11/30/2021 0 Comments Imperfection by Basil Rosa Tony Webster CC Imperfection What I trust is the cold. It doesn’t lie. It will kill you if you let it and it will show no mercy. I take it like a narcotic or a reward that I think I deserve. I take it after sex, either rolling over afterwards toward a window draft, or getting out of bed and lighting out for other spaces. I tend to enjoy the cold alone, allowing myself to unwind, get lost and stay lost. It’s winter now, January, and I’m sipping a beer on the back porch of my parent’s house. They’re in Hawaii visiting my brother. I’m housesitting for them. I’ve never been to Hawaii. Not interested. It’s not cold enough there. I prefer shivering in my sweatpants under the stars, letting the air dimple my skin. Out on the ol’ back deck, the one my brother Frank built the summer before he enlisted in the Coast Guard – more solid now since I’ve spent the last week re-enforcing its support posts. Been a long time since I’ve seen Frank. He liked the cold, as well, spent a lot of time in faraway spaces such as Newfoundland until frostbite ate at his fingers once too often and he developed a degenerative skin disease that can only be mitigated by living in a warm climate. So, he moved to Florida. Not the place for me. Not hardly. The deck is littered now with plastic children’s toys. More junk made in China. America’s drug of choice. My folks love being grandparents and can’t do enough for the new little ones, all of them adorable. Are my brothers’ wives sisters-in law, or sister-in-laws? Who knows? Who cares? Well, I do. I should look this up once and for all. I let the cold heal me of dread. I’m glad to be alone and I feel the night in a proper way – glacially with no connections to anything – my ghosts aren’t returning with baskets full of thoughts that a clear-headed morning might bring. My ghosts and a little faith has served me well. Not as much, though, as my family has. I’d be nowhere without them. If God should love anyone for their diligent self-sacrifice, it’s both of my parents. I know this, but does God? I wonder if my parents do. I’m glad they’ve gotten away, for a change. Glad to be the only one still single and around more often, able to help out. I suppose as one of their sons with all my inconsistent luck, I prove to them that preparation only gets one so far. Luck makes a difference. And who you know. I heard this from my parents constantly while growing up. I’m living it now and prone to explaining my situation by sharing with them what they already know. Laughable really, but I suspect all part of the journey that’s parenthood. I met an old friend today and as I sit in the cold I start recalling how he told me that after getting deployed in Iraq he knew God, and he’d lived a charmed life as an Army mining engineer – his title – and he’d poked and prodded, done his job, and he’d found an IUD or two fighting for Uncle Sam. He’d had his share of close calls, but he’d made it home. He didn’t rank that high, but he still had, as he said, “His nuts and all his limbs.” I was pleased to witness he was fully intact, though the look in his eyes suggested a few screws had come loose. Maybe they’ll tighten up now that he’s a civilian again. I don’t know what he was fighting for. I mean, I wish I knew, and I appreciate his sacrifice, but I don’t feel any more or less safer, though I’m sure plenty of Iraqis are pissed off that some foreign power occupied their country and blew an ancient city like Baghdad to smithereens. I wonder if historians will make sure we remember President Bush on TV calling it a “shock and awe” campaign. God must love a bullshit artist too. So, why am I still alive? What have I ever done for others? I don’t have answers. Wars will continue. I can trust these two points as much as I trust the cold. Earlier, I was looking at a photo of my youngest brother, Joseph, the first of us five boys to marry. He’s already divorced, though he has three daughters and is still fighting a prolonged battle for custody and the house. All rather ugly thanks to his ex’s ability to find the cruelest bitch on the planet as a lawyer. In the photo, it’s clear at that time Joseph loved his wife and his newest baby daughter. He’s holding that daughter high in one arm and he’s beaming as she kisses him all over his face. Maybe the only thing to trust more than the cold is a child’s unconditional love. It’s a comfort to think this, but I’m rational, a doubter and I expect no guarantees. I close my eyes and imagine my niece’s tiny hands pawing at my brother’s face. She has the same blue seas in her eyes as Daddy does. It’s simple, I suppose. Be there with children, support your own kin, make yourself happy. Yet even when I feel happy, I feel like I don’t deserve it. As if I’ve done nothing special and have no right. Blowing a sigh, staring at the stars. Shivering in the cold. Stress, nervousness about the future, but I like being out here. I love the silence. I savor the adrenalin as it churns, my body temperature plummeting. Each day is a form of deliverance, a chance to awaken and face who I am and to improve – to draw back the barriers curtains of imagined