April 2016 | poetry
Barbie Underwear
Most say girls stop playing
with Barbie when their
friends do. I didn’t
because I was the older sister
and our attic, renovated
in creams and whites,
had become a
plastic heaven.
I stopped when my
sister held a Tommy doll
to Barbie’s bare breast
in front of mom and attested
to knowing that this was
how babies were fed-
that I had told her.
I stopped when I feared
she would discover the way
I put Barbie on top of Ken in
bed and I tore apart
the Velcro pads sewed onto the back
of her shirt to keep
her decent.
Now, I realize the sound
of Velcro departing Velcro is that of
a pad being pulled off
panties. It’s something I should have
been able to pick up on then, because
I still wore belly-button high
Barbie underwear when I
stopped playing with Barbie.
Hotel Bed
We fell asleep in a room that was 65 degrees
at the highest – mid July,
around 11:15 pm.
I was wrapped in your zip-up, maybe
your sweat pants.
I was buried underneath hotel sheets
and a stupidly thick comforter.
I had puked up pink vomit
and called it a night.
The next morning of our vacation
you told your parents that we
were alright.
We drove to a dive:
The Athen’s Diner (on the placemat
it goes by another name).
It was only us and a few tables packed
with old men drinking coffee.
We moved onto the city to: decorate our clothes
with museum badges, eat matching meals
of Cape Cod chips and grilled cheeses,
before inevitably arguing with the GPS
on where our next destination was –
back at the hotel, so that we could hang
the sign from the doorknob
and try sleeping again.
Shop Rite Cart
I overheard you talk
of Cheerios and wanted
to know if your mother
slipped you into a school dress
and combed your hair
before breakfast in a kitchen
that had not yet had an avocado
colored phone from the 70’s.
The dinner you place
in a Shop Rite cart,
I can only assume most of it
is Italian.
Parents now long passed
siblings married and responsible
for the ones pointing at the shelves
as the cart wheels click along.
You showed me a photo of you
at a coworker’s retirement lunch in
which my only recollection is
the black sports coat. I’d been
with you the morning of. Waiting
for the others, you pulled your
hair back with a comb
like James Dean.
I wonder now if there was a wine
glass in that picture that was
yours. Tipsy, I’d imagine
you flushed and shy
gently wrapping your fingers
around my elbow, humming
the theme song to Mister Ed,
the only song I knew of that you
committed to memory.
Carrie Tolve
Carrie Tolve is from northern New Jersey. She spends most of her time divided between work, binge watching Parks and Recreation, and reading. She has been published in Mock Orange Magazine and has work in the upcoming issue of The Meadow.
April 2016 | poetry
Children huddle in front
of glowing TV boxes
and are told to pray
by pale godless people
who look like cigarettes.
Hatred is a hard thing
to comprehend at this age.
Turns out, so is God.
So instead some stare at
or through
or into
the scene before them
and feel simply happy
to be here-
huddled in this corner
in this classroom
far away and alive.
Jacob Louis Moeller
Jacob Louis Moeller is a poet, screenwriter, and server living the nightmare and chasing the dream in Los Angeles, California by way of Tucson, Arizona. Sweat and saguaros remind him of home.
April 2016 | fiction
Each day he chooses which view the dome’s artificial windows will show him. At the press of a button he can be in the middle of the desert, or overlooking a square in Paris, or surrounded by high-definition rainforest. Most often though, he chooses the marina. He likes to watch the sun ease up over the horizon as he sets to work each day. All that space. All that sea and sky.
It’s a tough gig, working at the bottom of the sea. As the deployment lengthens he finds himself longing for the surface. It’s not human company he misses so much as the chance to run somewhere that’s not a treadmill. The chance to be outside, with nothing above him but sky.
Some days it’s hard to bear. Some days he sits watching the marina for hours at a time, face inches from the glass, weeping freely. He slopes around the station, banging implements together, cursing underneath his breath. His daily reports become terse: ALL WELL. ALL WELL. BORED. ALL WELL.
One day he presses his face against the window so that there’s nothing else to see. It’s beautiful. If only he could break out through the window glass. Dive through into the sunlit blue water of the marina and swim towards those boats. He sits for hours, face cupped against screen. Watching. Hungry. Then he fetches the fire axe. He lines it up with the window. He’s been down here too long. He wants to sail.
Krishan Coupland
Krishan Coupland is on the Creative Writing PhD programme at the University of East Anglia. His writing has appeared in Ambit, Aesthetica, Litro and Fractured West. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2011, and in his spare time he runs and edits a literary magazine. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk.
January 2016 | nonfiction
I saw you today. You’d been left behind. Caught in the act of unzipping your old skin. There among the husks of your siblings, you gripped the maple tree, your body the color of new leaves unfurling. I saw your convulsive twitch, your jointed limbs. I witnessed your struggle to be born. That moment of leaving your armor.
We are not strangers. I know you from your song, August’s soundtrack, that vibrating sine wave. Your evening crescendo rises in the ears of joggers, gardeners, children at play on browning lawns. We shout to be heard from under the trees—or fall silent altogether.
I know you from your shell, torment of my childhood. Yesterday I lifted your kinsman’s carapace from a raspberry. My fingers shivered to do it. Recalling crackly monsters my brother left on my bookshelf, my pillow, my light switch.
I know you from your jittering bounce on the ground, a curiosity for the dog, an opportunity for the cat.
Once you appeared at my back door after I wrote a poem in which you starred. You looked up at me as if to say, You rang?
But I’ve never seen you like this, freeze-framed in the act of vaulting into your new shape.
Does it hurt, this slow-mo backflip into freedom? It looks like it would hurt.
Maybe it hurts like a foot gone to sleep, the flow of blood returning. Maybe you sense that soon, very soon, your new wings will dry.
Do you look back at your exoskeleton once you’ve juddered free? That hull too small to contain you?
I look into your unblinking eyes, and I think not. Perhaps it’s more like this: You climb, you rest, you open your wings.
The buzzing symphony pulls you to the treetops. You ready your instrument.
by Shawndra Miller
Mennonite by birth, mystic by nature, Shawndra Miller is a writer and community organizer who lives in Indianapolis. She is coauthor of Sudden Spirit: A Book of Holy Moments and is currently working on a nonfiction book about community resilience. Her work has appeared in Edible Indy, Indiana Living Green, Farm Indiana, and Acres USA, as well as Boiler Journal and Lavender Review.
January 2016 | poetry
Electrons circle
protons, neutrons
of an atom’s nucleus.
Radio signal, steady
beeps fade out, long
distance voyager.
People talk as their
electric and magnetic
fields converge.
Atoms bond together,
make molecules that
form everything.
Lone dog left
in a cage wonders
what he did wrong.
Biosphere clings
to lithosphere’s roll
round an elliptical.
by Steve Hood
Steve Hood is an attorney and political activist. His work won an award from the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association and has been published in many places including Crack the Spine, Maudlin House, and the anthology Noisy Water. His chapbook, From Here to Astronomy, was published by Pudding House.
