The Farmers Market Contemplates my Skull

October 2019 | poetry

“It is a vestibule introducing one into the presence of the Good. Vestibule? Yes, and vestige, too, the trace in the multiple of the Good which itself remains in absolute unity.” Plotinus, The Intelligence, The Ideas, And Being

 

Not whole, but wholly striving, this Somali sambusa

confiscates

my taste buds. The way its lentil skates

toward higher stakes with kombucha

 

dominates the echoes and mirrors

of the Radiohead

cover band’s striving. Running for cover, we head

into the nearest tent; whatever echoes and mirrors

 

the rain is handmade

or not for sale in here. The scent of a baker’s

cake comes in and offers me its handsaw when my Baker’s

cyst elicits memory’s handmaid.

 

Fliers for performances of The Comedy

of Errors litter

the eye with glitter

redivivus, cupbearers and community.

 

For the essence of spiritual CBD

oil – if the expression is permissible –

Corri’s turquoise Hamsa charm fits the bill

to a t.

 

They call this pinot

“Moonlight in a Nightie.”

Running for cover with impunity,

blue jays point –

 

by the grace of God – to hardy fuchsias.

A sobering and drunken wind’s companion

anions

break this Saturday into a million cluster fucks.

 

But for all that, the Elf King’s roastery

clouds the thousand eyes of death, whose motley crew

of semi-arbitrary forces in J. Crew

will have a pretty good story

 

after today. Sitting tight, last year’s regatta

queen considers last year’s gold rush,

crying in her lap with thrush,

and sips a microbrew until last year’s forgotten.

 

“Beauty must forget itself to be itself”; a misbegotten

thought, which thinking, thinks, “Your rage agrees

with you, and rages.” By the grace

of this harissa’s miniature toccata

 

on my tongue,

gap-toothed memory gets around,

brings out the best bratwurst in the lost and found.

Angry it isn’t ideal, a scaredy-cat’s got my tongue.

 

Jake Sheff

Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon. He’s married with a daughter and six pets. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate’s Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).

On Gagarin Prospect

October 2019 | fiction

Just before midnight, Irina and I went to Odessa station to meet the Moscow train. I paid our taxi driver but asked him to wait; he might or he might not, I knew.

It was cold, black, and raining softly.  Half the platform lights were out. The station stank of soot, wet concrete and disinfectant.  People huddled, smoking, talking.  We stood to one side. Irina wore dark red lipstick; raindrops jewelled her fur coat and her hair.

Loudspeakers crackled an announcement. People shuffled forward, craning their necks. The train drew in and stopped at the buffers with a hiss. Doors opened and passengers spilled out, some looking purposeful, some dazed. Men in fur hats embraced, slapping each other’s backs.  Couples walked off carrying plastic suitcases.

We’d come to collect something that someone in Moscow had paid the train guard to bring Irina. ‘Medicine you can’t get in Odessa,’ she said. We climbed onto the train, the steps and handrails battered with years of hard use, and walked through the carriages. Flattened-out cardboard was spread underfoot on the wet metal floors. Compartment doors hung open, showing rumpled grey blankets on narrow fold-down beds.

We found the guard in his yellow-lit cabin, distributing items to people who thanked him quietly and quickly disappeared. He handed over a small packet; Irina slipped it into her bag. Nobody looked at us as we walked back along the wet platform to the gates. Our taxi was waiting after all, and we drove back along Gagarin Prospect, lines of white headlights and red tail-lights starry in the increasing rain.

I didn’t ask Irina about the package, it was none of my business. Once we got to her flat I gave her back the old Makarov pistol she’d asked me to carry.

