years ahead. Black belts are dropped. Toilet paper sashes are consecrated.
Audition by Jerry Krajnak
Patricia opens the screen door. One tiny kiss on my cheek before she brings me in.
This him? Yes, Dad. This is Gary.
He ready to work? Yes, sir, I respond.
But he continues to sit at the kitchen table whetting the blade of an old Sodbuster knife. From a wood AM Zenith Hank Williams complains about someone’s cheatin’ heart. Mom hands me a mug of black coffee, sizes me up like I am on auction. I sip at the bitter brew. Patricia takes my free hand and leads to the sink, points to a pair of galvanized pails.
She whispers, One is for antiseptic. The other’s for . . . you know . . .
Oysters? I smirk, thinking I’m clever.
Their testicles, she corrects. No smile.
Screech of kitchen chair on linoleum floor. Her father rises, places a bit of Wintergreen Skoal under a lip, and hands me a bucket, heads out the door.
A bit of pink brightens the morning sky, in the air an aroma of hay and manure. As he leads into the pen, a gate complains. I’ll bring the calves here. You need to catch them, there in the headgate, so I can work on them one at a time. Like this. He maneuvers a device of smutty wood and rusted pipe. Its head stays on this side with you, its body with me in the chute. Don’t let them get past you. Understand? He turns from me abruptly, whistles for his dog. The two stride off toward the pasture. I stay, watch them go. A tap on my shoulder. Come in for breakfast, Patricia advises. He’ll bring in the cattle before he eats. Those two always do this part alone.
The sun is high once we reenter the pen. Her father’s soft voice surprises me as he speaks to a calf and urges it into the chute. I capture its head, peer into dark eyes, discover red eyelashes. The calf resists, shakes its head, complains. I hold on, and wetness splashes my face. He pats the calf’s rump, calls her Little Lady. Inspects, injects, then thanks her and nods for me to release her. Toward a field of fescue she springs.
Buddy comes next. This one’s a rascal, I’m warned as I struggle to fit the headgate around his thrashing neck. Three times my size, he slams me into a fence, and we wrestle cheek to cheek. Buddy’s dark eyes are ringed in red, double row of delicate lashes. He pleads for release and drills me with hate and fear. As snot and saliva fly, I try to hold him still. Patricia’s dad unfolds his knife. I think about my collaboration, what I am helping this man do. A calm voice directs. Back up just a step, would you please, little Bud? Then a quick moan and a plop from one of the pails. Blood colors the water. I watch it swirl and let Buddy go when I am told. Ask for a minute as he moves away. Patricia’s dad looks at me and nods. I’m not sure what he sees.
The morning moves on, and I help with Sweeties, Honeys, Buddies, and Partners. Each is thanked before it’s released to grassy freedom. At noon, her dad wipes his knife and folds it, stretches and heads toward the house with a pail, stops to admire his calves in the field. He wants their lives to be good, he tells me. I think of the knife in his pocket. He nods toward Buddy who grazes alone. That one has only a couple more years before I’ll have to send him away. A moment of loving pain today for two more years of grass and alfalfa. Maybe that’s not a bad deal. He searches my eyes for understanding, spits at the fence and walks toward the house. The screen door bangs behind him.
Patricia emerges, carries a now empty pail. They’ll be breaded and fried for supper tonight! She offers to help me clean up at the pump and works the handle while I wash my hands where blisters have formed. We gaze at the barn with its peeling paint, the dying garden, the slow-moving creek and the pasture beyond it that browns in late September sun. Buddy, the castrated Hereford steer, nibbles on fescue and watches. I think of that knife, of Buddy’s blood swirling in water. I turn toward Patricia, then to the farmhouse. What will happen after today?
We gather the buckets, towels, and soap, hold on to the handles together and stroll side by side through the grass toward the kitchen, its midday promise of cornbread and beans.
Slaughterhouse by Luisa Santos
When I tell people I kill hogs for a living, they all get this same wacky expression of relief. Looking me up and down again with newfound understanding, eureka. The same face someone makes when they find out a pedophile was also a victim of child rape. Sometimes mixed with some sort of sympathy, or maybe that’s just midwestern politeness. Later that evening, they would sit down at a nice big rectangular dinner table surrounded by at least two people they love. And in between mouthfuls of locally sourced veal, announce a new reason why their kids should do their homework.
