Dead Man’s Mountain

July 2022 | fiction

It was very late.  Mildred Sowers listened to the cold February wind.  It blew up Snake Hollow hard against the house and rattled the windows.  She sat in an easy chair by the woodstove and watched the flames as they flickered and danced around the lonely little room.  Faces of the people she had loved stared down from the walls in framed black and white photographs.  She was old, ninety-one and she had trouble sleeping.  Often she would sit up most of the night just waiting on Clarence.

Below the house, Snake Run wound its icy way down the through the mountains to Big Furnace Creek passed the cemetery at Furnace Creek Baptist where all her people were, the people in the pictures on the wall.  She’d lived there in the hollow all her life.  Joanne and Betty Lou were born in the house, right upstairs over her head.  They were getting old now too and had children and grandchildren of their own.  That’s the way things go, she thought.  They were all out in Tennessee and she hardly ever saw them.

There was only her sister Pauline to come visit and take her to church and to town on Sundays.  Mildred Sowers looked forward to seeing her sister every week.  Except for Sundays, and an occasional phone call, she might go for days on end and not speak to a living soul.  Still, she always had Clarence to keep her company and she was used to being alone.  Old people have to get used to being by themselves.  It’s just a fact.  The older you get the more you live inside your own head.

She reached over and stuck another stick of wood in the firebox.  Then, she leaned back and closed her eyes.  “Mildred, you really need to think about moving into town.  That new nursing home is a wonderful place and everybody says the food is real good.  You’d have friends there and folks to help you.”  Pauline was always after her to move, but she wouldn’t know what to do without her little house, without her mountain looking down on her and the comfort and security of Snake Hollow.  You can’t just up and change the ways of a lifetime.  No, as long as she could put one foot in front of the other she was determined to stay where she was, where she belonged.

The clock on the mantel struck four.  It was Clarence’s mother’s clock.  It had told the correct time for seventy some years without ever winding down.  In one way, the old timepiece reminded her of herself and her life.  She wound it faithfully every week just the way that Clarence used to do.  She could almost see him doing it.  He wasn’t a tall man.  He’d have to stand on his tiptoes to wind it.  He was a good man though, honest and hard working.  Everybody liked him.  If anybody ever needed any help they knew they could depend on Clarence.

The spirits rode the wind on nights like this, all of the spirits of the mountains.  Some folks would say that a soul never really leaves these old hollows.  Mildred Sowers wasn’t sure she believed it, but it was a comforting thought in a way.  After all, nobody knows exactly what Heaven will be like.  Even at ninety-one, it was hard enough just to try and make sense of this life without worrying about the next.  She didn’t know why she was permitted to live so long and why Clarence was taken away so young.  He was only forty-nine. That’s not long enough to live.  Still, they did have that precious time together.  She imagined his spirit aloft in the mountains, moving through the dark forest, riding the wind.

If he was coming it was nearly time.  It would soon be dawn…She listened for the sound of his boots coming up the front porch steps.  You could always tell Clarence’s footsteps.  He always walked heavy.  Mildred Sowers listened expectantly, but all she heard was the wind and the crackling of the fire.

James William Gardner

Author of, “DEEP AUGUST: Short Stories from the American South,” 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.

The Dangers of Dancing So Close to the Sun

July 2022 | poetry

I was born under a fish-scaled star, a scar in my aunt’s

brother’s father’s eye. Is this a bone I see, or ash dust

inherited, a silent twin inhabiting my ventricles?

The prima-donna sky preens, sends us lightning sprites

red and too quick to capture. I was walking. I was a whole

lot of broken, and snap, there goes my ankle. The moss

spoke of spring-like January, but the camera didn’t

hit the deep-rutted trail, held close to my heart. My

mornings are voluptuous, my miscalculations disguised

as happy accidents. I believe in my grandfather’s third

kidney, the way he lived through the work of shifting

one pile of stones to another corner of the barbed

and electrified yard, and back again until the sirens sounded

the end of light. Today I discovered a new species

of beetle, a bee who loved my shirt and wouldn’t leave.

