January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
It took her years, but she made a memory quilt the size of their home. At first, she used her husband’s worn work clothes. Some time passed and she cut, nipped, and threaded a fine needle through her children’s clothes, too. Her husband took to calling her fanatical; saying she no longer honored his wishes. The children grew and fell away like autumn leaves. Then the cancer stuck for good. She rolled her yellow eyes, lit her Marijuana cigarette, and touched him gently as she’d once done. Her life was coming to a close, she knew. Like flash cards in youth, quicker by the day. Now her children and husband gathered by her bedside; said their last goodbyes. They loved her dearly, but none knew what to do with her old clothes. They only wanted their fair share. But she hadn’t divided them; that they had done on their own.
by Bill Cook
Bill Cook lives in a semi-rural area in Southern California’s High Desert, and has stories published in Juked, elimae, Thieves Jargon, Tin Postcard Review, Right Hand Pointing, The Summerset Review, SmokeLong Quarterly and in Dzanc’s anthology Best of the Web 2009.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Dancing water sloshed
At the edge of gray
Slate, weary and washed
By a thousand coins, as the day
Gaped from the gap above. Broken
Floor-to-sky foundation, tired cracks.
Steady toss-chip-tumble tokens
Dug in deep. The architect’s facts
Ignored wish-fueled erosion, material
Chosen to swallow the glaring sun
Lies brittle and dry, a burial
Of whispered aspiration. One by one,
Tiles seep and shift to press
The tidal drag. Ten thousand cubic feet
Lost to ceramic distress,
Once upon a time wet and neat,
Now caged by empty glass walls
Mocked by ill-timed, temperate rain.
With dreams of glossy waterfalls
Intact in crass inscription, will it train
The eye and ear and heart
On what’s no longer within reach?
The wishing fountain wills itself a part
Of resurrection from the unintended breach
Of contact. At the center, a boat
Or a paper plane in copper, brushed.
Postmodern misdirection left to gloat
Over snap of sealants and lazy work of grouters, rushed.
by Meryl McQueen
Meryl McQueen is an American writer living in Sydney. Born in South Africa, she grew up in Europe and the U.S. Before turning to writing full-time, she was a social worker, counselor, college professor, researcher, and grant writer. She earned her doctorate in linguistics from the University of Technology, Sydney, her master’s in public administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her bachelor of science in education and social policy from Northwestern. Meryl speaks several languages and has lived in seven countries. She loves to play piano, sing, hike in the woods, and cook. Her poetry has been published in Blue Lake Review, Clearfield Review, Crack the Spine, The Critical Pass Review, Dunes Review, Ginosko, Ozone Park Journal, Phoebe, RiverSedge, the Set Free Anthology, The Tower Journal, Town Creek Review, Vanguard in the Belly of the Beast, and Yellow Moon.
January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
We lay in bed and smoked cigarettes. She wasn’t allowed to smoke in her apartment, but figured she’d find a way to cover the smell when the time came to move out. The future never concerned her much. Untouchable, unknowable things never did. Her naked leg rested on my stomach as we talked about the past, about music, about films. We both vowed to re-watch Twin Peaks, this time with each other. I worried that I’d never make it as a writer. We discussed this while listening to something like goth music, something she liked and wanted me to like too.
She said, “Hush. Don’t talk that way. Bukowski didn’t publish his first book until he was fifty-one.”
I said, “But Bukowski wasn’t serious literature. Philip Roth won the National Book Award at twenty-seven.”
She laughed and blew smoke in my face and said, “You can’t break out of prison and into society the same week.”
“What?” I said.
“John Wayne,” she said. “It’s from a John Wayne movie.”
“You don’t seem like the type.”
“I wasn’t born with black eyeliner and lace. Besides, Bukowski is twice the writer you are.”
I shut up and we made love. Later, she apologized about the Bukowski remark.
by Jason Christian
Jason Christian traveled for more than a decade, first with a carnival, and later in search of adventure. He is currently studying creative writing at Oklahoma State University and plans to pursue an MFA after that. He has published in This Land Press, Mask Magazine, Liquid Journal, and has a story forthcoming in Oklahoma Review.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Tulips
for my sister (Hep C Series)
Just as they have aged,
seven days within the vase,
Just as yellow turns
onto itself
to view the summer’s
guttural dreams,
And red has let loose
its fiery skill,
turning heart’s layers
to flames and film,
They now curl up
as most delicate friends,
or fingertips brushing
within a woman’s drawers
against that which lives
clung to skin,
Or the fine
dust layering a crystal
bowl left for weeks,
then months, then years,
within a womb of mahogany.
They all speak
quietly within the room,
of riotous life
and boisterous boom,
of raucous youth and blooming
almost off the stem.
So hard it was
to be contained.
So now, dear sisters,
let me near
to see grace swirl,
then rest
into a withered edge,
How its deepening
bends each head
on stem,
how green thrusts summer
against each bloom,
then dances, childlike
in the air.
I’ll stay, I promise,
as each petal turns
into closed hands
and prays for sleep,
so soft, so real,
Forgets all form
before this.
POEM 2014
There is no escaping—
wine glass
shot glass
poem.
You walk down the hall
to the chair
to the door
to the chair
to the bed
eat some fruit
glass of wine
poem.
Birds are cackling
giddy beaks
rays of late
it is spring
a plane-
like bird
flight unseen
only heard
blue sets its hem
fading silk
along the seam
of the hill.
Legs up now
bent at knee
rocking back
to the heart
and then forth
the one pump
that can keep you
in place.
A ticking like the lost
owl in the pine
every night
every hour
sending blips
desperate search
for a mate.
You cannot be contained
nor released
cocktail glass
Lexapro
tongue now numb
house asleep.
Find a pen
then poem.
by Jean C. Howard
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, performance poet Jean Howard resided in Chicago from 1979 to 1999. She has since returned to Salt Lake City. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Off The Coast, Clackamas Literary Review, Harper’s Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Eclipse, Atlanta Review, Folio, Forge, Fugue, Fulcrum, Crucible, Gargoyle, Gemini Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Painted Bride Quarterly, decomP, The Tower Journal, Minetta Review, The Burning World, The Distillery, The Oklahoma Review, Pinch, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Penmen Review, Pisgah Review, ken*again, Chronogram, The Cape Rock, Quiddity Literary Journal, Grasslimb, Rattlesnake Review, Concho River Review, Spillway, Spoon River Review, Verdad, Wild Violet, Willard & Maple, Wisconsin Review, Word Riot, and The Chicago Tribune, among seventy other literary publications. Featured on network and public television and radio, she has combined her poetry with theater, art, dance, video, and photography. A participant in the original development of the nationally acclaimed “Poetry Slam” at the Green Mill, she has been awarded two grants for the publication of her book, Dancing In Your Mother’s Skin (Tia Chucha Press), a collaborative work with photographer, Alice Hargrave. She has been organizing the annual National Poetry Video Festival since 1992, with her own award-winning video poems, airing on PBS, cable TV, and festivals around the nation.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
My grandfather snapped
fish spines off the coast of
Tel Aviv. Slick carcasses
slipping through his coltish
grip as though they were still alive
and thrumming, kicking in the Adriatic.
Latent instincts for survival sparking through
the only dormant muscles in the desert.
Stripped to his tawny chest he would wade
knee-deep in the algae & water pooling
under the orange groves, catch the rainfall
of citrus in skyward arms.
His soles thickened to leather from
skittering across the baking streets,
parched & shriveled like denied lips.
In the gravel he gathered you,
palms coarse, desiccated, groping
for your final strains. You escape
in relieved exhalations, lifting from
the earth at intervals wider than
floodgates.
Saba tugged Shoshana’s umber
plait, twined it around his enchanter’s
finger. They were twelve when they met—
she, staggering in from Jerusalem, caked
in Masada’s dust. Eighteen when they
holstered guns & swallowed smoke.
I do not know this place, embedded
as it is with the bodies of my ancestors
& their enemies, dyed in blood hot,
livid from the midst of battle. I scrawled
my prayers once on notepad paper
& twisted it within the crevices of the
Wailing Wall but can’t remember its contents
or whether it rests there still, atrophying.
I do not know this place, though I
am derived from its crumbling dirt
as my classmates do not know my
name was snatched from a city
on the West Bank, not from Plath poems
& air spirits, though sometimes I wish
that were the case.
I will not tell them.
Mother caresses my chin to tell me
I am my name—Ariel, the Lion.
Yet my grandparents’ steps
still thump in my ears, the bombs
will always shudder and rattle
my white-washed bones. I dart
back into my burrow, and I know
their smoke lingers.
by Ariella Carmell
Ariella Carmell is a senior at Marlborough School in California, where she is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine and Head Copy Editor of the newspaper. A Foyle Commended Poet of the Year and a recipient of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, she has work published or forthcoming in Cadaverine, Crack the Spine, Vademecum, Crashtest, Eunoia Review, and Canvas Literary Journal, among others. She also blogs for The Adroit Journal about the intersection of film and literature. Come next fall, she will attend the University of Chicago.
