April 2019 | nonfiction
You kiss Ryan Gosling at El Cid on one of those smoking terraces that overlook the canyon below Sunset Boulevard. You have both been catcalling the flamenco dancers and sharing cigarettes like you and your best friend used to on the patio of the coffee shop in Los Gatos, a life so distant from where you have come that you wonder whether you have made it up so that your character has backstory.
Contrary to what you will tell others later, the kiss is closed-mouthed and lopsided. You are so drunk it is not possible to know who leaned in towards whom, but it is likely that you perpetrated. You, desperate, starved for love, so deprived of the validation that you exist in this fetishized dystopia of self-willed kamikazes. There is some theatrical fondling of the shirt collar and its forced awkwardness. Still. In a small, lopsided way, you are confirmed.
The next morning, ebbing your way out of gin-induced oblivion, you manage to stumble into him. You are perusing the ’zines in Skylight Books, dressed in the same lace jumper you wore the night before, and he is handling a book on California poetry near the greeting card carousel. You should be wearing sunglasses. Or a mask. He is wearing a fedora; you, the glass beret you bought while backpacking through Brittany. Both of you are escaping the Los Feliz heat and its baking sheet sidewalks.
There is a blip. Unrecognition. A hiccup in reality—which is really a trademark experience since your unbecoming into one of many, many free radicals. Your grip on the black and white vanity print tightens. Your damp fingers smudge the script. But that’s okay. You will buy it anyway. As a memento of reformation. The smile is microscopic and barely hurdles the rampart of books and greeting cards, but by god, it is a smile. It is a laser to the brain. To his left, a wispy brunette spins the card carousel, unaware that you have conquered fantasy.
Ryan holds your gaze just long enough.
He licks his lips.
He sets the book down on an untouched stack of LA Weeklys.
Exits frame left. Fades to white.
Holy shit, you think. I’m finally real.
Tara Stillions Whitehead
Tara Stillions Whitehead’s writing has appeared in Fiction International, Red Rock Review, Chicago Review, Sleipnir, New Orleans Review, Texas Review, and elsewhere. She has received a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers and Pushcart Prize and AWP Intro Journal Awards nominations. A former assistant director for television and film, she now teaches film and writing in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
April 2019 | fiction
It was the first class of the morning. Five of six new students sat around the table, propped upright in their plastic garden chairs, attentive and ready to work. So far so good. Then the sixth student arrived.
She had long, long black hair. She said nothing, set a notebook on the table, lowered herself into a chair and in one unbroken motion laid her head down on the table and fell asleep. Her black hair spread out on the table like an oil spill.
From time to time I glanced at her, and eventually I asked her a question:
“Julia? What is an example of a relative pronoun?”
There was no answer, no movement. In the suspended silence, which seemed to anticipate—some consequence—all of us stared at her. Now her hair began to undulate in wide swaths, floating, covering her notebook, and a full quarter of the table’s surface. It looked as if it would entwine itself around the books, the chairs and finally, around us. It was voluminous, its brilliant, black sheen hypnotizing—alive in itself, it was both a reflective surface and a depthless expanse. As I stared at it, it darkened and—began to grow. I stood up and backed away from the table.
I covered my split second of terror by hop-stepping over to the blackboard. For the rest of the class, I stood beside it, supported by its reliable, solid substance. I scrawled all over it until the uninterrupted mass of sentences on the board reflected the uninterrupted mass of hair on the table.
For the next hour I couldn’t help glancing over at that hair, and every time I did, it looked slightly different and began to take on a range of emotional qualities. In one moment, the hair was luminous—emanating angular and vibrant rays of warmth and light; at another it was a malicious stain, glowing with hate. At another it was as brittle and fine as glass, emitting a shrill and painful sensitivity—I could almost hear it screech. At the worst moments, it was dull—implacable, the dark matter of the universe.
I was shocked when this nameless substance rose up from the table at the end of the class. I gasped but covered, “Ah—I—I hope you’re alright, Julia?”
She said nothing, picked up her notebook and did not show her face as she left the room.
She came to three more classes and slept through each one, her hair spreading out over the table and taking on an array of emotional qualities and physical transformations as I watched it. I tried to speak with her, but she wouldn’t respond or show her face.
After the fourth class, Julia disappeared. I never saw her again, but in the days that followed, the overhead light reflected off the table where her hair had been—a negative image of its substance— out of an obsidian darkness, a faint and iridescent haze of light.
Rosalind Goldsmith
Rosalind Goldsmith lives in Toronto. She has written radio plays for CBC Radio Drama and a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival. She began writing short fiction four years ago. Since then, her stories have appeared in Litro UK (print and online), Popshot UK, Thrice Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Understorey, Filling Station and antilang., among others.
April 2019 | poetry
Pops, Dis Playa Need Ta Roll
They leave home singing, return home singing,
iPhones providing a soundtrack to their days
as they overdub the lyrics with an aggressive,
more frenzied version of their own.
But singing is not right, not in the technical
sense of the word, an unqualified misnomer
that would have traditionalists seething
in their graves— sonorous crooners who
devoted their lives to perfecting the range
of their sound; signature vocalists like Holiday,
Pavarotti or even good olé Blue Eyes;
their throats emotive as any instrument.
How modulation of timbre transports
feeling into worlds unknown, even a single
note rolled in glissandro can transfix.
But my boys could care less about that—
music as a vehicle, spiritual medium with
transformative properties. My desire to be
moved lame as the word gobbledygook.
