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Catch and Release

26 March 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by James Callan

The tug of a taut, invisible thread. So thin. Unseen, it reflects on the gray water, so I suppose. At the far end a silver barb has found the silver mouth of a silver fish that has seen better moments, by far, again, so I suppose. Static water undergoes a savage transformation of violent thrashing, splashing. Like cheerleader pompoms in a gesture of exaltation for the winning touchdown, only inches below the surface of the lake. Liquid confetti tossed in celebration.

My arms hold on, barely, to the device that has snagged an agitated leviathan, or so it seems in my struggle. It’s probably a muskie. And when I finely pull the slick, scaled thing that weighs as much or more than a toddler into the canoe, onto the aluminum floor, I confirm, yes, a muskie.

I look into a mouth that looks like a perfect way to lose a finger, or a hand. This pink abyss, a downward spiral of open-heart surgery, scalpels and all. So many scalpels, needles waiting for their payback. I remove my wedding ring, just in case, and I go in reckless and brave, the last of which I like to think the more prominent. I had to be more than a little firm. I mean, fingers, hands, these are things I want to keep for myself. But in being firm, on the edge or perhaps over the edge of being rough, I remove the barb. I free the beast. And with one last wild gesture of courage, I shovel out what in that moment seemed to me to be the marriage between porpoise and a good way to get hurt.

The splash was surprisingly subtle. A non-splash, almost. Like a vacuum sucking in only the air around it, but quiet. The dark of the depth took the image of the muskie with it. Gone. Free. I caught a prize fish. And then I let it go.

James Callan grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand on a small farm with his wife, Rachel, and his little boy, Finn. He likes toads and frogs and polliwogs, but he LOVES cats. He believes when he says that When Harry Met Sally is the best Rom-com of all time, he is not offering his opinion, but is merely stating a fact. He has been fully grown for a long while, but still has some growing up to do.

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The Lovers: VI

24 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by J.T. Whitehead

Superstition adversely possesses the peace of my mind

better judgment once occupied.

God knows it tried.

Others take an image, in fragments, through multiple eyes,

with which to do whatever they wish.

I think we’re simpler & bigger than this.

If you could start a slew of words with “If you could” –

& you can – then we can play & learn.

Are you with me?

I’ll know I am playing my role in color, better than Bela Lugosi,

hungry & fatal if not eternal.

Let’s make a scene.

Few things are equally over-riding & under-lying & over-arching –

few things are so . . . superlative.

These are our themes.

J.T. Whitehead studied social and political and Eastern philosophy at Purdue where he received an MA in philosophy. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a writing tutor, a teacher’s assistant, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.

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Astronomers Estimate That There Are at least Seven Letters in the Word “Romance”

23 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Rich Boucher

Maybe I could be a bird
that will always live outside your window
and just when you need inspiration
I’ll just start talking
but you won’t be scared,
even though you were expecting birdsong:
you’ll be so shocked and then
this shock will blossom cracklingly
into inspiration; I wish I could tell you
what was whispered in my ear
when I asked why I existed
in kindergarten and a teacher leaned down
and actually told me the reason;
you can laugh at my fear of mailmen
all you like but when was the last time
you got a letter that wasn’t lying
when it said you should be happy;
mock my faith in the primary colors
but tell me you’ve never felt the intensity
of red and chose instead to call it a kind of blush,
tell me your shivers don’t call to mind blue,
swear to me you’ve never seen a yellow ambulance
and found yourself in complete agreement.
I’d love to meet the person you need me to be
and tell him that I might not be much
but at least I don’t have a degree
in the study of room temperatures;
romance is a word that has just enough letters
to spell itself and put me into a weird headspace
where I’m the one person who never learned
how to take sticks and turn them
into the because of fire,
but if you ever need someone
who can genuinely be afraid of the dark,
well, that’s something I can certainly do for you.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Bending Genres, Menacing Hedge and Stink Eye, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Boats Against The Current and Amethyst Review. Rich is BOMBFIRE Magazine’s Associate Editor, and he is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me.

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Sawdust

22 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Terri Mullholland

The wooden owl her dad carved and painted for her when she was a child still sits on the fence. The once bright colours now so faded that from a distance, and without her glasses, it looks as if it might fly away at any moment.

Her dad was always making something from wood, things for around the house, coasters, a spice rack, a chess set. He even made her a Noah’s ark, complete with two of every imaginable animal. Every weekend, he’d be there in the shed, whittling away, carving, shaping, chiselling, sanding, bringing each piece of wood to life.

The door would be ajar, and she’d creep in, sit on the floor and watch him.

He was a quiet man, never one to chat or whistle or hum while he worked, and not one for small talk. But during those hours in the workroom, watching his hands craft and sculpt, she felt close to her dad. He spoke to her through those silences they inhabited together.

She’d sit at his feet and play with the wood shavings that lined the floor, beautiful paper-thin coils of wood. If she found a perfect spiral that seemed to go on forever, she’d put it in her pocket, take it up to her room to wonder at alone. She’d carry pieces in the pocket of her school cardigan, a talisman against the bullies.

Her fingers would worry the coil away to nothing. Then she’d have to go back to the shed for a new piece.

He stopped making things from wood long ago. When his hands became stiff and clumsy, when he had too many accidents, and her mother said enough.

Two young men came to dismantle the shed; his tools were packed up and sold. She was glad he never lived to see it all go.

She wishes she could still go back for one last perfect spiral, one last lucky charm.

Now, years later, every pocket is full only of sawdust.

Terri Mullholland (she/her) is a writer and researcher living in London, UK. Her flash fiction has appeared in Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Toasted Cheese, Full House, Severine, Tether’s End, The Liminal Review, and Analogies & Allegories Literary Magazine. When she is not writing she can be found curled up with a good book and a cat.

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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

The Bluebird Word