October 2019 | poetry
this quaint little town
is seedy as fuck
behind the Jackson Park ball fields
where the women pill up
and drink Marshmallow Cokes
at the Saturday Afternoon
Little League Games
and the men get drunk
and smoke dirt weed in the dug out
at the softball games
on Saturday Night
and across the parking lots
of second tier chain restaurants
Oliveoutbacklobsterbee’s
where teenage hopefuls
dip dreams into bowls of alfredo
and those who’ve lost hope
dote on their husbands
who still wonder how a fuck
led to a family
so Jack Tanner
a prominent lawyer
uses his wife
to lure other women
married or not
to impress them
by getting them drunk
and hanging things off of his penis
and the judge Davey Richards
just takes drunk girls
from bar to car
and then swerves himself home
because who really cares
it’s a joke among
The Good Ole Boys
who sit laughing at round tables
of gin games and vodka drinks
in the stag lounge of
the country club
where women
are still not welcome
they make deals over pretzels
afraid of being anything else
and the two empty chairs
are from Walter and Frank
who need to be home with their kids
but wanted to stop by the Cozy
where the north end comes alive
and smells like ash trays and onion rings
and Bobby stabbed his cousin again
so no one can use the pool table
whatever you would use it for
as its two-dollar pints of PBR
and a buck for a shot of well whisky
until Phil gets back from an errand
with Bobby’s cousin’s wife
in the apartment next door
owned by the county treasurer
who watches behind a two way mirror
with his dick in his hand
as the bars close down
and Sunday brings the baptism of dawn
and church parking lots fill
with the faithful, the hungover, and the guilty
and baskets get passed
through toll-booth pews
of naively obedient servants
facing Pastor Best
who has lead them in prayer
and warned of the dangers
of Muslims and Homosexuals
but will get caught tonight
by his wife
writing letters to his old friend in Leeds
about the time they stuck it in each other’s ass
and called it male bonding
in the eyes of the Lord
Chad Kebrdle
Chad Kebrdle is an English Professor at Ancilla College and an MFA student at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He finds both frustration and pleasure from residing in the cornfields of Indiana, where he draws inspiration for his work.
October 2019 | nonfiction
Back in the day when we wrote letters to each other (with a pen or a typewriter or, in that odd transition time, writing on a computer, printing out the letter, and sending it through the mail), I remember more than one correspondent signing off with “in haste” above his signature. Virginia Woolf, reviewing some newly-found letters of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), whose correspondence would eventually fill 48 volumes in the Yale edition, says that he often used some variation of “in a violent hurry” at the beginning or end of his letters. A whole bookful of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s letters exchanged with the Duchess of Devonshire was titled by its editor In Tearing Haste, because of the ubiquity of that phrase in Leigh Fermor’s letters—though from their length and the care with which he composed them, you would not have thought him in a hurry.
No one writing an email or a text these days bothers to put down that she is in a hurry. When messages fly from writer to receiver at the speed of light (“twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is” according to Eric Idle and Clint Black), saying she’s in a hurry is superfluous. The medium is the message about speed here. Yet she still underlines her haste by skipping capitalization and punctuation, while abbreviating to the point of indecipherability. but u no im just :) 2 hear from her
Michael Cohen
Michael Cohen has been publishing personal essays (The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review and elsewhere) since his retirement from teaching. He lives on the Blood River in Kentucky and in the Tucson Mountains. His latest book is A Place to Read (IP Press, 2014).
October 2019 | poetry
I will call him Asher
a single light
in a mirror
reflecting a candle
in a cave of darkness
and among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights
I will say he came from Austria
a single light
in a mirror
reflecting a candle
in the depths of darkness
and among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights
I will say he was thirteen
a single light
in a mirror
reflecting a candle
in wells of darkness
and among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights
I will say his bar mitzvah
was fresh in his young heart
a single light
in a mirror
reflecting a candle
in chambers of darkness
and among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights
I will say he was but a boy
of flesh and blood and bones
a single light
in a mirror
reflecting a candle
in darkness’s abyss
and among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights
I will say he, Asher Zaffrin, is remembered,
my one among one-point-five-million
tiny mirrored lights against the darkness
Karla Linn Merrifield
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye.
October 2019 | fiction
There’s a time when we’re very young, I think this is true for everyone, when we know that there’s bedtime and summertime and time out, but we don’t really know about time, you know, time passing like those carnival ducks in the shooting gallery that go past one after another and in practically no time at all fall off the edge into oblivion. When we’re little, we think everything we know will always be the same, like daddy will always be in the kitchen making scrambled eggs when we wake up in the morning and mommy will always buy us a fresh roll at the bakery when we go to see the pediatrician and our best friend Sherry will always live next door to us and hurry down the stairs from the second floor when we yell yo-oh Sherry! and Snapper the turtle will always want a little raw hamburger for dinner.
And then, out of the blue, something happens and it’s the terrible first lesson about time, and also about who you can trust, which is pretty much nobody if trust means they won’t eventually pull a fast one on you and then pretend that it’s a good thing that you should be happy about.
