January 2015 | back-issues, nonfiction
27 February 2013.
She said:
Gentlemen, excuse me, gentlemen. Gentlemen. You’re such nice looking gentlemen. Gentlemen. I don’t mean to bother. All I have to give you [rustle of a plastic bag] is this flashlight. Gentlemen. I’m a pastor. I’m Pastor Patricia Smith. This is a high crime area. I was just beat down the other day. I’m the victim of sexual abuse. I broke these two teeth. I need: to get them fixed. Gentlemen I’m not a bum, I’m a pastor. Pastor Patricia Smith here. There was a murder up on Broadway. I’m the only witness. My mother. My mother: I’m just trying to get back to where my mother is. To New Brunswick, New Jersey, where my mother lives. I’m trying to get to New Brunswick, New Jersey, gentlemen. Gentlemen. Thank you, gentlemen. You can have this flashlight. Oh, you’re such nice gentlemen.
by Adam Morris
Adam Morris is a writer and translator in San Francisco.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Today I thought I saw an ex-love
driving an old Mercedes
with stinking exhaust.
He had a beard
and drove slowly
as if he had no where to go,
as if he wasn’t the younger man
I held captive
in my memory.
Years ago,
right there in the dark—
we became birds
standing on a wire of resistance.
He was a flight risk.
I had a nest.
Ex-loves are panhandlers
of the heart.
They beg for remembrance—
loose change in a cup,
memories clink and spill.
Who can survive on this change?
At the intersection of Washington Boulevard
and North Roosevelt Street stands a man
with a sign that reads:
Bet You Can’t Hit Me
With A Quarter.
I pass him every Monday morning.
I’ve yet to throw a quarter his way.
Sometimes he smokes
and it’s so cold
I worry his hands are too numb
to pick up that quarter—
thrown hot from some hand.
by Sarah Lilius
Sarah currently lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two sons. She is a poet and an assistant editor for ELJ Publications. Some of her publication credits include the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, BlazeVOX, Bluestem, and The Lake. She is also the author of the chapbook What Becomes Within (ELJ Publications 2014).
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
*
Here, there, the way silence
tows you below the waterline
and though you are alone
you’re not sure where her name
is floating on the surface
or what’s left
grasped by a single wave
that never makes it to shore
splashes as if this pen
is rowing you across the stillness
the dead are born with
–you are already bathing, half
from memory, half by leaping
from the water for flowers
growing everywhere –for you
this page, unclaimed :a knife
dripping with seawater
and your throat.
by Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
before
I’m stricken down
by overwhelming
heartiness
Lindo,
remember
my hands flagging
down my elbows
when I suddenly bent
them at asymmetric angles
and thrust them toward my second rib
to cry out a phlegmy Milwaukee born
Hrrrrraaghh!
I’m stricken up
like that often
you know-
I’ve watched you
you flinch with a smile
three seconds before it comes
knowing all
about the blended
and aimed reverence
laced tolerance
masking irritation
and dismissal I shove
into every
boisterous afternoon
I spend with you
by Steven Minchin
Steven enjoys capturing things he’s seen almost as much as things he has not. To date he has quite a collection of both. He makes Facebook his artistic warehouse and periodically promotes dead people there, elsewhere his work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Heavy Hands Ink, Short, Fast and Deadly, vox poetica, and Crack the Spine.
January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
The fire gnawed the grasslands to bone-cracked earth on the way to our village. We hoped the lake would save us, the buckets of life we hauled from the shore, the trenches of dirt we overturned, the drenched rooftops.
We saw it writhing across the plane, rivers of light beneath rainless billows, bound for our storehouses, our livestock, our children. We beat at embers, singed our skirts, lost our hats in the breach. We unmoored our fishing boats and cast ourselves on the mercy of the inflammable.
The lake became a cloistered room of steam and sodden embers, roof of smoke, wringing the breath from our throats. We drenched aprons and handkerchiefs, tied them round our sons and daughters, round their ash-flecked faces.
When our rowboats scrape the shore, the ground is still hot, patched with guttering flames. The soles of our boots melt. The stones by the lake are blackened and cracked, and the cattle have vanished to ash. The evening is yellow and gray with smoldering.
We remember the purple flowers that flourished by the water, the grass that tumbled toward the shore. We remember the woods across the lake, its mosses and mushrooms, its birds’ nests, its deer.
We remember that the fish are still in the lake, and the boats are in the lake, and our sons and daughters lie sleeping in the boats.
by Brianne Holmes
Brianne Holmes lives and writes in Greenville, NC. Her work has appeared in the Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, in which she was also named the featured writer in 2012. She has a piece forthcoming in the Journal of Microliterature. Currently, she serves as an editorial assistant for the North Carolina Literary Review.
