Delivery

July 2023 | nonfiction

Each time gets you instant skinny. As soon as the kid slips out. Okay, maybe not exactly “slips.” More like twenty-two hours of show-off stoic teeth-clenching stuffed-down guttural silent wailing, spring-loaded contorted spasming and twisted viscera vice-gripped wrenching, on all fours, crouching, bucking, crouching, bucking, butt-up then flipping, or being flipped, waxed pussy exposed to probing perineum massaging fingers stretching skin not meant to be stretched so thin it rips…. No! No! No! No! I changed my mind. Too late, can’t go back, can’t stop now. No epidurals for you. Just fifteen milligrams of morphine that do nothing. NOTHING. Get it out of me! They won’t let you push. Not now, just rest, just wait. The calm between storms. Worse than the searing stabs of pain is waiting for it to attack again. You’re doing great. Take a break, have a rest.… YOU HAVE TO SHIT IT OUT NOW! Why won’t the let you? Jerking, kicking, flailing, an animal eviscerated from the inside out, sinewed innards ripped apart like string cheese. You clutch Naomi Wolff’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood so hard it drips ink onto crumpled sheets, scream accusations during the exorcism to nurses checking vitals. Your husband’s face so close you could bite it off as he mansplains Lamaze-class breathing techniques. FUCK him and anyone else in the room not being ripped right now from sphincter to urethra by a live basketball trying to drive itself through a pinhole. He orders in Thai food and watches a crime show while you “rest.” Then, finally, spun on your side, legs held up and out, one final UGHHH ….  Easy. And you are skinny again. Or, at least not pregnant. Instant relief. You can breathe all the way. Your body torn, pulled inside out, is yours again. The infant placed upon your chest, slimed-alive pygmy alien crawls blind-eyed to the nipple and suckles.

You can see your feet and roll on your stomach again. And the boobs, a puberty you never had, big and hard, so full and round they look fake, Instagramable tits producing life juice, immunity superfood full of nutrients. And you thought pregnancy gave you boobs? These are another category, cups so full they shoot way up the alphabet. For the first time in your life, you have a chest that sticks out, more proud and womanly than ever been before.

Then the shitting starts. The first day out for a walk, alone with your precious angel perfect infant snug-wrapped close against your body, swaddled in the all-natural fiber baby wrap, imbuing you with a preternatural youthful beauty, though yours was a geriatric pregnancy. You wear white slip-on sneakers, the denim maxi-skirt from a French designer bought on sale at a boutique you permit yourself to browse in only once every two years, if that. The air as alive as you and your newborn. A bright calm clean day bears witness as you mother life upon your very being when your body decides to go rogue, and your anus explodes, a poop right there on the street. Your butthole expels a warm soft-serve you feel ooze down your thighs. You want to run the block and a half home but must keep the legs closed, fast walk in urgent tiny Geisha steps. Squeeze sphincter, squeeze sphincter, hold it, hold it… Almost home, your body relaxes before you are ready; something opens, dribbles out a warm splurt again. You all but throw your precious days-old cargo onto the bed, work fast to extricate yourself from the muslin cloth and leap onto the toilet. With speed and care you pull the postpartum mesh underwear down and out, so as to not spread the excrement even more, a move you will come to perfect in years to come when changing infants and toddlers in the same predicament. An expert in the tender cleaning of messes.

 

A. Cabrera

A. Cabrera’s creative nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers’ Tales 2021 Anthology, Deronda, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company.

Featured Artist: JC Alfier

July 2023 | visual art

Elle s’est tue (She became silent)

penché vers la lumière

Vous semblez hésiter (You seem to hesitate)

Woman and Desert

 

JC Alfier

Some of the pieces depict partial, oblique, or frontal female nudity to illustrate Carl Jung’s concept of the Anima: the female part of the male psyche — sensual, often oblique female archetypes where allegories give shape to dreamscapes of the unconscious, even as the faint image of the female reflects an abstracted, fluid persona — the objective and the subjective. My intents touch upon transgender femininity. Overall, my artistic directions and aesthetics are informed by photo-artists Yoko Mizuki, Heinz Hajek-Halke, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

Featured Author: Christy Prahl

July 2023 | poetry

Seventh Summer

 

A not so rare November day

that impersonates June,

 

bisque of sun,

Ligurian sky

 

when Sylvia, from the mailroom,

who walks with a cane,

 

/diabetes to claim

her right foot by spring/

 

joins me outside for a forbidden smoke.

 

Beautiful day, I say.

How do we make sense of it?

says Sylvia’s face

 

before casting alarm at the glaciers

melting in Alaska

 

and I share what I’ve heard

about the snow crab season

 

Cancelled, I tell her.

95% gone.

I can’t stop thinking of the fishermen, I say,

about to lose their livelihoods.

 

And all those people just being born,

she pines,

never knowing the sweetness of crab.

 

 

Delicata

 

Leo [the farmer] will die this afternoon,

forehead damp with kisses

from Gene [the tractor supplier]

and Dusty [the grower of feed corn],

queer but summoned gestures

from sturdy men

who talk with their hands.

 

Home remedies for Leo

meant the clench of his gut

metastasized

like the summer squash

in his tomato beds.

 

Goddamn volunteers.

 

We knew Leo from his blue eggs

and spiral notepad in his chest pocket

and honor stand on the side of the road.

Take what you want.

Leave your money in the jar.

 

He stood tightwire

on wood ladders to repair the plastic

of his hoop house with duct tape

and fed composting scraps

to a blind raccoon

[who stuck around].

 

Leo will die as so many farmers die,

shallow of air,

tallying from his bed,

wondering if he should have returned to church

all those years back

[when his wife begged him to],

 

the spent soil
of hundreds of thousands of fingerling potatoes

making rich, verdant crops

of his nails.

 

 

 

Christy Prahl

Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include the Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal measure. More of her work can be found at christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.

 

Just Started School

July 2023 | poetry

Mother didn’t talk much.

Didn’t want to fall foul

of the thought police.

There was the ugly guy with the cruel, crooked mouth

who owned the house and loved his chickens.

He believed.

 

‘Heil Hitler’.

We’d brought our blackboards.

My old teacher had a desk on a raised platform.

 

When it was all over,

Mother hung out a white sheet

from the bedroom window.

 

The new teacher taught us Russian.

Bald underneath this huge black fur hat.

His yellow teeth as large as a horse’s. Threw

that unruly boy down the school’s stone steps.

 

The wheels of tanks looming over me.

My brother made me an airplane from balsawood.

We continued to listen to AFN Europe—

my brother had crafted a crystal radio

from a cigar box.

 

The Russians changed the street names

and the portraits on the school walls.

 

Rose Mary Boehm

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com

Swear to God? Or How to Seduce the Most Beautiful Girl in Town

July 2023 | nonfiction

Male high school students back in the 1950s were prone, like teenage boys everywhere, to boast about their exploits. Whenever one of them told a story that was hard to believe, the others would blurt, “Swear to God?” The storyteller was required to reply: “Swear to God!” The tale often involved some sexual exploit that had about as much chance of being true as the teller’s having recently been transported by aliens to the moon. Never mind: if it was lurid enough or entertaining enough, fantasy would happily substitute for reality. For enormous whoppers, the other boys would say not merely, “Swear to God?” but also “Mother’s honor?” To which the proper response was: “Mother’s honor” uttered with right hand raised, left hand over the heart, and eyes tilted heavenward. It is unclear which was more sacred, whether “Swear to God?” ranked first because it was invoked first, with “Mother’s honor?” called upon simply to bolster the case or whether “Mother’s honor?” ranked higher because it was invoked last and was the ultimate court of appeal. There were other solicitations, such as “No shit?” and “Cross your heart?” but “Swear to God? and “Mother’s honor?” got top billing. One particularly tall tale required that we pull out all the ritual stops. My glibbest sixteen-year-old friend, for whom truth was absolutely no constraint, concocted a story of how the most beautiful older girl in town had succumbed to his charms. She was in her mid-twenties, had dark, dreamy eyes, full, sexy lips, large pert breasts, and an irresistible beauty mark halfway down her right cheek. The seduction tale proceeded in a heated frenzy for at least fifteen minutes during which my friend omitted no obscene detail whatsoever and his panting cohort listened in rapt awe. At the climax of which, so to speak, the group shouted: “No Shit?! Cross your heart?! Mother’s honor?! SWEAR TO GOD?!” To which my friend calmly replied, with his right hand raised, left hand over his heart and eyes titled heavenward: “No shit. Cross my heart. Mother’s honor. Swear to God.”

 

David Blumenfeld

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is a former philosophy professor and associate dean who in retirement returned to writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. One of his recent pieces was cited in Best American Essays, 2022 as a “notable essay;” another received a Pushcart Prize nomination; a third was “highly commended” in the 2022 Autumn Voices international poetry competition and will soon be republished in Five Points. His work for children has appeared in The Caterpillar, Balloons Lit. Journal, Smarty Pants, Carmina, and various anthologies.  www.davidcblumenfeld.com