October 2024 | fiction
The thing about meditating with other mental patients is that they are mental patients. Yeah, you’re a patient too, but I get it, they’re annoying.
The woman beside you sucks on a baby pacifier.
Helpful Tip: Breathe in and out at the same rate as she sucks.
Your group counselor says, “Now think of a conveyor belt and put your thoughts into boxes that go down it….”
You breathe in and out and wonder where do the boxes go? Do they spill onto the linoleum floor?
Helpful Tip: Distract yourself by squinting at the pacifier woman, commend yourself for not needing one to suck on. Do not ponder that this is a very low bar. Instead, imagine the conveyor belt turning and turning….
Do not think of your thoughts strewn across the linoleum floor like limpid half-dead octopi or like spilled magnetic refrigerator word tiles. I see you open your eyes. The man sucking his thumb stares at you. There are bars on the windows reminding you, reminding all of us, that we’re in a mental institution. A nice one, but still people try to escape. The weird man stares at you; he has a Calvin and Hobbes tattoo on his neck.
The therapist says, “Now imagine boats going down river, and put your thoughts into each boat….”
Oh, Jesus, what kind of boats? Rowboats? Tankers? Skiffs?
The woman smacks on her pacifier. Smack, smack, smack.
Put your thoughts on a damn boat, any kind of boat will do.
Dig down deep, Patient 89. Remember the story you told us in group, how you were on a real boat a month ago; this was back when everyone thought you were okay. You’d straddled a gunnel, one leg in the Dominican ocean. You’d breathed in and out, fishing line cast until the mate hurled you into the boat because he saw a water snake—beautiful, many colored— so venomous it could have killed you in fifteen seconds. It hadn’t seemed such a bad fate to you. The sky was a perfect blue, your tears made no sense. At least that’s how you described yourself on that boat that afternoon.
Breathe in and out, Patient 89. Soon they’ll give you a capsule, a sip of water. Patient 89, you’re no different than the pacifier woman, the Calvin and Hobbes man, than me. Your brain can’t be trusted any longer, so breathe in, breathe out… And know that I’m watching your every move.
Signed,
Patient 52
Laurie Lindop
Laurie Lindop holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. She has published nine non-fiction books with Lerner and Simon and Schuster. Her short fiction has been published by Redbook Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and elsewhere.
October 2024 | poetry
Bombed apartments lie open,
windows shattered, spears of
jagged glass, broken teeth
biting into vacancy.
Torn net curtains flap,
wave, signalling into emptiness.
No neighbours to spy on
No secrets to conceal.
In flattened playgrounds
twisted slides, slaughtered serpents,
still emblazoned in blue and yellow.
Swings sway in the freezing wind;
the haunting cry is heard
of dead children’s voices.
In ruined shopping malls
corpses clutch in frozen fingers,
plastic bags of untouched bread.
Cratered roads leave villages
names on maps, virtual destinations,
no more reachable than
Shangri-La or Camelot.
Stray dogs ravage the dead
Loose horses graze
in someone’s garden.
In a bombed-out cottage
an old woman cooks potatoes.
Behind her, two flower-papered walls,
half a cupboard, a china elephant,
the remnants of her bedroom, shown
on the evening news in Paris, New York, Delhi.
The village classroom,
a tangled mess of broken desks,
a single shoe, an open book,
a child’s sketch of a burning tank.
A boy crossing a pock-marked road,
automatically looks for traffic.
A ghostly line of phantom waggons
passes the unburied dead.
Stuck in muddy ditches, tank guns
point skywards at the rising moon.
A bomb explodes, a flash of red,
the dreadful beauty of instant flames.
In London, Washington, Moscow, Beijing,
they roll the dice, again.
Sarah Das Gupta
Sarah Das Gupta is an 82-year-old writer from Cambridge, UK, who has been writing since last year when an accident left her with very limited mobility. Her work has been published in many magazines and anthologies in over 25 countries, from New Zealand to Kazakhstan. This year, she has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star Award.
October 2024 | poetry
FRAMED
…for my father
To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song
in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.
– Arne Garborg
He spent years in the basement
at war against forgetting.
Scissors and tape were his weapons,
the conflict relentless,
his ability to recall
anything was vanishing.
