light air is. I’m thinking about the length of my longest gray hair and how long it’s been
growing, when the hawker nearly sings, “You’re going to take that, little lady? Magic price of nineteen ninety-nine.” I want to say, here, that no one says little lady anymore. It’s as archaic as traveling salesmen. Instead, I lie, “I don’t use tablecloths.” I replace the little appliance with the other ones—blue ones and red, green. Orange. I leave for the rabbit pavilion.
DeMisty D. Bellinger is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her fiction has most recently appeared in SpringGun Journal, The Monarch Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review.
KATHRYN ROBERTS
DUSTBIN PROPOSAL
Yesterday I found you baking brownies in your yellow oven. You held the pan below the broiler with your bare hands, kneeling on potholders like a prayer mat. Drops of batter slid down the edge of the off-white Formica countertop and a silicone spatula rested on the lip of a burnt orange ceramic bowl. Chocolate slashed across your right cheek. You leaned over the oven door and I wondered how you ignored the sharp pains that must have shot down your back. The old plastic timer ticked irregularly, seven minutes from ringing.
You forgot to turn the oven on, but I imagined as if you had. Your hands boiled and blackened, first your fingers then crawling up to your elbows. Little bubbles formed as the top of the batter crusted over. I think they’re done, Mom, I said. When I reached my hands under your armpits and tried to lift you up, you dropped the pan onto the top rack long enough to contortion out of my grasp. You reached right back in.
The old television played in the living room and Mr. Rogers sang about bathtubs and drains. I walked to the bathroom to check the cabinet. Your medicine bottles held all the pills, even though the fill date was almost three months old. Flattened toothpaste tubes stacked neatly on the shelves next to cardboard cylinders of used toilet paper rolls.
As soon as the timer went off you yanked out the brownies and tossed the pan on the stovetop. Careful, they’re hot! you said. When you removed your wedding band and threw it into the oven, I reminded you that the melting point of gold is nearly 2,000 degrees. Let it burn, you replied.
When you were a little girl, you buried your dolls in the garden behind the farmhouse. Grandma confided that after you went to bed each night, she’d dig up the fresh graves, pull the dolls out and mound the dirt again. She left the pinecone gravestones in place. Back in the kitchen, she rinsed the dirt from the plastic joints and shampooed the nylon hair. She threw out the old clothes, redressed the dolls in hand-sewn ball gowns and set them on your beside table. At school you boasted about receiving new dolls daily. You never knew your mother was on a budget.
Grandma said you collected random objects: empty bright-patterned Kleenex boxes, the ivory slivers of soap discarded to the bathroom waste basket, the greyed-pink topped stubs of No. 2 pencils. You bookended your shelves with empty glass soda bottles and populated the space beneath your bed with so much smoothed-out crumpled wrapping paper that no monster had space to lurk.
I imagine you leaving for college, the first higher-educated woman from a long line of seamstresses and factory canners. Your collections stored and labeled in corrugated cardboard, shoved into your closet. As you double kissed your mother’s cheeks, you grasped her hand and begged a promise not to throw out your relics.
Even though Dad died last winter, you set the table for two tonight. At five, a volunteer delivers a single plastic-containered meal and you divide the meatloaf, potatoes and peas between two plates. Sorry I don’t have enough for you, you say and invite me to sit down anyway.
Over the previous months you’ve reinvented him: rewritten anger as overworked, fists as caresses, thrown-against the wall boxed collections as your fault for holding onto useless objects. Your husband sits unsmiling, framed to your bedside table, the fireplace mantle, sleeved to your clear-plastic wallet slot. You stare at him, glossed over with empty-house wandering, your mind jumping across decades as chapters you reread to make real again.
Suddenly, you anger. I can see the search reflected in your eyes, the surge of fury without recognition of its origin. You clench my wrist too hard and fork-stab your mashed potatoes. The cheap plastic peppermill that won’t grind hits the wall and cracks on the ground, small spice pebbles clicking and bouncing across the hardwood floor. You shake your head and move toward the broom closet, programmed clean-up response overtaking the rage.
Tomorrow we will drive you to the nursing home, comfort you into a room you don’t recognize. All three of your children will share a space for the first time in twenty-four years to deliver you. I’ll hang gauzy white curtains and line up tattered mystery novels along your single bookshelf. Your son will discuss medication with the nurse out in the linoleum-covered hallways as your younger daughter hangs dresses in the closet, folds handkerchiefs and scarves into the drawers. You’ll bend down next to me as I hold up the edge of the bedspread and we’ll push shoeboxed soap, pigeon feathers, pebbles and dried pasta underneath like brownies to your oven.
