Outside their Circle

October 2023 | poetry

They finished each other’s sentences about the differences

between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions,

how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard,

as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.

 

Their dads knew how to build houses and get the right tools,

took their boys to the seances of men huddled in a circle

who spit as they called forth the spirits of wrenches and vises,

while I slept each night on the living room couch overhearing

 

Mom and Sis whispering in their beds about curlers and creams.

I learned about how to bounce drops of water on the heated pan

telling what size flame would make the pancake batter not stick,

and to speak about love and hurt, and not bolt it down inside.

 

The soft voices of poets and writers speaking sadness and joy

let me wander in places far away from that sofa in the night,

and I liked myself knowing the things that other boys didn’t

as they lay under cars with friends finding power in engines.

 

No dad, I sank lower in the back seat hearing how men loved

mastering gears, electrodes, filters, valves, and carburetors

like there was a way of friendship with the tribe of machines

always scary to me, who hissed I was not one of them.

 

Glen A. Mazis

Glen A. Mazis taught philosophy for decades at Penn State Harrisburg, retiring in 2020. He has more than 90 poems in literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, Atlanta Review, Reed Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, and the collection, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), a chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and Bodies of Space and Time (Kelsay Books, 2022). He is the 2019 winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize (Orchard Street national contest).

Behind the Garden Wall

October 2023 | fiction

A cracked skull the constables told me, must have happened when I hit the flagstone walkway. And the bruises, obviously caused by my convulsions. There was no doubt in their minds that I had succumbed to a fit of hysteria, which was perfectly understandable considering the recent spate of molestations in area. The dark stains on my bodice they attributed to a bloody nose, a matter of a weak constitution to be sure. They weren’t concerned about the volume of blood and didn’t seem to notice that there wasn’t any of it around my nostrils. They also didn’t seem to notice the rumpled grass at the edge of the walkway—or that it continued to the garden.

It was an uncivil hour, and he made quite a racket banging on the front gate and yelling that the beast had been seen prowling the lane. He said he followed its curious spring-heeled footprints to our garden wall where they simply stopped, as if it had leaped straight up into the air and over the top. If I could just spare a candle, he could continue the hunt.

From what I could see of him, he wore a long, dark cloak and carried a bullseye lantern that was spent. As I opened the gate, I offered a candle fetched from the kitchen—but instead of accepting it, he threw off his cloak with a sudden jerk revealing a devilish visage and claws that glinted in the moonlight as if made of metal.

He seemed surprised that I didn’t immediately faint at the sight of him or run as he belched out a gout of blue-white flame and clawed at me. He seemed equally surprised at what else I had brought from the kitchen—and at just how much blood a dinner knife could draw.

I wonder if, after I rolled his body off me and began dragging it to the garden, the thought crossed his mind that I might have been expecting him.

Francesco Levato

Francesco Levato is a poet, professor, and writer of speculative fiction. Recent books include SCARLET; Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; and Elegy for Dead Languages. Recent speculative fiction appears in Savage Planets, Sci-Fi Shorts, and Tales to Terrify. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a Ph.D. in English Studies, and is an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

Holly Willis

October 2023 | visual art

Peony 2

Peony 2

Peony 3

Peony 3

Holly Willis

Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal of designing encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder alongside critical reflection about our relationship with the matter around us.

Jim Ross

October 2023 | visual art

Maltese Cross

Maltese Cross

Black Parrot

Black Parrot

 

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years, he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Phoebe, Stoneboat, Stonecoast, and Whitefish. Text-based photo essays include Amsterdam Quarterly, Barren, DASH, Kestrel, Ilanot Review, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage Magazine, Sweet, and Typehouse. He recently wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim and family split time between city and mountains.

Only real bitches play bingo.

October 2023 | poetry

I’m talking the bitches who bring

their own dotting pens—the variety

pack that includes the bonus

glitter pen in fuschia. The bitches

who bring their own refreshments

and candies for when their blood

sugar inevitably drops

when the bitch across the room

yells bingo on a 30 dollar crazy L

card. Of course the bitch gets it.

She was winking at the caller

so of course the ball that came

next was a gift from him. His

balls. That’s what the real bitches—

my grandma and her friends say

when they lose. That, or they shit

talk the ugly Christmas sweater

that wasn’t ugly at all, even though

they’re all wearing gas station souvenir

shirts from tropical trips they took

years ago “before the ‘Vid hit.”

I ended up winning big—about

150 dollars richer but about 10

years lesser for it, but I was the bitch

who won three rounds while

the bitches were busy bitching.

Abigale Tabor

Abigale Tabor is a somewhat-recent college graduate living in a somewhat-decent town in northern Florida who writes poetry that echoes her life.