and impossible equivocations. Nothing is complete or fully realized. Imperfection defines us in the cold. Money. Distractions. All of it tedious, mostly. Maybe I’ll join the French Foreign Legion. Nah, too much sun. Besides, it’s all behind me, all that adventuring about. Time to settle in and keep it dull for a while. I’ve been dating these women, spending all my money on them. None really want me, it seems. I have to force my good graces on them. Have to work too hard. I need to find one who likes the cold. I’m tired of the ones I’ve met, and there have been many, of late, with their opinions and diets and pretentious designer-label fashion choices. Some of them, and this isn’t a gender thing though maybe it’s an American thing, have struck me as crybabies who’ve never gone a day without enough grub to shovel down their gullets. I do like women, though. I will marry one day, I’m sure of this. I dream of her. She comes to my, my wife, an answered prayer, a friend. Maybe she’s just not an American girl. It’s right, I think, to trust all links to the Almighty. I haven’t always felt this way. I suspect time has been working its charms on me in a baffling unique way. It’s opened me the way it’s opened my old man, my Pop, my father so proud of his sons. None of us has become locked into a Cain and Abel relationship. As brothers, we get along with each other and this pleases the old man, who never had a brother of his own. Sure, he doesn’t care to talk too much and he gets turned off whenever I start ranting on about global villages and international imperatives and feeling betrayed by government. This comes from my mother’s side of the argumentative beast inside of me. I just come right out and say it. Though my father did like when I told him I couldn’t condone any political system that would punish those with initiative. He also told me in his indirect way that he was more than disappointed, that he sometimes despised the military action in Iraq as much as he despised what he called the corrupting influence of the country’s growing welfare state. Yeah, my old man is old-school guarded and complicated, the opposite of my mother, who gets injured so often because she tends to remain open. Before they left for Hawaii, we were talking politics and I told them over dinner, “The bastards say what they want. They lie. There’s absolutely no more shame or accountability. Frankly, I don’t know why people put up with it.” What is a parent supposed to say to that? They’re both insightful, so they think first, long and hard, before venturing to say a word. In my father’s case, as if he’s far away on another coast, he often says nothing. My mother might respond, in private, but she’ll defer to my father and remark that I should probably take up political issues with him when it’s just the two of us. They’ve been married nearly fifty years. I wonder if during all that time they ever worried about or considered a divorce. It’s not a topic I’ve ever discussed with them. I wouldn’t know how, wouldn’t feel right doing so. They’re not a perfect couple, but they’re my folks – like a solid, impregnable fortress that as a boy I could go to as a place to hide from all the pain the outside world had inflicted on me. It was the only place where I sure of my allegiances. A stable element in my life, a marriage of sorts, with Mom on one shoulder and the old man on another. Amen. Yet nothing is stable. A man gets lucky if he meets a good woman. She’ll open him. But not me. Not this night, anyway. I’m icy and want to stay this way. I have the cold the way I like it – with no suggestion of any buzzing or ripples. The stars like talons that scratch at me from the inside out, ripping away the igloo walls that hold captive all my memories. Sure, I can love someone. It’s possible. I can be a father to the shining source of great gladness in life, though I’m not really sure I can love or trust another person after seeing so many of their faces in the sand of my dreams, knowing they’re all strangers, holding that carnivorous look that rarely softens. Those faces, my ghosts, the dead and living that define what lives and rots frozen inside. I’ve seen too much so quickly that it’s as if I’ve seen nothing at all. Time. Sort it out and heal and expect no promise the sorting will amount to anything other than more derangement. Still, I won’t sleep with a gun under my pillow. Let them come, either from April springs or in Jeeps that have been rolling days over distant horizons. If I’m not one then I’m two, telling my other selves where I’m going or if I’m coming back. It’s never too late for innocence, mercy, forgiveness and patience, but the rest of it – at least for now and maybe forever – it might all be too late for. Have to laugh. I feel like one of the chosen few, though I don’t what that means. I sleep in the nude and wake from nightmares just like anyone else. I continue to live without ever fully understanding my own fears and conflicted identity. The sky, it’s like an opened fridge on a hot day and I’m sweating as I reach in to get myself a beer. I must let life happen, just I let the cold of night become the place I’ve dreamt of as a home. I hug myself. Pins and needs shingle up the sweat of my back and my ears begin to ring. Basil Rosa also writes as John Michael Flynn. His first book of essays, How The Quiet Breathes, was published in spring 2020 by New Meridian Arts. His published story collections include Dreaming Rodin, from Publerati, and his most recent, Off To The Next Wherever, from Fomite Books (www.fomitepress.com). Visit him at www.basilrosa.com.
