Author: Editor (Page 12 of 62)

Yokwe!

15 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Linda Petrucelli

I spot my friend Malia among a squadron of women wearing flowery muumuus, shooing flies off a table laden with breadfruit. She’s invited me to the groundbreaking for a Marshallese community center and my husband Gary and I have just arrived at their out-of-the-way patch of volcanic real estate. I had helped Malia find support to take over the property and I anticipate being welcomed as a VIP, Pacific Islander style.

When she sees me, she waves.

“Yokwe, Leenda!” She is small-boned, with hair to her waist, a Polynesian Munchkin.

Malia is part of an exodus from the Marshall Islands who have migrated to Hawaii, refugees of rising sea levels and the health impacts of US nuclear testing. “Yokwe, Malia!” I repeat, recognizing the greeting, but not exactly sure what it means. We meet under a popup canopy flying turquoise, white and orange balloons, the colors of the Marshallese flag.

Gary, who has accompanied me for moral support and chauffeur services, is quickly dispatched to the crowd of men setting up folding chairs. Then Malia shows me a bolt of cloth which she cradles like a baby.

“Put this on now.”

“Excuse me?” I take a step back.

“You put this on now.” She presents the folded fabric with two hands. “Marshallese dress. Beautiful.”

Even after twenty years, I’ve never felt comfortable wearing the flamboyant frocks of my adopted home. My standard dress code is a black tee and jeans. But there is no escaping my plight. To refuse this gift would be insulting, so I relinquish the last shred of my autonomy, step inside a makeshift lean-to where the bathroom is located, and lock the door behind me.

Wild panic surges and my tee sticks to my skin like damp carbon paper. I unfold the dress and hold it up against my body. The Mother Hubbard, hand-stitched in the vibrant colors of their flag, appears to be an XS, suitable for a woman my size twenty-five pounds ago.

I strip down to my sports bra and briefs, then poke my head into the neck opening, sans hook and eye, snap, or even a button, and pull down as hard as I can. The seam stretches a little and my skull pops through, turning my hair into a fright wig and scraping my prominent, non-Marshallese nose.

Right around this time, Gary has graduated from folding chairs and is now in charge of grilling the ribs which, for a vegetarian, is a challenge.

With the dress bunched around my neck, I bend over to locate the sleeves. I squeeze my limbs into the tight pathways, two freighters navigating the Suez Canal, and immediately cut off the blood supply to my arms. If I was reasonably assured that I could get my perspiring body out of the dress, I would have called it quits and returned the gift with profuse apologies. But the patriotic straitjacket leaves me no choice, and I begin tugging the fabric hipwards.

When I strain the cloth over my haole butt, the material is so taut, I have to cross one thigh over the other to inch it down. What should be a flowing shift, on me, has become a slightly obscene, skin-tight shroud. I look like a Beluga whale wearing teal and tangerine.

Gary, now concerned by my absence, texts me: They want me to sing with them. Where R U? But the message never arrives. No cell service.

When I finally emerge, I mince my way into the daylight, hoping I will be able to breathe soon. Applause greets me and a cadre of Marshallese women appear to salute the flag I’m wearing. Malia whispers, beautiful, and adorns my forehead with a cowrie shell head lei that, due to my cramped posture, drunkenly tilts toward my nose.

I wish I was able to get into the spirit of things and enjoy myself. But I nearly fell over when I posed for photographs shoveling ceremonial soil, the garment interfering with my balance. And then there was the problem of sitting down and attempting to consume any quantity of food or drink, especially liquids. I’m sorry not to have fully appreciated the Marshallese haunting, acapella voices, their massive hospitality and joy. But I find joviality difficult when I wear a tourniquet from the neck down.

I sit next to Malia under the shade of a monkeypod tree and lean against her shoulder. “Remind me what Yokwe means.”

“You are a rainbow.”

