An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash
Poetry by Kate McNairy
brings a screen
door to lock up—
my shadow flees
an open window,
twists & turns
in breezes—
each fallen leaf
passes.
Kate McNairy has published three chapbooks, June Bug (2014), Light to Light (2016) and My Wolf (2021). Journal and magazine credits include Third Wednesday, Misfits, and Raven’s Perch. She was on the editorial board of The Apple Tree and was a semi-finalist of the Blue Light Poetry Contest (2014).
Nonfiction by Susan Pope
Nothing but white. Walls, comforter, window shades, pale light leaking around the edges. Am I awake or dreaming? Is it night or day? I’ve lost all tethers.
The fury that delivered us here to Iceland spun out. In the calm, bird song. I slip from the warmth of my husband’s side, fumble for hat, coat, gloves, binoculars, and gently open the door.
“Where are you going?”
My eighteen-year-old grandson lifts his head from a pillow in the next bed.
“For a walk.”
“At 4:30 in the morning?”
He, at least, has come to rest on local time, while my body hovers between oceans and continents, time zones and eras. We pause between our home in Alaska and our destination, Paris, where we’ll join the rest of the family for a grand tour of Europe.
Moist air skims my cheeks as I hike a worn path to the lake. Steam lifts from the shore, drifting up from thick black mud. No other humans stir, but the birds sing, each in its own language. In the distance, whooper swans trumpet to each other, surely bowing and weaving their long, elegant necks in a courtship dance. Close by, Arctic terns, bodies sleek and silver in the luminous light, hover, swoop, snatch fish from the smooth water, and hum their raspy tunes.
I imagine a tall, sturdy Viking woman walking this same path. She’s slipped out of her sod hut, leaving her husband and children tucked beneath their sheepskin robes, on her way to fish for Arctic char or steal eggs from bird nests along the shore. She feeds her family.
By contrast, here I am, a small, American grandmother in a blue and purple hat, wandering with no other purpose than to spy on birds and guess their names.
This extravagant journey was my idea, a gathering of three generations before my teenaged grandchildren flee my grown daughter’s nest. I hope that a glimpse of the wider world will be my legacy to them. But, more honestly, the trip is a gift to me, as I turn seventy. If I can just hold my family close one more time…. What? They will love me? Remember me? Thank me?
Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist, believed that the task of the last phase of life is to reconcile integrity with despair. If we look back on our lives and feel a sense of accomplishment, then we will feel complete, that our life had value. If we look back and feel guilty that we have not met our goals, then we will feel hopeless. The ultimate goal in this phase is wisdom. But, I feel neither wise nor hopeless, nor ready to declare this the final chapter of my life.
I reach a small clearing beside the lake. A weathered sign proclaims this ground—heated from the earth’s molten core—a sacred place. People once traveled here for healing. Now, it’s overgrown and neglected. Perhaps no one needs to make a healing pilgrimage anymore. I move to the center of the weeds and wait for a tingle of enlightenment. Instead, I feel only the warm ground at my feet and cool breeze on my face.
My mother turned seventy the year my daughter turned twenty-one. Their birthdays were two days apart, so we held a double celebration, my daughter reaching adulthood, my mother, wisdom, or at least longevity. I discounted my mother’s life then. I tried my best to be nothing like her. She had no interest in education, career, travel, or anything broader than taking care of husband and family. By contrast, I layered my life with diplomas, careers, and travel to exotic places. It was never quite enough.
I turn back, heading up the hill to the old school turned tourist hostel. Just as I fumble for my key, the night clerk rushes to open the door for me. He must have been watching the crazy woman roaming among the birds.
When I enter our room, it smells of sweat and damp clothes. Old man and boy man. I slide off my coat and shoes and slip back into the cocoon for a few more minutes, close to my men with their soft snores and grunts.
I don’t know if my mother felt wise when she died twelve years after her seventieth birthday. I do know that she was content to fiercely love the small cluster of people she kept close to her. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy for anyone to leave.