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Robert Sarkozi CC Canticle of a Mooring Collaboration This house has held me within its walls; the vault of its gabled roof beckons my ambitions to breathe. The “unknown flowers,” known to me, emerge here without expectation. Though unnoticed, their beauty is undiminished. The sound of gravel ground beneath my scuffed leather soles is a simple song of liberation. Cement stairs adorned with ash are a refuge for my drifting soul, a momentary respite from perpetual disorientation. An empty bottle and white silk flag stand guard outside the window, a signpost to surrender. My knuckles rap gently against the door. Waiting, I anticipate the warmth of a maternal love. As the door swings open, a swell of comfort washes over me – safely stowed in a home that has never been mine. I tuck myself into the crevice of a plaid loveseat, cradled by lines of burgundy and pine. A menagerie of abandoned treasures sits atop the coffee table. A stack of napkins from a take-out order, a small glass pipe, unopened mail, a roll of gaff tape, and half-consumed glass of yesterday’s water comprise today’s assortment. The thin curtain rods twist at unusual angles, and the drapes do little to address the sun. A tapestry hangs on the adjacent wall concealing pockmarks from unencumbered artistic expression. I know this room and the yellow vase they never wanted, the long beige couch with the cinderblock for a makeshift leg, and the rotating collection of lights and film equipment that congregate in the corner. These four white walls are a fortress that defend my spirit from the vultures that pluck me away from myself. Once he’s shut the door, he groggily enters in his all-terrain shoes. His hair is askew and his eyelids heavy, still waking from an afternoon of dysregulated slumber. This man has held me within this house with little more than the balm of his words. He is understanding. Encouragement flows from his lilting voice. He pulls laughter from my wreckage. Our sauntering conversation soothes; the weight of external demands dissipates. We are constructing characters, birthing worlds, and in our building, I heal. There is a patience in the way he speaks, compassion in his questioning. My work is better in his hands, and I am better for it. Creation for him seems effortless, conjuring and articulating with precision. Pouring over scholarly journals, we search for direction, pursuing accuracy. Occasionally the current of internet persuasion drags us deep into the realm of the superfluous. We emerge with knowledge we’ll never need - the journey into the unnecessary leaving me refreshed. He takes my will nots and makes them won’ts, my cannots and makes them can’ts. Clumsy dialogue becomes vernacular, the plot holes filled, our story enriched. At times I wish he could fix me too, but I am learning to stand in my brokenness. For months I’ve carried fragmented shards of self through this doorway, our hours spent pouring over words, searching for the path that takes us to the end. As golden hour descends, the porch ablaze with radiance, we finally find our way. This piece is inextricably ours. I can no longer decipher which contributions are mine and which are his. We have unearthed our denouement - an offering forged in the security of his care. A pinch of pride rests in my palm, consumed by a sea of sorrow. Cowriting this story has unalterably changed mine. Briefly, I rest in the solace of this holy cluttered sanctuary, calmed by his tender intelligence. The sound of gravel beneath my scuffed leather soles is a mournful dirge. I’m never ready to leave. Her sturdy white pillars tinged pink with sunset frame him as he lights a cigarette. I am strengthened by their nourishing. I want this image of him standing, sheltered by her lofty beams, stored in my mind’s repository - a lodestar to combat my aimlessness. Perhaps this ache of loss is preemptive, and we straddle the empty space between two chapters. But when our narrative is complete, my heart will shatter in gratitude. Christina Ray Henry is a Midwestern mother who loves elephant nose shrew, croissants, and the decision paralysis that comes with ethical decision making. 