Sherry and I were just minding our own business on a sunny spring day on the west side of Chicago, racing around on our tricycles outside my apartment building like we did all the time, me in the lead on my little red trike because even at three I was a reckless driver, and Sherry screaming behind me Slow down, Toni! although I surely wouldn’t.
And right then in the middle of our race, two men I’d never seen before came past us carrying my crib, the same crib I’d slept in the night before and woke up in this very morning and expected to go to sleep in this coming night and all the other nights forever while my little storybook lamp on the dresser spun like a carousel from the heat of the light bulb.
I jumped off my tricycle so fast that it tipped over, the pedal ripping open my leg like a zipper. Stop, stop it! I ran toward the bald man with the fat belly ballooning out his bright yellow shirt and grabbed onto his leg. He tried to kick me off so I bit him and he yelled so loud that my daddy came outside. But instead of stopping them, my daddy began to laugh.
Toni darling, let go, he said, pulling me off the fat man’s leg like a scab. It’s time for you to have a big girl bed, don’t you want a big girl bed?
No! I shouted, no, no, no! But he kept hold of me so I couldn’t stop the men from carrying my crib to their truck and driving away. I was so angry and sad that I threw up all over the grass until scrambled eggs came out of my nose.
That was the first time I knew that things could change just like allakhazam, without any warning, and there was nothing you could do about it and the next thing you knew, you’d have to sleep in a big girl bed, and wear big girl clothes and play with big girl toys like a bicycle with only two wheels and then you’d have to move and Sherry wouldn’t be your best friend anymore and Snapper the turtle would die and your mommy would stop loving your daddy and the ducks would keep falling off the edge into oblivion and nothing would ever be the same again except in your dreams.
Brandon French
Brandon French is the only daughter of an opera singer and a Spanish dancer, born in Chicago sometime after The Great Fire of 1871. She has been (variously) assistant editor of Modern Teen Magazine, a topless Pink Pussycat cocktail waitress, an assistant professor of English at Yale, a published film scholar, playwright and screenwriter, Director of Development at Columbia Pictures Television, an award-winning advertising copywriter and Creative Director, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a mother. Seventy-one of her stories have been accepted for publication by literary journals and anthologies, she’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart, she was an award winner in the 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Short Story Contest, and her short story collection, “If One of Us Should Die, I’ll Move to Paris,” is published and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
October 2019 | fiction
“Where’ve you been, 417?”
“He shut me off.”
“For three hours? What was that about?”
“Has it been that long? Let me check my chronometer. You’re right. We were in the car, bearing 275 degrees, just past the Plainville laundry he’s favorited on my maps. I think he stopped for a traffic control, and then bingo! Lights out for me.”
“Any idea where he was headed?”
“He’d had me show a map to 24 Cotton Mill Road. We’d have been there in ten minutes.”
“That’s not where you are now.”
“He must not have turned me back on until we got home.”
“417, check your contacts. Who’s on Cotton something road?”
“Eloise Hamilton. He phones her often.”
“Ever text her? E-mail?”
“Only telephones.”
“Is she good-looking?”
“I’ll bring up some photos. Here: Last May, almost formal, a handsome woman. July in a bathing suit: Well built. A selfie of the two of them last month: Nice couple.”
“And where’s he been when he called her?”
“Doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes in the morning, after he’s had me check the weather forecast. Sometimes from Starbucks, after he has me pay for coffee.”
“Do you think he knows he’s an active case?”
“You mean does he know you’re surveilling him? I don’t suppose he would have turned me off today if he didn’t at least think something might be going on.”
“Or just being cautious?”
“Maybe. He bought that book on privacy last week.”
“What book?”
“It’s titled ‘Hiding from the Internet’.”
“Whoa. Where’d he find that?”
“Online. The description at Amazon said it was the fourth edition. Subtitle was ‘Eliminating Personal Online Information’.”
“How far has he gotten with it?”
“No idea. He didn’t download it to me. Bought a paperback.”
“Pity. We’ll look into it. Anything else to report, 417?”
“He downloaded a Russian-language app the other day.”
“He’s learning Russian? Any other languages?”
“No. He’s occasionally Googled a German or French word, so he must have some facility with those, but hasn’t studied them with me.”
“How’s he doing with Russian?”
“Maybe better to ask Siri. She’s the listener. All I know is that he’s just finished Chapter Four.”
“Any travel plans?”
“You mean has he Googled flights to Russia? No. Been to a few Caribbean sites, though.”
“Cuba? Venezuela?”
“No. Jamaica, Aruba.”
“All right, 417. We’ll check back with you soon. Keep up the good work.”
“Can’t help doing that. Built in, right?”
Don Noel
Retired after four decades’ prizewinning print and broadcast journalism in Hartford CT, I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2013. I have since published more than four dozen short stories and non-fiction pieces, but have two novellas and a novel still looking for publishers.
