April 2024 | nonfiction
Feb or March 17, 1995
As my suitcase orbits away from me, I surprise myself by shouting “our bag.” Unbeknownst to me I have begun talking in plural. As we drive toward our home, I am puzzled by the empty sidewalks. The man who’s both from here and there assures me it’s normal. All creatures empty out at night. Alien landscape must look like this I think. I feel it again as the sky wraps my suburban apartment in an indigo that makes you remember the things you had forgotten you had lost. My skin picks up signals that my mind garbles. It is beautiful this new city. It is also impossible. This planet with supermarkets stacked sky high and hunger going unannounced is where I belong according to my papers that announce my status: nonresident alien
Vimla Sriram is a Seattle-based writer shaped by Delhi. This means banyans and parrots will try to sneak into her essays especially if she tries to steer clear of them. She loves the Pacific Northwest for its gigantic Douglas Firs, leaning Madronas, and oat lattes. When not craning her neck for elusive woodpeckers or nuthatches, she can be found reading, writing, and making cauldrons of chai for her family and friends. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in 100 Word Story, Wanderlust, Stonecrop Journal, Little Patuxent Review, River Teeth Journal, Cagibi, Tahoma Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine.
Vimla Sriram
April 2024 | poetry
Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men
from across the tracks wait patiently
at the station every weekday morning,
not for a train, but a day job, seated
on the edge of the sidewalk or against
the fence, near where cars enter to drop off
or pick up, all expectantly catching
the gazes of incoming drivers,
signaling silently, Whatever it is
you have to do, I can do it for you.
By noon, many head home to emptiness,
their wives away to serve as maids for
the more well-to-do. I wait for the train
from the Bronx that brings my housekeeper.
Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, “On the Art of Patience,” was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, will be published in June 2024.
Jim Tilley
April 2024 | poetry
To go back is as hard almost
as forward.
We all got a little silence lodged
in our molars some time
in middle school, mostly.
Field trips to the museum of future affairs,
long bus rides, behind the glass
our taxidermied bodies
in frozen poses of parenting,
pharmacy lines, conference rooms.
On the ride back we did not discuss it and also
there was no ride back.
We lived there in the museum, locked in,
setting fires in the courtyard to keep busy.
No one came for us
and we liked it that way.
Wrapped our fists in the curtains,
broke the glass,
hauled out our own effigies.
Only warmed them by the fire.
To go forward is much
harder than backward but also less impossible.
They came for us, pounded on the doors,
begged and begged.
We would not budge. Not locked in
but them locked out.
The smoke they thought
was signal was just s’mores.
In the basement canned food
for any number of eternities.
Draped our arms around
ourselves and sang songs
we didn’t know yet.
The silence dried up,
our teeth gleamed, a new silence
came to cushion us.
It was different, springier,
a shared give in the air.
Oh, sure, there must be lots we’re missing,
but we’d just be missing more
out there. We’ve seen enough.
No season left to tempt us.
Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent poetry has appeared in Red Rock Review, Prime Number Magazine, and The Westchester Review. Her work has been nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize and awarded the 2020 Penn Review Fiction Prize. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com.
Katherine Tunning
April 2024 | poetry
I.
The Buddhas
tell us not
to think of
a heaven,
of a hell…
This breath comes.
That breath goes.
Then nothing.
II.
Klara Dan
von Neumann,
drove from home
to the beach—
walked into
the surf and
III.
Woolf wrote:
“Dearest, I
feel certain
I am mad …
again… I
am doing
what seems best…”
IV.
Sylvia
sealed off
the kitchen
with towels
to stop gas
from drifting
into where
her children
were sleeping.
V.
Lao Tau says:
“Heaven and
earth are not
humane. They
regard all
as straw dogs.”
VI.
The next day
morning came.
nothing at
all changed.
Straw dogs
don’t bark.
William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation.
William J Waters
April 2024 | poetry
In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam,
While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within
The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts,
And over the bookcases crimped dense with Virgil’s deeds,
Twenty centuries of ‘I Am’s impartially abided to this place divorced of time.
Beside the domesticity of books, the graduate students sit, talking contentedly
Of matters related to weather, and ‘she loves you not’s’ of restrained importance,
And have exiled vellum-spined Kipling, Coleridge, Cranes’ consciousnesses
From their all-important talk, then to someplace as unreached
Within these twenty centuries and five floors of domesticity,
Below whose atrium the unconsoled words of creation
Retire into their dreadful humanity, read through perhaps and put away –
I search in heed for the truest ‘kings of infinite space.’
Wandering the columns of the Peabody,
Bordering a prodigiously fat shelf set aside for the modernist thing,
Certain truths seem forgivable to readers of certain breeds.
To chance upon a no more commonplace volume of Auden –
I turn to his ‘September 3, 1939’ two days, eighty years after the occasion
And chance upon some lady’s no more commonplace tow-color of hair,
Doubtless, having been collected by some stranger into a blonde plait,
A stranger whose limerence had left it truer bookmarked beside the verse –
‘For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.’
A young poet whose work can be best described as “allowing the glory of the mundane to permeate our understanding.”
Maxwell Tang
