The Orchard

October 2023 | poetry

My father hated coyotes, implicated them

in every “missing pet” poster we passed. I didn’t understand,

not really, until they took my dog. They must have been

just beyond the fence, eyes glittering an amber light, like yellow flames

 

in the dimness, yipping, jumping, speaking

a language my dog knew once, but had forgotten.

Like seeing himself in a river: they the bright, sharp jasper and he,

these centuries departed, the smooth river stone.

 

They led him out into the neighbor’s orchard, where he found himself

trapped, those yellow flames rising, climbing the walls,

he was trapped in his becoming, all those eyes of pyrite

turning in their sockets with each snap, each severance.

 

Come morning I found the pieces of him, bones

littered around, broken open

like glass bottles they drank the liquor from,

the tufts of fur like flocks of fallen birds, and all of it

 

gone so cold in its stillness, I’d consider it a painting:

the Goya in the pale hair, the dirt, the vermilion

of Saturn’s Devouring. I hated them for it,

for years, but why shouldn’t they

 

feed their hunger in the ways they can, have the thing

that climbs into their mouths? Why shouldn’t they,

voracious jewels of stone or glass or fool’s gold,

glitter like they do?

 

Cami DuMay

Cami DuMay is an undergraduate at UC Davis, pursuing a degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. She has won two first-place awards and one second-place award for her writing at the university, and her work has appeared in Equatorial Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and by the Moonstone Arts Center. She writes about myriad aspects of life, from intimacy and trauma to nature and insects, but has a particular fascination with the intersection of the natural world and secular worship.

Moon Child

October 2023 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

We drank Tang, just like the astronauts,

but stopped short of breakfasting

on freeze-dried eggs. Saturdays,

Dad melted Crisco in the fryer,

dropped little meteors of batter

into the bubbles, served up fritters

with real maple syrup. Sixties kids

had it made in the shade— all-day freedom

on banana-seat bikes, Oscar Meyer

bologna sandwiches eaten on the fly,

Nestle’s chocolate chips folded

into Toll House cookie dough by Mom,

a June Cleaver clone except that she wore

capris instead of a dress, and hair statuesque

in an eight-inch beehive. Her Max Factor lipstick—

Electric Pink— always freshly applied,

the house swept, dusted, and promptly at 6,

martini’d. The family’s crisp white edges

began to curl at cocktail hour, threatened to tear

at dinner, the effort of kindness simply

too burdensome for our mission commander to bear.

As the Green Giant canned peas were passed

and the potato-chipped tuna noodle casserole

spooned out, one wrong word, an errant opinion,

an ill-timed sigh— and all planets ceased

rotation around the sun. I sat farthest away,

little brother too close. Little elbows on the table…

a big man can be a fast man. A spoon a weapon.

A woman, powerless. A moon child escapes

in her mind-made spaceship— rocketing away

to the lunar maria, their vast darkness

so perfect for hiding.

 

 

Ann Weil

Ann Weil is a past contributor to Burningword Literary Journal. Her most recent work appears in Maudlin House, Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, 3Elements Review, The Shore, and New World Writing Quarterly. Her chapbook, Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, debuted in April 2023 from Yellow Arrow Publishing. To read more of her poetry and flash fiction, visit www.annweilpoetry.com.

Helen Geld

October 2023 | visual art

Super Thread

Super Thread

 

Helen Geld

Helen Geld, a former graphic designer, now focuses on the creative process of photography and art.  Her photographic work expresses the beauty and mystery of antique objects.  Her work has appeared in such journals as Poppy Road Review, The Blue Hour, and most recently in Loud Coffee Press and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

The Goats

October 2023 | fiction, Pushcart nominee

Even before the car turned into their driveway, Wilma and Edgar could see they had visitors.

            “Is that what I think it is?” Edgar said to his wife of forty years.

            “I believe so,” she answered.

            “Oh, well.” He peered out at two small goats. They had taken over the small porch—one  nibbled at the leg of Wilma’s rocker, the other rubbed its backside against a porch post.

            “That post is loose,” Edgar said.

            “Aren’t you going to park?” Wilma asked.

            “Reckon so.” Edgar removed his foot from the brake. He stopped shy of the carport, not wanting to lose sight of the goats.

            Locked in her own stupor, Wilma was thinking of all the times she’d asked Edgar to screen in the porch. Her concern had been mosquitos that kept her from enjoying late afternoons outside.

She looked at the largest of the goats—the one with a clump of hair hanging from its chin. An image of Edgar in his fifties leapt from her memory—he’d sworn he’d never shave the goatee. She smiled, thinking of the day he had.

            She wondered, aloud, “Where did they come from.”

            “Probably the goat farm down the road,” Edgar said.