Susan Pope writes about nature, travel, and family. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Alaska Magazine, among others. Her writing reflects intimate ties to the North and a restless pursuit of faraway places.
Nonfiction by Caryn Coyle
That morning, I don’t remember waking up, what I wore, or how I felt. I do remember Leigh picking me up in her Ford Bronco. Her son and daughter watched me from their booster seats in the back of her car. I remember green. Maybe a hedge, maybe grass next to a parking lot. The building looked liked a cement box. She left me there, saying she would return later. She couldn’t find a sitter.
Her kids are grown now. She has two grandchildren.
I waited in a room with blinds on the windows. I couldn’t see out. I was nervous. Sick to my stomach. I had been throwing up and my breasts felt huge; sore and painful to touch. I was directed into a small office with no windows and sat by a desk. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform and a navy blue cardigan sat behind the desk and asked me my name. I remember asking her if I had to give my real one.
I wanted to be anonymous. If there was no record of my being there, I could forget it. Hide from it. Never speak of it again.
My next memory is the one I cannot block. The one that haunts me forty years later.
I lay on my back. My heart pounding. My head aching. I thought I had no other option.
It sounded as though he was surprised to hear from me when I called him.
“What’re ya? Pregnant?”
The tone of his voice was sarcastic.
When I said, “Yes,” he was silent.
My head crackled. The quiet was disturbing.
“Well, you’re gonna’ get rid of it, aren’t you?”
We met at a bar. He stood near the door to the restroom, smoking. One of his eyes was a different color than the other. He smiled at me; small, yellowish teeth. He asked me my name and when I told him, he said that the woman he had just divorced had the same name.
He lived on the main floor of a large house that had been divided into apartments. His bedroom had been the original living room. It had big, bay windows. His kitchen, at the back of the house, was narrow and he made me breakfast, cutting a round hole with a drinking glass he turned upside down into the soft center of a slice of bread. Cracking an egg, he emptied it into the hole in the bread and grilled it, telling me that was how his nanny had cooked him breakfast when he was little.
He drove a Volkswagen and took me sailing on a boat docked in Annapolis. We could walk to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium from his house. Together, we picked up pizza from a place with a sticky strip over the counter, heavy and black with flies. Eating that pizza in bed, we didn’t care about smearing the sheets with sauce.
Then, he just stopped calling.
I got pregnant after a Friday night happy hour. Walking into a new place — a sports bar — I spotted him. It was loud, crowded. Music thumped over all the voices and I felt my heart beat in my forehead when he smiled at me with those small, yellow teeth. A cigarette between his lips.
I said “yes,” too quickly when he asked me if I wanted to follow him home.
On the bed in the room with the bay windows, I wanted him to love me. But I wasn’t someone he wanted. I was the woman with his ex-wife’s name who would follow him home.
#
The doctor was short. He wore green scrubs. A frown.
My feet in stirrups, a sheet over my legs blocked my view. I didn’t feel anything. I remember a whirring, buzzing sound and I watched the ceiling; white pocked marked rectangles.
The recovery room had several cots and I listened to other women moaning. I thought they sounded pathetic. I wouldn’t join them. I had counted back to the night with him and thought the fetus was five weeks old. I have searched illustrations in medical books to see what a five week old fetus looks like. I have also tried to console myself by calling it a zygote. Not a real being, not yet.
I hope it couldn’t feel anything.
Throughout the decades, I have wondered what the child might have been like. I think of how old he or she would be. I tell myself I had no other option. He didn’t want us.
#
A nurse brought me my clothes, a prescription for tetracycline and a Kotex pad. On the curb outside the cement building, I waited for Leigh. The curb was warm. It was the kind of spring day that was meant to be enjoyed.
Leigh pulled up with the kids still in the back seat of her car.
When I opened the Bronco’s door, she asked me if I was all right.
I told her I was and turned to look at her children. They watched me with big, brown eyes. Neither of them spoke. I doubt they remember; they were too young.
Leigh stopped the car by the sidewalk to my apartment building and said, “Just forget about this whole day.”
“It never happened,” she added as I closed her car door.
Lying on my side, in bed, my legs folded up to my chin, I watched the light blue, streamlined telephone on my bedside table. I didn’t pick it up to call him and it did not ring.
Caryn Coyle edits creative nonfiction for the Baltimore based literary journal, LOCH RAVEN REVIEW and her work has appeared in more than three dozen literary publications. She lives in Massachusetts.
Fiction by Maureen Sherbondy
At the dance club, the man’s shirt pattern peels away and bops to the tune. The red and black circles jive back and forth, shimmying to the drummer’s four-four beat. Now void of any pattern, the shirt stares with white-cotton envy at the gyrating circles.
Five other times the man had worn his fun shirt to the club, promising he would finally get out on the dance floor. But he just couldn’t work up the nerve.
Tired of words that held no meaning, the pattern calls a mutiny this night and creates their own adventure. When the man orders the circles back in their place on his torso, they roll out the door, eventually stealing away on the tires of a jazzed-up sports car.
Maureen Sherbondy‘s latest book is Lines in Opposition. She has published in Litro, Calyx, Stone Canoe, and other journals. Maureen lives in Durham, NC.
Nonfiction by Thomas E. Strunk
Growing up in a trailer park, one rarely feels significant. But we still had the bugs to look down on. I don’t know what went wrong with me, a boy from the forest bothered by bugs. Sure I was fascinated by the water-skaters that danced over the crick out back. I stood in awe at the ant hills we’d come upon in the woods, but had no desire to poke them. At best I ignored the daddy-long-legs that crawled over the hillside in summer. Yet at some point in my youth a fear crept in at things that crawled, perhaps it was a late-night movie, but more likely the katabasis I endured when I was twelve, my descent multiple times beneath our siding-enclosed trailer.
A real man of the woods my father, not frightened to inch his way along the length of the trailer and then creep to the other side where with flashlight and wrench he could turn off and on again the water. He wasn’t the kind of man to worm his way out of his responsibilities.
“We’ve got to crawl under there so I can show you how to deal with the water.” But I was not that man and begged off the mission.
“Can’t you just do it before work?”
Until my father made it clear, “And leave you with no water all day? There is no choice.” For the workers were coming to the trailer park when he was at work, and I was at summer bored and idle and able to go inching my way under the trailer.
And so I followed him on my belly the long way – the door through the siding at the back left of the trailer, our journey’s destination, the water pipes at the front right, so I could learn, like him, how to turn the water off and then on.
The next day, alone and reluctant, I entered through the siding door and left the daylight behind me. I held the flash light before me but did not look at what it illuminated for fear what I might see; rather I wriggled in the light’s general direction. I crawled with all that was under there in the darkness, sweeping cobwebs as I went. I made it to the water pipes and plied the wrench hurriedly, hoping I had twisted it enough to choke off the water. And then the return, always harder than the descent. I turned myself around on the dirt and made my way towards the light peeking through the siding door, far in the distance at first. Yet I hastened and did not turn to see what I left or what followed behind me. I came at last to the exit and crossed the threshold.
When I emerged from beneath the trailer into the light, I did not come forth braver or with new knowledge that I gained along the way, but joyful to see the blue sky and its birds free to fly above the ground. I feverishly shook off the dirt and whatever bugs had found me, never wanting to know their wisdom.
Thomas E. Strunk explores nature and working class life and strives to express the longing for spiritual, emotional, and political liberation. His literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinyon, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachia Review and East Fork Journal. Thomas blogs at LiberationNow.org and lives in Cincinnati.
Poetry by Margaret D. Stetz
Headlong into glass
two collisions
in rapid succession
after the crashes
wreckage outside the door
small bodies sprawl motionless
on a cold morning.
What compels me to push
beyond the door
to sit down on grass
in nightgown, slippers
to gather their corpses?
Cradling both in flannel-sheathed hollows
staring at membranes closed over eyes
at beaks gaping emptily
ignoring the chill through my legs
I see—movement.
Then pouring my heat and will
into the moment
watching as one
then the other
slowly
looks back.
(Is this how a surgeon feels
holding a heart as it beats?)
They owe me nothing—
the same miracle likely
to happen without me
their crimson breasts already skyward
harder to follow.
But if only they could
raise me too
high higher
never again
to enter that house
to stand hopeless
unrescued
from crashes collisions
behind the door
Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. She began writing poetry again after several decades away from it. Her new work has appeared in “Azure,” “Existere,” “Review Americana,” Kerning, and many other journals.
Nonfiction by Emily Rankin
He bought it during quarantine, on one of our rare outings. He’d decided spur of the moment to make a new recipe, and we found ourselves wandering the grocery aisles at 8pm. He needed fresh basil, and I suggested we buy a small plant in place of a plastic carton of browning stems.
I padded into the kitchen the next morning and found it, wilted and half dead, on its side on the countertop. He’d used a handful of leaves and left it to rot. I considered abandoning it there, letting it go to show him what he’d done. But it looked so small and hurt and tired. I stood it up, pruned the decay from it, and set it in water on the sunny windowsill. I tended to it, and it was happy. It grew to be nearly two feet tall, and I bought a real pot for it, and soil. He never looked at it, never watered it. I wondered if he felt guilty. I hoped he did.
It came to me in dreams. I’d see myself, in the kitchen in the night, finding it dead. Pulling it from its pot and seeing strange roots all through the soil. Then looking more closely and discovering that it was in fact very much alive, new shoots everywhere, overtaking everything.
When I finally got out of that house and into my own apartment I took it with me, hung a shelf for it high enough that the cats wouldn’t disturb it. Watered it, added new soil.
That summer I was gone most days, no air conditioning in the place. The basil started to wilt and shrivel and no matter what I did it wouldn’t stop, until all that remained were two gnarled sticks with a few inches of new growth at the ends. I thought it was as good as dead, and it made me more sad than I’d like to admit. I gave it water and set it on the porch, in the noontime sliver of sunlight, to live out its final days with the wind against its face.
But it didn’t die. It hung on, struggling and stagnant at first, then finally growing again, slowly, in ever more bizarre twists. New shoots completely sideways, leaves sprouting at odd junctures, those two remaining branches twined like ivy. I was afraid to pull any leaves from it, afraid I might disturb its new health. After a month, I finally began to trust it wouldn’t die. At least, not imminently. I gave it new soil, more water. Set it outside in good weather. What remained of it came back to life.
A year later, it sits, sometimes, on the shelf I hung for it, winding spring-green tendrils around itself. Drooping with the weight of its own strange design, and growing ever more wild.
Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangled threads of human connection and liminal space. She is currently based in New Mexico.
Poetry by Satish Pendharkar
We’ve never made passports or visas
Nor purchased air-tickets to fly;
We’ve entered and exited places at will
For ages and since times long gone by.
Every winter flying in from far-off
Onto Mumbai’s mudflats we descend;
To binge on blue-green algae
Before roosting to let our minds unbend.
However, this year (though even) has been odd
People have not flocked to see us;
No cameras clicking away, no tourist boats
Why have folks quarantined themselves thus?
Not that we’re missing the ruckus they create
Not that we’re missing their lasting stink;
For, flouting all social distancing norms
We’re preoccupied in painting the place pink.
Satish Pendharkar lives in Pune, India. His poems have appeared in Agave magazine, Parody, New Asian Writing, dotdotdash, and Indian Literature. He has published a book of poems titled “Nocturnal Nomad” and a novella titled “The Backrush of Memory”. He loves singing and hiking.
Nonfiction by Paul Rousseau
I rent a forty-four-year-old brick house. It is a modest single-level structure with a small garage. A young couple purchased the home from an older couple and provided minor updating. I moved in once the renovations were complete.
I have been in the home for four years. I intended to stay one year, two at most. Lassitude and complacency altered my plans; that, and the death of two dogs and the sickness of another, my own health woes, and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.