11/30/2021 0 Comments The Summer of 77 by Emily Rich Simon CC The Summer of 77 Do you think Dorothy Hamill ever feels pain? How could she? She’s America’s sweetheart. Look at her smiling out from the covers of Time and Seventeen, flipping her bobbed hair for Clairol’s Short and Sassy shampoo, a product created just for her. Watch clips of her on TV as she turns in her gold medal performance in Innsbruck, gliding effortlessly over the ice, weightless and yet perfect in her red flounced skate dress. She doesn’t seem of this world; as if she exists on a plane far far removed from the lame existence of the rest of us. ++++ “You look like a walking skeleton!” my older sister, Audrey, laughed the day I came downstairs in shorts a new halter-top. “You shouldn’t even try to wear a shirt like that.” Halter tops were for girls like Audrey all curvy hips and breasts. A 14-year old bombshell. Hair curled back like Farah Fawcett, full lips coated with clear, shiny gloss. Next to her, I might as well have been made out of pipe cleaners. ++++ “One of my colleagues said he saw me walking with a beautiful woman the other day,” Dad said one night at the dinner table. He gazed at Audrey, his favorite. “I said, ‘Oh no, that was my daughter…but she is quite a piece!” Audrey blushed and laughed quietly and looked down at her food. What else could she do? I mean, we were all afraid of Dad. ++++ “I think this is going to be your year to get a boyfriend!” Maureen exclaimed. Maureen was my best friend, wildly more adventurous and outgoing than me. I played the role of admiring sidekick. We were walking barefoot along the grassy medians of Denver’s 7th Avenue Parkway, with grand brick houses standing aloof and decorous on either side, like fortress walls around our charmed upper-middle-class enclave in the city. Maureen was already on her second boyfriend at Bromwell Elementary. But we were headed off to Junior High now, and I needed to catch up. ++++ Aside from me, the Patterson family was solid in stature. Dad had his big stomach and wide bottom, Mom, full chest and broad thighs. But I was built differently: sapling thin, all poking out ribs and collarbones and spindly, bowed-back legs like a stork. “You’re likely to blow away in a windstorm!” Mom teased. “You’re built just like my mother,” Dad snipped. Audrey in her form-hugging T-shirt just sneered. Pathetic. I came to think that being thin was the worst thing you could be in my family. I didn’t yet realize there could be something worse. ++++ Maureen was anxious to move things along where boys were concerned. She’d been practicing make out techniques on her pillow, she told me, just like the girl in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. But I wasn’t so sure what the rush was about. I’d never had a boyfriend, had barely even talked to a boy. The thought of kissing the mouths of any of the boys in my class at Bromwell made me gag. And making out with a boy? I couldn’t even imagine it. I’d seen Audrey “making out” with her boyfriend, Len, enough times to know that was not for me. Len was a tall lanky boy with a blond afro and enormous Adam’s apple, who sometimes rode the bus home with her from Academic Prep. I caught them more than once on the basement sofa, mashing their faces together as he frantically kneaded the front of her shirt. It was an ungainly display. And then, some of the things Audrey told me she and Len did when no one was around were almost just too disgusting to envision: how she put her hands down his pants and rubbed his “thing” while he worked his fingers up inside her “hole.” If that’s what having a boyfriend meant, you could count me out. Still, it would be nice to have boys notice me and think I was pretty. ++++ “I mean, Morey is huge!” said Maureen. “You’re going to meet all kinds of new people. You know what you should do? You should cut your hair. I’m growing mine out, but you should cut yours. Get a new look, like Dorothy Hamill.” My long stringy hair was pretty lifeless, it was true. Yes, a Dorothy Hamill haircut! That could change everything. As I walked home from Maureen’s house that evening, I held myself erect like a skater, picturing a perky bob of hair, flipping about, catching the eyes of boys as I glided through the halls of Morey Junior High. ++++ I’d heard Dorothy Hamill trained in Colorado Springs. Close by. Maybe she was there that afternoon it happened, the day my dad pulled Audrey out of the shower. Maybe she was perfecting her routine for the Ice Capades, spinning and spinning in a cotton-candy leotard above this world above us all. But I was there and Mom was there the day Dad pulled Audrey out of the shower. I saw Audrey’s body, pink from the steam, red where Dad had hit her. I saw her round breasts, exposed, as she thrashed against his grip. I saw Mom standing in the hallway white legs in white shorts knees slightly buckled mouth a thin firm line. Immobile. I was used to Dad’s violence, we all were. The back of his hand, the sole of his shoe, the grip of his fingers in your hair before your head went into a wall. But this was something different. Dad in the shower with naked Audrey. Something perverse. And I spun on the carpet screaming stop stop stop to an audience that didn’t respond. ++++ Summer ended and seventh grade began. I got that Dorothy Hamill haircut after all, but I didn’t bother to style it. It slumped like a bowl of soup poured over my head as I boarded the bus for Morey Junior High. It didn’t matter. By then I had stopped caring, stopped talking even. Even to Maureen. Any thought of getting a boyfriend had been blacked out from my mind. ++++ Did you know Dorothy Hamill suffered from depression? I read that somewhere. And yet, there she is, sparkling and smiling for us all. Part of me feels sad about this, part of me admires her all the more. The things a person can survive. It just goes to show. Emily Rich is managing editor of the Bay to Ocean Journal, published by the Eastern Shore Writers Association. She has taught memoir writing at the Bethesda Writer’s Center and through the Lighthouse Guild at Salisbury University. Her work has been published in The Pinch, Cutbank, Hippocampus, Delmarva Review, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. She’s twice been listed as a notable in Best American Essays. She lives in Trappe, MD with her husband and three hyper Labradors. 