Kathryn Roberts works as a bread baker in Portland, Maine. She currently is finishing her BFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College and was elected Editor-in-Chief for the Spring 2012 edition of Goddard's literary journal, Guideword.
PARKER TETTLETON
ARY
You know when you’re still not doing that anymore. It’s not a minute or kissed by a sandwich.
Cheeks are subways. Thinking is for assholes.
BUY WHAT YOU WANT
Remember what you didn’t have to tell them. Form a mask, wear it alone around. Stand up stuffed
animals instead of empty ones. Pull your eyes in as far as they will go. Do this for the If, the Maybe that
they’ll come back out.
AISLE DOMESTIC
When you don’t call you sound the same. I’ve indented. Something about pasta & fucking
torture, otherwise. There are more than two stages of cold.
BC
There’s a sound for flannel. Some of anything is awful special. You text for directions, I discount
aluminum. We’re two cars ahead of blues turning right.
SINCE V
It’s raining if there’s a difference. I stop to start another apartment later. Lightning has steps. I
walk like a duck when I’m drunk. Tomorrow I don’t have to work. I’m going to see a movie with
anybody.
Parker Tettleton's work is featured in &/or forthcoming from Gargoyle, elimae, Mud Luscious, The Catalonian Review, & FRiGG, among others. His chapbook SAME OPPOSITE is available from Thunderclap! Press. Find more work & information here : https://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com/.
DANIEL ROMO
BULK
For Devan
My shopping cart is a wheeled cornucopia of comfort. Vodka and beer to swim with my low spirit. Doritos and frozen burritos so I could die from my diet. If I were a building, I’d have been demolished due to structural damage. If I were stronger, I wouldn’t have told her to keep the ring anyway, and gotten over her wrecking ball I can’t to my gut. My groceries are high calorie Jenga pieces marking the last two years of our romance. They spill into the aisles and over my waistline, waiting to decorate my coffee table. I grab a sample of pineapple juice and crawl underneath the oranges bin. My body slowly falls to the floor like a melting Creamsicle. A checker with a sympathetic voice as if she speaks the language cloggedarteries, talks over an intercom—Harry, cleanup in produce.
Daniel Romo is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte, but represents the LBC. His poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, MiPoesias, Fogged Clarity, Scythe, and elsewhere. His first book of poetry, Romancing Gravity, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. More of his writing can be found at danielromo.wordpress.com
HOWIE GOOD
LOST BOHEMIA
Do what you feel, they told each other, and misaddressed packages intended for India to China. She noticed blood on the handkerchief. We are all mass assassins, serial killers, he said. In autumn, leaves fell into their drinks. The arrival of a fat little bald man everyone called Red could only mean one thing – the baby would celebrate its birth with tears and anguish.
WAR IS ALWAYS WITH US
1
An angel
with a grave face
walked in.
Everyone knew
what that meant:
ambulances
are everywhere.
2
All over the country,
people had lost each other.
Others got suddenly old.
Small groups huddled
around baby cribs, sobbing.
3
One eye is for looking outward,
the other for looking inward.
The great windows of the cathedral
are missing their stained glass.
THE ARTIST MODEL
As a flower,
she would have been
a tulip,
with decorous hints
of pubic hair.
STRANDED
I study my reflection in the window of the butcher. The trains that leave the city empty
return empty as well. Does the sound of sobbing mean what I think it does? People
who were born here exchange knowing glances. Tomorrow’s paper may carry news of a
terrible accident. For now, it’s night and raining, and somewhere lovers are blowing
smoke rings into the dark.
Howie Good's latest chapbooks are Inspired Remnants, forthcoming from Red Ceiling Press, and Threatening Weather, available as a free download from Whale Sounds at https://wschap5.wordpress.com/
RANDALL WEISS
HONOR
Do ants honor their dead
more than their living?
Their squished
more than their disabled?
I imagine the parade—tiny coffin,
mere thread for a flag—
proceeding down an underground Main Street.
He's their hero.
I made him that.
Randall Weiss is a poet from Tulsa, OK. He hosts a monthly poetry reading in Tulsa, Third Thursday Poetry Night, and frequents the local open mic nights. He's also a perpetual student pursuing a B.A. in English.