 

Peter Justin Newall

Peter Justin Newall lives in Thalgarrah, NSW, but has lived variously in Australia, Ukraine and most recently Kyoto, Japan, where he sang for a popular local blues band. He has been published in England, Hong Kong, the USA and Australia; his stories The Luft Mensch and The Chinese General were each nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Emily as an Echo of Old Music

October 2019 | poetry

Rarely do we tear off a wing

from our past bodies to feel alive

with each other, but it happens

 

enough that we need

some real wolves in the music

we listen to when the children

 

are sleeping.  I sing to howl

without the substances

of our first life together.  Emily,

 

she likes to close her eyes

& stand alone in the water

of her love for me.  It’s a new

 

distance.  We are dancing bears

that cannot understand

how we found our hind legs.

 

We are so many animals

that I do not understand

how these songs keep finding us.

 

 

Darren C. Demaree

Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently “Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire”, (June 2019, Harpoon Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Dentist’s Chair, Circa 1961

October 2019 | nonfiction

I was to be sedated due to overwhelming anxiety and a horrific gag reflex. A pill, an injection into my right arm, and inhaled gas. Seemed like a lot for a skinny eleven-year-old, yet I gulped the gas in fear. The dentist tilted the chair until I was lying flat. Within minutes, I was asleep. Slumbering in a soporific dream. But though asleep, I was able to observe, kind of like when you suddenly die and you’re floating toward the white light but can see everything happening to your body as the doctor tries to restart your heart. It was that vivid and clear. Like sitting in the front row of a movie theater. Anyway, I could hear the dentist telling me everything would be fine, to relax, that he was going to remove those “dirty little cavities.” I heard the click of the door lock. He turned on a radio, loud. Then, unexpectedly, he unbuttoned my trousers and pulled them to my knees. Then my underwear. He placed a white towel on my lap and a wet washcloth on his instrument table. He touched my penis, barehanded. I felt warm and flushed, my heart slapping hard in my chest. He moved his fingers faster and faster. Then I felt a sudden shiver of my body, almost like a seizure, but a good seizure, then pure exhaustion.

I awoke to the sound of Frank Sinatra, or maybe it was Dean Martin, I don’t remember. The dentist snorted a laugh and handed me a mirror to look at my teeth. Two gray fillings sat planted in the back. He told me I was good to go, but to brush daily, and see him in six months. My mouth was still numb, but I tried to thank him: Thankf youff. He winked. I slid from the chair, stumbled a bit, and opened the door to the foyer where my grandmother waited. Another young boy, seated with his mother, fidgeted nervously.

As we drove home, I noticed a damp spot on my pants, near the bottom of my zipper. I turned toward the car window so my grandmother couldn’t see and touched it with my finger. It was a texture I recognized from the times I secreted a Playboy to the bathroom and locked the door. I rolled the window down and rested my chin. The storefronts passed and the wind tousled my hair.

##

I’ve never been able to love. I’ve tried but failed, miserably. Over and over. I’ve struggled to understand why, scouring the years of my life for an answer, yet finding none. However, I’ve noticed that when love begins to emerge from the solace of aloneness, I recoil, the festering memory of the dentist’s chair rising like shards of glass tumbling in a broken heart. It’s a gaping wound that can’t be stitched. So now, in the closing years of life, I’ve resigned that finding love is at hopeless end, and my remaining days a fated time of lonely solitude.

 

Paul Rousseau

Semi-retired physician and writer, published in medical journals and a smattering of literary journals, including The Healing Muse, Blood and Thunder, Intima. A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Months To Years, Cleaning up Glitter, Prometheus Dreaming, Hektoen, Hospital Drive, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Tendon, and others. Currently working on a collection of essays. Lives in Charleston, SC, longs to return to the west. Lover of dogs.

Jeremiah Gilbert

October 2019 | visual art

Okavango Delta Reflection

Okavango Delta Reflection

 

Jeremiah Gilbert

Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and avid traveler. He likes to travel light and shoot handheld. His travels have taken him to over eighty countries spread across five continents. His photography has been published internationally, in both digital and print publications, and has been exhibited worldwide. His hope is to inspire those who see his work to look more carefully at the world around them in order to discover beauty in unusual and unexpected places. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels