October 2024 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
I was in line at a fast-food restaurant with which you are familiar, standing behind a software engineer who, like all software engineers, had a touch of the –tisms. He was tall, of course, neatly muscled, and odd, all of which was already apparent but became clearer when he turned to me, as if surprised to find me standing behind, and said,
I redesigned my points app so that it randomly chooses a food item from the menu within my points price range.
You must like variety, I replied.
Not really.
The person in front of him, who was ordering from this well-known menu ploddingly, as if she had never heard of fast food, asked time-consuming questions to the minor in the uniform, some of which the minor, helpful but baffled by this line of inquiry, passed on to the tired manager who expedited both dine-in and drive-thru lines.
If not for variety, then why adapt the app?
Because you get what you get, the tall man explained.
He turned back around and, as if studying the selections somehow mattered to him despite the app, resumed his prior gaping, over the head of the astonishing newbie, at the menu, which suddenly appeared, mounted over a Bunn and two soft-serve machines, as if it might fall from the wall and crush the harried manager and the uniformed minor.
You are entitled to what you ask for, I told the tall man, who turned at the waist and looked down at me another time.
You get what you get.
Because of the app, which you made!
Correct.
Therefore, you like variety.
I would not say that.
Then you like surprises.
No big surprises on this menu, he said.
Then you do this, why? Because you ascribe to the philosophy in the Rolling Stones song?
I would not say I am dissatisfied.
I mean the other song, the one with the children’s choir.
John Lennon’s X-mas song?
No, I mean…
You do not seem to comprehend that you get what you get.
Because you have asked for it, I insisted.
He turned back around to check the progress of the menu, which was irrelevant to him.
By redesigning the app to deliver unnecessary variety, I added, you are essentially getting what you want.
Previously, the tall man had turned at the waist to look down at me over his left shoulder. Now, as if alternating for sake of variety, he turned to look over his right.
The app randomizes my order.
There has never been a question about that, I replied. The question is why you have randomized the app.
Because I can, the tall man said. And because you get what you get.
####
At this point you interrupt me and ask why I started this story with the words “of course.”
What? I ask.
In your exposition, you remind me, you said “He is tall, of course.” Why “tall”?
“Was,” I correct you. I said “He was tall.”
Matt Wanat
Professor of English at Ohio University Lancaster, Matt Wanat is co-editor of Breaking Down Breaking Bad and The Films of Clint Eastwood. Wanat has published critical essays, encyclopedia articles, reviews, and book chapters on various authors and filmmakers. Wanat’s fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction publications are available or forthcoming in The Wayfarer, Coffin Bell, The Wax Paper, and Pennsylvania English. Wanat resides in rural southeastern Ohio.
July 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Elect
Toast with choice wine the elect.
Toast the vampires, bad boys, hyenas,
stone-cold demons and assholes
strolling the halls of heaven,
side by saintly side with hermits and virgins,
stumbled apostles, unwed social justice mothers,
preachers-to-the-animals,
preacher dragged to the fire,
girl soldier dragged to the fire,
mothers, fathers, babies unbaptized,
founders of monastic communities,
fallen archbishops, Juan Diego,
the poor and unsightly, the troubled rich
— which is to say, every one of wealth —
robbers who love their father,
lost tribes of angels,
archdeacons who don’t get along with each other,
holy men wrestling with Satan,
the innocent old, Job, the inside traders,
the cashing-in and the cashiered,
holy men wrestling with an angel
or a Deity maybe,
break the rib, dislocate the hip.
Collect the elect
— the hell-raisers and hell-preachers,
the abject, reject, object,
subject to pride,
subject to anxiousness, empty echoed terror.
Toast with Diet Coke the McDonald’s regulars,
the cathedral regulars,
the Mozarts, the Manets, bankrupt Vermeer,
the pulsing maters, the buttermilk cups,
open arms, open legs,
the bell ringers and the rung bells,
the sleek-bodied, the weighted,
the glide and slide and blithe,
the large and loud and meek.
Round up the elect for the trains.
Lift the incense.
Light the tall candles,
the Easter candle before the tabernacle.
The mystery of faith.
Lift the morning sun through the rose window
and the saints with green halos
and the virgin with blue halo
and the baby with the halo of red.
Gather in the plaza the elect
for goats-and-sheep time,
each then by a different path to the same pasture.
Hymn the bricks and marble,
the dark basement, the ceiling, cracks,
the space like another cosmos.
Whither shall I go?
Count sins. Record errors and malignancies.
Keep track humanity.
Serve the chalice of soup-kitchen soup.
Break day-old bread, a leg unwell knit.
Mark each word.
Dog in the sanctuary.
Armor at the church door.
Turnips growing in rows under the pews.
Much barking at the altar.
Wake up, baby!
Open your eyes to the morning snow,
sunlight on the white city, a joyful demand,
on the streets and sidewalks,
factories and tattoo shops,
police cars and hearses.
Climb the column.
Sit on top and pray alone
for a novena of novenas,
eighty times eight.
The aroused, the aloud, the bowed
and unbowed, the cowed, the aground,
the bound and unbound.
Soon and very soon.
Let the barrio close you in awkward embrace
— smell the rot, touch the frail wood,
feel the play of texture in the ugly wood,
listen to the wind across the wood face.
