FALL 2018

A woman walks 5 dogs on leashes down the middle of the street. She walks at a gait almost right for someone so old and skinny. Every few feet she says, “There’s cars coming; get out of the street!”

A woman kneels and stares into the face of a 6 year old boy. She curses at him and wipes his nose with a kerchief. His Spiderman jacket is new. Her clothes are not. Her denim jacket is falling apart.

A woman without teeth coughs and clutches an unlit cigar in her mouth.

A man leans against a bank and waits. He grimaces to himself, looks up, and makes a sort of smiling face to nobody in particular, then grimaces again when he imagines what the sort of smiling face looks like to the women around him (but the women haven’t looked at his face; they stopped at his arms, maybe the bottom of his beard), but so then he considers the grimace and tries to smile again, anyway. He doesn’t look away from the woman without teeth. Her coughing is the kind that can only come from the toothless. Sounds uninhibited by teeth hold more water, even when they’re small. They travel differently, carving the notes of a final noise. He does not imagine the woman’s name. He only looks at her mouth, the absence marked by bare gums. He names her mouth: uninviting gape, clumsy hole, gum tunnel, was-a-mouth, finished bitch. He grimaces at the vaginal names and the last one. Still, more names come up: dead fish, gnawing cave, frog socket, yogurt funnel. And the names give way to direct memories. Years before when a man walked up to him, yelled “nigger!”, and punched him in the face, and his front teeth fell into his hand. He stood there sputtering blood, too fucked surprised to know what to do. At the hospital they put the teeth back in without anything to cut the pain, and it was so bad he couldn’t do anything but pretend that it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t him. And he didn’t sleep for 24 hours. And for months even the smallest vibration sent cuts of pain through his skull, so driving to work brought tears and thoughts of jumping off buildings and some silent promise to just keep going because maybe it didn’t happen to me afterall and this will all get cleared up and the teeth never left my head. (Teeth are incredibly long, you’ll notice, if yours ever fall out into your hand.) And for years, at first hourly and then less often but never really ending, there are flashbacks to the punch, just the punch, and the look on the face of the man punching and the sharp shock of surprise and sudden loss. There is a particular grimace for a flashback: the head moves to the side, the eyes close, in the worst ones the hands go up, as if to parry the blow. The primary trigger, initially, was kissing or anything else that meant something coming close to his mouth. He hadn’t decided if the fewer flashbacks meant recovery or repression. He’d considered therapy but never got around to it. He pushes off from the bank and moves toward the edge of the sidewalk, looking up the street, stretching, and pulling at his beard with his left hand.

A man tracks mud through the bank lobby and smiles so hard and honest at the clerk that when he (=the man) hands over his check and deposit slip the clerk forgets to say hello and just smiles back.

A girl watches her brother and wonders if the woman wiping his nose will wipe her nose too and “where is my mom” and “I don’t think we’re allowed to say those words” and something about boots before her mom’s car turns the corner and she is pulled along and into the backseat and a seatbelt is fastened, and when she starts to tell her mom everything her eyes get wide because her mom doesn’t look or smell right and the her-mom-voice coming from this woman driving the car who is almost-her-mom-but-not-quite-right says, “Close your goddamn mouth” in that way that closes a goddamn mouth without anything else but then this almost-her-mom-but-something-changed turns around and slaps her hard on the leg, too.

A man asks 13 strangers for change to ride the bus. If he doesn’t drink in the next hour he will rip out all of his hair or step in front of traffic. Of the 13 people he asks for change, 5 acknowledge him, and only 2 give him anything. The last person he asks gives him a bus token and some religion.

A woman prays under her breath the prayer she meant to pray that morning over breakfast. While she prays she worries about whatever could have made her forget to pray. She remembers the last three years of her husband’s life, when he forgot not only praying but nearly everything before he sat down and decided to die.

A boy fastens a pin to the edge of his sweatshirt.

A man bends down to pick up a cigarette butt off the ground.

A girl screams and fastens herself to her father’s leg.

A man leans onto his cane and says, “And I was tall, huh?” The man to his right says, “…”, and he laughs. After each laugh he coughs. He holds his cane perfectly still, even when coughing.

The sun is not radiant. It is not raining. The depth of clouds is impossible to judge from the ground. Car exhaust washes over the men, women, girl, and boy. There’s a glimmer of something in the backseat of a gray sedan that drives by, and for a moment they all stare at it together.

Don Antenen lives in Philadelphia.  He works at a grocery store and loves professional basketball almost as much as he loves his cats.

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From his perch on the lawn mower, Ralph can’t look directly at the sun, a watery glob of light, not even with sunglasses on.  So he looks down, running his arm across his sweaty brow, and watches the white lines in the grass as he maneuvers down the football field.  The puffy noise-dampening headphones create the feeling of being submerged water, the sound of the thrashing blades and stirring engine gagged as he swelters across the grass.

Maya Dremmer, girls’ soccer coach, is running around the tartan athletic track.  Ralph follows her shape with his eyes while keeping his head straight forward until she leaves his field of vision, and as he curves around the end zone, she pops back into view, a shimmering, supple dot on the horizon.

Her skin, a creamy bronze matching the tan hue of the ground beneath her, glistens like a mirror.  She, too, wears sunglasses, but hers are runner’s shades, and they stay put as her head bobs with each thump of her feet.  Ralph imagines the sound, rhythmic and sustained like a dripping faucet or the tinkle of a mallet on a xylophone.  He pictures the two of them listening to some classical music she’d pick out while they sip a bottle of wine he can’t afford but buys anyway.

She is here every Saturday.  He tries to wave when their paths come close enough for him to memorize the shape of the sweat soaked through her white t-shirt, an ornate necklace, a glimmering stain on the blank landscape of her upper body.  Sometimes, when the sun shines just right and the shirt clings with just enough dampness, he can see the dark curve of her sports bra underneath.

Maya never waves back.  Ralph starts to lift his fleshy hand and feels the sharp yelp of a “hey!” start to gurgle up from his gut, but before it can escape he clamps his mouth shut, feels a salty tear of sweat dribble across the trench of his lips, and he drags the back of his hairy hand across his face instead.

He’s guiding the lawn mower across the fifty yard line in a steady arc, following the track that keeps him fenced in on the grass.  Ralph imagines himself calling out to Maya, waving at her, asking her how her run is going.  He sees her slow down, peeling the sunglasses from her face.  Her eyes are emeralds.

She says: “Magnificent.”  The word leaps from her tongue, crisp like a Bible verse.

Or: he asks her if she’s training for a marathon, and she says, “Yeah, the Boston,” and he nods, asking with a transition smooth as glass, if she’d like to get lunch sometime, and she nods, her lips curling into an oasis of a smile, saying, “Yes, that’d be great.”  He loses himself in the dimples of her flushed cheeks.

Or—maybe—she slows, legs smacking against the track like a dying metronome, each beat further from the last.  She checks her watch, marking her time.  Ralph puffs out his chest and breathes in deeply when she glances at him and he mentions the humidity.  How it’s usually so dry this time of year.  She shakes her head, but he knows she’s agreeing.  A sprinkler spray of sweat erupts from her forehead.  “It’s a bitch,” she says.  “Covers everything like a damn blanket.”

He cringes.  She wouldn’t curse like that.

Ralph stares through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, watching Maya bounce around the track.  He remembers his mother at home, waiting for the newspaper and fresh cantaloupe, for the classifieds and comics, and how she will crane a white finger toward a printed box that boasts ten dollars an hour and saying how he should take it, call at least, leave a message if they’re not home.

His head twitches and his mother tumbles away, replaced by a picnic table, Ralph and Maya, the grass long and green, their children laughing and tugging at her plaid shirt two sizes too big and redder than his cheeks will ever be, and she waves them away toward the playground like an afterthought.  Maya giggles and caresses his arm, her voice coming in waves.