11/30/2021 1 Comment Lady in Red by Kerry Trautman Simon CC Lady in Red As a little girl dressing Barbies, I assumed I would someday have breasts. Titties, boobs, smooth billowy cleavage men and women alike long to rest their cheek against for a nap or nibble. But I didn’t grow them. A week before prom, my date told me he met a girl on spring break, showed me her picture, said he was confused. I knew before seeing the photo that she would have exuberant Cs ready to pounce on the lens. I wasn’t confused. I knew exactly what I lacked. He said he still wanted to take me to prom, said he’d have more fun with me than her. My mom had already made my red dress. The closest thing to a compliment my mother ever gave me was saying, You’re so skinny you make me sick with a smile. What she meant was that she’d been overweight for decades and remembered how it felt to be thin, wished she still was that girl. That’s what she meant. But what she said was that looking at her daughter’s body made her feel physically ill. She said this while pinning red sequined fabric for my prom dress. She later made my wedding dress—partly because it allowed me to design what I wanted, partly because it cost a fraction of those in stores, but also because fancy dresses in stores didn’t fit, were made for people with breasts. On me the dresses were baggy and deflated. Wired cups like Oliver’s soup bowl held cloudward begging to be filled. Sparkly, satin reminders of what I lacked. I went to prom with the guy, with his friends and girls I didn’t know. We danced coolly stiff-armed to “Lady in Red,” went to a party at a house after with Hawaiian punch spiked with god-knows-what. Late in the night it rained, and the guy and I lay stiffly side by side on the sunroom floor watching water drum and stream down the glass, and I told him he should have brought the new girl instead of me. I imagined him sliding his hands down in the bodice of her hot-pink strapless number to claim his prizes. No, he said. He would have been bored, he said. I wish I could put your brain inside her body. Then I’d have the perfect girl. I doubt he realized what a shitty a thing that was to say. I did. As if all I had cultivated inside myself—my roots, my imagination, my xylem and phloem, my 3.8 GPA and notebooks of stories and poems, the chlorophyl of me, and my phototroph-ing toward sunrise—none of it mattered without blossoms to offer up. After marriage and birthing five children I’m no longer skinny enough to make anyone sick. The flaps of nothings on my chest somehow knew how to swell and fill themselves to feed all five, as if having waited backstage for the audience who most deserved them. I buy dresses with rows of ruffles up top, and padded bras, and layers to shape-shift my body into some expected balance. I never learned to sew, never learned to stop missing things that were never there. A lifetime Ohioan, Kerry Trautman is a poetry editor for the journal Red Fez. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in various journals, including Slippery Elm, Free State Review, The Fourth River, Hawaii Pacific Review, Paper & Ink, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Her work has also appeared in anthologies such as Mourning Sickness (Omniarts 2008), Journey to Crone (Chuffed Buff Books 2013,) Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince (NightBallet Press, 2016,) and Resurrection of a Sunflower (Pski’s Porch Press, 2017.) Kerry's poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.) 11/30/2021 0 Comments The Lesser by Lorna Rose remuslt CC The Lesser Have you survived something hard? How did it change you? How was it when you broke in places you didn’t know could break, the fissures inviting more darkness until you no longer knew light? Like you were lesser than everyone, that you didn’t deserve to be alive. What was the texture of that time? Was it cold like metal or sharp like splinters, or something else? I was finishing my 8th grade year, my last year in middle school. My confidence from earlier grades had disappeared under the darkness of teenage angst and an increased sense that I didn’t belong anywhere, that I was so awkward and emotionally thick that no one cared to understand me. I walked through the halls with my head down, shrunk in my seat in class so as not to get called on, made up reasons why I couldn’t play basketball in gym class. Often I ate lunch alone at the end of someone else’s table, pretending not to care, pretending to be remembering a fun conversation with a friend, where we laughed loudly at inside jokes. I cowered in that hollow place outside The Cliques and, as such, had gotten a reputation of being a nerd. Kim Jones, one of the popular girls, even made me a nametag that said ‘nerd.’ I reasoned that if I treated The Cliques as snobbish as they treated me, I’d belong. I snarled at them. I wished them illness and ugliness. I screamed to be a part of them. I pieced together a plan. It was the last time I’d get teased for having a crush on Dan or Mitch or John. It was the last time Kate Sawyer would write me a note telling me to give up my crush, that Ted would never like someone as scummy as me. It was the last time Mark Peterson would call me on a Saturday night and ask me out, only for me to hear laughter in the background and realize it was a prank call. It was the last time they’d call me “special” for getting extra help in math or being allowed extra time on tests. It was the last time they’d call me Pizza Face or Acne Factory as I stepped off the bus, the last time a stray volleyball in gym class would break my glasses, the last time food would get caught in my braces, the last time they’d throw gum in my hair. When no one else was home I would sneak into Mom’s medicine cabinet. I pictured myself emptying the large bottle of Tylenol, relishing each pill as though it was a secret candy. I’d lie on my bed next to a note saying goodbye, that I was sorry to have had to do this, and a list of names of my tormentors. Little by little my sweet blood would turn to poison, and silently, one by one, my organs would hush themselves, drain dull, flicker out. I’d be asleep by then, my last breath full of daggers for everyone who had put me in this place. News would spread, and a terrible, insurmountable guilt would shroud the school. The brilliant part was that all those people, the bullies and the crushes and the cool kids, the whole school, would feel such pain, way down in the bowels of their guts. They’d carry that weight forever, and I would just smile. I’d make them remember me as the better one, and they as the lesser. I’d make sure their perfect hands were tarnished with my blood. This part of my story felt like metal, cold and stoic. I didn’t let anyone know how black and all-consuming the darkness was. I didn’t think anyone would care. School and home were equally difficult; I didn’t fit in at either place. Both places scared me. Everyone was intimidating because they seemed smarter and simpler and happier than I. The hardest part of planning to end your life isn’t the pain you feel, because that’s temporary. It’s not the shame, because you are passed the point of concerning yourself with it. It’s not using your death as a tool to exact revenge; that’s what makes it feel useful. No. The hardest part of planning to end your life is investing all your time, all your energy in planning the pain of others who probably don’t care to begin with. If you’ve ever been down that deep, it takes all you have to pull yourself out, both hands grasping at the rope of light, grunting and straining every muscle to climb above. And even as you’re ascending, you wonder if it’s worth it. If you’re worth it. You are. Because here’s the thing: all those jocks and cool kids, they all have the same insecurities as you. They might feel as shitty about themselves as you do about yourself. It’s just no one talks about these things. They certainly won’t. This is the Great Secret about middle and high school. Most freefall in their isolation. One day you will look back on this time with a sort of appreciation. You know what dark looks like, what the cold metal feels like, how sharp those splinters can be. You will look at the light present in your life and know it’s light. You will be free of the dark. Lorna is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared in Third Wednesday, Motherwell, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. Lorna also speaks publicly on motherhood, finding resilience through writing, and her experience in AmeriCorps. She is at work on a memoir about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. For more, go to www.lornarose.com. 11/30/2021 0 Comments Alice’s Arm by Paul Ruta Alice’s Arm I didn’t get weird about Alice’s Arm until it went missing. It was special. In fact, in all my decades of going to concerts, Alice’s Arm is the only physical souvenir I ever got. It was a little something thrown to me from the stage – a piece of crap, if you asked my mom, the prime suspect in its eventual disappearance, but a relic of Roman proportions to me. By late 1973 I was a newly licensed driver, and my friends and I would pile into the Volkswagen and cross the border from Niagara Falls to see concerts in Buffalo, New York. The venue was often Memorial Auditorium – the Odd, as it was known – a cavernous facility noted for its cruel acoustics. Alice Cooper played the Odd that New Year’s Eve, the final North American date on the Billion Dollar Babies tour. You got your money’s worth with Alice. He believed that showmanship was equally important as musicianship – a radical concept in the early seventies – and he pioneered the