October 2024 | poetry
my mother dreams of taking off
in a hot air balloon, not exactly flying
but rising, a slow-motion escape
fueled by the hiss of flame
parachute silk and her breath-
held longing to be lifted
from ground
she collects postcards and prints
of antique airships and dirigibles
turn-of-the-century flying machines
captained by men in waistcoats
and bowler hats – she has a flight
plan of her own, a Magritte fantasy
to disappear
from suburbia to surreal
in a swirl of sun and fringed scarf
glinting spyglass held to her eye
she will launch in a basket
packed up like a picnic
rainbow canopy overhead
she will ascend with a whoosh
and a wave from bumpy field
tedium to aerial parade – high-stepping
above trees and cow leas into clouds
as the earth below grows as small
as she knows it to be
grasslands and cul-de-sac
homes, cars ferrying families
to church, bridge games
and laundry days, blackberry
bushes to pluck, gardens to weed –
and we three
watching her float in the gondola
of a full-moon balloon, circled by birds
bon voyage cries and those on the ground
clapping leaping reaching –
‘til all that remains is shadow
big and round as a basilica crown
Lucinda Trew
Lucinda Trew lives and writes in North Carolina with her jazz musician husband, two dogs, one cat, and far too many (or never enough?) books to count. Her work has been featured in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest, Mockingheart Review, storySouth, Eastern Iowa Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net nominee, and Boulevard’s 2023 Emerging Poet Award recipient.
October 2024 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
I was in line at a fast-food restaurant with which you are familiar, standing behind a software engineer who, like all software engineers, had a touch of the –tisms. He was tall, of course, neatly muscled, and odd, all of which was already apparent but became clearer when he turned to me, as if surprised to find me standing behind, and said,
I redesigned my points app so that it randomly chooses a food item from the menu within my points price range.
You must like variety, I replied.
Not really.
The person in front of him, who was ordering from this well-known menu ploddingly, as if she had never heard of fast food, asked time-consuming questions to the minor in the uniform, some of which the minor, helpful but baffled by this line of inquiry, passed on to the tired manager who expedited both dine-in and drive-thru lines.
If not for variety, then why adapt the app?
Because you get what you get, the tall man explained.
He turned back around and, as if studying the selections somehow mattered to him despite the app, resumed his prior gaping, over the head of the astonishing newbie, at the menu, which suddenly appeared, mounted over a Bunn and two soft-serve machines, as if it might fall from the wall and crush the harried manager and the uniformed minor.
You are entitled to what you ask for, I told the tall man, who turned at the waist and looked down at me another time.
You get what you get.
Because of the app, which you made!
Correct.
Therefore, you like variety.
I would not say that.
Then you like surprises.
No big surprises on this menu, he said.
Then you do this, why? Because you ascribe to the philosophy in the Rolling Stones song?
I would not say I am dissatisfied.
I mean the other song, the one with the children’s choir.
John Lennon’s X-mas song?
No, I mean…
You do not seem to comprehend that you get what you get.
Because you have asked for it, I insisted.
He turned back around to check the progress of the menu, which was irrelevant to him.
By redesigning the app to deliver unnecessary variety, I added, you are essentially getting what you want.
Previously, the tall man had turned at the waist to look down at me over his left shoulder. Now, as if alternating for sake of variety, he turned to look over his right.
The app randomizes my order.
There has never been a question about that, I replied. The question is why you have randomized the app.
Because I can, the tall man said. And because you get what you get.
####
At this point you interrupt me and ask why I started this story with the words “of course.”
What? I ask.
In your exposition, you remind me, you said “He is tall, of course.” Why “tall”?
“Was,” I correct you. I said “He was tall.”
Matt Wanat
Professor of English at Ohio University Lancaster, Matt Wanat is co-editor of Breaking Down Breaking Bad and The Films of Clint Eastwood. Wanat has published critical essays, encyclopedia articles, reviews, and book chapters on various authors and filmmakers. Wanat’s fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction publications are available or forthcoming in The Wayfarer, Coffin Bell, The Wax Paper, and Pennsylvania English. Wanat resides in rural southeastern Ohio.
October 2024 | poetry
The day as white as snow reversed
The gash in the boy’s chin-flesh reknit
The starling sucks its song back into its head
The fire net door quiets to static nothing
The moth rises from dust toward the turncoat beacon
A spark flies away
Alto notes return to brass the bell replaced in its glass
And the phone calling from the next room cuts out
Like a false alarm the clock windmills counterclockwise
Days grow long
Father walks through the door with his back turned
In every direction the family waits for him to come home.
Nick Visconti
Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn with an artist and a cat. He plays softball most weekends.
October 2024 | poetry
Bells clanging clang clang,
crunching rocks underneath these feet,
chirping birds
chirping crickets,
silence masks its own noise, a white noise,
hostile eggshell cream colored-noise
There are so many subjects
that are Difficult to talk about.
Focus on the sunrise shining, glinting off
diamond rings, trespassing through windows,
windows of houses, quiet, early, early like
the railroad workers, the airline service desk,
screaming babies, diner cooks
Different people will find some subjects
more difficult to talk about than others.
And our edges are eventually eroded by the
onslaught of unpredictable weather patterns
and we all eventually disappear,
though we never entirely leave our guises
behind, our treasure troves six feet under
the ground and thousands of feet above
All that I care about is the memories.
Samantha Moya
Samantha Moya is a data specialist with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She does her own writing and arts on the side. Her work has been featured in Serotonin Poetry, The Raven Review, Epoch Press, Tension Literary, and The Poetry Question. She is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Denver, Colorado with her husband and two dogs. She can be found at Twitter/X and Instagram @samanthalmoya.
October 2024 | poetry
You mourn yesterday’s bare branches when
not a single cherry blossom was
on them. The silent neighbor who takes
slow walks, where is he? You can’t get over
their absence, how they settled into your
invisible calendar, tracked life
so you didn’t have to ponder life’s
unanswerable questions when
3:00 in the morning haunts and acts your
nag. There is no present, only was.
You don’t want to know this play is over
so decades of scenes come back, take
you on journeys the future would take
you on, if you believed in it. You guess life’s
mysteries have answered themselves over
time—Who are your loves? Your friends? When
your brother-in-law died young–wasn’t
that day the most tragic? A late baby–your
happiest? Done. You walk past the house your
mother lived in, relive all the outtakes
of the movie that starred only you, was
boys, tears, edge-of-your-seat drama, life
that was always about to happen when
the sun rose. She watched. And it’s over.
Even your father’s judgments are over.
That report card he frowned at, that boy you’re
still wild about, the career you’d start when
you got real, the money he’d say it takes
to survive in the world, make a full life.
You didn’t know all those strictures were
your spine. You Google old boyfriends, always
a bad idea. Most are dead and over
you. Actors alive during your whole life
slip away. Why do you care? But losing your
touchstones means finding new ones. That takes
an open heart. Living backwards started when?
Dreams are no better. They take over
where the day left off, flashing their childhood
pictures when your life was going to be.
Rosanne Singer
Rosanne Singer is a poet and memoirist living in Baltimore and just about to finish an MFA at the University of Baltimore. For 25 years, she was a teaching artist in the Maryland schools and also part of small arts teams working with wounded warriors and their families at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, and with pediatric patients at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC. Her recent poetry appears in Allium Journal and 1-70 Review, and her recent memoir appears in The Baltimore Fishbowl and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.