Ralph is hot.  The sweat falls along his face.  He remembers his brother, theChicagolawyer that ran away from the humidity.  His sister, artist, screaming about Salvador Dali, melts away like a drooping, disintegrating horse.  He imagines a roan bubbling up through the freshly-cut grass, then falling to pieces in the heat.

Ralph squints and crosses the forty-yard-line.

He feels a tear in his eye.  It stings like sweat.

Maya turns toward the goal posts as Ralph reaches the other end zone.  The sun shines in front of him, a blinding sandy desert, and he wants to call out to her.  Light cascades toward his face, bouncing off his sunglasses.  The landscape wavers like an illusion in front of him.  Reaching toward her, Ralph cranes his neck to follow her, but he’s approaching the track, and he has to coax the lawn mower back toward the other end of the field, leaving Maya behind.

Joe Baumann is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where he serves as the nonfiction editor of Rougarou: an Online Literary Journal.  His work has appeared in flashquake, Shady Side Review, and Pill Hill, and is forthcoming from Barely South Review.  He is currently at work on a travel memoir and collection of short stories.

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As we drove toward the Gulf of Mexico in my wheezing hand-me-down car with a backseat full of unfolded state maps, a sun-bleached atlas, and fast food sacks stuffed with gas station receipts and waxy candy-wrapper origami, we listened to every song we could think of that cued us to yell “drive” or “summer” or “go” long and loud during the chorus. On the interstate, we lowered the car windows and let the wind wrack our heads, hot and thundering, whipping the pages of books and churning my ratted ponytail. We had agreed, even before making a packing list or borrowing a tent, on the basics, and that one had been Lee’s idea: car windows down as much as possible.

When Lee drove, I snapped photos out the window of the road signs as they whizzed by. I fed a Neil Young CD into the stereo when we ran out of raucous traveling songs. Lee smoked and softly sang along. We mauled diner cheeseburgers and dropped quarters into small-town jukeboxes all along the way and ripped rodeo fliers from community bulletin boards as keepsakes in Nashville.

At night, to fight off drowsiness, we talked. Listed the middle names of all our family members, played slapdash versions of Truth or Dare, described our favorite Twilight Zone plots and then invented our own scary stories. “Once upon a time, there was an adult,” went mine; I drew my voice out deep and low and winced as oncoming headlights passed over my face, “and she went to work in an office every single day, and she forgot what it was like to drive fast and go on road trips and eat hot dogs for every meal, and she got married to a boring guy and had two boring kids and was boring for the rest of her boring life.”

“Wow,” said Lee. “Truly chilling.”

++

While we were grilling hot dogs on our camp-issued grill in Mississippi, the man camping next to us noticed that we didn’t have a lantern (despite our weeks of planning sessions and one massive trip to Walmart, we’d somehow forgotten this one item, which we hated; it made us look unprepared when we were determined to appear the opposite) and invited him to take a spare one he had rattling around in the back of his pickup truck. I could hear them from our site. Then he offered a beer, no way of knowing Lee was nineteen, of course, “and one for your lady,” offering another.

“She’s my sister, actually,” said Lee. Just a few days after leaving, we had agreed on this version of the truth after realizing that the facts—we were friends, just friends, camping in a tent together for two weeks—confused neighborly strangers. A brother and sister explanation never raised eyebrows—most times it did the opposite, made people fold with tenderness—and felt easier to slip into than the real truth anyway. We both read a lot and did a lot of thinking, and I think we both knew that our friendship would last a long time if we didn’t do anything stupid to break it. Brother and sister felt correct: two people who had a special understanding of each other, chugging along side-by-side through the South. When I was around, I liked to jump in and embellish the lie further.

“Twins!” a motherly park ranger had repeated after me in Mississippi, shaking her head, overcome. “What a blessing.”

Lee thanked the man for the lantern and trudged the few feet of gravel road back to our site, holding the cans in the crook of one elbow. I was lying on my back just outside the tent, holding a thick paperback high over my head like a roof, shading my face while I read. The air was gleaming and hot with sunset. “Will I like this?” I asked, squinting up at him as I reached for the can.

Lee had been drinking bad beer since he was fifteen. He told me the taste wasn’t really the point. I shrugged and pulled on the tab and the can hissed and foamed. “Goodbye, cruel world,” I said as I tipped my head back. The taste of aluminum, the salty sweat of my upper lip.

++

By Birmingham, I’d been driving for most of the day, so Lee offered to fill up the gas tank. I was wearing a sundress and boys’ Goodwill sneakers, chewing on a stick of beef jerky in the parking lot, thinking about how I wanted to get drunk at the Gulf of Mexico. When he walked by to pay inside, I told him so. I’d been thinking about the cheap beer from the day before, but I didn’t know what to buy. 

“Depends how you want to feel while you drink it,” Lee said. I loved him for those words. I’d never been drunk before, really, but I could imagine how I wanted to feel exactly: barefoot and grimy and young, sitting in the salty muck of the Gulf, breathing Lee’s cigarette smoke, like I never had to leave.

“Disgusting,” I lisped through a mouthful of jerky.

We went inside together, through the cool rush of the automatic doors, past shelves of brightly wrapped candy to the alcohol section. We walked through aisles of dusty wine bottles, sleek and dark, and I cooed over the names, the dramatic descriptions on the labels. I held up a bottle of bourbon with two hands, framing it like a spokesmodel, and asked Lee what it tasted like. What kind of cocktails you made with it. He said “cocktails” weren’t exactly his specialty. I trailed my fingers along the bottles as I shopped, like a collector at an antiques mart, and asked what was sweet, what was fizzy, what was complicated and mysterious. Asked what was good mixed with Coke, with lemonade, with Red Bull—strolling slowly down the lit, buzzing beverage fridges.

Finally I stopped again in front of the shelf packed with rows of fat whiskey bottles and turned to Lee, holding my shoulders in a half-shrug. “Eh?”

“The right place to feel disgusting.”

“Gotta start somewhere,” I said, and picked the cheapest one. Lee touched my wrist and guided the bottle back onto the shelf.

“This is a special occasion,” he said. He rooted in his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll put in. Let’s get the real stuff.”

At the counter, I chattered through the transaction, suddenly nervous that the clerk would look to Lee for ID, too—I read the names of cigarettes out loud, asking Lee if he’d tried this or that, Gold and Ultra and Lites. Laughed hard at plastic keychains chattering together, blaring bitter jokes about wine and wives. The clerk didn’t ask either of us for ID. Outside on the pavement, I lugged the plastic bag with the whiskey into the back seat with one hand and it slid over the layer of park maps and paperbacks. I pushed the receipt deep into the glove compartment. I loved the idea of finding little bits of our trip in the months to come, when I was off looking at strange apartments or driving to job interviews. Then I unfolded the map on the roof of the car while Lee plunked into the driver’s seat. I bent down, peering at him, clapped my hands for punctuation and said, “Saltwater. Let’s find it.”

++

Once we drove within thirty miles of the Gulf of Mexico, a mist descended on everything, warm and wet. My camera lens clouded. Then came the tourist attractions blinking from the side of the highway, neon and shrill, souvenirs and seafood. And soon I shrieked, reached with one hand to throttle Lee’s shoulder as he drove—there was the shimmering water drowning the landscape, and the sunset streaming pink and red above it.

It was dark by the time we pulled up to our campsite. The car rattled from the effort as it cooled, and the lantern only spat out enough light to make us laugh and to attract wildly buzzing insects. I set up our tent while Lee unpacked our sleeping bag rolls and the grilling supplies, grimy with grease and cheap charcoal. The hot dogs charred in the darkness. I sat down at the picnic table and Lee sat across from me, the lantern between us, the bugs diving and circling.