Later, as we’re about to drive home my husband tells me, “Hey—nice dress!” I lower my rear end onto the car seat, swing my hobbled legs inside, and reach for the seatbelt. A rip sounds from under my right armpit. He asks me, “Don’t you want to change first?”

Finally, Gary puts the key in the ignition and the motor roars to life. He looks over at me, grins, and says, “Yokwe!”

“Shut up and drive,” I tell him. “I’m so over the rainbow.”

Linda Petrucelli’s essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Parhelion, Barren, and Permafrost, among others. She’s lived in Hawaii for the last twenty years. Read more at: https://lindapetrucelli.com

The Sound of the Rain

12 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Steven Deutsch

My grandmother liked nothing
better than to walk in the rain.
On days when most were calculating
how best to stay dry while getting from A to B
she would don her old gray raincoat
and even older brown umbrella
and walk a few miles down Church Avenue
past a hundred store fronts
to nowhere in particular.

She never wore a watch
and I often wondered
how she knew to turn back
or if she always would.
It would not have been that hard,
it seemed to me,
to find a better place to live.
I watched for her,
as if the watching were a magnet
to draw her back home.

I only walked with her once.
At first, I blabbered and struggled
to keep up—my stride
half of hers.
But I soon settled, realizing
the sound of the rain
didn’t need the accompaniment of my voice.
That very wet March Day
she took me into one of the corner candy stores
that dotted our path
for a burger and vanilla malt.
Grandma had tea with milk and sugar.
The trip back was half as long
and twice as quiet—in the best way
I could imagine.

Steve Deutsch is editor of Centered Magazine. He has published six poetry books of which Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair poetry prize by Evening Street Press. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net.

Midnight Music

10 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Tracy Duffy

Like a…rat-a-tap-tap
from the drummers—drum
goes the night-time, in the forest
like the crickets—hum
Chiming in, the hooting
of the owl at night

set the tempo, set the tempo
to the music, midnight

Neon shiny stars
grant the stage, its light
the rattle—ssh, – rattle – ssh
of a sliding snake
and the dripdrop, dripdrop
of fish into the lake

set the tempo, set the tempo
like the drummers-drum
Hum…hum…hoo
Ssh…ssh…shey
Drip…drop…doo
Tempo Set

Tracy Duffy writes poetry while taking a gap year from a lifetime of work in medical cosmetology. Earned BS in Organizational Management while raising a family. Published in Bacopa, Writers Alliance Gainesville; P’AN KU, BCC Student Literary/Arts Magazine; Tiny Seed Literary Journal; Open Door Magazine Labyrinth; Anti-Herion Chic; Passage: The River.

At the Dive Bar After Thanksgiving

7 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Olivia McGill

We were at a bar with my partner Sam’s friends. Cal showed up late in the night. I hadn’t seen him in a while but heard how things were going for him. His wife kicked him out for the sake of their seven-year-old daughter. He was crashing at his woodshop.

His dark hair was grown out and slicked back. He wore his normal outfit, basically an Ace Ventura getup with a Hawaiian shirt and teal pants. With his good looks, it used to seem quirky, almost cool. But now, the overall effect was nauseating. He was no longer parodying a slimeball. He was one. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his normally tan, toned skin looked clammy.

Of course, the presence in people’s eyes is different when they’re on drugs. Distant. Wandering. But it was more than that. His eyes looked wider, slyer, his eyebrows more arched. I wasn’t shaken, per se, but had that subtle feeling that his arrival was doing something to my brain, somewhere deep in the engine room, where I couldn’t quite reach it.

“I like your sweater,” he said as he pulled at someone’s sleeve. “I love your hair,” he told me, his too-close gaze hooking into me as I tried to smile and turn away at the same time.