idea of rock concert as multimedia extravaganza. Alice Cooper was massively popular at the time, though his act was macabre: blood-filled and violent. At a certain point a guillotine was revealed onstage, whereupon Alice chopped the head off a mannequin, dismembered its body and flung the parts into the audience. I happened to catch one of those parts. It was a pink flesh-toned curve of fiberglas, an eight-inch fragment of the mannequin’s forearm. I was thrilled. I kept Alice’s Arm in a dresser drawer, nestled alongside a barrette taken from an early girlfriend, a clip-on bowtie, a broken Timex and the world’s least valuable coin collection. As with some of my other keepsakes, especially the barrette, I would take Alice’s Arm out of the drawer from time to time, ponder it for a minute or two, maybe give it a sniff, then put it back. And that would be that. A few years later I came home from university for a weekend and discovered the tragedy. My mom, in the process of “straightening up” my bedroom, had gone into my drawer and threw away Alice’s Arm. I didn’t see it this way back then, but she couldn’t have known its significance. Any reasonable, randomly selected adult would similarly conclude that Alice’s Arm looked exactly like a piece of crap and be inclined to throw it away. Still, she denied it, but I knew. If my mom hadn’t thrown it away, Alice’s Arm would probably have found its way, in the natural course of events, to the bottom of a trunk containing other boyhood mementos, then stashed in an attic and eventually be lost to the mists of time. But she did throw it away, and that has made all the difference. From the moment of its disappearance, Alice’s Arm took on new, mythological meaning. It passed from existence to nonexistence, from reality to immortality. Now I was free to openly mourn the loss of Alice’s Arm – its amputation from my life, no less. Now, according to my own melodramatic script, I was a victim of parental tyranny. I’d been emotionally trampled and couldn’t wait to have my suffering validated, especially by my fellow sufferers. Suddenly I was potentially interesting among a certain subset of my peers, or at least somewhat less uninteresting than before. I thought so, anyway. It didn’t take long for me to snap out of my self-imposed victimhood, especially when I began to appreciate that more than a few people I knew suffered from problems that were not imaginary, not self-imposed. Yes, some people had real problems. And so, without further ado, Alice’s Arm was indeed quietly stowed away in a box of memories: the overstuffed one inside my head. Alice’s Arm continues to occupy a strange little corner of my mind, and like a resident ghost it occasionally rattles its chains just enough to remind me it’s still up there. So here I am, nearly half a century later, yammering on about it yet again. I suppose that’s how fetishes work. I once read about a neuropsychological study that said our personal, experiential memories are not as reliable as we like to think. The study wasn’t talking about the wobbly memories that we freely admit are flawed, but the ones we believe we remember with great clarity. The thrust of it is that the more we convince ourselves of our ability to zoom in and focus on the fractals of even our strongest, most detailed memories, the more inaccurate our recall actually is. Further, that the more often we conjure a given memory, the worse it gets, like a tracing of a tracing of a tracing, until we’re left with little more than a mnemonic emoji that we mistake for the real thing. Many people would call bullshit on that study, which, in a way, proves its point. I haven’t decided one way or the other. All I know is that there’s nothing more mysterious to us humans than the workings of our own brains, so maybe there’s some deep evolutionary purpose for the way our minds keep messing with us. I hope that study is wrong, if only for selfish reasons. I want to believe that in my mind I can truly sense the grapefruit-like heft of Alice’s Arm and hear the dull response to my tapping fingernail, I want to feel the finely pebbled texture of its spray-painted exterior and stroke its rougher concave insides, and I want to smell the peculiar odor of its odorlessness. If it turns out that my memory of Alice’s Arm is somehow not accurate, or not entirely accurate, so be it. Anyway, how would I know? The memory is close enough for rock & roll and that’s good enough for me. Paul Ruta is a Canadian writer living in Hong Kong with his wife and a geriatric tabby called Zazu; his kids live on Zoom. Recent work appears in Cheap Pop, F(r)iction, Reflex Press, Truffle, Ghost Parachute and Smithsonian Magazine. He reads for No Contact magazine. @paulruta • paulthomasruta.com 11/29/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Han Raschka stanze CC and deliver us from evil after ten years of sacrilegious prayer it is still comforting to palm broken glass eight months clean from ripping yourself open does not mean temptation does not sit on your chest threading your fine hair through a needle ready to sew you back shut if needed you wait for god to tell you you have done enough. Han Raschka (they/them) is an up-and-coming writer from Wisconsin, but don’t tell them that. When not wrangling their three dogs or drinking far too expensive coffee, they can be found taking workshops through the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute to hone their abilities. Recent accomplishments include a Brooklyn Poets 2021 Fellowship. They have previously been published in Sixfold Journal and The Sapphic Writers Collective. 