I couldn’t believe we were really there—the saltwater so close we could sleepwalk into it—and said so, hugging my knees from my side of the knobby table, and Lee agreed with a grin. We sat for a moment in the pocket of silence, the rare absence of conversation, craning our necks to squint at the shadowy tops of palm trees above us. Then we picked up our blackened food and bit in. Ketchup dripped on our paper plates.

“We live here now,” I said.

“I like our house,” he said. I snorted into my food. “And our backyard is pretty good.” The Gulf jangled with noise, frogs chirping and insects creaking and singing. Who knew what else. There was a sign posted at the shadowy edge of our campsite, where the ground melted into black water: BEWARE OF CROCODILES. I pointed at it and we cracked up, imagining waking up to a crocodile sleeping between us, having brought its own sleeping bag; crawling out of the tent in the dewy morning to a crocodile standing on its stumpy back legs, cooking breakfast, trilling I made coff-eeeee!

“Or a crocodile passed out with an empty bottle of whiskey in its paws,” Lee said.

“Paws,” I said. “Right, crocodiles probably have paws. God, I kinda want to open that whiskey now.”

“We have to wait,” he said. “It’s for the Gulf. We’re so close, we can’t blow it now.”

“What if we went to the beach now?” I said. I couldn’t tell if I was joking, but when Lee asked me if I was, I said no.

++

“You do understand it’s pretty likely that we’ll die this way,” Lee said. We were high-stepping our way down the murky shoreline from our campsite in tall rubber boots my dad had made us pack. Lee was ahead of me. I had my index finger hooked in his back jeans pocket and the whiskey bottle jostling heavy in my backpack. The ground sucked at our feet like a giant mouth. I watched the globe of the flashlight float ahead of us. I could close my eyes and see just as much as I could with them open.

“I’m okay with that,” I said.

“Our bodies could just float out to sea,” he said.

“Get eaten by whales.”

“Or rescued by dolphins.”

There was no gate, like we thought there might be. We crouched at the edge of the beach where it opened up, wide and public in the dark, studded with lifeguard stands and beach chair kiosks. “Don’t move,” I said to Lee, and leaned on him while I bent one leg and pulled off my boot. Somewhere far off in my mind, I was aware of making excuses to touch him.

“This is good,” he said. “If someone sees us and we get caught, this is your defense—the flamingo.”

“Except we won’t get caught,” I said. I knew this was true as much as I knew my own name, that if there was a God, he wouldn’t allow us to get caught. We were meant to be here, roaming the cooling sand, as much as the noisy water or the yawn of sky; we were just as much a part of the plan.

I took Lee’s hand.

“We’re on our honeymoon,” I said. “If we get caught. We won’t get caught, but if we do. We just got married and we’re on our honeymoon and we’re two young people in love that no cop would ever send to jail.”

“And we had no idea that walking the beach after dark was illegal,” Lee said. His hand felt big in mine. “Two dumb young people in love.”

“We won’t get caught,” I said again.

We stepped from the shore, out of the tall grass, onto the open stretch of sand. I heard nothing but the rush and swallow of the water, the buzzing of the city down the road. No other people in sight. Lee switched off the flashlight and we walked in the blue moonlight. We kept holding hands and we didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, Lee crouched in the sand. “Let’s sit,” he said. He let go of my hand and tugged at my arm like a diver on a rope, two quick pulls to let me know all was well in the depths. I sat next to him and heaved my backpack into my lap. I unscrewed the whiskey bottle with the damp hem of my dress. We smelled like swamp, like wetness and moss and seaweed. We smelled like mermaids. I took a drink of the whiskey before passing the bottle to Lee; one swallow made me sputter and shiver. Goosebumps prickled all over me. Lee laughed and I bumped him with my shoulder. He took a drink, too.

“I wish we really could live here,” I said. “Or at least never leave.” I’d promised my parents that when we got home I’d actually start the process of finding a post-college job. I could see my whole life unspooling in front of me: college to prepare for a job, then a job, an office that would file me down like a river rock and wring the life out of me, this life, the wet Gulf air and ashy grill grit in my hair and the car-window brightness bringing out freckles on my arms like shadows in a photo developing in a chemical bath. I had spent so many hours trying to find what I wanted, but whenever I thought I’d found it, whenever the bell rang deep inside of me, the context didn’t make any sense: country songs on the interstate, the sunshine smell inside my elbows, sitting in the damp sand of the Gulf with my ass wet, slugging whiskey with Lee. As much as I loved those moments, none of them added up to a plan, and I was pressed against a deadline; life demanded a plan. I wanted to change that about life, not just mine but the whole thing, living, being alive: why couldn’t I stay in the places I loved best?

Lee passed the bottle back to me, and when he did, I turned my face and kissed him. He put his hand on my hair. My lips burned from the whiskey and the pressure of his mouth on mine. Even as it was happening, I was thinking: now Lee and I have kissed. I was thinking: this will never happen again. It was a kiss like a punctuation mark, an ellipsis full of longing; I wish we really could live here… I could hear it repeating; I wish we could stay. A kiss that wanted to say more than I could say myself, full of more words than I knew how to pronounce.

I pulled my mouth away from Lee’s and together we made a small version of the sound of the Gulf, the suction of the water breaking at the shore.

We stared at our feet for a few moments, half-buried in the clumping sand. Lee asked if I was crying, turning his face to see mine in the dim light, and I said I might have been. My armpits stung with new sweat.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, in a voice that sounded different from Lee, far away and smaller—like Lee, I thought, mind spinning from the whiskey, if Lee was being swallowed by a whale.

I told him what I was thinking. How sad I felt about the way life worked, always pushing us forward, letting everyone die, everything be lost. Stupid things to be sad about, irreversible, unchangeable things. “I’m a little drunk,” I said. I never drank.

Lee was quiet. He lowered himself onto his back in the sand with his arms up above his head, his whole body open. He pointed up above us, into the sky, the mouth of outer space. “Somewhere out there,” he said, “are billions of universes. More than billions. Enough universes to make billions of you.” He’d read a book about it. In some universes, all the rules would be changed enough that I’d never have to give anything up or say goodbye to anyone. In at least one universe, my life really would be to sit in the sand of the Gulf at night, drinking whiskey with him. I got one night that would never end, that would be my whole life, and I’d be alive forever there. That was science, he said. Proven and real. Somewhere, this was the world.

I didn’t know if it was true. But I held the idea inside me. Like an egg safe in a nest. I laid on my back next to Lee, both of us with our arms above our heads like we were jumping, falling, diving through deep water, trying to sink as fast as we could to the bottom. He lit a cigarette and hummed Neil Young: I was thinkin’ of you and me. I was thinkin’ bout you and me. He’d cut his teeth on those songs when he learned to play guitar.

“Cool honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was sad anymore.

“’Til we get eaten by alligators,” he said, and I screamed “CROCODILES!” and then we laughed so loud that he stuck his cigarette in the sand and put both of his big hands over my mouth, telling me the troops were coming, the sharks would hear us, we were about to get eaten, go to prison, get dragged out to sea. His fingers tasted like tobacco and dirt. The sky spun. The stars spat and gleamed and burned out.

++

Rain falling on the tent woke us, the noise spreading, insistent and sharp as applause. We gathered our pillows, Lee crouched to roll our sleeping bags, and then we ran to the picnic table, holding our bundles above our heads. We slumped against each other, side-by-side in the blue light of very early morning, our cold bare feet on the benches, looking down at matted patches of marshmallow and sour spilled beer. We’d forgotten to put out the lantern; it buzzed next to us, still hauling in bugs. I thought about going back to the Gulf in the daytime, in the light of the whole world, the lifeguards and seagulls; I pictured us walking onto the beach full of our secrets, Lee and me cannonballing into the saltwater among all the whales and crocodiles and seaweed and bobbing up again, clean and buoyant.