Five years in the industry, no one’s ever told me that I look like a butcher. But I know that I do, and so does everybody else. If the geriatrics at my work talked, they would be the only ones to tell me. Instead, they just stare as if they know the exact time and place of my death. Everybody else in Jerry had a nice shiny block scraper up their ass at all times. The type of white people with a sinister level of emotional repression. If the end of the world were announced tomorrow, all these PTA moms and guys named Roland would host bigger, more illegal sex parties than billionaires in Vegas hotels.
I’m not a particularly shameful person. Don’t feel ashamed. I lost that about two states and a family ago. I’ll feel an extra layer of self-consciousness sometimes when I’m pretending to order for two people at the McDonalds drive thru. But it doesn’t even come close to the sweaty back shame of my distant past. Not anymore. Now I live only for the satiety of evening food comas and cases of 99 Bananas.
The other day I was getting gas on the way back from work, it was a Friday, both paycheck and bar day for me day so I was feeling generous. I saw a tweaker waving cars down like a fucking animal. It was a new strategy I had never seen before, he had one of those
cardboard signs but instead of holding it so people at the red light could see, he was doing some sort of ritualistic dance around it. He would throw his boney arms above his head, shake his body like he was seizing up, and thrash them back at his sides. All while spinning around the sign, all with his eyes closed. I don’t know if I was driven by curiosity, or boredom, or by his “Diabetic Resilience” t-shirt, but I decided to go over to the guy. I figured I could offer to buy him some food, that’s it.
So there I am, walking up to this tweaker empty-handed, unarmed, and now very anxious. I get about five feet away and shout over the traffic if he’s okay. This guy almost gave me a heart attack how fast he ran up to me, it was like his mind was instantly snapped back into his body and he knew exactly who I was. He had a lot of energy, maybe even a little more than speed, and hugged me a little too low, a little too long. Then he told me his name, Daniel, and asked if I could drive him to the Narcoossee animal shelter to pick up his dog. He said she was taken from him by “the pounders” and even had a crumpled piece of paper with the address scribbled on. I
thought, he doesn’t want drugs, he’s a little weird but probably just misses his dog. So, I said yeah, sure, why not?
The whole drive there he was freaking me the fuck out. He kept repeating the address on the paper over and over again and loudly smacking his lips. I sucked it up, I had to, I chose to do this. At least he wouldn’t ask me any questions about myself, this man didn’t give a fuck who I was, I’m not even fully sure he realized somebody else was driving the car. This guy just really, really wanted to get to 1650 West Gleam Street.
He swung the door open before I could even put the car in park and told me he would be five minutes. It wasn’t five minutes, it was half an hour of quietly sitting there with my moral compass, deciding whether or not I should just drive off.
He eventually did come back, with no dog, no shoes, nothing except a tiny ball of tinfoil and a look of sheer panic. He hopped in my car, the back seat this time, and told me to get the fuck out of there, fast. When I asked him what happened to his dog, he said we were too late and that “they” had already sent her to “the slaughterhouse”. Don’t get me wrong, I knew this guy was full of shit. I knew that there was no dog, no shelter, and definitely no slaughterhouse but I had no idea what kinda trouble this kinda guy could possibly be in, so I stepped on the gas. I asked him where he lived, if there was any place I could drop him off besides the side of the road and he told me yeah, that his friend lived downtown. When I asked him where downtown there was no response. And when I asked him again there was a mumble, then a groan, and then silence.
I can’t say for sure that nobody has ever shot up in my car, but this was certainly the first time with me in it. That was one line I was always proud of never crossing, I wasn’t interested in a buzz that I couldn’t buy at the convenience store. So, you can imagine my panic upon realizing I had a zombie with a needle stuck to his arm in my backseat. I was in too deep now; I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I just dropped him off the side of the road. My neck flushed hot with hatred. I hated myself for this, for not knowing how to be a nice person, for having no self-respect, for being a pussy too scared to say no.
