The Absence of Joy in Love

July 2021 | poetry

Heavy weighted blanket, legs half-out, rain against the window,

you whispered, “what if it gets old? what if you get bored

with me?”

“It won’t and I won’t,” I said.

“But if.”

“If?”

The smell of warm linen, chest swelling

like infatuation.

Oh honey, it would be a blessing

to grow old and bored with you

(just to be with you),

and should there be a loss of love

(I write love but mean passion, puppy-love)

in the years to come—

no wild nights into sleepless mornings, no constant hand-on-thigh,

no attentive eyes, no planned dates—

I would learn it again,

remind myself, reread my letters,

grow curious afresh,

in body, soul, and mind,

in duty and promise,

in decision and action,

even in dry periods with no joy,

Love you.

 

Alexandra T. O. Cooley

Alexandra T. O. Cooley is a poet and graduate student from Alabama. She is currently a pursuing an MA in English from Jacksonville State University and hopes to pursue an MFA in creative writing after graduating. She loves making lists, petting animals, and planning vacations with her husband, James.

Magpies

July 2021 | fiction

That girl’s come again, the one called Jewel. She likes to correct me, says her name is Julie. I know. She’s my youngest granddaughter. That’s what she says. Like the others, she visits, like the others she says goodbye. Jewel comes often enough, I’m starting to expect her, and maybe it’s not just to say goodbye. She asks after my sleep, the food. It’s mud, I tell her. Jewel, who wants to be Julie, looks toward the window. For a change, it’s broken clouds, some blue sky, the snow gone elsewhere today. Nobody has to shovel. You must be glad you have a window. I like to look out. That chair makes it easy to watch the birds. Jewel walks over to the chair, presses a hand against the cushion, waits for it to push back. Very supportive. Go ahead, try it. No, Grandpa, it’s yours. Always like this. Yours. Mine. Theirs. Hard to know what to make of it. I’ll join you in a moment. Go ahead and open the window. Probably not supposed to. Only way to hear the birds. Jewel, who has black curls of hair pulled into a messy bunch, says, I can see them. Magpies? Perhaps. Well, you can’t hear what they are saying. What are they doing? Pecking between the cracks. Always looking for sunflower seeds, crumbs, stupid bugs. There’s one who has no tail. That’s Squirt. He steals whatever anybody leaves out there. Sometimes people don’t even realize they lost something. He took my watch and a ring I used to have on this here finger. Awful snug that ring. Not sure how he got it off. I rub and twist both sides of my finger. You can still see the mark it left. I swing my legs off the bed. Not as easy as it used to be. No faking that. Let me show you.

 

Connie Wieneke

Connie Wieneke’s prose and poetry most recently has appeared or is forthcoming in Weber, Talking River Review, Split Rock Review, Camas, Stand, and other journals. Her work also has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies, including The Artists Field Guide to Yellowstone and Orison Anthology. Since 1983 she has lived in Wyoming.

Lawrence Bridges

July 2021 | visual art

Fleet Day San Francisco

Storage

 

Lawrence Bridges

Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood. As a filmmaker, he created a series of literary documentaries for the NEA’s “Big Read” initiative, which include profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick.

Mothballs

July 2021 | nonfiction

Tucked under a pile of wool sweaters, under the wedding dress that I didn’t let you help me pick out, under the little white sailor outfit that I bought on Etsy for your grandson’s baptism that you missed because you were dead, deep in a corner of the cedar chest that grandma wanted me to have even though what I really wanted was her piano, are your ashes (some of them anyway) in a black velvet bag.

That you wanted to be burned, instead of locked in a box to not-rot under the dirt, was the only thing we knew for certain. We split you up between the three of us, each with our portion, and made our own plans. I used to tell myself that I would scatter your ashes from the roadside overlook where dad took your picture on the way to our wedding, but I kept waiting for the right moment: when I got pregnant, when I had the baby, when he was old enough to come with me. When. I want to stop grieving you.

But there you are, buried in the dark at the bottom of your own mother’s cedar chest, trapped in the smallest room of my house, where dad sleeps when he comes to visit.

Dad told me he can’t find his bag, his share of your burned up bones and flesh. Maybe you got yourself lost? Perhaps I’ll get you out, tell him I found you, and set that part of you (of us) free.

Desi Allevato

Desi Allevato lives with her husband in central Virginia, where they are raising one child, two cats, and a hundred tree saplings in a suburban backyard. She has a brain tumor and an unfinished dissertation about Russian history. Her recent work is published in Longridge Review and mac(ro)mic. Follow her on Twitter, @desirosie.

Featured Author: E. Laura Golberg

July 2021 | poetry

Logistics, 2020

 

How many bodies can

be held in refrigerated

trailers, giving families

time to claim them?

 

The number of those,

anonymous, buried

at the public cemetery

in New York, increased

five-fold in April.

 

Outside a Brooklyn

funeral home, dozens

of decomposing bodies

were found in one

tractor-trailer

and one rented U-Haul.

 

Eighteen thousand dead

in eighteen thousand

body bags are moved

by forklift to one

hundred and fifty

refrigerated trailers,

fifteen rented vans.

 

Dedicated Carnivore At the TSA

 

I

watched you

watch her

grab the tape

you had firmly affixed

round the lid of the cooler.

 

Rip

she went.

You watched

her as she

dove into its white hold

and brought up the brown pork butt.

 

She

made sure

she knew

what it was,

carefully rotating

each piece before replacing

 

it,

extract-

ing that

ham then the

Fanestil baloney

and its smoked bacon, vacuum-

 

packed.

You were

the new

Miriam,

watching such a precious

cargo being lifted out.

 

E. Laura Golberg

Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.