Lindsey Gates Markel lives in Urbana, IL and has an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Her thesis featured recurring themes of cats and nipples (but not cat nipples). She never knows exactly what to do with the space at http://www.youareamongfriends.com. Her fiction has previously appeared in Storychord.

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There’s a baby coming out of Lara and Jerry wants a cigarette. In the hospital, smoking is not allowed. Jerry turns to the window and parts the blinds with his fingers. He lets them tremble back against the glass as Lara releases a stream of air from her lips. Jerry feels like he is in a barn, with the horses, and one in the last stall can’t get up, its haunches slick with sweat. The nurse rubs Lara’s glistening calves. Jerry thinks of the empty parking stalls outside. He takes a drag from an imaginary cigarette and blows against the window, creating a tiny circle of fog. He sticks his finger in the middle and forms an even smaller circle, a clearer circle – a window within a window looking out onto the parking lot.

Jerry started going to see Lara not because he fell in love with her, but because he knew he wouldn’t. She became someone to see and someone he didn’t have to talk to: when Jerry talked, he rarely said the right thing.

Lara gave him the sonogram a few months later, on a day she came to see him at the lumberyard. She handed it to him with her upper lip twitching slightly and her fingers trembling as they raked through her hair. Jerry stared at it, holding it up to the light, and looked at the smoky gray thing on the glossy paper.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“That’s our baby,” Lara answered, breathless.

Three days later, Jerry’s wife, Susanne, found it folded in two, stuffed into the back pocket of the jeans he had left on their bedroom floor. Susanne always complained that he lacked common sense: while useful at fixing a loose floorboard or killing the bats that sometimes got into the attic, he usually forgot to turn off the gas stove after making himself breakfast, and Susanne would come into the kitchen a moment later smelling the air like a dog.

“Goddamn it, Jerry,” she would say, flicking off the burner.

She came into the living room while Jerry was watching a basketball game, carrying his jeans in one hand, a stain stick and the sonogram in the other. He was sitting on the couch with his knees spread, a beer bottle balanced on his left thigh.

“Jerry. What the fuck is this?” Susanne waved the picture in front of his face.

Jerry lowered the bottle back to his leg, but it tipped onto the carpet where the dark liquid quickly spread into the fibers. “A baby,” he said.

Susanne packed her bags, throwing her sweaters and underwear into piles on their bedroom floor. Jerry sat on the front stoop smoking a cigarette, watching the neighborhood kids play flashlight tag in the courtyard across the street. When the screen door slammed behind him he put out his cigarette and stood, reaching to grab a bag from Susanne’s hand.

“I got it,” she said, pushing past him towards the street.

“You call a cab?” he asked her.

Her eyes closed. “My mom,” she said.

Jerry pulled another cigarette from his shirt pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “I thought you found a place to live?” His cigarette fell to the ground as he spoke.

Susanne sat on one of her suitcases and Jerry watched it wobble back and forth before she found a steady seat. “I just needed a ride.”

Jerry dusted off his cigarette. “I would’ve taken you.”

Susanne lost her balance and fell, sideways, into the grass. She lay there like the beam of a flashlight from one of the kids, fallen onto the lawn. She sat up and rested her elbows on her thighs, staring out at the courtyard. “Don’t be stupid, Jerry.”

A car pulled along the curb and Susanne threw her bags into the backseat. She turned to face him, leaning over the open passenger door.

“Can you just tell me one thing?” Susanne asked. “Do you love her?”

Jerry looked at Susanne’s face, at the spray of freckles across her nose.

“No.”

Susanne got into the car and set her arm along the open window. “That’s too bad,” she said, as the car moved away.

Susanne watched a lot of crime shows while they were married. She used to watch talk shows and soap operas, hastily changing the channel if Jerry stopped home midday to eat lunch. Her home-based tailoring business began to slow down over the years, so that later, on those lunches at home, Jerry would come across his wife sitting tense on the couch, the detectives on screen poking at some dismembered body.

“I finished early,” she would say, when he asked if she had a lot of sewing left to do.

Jerry always thought the continued viewing of homicides and rapes would give her nightmares, but it only seemed to give her ideas. She would roll over against him in bed until he could smell her toothpaste in the warm breath against his neck. “I want you to hurt me,” she whispered once.

“What?”

“Hold me down, with your knees on either side of my hips. Make me scream.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re such a wimp sometimes, Jerry.”

Jerry rolled over, facing the dappled shadows falling on the closed closet door. “Go to sleep, Susanne.”

Susanne got up and slammed her way into the bathroom. Through the door, he could hear her yell, “Goddamn it, Jerry! You’re supposed to want to fuck your wife!”

When he was a child, Jerry could hear his father’s goats out in their pen in the mornings. The sound of the rusted bells around their necks always seemed to coincide with the dawn, and Jerry would roll over in his bed automatically and look out the window at the hills in the gauzy light. If he kept his eyes open for just a bit longer, he would eventually see his father, his shirttails rippling in the wind and a metal pail swinging in each hand.

Jerry always liked the smell of their fur, as he ran his hands through it backwards, watching the white or black or brown hairs bristle through his fingers. Their smell was like air – like the air Jerry used to believe the mountains smelled like back when nothing but bears and rabbits lived there. It was his job after school to go out into the pens and make sure the goats had enough grass, that the hay and capeweed were spread evenly amongst them. He felt like the shepherds they read about in Sunday school – leading an innocent pack to their food and water. The kids were his favorite. Curious and bleating, the little goats would take his shirt between their teeth and chew. He would pry them off and run towards the fence laughing. The goats would stumble on their new legs and Jerry would prop himself on the wood beams and watch the little families look for food.

Towards the end of every spring, his father killed the male kids that were not needed to mate with the females. The killing seemed more like a personal ritual for his father, rather than serving the purpose he claimed that it did. Slitting the throat, his father would jerk forward once, quickly, and the blood would pour into a bucket sitting on the grass. Some would stain the dry alfalfa beneath their feet. The goat would collapse into his father’s looped arms, his legs on either side of the slack little body, and the eyes would go dull like a mirror covered in dust. In one beautiful, swift movement, his father held the life of one small thing in his hands.

Each spring after the slaughter, Jerry would help his father dispose of the bodies and then go cry behind the garden shed.

Lara was Susanne’s idea, in the first place. She brought her up one night at dinner, over meatloaf and green beans.

“I wish I had someone to wear pretty underwear for, Jerry,” Susanne said. Jerry continued chewing his meatloaf.

“You’ve got some lacy things don’t you?”

“Look at me, Jerry. I’m wearing a man’s shirt and my grandmother’s old shoes.”

Jerry leaned back in his chair and stared at his wife across from him, hands folded in front of her plate, the sleeves of one of his flannels rolled to her elbows. He peered below the table, at Susanne’s gray canvas sneakers sitting atop the fraying rug. He remembered when they were teenagers, and she wore dresses in the summer and sweaters cut low in the winter. He wondered how long it had been since she thought of herself back then. He sat back up.

“You got a cigarette?”

Susanne stared at him a moment and then stood. She walked to the dish on the counter and tossed him her pack of Marlboros. Jerry dug for a match in his shirt pocket.

Susanne sighed and leaned against the counter, playing with the knobs on the stove. “I met this woman, Jerry. At the dentist’s, while I was waiting for Georgiana to clean my teeth.”

Jerry found a match and lit it, cupping his hands around the flame. He went to drop the match in his glass of water but missed, and it landed on a paper towel. Susanne rushed forward and smothered the thing with a damp dishtowel. She crumpled it between her hands and threw it onto the table.