A few months ago an older man named Thomas rang the doorbell and inquired about the previous owners. I informed him the older couple had moved but did not leave a forwarding address. He told me the wife of the older couple had died—he noticed the obituary in the newspaper—and he assumed the husband still lived in the house. He removed his glasses and patted beads of sweat with a bandana.
“Nothing stays the same, does it?” I nodded. “We lose a lot as we get older, don’t we?” I nodded, again.
Then, unexpectedly, he heaved a deep, sobbing breath, and blurted, “I lost my wife a few years ago myself.” I gently touched his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he muttered, “she was filled with cancer. But she gave it a good fight. We were together forty-nine years.”
He pulled a yellowed, dog-eared photograph from his wallet; it was a panorama of them at the Grand Canyon. “She loved the Grand Canyon. I drove two days to the South rim to release her ashes. It’s what she wanted.”
“You’re a good man, Thomas,” I replied. He pivoted toward the living room. “We spent many an evening in that room. Drank beer, played cards, watched Ed Sullivan. Good times, good memories.” He paused and scratched day-old stubble.
“But somehow our families drifted apart. I don’t know, I guess it was because the kids grew up, our jobs wore us down, and we got sick: high blood pressure, diabetes, and emphysema for me, two heart attacks and a mild stroke for him. And as I said, my wife…” He stood silent, as if in pilgrimage, then asked if he could walk through the house one final time. I jiggled my head and motioned for him to follow.
We visited each room. He stroked the walls, turned the doorknobs, flicked the light switches, opened the blinds. Afterward, he wiped his eyes and begged an apology for the intrusion. I told him no need for an apology, I appreciated the company. He took a final glance at the house, bid goodbye, and shuffled to his car. He plopped into the driver’s seat, lowered the passenger window, and shouted,
“Some memories are best forgotten.”
My shoulders slumped; the reminiscing had seemingly kindled the cinders of old grief. I began to walk toward the car to offer comfort when he turned the ignition and disappeared down the road.
That evening, while lying in bed, I thought about the older couple. They had resided in this house for forty years. It was their refuge, a shelter from an often unfriendly world; how difficult it must have been to surrender four decades of security and stability. Yet, they had their memories; abundant memories.
However, as I reflected on Thomas’s heartrending lament, “Some memories are best forgotten,” I was reminded of the book Prince of Thorns, in which the author, Mark Lawrence, writes, “Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.” He seems to imply that all memories are dangerous and painful, an implication that is contrary to my personal experience.
And as a person who has also lost a spouse, I speak with widowed authority in agreeing with Thomas’s assertion that some memories—but not all—are best forgotten, for there are memories that provide us solace, and there are memories that remind us of what was, and what will never be again.
Paul Rousseau (he/his/him) is a semi-retired physician, writer, lover of dogs, and occasional photographer published in sundry literary and medical journals. Co-winner of flash fiction competition, Serious Flash Fiction 2022. Nominated for The Best Small Fictions anthology from Sonder Press, 2020. Twitter: @ScribbledCoffee
Poetry by Adnan Onart
Her name rhymed with inch;
“joy” in my mother tongue, Turkish:
Sevinç, o Sevinç!
Dark skin, black hair,
and I was told,
eyes blue-green.
All the boys in the neighborhood
between 11 and 15
were after her:
starting fights in front of her house,
sending poems to her,
bribing her baby brother
with his favorite
pistachio ice cream.
No avail:
Never smiling, always serious,
she carried an adult anger
around her as a shield.
What chance had this skinny boy
with good grades in math and sciences?
None, you would think.
This is how I learned
that kittenish life
is full of opportunities,
we don’t dare to grab:
on the day of our move,
she called me out of the truck
and gave me five tiny sticks
of chewing gum
without saying anything.
Adnan Onart lives in Cambridge, MA. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow and The Massachusetts Review. His first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For, was published by The Aeolos Press. He was one of the winners of 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition.
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