I tracked his movements as he hovered around the bar, bouncing from one group to the next, his unwantedness not registering for him. He slunk into the booth behind ours, and I tried to carry on a conversation but felt his presence above my head. He spilled a stranger’s drink. Then he slowly climbed over the booth wall, pried Sam and me apart, and sat in between us, his intense eye contact ping-ponging back and forth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Sam asked. Cal had a new girlfriend who looked like his wife but who was annoying. “She’s in Mass…,” Cal said wistfully, reminding me of my father. The self-pitying tone of the addict during the holidays. Just a few days before, my dad sent me a text asking, “what u doin for thanksgiving.” I knew it meant all his buddies were with their families.

I wanted to ask Cal about his daughter but didn’t, unsure of what it might trigger in him. I didn’t know how often he saw her. And anyway, it was clear that he was not identifying as a father at that moment. It was like I was watching a different angle of my dad’s life, the one where he parties and doesn’t think about his children. I was in the role of the friend instead of the daughter. It wasn’t happening to me. It was happening to another little girl. I thought of who the friends might have been. The ones who thought of me as they watched my dad stumble and wander.

I’ve been through a lot of therapy. Sam told me a while back that Cal’s wife is in AlAnon. That’s the one where you know an alcoholic or addict. I’m in the one for people who were raised by them. I wonder if their little girl will end up in the same program, working to undo all the damage being inflicted on her despite the efforts of the single mother.

The funny thing about having an addict for a father is you don’t usually have a clear picture of what you missed out on. And when you see it, fathers in white collars coming home at the same time every day, taking their girls on outings, talking with them lucidly, you think it’s “icky.” It’s “too tender.”

And then. After you’ve accepted what happened to you and grieved what you missed out on. After you’ve learned to stop expecting anything from him. After you’ve found your own source of stability, joy, and love and have seen a glimpse of who you are despite him. After all that, you end up at a bar and a friend shows up and it’s him. It’s your father, twenty-five years ago, woodshop and all. Just switch out the Hawaiian shirt for a cowboy hat.

And part of you can’t help but think, “Stop everything. We can’t let this happen again. There must be something we can do.” But everyone just shakes their heads and exchanges looks. And the daughter remains unmentioned. And you keep thinking, “Something should come of this.” And nothing does.

Olivia McGill is from Hell’s Kitchen and lives in Brooklyn. She writes for a consulting firm and volunteers with Showing Up for Racial Justice. You can read her work in Danse Macabre, Ant vs. Whale, and The Adult Children of Alcoholics blog. She is working on a book-length memoir.

Not Mary Oliver’s Linden

4 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Diane M. Williams

Mary Oliver drove through Linden,
Alabama, and wrote about hulking birds
of prey in a field outside of town.
I wonder what led her to that southern
town that I forsook years ago.
Now, years after her death,
it’s much too late to ask.

Yes, I remember black vultures
descending on rotting carcasses,
shiny summer grasses of field and roadside.
But my Linden, Alabama, is not
the detached visual image of Mary Oliver.

Girl, age twelve, brother and two sisters,
Damn Yankees from up north,
Dad trying to make a go
as a dairy farmer in the Alabama Black Belt,
Mom a hospital nurse.
We didn’t know to say yes ma’am no ma’am.

Summer whipped the sultry farmhouse,
tarantula mother birthed her babies on my bedroom wall,
black widows nested in abandoned buckets,
our home a tired reminder of neglect—
peeling paint and broken shutters,
our lawn a field of weeds,
Lombardy poplars loftily ringing the crescent driveway.

We sang wild dewberries into our pails
uncaring of copperheads and scorpions,
danced across meadows bringing cows in
for evening milking,
trudged gleefully two miles in sticky knee-high grass
brushing off ticks, sweat bees, grasshoppers
to the town swimming pool,
splashed away our poverty
with kids who didn’t know.

Girl, age twelve, I dreamed
the “Wayward Wind” with Gogi Grant
got kissed by a snot-nosed boy in a haystack
rocked with Elvis in the jailhouse on late-night radio
wept finding my dog dead in a roadside ditch
practiced French words with my Jersey heifer.

