No Strings Attached

January 2020 | poetry

In Darwin,

Minnesota

the biggest ball

 

of twine

is unencumbered

by human

 

frailty.

No discontented lovers

struggling with rope

 

burn

anxious to be free.

No lasso-

 

twirling cowpokes

waiting in ambush

for that special

 

someone.

No timber-hitched

twosomes and threesomes

 

double knotted

like old sneakers.

No families

 

held together

by spit

and slip

 

knots.

Just a ball of

purposeless string

 

bigger now

than the town

hall.

 

Steve Deutsch

 

Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. His recent publications have or will appear in Evening Street, Better Than Starbucks, Flashes of Brilliance, SanAntonio 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.

How To Recognize An American

January 2020 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

In those days of “The Ugly American”

and Gary Powers, his U-2 Incident,

we lived and traveled in Scotland and Europe.

It was mostly the intense teenage boys

who yelled, “Yankee, go home!”

or maybe the coal man, if you could

parse out a few understandable words,

who insulted our Canadian friends

by mistaking them for one of us.

Sure, speaking would give us away,

but how did they know us on the streets?

Walking with hands in pockets, some said,

or overcoats, a wimp’s shame

according to the hardy Scot

with his damp-to-the-bone chill and Gulf Stream,

not guessing Arctic winds and ices.

Years later, the writer was unmasked

in Austria without a word,  without a pocket,

without a coat. “Because you smiled at me,”

the face of officialdom admitted.

“We don’t mind. It’s nice.”*

We carry our terrarium worlds with us,

never guessing how we seem, yet ever fretting

over imagined opinions. (My female generation

always tucking bra straps, hitching slips …

.”what’s a slip?” …while the young

shape their selfies and let it all show,

have different hang-ups.)

Is it American to always

go “spot checking” ourselves?

The Brit’s American joke back then

was the Yank, hand to mouth,

nose to armpit, checking for suspect odors….

checking….checking … is it only human?

only American?….. or only me?

 

*from  Lynda Lynn Haupt, MOZART’S STARLING

 

 

Carol Hamilton

 

Carol Hamilton has recent and upcoming publications in San Pedro River Review, Dryland, Pinyon, Commonweal, Southwestern American Literature, Pour Vida, Adirondack Review, The Maynard, Sanskrit Literary Magazine, U.S.1 Worksheet, Broad River Review, Fire Poetry Review, Homestead Review, Shot Glass Journal, Poem, Haight Ashbury Poetry Journal, Sandy River Review, Blue Unicorn, former people Journal, Main Street Rag, Pigeonholes Review, Poetica Review, Zingara Review, Broad River Review and others. She has published 17 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry, most recently, SUCH DEATHS from Virtual Arts Cooperative Press Purple Flag Series. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.

 

 

 

Eric Blanchard

January 2020 | poetry

Inspiration

 

The blank page is inspiration—

 

a silent beckoning

in the mind’s ears.

 

Listen.

It is just like the ocean’s coy whisper

in a conch shell,

whooshing.

 

A toddler scampers across it,

leaving word-like footprints.

 

Lacking social concerns,

he builds sandcastles of

 

random syllables.

Unwittingly,

 

the wave grows toward

tsunami,

 

washes away innocence,

 

replaces it with complex

tortured syntax

 

and walks away.

 

 

 

Planning My Road Trip

 

            This will be epic!

 

I am planning my road trip.

(Who am I kidding? I am daydreaming.)

Really, I will have to be frugal

and pack light,

 

but for an extended adventure—

bring only essentials. Roll my bedroll

tightly, strap it

tightly to the luggage rack.

 

The saddlebags are filled

with necessities: road flares, inner tube,

a selective assortment of tools.

 

A duffel of clothes fit for all seasons

sits on the passenger pillion (rides bitch,

if you will),

which would otherwise be empty.

 

My route has been mapped out,

with various alternatives tossed about,

like a maverick or nomad.

 

I will visit forty-eight states

(and at least one foreign country) alone.

Of course, many things,

 

like consumables, I can gather

on the road;

beg, borrow, steal the rest. I will need

a pup tent and a Coleman stove

 

for the road-side campsites

I will sleep at to save money

on occasion, weather permitting.

 

It will be bare-bones and dirt-cheap.

(Yes, even in my dreams.)  Now,

if only I still had my hog. . . . It won’t

be the same in an RV.

 

Eric Blanchard

Growing up in Texas, Eric dreamed of dropping out of high school, but when the haze of adolescence cleared, he found himself in law school instead. After being a trial lawyer for a decade and a half, he ran away to Ohio, where he taught school and lived life for about a minute. Eventually, he returned home to help care for his parents. Eric’s poetry has been included in numerous collections, both online and in hard copy. In 2013, his prose poem “The Meeting Ran Long” was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net anthology. His chapbook, The Good Parts, will be published in January 2020 by Finishing Line Press.

Partly Cloudy with a Chance for Joy

January 2020 | fiction

The low clouds only added insult to the oppression Lucy and her colleagues felt at the 61st Annual Law Librarians of New England Spring Meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn Portsmouth, which had been more of the same reluctant glorification of artificial intelligence in legal research paired with debates on the looming obsolescence of their profession, but afterwards, late in the gray afternoon as she sped north through New Hampshire into the White Mountains with her fists at ten and two on the steering wheel, right before she entered Franconia Notch, right where things started getting majestic, Lucy rolled down her window, stuck her head out, and sucked the cold air hard into her lungs as her black hair whipped around her skull like flames, and just then the clouds parted and golden sunlight prismed into great triangles that quilted the earth, illuminating the white quartz in granite walls, dazzling the green sequins of new birch leaves, setting spark to the Pemigewasset River low in the valley where it rode high and wild with snow melt, and a small shard of sunlight tore from the quilt to puncture Lucy’s left eye and travel unknown conduits deep between dark folds of her flesh to prick some sublime wound, ancient and tender, which never fully healed and claimed only a thin membrane to protect it; this the shard pierced and a surge of energy, unnamable, untamable, pitched through that punctum, up through her body and out her mouth and eyes, translating not into words or wisdom but violent laughter and tears, forcing her to pull to the shoulder, tires crunching over gravel, so that she might die just for one moment of perfection on the side of the road with the 18-wheelers roaring by, rocking her car on its wheels as she sat stunned, laughing and crying at the light, the granite, the leaves, the air, and her heart in anguish with joy at the absurdity of beauty before the membrane just as quickly mended and she, careful to use her blinker, conscious of the time and when her son’s high school rehearsal of The Tempest would end, wiped her eyes, rolled up her window, and merged back into traffic to continue her drive home where she would reheat yesterday’s pea soup for dinner.

 

Julie Jones

 

Julie Jones holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and the Cincinnati Review: miCRo. She has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2020. You can find her at juliemjones.com.

Jerome Berglund

January 2020 | visual art

The Fall II

The Fall II

 

Jerome Berglund

Jerome Berglund graduated summa cum laude from the cinema-television production program at the University of Southern California, and has spent much of his career working in television and photography. He has had photographs published and awarded in local papers and recently staged an exhibition in the Twin Cities area which included a residency of several months at a local community center. The most recent show featuring fine art photography, at the Pause Gallery in New York, opened in early December.