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Familial Territory

10 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jessica (Tyner) Mehta

You told me you looked like your father,
your brother like your mother,
but that’s not what I saw in the Mumbai tea house–
what everyone told you was wrong,
a lie from their eyes. Your mother
engulfs you both, in the cacao black
eyes and teeth crowded as a morning train.

Your father, he’s slipped into your innards,
entrenched in your turned down chin,
arms frozen across chest, the cold set
of your jaw, the distance of your aura.
Your father doesn’t scare me

because all I see is you. You in thirty years,
the you of our past, over-seasoning tradition
and fear with barricades.
I broke them down once,
I can do it again, they all doubt me

and therein lies my power. It’s in my tiny bones,
the reach of my hair, the fray
of my lashes. You know my stubbornness
is thicker than yours, my desire burns brighter
than all the fireworks of Diwali
and your father—the poor man

will see me one day
just as you do.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a multi-award-winning Aniyunwiya, Two-Spirit, queer, interdisciplinary poet and artist. She is currently preparing for her Fulbright Senior Scholar award and her post-doctoral fellowship as the 2022 Forecast Change Lab fellow.

Grandma’s Refrigerator

8 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Abigail Mathews

Grandma’s refrigerator is the color of the world. It is everywhere.

When the sky is no longer dark, but painted with rising yellows, then the smell of the kitchen is nearing, and I am reminded of milk jars and oven mitts.

Oh, when the flowers finally bloom, and the yellow petals fall to the mud, I see cigarette smoke wafting out windows, and oven-crisped cookies sliding from the pan onto dirtied white floors, and Grandma’s refrigerator is humming.

And the bumblebees are humming, and their yellow hue is familiar.

If the soil were to be peeled back and the dirt dried by the yellow sun, then the grass would turn yellow and die, and the flower roots would turn yellow and die, and the leaves have turned yellow and died, and I wonder when it became Fall again.

It was just yesterday that the dragonflies nibbled my ankles, and the skin on my shoulders were freckled, wasn’t it? The air crunches again, as does my chest with my fiberglass inhales. My yellow lungs heave like the chest of my grandfather.

The Autumn air brings a stale smell, but it is not a painful stale, because it is the stale smell of grandmother, and you remember how she cooked for you while you sat at the kitchen table picking apart napkins, and she wore an apron lined with yellow lace.

And the lace was as thin as her skin and as yellow as her refrigerator.

Abigail Mathews is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she is pursuing a major in creative writing.

In a Living Room

7 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Tanner Rubino

Warm yellow sun slipping
Down couch cushions
Of a
Loveseat, light green-grey
Stamped with trees and hatch marks
Potted plants position their shadows
Like vines along the vertical lines of the door
Winds peel petals from autumn branches
Solar eclipse of oak leaves across my eyes
Light fights like the leaves
To hold on
Neither can do it forever

Tanner Rubino is a fourth-year Professional Writing student at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Her work has been published in Champlain’s newspaper, The Crossover, and their magazine, The Well. When she’s not writing, Tanner likes to spend time outdoors or inside attempting a new art form.

selective focus photography of red waterlily flower in bloom — Photo by Couleur on Pexels.com

We Went Walking

6 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Heather Sager

I remember that June
when we went walking.

The day stayed up late.
The orange orb floated high in the sky.

And you, dear, were walking
by my side.

You told me you’d
keep me company.
You knew I walked often
alone.

And the warm warm sky glowed
though it was getting late,

and we saw the busy summer street,
the lush summer trees.
We went around the pond
three times, talking.

Sunrays illumined your red shirt
and your wide eyes.

And the sun carried us,
together, into the nighttime.

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Her most recent work appears in The Orchards, Fahmidan Journal, Magma, Red Eft, Version (9), The Bosphorus Review of Books, Shabd Aaweg Review, The Fabulist, Willows Wept, and more.

The Package

4 May 2022 / Editor

Microfiction by Kenneth M. Kapp

Bob was a joker with a permanent smile. If asked, he’d answer: “Told myself a joke and it’s a corker.”

Now a widower he lived in a small Milwaukee bungalow. A sign on his mailbox pointed to a milkcrate below: Please leave all packages here. Old and still smiling, he made his final arrangements.

