July 2017 | fiction
When I was a child, my father’s trombone hung from a hook in the utility room in the basement. It was the color of dull brass, with a few greenish patches. It was an unremarkable piece of household flotsam among the extra furnace filters, metal folding chairs, and boxes of old clothes to give to charity.
He played it a couple of times a year. Played? He would blow into it for a few seconds and move the slide up and down, seldom conjuring up a sound that could be called musical. He puffed his cheeks out comically and crossed his eyes at us kids. We would shriek with delight that our strict, straight-laced father was clowning for us.
When my father came up the stairs with the trombone, my mother, grim-faced, would walk out of the room. If she was in the kitchen, she banged the pots around. Sometimes she left the house entirely.
My father was not given to explanations and we kids were too timid—no, afraid—to ask: Why did he have a trombone if he couldn’t play it? Or could he play it and he just didn’t let on? And why did it upset our mother so much?
When I went back to visit my parents as an adult, I always meant to ask him about it. I’d mostly left my fear of him behind, but each time I visited I had other things on my mind—dating, career, marriage, children, divorce, my parents’ health—and I never got around to it. To that and many other things.
My father died five years ago, but his presence remains vivid to me: his smell, his V-neck undershirts, his anger. Above all, perhaps, his guardedness. I never felt I really knew him.
My mother’s memory is failing her, and now she is moving to a nursing home in another city to be closer to my sister. As we were packing the contents of the house my mother had shared with my father for forty years, my sister asked me whether I wanted the trombone. I didn’t have to think twice.
The trombone hangs on a hook in my basement. I take it upstairs a couple of times a year and blow furiously into it. My children howl with laughter at the fractured sound and my red face. They never ask me why I have it. I’m not sure I could explain if they did.
Joel Streicker
Joel Streicker is a writer, poet, and literary translator based in San Francisco. His fiction has been published in Hanging Loose and The Opiate, and is forthcoming in Kestrel and Great Lakes Review. Another story of his was a finalist in Epiphany’s spring fiction contest in 2016. Streicker’s English-language poetry appeared in the fall 2016 issue of California Quarterly, and his Spanish-language poetry was recently featured in El otro páramo (Bogotá, Colombia). Común Presencia (also located in Bogotá) published a book of his Spanish-language poetry, El amor en los tiempos de Belisario, in 2014. In 2011 he won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his work with Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, and in 2012 he was a translator in residence at Omi Translation Lab. His translations of Latin American fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and Words Without Borders. Streicker’s translation of a story by the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez is forthcoming in Freeman’s. His essays and book reviews have been appeared in The Jewish Daily Forward, Moment, and Shofar, among other publications.
July 2017 | poetry
The rules are shaped and branded
On to genes, down generations,
Passed round in
Story and in song,
To make forgetting harder.
Ideas are bubbled up
On home-fired cauldrons,
Fuelled by a thousand years or more
Of thermal layered grievance
That have no taste, no smell, no colour:
Yet, still, they stink.
A virtual reality of light and heat
And sound that causes
Temperatures to rise and red mists form
Round ancient borders
Where battle lines are drawn
And citizens are armed against each other.
Upturned tables, scattered pieces
Mean no peace for people powered by hate.
The frenzied game plays on;
Until the victor stands elated,
Knows records are at last set straight
And neighbour’s scalps are buried deep.
He will not sleep,
For ghosts of so called civil war
Will always rise again, to haunt.
Caroline Johnstone
Caroline is originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Ayrshire, Scotland. She has just started writing poems again, and writes mainly on philosophical, political and life experience themes. She has been published in The Galway Review, Imagine Belfast and The Snapdragon Journal and was shortlisted for Tales in the Forest. She blogs for Positively Scottish, helps the Women Aloud NI with social media and is a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland).
