Month: March 2022 (Page 2 of 3)

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Some Evidence

20 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jen Prince

There’s a little church in my hands—
supplicant fingers that petition the kitchen table, fracture,
find broken only the bones that matter.

Hound the relics of god’s own garbage that thrum under my skin, gentle and wicked,
blinkering as through a veil.

What I find I pull close, press in, tuck under my chin. Now
this is the dark-eyed child who takes after her mother.
This is the daughter who speaks softer.

Down the hall the dog is barking, marking the wail of a plane through wafer-thin walls—
there’s a certain pitch at which my brain just breaks.

My voracious father, a dog lover, has been known to lose his appetite from time to time.
Has been known to gorge instead on godly ferocity, the muscles in his jaw flickering
like the first light of the world.

I know you better than you know yourself, he said: when I met your mother,
I warned her I could yell.

In my own home moonlight passes over like a benign plague or stranger’s favor,
and an owl calls me alone from sleep.
The iron words lie hot on my tongue, drowned and hissing.

Jen Prince is a writer and editor based in Memphis, TN. Her poetic work centers on ideas of separation, memory, and myth. Her poem “Brittle Mirror” has been accepted for publication at the Scapegoat Review.

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This should’ve been an Urdu ghazal instead

19 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Uday Khanna

While being buried I thought why spare me space for breathing,
I should’ve been wound in white and cremated instead.

Waking has taken up the place of life,
I should’ve been nostalgic for a time which passed me by instead.

Living has come disarmingly too fast lately,
I would like a stern word instead.

Someone asked me how I write so beautifully of terrible things,
I should’ve been a keeper of chopped meat instead.

I was named ignorant far too many times,
I should’ve been left blissfully unaware instead.

I keep meeting myself on different horizons for novelty,
The mystery of time is repetition instead.

This circle tells me I’m merely a handful of mistakes,
I should’ve been a fistful of wasted sperm instead.

Soon poetry will become unattainable,
I should’ve gone back to plucking flower buds instead.

O poet, you’ve spent all your life seeking to write about an ungrateful ant,
You should’ve stepped on it instead.

Uday Khanna is a research scholar currently pursuing his MPhil from the University of Delhi. His research interests lie in the fields of postmodernism, media theory, cyber-culture, and 20th century short-story genre.

Photo by Christophe Van der waals on Unsplash

Hashtag Icarus

16 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Stephanie Buesinger

Bronwyn set out to conquer the world by the ripe old age of twenty-five. Our boarding school crowd knew we had advantages few others possessed. Still, among us, Bronwyn sparkled most brightly. When I heard she set out to visit every country on Earth, I recognized it was within her grasp. Each destination earned a spot in her Instagram grid or a full story, if it was an especially picturesque sight. Bronwyn’s followers could receive real-time updates from her social media channels; they would seldom go a few minutes without a live feed. Rumor had it that Bronwyn was in talks with an up-and-coming Hollywood director who promised to turn her around-the-world voyage into a feature film, one that would premiere at Sundance, Toronto, even Tribeca.

We met at boarding school- me, the Nick to her Gatsby. I was ever the observer, aspiring to a literary life, while Bronwyn became the famous author, the narrator to her own fairy tale. Bronwyn scored visas to the most challenging locales with ease. She performed a downward dog in ballet flats atop the Great Wall of China, and sported designer sunglasses at Machu Picchu. It helped that Daddy was a celebrated hedge fund titan and her mother a former model-turned-reality star. Like a character from a Fitzgerald novel, Bronwyn led a charmed existence. Well, she did until now.

They crowned her the top “influencer” of the year, the girl everyone wanted to be. Meanwhile I toiled at a substitute teaching job in my midwestern hometown, trying to impress the merits of Faulkner and Nabokov upon snickering middle schoolers. Bronwyn seemed destined for social media. She had both the classic good looks for fingernail-sized selfies and the vanity to go with it, sharing photos of herself multiple times a day in skimpy ensembles. Yet for all Bronwyn revealed, she kept us guessing.

Who took that picture of Bronwyn bartering the four carat Asscher cut diamond solitaire given to her by her ex before he ran off with that magenta-haired hipster chick? We heard the new couple opened a microbrewery slash small-batch sausage factory in Williamsburg. Did Bronwyn just trade the ring at a makeshift stall in downtown Kathmandu for a Sherpa guide up Mount Everest? Indeed. And just how was she able to climb while transporting the Wi-Fi receiver, several vintage Penguins, a wheel-thrown artisanal coffee mug and a French press, not to mention the micro-roasted beans custom blended by a former Google executive in Portland?

We never considered Bronwyn to be sporty, but her sponsors outfitted her in high style. Elite outfitters jumped at the advertising bonanza Bronwyn’s twenty million followers represented. Even I could not resist the mesmerizing loveliness of her silhouette outfitted in the close-fitting black parka that retailed for two grand, her blowout still fresh after an application of dry shampoo. Her emerald eyes flashed like the light on Daisy’s pier, calling us to look. Funny, I didn’t remember her eyes being green.