“She was sitting beside me, and she was reading this article in some magazine, called ‘Three’s Company.’ It was about bringing a third person into the bedroom.”

Jerry stared at his wife. Her arms were crossed and she was biting her lower lip, looking at him like he was about to hit her on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. He cracked a smile. “She read it to you or something?”

Susanne sighed. “No, Jerry.”

Jerry finished his cigarette. He looked at his dinner plate, at the juice from the beans pooling around the meatloaf. “Come on, Susanne. I don’t understand what I’m not doing to make you happy.”

Susanne went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer. She set down a pint of coffee ice cream in the center of the table.

“You owe me enough to hear me out for a minute.” Susanne pried the lid off the ice cream and her thumb slid across the surface. She licked it clean. “We both want to try it. She’s coming over on Sunday.”

The next evening, Lara walked through the door in a red rain slicker, carrying a plastic bag full of chocolate bars. Jerry stood from his spot on the couch as Susanne closed the front door. Before he could even hold out his hand Lara said, “They were left over from my nephew’s soccer game,” and dangled the shopping bag before him, just as she would hold the sonogram out to him eight months later.

They sat together in the living room. Jerry looked over at Lara. She seemed so crisp: her silhouette defined by straight dark hair and lips outlined in lipstick. He looked over at Susanne. She looked as if the seams holding her together had been plucked in half with a razor.

“Well,” Susanne said, patting her thighs. “So Lara, you’ve got a nephew? You ever been married? Got any kids of your own?”

“Nope, never married, just my brother.” Lara reached behind her and opened a miniature chocolate bar. “How long have you two been together?”

“Obviously too long,” Susanne said, and both women smiled conspiratorially.

Lara chewed on her chocolate while looking around the living room. “I tried bondage a few times,” she said, swallowing and taking another bite. “But it can get kind of, I don’t know, out of hand pretty quick. You know how guys are.” Lara finished the chocolate.

Susanne was nodding. “I wanted to try some things before, but he refused,” she said. She looked over at Jerry. He felt his mouth drop open, like a fish suffocating on land.

“You watch those Law and Order shows, right?” Lara asked Susanne.

“Yes!” Susanne answered. “I always feel kind of strange but some of the things, well the violent things…” she trailed off and Lara leaned onto her knees.

“You’ve wanted to try them.”

Susanne sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, sighing. “I thought it was only me.”

Jerry felt like the third wheel on a blind date. He watched his wife leaning towards this other woman, becoming relieved by this other woman, falling in love with this other woman. “Can we just cut the bullshit here?” Jerry asked. He coughed into his hand and sat up straighter, trying to think without looking upset or confused. “Why the hell would you even want to do this?” He directed the question at both of them, but looked at Susanne for confirmation.

Susanne jumped from her seat and turned to look at Lara, who stayed sitting with both hands in her lap, the red rain slicker draped over the back of the chair. Jerry felt a warmth spread across his neck as his voice cracked, and he coughed once again into his fist. “I just want to know what the point of this is, Susanne. I’m part of this, too.”

Susanne walked towards him and set both hands on the arms of his chair. He could see the freckles dotting her nose. The first time he ever kissed Susanne, when they were only seventeen, it was outside in the summer, in a field behind his house. It was a kiss so light and so innocent that when Jerry opened his eyes and looked into Susanne’s face, he thought he could see the same thoughts running through her brain. He could see the freckles sprayed across her nose from being so close to her and he touched them with his finger. Susanne smiled, and leaned into him, her head fitting perfectly into the crook of his neck.

Now, in the living room, Jerry wanted to run his fingers along her freckles, one by one, connecting them with touch and air.

“Jerry,” Susanne said. “You have never been a part of this.”

With his wife inches before him and another woman a few feet away, Jerry breathed in Susanne’s smell and felt a swoop of fear through his abdomen. It felt like love, like the most love he had ever felt. He nodded and Susanne smiled, returning to her chair beside Lara. She leaned forward and set her fingers lightly against Lara’s knee.

“I think we’re ready,” Susanne said.

Lara crinkled an empty candy wrapper between her fingers and turned to drop it into the plastic bag. She missed, and it floated to the carpet.

“Let’s see how this goes then,” she said.

Lara led them up the stairs and Jerry found himself wondering if Susanne had told her where their bedroom was before she even came over to meet him. This thought made him feel even more insignificant than before. The hallway seemed crowded and dark, with three bodies in one straight line all headed towards the same destination. In the room, there was a quiet rustling of clothes and of curtains being pulled closed. Susanne had not made the bed and their green quilt was in a lump at the end of the mattress. Jerry kicked off his shoes.

When he and Susanne first began sleeping together, she used to curl into him and stick her feet beneath his legs. She was always cold and with his arm wrapped around her waist beneath the blanket, Jerry felt she was too fragile to exist beside him. Now, Susanne lay naked on the sheet, one arm beneath her head. Lara slid in beside her and kissed her once, lightly on the lips. Jerry wondered if she felt the same warmth he used to give her, next to her in bed.

He didn’t know who to look at or who to touch, and when it was over he excused himself to the bathroom. In the mirror over the sink, he examined his face and couldn’t believe the man looking back at him was the same man who had just moments before hopped out of a bed where two women clawed and grasped at the sweaty skin of his back.

As Susanne lay in bed that night reading a magazine, she was talking rapidly, but Jerry only caught a few words of what she was saying.

“She’s just like me,” he remembered Susanne saying, before she turned out the light and went to sleep.

A few days after meeting Lara, Jerry found he couldn’t stay in bed beside Susanne. He went early to work, spreading the blueprints out before him. While the paper unfurled he imagined the bedspread in his and Susanne’s room, rising and falling with the breath of his sleeping wife. He bought a coffee and brought it back to his office on the construction sight, where he spilled it all over the prints and crumpled them up in a heap, screaming, “Shit” at the plywood walls.

He dug through Susanne’s purse and eventually found a yellow scrap of lined paper with Lara’s phone number scrawled in his wife’s messy handwriting. Jerry looked her up in the phone book and saw that she lived on Melwood, in the new apartment building Jerry’s crew had finished building last spring. He drove there on his lunch break, his arm dangling out of the window of his truck. When he arrived, he took the elevator to the sixth floor and knocked on Lara’s door. He realized on his third knock that it was one o’clock on a Thursday and she was most likely at work. Right as he turned to leave, the door opened and Lara stood before him, hair mussed and eyes barely open.

“Oh. Jerry. Good morning.”

“It’s one o’clock,” he said.

“I work nights at Peter’s.” She cocked her head and rubbed her eyes with her hand. She squinted at him and then smiled. “Come in.” She stepped aside and Jerry entered her apartment. The coffee table and kitchen counter were strewn with fashion magazines and coupon leaflets from the paper; a door was partly open to his left and he saw a pink shower curtain, a canister of self-tanner on top of the toilet.

“Well, can I get you something? Coffee, water? A beer?”

“No, no, I just came to talk to you about something.”

Lara sat on the edge of the couch. Her robe parted a bit and Jerry could see the inside of her thigh. “Oh, I see,” she said.

“It’s not like that, it’s just; I don’t know how to say it.”

Lara stood and stepped towards him. She looked down at his mouth and then up to his eyes, like she was zipping up a pair of pants. “You just didn’t want a threesome, is that it?”

Jerry saw that Lara’s nose was clear, free of freckles. “Yeah,” he said softly.

Lara slid her robe down her shoulders and her breasts hung before him like something out of a painting he once saw in a school art book, sneaking looks at it beneath his desk throughout the day.

