All That We Are

April 2021 | poetry

charlotte said

 

there are times when i feel like i’m observing

myself from a constellated distance in the same

way one would look at a starry sky or a pastoral

scene or a bloody gory picture show

 

and when i see myself

 

in this way

 

i am wearing a full length black dress

and my head is shaven in a haphazard

and misbegotten manner

and the background is so white

that it becomes a sort of nothingness

not quite an ethereal nothingness

but a quivering nothingness composed

of floating particles of debris that could be

flecks of white ash from raging wildfires

and so i wrap my quavering white

hands around my shuddering body

like a cowering child in a torrent of criticism

and all i can see are a set of white hands

wrapped around a flowing black dress

in front of a spectral white nothingness

and my chalk white face is emotionless

and my eyes are painted black coals

devoid of compassion or empathy

and i am struggling to keep my mouth closed

because i know if i open my mouth

i will release a stream of swarming plague locusts

and these locusts will be filled with lechery and greed

the sort of lechery and greed that devours defenseless

acts of kindness and helpless acts of tenderness

 

James Butcher

James Butcher’s work has appeared in Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, and Cream City Review.

If Right Now Everything Stops

April 2021 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee

If right now everything stops, and there is no longer re- but only de- (decay),

Autolysis: self-devouring. Your cells deplete themselves from the inside out. Within seventy-two hours, your swollen heart desists. Orange peels decompose six months later. Cotton socks decamp within a year. Wool sweaters and milk cartons depart in five. (Every carton of milk you drank in elementary school is already gone without a trace, and isn’t that surprising?) Twenty-five years later, your leather shoes defect. Tin cans and tissue (the kind which makes you soft to hold) take fifty to degenerate. Bones and batteries, a hundred years defiant.

Plastic, that twentieth-century debutant, carries on through the 2500s. Only the sun will touch it, photodegrade those polymers into microscopic morsels. Half a millennium to demolish the great graveyards of Dasani, Fiji, Pellegrino, Aquafina, Poland Spring, oh, La Vie. Half a millennium despoiled by every diaper you ever shat. And the ocean breaks down its microplastic detritus last.

Your teeth do not decay for tens of thousands of years. That is not as long as it takes to depose the skyscrapers, debris fields crumbling down to quartz for the wind or the water to disperse. Anthropic fossils press patterns into stone: earth’s interior design. There are mosquitoes deposited in resin, resins deposited in rock, rocks deposited in water. Pirates’ gold fillings do not depreciate, and neither do the diamonds of the brides. Glass bottles, those stubborn webs of silicon, take a million years to deteriorate to sand.

Then finally it is the deathless age of Styrofoam. A quiet planet blanketed with desiccated snow.

And a plaque on the moon still bears dear Richard Nixon’s name.

 

Hannah Story Brown

Hannah Story Brown is a writer and dramaturge based in New York, dreaming about green cities. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2019, and her work has been published in The Seattle Times, the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, and the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Streak-Free

April 2021 | fiction

The Windex was disappearing at Hunky Mike’s Sports Pub. Gallons each week. Ever since the Skin-Melting Bacteria had flown in from Peru on the beaks of white pigeons, we were obligated to perform rigorous cleaning routines. Most people held their pints with latex-gloves, but the occasional Hunky Mike insisted on riding bareback. We disinfected extra hard for those guys. Those guys thought their skin couldn’t be melted. Oh, but it could! We’d seen the flesh fall off the face of the Hunkiest of Mikes. After, we’d have to shut the whole pub down for two weeks—no tips.

Windex was not on the CDC-approved list of cleaners, but we used it anyway because Fred loved the smell. Fred was the Boss. He was an alcoholic. He’d worked in restaurants his whole life. It was an occupational hazard. Sometimes Fred forgot to put on his gloves—because he was drunk. We’d all watched in horror as he went to touch some un-sanitized surface with his bare skin. Fred! We’d shout. Hey, Fred! The Bacteria! Then he’d look at us like, what bacteria? until his memory got jogged and he started crying.

Fred’s wife divorced him a couple of years ago after he smashed his Corolla into a tree while their son was in the backseat. The son drinks his meals through a straw now. Fred’ll be paying back medical bills for eternity. Before the Bacteria, Fred’s ex-wife used to wheel the son into Hunky Mike’s. They’d sit at a table by the window and she’d spoon-feed him mashed potatoes while she drank a glass of Chardonnay. When the son saw Fred, he called him Daddy. Those nights, Fred got blitzed.

It was Marcy the Prep Cook who found Fred that morning. The night before he’d had a run-in with a glove-less Hunky Mike who’d called Fred a Loser. Fred took stuff like that to heart. Marcy said Fred was passed out in the mop closet, an open gallon of Windex in his lap, the blue stuff dribbled all over him. Marcy said when he woke up, she’d had to pry the bottle out of his hands. He kept trying to drink it, she said. He kept on saying, I just want to be streak-free.

When the white pigeons first appeared, we thought they were doves. We thought we were entering some new epoch of peace and calm. That people were going to start loving each other. That we were going to stop spewing smoke into the ozone. That we were going to stop killing each other and everything else. Now, government gunmen crouch in the corners, and the birds get sniped. Not just the pigeons—the doves too. You can see them out there, falling mid-flight, white smudges in the blue sky.

Elizabeth Mayer

Elizabeth is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her previous work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, CHEAP POP, Bodega, CRAFT, Fiction Writers Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her daughter Ruby.

Country Road at Night, North Carolina, 1979

April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Like eyes in a skull,

riveted on me,

I see the windows

of a white van

in my rearview

mirror.

 

I speed up

so does he

and we keep

going like this,

the sweat of fear

stinging my eyes

till I am racing,

a rabbit, with

a fox that covets,

gaining.

 

A sign for a business district–

the car, and my heart, slow

down.  I turn off, spy a gaggle

of little boys headed home

from Cub Scouts or Bible School.

Grateful to them, I stop, roll down

the window, tell the nearest child:

“I am being followed.

Could I use your parents’ phone?”

“OK”, the kid says “I live over there,”

pointing down the road. “Get in,”

I say, “I’ll take you all home,”

and seven small boys

climb in.

 

I am driving slowly

when the sheriff

curious

at the sight,

of a white lady’s car

bursting

with black boys,

stops me.

 

I look back and see

the white van

at the turnoff

to the town,

waiting.

 

 

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.

Eugene Shin

April 2021 | visual art

Plural Cycles

 

Eugene Shin

Eugene Shin is a teenage artist living in Seoul, Korea. He has previously been recognized by the Scholastic art competition with several photographic works. He enjoys experimenting with various materials and recently he is expanding his interest from photography to drawing, painting, and digital art. He hopes to express himself with diverse artistic ways continuously.