When I spotted Bronwyn’s snapshot of the colorful Nepalese flags surrounding her flat lay photo of a traditional stew, homemade granola and matcha chai latte at 19,000 feet, I realized she was near her destination. At 26,000 feet at the South Col, the air was so thin, most climbers require oxygen tanks. Not Bronwyn. She had the lung capacity of an Olympian, a legacy of her grandfather who had skied for the 1964 Norwegian team at Innsbrook. She had that magic, if not the fortitude, that flip of the coin that determined who was blessed and who was condemned to a life of mediocrity.

As Bronwyn made her approach to the summit, she reached up for that most elusive selfie of all, the one atop this planet’s highest peak. As she shimmied off her elegant parka, as she held her iPhone aloft to attain that ideal angle of her cheekbones, cut like glass against the clear azure sky, as she fiddled with the smartphone to get a better connection, difficult at 29,000 feet, we reached with her. I thought of the ancient mountain, called Sagarmatha by the people of Nepal, and Chomolungma in Tibetan, and considered sacred by both cultures. I thought of how it would have looked to the first explorers, those who dared to face its perils—infinite crevasses, shifting ice, avalanches, frostbite, altitude sickness. I considered the slow dripping passage of the ages, continents colliding, mountain ranges rising, pushing aside all in their way. And as Bronwyn aimed her iPhone toward the golden heavens for the perfect backlighting, she fell.

And we streamed the Netflix series when it came out.

Stephanie Buesinger writes fiction and children’s literature and enjoys illustration and photography. Current projects include a middle grade novel and a picture book. Stephanie has degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked in corporate finance and economic consulting. Stephanie is the Blog Editor at Literary Mama. She lives in Florida with her husband, teenagers, and rescue pets.

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Paradise on High

15 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jon Wilder

heaven is forever i get that / but doesn’t the idea of forever scare anyone else / won’t we get bored / is it like church / cause i don’t like church / i spend most of it drawing on welcome cards and looking at the clock / it’s not like i have anything else to do / it’s knowing i’ll spend the morning listening to a message i’ve heard a thousand times / something about disciples and learning from your mistakes / hands during prayer time / hymns in triplicate / McDonalds on the drive home / hey Dad is salt good for anxiety / cause the basic beauty of a clouded eden isn’t doing it for me / i feel i’d wanna move eventually / like a small town to escape / it’s either get out or never leave / but if i don’t want heaven will i be chained to a rock for eternity / lashed with a flaming whip while demons dance around me / will the devil do the work or will his flunkies handle the real pain / do you go numb or is the hurt for good / are these the only options / can i get a third / look at the clock Dad you’re running kinda long

Jon Wilder is a poet and musician living in Portland, OR. He writes, records and releases music under the name Boom Years and his poetry has been featured in Levee Magazine, Duck Lake Books, Sonder Midwest & Salem State. His first book “Bullpen no. 1” was released in 2016 and his second collection of poetry “Original Fear” comes out on May 13.

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Some people die and go to Hell and some

14 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Gale Acuff

to Heaven and in the Bible there’s some
guy who went to Heaven but he was still
alive, I forget his name, I’m only
ten years old, barely old enough to re
-member anything but anyway I
want to do that, too, go to Heaven or
for that matter Hell but just enough
to have a look and size those places up
and then return to Earth and maybe tell
all the people what I saw in either
spot and maybe even (if I need cash
flow) sell that information–at a fair
price–and return early and pray that when
I die for real they’ll get their money back.

Gale Acuff, who holds a PhD in English/Creative Writing from Texas Tech University, has published hundreds of poems in over a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine, where he currently teaches at Arab American University.

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Primitive Prayer

13 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

I go outside at sundown,
pinning the stained-glass trail
to the Earth with ice cleats,

glorious snow under my feet.
The hawk screams above Creek Road.
Does anybody live in that blue house?

Hopper lonely, so Hopper lonely.
The snowbank at the side of the road
sits in the shape of a pew,

but I’d rather move with the mallards
slapping their wet feet, ready to fly.
I’m ready.

A songbird pounds
his pipe organ in the sky,
calling me up the hill.

I climb
breathing in the night air,
revived by this primitive prayer.

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a widely published poet and the author of two chapbooks, Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), and Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021); she is also a teacher, and woodland roamer. Nancy can be found at www.nancybyrneiannucci.com

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At Dawn Where Two Worlds Meet

12 March 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Hope Nisly

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
-Rumi

The light of early morning is magic, pure and simple and full of possibility. I believe this, even when I am rudely jolted awake by the ring of my phone and it is barely light out. A voice asks, “Can you be ready in five minutes? I’ll pick you up. I want to show you something.” Because the voice belongs to the quietest of my five brothers, the one who seldom displays strong emotion or succumbs to any hint of urgency, I respond quickly and without a clue of what might be coming.

Now here we stand quietly at the fence row of a neighbor’s farm. We are looking out over a convocation of bald eagles, at minimum forty, that landed in a field newly-covered with the aromatic debris from a farmer’s barnyard. I take a deep breath and hold it, as if any movement or sound might obliterate the tranquility of this early morning tableau.