Whenever they fucked from that day on, Jerry felt as if he were watching his body do the things it did while he himself floated forth on air from the outside. It was better than being afraid, though; afraid of doing something irreparable. He thought of his father killing goats and the impossible weight of those bodies as they dragged them into the woods. He wondered if Susanne could sense it in his hands when he touched her, the bodies he had pulled behind him. While his callused hands ran over Lara’s skin, he always thought of leaving dirt behind; emptying his body of the past.

The doctor and nurses swarm around the baby that has just emerged from the impossibly small space between Lara’s legs, wiping it of fluid and wrapping it in a pink blanket. A girl, Jerry thinks. Lara leans against the pillows behind her head. She smiles weakly as the nurse brings the pink bundle towards her and sets it in the crook of her arm.

“Would you like to hold your daughter?”

Jerry sees the nurse standing before him, holding his daughter and looking at him like she has the greatest gift to present to him.

“Yes?”

Taking his confusion for ascent, the nurse sets the baby in the crook of his elbow. Her head nestles against the worn flannel of his shirt. Her eyes are slits and the tiny holes of her nose are pinholes in her face.

“I want to call her Margaret,” Lara says from the bed. “Maggie while she’s little.”

Jerry looks down at his daughter and jumps when he realizes he can feel her heartbeat, right there against his skin. He runs his tongue across the front of his teeth and thinks, I made you. Staring down at the little girl in his arms he sees the beginning of a life that is held in his hands. She can either see what the world has laid out before her or remain hidden in her tight cocoon of blankets, protected by his hands. He watches her stirring and allows the wriggling movements of the little body to travel up his arms and down his legs. He feels her in his arms and as he looks at her face he can only wonder if she will develop freckles down the bridge of her nose. Jerry hands Margaret – Maggie – back to Lara.

“I really need a smoke,” he says. “I’ll be outside.”

Jerry stands outside the hospital and smokes a cigarette down to the filter. The sun has set and the darkness around him feels better than that little body in his arms did. He opens his carton of cigarettes and taps another into his palm.

Once, on a day after school, Jerry was in the kitchen making a sandwich when he heard a click on the linoleum behind him. He had left the back door open to let in some fresh air and now, before him, was one of the male kids from the pasture outside. They were tricky things, always finding ways out of their pen and into places where they weren’t allowed. His father would kill him if he saw muddy hoof prints on the kitchen floor. Jerry stepped towards the goat, slowly.

“Come on, guy. Let’s go back outside.”

He went to grab him by the fur around his neck but the goat darted around him, through Jerry’s legs and under the table in the corner of the room. Jerry grabbed a frying pan from above the stove and crawled with it under the table. He smacked the goat on its rump and it scampered out, bleating. Jerry huffed after it, reaching to give it another tap and scare it out the door. But when the pan was raised in his hand, hanging above his head, he lost the weight of it, the feel of iron in his hand, and when he brought it down against the goat’s behind it fell onto the floor, screaming. Jerry knew he broke something, its tailbone or spine, and was sick with the fear that he had done something irreparable, and that his father would scold him for injuring the kid rather than killing it.

He dropped the frying pan to the floor where he didn’t even hear the clatter and grabbed a butcher’s knife from the stand on the counter. He held the goat’s body between his legs and ran the blade across its throat like he had watched his father do dozens of times. But he must not have gone deep enough, because the goat continued to bleat and squirm against him. Jerry began to cry. He gripped the knife until his knuckles turned white and pushed it through the goat’s neck, until it came out the other side. The body fell slack, bleeding, and dropped to the floor.

When Jerry’s father found him an hour later, the goat lay on the floor, its white fur matted with congealed blood. Jerry sat beneath the kitchen table, knees pulled to his chest and fingers still clutching the handle of the bloodied knife.

Beyond Jerry’s reflection, in the lobby, sits a wheelchair. He walks through the automatic doors and sits on it, rolling back and forth. He sees the gift shop ahead and wonders if he should buy a teddy bear, some flowers for Lara. Instead, he rolls outside. He allows the chair to take him past the parked cars, past the empty white lines, past the grass growing baldly through cracks in the gravel. He stops in an empty parking space and spins around. He looks back at the hospital shimmering in the dark.

He used to sit out amongst the goats in the night, when it was so warm it was better than taking a bath or curling up beneath his quilt. They would circle around him and lower themselves onto their knees, their eyes closing and blending in completely with the hair of their bodies. Jerry would lie on his back with the straw beneath him.

Jerry leans back in the wheelchair, tilting his head up. Above, there are so many stars it seems the sky has been punctured, over and over, with a pin.

Joellyn Powers attends the University of Pittsburgh. She has work appearing in Twelve Stories, Big Lucks: Quick Lucks, DOGZPLOT, and Metazen. She blogs at http://especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.

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I saw the mouth outside of an Irish-American bar on Twentieth Street.  She was leaning against the rain break surrounding the building.  She had the prettiest teeth I have ever seen on a mouth:  evenly matched, reflectively white as they glimmered with her every move in the sour streetlamp haze.  Her ruby red lipstick went all the way around her, and I could feel my appreciation, right then and there, beginning to grow, to edge self-consciously upwards.  Her corners tended up, and the whole of her smiled.

I am not in the habit of picking up any stray mouth as soon as I see it, and I was sure if I tried I would have no luck, but something was pushing me.  The lift of her lips was as broad as evolution, and my hands were aching to pry into the depths of her gums.

So we left the downtown and headed into the near carpet-dull suburbs, getting a room at a modest and inexact hotel:  one of those you might stay at with the family when you are making a blue shifted road trip.  It had doors opening from the parking lot outside, so no embarrassing parades through the lobby were necessary.  I sprung for a room with one king bed.   It smelled like kitty litter deodorant, but neither of us cared.

And she was a wonderful mouth.  She could make a sound with her lips that would seem to come from the dark strength of underwater flora, and her teeth would grind like sandpaper on a stripper’s behind.  There were obviously those two contrasting sides to her.  I fell into her incisors and sang simple lust to her molars.  I lolled about her lips like a cat on a warm afternoon exploring every inch of the sun on a carpet.  I felt pity for the maids who would reclaim the room the next day, as lipstick was everywhere like the blood of a machine driven sacrifice.

I had intended to rise in the morning, head out to breakfast, leave cab fare on the table.  I pulled back the sheet for a last stroke of the brazen, snake hearted lips and there she was:  a tongue now.  Long and languorous she stretched nearly the length of the bed: dimples rough on the cheap one-man sheets, the tip curled around one of the extra pillows.

What can a normal man, with normal urges and wants, do?  I could have been out like the sound of a tape dispenser.  I could have left a twenty, balled my memories into my socks, and bolted.  But the way that tongue might curl; the things she might be able to do as a tongue; the growth of her experience as a mouth salaciously imbued with the texture of a tongue:  the imagination of this kept me transfixed.

The tongue released its grip on the pillow, flattened itself out, and then began so seductively to roll itself up.   The saliva was drying on the sheets, but remained crystal beads against her thundering pink.   I called the front desk and stretched my credit card limit for another night.

Ken Poyner is appearing in the coming year in “Corium”, “Cream City Review”, “Emprise Review”, “The Adirondack Review”, and elsewhere.  He lives with his power lifter wife in the lower right hand corner of Virginia and is surrounded by thecost of keeping up a house.  He started out in the small presses in the 70s, and recently is getting ever more forward with the web.

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I stole a purse from a middle-aged woman at the Claire’s in the mall. She yelled, and they gave chase, but I was faster out the emergency exit. It was just tucked under her arm, no strap, so available amongst all of that pink.

The take was $176 cash, cards, the keys to her home and Honda.

On the keychain, something grey, round, furry and Japanese. I recognized its squashed, smiling face and whiskers, the white belly and pointy ears—a Totoro, a woodland spirit from an 80’s anime. I cupped it in my palm the whole way home, stroking its fur with my thumb.