So guess what I did. I drove downtown. Not to his imaginary friend’s house, not home, but to this trashy margarita chain I used to go to that had concerningly cheap drinks. I parked, got out, and locked my car like any other Friday. I liked periodically visiting my old blackout bars because by that point I had no idea who the regulars were, who was there on occasion, and who had been going there every day for the last twenty years. It’s much less depressing watching drunk people embarrass themselves when you can assume that it's their first time in a while.
So I’m sitting there at the bar eavesdropping on the happy loud people. Only my usual routine. I watch the two young bartenders flirt while listening to the old men next to me croak on and on about the Vikings this season. Always something about the Vikings, any bar I go to. By my third double rum and coke, I was actually starting to laugh at it all. What would happen if I took Daniel in and cleaned him up, finally got some company? I was about to wave the girl down for another drink when I heard the men start laughing about something else. But this wasn’t the same, monotonous default chuckle they would let out just to fill the silence. This was a much
more intentional, guttural laugh. The second I heard one of them wheeze I had to turn around to see what they were looking at.
At first, I didn’t recognize him, the man hanging over not one, but two butt drunk girls by the pool table. I guess they were trying to synchronously swing their hips to Wonderwall but failing miserably. It was like some sort of sick joke. If God were real, he hated me enough to let me know that even a crazy junkie off the side of 192 was less repulsing to women than I was.
Then two cops walked in and handcuffed the guy, pushed his sorry face against the pool table and patted him down. The inhuman screech he let out sobered me up well before the second cop started over towards me.
At the station I asked no questions. I knew exactly how it looked. A getaway driver for a tweaker. For all they know, for all anybody knows I was shooting up in there as well.
Daniel was asleep next to me, in handcuffs when a female deputy came up to us holding a ratty little yorkie. She asked if it was my dog.
Overlook by Larry Thacker
When we passed Yam Junction and kept going, I thought Papaw Abe had maybe forgotten what he was doing or was possibly having another mini stroke. I was worried either way. The Carters County line was only another three miles, and he was going sixty. For someone who bragged about never leaving the county for decades, if ever, and hardly even out of the town of Fetch, he seemed on a collision course with a hypocritical conundrum.
I felt like saying something. Part of me was cheering him on, thinking, heck yea, Papaw, make a run for the county line, let’s see what’s on the other side. But at the same time I wanted him to turn around, like he was about to unwittingly make a terrible mistake.
He broke the silence before I could decide.
“Don’t say anything about where we’re going to your mama, you hear me?” he said, kind of softly, as if she might have stowed away in the bed of the truck and was eavesdropping.
“I don’t know where we’re going, Papaw,” I said.
“We’ll be there soon enough, buddy.” I liked how he called me buddy.
Another few quiet, winding miles and we swung a quick right off the highway onto a half dirt and gravel single-lane road. It meandered along a good-sized creek on the left. I watched for beaver dens and herons as we kicked up dust. The road passed a few houses then headed uphill into thicker woods on both sides, reminding me of what a dark jungle would be like.
It made me wish we had more woods near where we lived. I liked walking in the woods by myself, imagining they were rainforests full of strange plants and wildlife. The road thinned and became a cliffside on the left and I worried we’d meet another car coming at us and neither of us would have a place to turn around and we’d be in a fix. That’s how my mind worked. Maybe the idea of someone volunteering to back out was too scary to consider, like it’d be some sort of eternal standoff.
Trees started clearing as we reached the top and we were suddenly pulling into a little mountaintop cemetery. There was no sign, just a bunch of graves on a hilltop with a dirt road circling around and back out. One side of the mountain was still a steep drop off. There was a little pavilion situated along the cliff edge and we parked by it and got out.
I still hadn’t said anything. We walked around a few graves. Some were so old they looked like creek stone. Others dated from the 1800s. Some were newer.
“Me and him used to run around when we were in school,” he said of one, kicking some weeds away from the stone.
“This’n here was a real piece of work,” he said about another.
He stopped and stared at another. It read:
Beatrice Jean LaMont
Sweet Daughter and Friend
1938 - 1984
He hesitated too long for me not to ask. “Did you know this lady?”
He nodded with a little smile and walked to the pavilion bench and sat. I followed.
“This is where I come to get away from everybody and everything,” he said, looking relaxed and shuffling in his shirt pocket for a smoke. He hardly smoked at home. My mother gave him grief over it, but we knew he’d sneak a few occasionally. He had half a pack of Marlboro lights left.