In several weeks, this field will be covered with green shoots pushing up through the rich, muck-covered soil. This morning, however, it is covered only with majestic birds that swoop and peck at the dung, hunting for a mischief of mice or a labor of voles too slow to evade their talons of death. The eagles, so recently snatched back from the edge of extinction, ignore our curiosity.

In the pink glow of the rising sun, our shoes damp with dew, all hints of our political differences have faded into the shadows of this flood of early light.

Words are superfluous in this light. Side-by-side, we stand in silence and solidarity and hope, basking in this breath-taking view of these birds of prey. I am content to stand quietly in the lengthy early-morning shadow cast by my brother, this quiet man whose soul is full of love for all living things, who wants to share this with me just because I am; just because he is; just because we are.

Hope Nisly is a retired librarian living in Reedley, California where she gets up early to catch the full moon going down and watch the sun rising in its wake. Her writing has appeared in Mojave River Review, Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review, and Persimmon Tree. Her stories have aired on Valley Writers Read, a program of the local NPR-affiliate station.

The Single Story of a Latinx Pinocchio

11 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

1.
My Puerto Rican aunt in North Carolina, lived in pearls, three-inch heels, and illusions.
“There is bigotry for blacks, but we are white.”
And yet a woman stopped her car at my aunt’s Corinthian columns
“How much do they pay; I can pay you double.”
The Gucci suit and diamonds was no shield.
Still, my aunt, mi tía, insisted; “ignorance vs. prejudice.”
(A PhD from Columbia in New York assured her notions had to be right).
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Don’t be impertinent.”

2.
A woman with puffy bleached hair, and a ‘T’ shirt of compassion says,
“Tell me your hardship story,” empathy fills her eyes, and I almost laughed.
I know what she wants, but living in a palace surrounded by cultured men would unhinge
what she expects and I am tired
half a century of talk. I want calm, and I want peace, and I want somehow to fit
in this olive brown skin, so I gift her;
“Born in a shack without water or electricity. It was the slums, el barrio.”
She tearily pats my knee, my father in his grave protests, ‘Remember Caruso and Barcelona’,
he says and I silence him, so I swallow memories in surrender
and I become the Latinx Pinocchio.

3.
It is easy to release a single story,
harder to pretend virtue,
so I talk in a soft voice,
when pain blinds me in anger.
And I work harder,
three times, five times, a billion times,
knowing it would not be enough
I still will be the sleeping effigy
under a large sombrero.
Above all entomb lust under a blue tarp,
along with my ambitions,
my culture, mi gente,
and my nose grows long,
but I can’t bury the rhythm of my hips,

4.
I can accommodate, I can give and I will take, will sigh after I cry, and smile until I make a grimace, but when my children are denied— yes— then, I will justify this constant view,

I will lose my temper.
Time after time, my children were told:
“You can’t write Hispanic in these forms.”
“What do you want? Some sort of privileges?”
“You are white”
I see the pain each time they denied
my part in them.

Now, my grandson is too young to understand,
“Yes!” he screams, “she IS my Nana,” Confusion in his eyes.
To me, carrying them in my arms:
“Where did you go to adopt these children?”
“Tell me the truth, are they adopted? Or are they albino?”
“No! You can’t possibly be their mama!”
This I cannot give.
Here I draw the threshold.
I will cut this wooden nose to spite my face.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a self-described ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published; Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez by Redbat Press, and a poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies and have received honors and awards. A new full collection of poetry will be released by RedBat Press in the fall.

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My Youth

9 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jeana Mahan

Waiting by the water
a girl stands
round belly and barefoot

She’s afraid that it’s cold
or a shark
will bite at her ankles

The fear will follow her
while she lives
or until she’s sixteen

Why doesn’t she just jump
push her now
before the mud takes her

It’s life or death for her
her toe dips
she lets out a brief yelp

The water did not win
she lives on
though the sharks circle her

Jeana Mahan lives in Los Angeles, California. Her fiction has previously been published by Maudlin House.

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And It Must Follow

7 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Dianne Thomas

The night belongs
to bats and rats
and alley cats

to coons and possums
and moonflower blossoms

to kids in cars
who frequent the bars

to cruise and drink
and do the things they only think

about in daytime
when they must tow the line

to earn their keep
and only dream of sleep

to do as we did
when we were kids

our candles burning at both ends
shunning family to be with friends

dancing, laughing, singing
our ears ringing

as we moved into the street
with the world at our feet

or so we thought
until happiness could not be bought

with charm or looks
we couldn’t even get our hooks

on real affection
discovering life’s true complexion

and slowly we turned
to what could be earned

in sunlit hours
in concrete towers

to a daily grind
always keeping top of mind

the whistle blow
the freedom to go

but now to the nest
to be at rest

with comforts we’ve gained
because we’ve strained

for one more day
with dreams put away

till nightfall ends the pain
and bats and rats and alley cats
rule again

Dianne Thomas is a Detroit-based writer whose work has appeared in Octavo, Flashquake, The Threepenny Review, and other online and print publications.