October 2022 | poetry
Downpour pelts windows, rakes roof
like shards hurled in menace.
The torrent brakes slowly, as though coaxed to relent.
A respite that cradles seeds of relief that will soon
vanish, Scott thinks as he zooms in on a cardinal’s
cautious dip in a puddle beyond its sheltered nest.
Choice lies in the space between frames.
Focus to see it, or miss it & get carved by tides.
Worse yet, see it and stand struck, a piano key stuck
unhinged from resonance. Scott once found consonance
with Steph under a willow tree, a refuge from raindrops
that soaked their skin as sunlight dappled through
storm clouds. Creeping myrtle carpeted ground where
he went down on one knee, weather be damned.
He’d still make that choice after seeing
the frames that followed: currents that surged
and swept them in their wake. Adrift, he crops
the cardinal shot, softens shadows until
its color pops, stashes it amid thousands of
moments frozen in time, sketches on fogged glass
stiffened into stone. Steph murmurs, voice barely
a whimper since her last chemo. He
lets go
of his camera, its lens
powerless before a butterfly’s floundering flutter.
V.A. Bettencourt
A. Bettencourt writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, and Willows Wept Review, among others.
October 2022 | poetry
1.
With boulders, or another substance that can’t burn, I’ll build a barn,
buy Nigerian goats to bounce with favored popcorn sheep.
Animals kicking bare bone as wildfire steams a skyline.
2.
Goatee on my chin, the soul of California is burning like a lung.
I’m goat eye, horizontal, confusing as three pupils,
a shag of helpless, readying to die in the coming singe.
3.
I don’t eat meat from a table though mouths I love
water at the char of curry. Sweet strings of shoulder,
a chew of God meat in the cheek of a funky heaven.
Robert Carr
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal, the Maine Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Selected by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, he is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org
October 2022 | nonfiction
There’s singing and then there’s Freddie Mercury. Out of the deep and deepening well of sound just there in him as if music like a swarm of bees searching for home at last finds it in him, pours into him, seeps into every molecule of bone and marrow, shimmers the blood flowing through every capillary, flumes up into his throat and rushes out to buoy me on the exhilarating, turbulent sea of Bohemian Rhapsody, waking my fallow griefs, fruiting them in every bare note of a capella then oozing into ballad then punching up my flagging spirit with fisticuffs of opera and hard rock then wafting ever so slowly like a collapsing mylar balloon sinking back and hovering over the reflecting well of sound in him and submerges there.
Biographer David Bret puts Mercury’s deep, throaty rock-growl nudging a tender, vibrant tenor to life, then scaling a high-pitched, perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline, in my ears, and for a moment I hear the small shatters of broken glass on kitchen floors, the throb of tired feet and stubbed toes on a narrow trail. I draw a breath of musty, fragrant air, duck my head into a dust devil whirl of exhilaration and then I’m wrapped in the chill of lost ways and then lifted in crazy joy, into the mosaic of a stained glass window sunlight beamed through the pinwheeling colors splashed onto a stone cathedral floor.
He’s humming now, collecting minors and majors, pulling out useful detritus from his storied life as he draws out a velvet chair, directs me into it, and settles me at the groaning board of the feast. The late summer dusk chorus of crickets starts up and I do not shut the windows all night.
Paula Marafino Bernett
Paula Marafino Bernett’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The Louisville Review, Margie, Nimrod International Journal, Rattle, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Whiskey Island, among others. Her lyric essay “Digression and Memory, The Handmaiden Effect” and a companion essay “Four Hands Improvising on a Piano” appeared in Fourth Genre. A lyric essay “The Smallest Leaning Begins …” was published in Eastern Iowa Reviewand Birdcoat Quarterly published “Lady Mondegreen Rises from the One Who Was Laid Upon the Green.” The flash essay “How a Person Becomes a Body” was published by Gigantic Sequins and nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MaLa from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. She lives in NYC with Chance, her beloved Chessie.
October 2022 | fiction
“You’re going to get in trouble if you sleep in class, it’s that simple. You sleep at home, not in class. You know this.” The Principal leans back in his faded burgundy chair, arms crossed like the period at the end of sentence.