The wind issuing from god’s mouth was warm. The wind

issuing from god’s mouth chilled me to the bone. The grass

was god’s also, and Matisse’s cat dreamt of Marianne

Moore with crooked wings. The moon is in umbra, the moon

is menopausal, and time makes less sense than it did

five seconds ago. I will haunt the stars I can’t touch

right now. Every turtle galaxy, every swan-booted nebula

now my problems have been all but solved. I put my nose

to the sweet pea, to the whetstone, and learned something

of the extermination of the human race. I pray my father’s

father’s sisters, who flew through the chimneys, knit

their souls back into body when the stars call us away from here.

Ronda Piszk Broatch

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

David A. Goodrum

July 2022 | visual art

Beach Legs

David A. Goodrum

David A. Goodrum lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into many art festivals in cities such as St. Louis Missouri, Columbus and Cincinnati Ohio, Ann Arbor Michigan, Bloomington and Indianapolis Indiana, and Madison Wisconsin. His intent is to capture images that might instill in others – as they do for him as he makes them – a sense of calm and tranquility. He hopes to create a visual field that momentarily transports you away from hectic daily events and into a place that delights in an intimate view of the world. Additional work can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com and www.instagram.com/goodrum/.

The Sun Is This Day’s State Of Affairs

July 2022 | poetry

                yesterday was no sun

anywhere but everywhere I can’t

know only my ken  my neighborhood

my house of cats and cashmere

pickled by moths

                          the little I see—

I can count the walls

and know I exist

                         but the sun never

asks about itself   it is not a god

who depends on its people

                                not all seeing

objects are created equal

                               every day my skin

sees more than I do  even muffled

in clothes its cameras see eye to eye

with the cat’s toes

                     my wet flesh envelope

posts itself on dog walks and sky chases

in city parks

                    I can’t vouch for you

my deep wide body  you know more

than I do

            What are you cooking in there

what conversation are you having

with the sun?

                   I tell your knuckles

to unbunch  yet there you go

spending your skin on everyone

Mary Buchinger

Mary Buchinger is the author of five collections of poetry, including / klaʊdz / (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015), and Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Boston Globe, DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, Massachusetts Review, PANK, phoebe, Plume, Salamander, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She is president of the New England Poetry Club and professor of English and communication studies at MCPHS University in Boston. Website: www.marybuchinger.com.

Gimmickry

July 2022 | poetry

Vomiting against the wind, hungover sacrosanct,

presenting itself through a badge of honour,

traipsing through the streets, a homely sight,

more surprises championed against growing up

sympathised through another disposition.

This goodly act, slighting for  better entertainment,

what happens upstairs stays there, coffee aside,

working through swathes of imperfect manuscripts,

more worse then the other, never fathoming distance

infinite drafts slipping under scrutiny of same.

Close proximity, proposed even more attractive,

a steady kiss prolongs the desperate situation

being pawed for good measure, regretting at leisure

Hitting through secret apertures waiting for use

wanting  what’s not on the table, a desire abdicated.

Watching from below, a closeted cry still heard

oscillating through indifference and agony,

monumental trademark as ubiquitous as the trees

lights not going out, under cover of alcohol,

solid flowers in lieu of half-arsed apologies.

No context for that smile, private jokes abiding,

grimacing from one’s own a fault worth permitting,

loved within measure still not enough,

infinite coffee, refills, riches worth pursuing

not uglified by persuasion, desired through want.

Patricia Walsh

Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland. To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled “Continuity Errors,” with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. These include: The Lake; Seventh Quarry Press; Marble Journal; New Binary Press; Stanzas; Crossways; Ygdrasil; Seventh Quarry; The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet’s Wing, Narrator International, The Galway Review; Poethead and The Evening Echo. She has also published a novel, In The Days of Ford Cortina, in August 2021.