He glanced at me watching him light up. “A pack of these’ll last me two weeks,” he said.
The road leaving Partin County into Carters County was clearly visible from up here. The road wound like a relaxed snake, parallel to a little river, walled in each side by the valley. There was a tiny town way down, almost out of sight.
“That’s a little town called Reckon all the way down there. See it?” he pointed and asked.
I couldn’t resist. “I reckon.”
He laughed at that like he’d never thought of it.
“She took off down that road when she left out,” he mumbled, squinting down the valley like he was watching a ghost fly away.
“Who?” I asked.
“Beatrice. I called her Bett back then. This was back before I met your grandma.”
“Did you like her?”
“You bet I did,” he said. I could hear the smile in his answer.
I was curious now. “Well, what happened?”
“She wanted to get married. I did too, I guess. But she had to leave. Her family was well off. Until the mines were hurting. They moved to Chicago.”
“I could’ve gone with them. Been packed in five minutes and gone.”
“But you didn’t”
“I couldn’t leave. Wouldn’t leave. Mother was sick. She was always sick. She got sicker when they were getting ready to leave. Go figure. She didn’t like the idea of me running around with this gal anyway. She was jealous of that family’s money. I don’t know why. They weren’t that much better off than we were.”
He took a long, thoughtful drag on the smoke.
“Your mother sounds a little like mine,” I said, taking a chance on being a bit of a smart aleck.
“You’re right about that,” he giggled. “My mother and my daughter, your mother, a lot alike.”
So, something as strong as love couldn’t even bring Abe to leave? Here he was, a lifetime later, mulling over the past, only a few steps from probably his biggest regret in life.
“This is her family’s graveyard. Back then there weren’t near as many graves when we’d sneak up here.”
I think he was blushing a little.
“I never thought she’d be a-laying over there with the rest of em.”
He explained how the day Bett and her family left town, he followed them, just short of the county line, hung the right and raced up the single-lane road to the hill clearing, praying not to meet someone head-on. Once up top he’d watched, sure he could still make out her father’s yellow 1957 four-door Bel Air, zooming north, weaving traffic, getting tinier.
I asked if he ever saw her again. He nodded.
“She was coming out of the bank in Fetch one day. A little boy by the hand, another on her hip. Her grandmother had passed, and she was back for the funeral. She didn’t see me. I made sure of that. She met up with a man down the street. He took the smallest kid and hoisted him up on his shoulders for a ride. It had been a few years. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, let alone a wife and kids. But she’d gotten over me just fine it seemed,” he said, nodding back to her grave.
I could tell this had really hurt him. I wondered how it could still be fresh after all this time.
“I needed a kick in the pants, I guess. After that, after seeing we weren’t gonna end up with each other by some miraculous stroke of luck, I gave up and got to seeing other girls. Met your grandma.” He patted me on the head. “The rest is history, right?”
“Did you love her?”
“Who, your grandma? Or Bett?”
That was a good question. Who’d I mean. At that time in my young life, I’m sure I didn’t grasp the idea of loving more than one person at a time, of being barred from being with someone you really cared for, of what to do when you’re broken with heartache.
“I reckon I can say things like this now, huh? Years after your grandma Lou’s been dead and Bett’s gone too. I loved them both. I couldn’t have loved your grandma any more than I did. But I never quit loving Bett. Isn’t that odd? It’s probably hard to understand being so young.”
That was my first recognition of how strange love was and how stubbornly long love could last. I was looking at it with my own young eyes, but I could see it in Papaw Abe’s eyes. After all these years, after losing her, after falling in love again and marrying and having a family and even having me as a grandson, a thread of love was hanging on like a wire, tied from where he now sat through time and over to this woman’s remains.
He stared out off the hill, over the cliff, over the valley, scanning the road, I’m sure imagining that car with his old girlfriend speeding back to where he’d lived now for so long. I’ve wondered what such a reunion would have been like, even though it happening would have surely done away with this version of me in his history.
He shook his head and snapped out of whatever he was seeing.
“Get out of here while you can, buddy,” he said. “It gets hard to do. Eventually you give up.”
That broke my heart for him. What an awful thing to realize. It’s one thing to really believe that there’s nothing for you outside of what you have, but to know better and still give up on it? That’s a bad spell to be under
A Pause by Eric Lande
Katie’s last lover, Ernie, had been told to get lost as he had a girlfriend who kept switching tenses — from present to past, back to present. That’s when Denis made his appearance in Katie’s life, despite Denis and Ernie being best friends.
It had been a year since a colleague in New York asked me to teach Katie, the lover of one of her students, to dance Argentine tango, so that her student would have someone to dance with at the milongas. Katie had become more to me than just someone I taught tango. You might say I had become an interested party.
"He's really quite sweet,” Katie mentioned while we were dancing. “He tells me he doesn't want sex." I stopped dancing; I couldn't continue. What's wrong with him? Just maybe ... he's gay!
"He just wants to sleep with me ... but no sex." If all he wants is someone — or something — to sleep with, what about a teddy bear from the Vermont Teddy Bear Company? What a line. Was this new age, or were we regressing to the Victorian era? I couldn't keep up. I seemed to have missed a great part of the real world somewhere in my education, but I'm a fast learner, and my education was accelerating. I kept Katie in place while I stepped back, gently moving around her while she leaned.
"I thought, why not?” Katie sighed. Why not? I could think of a gazillion reasons why not. Stepping forward to close the space between us, I brought her forward, to my right. “I'm no longer seeing Ernie, and even though he and Denis are best friends, there's no harm in seeing Denis, now. So, we started dating." As Katie stopped, I caught her trailing foot. There was no let up, no time to breathe. I thought there was supposed to be a break here and there — like in school — what about a café latte? but, no, not for Katie ... nor for me. I was feeling exhausted — after two battles and one skirmish — and I could foresee still more to come.
Bending at the knee ... "Denis is one of those people who don't believe in having money or any material possessions.” … I led her to place a gancho .... Yeah, I recognized the type: they don't want their own money; they want yours. ... after which I led her to continue around me, clockwise .... "You know, fuck the establishment. He doesn't even have a bathroom in his place." I almost let out a guffaw. Well, we have gone back to the 19th-century ... or earlier. Didn't the Greeks and the Romans have bathrooms in their villas? Maybe they didn't have toilets that flushed, or water from taps, but I do believe they had bathrooms in the house. In any case, in-house bathrooms were necessities ... for me. What did Denis do in the winter? Maybe he had friendly neighbors; but did they have bathrooms in situ? This was just too primitive — but I wasn't having an affaire with Denis. I must remind myself of this every now and then.
And heat: what about central heating, or at the very least, space heaters? Or eiderdowns? But then, that must be the reason he needs someone to sleep with ... to stay warm. Now I got it!
"Sweetheart, I'm only thinking of your welfare now.” Who was I kidding? I was thinking of my welfare — as well as Katie's. After all, I'm in this too. “What I'm about to tell you is from the heart: don't. Don't start up with this guy.” We were standing, just standing. “As sweet as Denis is — and he may be sweeter than summer corn — the guy's a loser. How can you even consider fooling around with him? Listen to me: don't go there; nothing's worth it. In any case, you haven't given me any reason for dating him — other than he's sweet, and I know a lot of sweet guys ...." I couldn't finish, because Katie was squeezing me so hard — she was a massage therapist, and message therapists need strength to do their job — that I'd lost my breath.
"It's soooo sweet of you to be concerned. But don't worry honey. I hope I didn't worry you? Don't worry — 'cause I'm not really dating Denis." Thinking back to when Katie enlightened me that a relationship had to last at least six months, that anything less was merely an interlude, I guess the affaire with Denis didn't even rank as an interlude. What could be briefer, a pause?
Phosphenes in the Shape of Jellyfish by Jenna Grieve
The workers at security nudge one another when they spot me, my boots on the floor stickers, awaiting my turn to put my little liquids bag and my passport and my keys in a grey tray. These workers are always on the same shift – the short man and the young woman with the afro. He rolls his eyes at her as he beckons me forward. I silently push my tray onto the rollers. After I’m beckoned through the body scanners, and my tray is sent down my way, it takes me a moment to notice it because a jellyfish is obscuring my vision, its tentacles pulsing like heartbeats. The short man coughs.
