July 2017 | poetry
Swimming Laps
crawl up 1 crawl down
2 up 3 down 4 up 5 how
many minutes how fast the heart
rate down 6 the second hand do-si-do-ing with the minute
hand of the big wall clock the beat of the rock-a-billy on
the boom box up 7 breaststroke down 8
up 9 down 10 flip turn up 11
backstroke down 12 butterfly up 13 down
14 sidestroke 15 16 how long? long enough
next crop of legs dangling swinging impatient on
the ledge, lanes a blur up down up down bathing caps goggles
you know/don’t know men women counting strokes times
laps minutes days (how many this week) (not enough) hot pink/
slate black FitBits blinking/sleeping pulses (up, down) calories in out…
You know nothing about the people in these bodies. Only
their swimsuits, sliding jumping climbing getting in/out. You say hi
to the red bikini. To the floral board shorts. You/they hustle to the showers,
to the lockers, to the hairdryers. Presto! Ms Bikini perfect in Givency suiting.
Spiked Prada’s. Mr. Board Shorts casual Armani all the way. The stay-at homes,
the techies, the mommy/daddies, the laid-offs, the bigwigs, the retirees – headed out
in their yogapants grungy sneakers /crocs, toting their Lululemon/Nike/no-
name duffel bags off to the parking lot. Remotes awakening their shiny Masaratis
their slightly dented Kias, their ‘50’s Corvette convertibles, lovingly restored.
Their Honda minivans moving forward backing carefully anonymously into the world.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Again. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Again.
Suffering, Medicalized (in the ER on a Friday night)
On a scale of 1 -10, where 1 is no pain and 10 is the worst you can imagine, how bad is your pain?
10.
How would you describe it? Check two:
Burning ☐
aching ☐
stabbing ☐
shooting ☐
lacerating ☐
piercing ☐
pounding ☐
radiating ☐
throbbing ☐
stinging ☐
crushing ☐
Two isn’t enough choices
Sorry, that’s all the computer gives you.
How is your mood? Remember, just check two:
happy ☐
unhappy ☐
angry ☐
miserable ☐
anxious ☐
terrified ☐
hopeless ☐
hopeful ☐
depressed ☐
suicidal ☐
Thank you. Take a seat in the waiting room, and fill out these other forms. The doctor will see you in order of the time of your arrival. Or maybe the nurse. Or maybe the intern. Someone, at any rate.
May I have your insurance card while you are working on the forms?
Oh – your card has expired. Come back when it has been corrected. The 800 number is on your old card. They open at 8 AM on Monday.
Goodbye, have a nice weekend.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro
Marian Kaplun Shapiro is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A Quaker and a psychologist, her poetry often embeds the topics of peace and violence by addressing one within the context of the other. A resident of Lexington, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.
July 2017 | poetry
Scientists call it the measure of the disorder
or randomness in a system.
Too abstract?
Then reduce it to this: it’s hard,
very hard, to make things better
but it’s always possible to make them worse.
Thus relationships, children, companies, countries.
Entropy is the clock that forever
runs forward and down until it no longer
resembles a clock at all.
Meanwhile the love leaks out of marriages
one molecule at a time,
airlines beat passengers in their seats
and drag them screaming off the plane,
and we drop bombs on our enemies so big
they dwarf our own disorder, or so
we think, or would think, if thinking were something
still within our grasp.
I must make time in my desert of a day
to visit the grave of Robinson Jeffers and tell
his silent stone that our republic
no longer shines as it perishes
and entropy is the reason.
I’m sure that will comfort his departed shade,
long since dissipated into millions of strange shadows
by that other, more efficient entropy, death.
Kurt Luchs
Kurt Luchs has poems published or forthcoming in Former People Journal, Into the Void, Minetta Review, Poydras Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Otis Nebula, Sheila-Na-Gig, Right Hand Pointing, Roanoke Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, Noctua Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Antiphon, among others. He founded the literary humor site TheBigJewel.com, and has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as writing comedy for television (Politically Incorrect and the Late Late Show) and radio (American Comedy Network). In September 2017 Sagging Meniscus Press will publish his humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny).
July 2017 | fiction
I pulled open the small drawer below the wall phone and saw a point of silver sticking out beneath the mélange of business cards, a sticky pad, and a strip of lime green cloth.
Sucking in a sharp gasp of air, I said, “I never gave up hope I would find you. I just put you in the wrong drawer.”
I gazed at the simple – yet elegant – letter opener that had “Made in Germany” stamped at the end of the haft where it joined the handle. He used it most of his life. Then it was my turn to slice open envelopes.
To catch more of the knife’s glimmer, I drifted toward the window, cut by the certainty that I would never see light reflecting from his eyes again.
