October 2020 | poetry
Jerry Rubin
lived next door.
Does that still count?
He was Protestant.
I was Catholic.
We were a hundred sacraments apart.
The kiss was quick, a dry pinched peck.
I didn’t even have time to close my eyes
like the flawless girls in the Saturday movies
Later when I confessed
to my Catholic classmates
there was an audible gasp.
Startlingly, Mary Beth didn’t say:
You KISSED a boy!
She said, you kissed a PROTESANT
as if I had said
I kissed a blind goat
with leprosy.
Jerry grew up and moved away,
I grew weary of Catholic boys, apostles,
Catechism. Catechism. Catechism.
Maybe that’s why I married a Hindu.
And the first time I kissed my husband-to-be
it was fierce and long and wet
and I thought
Hare Krishna!
Hare Ram!
Gail Ghai
Gail Ghai is a graduate of the University of Alberta and a Fellow in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Malahat Review, Jama, the Yearbook of American Poetry and The Delhi-London Quarterly. Awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Henry C. Frick scholarship for creative teaching. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry as well as an art/writing poster entitled, “Painted Words. Ghai works as an ESL instructor for the Pittsburgh Pirates in Bradenton, FL and also serves as the moderator of the Ringling Poets in Sarasota, FL.
October 2020 | poetry
It’s so much work to stay alive
but living has its payoffs
sunset so stunning it burns your eyes
mathematical precision in a seashell
an unexpected kind word
in a foreign city
not that any of these will fix
the human condition
after all there’s a graveyard
beneath everything
but such small grace notes
can lighten the load
Like when you teared up
kissing that girl good-bye
in the Yugoslav train station
all those years ago and the men
nearby wiped their eyes as well
and patted your shoulder
in solidarity—no matter
you shared no language
no lived experience, you
a U.S. vagabond surrounded
by Slovenian workers
The station was shabby, squalid
yet the memory of their kindness
lifts your spirits still
Sally Zakariya
Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Muslim Wife (Blue Lyra Press, 2019). She is also the author of The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.
October 2020 | fiction
Circa 1980, back from college on break, I took my 53 year old mother to the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show in my hometown. In the car she flashed me her lacy bra peeking from her unbuttoned plus size floral tunic, shimmying her bosom and smirking at the look on my face before buttoning up again.
The Channel 7 news team was at the theater, and Mom intoned, mock-voice-over, “Fans of all ages flocked to the contemporary cult classic…” But no one else there looked over 25; the generations didn’t mix it up as much back then. Gray perm and shelf hips notwithstanding—even back in grade school kids always thought she was my grandmother– she was the perfect audience, probably the only one who understood all the allusions. After all, Lily St. Cyr was born way back in 1918.
Neither of us jumped into the aisle to do the Time Warp, but I could tell she wanted to. She had a way of laughing that was like how some people cry—with her whole body. Everyone always smiled when my mother laughed, which was a lot of the time.
As we walked to the car she took umbrage with the critics who dismissed one young Susan Sarandon’s performance. “Her eyes are very expressive. She’s gonna go places.”
She went on to compare the male characters with guys I liked in high school. The many Brads, the one Frank and two Rockies were obvious. We clashed over Eddie—I said there were no Eddies in my history; she said there were at least three. “I heard Ninja Star Nun-chuks is in jail right now,” she said. “And Skateboard Steve definitely shoplifted you that mood ring. And Pig-Pen…”– who had once left indelible dusty handprints all over my white French cut T-shirt–“…wasn’t he busted for …”
“Why must you remind me?” I was newly engaged, and smug. I thought only, and constantly, about my perfect fiancé, how much in love I was, how perfectly he smoothed over my ruffled past.
“Just trying to keep you humble,” she said.
I scratched my nose—she always made it itch when she annoyed me.
She caught me. “Aha—I see I still have the power.”
I deflected. “Well, what about the criminologist-narrator? I never dated him.” Ha-ha: he was old and irrelevant. As I said it I realized that he, the foil, a disembodied, judgmental scientific explainer, reminded me of someone…my father-in-law-to-be. Then I realized he also reminded me, just the tiniest bit, of my father-in law’s son, my own fiancé.
I held my breath, discreetly dragging my hand across my nose.
She paused. “He was quite the know-it-all,” she finally said.
I suddenly remembered her saying of one of the Eddies, (Skateboard Steve?) that one day I needed to match up with someone (even) smarter than I was. I’d said she’d sounded sexist and she’d said no, her advice was specific to me.
As I exhaled, she added, “How ‘bout them guns on that Rocky?”
And then she laughed and I smiled.
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh has been published in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Berkeley Fiction Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Bridge, Green Briar Review, and other places. Her work has earned an Illinois Arts Council Grant and a Pushcart nomination. Julie has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, lives in Chicago with two cats and a lot of books, and works a day job as a professor and at a school of psychology.
July 2020 | poetry
You must build doors
to invite people in
is what they’ve told me
since the funeral,
but these are coddled,
runny-hearted
idiots, the open
floor plans of people.
They lust after beige:
plush-carpet beige,
nice and wanting
nothing. What I want
is to pause
for caterpillars
and talk to them
like we talked
to her in hospice.
You look for twigs
to coax them
to grass, deliver them
from the threat
of neighborhood kids
who love nothing
inside their rooms
and would murder
for candy, or pets
they would let die.
They are too young
to love a better way.
To close these doors
built to nowhere,
doors flung open
just for them
to hurtle through.
Emily Kingery
Emily Kingery is an Associate Professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, where she teaches courses in literature, writing, and linguistics. Her work appears or is forthcoming in multiple literary journals, including Eastern Iowa Review, Gingerbread House, High Shelf Press, New South, PROEM, Prometheus Dreaming, Quercus, and Telepoem Booth, and she has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. She serves on the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit organization that supports writers in the Quad Cities community.
July 2020 | poetry
For fifty years, we lived
at the bend in Spring Creek
where the stream turns
back on itself,
in a shingled Cape Cod
too small for the family
and dreadfully cold.
The creek’s ceaseless song
captained our seasons—
the slow murmur
of half-frozen water
holding tenuously to life
or the great green rush
of an early thaw.
Each spring we bailed
the basement
trying to keep our poor boat afloat—
fearing any minute
we might have to swim for it.
How our children learned
to hate that sodden season.
They are grown now
and scattered here and there
like the spray of water on rock.
It seems forever since a visit.
The oldest, Jillie, tells me
it took years to get the creek
out of her head.
I drove past the old place today—
much of the roof is collapsed and jagged.
I like to watch the fly fisherman
pluck rainbows from their hidden holes,
with a grace beyond my understanding.
And then, at sunset,
the creek and I head home.
Steven Deutsch
Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. His recent publications have or will appear in 8 Poems, Louisiana Lit, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Biscuit Root Drive, Evening Street, Better Than Starbucks, Flashes of Brilliance, San Antonio Review, Softblow, Mojave River Review, The Broadkill Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Panoply, Algebra of Owls, The Blue Nib, Thimble Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Borfski Press, Streetlight Press, Gravel, Literary Heist, Nixes Mate Review, Third Wednesday, Misfit Magazine, Word Fountain, Eclectica Magazine, The Drabble, New Verse News and The Ekphrastic Review. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2017 and 2018. His Chapbook, “Perhaps You Can,” was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length book, Persistence of Memory will be published by Kelsay in September 2020.