Marley nods, scrunches down in the hard, wooden chair in case she might actually be able to disappear.
“You should be tired of this by now. How do I get you to understand?”
Marley stares at the front of the wooden desk, the ugly words scratched there, bites both lips since her fingernails are already gone.
“Then why do you keep doing it? You know it’s not okay? Why not just go to sleep earlier?”
She wants to answer, wills the words to expose themselves, but nothing happens.
“Watch less TV… listen to classical music….”
Marley’s fingers strangle each other in her lap.
“Do you have something you want to talk about?”
It feels as if one of them might snap.
“I can’t help if you don’t let me.”
Help?
“Do you go to bed early?”
Somehow her head bobs once vertically on its axis.
“Then why are you so tired?”
She doesn’t even know where the shrug comes from.
“Do you have nightmares?” He seems hopeful. “Is something waking you up?”
A single nod, like a flower poking through snow.
“Yes?” He straightens.
Marley leans forward almost imperceptibly, lips parted.
“You can tell me.” The Principal leans in to meet her.
Marley tastes the words, not sure if they even make sense.
The Principal collapses back into his chair. “I can’t help if you don’t let me.”
Marley struggles to make the words work in her head first. Some things you have to live to understand.
The Principal sighs and drops his head, waiting patiently. Marley blinks, trying to see clearly. A plane goes by outside. The words mix, get lost, mix again, then form something she allows to squeeze through the cracks. At first just a small croak escapes her, then something just above a whisper… “My mother… she… gets sad a lot… at night… she wakes me up so I can… help her sleep.”
There’s a long pause as the Principal stares into his lap seeming to take this in. Marley stares into her lap as well, waiting for whatever comes next. Another plane goes by, just a sound, hundreds of people riding a hum in the sky. She listens, wishing she were anywhere else. Then another sound from under the desk, the unmistakable whoosh of an email flying through the ether.
The Principal looks up at her with a concerned frown. “Look, I can’t help you unless you’re willing to share. We’ll overlook it this time. Get back to class and sleep at home. Okay?”
Teja BenAmor
Teja BenAmor is a fiction and screen writer from East Village, New York City. Her screenplay Toothbrushes & Cowbellswas a finalist in the Cinema Street Screenplay Competition. Most recently her work has appeared at Every Day Fiction.
October 2022 | fiction
For thousands of years this was a peaceful place – pine trees stretching up toward the sky, hawks gliding at the line where the clouds met the infinite blue, fish scuttling down full rivers, one might even get lucky and see a brown bear, a flopping salmon in its mouth. But then the bulldozers came, ripping the ground with violence like a dagger cutting deep into flesh, shattering the idyllic mirrored surface of the lake, those still parts of the river, with the boom of seismic blasts, draining the land of its blood. Pipes were laid for oil to flow but no one who lived here wanted this. The people arrived to defend the land like birds in murmuration, huge crowds, a mass of bodies, there to put their flesh in front of the bulldozers. The people were peaceful. They were told to hold their ground and not panic. But then the riot police showed up to make an example of them. The people were shot by rubber bullets, sprayed with mace, assaulted by water cannons and blinded by tear gas.
After many days and months of camping in frigid temperatures, the people were close to giving up but then one morning as a hawk squawked across the sky, they opened their tents and discovered mirrored shields had been placed in front of every tent. They held these mirrored shields up in front of them, feeling like superheroes. They moved toward the riot police like a unified silver mass of shimmering scales. The police gasped to see themselves reflected back in these mirrors – their black helmets, bullet proof vests, combat pants, guns strapped to holsters, but underneath all that gear they were still human, still of this land, like the stardust they were born from and the dust they will return to.
For a moment there was a vibration of shared humanity -that underneath the uniforms they were just like the people they had been told to fight.
Christine Arroyo
Christine Arroyo’s work has been published in X-R-A-Y Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Dark Recesses Press, Beyond Words, and Variety Pack, to name a few. She lives with her husband in New York’s Hudson Valley with her rescue dog and cat.