Their base requirement visceral: rap the body
can feel, words that rise defiant, defendant;
brash sentiment carried mostly on the wing
of bass and rhyme. After dinner my son
pimps in his self-affected gangsta: Pops,
dis playa need to roll… I got beats to make
this nigga feel like drippin. Then he thumps
his chest with an inverted peace-sign.
Smiles thinly. Scrolls through graphic
soundbites on iTunes rapping over the top
of his favorites: Tupac, 2 Chainz, Biggie
and Wiz; ownership meant to impress.
He tells me Rock is dead. I think to
counter, wish to tell him he’s got it
wrong, there’s much more to music
than this. But thinking is where
it starts and ends.
Sunny-Side-Up
This reliance on spiritual balance
A far remove from its initial days
When I practiced The Upanishads in one
Hand and held the braided hose
Of a hookah in the other like an umbilical
Connecting me to the rich omphalos of God.
Meditation a zeitgist in the 80’s.
As the Beatles and Maharishi disappeared
In the rear-view, Wall Street’s
Three-piece-suits loomed king.
But at college I was smitten with Birkenstocks
And the regurgitated vibe of Woodstock,
the lanky TA’s chakra—hipster minyan
To professor So&So of Far Eastern Religion—
That accompanied me across The Quad
After lecture. He made pursuit of transcendentalism
Seem as cool as dropping the needle
On the Talking Heads, a tab of windowpane
On the eve of a Dead show.
But Enlightenment’s novelty wore off
Like a monk’s interest in the secular.
And then the world does what it does
And life did what it did and like
Finding a rhythmic breath
Or frying an egg sunny-side-up,
I finally got the center to hold.
To know then what we know now…
Well, we’ve all heard that one before.
Tony Tracy
Tony Tracy is the author of two poetry collections: The Christening and Without Notice. He is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Flint Hills Review, Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Hotel Amerika, Painted Bride Quarterly, Potomac Review and various other magazines and journals.
January 2019 | nonfiction
My mother said, “It’s ok to say no.”
I needed a cup from my grandmother’s cupboard, but I was four, unable to reach. My aunt grabbed me by the waist, cupping my bottom the way a swing set holds the body of small children. She hoisted me up to reach the cup, but I wouldn’t grab one. When she set me down I mumbled, don’t touch my private parts. Her laugh was defensive. She confronted my mother and said I was disrespectful. My mother said, “She governs her own body.”
In middle school an older female teacher sometimes walked behind students and laid her hands on them. Everyone joked about how inappropriate it was. As a class, we decided we would stand up and voice our discomfort. One day, she rested her hands on my shoulders. I jumped up. Don’t touch me, I shouted. The room was silent. I was sent to the principals’ office and eventually transferred to another teacher. My mother was proud of me, although I’m ashamed of myself now for those moments of pain etched in my teacher’s face after I’d shouted at her.
That was my mother’s gift to me. While other parents taught their children to say yes, to their teachers and their elders and their peers, my mother was adamant I learn to speak for my body.
Recently I went to get a massage from a cheap parlor; a type of place where you don’t undress. I signed a form stating I wanted a stranger’s hands on my body, to pull and push it into submission.
In a communal room, my masseuse told me, in broken and heavily accented English, to flip onto my stomach. Without speaking, he removed my arms from the shoulder straps of my dress. I assisted him. My stomach burned. He tugged at the dress, mumbling something as he pulled hard against my waist. I was waiting for him to stop. Stop beneath my shoulder blades. Stop there, at the lowest rib. My body became a list he checked off with ticks. He unsnapped my bra.
When the dress was pulled to my hips, just below the two dimples along my lower back, I told him that was far enough, the only words I was able to utter. The breath from his laugh hit my naked back and stung.
Later I learned I’d unknowingly consented to a massage, body unclothed. The masseuse was not a predator. But during that hour, I was a woman, silent.
Afterward he tried to snap my bra back on for me. I removed his hands and attempted it myself. My hands shook; I couldn’t hook the clips of my bra. He laughed again as I took the bra off completely and, still face down, slithered back into my dress. I shoved a crinkled five-dollar bill into his hand, fled.
In the car I fixed smudged mascara, my frizzled hair. My lip was swollen from where I’d bit it to keep from screaming.
by Briana Loveall
In 2018 Briana Loveall was a finalist for the Beacon Street Prize and the winner of the Peninsula Pulse Hal Award. In 2017 she was a finalist for the Montana Book Festival Award and the Annie Dillard Award. Her worth has appeared, or is forthcoming, with The Rumpus, The Forge, Under the Gum Tree, Crab Orchard Review, and others.
January 2019 | Best of Net nominee, fiction
When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does a flag pop out? If so, whose flag is it, anyway?
When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does his Cornucopian hat pop open? If so, do birds fly out? What kind of birds are they?
When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does he lose his trousers? What else does he lose?
When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does he ever hit the bullseye? How many Kewpie dolls has he won? Any wear a burka? A hula?
What kind of gun does Uncle Sam shoot? Without getting arrested? Without having his enlistment extended?
Is Uncle Sam related to Yosemite, by any chance?
by Michael Karl Ritchie
Michael Karl Ritchie is a retired Professor of English from Arkansas Tech University with work published in various small press magazines, including The Mississippi Review, Margie, OR Panthology – Ocellus Reseau. He has had three small press chapbook publications and Winter Goose Press has just published his collection of poems Ampleforth’s Miscellany (2017).
