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New Shorts

30 August 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leanne Rose Sowul

I was so proud of them: cream-colored denim with turquoise flowers, bright green leaves, and cuffed bottoms. The perfect length to show off my new, longer, sixth-grade legs.

At recess, we sat on the low ledge of the concrete court while the boys played basketball. We watched them, waiting for them to look our way. We fidgeted, hands pulling the weeds that grew up between the cracks, fingers brushing the pollen off buttercups.

Then, one of the girls said, “Hey, is that leg hair?” I felt the brush of her hand, running up my shin from ankle to knee. She was right—my leg was covered in soft down. I hadn’t noticed.

“Hasn’t your mom taught you to shave yet?” she asked. The others turned, looked, laughed. My face flushed. I looked at the other girls’ legs. Smooth, white, perfect.

The boys were yelling, laughing, piling onto each other. They’d swarm back into school with dirty knees, sweaty hairlines, and smelly pits. Still, girls would line the hallways, trying to catch their eyes.

I wish I could say that I stood up then. Told that girl off for touching my leg without permission. Made an impassioned speech about a woman’s natural body. Strode into that throng of boys and grabbed the basketball. Walked into the school dirty and sweating, happy and uncaring.

Instead, I pulled down the hem of my new shorts as far as they could go and tucked my legs underneath me. Instead, when I got home that afternoon, I asked my mother for a razor.

Leanne Rose Sowul is an award-winning writer with publications in JuxtaProse, Under the Gum Tree, Five Minutes, and more; she has performed her essays for “Writers Read” at Lincoln Center and in collaboration with Carnegie Hall. Join her “Good Character” newsletter on Substack for more.

How Light Travels

28 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sheila Dietz

For Christina (1956-2017)

In this picture it’s Christmas morning
and we’re opening presents. Carl, five,
looks away from the camera at Mary
who is out of view. He holds a bag—
red fabric tied at one end
with gold ribbon. I, the oldest,
maybe ten, am trying to pull
a fat gold ribbon from a gift wrapped
in white froth. I wear a shy
smile for the camera
which has caught me in my pajamas—
the red ones with a hole in the heel.

And you, baby sister, your wild,
curly hair catching the light,
cozy in your faded red nightgown
with white buttons, are lifting your face
to the person taking the picture.

One hand is open in your lap,
fingers splayed, and still,
two of its fingers held fast
by the other hand—a nascent
reticence that has not yet reached
your mouth, which, open in a wide smile,
reveals pure joy while the light
in your gold flecked eyes
reflects a gold ornament
dangling from a nearby branch.

Oh, Christina,
how can it be that I did not see you
until just now?

Sheila Dietz also writes as Sheila Bonenberger. She holds an MFA from Vermont College, and poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Denver Quarterly and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Most recently her work appeared in the 2023 One Page Poetry anthology.

Skipping

26 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Carolyn Jabs

The woman with the stethoscope
asks matter-of-factly,
“Has anyone mentioned
the pause in your heartbeat?”
I’m not one to worry,
but that night, in bed, I hold
my own hand and find the pulse.
No question, my heart
has taken up skipping.

All night I have uneasy dreams.
My heart pursues its syncopated ways,
as if to say don’t count on me,
things are not as certain as they seem.
At dawn I follow my heart’s direction—
skip over what was written
on the day’s agenda,
pause to listen to birds,
gossiping as the day breaks.

All morning my heart and I
are in cahoots. It sprints for a minute,
then hesitates like a toddler
seeing a dandelion for the first time.
I follow its lead. After a lifetime
of inattention, I want to know why
my heart hesitates, want to register
the moment it shakes off doubt
and decides we’ll live a little longer.

In her professional life, Carolyn Jabs contributed essays and articles to many publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Working Mother, Self and Family PC. She is author of The Heirloom Gardener and co-author of Cooperative Wisdom, an award-winning book about an innovative approach to conflict resolution.

Sometimes the moon

22 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Jan Mordenski

cannot help himself.
Sometimes, with the next day
spread out before him like an azure flag,
and the golden glances of his brother—
the radiant rival on whom he so depends—
blazing across a bright tomorrow,
he cannot merely fade on cue
into his designated background
without comment, without query,
without—momentarily—
facing the morning throng
with a pale yet perceptible smile.

No, sometimes, with all the timidity,
all the temerity of a second son,
he feels he must, if only briefly,
hold his unsolid ground in that unfolding sky,
just to remind us how precious, how frail,
how necessary, is the belief in things unseen,
in persons unnoticed, in sentiments so deep,
so true yet unvoiced in those unabated moments
that are there, and then gone,
and then—hopefully—remembered
like the sighting of a summer’s moon
lingering in the morning sky.

Jan Mordenski, a trained folklorist and writing teacher, is from Detroit. Her poems have regularly appeared in print in Canada, Ireland, England, Australia, and the United States. Her poem “Crochet” was selected for the American Life in Poetry series. More of her poetry appears on Ravens Perch, and Quadra/Project.

Estate Sale

19 August 2024 / Editor

Fiction by Deborah Wessell

“Excuse me. Excuse me? Would you take ten for this?” Lois hoisted the tuxedo
pants and jacket before the bored, merciless eyes of the man accepting money.

“Tag says fifteen.”

He was middle-aged, as she was, but lean and weathered, with a graying ponytail
and bare feet. His till was a fishing tackle box. Behind him a Sunday morning crowd
picked over the debris of someone’s life, the husband who had worn the tuxedo and read Sky & Telescope, the wife given to macramé and saving cottage cheese containers. Lois wondered if they were dead, but of course it would be ghoulish to ask.

“I know the tag says fifteen. But it’s not in good shape, and anyway I only have
ten dollars with me, so…”

“So?”

“Never mind,” she murmured, but he cut her off.

“OK, ten.”

Lois was certain that the man knew she had always wanted a tuxedo jacket, just to
wear with jeans, and that she feared she was too old and overweight to carry it off. Well, was he such a prize, with that silly hair and the T-shirt with the rude slogan? She pulled out her wallet and something dropped from her purse: a slip of paper folded around two twenty dollar bills.

“Oh!” said Lois, appalled. “Oh, that’s right, I went to the cash machine last night.
I could, I mean, if you want fifteen…”

The man snorted. “Forget it.”

Lois drove home in mortification, and it was days before she could bring herself to try on her purchase. The pants, at least, made her laugh: clown pants, much too short and huge around the waist, with stiff black suspenders. Then the jacket, heavy on her shoulders. She slid her hands down the lapels and smoothed the skirts over her hips, sighing over the bulges. Then she frowned and explored a miniature inside front pocket. A small rough nugget met her fingertips and she drew it forth: a tiny ivory wedge, smooth-sided, red-brown at the jagged base. A baby tooth.

Lois had a rushing vision of a dark bedroom, a child’s breathing, a slanting slice of light from the hallway. Daddy, with his barrel belly and his suspenders and his satin lapels, on his way to some long-ago fancy night out, steps to the bedside and slips one hand gently under the pillow to exchange a silvery dime for this disgusting little miraculous tooth.

The man in the rude T-shirt, was he that child? Even if he wasn’t, he was a child once, and someone loved him, or didn’t love him. Lois was dizzied by the thought, not only of the man, but of everyone, herself and her own children and her friends and their children and oh Lord, everyone she’d ever met or would never meet and all of them, every individual on this entire warm busy planet, would someday be dead, and there would just be these little things, these objects once significant of love. The thought was marvelous but entirely too much, and Lois threw the tooth away.

Deborah Wessell writes the Wedding Planner mystery series under the name Deborah Donnelly. She is a former librarian, copywriter, and speechwriter. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her writer husband and their unruly corgis.

After Hours (Guggenheim Museum, 1984)

16 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Nowak

Day in and
up, elevated to the first
piece held in its cell, swarms

of visitors graze on
to the next, descending
away from
Picasso’s late self-

portrait, his hungering gaze
you’d know, my love, if you could
close in.

No matter our rank, we workers
keep watch over
what at times feels ours, so

after the head guard
sends the last tourists spiraling
out and commandeers
the take from my Front Desk shift

like a bluff, beneficent
uncle, he sends me home

to collect you for a private viewing
proud to break
an unwritten rule
no curator would consider.

The Museum glows, evening-lit
as you unlock
tiers of meaning in each

figure and gesture, each tribute
to forebears in a history
Picasso became
as he painted
his final night’s work.

No one else ever
will know we were here
beyond the three of us
joined by the fourth.

Nancy Nowak’s poetry appeared most recently in The Comstock Review, Poeming Pigeon, Timberline Review, and Willows Wept Review. Previously published work is found at www.nancynowakpoetry.com. From 1994 – 2016, she was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Umpqua Community College. She lives in Winston, OR.

Going up Gorham

12 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Rankin

Nature is an expression of intelligence and necessity.
PLATO

Here where mountain marries earth to the sea, I open like a prayer.
The climb begins with a sigh as I scour the trail for the wag of his tail.
Clouds form stepping stones into the horizon, and I wonder how
to find a way to tomorrow. Or if I even want to hear the silence that follows.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.

One year since. A cool morning then, just like today. A whisper
of early autumn air being polite, nothing more. One of those days you’re blind
to the darkness that’s coming. Gulls and ravens trade places
in the sky, but I’m resigned to the gray that lives between.
I’m in the kind of place where you can’t get there from here.
The way you sometimes need rain to move air.

A bird out of sight offers up its lone song, but all I can hear
is, Still gone, still gone. Far below, ocean keeps sending itself onto shore,
tending the earth’s wounds with waves. Above, the sun rises
over the trees, turning up the volume of the sky.
As the trail stretches skyward, I’m searching what’s near, seeking
what’s revealed in the rooms of the climb.

Autumn huckleberry bleeds into the surrounding hills,
but I’m tuned to the pitch of the path, the blazing red leaves
saying more than I can bear. My eye catches a common tern
sweeping the sea, and I hand myself from rock to rock,
finding solace in the scratch of shoe against granite. I struggle
to unlace the root-studded trail, only to find myself entwined instead.

On this mountain that hands land to sea, the breeze reminds me
of something worth knowing, and I breathe deep,
lungs grateful for all that salt air can relieve.
Ahead, a stand of scrub pine raises questions I can’t answer.
As views of Sand Beach keep turning my head, I’m wondering
what word the sea might offer for grace.

But further along the trail I spot a cairn
stacked in place by some fellow wanderer
who needed to assure me with something only stones can say:
You will find your way, even as the earth turns below your feet.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.

Anne Rankin‘s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, The Poeming Pigeon, Hole in the Head Review, Passager, Scapegoat Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle (forthcoming), and elsewhere. Her poem “Small Primer on Loneliness” received Honorable Mention at the Belfast Poetry Festival 2021.

The Marimekko Dress

10 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Katharine Davis

My mother bought me a Marimekko dress,
a dress from Finland, a cool and distant land replete
with fjords, icebergs, wild reindeer and elk.
A dress to wear following my wedding at
my grandmother’s farm, a dress for going away.

All went as it should: a tent in the garden,
dahlias robust and in bloom on a blazing August afternoon,
with views of the covered bridge across the field.
A small gathering of family and friends,
my father in a blue blazer, my mother in gauzy watermelon pink.

Tea sandwiches followed by cake and French Champagne.
No music, no dancing, the scent of mown hay wafting in the white haze,
my sisters, flowers in their hair, sneaking cigarettes behind the barn.
After tossing the bouquet, I slipped on my Marimekko dress,
neatly pressed, blue and white, wavy horizontal stripes.

My Marimekko dress was cool against my skin. Expensive, well-made,
the perfect fit, just right for starting another life.
My mother died two years later. The farm was sold, and fifty years have passed.
But in my dreams, I see it still, a shirt-waist dress with silver buttons,
worn by me, but chosen by my mother.

Katharine Davis is the author of three novels: Capturing Paris (included in the New York Times suggestions for fiction set in Paris), East Hope (winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2010 award for fiction), and A Slender Thread.

Priced to Go

7 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Lyle

our yard-sale discards
shabby in daylight’s glare
only undo me
when I spot treasure—

twiggy high chair
where grandparents fed
during mother’s recovery,
like graying cardinals
on a final nest—

sturdy wooden rocker,
where little limbs
rehearsed dancing,
hello and goodbye

folding lawn chair
with one missing web
beckoning rest,
a soak of sun

impressioned recliner
from beside the window
still ready to hold a wave
like a child
sighting a parade,

all priced to go
like yellow goslings
straying an open field
under a hawk’s hungry eye

Michael Lyle is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Everywhere of Light, and his poems have appeared widely, including Atlanta Review, The Carolina Quarterly and Poetry East. Michael is an ordained minister and lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Visit him at http://www.michaellylewriter.com.

Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash

Way Back When

1 August 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

My little sister is seven, bundled up in a brown, corduroy car coat. I am nine, sporting a pair of orange polka-dotted pedal pushers and feeling fairly fleet-footed in my canvas Keds. Together we are walking home at dusk from our neighbor’s house where we have enjoyed yet another game of Chinese checkers.

“Can we play orphans?” she asks. Orphans. It’s a familiar game of ours, influenced by the thrill of childhood literature – The Boxcar Children or Oliver Twist or any number of hair-raising fairy tales that filled our impressionable psyches. According to the game’s unspoken rules, we must identify a house friendly enough to ask its current residents to take us in – two bedraggled sisters who have only recently escaped from the workhouse.

Perhaps in our mind’s eye, we are barefoot, ragged, dirty, but also surely sweet-faced, hopeful, and plucky. After some faux-hesitation, we will, of course, choose our own house – what else? – but the exercise allows us to flirt momentarily with independence and adventure, only to be flooded by a warm, familiar security afterwards. Our chosen scenario, as usual, unfolds with a practiced, codified dialog:

“How about this one?” she suggests, as we walk past a large corner house.

“No, too dark,” I respond on cue, shaking my head vigorously as we march along.

“Then this one?” She points to a house whose front lawn has recently been edged. A forgotten rubber ball is wedged between a planter box and a picket fence. I appear to inspect her choice before disqualifying it with a “Naah,” aligning myself perfectly with the unwritten script. “Not cozy enough,” I announce.

“Then how about this cute little house? It looks sort of friendly,” she says, tacking on a hopeful argument for good measure. Hmm, I take a look. She could be right. Among the cookie-cutter post-war housing that went up fast in the Fifties and that provided the parents of baby boomers a decent, if not charming, place to live, this house – with its ruby red front porch and generic cement driveway – just seemed to stand out. Well, at least to us.

We stop and peer in, evaluating the odds, wondering if this family might adopt our lonesome selves. Will they show mercy? Human kindness? Would they like the addition of two beseeching little girls around the dinner table tonight? I notice the glow from the light in the kitchen and guess at our older sister studiously setting the table, carefully placing our father’s milk glass at the helm. “Yes,” I agree companionably as we turn into our own comfortable driveway and trot up the front steps. Out back, between the clothesline and the dangling tether ball, is a likeness of our handprints, marking the day when three sisters leaned down and opened their hands, stretching and splaying their fingers wide as they pressed their palms into fresh cement.

Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

The Bluebird Word