Fay L. Loomis
Fay L. Loomis, a nemophilist (haunter of the woods, one who loves the forest, its beauty, and its solitude), lives in upstate New York. An active member of the Stone Ridge Library Writers, her poetry and prose have appeared in online and print publications, most recently in Peacock Journal, Postcard Poems and Prose, Watershed Review, and First Literary Review-East.
July 2017 | fiction
Marco looked at the empty space that his sculpture was going to occupy. What the hell did he have to say that would be worth occupying this space with? His collection of found objects that were going to be used for the assemblage lay in boxes and sat in bags all around him. He had metal and wood and plastics of all sorts. No paper. He had given up on paper and on vocabulary because words had only ever gotten him into trouble in life. But even without words, his sculpture was supposed to mean something.
The empty space before him was more profound than anything he could fill it with. He could add pieces of his life: the slights, the insults, the bashings in the head he’d endured at the hands of so-called friends who’d only ever left landmines for him to be exploded by later. No, they did not deserve any acknowledgment in his work. He could talk about his great loves, the ones who sliced him open, threw him onto funeral pyres, and, even worse, ignored him when he needed them, especially when he’d dedicated entire weeks to their problems. It was always the same thing: I love you if you are helping me, but if you need anything in return, well, then you are just out of luck. Yep, that was it. He was out of luck. He was completely out of luck. And what can one do when one has no luck left at all? What is there left when all hope of anything ever going right again has completely gone?
That is what he needed to figure out. That was what the void before him needed from him. It was the artist’s job to stare into the gaping maw of nothingness and pull from it something. That was a profound obligation. But now that he stared into that gaping maw, all he found was nothing. His ability to pull anything out of nothing was gone.
He picked up the bags and boxes and carried them out to the dumpster. He had nothing left. Without the objects, perhaps the silence could finally overtake him. Perhaps the noises that kept hurting him would finally quit, quiet. Quite.
He had left nothing.
Eckhard Gerdes
Eckhard Gerdes has published books of poetry, drama, and fourteen books of fiction, including the novels “Hugh Moore” (for which he was awarded an &Now Award) and “My Landlady the Lobotomist” (a top five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll and nominated for the 2009 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel of the Year). His most recent books are a tongue-in-cheek work of creative nonfiction, “How to Read” (Guide Dog Books); a novel, White Bungalows (Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press); and a collection, “Three Plays” (Black Scat Books). He lives near Chicago and has three sons and three grandsons.
July 2017 | poetry
Natal Motions
You blame me for rumors
floating across highways
which come to rest uneasily
among swans
and other natal motions.
The voice you claim
to speak with may be your own
or the disembodied sound
of warm intentions you thought
had finally been quelled.
Like a spin of insects
beneath an evening streetlamp
it’s useless to sleep
when you could be awake
imitating life and tracing art.
I appreciate the false existence
you’ve found in a patch of tulips
but I don’t want
an expression of your tenderness
chained to a bird of song.
The Highest Reaches
Beneath the highest reaches
in a yellow-gold field
your eyes are filled
with gestures of joy
and light-blue bends
but sadness and star grains
still cling to your hair.
I rise to my feet
even in an anatomy
of insignia and pins
obscured beneath a canopy
of crippled captivity.
The birds have ended their ostinato
and we’re left
with only a stuttering silence
of leaves.
My dream is cracking open
the egg of a white lizard,
a little girl pounding
on a locked door.
If it’s me you’re crying for
then no, I don’t want you to stop
until we’re separated again
by sutures of emerald green
and pinches of black.
Gelatin Plateaus
You’re scared to exchange words
fearing that I’ll intersperse my voice
with a disastrous elixir
designed to make you love me.
In my guise as a simple hitchhiker
with a broken guitar
you’ve driven past
at least a dozen times
coursing the roundabout
with your left foot tapping out the window.
Cast from the joke of a raven
you dance naked but impenetrable
in a tongueless world of gelatin plateaus
and abalone snow.
The sound you’re hearing in your mind
is only a mortar and pestle—
the killing powder was consumed
when you first imagined
the swollenness
of my lips around your nipple;
felt the insistence of glacial stone
opening furrows of ochre and loam.
Disconnected Flickers
Never does my mind
consider the disappearance of earth—
my thoughts go even further than that
a grisaille balance of stars
and starlessness
the high pitch of emptiness
and the decaying swingset in my backyard;
warped, brittle wood
and tattered canvas.
A calm has descended upon
morning grass
and the departure of small mammals
for more secluded silences—
the faintest trace of your instep
makes the world more
than a sequence of disconnected flickers
running in the direction
I suppose.
Richard King Perkins II
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.