He cut up hundreds of old photos,
following the lead of his demolished brain.
Anything he believed excess
he cut from the photo-
trees, cars, houses, the sky.
It was the people he was holding on to.
Like the cat pushing his whiskers into
the corners of walls,
my father rubbed against
the corners of his longing,
leaving a vague imprint of his losses,
the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.
Memories he was
not even aware were lost,
had been swept away.
The chosen were taped
somewhere into a cheap frame
he’d buy at the drug store across the street,
until he could no longer remember where it was.
If someone struck a match
in the trashed warehouse of his brain,
that person was cut from a photo
and taped into his new dwelling-
The Frame of the Familiar.
Everyone overlapped-
the newborn, the aged, the dead,
the teens, the young adults…
it made no difference
whether they had known one another or not,
as long as he thought
he might have known them from somewhere,
from some time now omitted.
To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,
the one person he was still sure he knew.
He’d hunt for a place
to tape himself
in this new world, part color,
part black and white, part sepia.
There were giant people, tiny people,
torn people, faded and stained people,
in this multi-colored person-scape
comprising only those folks
he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,
even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant
made it into a frame.
When a frame was completed
he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,
its walls covered with frames,
grab his Black &. Decker
and drill straight through the frame
and into the wall.
Done.
Onto the next.
He had discovered a way to resurrect
some inner joy,
but the imperative was
to tape securely
lest someone get separated
and forget their way back.
He tamed the rough, curled edges
of the old photos with Scotch-tape,
and brought generations together,
a congregation of the living
alongside their ghost kin,
a population of his own design
of faces remembered,
or faces
he thought he remembered.
John L. Stanizzi
John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.
October 2024 | nonfiction
That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio. But some nights we were all right, driving on a dark desert highway, cool wind in our hair, except it was Florida in August and you could swim through the humidity, and the smell of boiling oranges oozed from the Tropicana plant.
That was when we rigged an 8-track under the Dart’s dash, and blasted our own music—screaming along with Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” as we thundered down I-75 from Gainesville to Tampa, to the theater where Patti had fallen off the stage the year before and broken her back, but this night she refused to stop singing and howling and flinging her marionette body around, even as the lights came up and the loudspeaker complained that we should all exit the building immediately.
That was when we drove back through shadowed cow fields, headlights dangerously dimming because an alternator belt had broken. We fired accusations: “What’s wrong with your stupid car?” “Why don’t you help me figure out what to do, instead of giving me shit?” We found an all-night truck stop that could help us out. The radio behind the greasy checkout counter moaned, don’t it make my brown eyes blue?
That was when we returned to the hovel in the student ghetto, to the bed with tangled sheets that never got washed. We put on “Aqualung,” drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run sounding wrong and dirty and hot. Then, one of us said it. It just slipped out. And the next album dropped with a flat clunk down the record changer, and the needle hissed as it hit the first grooves.
That was when 10cc sang, I’m not in love.
Kit Carlson
Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Short Fictions. She has recently published in EcoTheo Review, River Teeth, Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Wrong Turn Lit, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.
October 2024 | poetry
I take in a terrific piano concert: classic
ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie
from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers.
Professor Longhair tribute. A boogie version
of the national anthem; it never sounded better.
The pianist’s fingers blur; from his left hand
the bass rumbles like a train under the street.
Beside him a drummer sits on a box-drum
he beats time on, and
I’m grooving,
moving
my body all over along with the drumbeat;
doing a jitterbug
sitting down.
Big smile all over my face.
Keeping time with every beat. If only
someone else would stand and dance!
The Texas town that I moved here from, lots
of people would have been up and dancing—
in the aisles, down front, at the back, anywhere
there was room. Shouts and whistles
between numbers, hair and feet flying.
This Midwest audience: the woman next to me
wears a cautious smile. A couple behind me
peer studiously at the pianist. A few people
tap feet or joggle their heads. That’s it?
After each number, polite applause.
I’m totally frustrated! And damn!
That curly-haired drummer is so hot
perched there on his cajón
with his twice-pierced ears
and the stud at the side of his nose.
Lynn D. Gilbert
Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Arboreal, Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Footnote, The Good Life Review, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
