July 2014 | back-issues, fiction
I think of my grandmother’s skin—warm creases, her hands rinsing off a peach, its hair smoothed from the softness of wellwater just eat from my hands, can you taste how ripe it is? I just picked it in the orchard this morning.
Or the first day I met Rebecca in that cold café and how the overhead lighting made her nervous, so she pulled and stretched at the bottom of her shirt whenever she talked, and sometimes even when she listened these lights make me itch.
Or the time Keith and I sat on top of Angel Ridge, his legs hanging over the ledge, his dark hair dissolving into the thickness of the night, sitting by my side, his thumb softening my ear, his words frightening me we are all alone.
And no matter how much I try to remember the warmth of my grandmother’s hands or the way I saw myself in Rebecca’s nerves, I can never escape the night of Keith, the night he made me believe, made me see—that we are no more important than the roots of the trees below.
Bethany Freese
Bethany Freese is a writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Coalmaster, stoker of purposeful flame,
worker of the bellows of hell, adept
of the infernal majesty.
Mama visited him in Washington.
He was lobbyist for a lathe turners union.
They ate lunch at Ollie’s. A waitress fawned all over him,
said he had paid doctor’s bills
for her son; rank
humanitarian, Exalted Cyclops, klavern keeper,
you couldn’t get the n-word out of his mouth
with a shotgun.
He stole heat from fire;
water boiled and became vapor at his command, a change
of state; he was a keeper of dark mists, magus
of the four winds.
His steam drove the turbines that create
reality; he was a wizard of the first order, someone
who realized you could disembowel a man
and it would not kill him right away.
Bryan Merck
Bryan Merck has published in America, Amethyst Arsenic, Burningword, Camel Saloon, Danse Macabre and others. He has fiction forthcoming in Moon City Review and poetry forthcoming in Triggerfish, Eunoia Review and others. He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Fiction and Poetry Prizes. He lives in south Georgia with his wife Janice.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Arbor vitae, meaning tree of life:
rooted in the sagittal section
of sheep’s brain –
little cerebellum and
white-matter trunk,
white branches tucked within it.
The branches bare, as in winter.
Another, in the Kaballah – perfect
orbs suspended, tied
to the ceiling, to each other.
Tattooed in the characters of a language
whose characters were indecipherable.
Its intricacy mesmerized: no roots,
no reaching branches. The strings
between spheres held like taut sinews
with no need for beginning or end.
Yours a galaxy, stretch of strange planets
holding each other aloft.
Mine a single, irreversible cut.
Courtney Hartnett
Courtney Hartnett is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013 with a BA in Interdisciplinary Writing, and her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachian Journal, storySouth, Blood Lotus, and Dew on the Kudzu. Courtney was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Allison Joseph Poetry Award.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
He took his car and swerved
down
the side of the mountain,
up the side of the mountain, overlooking
the valley of trees, miles of green and farther away, the city.
He drove fast and we screamed joy. No music. Just the wind, high-pitched, shrieking, racing with us around bends, curves, inclines.
You flew.
Mustangs,
Thunderbirds,
Winged horses
Fell from the sky.
Long before crumpled metal and flames, they were fire, lava furies taunting the darkness with their light. Solar flares against the twilight universe.
She screamed when the blue-clothed messengers came. Inaudible sounds.
Molten feathers cannot achieve flight.
Porcelain seemed wrong to contain you
so I took handfuls and threw them into the pale blue from an incredible height
and watched grave dust line pristine clouds
until the invisible gathered it
and took you away.
Azure Arther
Originally from Flint, Michigan, Azure Arther learned early to deal with economic struggle by manipulating her experiences into fodder for her creative fire. Now a resident of Texas, and a grad student at the University of Texas, she placed second in the graduate level of the 2013-14 TACWT contest. She has been writing since she was five-years-old, and laughs at her first ten-line story, which was about three puppies.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Eurydice
What would he say if he could see me like this:
stinking of nicotine, sitting in the dark
across from the fucker with fat fingers
who’s never seen anything like me before.
Would he kiss me
Or tell me to brush my teeth?
Nowadays I can drink a carafe of wine and not feel a thing.
I got all the mean, deep feelings a girl could want.
Does that count for something in a lover?
What would he say if he could see me:
“Just because you went down south for a few days,
it doesn’t make you a bohemian.”
Would he bring lilacs?
Would we drown in the silence?
Would he find anything irresistible left inside of me?
Maybe I can still forget about him.
There’s always that distant possibility.
The Man I Loved
He drifted out with the tide.
He burned away on the end of a cigarette.
Or maybe he went out for a carton of milk
And never came back.
It was a harmless kind of disappearing.
Kate Douglas
Kate Douglas is a writer and performance artist living in New York. As a playwright, her work has been produced at Ars Nova and Joe’s Pub. She is a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters’ Lavina Kohl Award for Excellence in Literature and the NJ Governors Award in Arts Education for her short play Treading Water. Her poetry has been published in Contrary Magazine, among others.