I threw everything away outside our building except the cash, keys, two tampons and a compact I’d found in the purse. Amy might need those.

I put the other stuff in the bathroom before showing Amy the Totoro. She knew it, of course. The movie had always been a part of her collection, and she liked to say that she’d caught on to Miyazaki before his stuff got so popular. “Aww, he’s adorable,” she said, touching it to her nose. “You found this at the mall?”

I boiled water for ramen in the kitchen and looked out at her. Amy had already hooked the Totoro to her keys, toying with it as she watched TV. Her black hair, her painted eyebrows, her boots.

When she came to the table, the keychain clicked against her thigh. I thought, it’s kawaii, it’s just cute. An anime fetish.

I had trouble sleeping that night. It wasn’t guilt, exactly, but something more fundamental, arbitrary and honor-driven.

Imagine: the myth of the suburban woman on her period buying junky stuff for her daughter at the mall, carrying icons of Japanese spirits in her bag. You wonder how she ended up, how she made it home. I turned to look at Amy. She lay on the bed with her back to me. I felt unbearably exposed.

In the morning, the Totoro had vanished from Amy’s keychain. I speculated that he’d gone back to his tree in the countryside. On my way out, I paid the landlord our outstanding rent.

After work, I drove to the mall and sat on the bench outside Claire’s, watching. I’ve always been the kind of guy who goes back.

I knew the woman behind the counter recognized me—shaved head, earlobes stretched an inch wide, I’m hardly inconspicuous. Inside, she picked up the phone and called security.

I sat there, kneading the little plush totem in my hand, waiting for judgment. I felt myself slipping into folklore. I smelled camphor.

Simon Jacobs attends a minute college in the Midwest. He edits the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for fiction under 30 words, and serves as the flash fiction editor of Flywheel Magazine. He builds tiny things for people he loves and leaves them at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.

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The first time the place burned,
I was fifteen and awake enough
to wait outside,
vainglorious,
orange of eye,
to kneel amidst the ashes
and comb my blackened fingers
in their lunar surface.

I was reminded of that brown worm,
years ago, dragged in my hands
as I drew raking swirls in
the earth,
or of the trails of bicycle tires,
loose comets that helix in the dust.
I was now a swirl of dust,
I would be black smoke.

When I burned, my fingers raked jagged lines
on the air.

John Phillips is a professional musician in the wilderness of middle Georgia, a magician on the side. He performs illusions and sleight-of-hand with wood, strings, sticks, paper, words, and cards.

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It was the most intimate way
we’d ever touched: his belly
reddened by the pulp of berries
I picked on our hike with my parents’
little dog in tow.
The curved autumn moon,
already visible in the afternoon,
made him feel self-conscious.
He was cold, hard,
ready to return to the car.
But I stopped and told him
I felt like a giraffe, tall and awkward
and all alone. His eyes never strayed,
even when I rubbed the juice hard
into his course, black hair, searching.
He wanted to kiss me, but he never did.
And when I hear his name,
I still feel stickiness on my hands.

K. A. Wisniewski is the editor of The Comedy of Dave Chappelle: Critical Essays (2009). His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Chariton Review, Raintaxi: Review of Books, CAIRN: The St. Andrews Review, The Chiron Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, and The Maryland Historical Magazine. He has taught at Widener University, Stevenson University, and Cecil College and currently lives in Baltimore, MD.

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You don’t have to come
back here mixing my pot
lesson learned flail fists
are good for nothing
except wooden spoons
beating thoughts whipping
human communication out
of the sector for united
division getting all AMEN
on your ass I’m nothing
synced can’t flow back
to my momma the canal
of fury birth wears a disaster
in the soil under the feet
of all women as is life
I am man in an age of pot
I mean a melting pot sticky
as we tumble onto each other
like dumb geese on the bank
of a hot boiling lake.

Tyler Gobble is lead editor of Stoked Journal and a contributor with Vouched Books. His poems have recently appeared with or are forthcoming from PANK, Country Music, Used Furniture Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. Later this year, his chapbooks, Please Tell Me You Have Good News (H_NGM_N Books) and Stale Champagne (Artistically Declined Press), will be released. Find more at http://www.tylergobble.com.

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My luck sinks into things
yearning to be lost.

I keep unless obliged
to sleep.

That’s their chance.
In the big black,

I’m lost myself.
That’s peace.

It never lasts.
There’s awakening

to shambles & schemes.
Death promises impossibilities

like a campaigning mayor.
Sometimes I believe,

knowing better, all the same.

J. Tarwood has published poems in Free Lunch, American Poetry Review, American Poetry Monthly, BAD, Big Muddy, Buckle &, Bryant Literary Review, Rockhurst Review), Pike’s Creek, Blue Mesa, Eratica, Calliope, Coe Review, Front Range Revie, Natural Bridge, Willow Review, Yet Another Small Magazine, Rio, Rhino, Paris/Atlantic, Phantasmagoria, California Quarterly, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Lilies & Cannonballs, Colere, Poetry Ireland, Wind, Grassroots, Poetry Motel, Midwest Quarterly, Main Street Rag, White Pelican Review, Quantum Tao, Red River Review, Rapid River, Spiky Palm, Runes, Terra Incognita, Visions, and Plainsong. In 1997, he won a Plainsong poetry award, and was a featured poet in Visions in 2001. One of his poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003. He also has two books published, The Cats in Zanzibar, and Grand Detour.

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And I claim, quite simply, that it was his shoes:
how sitting in his den for our talk he told me
“facts so you’ll know” which I could never refute
because I did not know but only felt and could never
say to him, my father, who never heeded the boy
in the earth of me, my wish for quiet
deep abiding quiet of heavy blue smouldering Florida
the off shore breeze keeping the waves still, fat rolling noiselessly
out of nylon and breasts and rears and palm trees
standing sleepy attention, mortal before condominium,
skin the scent of lotion. . . .

My father! I looked at the perfect leather of
the soles of his shoes, the untouched heels, how nothing
was worn, how when he crossed his legs to make
his points wave on wave he showed the underside
as if he knew this too would stop me, my faint
wonderings, the voice inside that hummed.

And instead, I looked out over the penthouse balcony
out past the sound of air-conditioning, of money, out
beyond the elevators that raised the dead, the long hallway
and locked door, the wheelchair outside the bathroom
for Mother—and considered the magnificence the sheer
finality of the gesture of leaping into the common humidity
the air of possibility and so bring this hopeless boy
down onto the tennis court to release me here
for this hearing where you have asked
and I have answered that it was his shoes
don’t you understand? his perfectly clean
and unused shoes.

Richard Stolorow has been an English teacher, bartender, gardener, handyman, concierge, and book store clerk, in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, New Mexico, and now in Rhode Island, and has enjoyed seeing many of his poems and stories in literary magazines.

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Around a corner, names
from the Civil War
mark the rock faces,
dates, initials from before.

Our grandparents in ties
and pendants, Sunday finest,
added their names where they
found space on the same

rocks as us, uplifted
from bright sea. Spring
after spring, tulips mark
the ground like this,

yellow struck with orange,
sparks of fallen stars.
I could fill my hands
(pick them up, baby girl,

until your hands can hold
no more). We walk
around and in the core
of stone, a sport

to squeeze, to climb
on sandstone perfectly
cleaved. Inside the city,
children hiking

scream. We are three
miles south of where
the glaciers stopped, soft
stone, lichen, tulip

trees, everything
above me.

Angie Macri was born and raised in southern Illinois. Her recent work appears in Ecotone, The Pinch, and Third Coast, among other journals, and is included in Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, she teaches in Little Rock.

