When the Butterflies Dance

July 2023 | fiction

“Momma, where’s Mamaw?”

“I think she’s out in the yard somewhere.”

Regina Woody opened the back screen door and called out, “Mamaw!  Mamaw are you out here?  Then she spotted the old lady down along the fence standing very quiet and still.  She was watching something.  Regina Woody walked down past the peach trees to where her grandmother stood.  “What you doing?” she whispered.

“Look Honey,” said the old lady.

“What?”

“It’s the Little Yellows.  See?  The Little Yellows are out.”  She pointed to the honeysuckle growing along the fence.  There were eight or ten small yellow butterflies fluttering above the green leaves in the morning sun.  See how the dance,” said the old lady, “Like darting yellow petals.  They are another of the Lords simple gifts.”

The small yellow insects flittered like tiny dancing marionettes in the bright sunshine.  It was as if they moved in time to some sweet melody that only they could hear.  But the old lady must have heard it too.

“They’re beautiful,” said Regina Woody standing very still beside of her grandmother.

“When I was a little girl just about your age my momma made me a Sunday dress out of material with Little Yellows on it.  Oh, how I loved that dress.  Momma told me that they were a reminder of God’s love for us.  They’re only here a short time.  Then they’re gone again for another year.”

As Regina Woody watched the tiny butterflies it seemed to her that the world opened up around her, the clear blue sky, the distant green hills and the sweet smell of the honeysuckle there before her.  It felt as if she and her grandmother were standing at the very center of the universe with the colors and shapes spinning slowly around them.  Is that the gift of God, she wondered?  Is that why the butterflies dance?”

 

James William Gardner

Author of, “DEEP AUGUST: Short Stories from the American South,” and “THE HEALING GROUND,” James William Gardner writes extensively about the contemporary southland. The writer explores aspects of southern culture often overlooked: the downtrodden, the impoverished and those marginalized by society. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  Gardner is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Roanoke, Virginia. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Deep South Magazine, Newfound Journal and The Virginia Literary Journal.

Objects Near Fenway Park

July 2023 | poetry

I thought I was Li Po,

had moonwine midnight

feelin’ alright,

but my Mandarin was a nightmare

and all the trolleys stopped

at Harvard Sq. when it was still called

Peking, a long walk

down a dark hall, the door to out.

 

Oh, there was Jesse Colin

Young in the Fenway across

from the Gardner with its lost Rembrandt.

At the movies with Lara and Omar,

A Man and A Woman,

Juliet of the Spirits.

Is it any wonder then the grape jam

and Jif, the nasty PCP, horrific

spider plants, piano dances,

Mozart and endless drum solos.

 

You were gone in a flash, a screech of empty space.

Maybe a god hears the collisions, collusions

spontaneous combustions on the shy

trolley that speeds slow over the black

Charles living below.

 

That strap to hold on to,

the flat place to stand.

Everything looked obvious, solid

square like a windowpane, the street

outside melting like a Dali, this chair

from which there is no falling,

in the thinnest slit of morning.

 

Before ink, blood,

before blood, water, ochre

stick figures with spears

saying I love you in stone.

You were always somewhere.

I don’t know? Chicago?

Between us the wet

spot where I drew concentric

on your unrecognizable

abstract, Cubist, small, fantastic.

 

Michael Crowley

Michael Crowley is a retired English teacher living with his wife and cat in Cranston, RI.  His poems contain bits of twisted nostalgia for his past, using scattered reflections, half-finished expressions, allusions to pop culture, partly developed images and enough odd humor to avoid sentimentality.

Nice Girls Say Please

July 2023 | poetry

Unicorn and Pegasus sat down with the Queen.

Unicorn’s horn went somewhere obsc –

“Cream with your scones?”

Nice girls say please.

 

Knock, knock?

Who’s there?

Mother told me not to swear.

Knock, knock?

Go away, come again another day.

Knock, knock, knock.

Go away, nasty girls who want to play.

One has a phone; one has a knife.

One’s barely clinging onto life.

 

“Raspberry jam?”

Nice girls say please,

hide the bruises on their knees.

Knock, knock?

Who’s there?

I said, who’s there?

Nobody loves you; nobody cares.

 

Too many sweets will make you sick.

Mother call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.

Nobody loves you. Nobody cares.

Let’s push Pegasus down the stairs!

 

Sticky-sticky hands, covered in jam.

Simple Simon broke her hymen.

Mother call the doctor, quick, quick, quick!

He smashed her face with a candlestick!

 

Nobody loved her. Nobody cares.

Nice girls don’t meddle in others’ affairs.

 

Megan Cartwright

Megan Cartwright is an Australian college teacher and poet. Her work has appeared in Arteidolia Press, Authora Australis, Blue Bottle Journal, Meniscus Journal, October Hill Magazine, and oddball magazine. She also has poems due to feature in upcoming issues of Fatal Flaw, Tabula Rasa Review, MONO, and Quadrant Magazine.

Tetman Callis

July 2023 | visual art

Microfiche 12

Microfiche 14

 

 

Tetman Callis

Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories and poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines. His photographs, painting, and mixed media pieces have shown in galleries in Albuquerque and New York City. His photographs have previously appeared in Burningword. He is the author of the memoir, “High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico” (Outpost 19, 2012), and the children’s book, “Franny & Toby” (Silky Oak Press, 2015). His website is www.tetmancallis.com, and he can be found on Facebook.

The Chaise

July 2023 | fiction

A young woman lies, shining, on a chaise by a pool. She tilts her head forward. This flattens the neck, turns it into a lovely puddle of brown butter. She examines her midriff.

At the same moment, a man passes. He is old enough to remember fresh footage of ayatollah-freed hostages. To remember their peculiar mix of weak and exulting. He has witnessed it since: an old dog caught in the rain and finally home sneezing, grandfathers at piano recitals.

He sees the woman arrayed, shining. He says to himself, Give me a weekend. I’d glaze that flat stomach Saturday night and Sunday morning I’d ruin it from the inside. He does not say this to her. He says to her, Good morning.

She does not notice the man until she hears him. She is young enough that she is comprehensively unsure of things. Where she should and/or will put her arms while lying down. What she could ever possibly do, possibly, to justify the sluice of self that runs through her head, that puts her ridiculously at the hub of the world. Her year in a children’s hospital did not change this. Losing her mother to the same bone cancer two-and-a-half years later did not change this. Nor the genes that stole from the family an implausibility to rage against. She is young enough that each thing is more different from the last thing than the same.

She says to the man, Good morning.

What she says to herself, in the meanwhile, is what she’s been thinking, and the words, were she to speak them aloud, would hardly devastate the man, though they should wound him deeper by multiples than his would her, even were he to stop smartly at the foot of the chaise and divulge the reason for his staring. The roach next to Descartes’ shoe crouched and crouched and still could not wonder after existence, and this man cannot begin to comprehend his pitifulness. For this man, a man pretending not to stare and staring, there is no change, there are tax rates and sensation, and the future is over. On the other hand, as he is not a roach altogether, hearing the thing might remind him he could never hope for such a thing.

To herself, as she watches her own skin blip out pearls of minute perspiration, she says, Soon I’ll be who I really am. Soon I will be who I really am. She says these things to herself, thought and not speech, but two thoughts, no mistake, and not because she does not want to be who she is, but because she is merely sure, freed from uncertainty by a curious mix of cowed and exulting, that who she’ll be will be more different from the last her than the same, as sure as the beads of sweat there, fat and quivering, tiny curving windows into a hazy future, right here, which is why we’re staring.

 

George Choundas

George Choundas is a Cuban- and Greek-American and a former FBI agent with work in over seventy-five publications, including The Best Small Fictions, Boulevard, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, and The Southern Review. His debut story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2 2018), was awarded the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His debut essay collection, Until All You See Is Sky (EastOver Press 2023), was awarded the EastOver Prize for Nonfiction.