The jellyfish are a recent oddity. They populate my vision, filmy between my pupils and the world. Rippling pastels and neons like shop signs in the rain. My optician was as confused as me, tossed the word ‘phosphenes’ across the sterile room with a shrug. I was only glad they didn’t want to surgically remove them. My little mischievous buddies who are, even if they do enjoy obscuring road signs, my protectors.
*
The knife sculpts the pineapple.
“I make it all absolutely fresh to order. Don’t even pre-cut the fruit. I once fired my brother for that. True story.”
The middle-aged knife-wielder turns her head to grin at me, but the knife keeps going, slipping the pineapple out of its spiky dress.
“So are you temporary or permanent?”
“What?”
“In the airport. I see you a lot. So you either work here or you do a lot of travelling.”
My sleeve around my knuckles, I rub a circle of water into the counter. Behind me, a group scrape back their chairs and remark to one another that the smoothies at their Chiang Mai yoga retreat were better. Oh, nothing could compare to the swim up bar in Cancun. Remember that hilltop place in the azores, how fresh the fruit was?
‘Everybody’s temporary,” I say.
“Not me.” She loads the blender with handfuls of pineapple chunks, then grabs the top mango from a pyramid exotically displayed on a banana leaf. “It feels incongruous sometimes, mind you. To be permanent in a place where nobody is meant to be.”
She looks behind me, but I know what she sees. Hoards of people waiting for gate announcements at the departures board, patting pockets to reassure themselves they still have their passports. She juices a lime. Am I temporary or permanent? A chartreuse jellyfish tugs at the upper corner of my vision and seems to pull it loose, and the world warps around this corner until I blink it back into place.
*
At dusk, two children weave around my legs, making airplane noises, arms outstretched. Their parents slump against the window, carry-ons stacked around them. The mother purses her lips at a crossword book while the father swallows paracetamol and water, condensation running down his wrist. I feel like I’m in their way, but I don’t move. This window has the least obstructed view of the runway. I love to watch the planes, their slow drive to the runway, the speed with which they hurtle down it, and then, the sudden lift. The jellyfish mimic them, floating up and out of my vision. They seem to smile, though it is difficult to tell.
The family move to their gate. Shop shutters drop. I used to feel carved out by the sleepy haze that falls over the airport at night, and how with longer lulls between flights, the airport itself seems to have to crack its knuckles to gear up for take-off. But now I have the jellyfish, bubbling a border through which I can see it all.
“Last call for Martha Peters. Please proceed to gate nineteen immediately.”
I hate this part. I wish I could go back to the smoothie bar, but I’m afraid the lady will notice the name on my debit card and tell me: “Go, run. Run!”
I think about how she described herself as permanent. And I know this isn’t how she meant it, but I’m swarmed with an impression of her as some sort of airport spirit. Decades from now, this place might be empty walls and hollowed husks of spent planes, and I picture her right where she always is, cutting mangoes for nobody.
“Last call for Martha Peters.” The announcer sounds bored. Sick of calling out my infamous name. The jellyfish crowd my vision, stir into a frenzy. Do they want me to fly? They part to show me the arrow. Gates twelve to twenty: right. I obey. Walk slowly, then run. Could I do it? Leap into the sky aboard one of those beautiful machines? I can’t even remember where the flight is going. Somewhere close– the cheapest ticket. I could see what another airport is like. Jellyfish bounce and multiply and tangle bright tentacles around one another.
“Last call-”
I am face to face with the voice on the other end of the tannoy. The jellyfish settle, but I step backwards, heart racing. I’m so close. If not now, when? What would it take for me to get on board? Would all the jellyfish need to form encouraging words, or the shape of an airplane, like synchronised swimmers?
“Ms Peters?”
A single jellyfish bobs, its lilac mushroom-cloud head pulsing. I don’t know where the rest of them have gone. I blink and walk away.
Music
Day is done by Joel Peckham JR
Scrape me a coconut by Lee Frank
All Too Much For The Telepath by Daniel Klawitter
Blissful Love by William Kupisch
It's you that you have to start loving by Merci McKinley
Won't you let me sleep by Francisco Vara