July 2017 | poetry
I always wanted to wear the pants
James Dean wore, and Rebel
taught me he was all wick and no wax—
ghost-riding his way off the bluffs—
because you know that he didn’t
make it out of that car wreck,
not really, not in the cold, rehearsed
way his total soc counterpart did,
when he cowered before the onslaught
of fragrant light beams or
fictions, projections on canvas,
but never the real fear, real
darkness, no. Instead: two tons
of steel clasping him like a baby
bird in a broken nest. That day,
pretending to fly off the cliffs,
he gripped tight the wheel—
white knuckles, greased hair,
creased brow and grimace
grown around the stubby butt
of a cigarette—he gripped tight
and slammed the gas as though
the treads could peel back the future,
the Porsche 550 and 49 Mercury,
the lot and US Route 466
playing tug of war like two groups
of children unlikely to ever let
the sun go down. And James,
having seen the future and the past,
bit down hard on the smoldering
tobacco and shut his eyes, because
in that moment he was unsure if
he was about to die, or push through;
and the potential was in the engine,
potential in the pedal, potential in his feet,
in the rawhide stink of leather, in the smoke
and heat of gasoline, in the bristles
of his comb; and now that he no
longer knew which car he was in,
he flinched, and death caressed him
with metallic fingers; and the sun setting
across the desert flats flickered over
the crumpled flesh and steel, and
the bystanders squealed and cried
with excitement, and the ghost of
James Dean walked around the car
and wondered if he were the dream,
or his body. He looked down and thought
stop pretending. Always the actor, always
the hardness of perfection, of dying young
enough to have been everything and nothing
at all—broken bones, crumpled steel,
oil strewn across asphalt and dust, salty
tears, baking sun, acrid smoke, and on
the wind tossed side of perfection,
his cool hair fluttering, timeless.
Noah Leventhal
Noah Leventhal is a gumshoe literary detective. He recently graduated from St. John’s College -Santa Fe, New Mexico where he managed to avoid nasty juniper allergies for three out of his four years. He enjoys dissolving dream into reality, even when he is talking or eating food with his fingers.
July 2017 | poetry
Recalling a melodious pitch,
or forms of movement, thus
Swarms of creatures the mind adventures,
the swooning of the thrush
And while I beckon hitherto
ineffable thoughts I ponder:
the motive of a person’s word and deed
when that one says, what’s wrong dear?
Further, have I not known
the brilliance of mind on earth
The one that makes me move in glory,
and relinquish undue search?
If not, I will declare
I must continue onward
And love that which is from above—
those objects and things we ponder
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus
a taste of pondering eminence
a taste of Nature’s Sexes
And while I sit, I wait
for Heaven’s inspiration
to be greater than the vile amorous
to rejoice in my long sation
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus.
Lance Gracy
Lance Heath Gracy is a retired infantry Marine, current graduate student, teacher, and tutor. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of the Incarnate Word, and has published there in the local literary arts journal. He is in pursuit of an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas-San Antonio. He has a passion for evangelizing truth through various means, but has an interest writing poetry in particular. He lives alone with his German Shepherd, named Dennis, and enjoys reading, studying, running, gardening, and time with fellows.
July 2017 | fiction
When the birds and bees die off because of chemical misuse, where will procreation be, who will make love? Only the Doomsday Clock will keep moving and gasping.
Every field is being stripped. Big Dude tractors, and grain hoppers the size of two car garages. Harvest is part of mid-America; it’s what we do; it’s how we feed the world.
A slow and steady rain follows two days of harder rain, chides us for cranking up our diesel tractors and ethanol plants here in corn country, and causes this climate shift which accounts for alien-warm Midwestern winters with too little snow and too much gray. We call these downpours toad-stranglers.
It’s here where thighs turn thick as oaks in an abandoned field, where the waist takes on a tractor’s tire, and where breasts grow a valley between sagging hills. We don’t kill ourselves anymore like Karen Carpenter did because we know we must live with our choices. One too many flavored coffees and we forget how we once loved the pain, would do anything for a compliment. Now we find little shame in comforting ourselves in a weeping world where the only true love lingers along a crowded sky.
My gentleman farmer ages with the seasons. At fifty, the wear is evident. At sixty, a tractor becomes a ten-story building to scale. He wanted to climb Devil’s Tower once, but that was before his days ran together into a jumble of moments called Time.
See this mishmash of days, see it clear, this is life, this here and there. To forget to fight, to uncurl the fist, to close the lips, is not surrender. Peace comes to the quiet heart. And to pray upon the fertile land for an end to war is virtuous.
Chila Woychik
German-born Chila Woychik has bylines in journals such as Silk Road, Storm Cellar, and Soundings East, and was awarded the 2017 Loren Eiseley Creative Nonfiction Award (Red Savina Review) & the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award (Emrys Foundation). She craves the beautiful and lyrical, and edits the Eastern Iowa Review.