His time was up. His cremains were delivered to his home and left in the milkcrate. A curious neighbor checked and discovered the package he had preaddressed. A cloud enclosed the return address: If unclaimed return to SENDER (a large arrow pointed up).

Kenneth M. Kapp was a Professor of Mathematics, a ceramicist, a welder, an IBMer, and yoga teacher. He lives with his wife and beagle in Wisconsin, writing late at night in his man-cave. He enjoys chamber music and mysteries. He’s a homebrewer and runs whitewater rivers. Visit www.kmkbooks.com.

nephelococcygia

2 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Alyssa Harmon

you say
it is rare for two people to see
the same image in clouds.

we see each other’s hands
drifting away in the wind and
pretend the blue sky
is not dividing us.

Alyssa Harmon is working on her master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of West Florida. Her poems have been published in Merrimack Review, Minerva Rising, Shaking the Sheets Magazine, and Odet Journal. You can find more of her work on Instagram @alyssa_harmon_.

arachnid artistic blur close up — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Lost One

1 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Spencer Trecost

I look at the sky and see a cloud
So I talk to you but not out loud

You left me here on the ground
A place at times I cannot stand

I hear the noise as people speak
But for the one I listen I cannot see

I feel you in the vast blue sky
I feel you in the tears I cry

I taste salt air and remember when…
So I reach for you but touch only wind

You’re near but far, a heart without beat
While mine still races as I desperately seek
The one who is missing
Me.

Lisa Spencer Trecost is a heart-centered writer who loves to travel with her husband and dogs.

Two Pages

29 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Benjamin Leuty

When they found the alligator in the river,
The kids gathered crabs to feed it
while the elders plotted against it.
And nobody thought to leave it be.

In the days before the gator,
I’d cast myself into the current,
Let my body be a continent
Then a collection of islands
The air between shirt and chest ballooning
And then suddenly,
At the last possible moment,
fleeing in bubbles
Like a flock of birds
I’d sink.
From time to time,
A shoe of mine might bobble
Confused and surfing the ripples on the surface
Like the float that marks your fishing line
And assures you there’s a connection between
hook and line.

I’d climb from the pond,
Sopping wet,
And be a rainstorm
for a second
for just the square foot
beneath my body.

By then it might be dark,
Glass shards making stars of themselves
Under street lamp’s glow
Leafcutter ants still busy
Hauling the trees away
Bit by bit
As if to reconstruct somewhere else
Like Ikea furniture.
Carpenter ants,
Hauling houses away
Chunk by chunk.

In the sand,
A turtle might be dragging itself to sea
Flippers leaving a trail
Like jeep treads.
And I might find that nature
And my town
Are two pages of a book
Stuck together.

Benjamin Leuty is a high school senior at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. His work has appeared in his school literary journal Umläut. In his spare time, he cycles, reads, plays video games, and hops up and down.

7:00 PM, JUNO

28 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Stephanie Buesinger

The turtle’s shell is plastic, his insides
spongy – we dug out the hard wires,
tossed out the batteries that made up his belly
left only the soft parts for you.

The first thing I bought from a TV ad,
his shell riddled with holes to project the night sky
you wanted only his squishy body, sweet face
even after I wash him, he smells like you.

They say – watch out
for alligators in shallow water
for poisonous frogs in deep grass, but you
always liked the roughness of shells.

Tonight, under the white moon, the mothers will crawl onto this sand to lay their eggs
Like me, sea turtles can hold their breath for a long time.

Stephanie Buesinger writes fiction and children’s literature and enjoys illustration and photography. With 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.

Below Beach Sands

26 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ed Higgins

feeding sanderlings rush
along the tide’s wet sand

sand-colored mole crabs
burrow quickly below the swash

maximizing their escape—
like the burrowing crabs

I sink below sloshing surfaces
backward into ovid breathing holes

barely remembering which way
is up, wanting protection,

leaving few marks to reveal
my fears, eyes alert

as predatory birds plunge
their digging beaks

Ed Higgins‘ poems and short fiction have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Danse Macabre, Ekphrastic Review, and Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. Ed is Asst. Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. He has a small farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek.

The Bluebird Word