Digital Butterflies, Electric Buzz

July 2022 | fiction

  1. Digital butterfly

His hands are rough, like sex, and when he touches me it is delirium and fever and ecstasy, but he is only reading my palms. Butterfly, he says, digital butterfly and traces his fingers along the fate line. Social media influencer, I remind myself, that’s who you are. It makes sense. He has long hair, black, melanin, falling against his shoulders as he dances his pointer finger and then his middle towards the heart line. Yes, there is rage and loss and obsession. Yes, there is desire. Jacaranda, he says and I understand. The petals would fall on Los Angeles sidewalks.

Yes, I remember.

He traces further, white t-shirt, black silk. He feels like cool sands at midnight, like quiet beaches with prescient waves. His fingertips move along my palm and I wonder if I’ve ever been known and then he stops, looks up, his eyes grey but also charcoal. You like wine? He asks. Don’t you know? I think, but he pours a glass and it is dry and friendly.

I drink and my skin grows warm and buzzes. From his couch I can see into the kitchen and there are hand towels printed with small black butterflies.

  1. Dancer

Don’t you wanna hold me down? Touch me? I ask.

He’s sitting on the bed, Motel 6. I’m standing in front of him, florescent pink lace and long legs. Glitter on my eyes. I put my hands in his hair, hair the color of the dark pavement in the parking lot when it rains, the darkest. I run my hands through that black silk, run them down white t-shirt, chest, abdomen, thighs.

No, he says, I only want to touch your hands. His eyes empty beaches late at night, early into the morning before the sun rises.

I place my hands over his face, cradle him, and his lips run along my palms as I bring them down in front of him to hold. He takes the right and then the left. This is the heart line, he says. This is the fate line. On his arm beneath his shoulder is a tattoo of the yin-yang symbol, thick black. The color green, he says and I think of the heels I wore last night, plastic against metal. Philosophy major, and I think UCLA. Dancer, and that is now, how I make my money, how I got here, this motel room. He moves his thumbs along every line.

Beneath his skin I feel electricity like a gentle hum, wings, beating.

Elle Reed

Elle Reed is a writer from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bombfire, Bullshit Lit, Misery Tourism, White Wall Review, Metonym, and others. She is currently finishing her first novel, about the desert, longing, and friendship.

Cliffhanger

July 2022 | poetry

Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro Harbor, CA

 

The green bridge is a weighty suspension

of disbelief,

its angle of ascent firing my muscles,

a forced march in country

shadowing my climb up its short suspenders.

Hands heavy on the rotund rail,

its pitted touch flashes a pier railing,

my father demonstrating baiting a hook,

the wriggling body dangling over the side.

Night pulls up its blanket

veiling the wind-stropped containers

stacked like toy blocks below

while nestled in the standing army of alien cranes

a decommissioned battleship sleeps.

The watery bay beckons.

Below a siren wails to climb the rail.

Roger Camp

Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he tends his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Saint & 2nd. When he’s not at home, he’s traveling in the Old World. His work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review and Nimrod.

Puzzle

July 2022 | poetry

Even during class, my sister

strummed chords, fingers

caressing frets or stretching

strings bleeding the blues.

Sometimes she’d pick

a country tune, wailing for lost

beers and pickup trucks,

mourning every orphan.

Now her fingers pluck

bibs and diapers

from laundry, her kids

a Greek chorus of woes

and triumphs. The guitar resonates

during birthdays

or under a beer tent.

My brother-in-law puzzles

at her frustrations. After beers

one night, he confessed

she hums in her sleep,

and taps her finger.

It’s weird, he tells me: sometimes

her hand finds a rhythm, as if

stroking our last dog’s head.

John Cullen

John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press.

Birdwatcher in Kyiv

July 2022 | poetry

They know before we do,

the birds. In the yard,

feeders swing on their chains.

If you think we don’t bury

our cash in the thaw

of the dark dicey frostbite,

you’re wrong. Trust God

or no one, I urge my husband.

Do not answer the door.

I pour vodka down his throat,

call through the cracks

to bring back the warblers.

Bird bird bird, where is your,

when will it, why why why.

What jumps faster

than blood from a vein?

If you think we don’t practice

the dash to the bunker,

you’re wrong. We’ve run out

of drugs and honey,

but we cannot run far,

railcars packed with

no more time. Before

the siren glass shatter,

we walked fine,

and the mistle thrush

spilled operettas

over the sunflowers.

The neighbors are hiding

their children in attics.

The absence of silvery

wings. Do it now,

begs my husband, break

the thermometer, inject me

with mercury, hollow

my bones before lark

and nightingale swallow

each other’s songs.

Jenny Hubbard

A former high-school English teacher, Jenny Hubbard writes full-time in her hometown of Salisbury, NC. Her work has been published over the years in various journals, including Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Nine Mile, Maryland Literary Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Both of Jenny’s novels, And We Stay and Paper Covers Rock, have earned major awards from the American Library Association. Represented by Jonathan Lyons of Curtis Brown, Ltd., Jenny is currently under contract with Penguin Random House.

Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip

July 2022 | visual art

Tending the Garden

Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip

Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip is a writer, musician, and freelance artist currently based in Virginia. Her most recent work appeared in Barren magazine. Ever searching for stories to tell, she enjoys crafting images that weave together her introverted sensibilities and love for landscapes.