11/29/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Annie Stenzel Tony Webster CC Object permanence The flight of youth a bit like a moon rocket Infant to ancient. Innocence to experience Barely a trace of tender left by the time childhood is complete Seems like the word heedless says it all But at the helm, is anyone paying attention? You’d think grabbing an old photograph might be useful In my case, very small images in black and white I was pale, the pictures were blurred, my hair was curly- I was pale, the pictures were blurred, my hair was curly- In my case, very small images in black and white You’d think grabbing an old photograph might be useful But at the helm, is anyone paying attention? Seems like the word heedless says it all Barely a trace of tender left by the time childhood is complete Infant to ancient. Innocence to experience The flight of youth a bit like a moon rocket Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear regularly in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K.—plenty of them by now. She has the usual degrees, but always earned her keep doing something completely unrelated to poetry. A co-editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she now lives within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay, and relishes the proximity to salt water. 11/29/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Jeff Weddle Tony Webster CC Outside, The Sun Ablaze Not coming back, but watching. Chair, mirror, floor. Suffocating, at best. Footsteps in another room. Familiar music you can’t quite place along with decay, roses. Entering the room. Leaving. Watching them take you off. Clocks make no sense if yesterday is right around the corner. All conversations at once, everything finally understood, and now you know the music. Consider this: Clarity might be overrated, but it is often worth the struggle. Every moment is every moment, as any child understands. No goodbyes on this dusty afternoon, but memories of children, a botched exit, a lost farewell. Trust Me. Just See What Happens Tell the beautiful girl you love her, if you do, but don’t say it otherwise. Let go and see what happens. Get a canvass, some paints and a dozen good brushes of various sizes. Open your heart to potential. Let go and see what happens. Point your car west and drive three hundred miles with no stops and no idea of a destination. Let go and see what happens. Kiss the beautiful girl each morning and night and at various times in between. Let go and see what happens. Age with grace. Accept the changing seasons. Let go and see what happens. Embrace death when it comes as only the true of heart can do. Say your goodbyes with laughter. Let go and see what happens. Jeff Weddle won the Welty Prize for his first book, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). He has also received honors for his poetry and fiction. His most recent book is a poetry collection, There’s More To It Than That (Poetic Justice Books, 2021). Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. 11/29/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Sita Gaia Ian Livesey CC
Dreaming Of A Reality I scroll through toddler clothes for girls online; no pink please for my little girl. She likes green and polka dots just like her Mum. I velcro her shoes before we walk down the cobble road; she picks the stems of the flowers she knows all the names of. Pursing her fingers to your lips saying Mum be quiet to indicate a hummingbird is near. Wait, are we on a cobble road or the yellow brick road? She grabs my hand with her small sticky one . If you are Toto, isn't your hand a sticky paw? Why are we on the way to the Wizard of Oz and don't I know the way home? She looks at me, puzzled as if that was the plan all along. Duh, Mum of course. We already talked to the Good Witch and our friends, the Tin Man who wants a heart, & the cowardly lion who only wishes he had courage. We just need to get my ruby slippers & we can go home! My clumsy feet with no agenda trip over a rock & suddenly we are home. She and my wife give me water & she gives her other Mom her havourite flowers in a mason jar tied up with a reused ribbon found in our decorations box. I wake with a start from my dream of loss. I will have to be the best gay aunty to all the little kids in my life instead. Sita Gaia (she/they) is a queer chronic illness warrior and the author of the chapbook, "Knocking On The Body's Door" (Prolific Pulse Press LLC). She has been published in Harness Magazine, Fine Line Literary Magazine, and Kissing Dynamite, among others. They love owls, and drink way too much coffee. They reside in Vancouver with their wife. |
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