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Despair has taken on the shape
each cloud leaves afterwards
–you reach across the hole

one hand crazed
a moon rising from the other
as if there were crossroads

and the sky winds down
into evenings that are not yours
–an unbearable headwind

weakened past sorrow, past drift
past sleep and your breath lies down
where nothing holds on

–you don’t save the pieces, it’s useless
–you look up and the air
little by little is led

past emptiness :the no lips
that are not a face, not a voice
and from your arms.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at http://www.simonperchik.com.

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Speak to me via the somnolent satraps, the gilded trickle of kerosene
rays hiking up hemlines of the shore and everything dusk-terrained
the ironing boards of backs pointing north, lodestar the electric surf
quivering an aria to the command of la lluna, we are approaching the
quintessential rigor mortis of a day broken into like new shoes dead
skin of an animal about to go extinct. there is some noise about
departure the accursed meteorology of seasons through lack and love
fingers woven into one another like shoestrings. bulbs blinking
all senses piqued by the trigger of newspapers fluttering like small
birds defying storms, this fatality filtering through your DSLR
this window, a flotsam of demand and dearth, sand and surge
the hue of weather sleeting your eyelids like ryu’s transparent
blue. collect your variables, affirm your constancies, nature will
resurrect your fault-lines like slithering tracks of trains and the earth
quake will seize the diem, dream the seizure, your body its birthplace

Scherezade Siobhan is a late blooming provocateur from Bombay, India. She is a behavioral profiler and a rose whisperer of sorts who perennially suffers from fernweh. Also, she likes swords. She has been published in Muse India, Gutter Eloquence, Whale Sound, Mixed Fruit, Blue Fog Journal, Danse Macabre and a few others. She is also nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Small Country”. Forthcoming poem in Compass Rose’s March’2012 print issue.

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Admit it, you might be driving through North Dakota
imagining the movie you’d make, if that movie was your life
a string of Oscar moments, where you actually kissed the crushes
of your adolescent days, sent the suicide notes

composed in your mind, running the camera close up
on people’s faces as they read your desperation. Did they really love you
or was it all montage—fantasy trips to Paris, pillows, and fade to black,
your funeral, the volume turned up, the camera igniting

the glow of your reflection as they sob and say beautiful things.
It’s all about unleashing your inner plot
driving recklessly down the highway, which is lined with sunflowers,
and bland as toast. Your life, the perfect tragi-comedy,

as the cop pulls you over, close to the Montana border,
and you imagine the non family-friendly version of the movie
as they clip on the cuffs. This might be the best thing that’s ever happened.
You can imagine escape, and thriller chase scenes,

a clock ticking toward the death you can’t escape from
even if you’ve never had the intention of ending your life
a second earlier than fate intended.
Ah, fate! If only you’d already divined the end.

D. Dina Friedman’s poems have been published in many literary journals including, Calyx, Anderbo, Bloodroot, Pacific Poetry and Fiction Review, Inkwell, Slant, and Hurricane Alice. She is also the author of two young adult novels Escaping Into the Night; and Playing Dad’s Song. Visit her website at http://www.ddinafriedman.com.

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Not a leaf remains.
Every branch stripped bare
but for a score or more
of apples in the highest boughs
that haven’t fallen yet.

Drawn by the sweet smell
the starving deer circle beneath
dazzled in their need
as any human by desire
for the ripeness out of reach.

Sarah Brown Weitzman has had work in numerous journals including THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, AMERICAN WRITING, POTOMAC REVIEW, AMERICA, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, THE BELLINGHAM REVIEW. Her second chapbook, THE FORBIDDEN (2003, Pudding House) was followed by NEVER FAR FROM FLESH, a full-length volume of poems (Pure Heart/Main Street Rag, 2005). Weitzman received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A former New York academic, Weitzman is retired and lives in Florida.

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Roberta Pantal Rhodes has had short stories published in Confrontation, Parting Gifts and other literary journals. Her children’s chapter book, “Beauregard the Cat,” was published by Mondo publishing. She has also won first prize at the Writer’s Voice for hershort story, “She Will Not See the Tears.” Promenthean has published some of her poems.

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David Michael Schmidt was born in Winnetka, Ill in 1942. He has been a retail entrepreneur since 1967. He began to write poetry in 2009, writing only rhymes and self published a collection of 50 poems along with some illustrations that he drew. He now also writes free verse and short stories. His poems are sometimes cynical and humorous and can be controversial. He has written opinions and observations on subjects of religion, politics and life in general. He does write about nature but does not write love poems. He is very creative and likes to keep changing and evolving. He enjoys writing poems that make people think.

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Mark J. Mitchell studied writing and medieval literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz with Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, Barbara Hull and Robert M. Durling. His work has appeared in the anthologies Good Poems, American Places (Viking/Penguin), Line Drives (Southern Illinois University Press), Hunger Enough (Puddinghouse Press) and Zeus Seduces the Wicked Stepmother in the Saloon of the Gingerbread House (Winterhawk Press). His chapbook, Three Visitors, won the 2010 Negative Capability Press International Chapbook competition and will be published later this year. His poems have also appeared in many magazines over the last twenty years, including J Journal, kayak, Blue Unicorn, Black Bough, Santa Barbara Review, Pearl, Runes, Buddhist Poetry Review and Poem.

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Colleen Payton earned her M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. She teaches college writing, literature and humanities at the Art Institute of Atlanta, and writes about the arts forAtlanta Magazine, Dance Magazine, Native Peoples, Dance Spirit, Chattanooga Magazine, Hispanic Magazine, Ballet-Tanz , based in Berlin, and other publications. Her poetry has appeared in The King’s English, Recovery, Nostalgia and Oklahoma Today.  During the most recent decade, Payton has presented at several academic conferences. Her work of scholarship, “The Stage as Battleground: Ballet. Opera and Gender Politics in the Age of Giselle” will be published in the Journal of the Colloquium of the Revolutionary Era, 2009-2010 compendium.

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Elizabeth Yalkut is a novelist and poet. She works as a front-end web developer in Washington, D.C., and blogs about food at her website, http://www.elizabethyalkut.com. She graduated from Emma Willard School and Barnard College, Columbia University.

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Mark Jackley is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Every Green Word (Finishing Line Press), and a full-length collection, There Will Be Silence While You Wait (Plain View Press). He lives in Sterling, VA.

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William Bradley’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, including Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Chronicle of Higher Education, College English, and The Missouri Review.  He’s no longer a dog person, but he has two cats who demand most of his attention and affection.

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Ethel Rohan is the author of “Hard to Say” (PANK, 2011) and Cut Through the Bone (Dark Sky Books, 2010). Visit her at ethelrohan.com.

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Jacqueline Doyle’s flash and lyric prose can be found in 5_trope, elimae, flashquake, blossombones, Tattoo Highway, Prime Number Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Staccato Fiction, Thumbnail, LITnIMAGE, and Everyday Genius, among others. She has recent fiction and creative nonfiction in Front Porch Journal, Pear Noir!, Blood Orange Review, Prick of the Spindle, Bartleby Snopes, and California Northern Magazine.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at California State University, East Bay.

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Jimmy J. Pack Jr. is a part-time lecturer in writing at Penn State, Abington and is currently attending the Creative Writing MFA program at Temple University where he is working on his first creative nonfiction “novel” titled Dispatches to America: A Route 66 Memoir, of which “Frantic Fantastic Life in Oklahoma” is a part. Much of his writing and photography of Route 66 can be found at www.jimmyjpackjr.com. He has been published in Rosebud, Lost on Route 66: Tales from the Mother Road, Pinion, The Rockford Review,Bluestem, The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Evansville Review, Concho River Review, Taproot, Willard & Mapleand Cooweescoowee, with forthcoming publications in American Road Magazine.

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