ADAM GRAUPE
KIDNEY STONES
It began not with a bang but a whimper. I felt a stabbing pain in my lower back and the urge to pass what felt like a razor blade through my urinary track. Waves of nausea flooded my head with shocks of pain in my groin and back. I sprinted to the bathroom hoping to pass the stone but only a trickle of blood splattered onto the toilet seat. I rushed outside, and, after vomiting in the driveway, I cursed at the sun, and bit my right hand as hard as I could to distract myself from the back and groin pain. I got in my car and soon my speedometer needle squeaked past 85 mph and soon I entered the hospital parking lot with tires squealing.
“I’m having a kidney stone!” I barked at the admitting nurse.
She was unmoved and queried, “Do you have your insurance card with you? What is your mother’s maiden name? What is your Social Security Number?”
Judas Priest.
I entered a maze of questions and maddening forms, but I soon made it past the barbarian at the gate and into a tiny hospital bed. I flopped about like a fish on a hot skillet until a doctor who looked like Alan Alda’s twin came in. Hell, he probably was Alan Alda. I grabbed his right arm and begged, “You’re going to give me a shot right now?”
“Yes, but a nurse will administer it. It’ll be quick; she’ll just hook it into your IV.”
Alan Alda turned and left the room.
“It that you Kevin?” It was an old woman’s voice: croaking, tiring, and somehow accusing.
I turned and noticed an old woman in a wheelchair. She had eyes covered with cataracts.
“What?” I said.
She nodded. “I’m ready to die, Kevin.”
I shook my head. “My name isn’t Kevin.”
She begged me to take her home.
“I can’t take you home. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who I am.”
She shouted, “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE KEVIN!”
“You don’t know the half of it, lady.” Oh, gawd, how I wanted to crawl under my bed, hide and show what a brave man I was.
A nurse bustled in. I smiled until I realized that she was there to help the shouting woman instead. I twisted back and forth. Another nurse came in. She asked my name and my birthday. I told her. She drained morphine into my IV.
I held my breath but didn’t feel any relief.
O, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…
“TAKE ME HOME TO DIE KEVIN!”
I bit my lower lip until I felt the blood dribble down my chin. Why wasn’t the morphine working? It was all a joke. The nurse used a placebo: there was no other explanation. Suddenly I felt covered in a blanket made of warm liquid. I floated up, sprouted wings, and soared out of the window, past the moon and the stars, and into a pain free universe.
….
The kidney stone passed and so did the morphine. An older grinning doctor shook my hand three times and told me I was too young to have another kidney stone anytime soon. He was wrong, but I believed him. Oh, how I believed him.
Adam Graupe's first piece of writing appeared in Futurics in 1996. In that article he made comically bold predictions about the future of the Information Superhighway and about how floppy disks would someday become more affordable.
RUSS WOODS
FOLLOWING RULES
I am returning my library books on time.
I am reading them fully and finishing them.
I am following rules.
Look at me following rules
No renewals. No bullshit.
I am a good citizen.
I am also not swearing in public.
I am writing my congressman.
Not to tell him I want something from him.
Just tell him he is doing a good job.
I do not know if he is doing a good job.
I think he should be told he is.
I am keeping all of my receipts.
I keep them in a hanging file in a file cabinet
in my office which I have altered to perfectly
fit the dimensions of even my largest receipts.
I am paying parking tickets.
I am decidedly not eating silica gel.
I am not even getting parking tickets but am
finding them on other people's cars and paying
them.
Or I was, before I found out that was illegal.
now I am just following the signs
about parking not thinking
not thinking of tickets at all.
I am trying to forget that they exist.
Russ Woods once saw a gang fight on his commute home. He has been published in New Wave Vomit, Dinosaur Bees and Pangur Ban Party and has work forthcoming in LIES/ISLE. He co-edits Red Lightbulbs with Meghan Lamb. He recently lied about his favorite movie to the Mayor of Homewood, IL on television.
JOHN NYMAN
JET ENGINE
We stood under a jumbo jet and opened our mouths;
everybody said something,
but nothing
(what we heard over the jet engine's screaming
at us, demanding that we speak our minds).
ACCIDENT
When I slice the vegetables for dinner
and also see blood—the accident
which will stain the stained wood cutting board,
and be fed to all of us, anyway—what picture
could find this kind of shallow, skin-
depth damage, like coloured
streaks
in the evening sky? The Twilight stars
on TV tell Oprah, "Kristin Stewart is pregnant,"
and if I waited months I could find that baby
and pinch him, hard, and feel his skin's grain
in my fingerlines as he cries saltwater, and the spot
I touched would turn to a colour that,
if any more beautiful, would be like magenta.