The Gifts One man bought me a set of knives. Pink & yellow blades. To make me a good woman. Kitchen-sharp. He liked apple pie, the butter of my thigh. I sliced my webbed toes instead. Left the waddle, learned to run. Another man bought me a stone for sharpening the blades. This fable is […]
Category Archives: Issue 30
Oz Hardwick
Swarm Bodies break up every day, but still we’re surprised when it happens to us, and we struggle for an appropriate image. Let’s try this for size: a beehive in a golden field, the Sun low, and a pandemonium of urgent buzzing. There’s honey fit for gods and wax to light lovers to that room […]
Jay Kelly
/ Speaks Remember only this. The stillborn are still born. Yes, I came and went without breath or wail, or sup of milk at your readied breast. I didn’t wrap my hand around your little finger, yet we know what we are to each other. You had reasons for not naming me but were so […]
Ian Willey
My Death I ran into My Death sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a café, reading the paper. What’s new? I asked, sitting across from him. Do you really want to know? he replied. Never mind, I said. What are you going to order? This place has the best brownies, he said. That and a […]
Susan L. Leary
Cholesteatoma My brother was born with a tumor wrapped around the bones in his right ear. The tiny structure a snail’s shell, this time with the snail inside. As he gets older, the tumor puts pressure on the bones & they break into a shrunken tuba or finch’s claw, something to move across the board […]
Leigh Chadwick
Hospital Poem I wake up as myself and then wake up as another me and then another me says hello to the first or second or eighty-fifth or three millionth me. A storm brews in the lunchroom, chipping the coffee pot, knocking over a chair. I am wearing a gown covered in charcoal. The walls […]
Lucas Clark
The Marvel of Beauty There were two horses wearing bedsheets over their heads. In their pasture, which they could not see, there was a breeze that shuffled the strands of grass; there were crickets hopping and catching a ride on the breeze; there were frogs who sat below the breeze and the grass, sending their […]
Jo Gatford
Inside the whale Inside the whale it is quiet and wet and warm; the pressure of the water outside womb-tight white noise. You panicked, briefly, when the baleen closed behind you, but then it dives, long and sinuous, and being frightened seems unnecessary—irreverent, to disturb this temple—like screaming in a library. Kissing at a funeral. […]
Maslen Bode
Five Ducklings Maslen meets a man in a coffee shop in London, but the daydream always stops before he asks her anything. The dream’s allure isn’t about mystery. It’s that no one ever has to make any choices. Maslen tells Sabrina about the dreams she had growing up. In them, she manufactured impossible decisions: save […]
Peter Anderson
conception We could not conceive of such a thing and yet it came to be. Carrying its own luggage with it, a tray of seedlings from the windowsill of a past life. Flowers of reincarnation blooming but once a century. The desert deep inside us waiting for an opening in the conversation to spread across […]
Brad Rose
Just Like Old Times Tuesday and Wednesday, I experimented on myself. Now, no more cuboid thoughts and I’m sleeping faster than ever. Thanks to the molecule splitters, I just had to replace the blood on the left side of my body, so it only took half the time. Sure, it was expensive, but you can […]
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Chain of Fools It’s a sun-drenched cut-grass balmy-air day and I’m speeding down the street in a borrowed jalopy as Aretha wails One of these mornings on the radio hair tousling elbow out the window feeling strong when I see my boo with his Frank Zappa moustache and winning grin driving the other way and […]
Gordon Taylor
When You Read What He Wrote Just for You This is when nightmares began, the voice counting to infinity and the horses pounding down a gravel road, and there was my own voice too, the pitch I can’t recall, calling for my mother. What do you see? she would ask. Around the same time, my […]
Candice May
Unexplainable You can swim in the cold murky waters of your own existentialism. When you first learned the word, you were ten or thirteen or eighteen. You were on a precipice, crossing over. You can inhale black holes and try to show up eager-eyed for work. You use the backscratcher on your arms, your inner […]
Francine Witte
Home Shopping Late night, all alone. Amethyst twinkling from the TV set. The beautiful “o” of stones. I feel like an “o” myself, a zero, because 3 a.m. is when the world gets so quiet, you hear everything. The host is a piano of teeth and a candle of eyes. She says things like special […]
Richard Baldasty
No Idea You have come to comfort me, I know, while I am beset by Bedouins and their camels in the driveway. Kind of you; all the more because you don’t believe me—no one else sees them and I, old man, am considered fanciful in my distress. Perhaps so: life at length plays fast with […]
Linda Malnack
Balloon Loan I am sitting in my convertible ARM chair with the door to the what-if analysis open. I feel a cold wire transfer from the men’s room where George just smoked a variable rate and left the depreciation open to the basis point. I am on the edge of a potential return. Thank you […]
Phillip Sterling
Memory Play When we visit my family in Detroit on holidays we have to sit through old home movies. My wife sees me as a young boy, and I make a fool out of myself the same way every time. Here I am playing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog” on a Mickey Mouse […]
Meg Pokrass
Cat Proposal This is the night you propose to the cat. She has nothing left to prove to you. She is wild and pale and her eyes are green as pickles. You know there are parts of your heart that you can offer her fluffy light spirit. You have stopped answering the phone, made changes […]
Mike James
E Pluribus Every t-shirt he owned said something in Latin. He owned more than 11 t-shirts, but less than 23. When traveling on a train headed east from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine he tried to count the number of t-shirts. The train maintained a constant speed over mountains, canyons, rivers, and fields. He could […]
Mike James
You & You & You & You If you were a hat you’d be a fedora, brown and sweat-stained, still good for winter weather and rain’s summer surprises. If you were a feather an ostrich would be minus one. If you were a puzzle you’d look nothing like the picture on the box. No summer […]
Mike James
Ingmar Bergman Contemplates Silence on a Beach This is not a swimmer’s beach. The water is cold year-round, as if cursed by a witch. No matter how many years of waves come ashore, the rocks don’t wear to smoothness. Each is a flint knife, water sharpened. Hard shoes are needed. There are summer days when […]
Issue 30 CONTENTS
read issue Mike James Ingmar Bergman Contemplates Silence on a Beach You & You & You & You E Pluribus Meg Pokrass Cat Proposal Phillip Sterling Memory Play Linda Malnack Balloon Loan Richard Baldasty No idea Francine Witte Home Shopping Candice May Unexplainable Gordon Taylor When You Read What He Wrote Just for You Kathryn […]