            “They travel that far?”
“Oh, yes, farther.” Edgar wanted Wilma to stop talking. They would have to go in to bed soon; it was already past eight. He could feel her restlessness.

            “We’ll have to go in,” she said.

            “Yes.”

            As the couple sat in silence, the goats began prancing around. The older goat came to the very edge of the porch and looked squarely into Edgar’s eyes. The animal let out a loud, “Blleeeeaaahhh.”

            Wilma flinched.

            “They’re testing us,” Edgar said.

            “Well, I don’t like it.”

            “Now, now.” Edgar patted her left knee. Her dress had ridden up her leg. He felt the warmth of her skin beneath his hand.

            She said nothing. He could feel the tension running through her.

            He hoped she wasn’t recalling all his foibles. That’s what she did now. He was too distant, too independent; then other times he was too nice, too cloying. He knew she was waiting for him to get out of the car and chase the goats away. Then she could go straight to her room, get out of her travel clothes, and lie down on her bed, alone.

            The goats romped some more; one hopped onto Wilma’s rocker and fell back as the chair rocked suddenly.

            This made Edgar laugh. “Look at them. I wish I still had that kind of energy.”

            “Blah,” his wife said.

            There was something about the way Wilma said, “Blah.” Edgar could feel his hand, still on his wife’s knee. A flash of old desire nudged him, touched him deep—much as if a sexy woman had bumped against him, and he was forced to pay attention.

Edgar couldn’t understand it, but he felt young again, ready. He looked into his wife’s eyes and squeezed her knee.

             “You old goat,” she replied.

Juyanne James

Juyanne James is the author of The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories (Chin Music Press, 2015) and Table Scraps and Other Essays (Resource Publishers, 2019). Her stories and essays have been published in journals such as The Louisville Review, Bayou Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Thrice, Ponder Review, and Xavier Review, and included in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 (Algonquin) and Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories (Portals Press, 2011). Her essay “Table Scraps” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2014. She lives and teaches in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Mission Report: El Eclipse de la Grande

October 2023 | fiction

La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, Thursday, July 11, 1991

10:50 am

I am writing in a thatched hut a half mile down the beach from the village. The surf crashes on the shore.

Supplies

2 jugs agua pura

2 cameras

Tortillas

1 can chicken meat which tastes like dog food

1 can Vienna sausage which IS dog food

2 granola bars

1 can Herdez salsa

 

We have traveled here from Lubbock to witness the greatest full eclipse in decades, using an Eclipse Monitoring Station fashioned from a Johnnie Walker box with a hole cut in it. The hole is covered with foil from a cigarette pack, with a smaller hole poked via a safety pin in the foil. It’s a Camera Obscura, a pinhole camera. Jimbo read about this design someplace. He is a friend from high school and has joined as a Mission Specialist.  He wears a straw cowboy hat and a red Speedo. He has a portly frame.

 

11:00 am

We have not pinpointed what time El Eclipse will begin, having heard many different accounts. Mission Specialist Jimbo was supposed to be on this. One local said it would not occur here in this part of Mexico at all. We discounted his opinion immediately.

The man told us this last night as we sat at a table on the dirt street in front of a little store lit by a bare bulb. A large man with a cleaver, shirt open, was chopping pork on a board, then frying it in a pan over a propane flame.

“El carne?”  I said.

“Si, es porco. Taquitos.”

“Dos, por favor,” I said.

He fried the chopped pork and scooped it onto two steamed tortillas.

“Frijoles?” I asked.

He handed me a Tupperware bowl with cold beans floating in it. The taquitos were mas fina. I considered my potential disablement from the mission after consuming the frijoles.

12:45 pm

A hen with six chicks has disappeared from around the shack behind us. El Eclipse underway.

12:55 pm

Eating Herdez salsa out of a can. Smoking a cigarette, peering into Camera Obscura. The earth-rending blackness we expected has not yet materialized.

1:18pm

Sort of like a cloudy day at the beach.

1:30pm

The sky seems to be lightening up. A rooster crows behind us. I believe El Eclipse is over. Jimbo reports that the whole universe has now changed and that his fillings hurt while the spectacle was underway.

A long moment of silence, as the surf crashes.

“Mine, too.” I replied.

 Conclusions

The next night, drinking pulque at Hermana Hortensia in Mexico City, Jimbo and I found an English-language newspaper, showing the path of El Eclipse.

We were several hundred miles off course, far from the dark zone, figuring that the moon was really big and would black out the whole country. As the mildly hallucinogenic pulque kicked in, we closed the mission, agreeing we are clueless specks of sand on the beach.

 

David Fowler

David Fowler has lived in New York, San Francisco, and on a ranch near Penelope, TX. He writes from journals kept during his travels and lives in Jackson, MS. This is his first published fiction.