Passing through Linden, Mary did not know
that in that field where vultures
hovered and gorged themselves
lay the remains of my childhood,
the tattered fantasies
and memories of Girl, age twelve.

The forlorn house and tumble-down barn
long ago torn from the landscape,
now the ghosts of the Lombardy poplars
sing to the restless wind.

Diane M. Williams taught college French for many years, then joined the creative team at UT Knoxville as an editorial manager. Her poetry has appeared in One Trick Pony, Bluestem Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, Black Moon Magazine, and The Avocet. Her poetry collection, Night in the Garden, appeared in 2020.

Memory, a Satellite

1 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by KB Ballentine

Oh, my grandmother’s hibiscus!
Her begonias were bright and beautiful,
but her hibiscus was magic. Sunbaked
and salt-sprayed, filaments and anthers
waving wild in Florida rain brewed an elixir
that made the hummingbirds chirp.
An instant brightness, that shocking red
(matching my skin one summer),
where bees hummed praises and nuzzled
into the honeyed hearts. Forget the oranges
bulging behind blossoms, hibiscus let me know
I was home—wherever I happened to be.

KB Ballentine’s latest collection All the Way Through was published in November 2024 from Sheila-Na-Gig Inc. Other books are published with Blue Light Press, Iris Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Additional writing has been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal. Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

While Walking Down the Twilit Road

29 March 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

While walking down the twilit road
that flows along my neighborhood,
I cast aside my daily load
and thought of comfort as I could
until a limping insect crossed
upon my way. So small. So lost.

It labored toward a leeward hedge
along an inconsistent line
that ended in the rounded edge
where bricking holds a crossing sign.
Six legs marched forth to meet the goal,
their push propelled by sturdy soul.

A line of molt had split the shell.
Two claws were badly worn and bent.
The bulbous head bobbed in a spell
while on the creature weakly went.
I felt a stir of comradeship
as I beheld this forlorn trip.

Too often have I dwelled these days
on thorny word and bitter thought
and given reign to black malaise
convinced depression was my lot.
Cicada nymph, your simple drive
reminds me how to be alive.

Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, Antietam Review, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, Glacial Hills Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing.

Robin Bathing in Puddle

26 March 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Russell Rowland

The puddle was available, because
it rained last night. Drought means a long time
between birdbaths.

Only a quick dip and flutter. Overindulgence
takes time away from foraging.

I relate to the hygienics
of a backyard bird, for after all, we too are songs
bird-caged in bodies for a while—

though we have bathed in the Jordan
with some others, to wash away shortcomings;

restore our voices. The robin
meanwhile simply rises, refreshed and cleansed,
to a nest with its three promises.

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Red Eft Review, Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Next Lives

23 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson

We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.

We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.

“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll.

“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.

“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue.

“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.

“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.

I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.

I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.

We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.

“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.

“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says.

But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled.

I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.

“Walk on my back,” he says.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”

“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”

I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.

I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.

Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

Whaleshark

20 March 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Arthur Ginsberg

for Miriam, La Paz 2024

Of all the treasures hidden in the sea,
creation sprinkled them with luminous dots,
and none more magisterial than thee.
They range from far to migrate to this spot.

For months they feast on ocean’s sumptuous broth
of plankton, krill and small fish through fine gills.
Stunned by their beauty we hover like moths,
recalling with horror how Ahab killed.

We come as strangers to this holy place,
as do pilgrims travel to a shrine,
to feel these spirits through our eyes’ embrace,
to revel in their eloquent design.

From fin to head they’ve not a single bone,
a scaffold upon which to drape their flesh,
solely from cartilage these giants have grown
to swim for years through oceans without rest.

Our guide beckons that it’s time to go
back to the solid earth we love and know.

Arthur Ginsberg is a neurologist and poet from Seattle who has studied with Galway Kinnell, Marvin Bell, Dorianne Laux, and Sandra Alcosser. He holds an MFA from Pacific University. He teaches poetry in the Honors program at the University of Washington. His books are Brain Works and Holy the Body.