Let us as elect wash the feet.
Let us chop up pews for firewood.
Let us recalibrate the statues
and the paintings and the hymnals.
Let us go out each morning as elect,
each noon, at night.
Let us go out and among
and in and with.
Toast with strong coffee
out and among and in and with,
sacred prepositions.
Holy grammar. Holy word.
Holy embrace, elect.
Patrick T. Reardon
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of six poetry collections, including Salt of the Earth: Doubts and Faith and Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems. His poetry has been featured in numerous journals such as America, Rhino, After Hours, Heart of Flesh, Autumn Sky, Silver Birch, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Poetry East, The Galway Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden. In addition to his poetry, he has also written a history book titled The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago, which was published in 2020 by Southern Illinois University Press.
April 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
When she said that,
I think she has never tasted how a good Irish whiskey
echoes in your mouth after you swallow its heat.
Or understood the way lint can reveal the archeology of your life.
Her comment tells me she has never watched
a vivid crimson cardinal alight on the halo of a basketball hoop
in the fading light of an afternoon.
If she can say that, I’m sure she hasn’t felt the love
when the wind caresses the yew tree.
And she will be mystified by why you must throw away
the first crepe in the pan to the dog.
When it comes to believing in the curative power
of the medicine of tears, she probably doesn’t.
And if she cannot hear how the meter of the telegraphic SOS
from the Titanic can truly break your heart,
She’s just not listening hard enough.
Larry Oakner is the author of three chapbooks of poems, including Unwinding the Words (Blind Tattoo Press) SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press), and The 614th Commandment (under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch), along with a chapbook, The Canticles of Private Lucius Swan, (Pen & Anvil Press). Over 50 of his poems have appeared in publications such as The Ekphrastic Review, Red Eft Review, Red Wolf Press, WINK, The Oddville Press, Tricycle: Buddhist News, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lost Coast Review, The Long Island Quarterly, and many others.
Larry Oakner
January 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
I attended a party hosted by one of my university
English professors. The party was timid. Everyone
in a house full of friendless people. Soon, I see
my professor is flirting on my date. I am across the patio
talking to a stoned lonely classmate near the nacho
salsa station, and my prof, swinging jigging away,
making my date giggle, smile, move, bob and sway.
The world is glorious and cruel. Full of voids
impossible to fill and so hard to ignore.
My professor was working hard to diminish
his middle-age pansa: running his hand through his hair,
leaning forward, holding that cigarette but not lighting it.
Does this really work? When does his ex step in? And I wonder
if this is me in twenty years. Drifting to bad jazz, citing Derrida,
considering busted summers in Prague, then back to all this,
hosting a house of students and colleagues
without anyone causing a lucha, because no one thinks anything
is worth throwing a punch. Nada happens.
I had this friend who launched off a table
in a crowded bar because he saw his novia
dancing with a gringo. Did my friend think she really
had a Sancho? (Remember this: action is often a good
remedy for grief). He flew into the dancers,
a super-villain returning to earth. His cape a flash
of cursing. A big fight, the boogying couples scattering
off the dancefloor. After the incident, and him
banished from the club, I spied him and la novia, seated
on a curb in the parking lot. She cupping his face
in tenderness insisting, she loved him, loved
him. Chanting it. The night sky believing all
of her. My friend looking down into the alley,
discovering his bruises, adjusting his ripped
camisa, her words all shadow and dusk.
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith was born in Merida, Yucatan, grew up in Tucson, Arizona and taught English at Tucson High School for 27 years. Much of his work explores growing up near the border, being raised biracial/bilingual, and teaching in a large urban school where 70% of the students are American/Mexican. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his writings will appear in Drunk Monkeys, Inverted Syntax and have been published in Sky Island Journal, Muse, Discretionary Love and other places too. His wife, Kelly, sometimes edits his work, and the two cats seem happy.
January 2024 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee
Although I’m not particularly fond of violence, I decided to watch the TV miniseries “World without End.” It’s a Medieval butchery, maybe along the lines of “Game of Thrones,” which I haven’t seen.
Anyway, I watched the first hour of this curious pastiche of 21st century sensitivities dressed up in 14th century primitivism. In that hour, I saw a man get his forearm chopped off with a meat cleaver; a man get both legs broken with an enormous mallet; a pilloried man getting dung thrown at his head, apparently all day; and two hangings, one of which included about 15 victims, all of whom were simultaneously thrown off a bridge, necks ennoosed. There were also three graphic depictions of coitus, only one of which was consensual.
I stopped watching just before the first burning of a witch. My god, who are we to make such inhumanity profitable?
Richard LeBlond
Richard LeBlond is the author of Homesick for Nowhere, a collection of essays that won an EastOver Press Nonfiction Prize in 2022 and was a finalist for general nonfiction in the Spring 2023 San Francisco Book Festival. His essays and photographs have appeared in many U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Weber – The Contemporary West, Concis, Lowestoft Chronicle, Trampset, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. His work has been nominated for “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best of the Net.”
January 2024 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
By the time I realized why this sublet was so cheap, it was too late—I was being tortured by the Inquisition. In case you were wondering, it was nothing like the Monty Python skit. How awesome would that have been? Well, it doesn’t help that I started giggling when they told me to, “Confess the heinous sin of heresy.” Oh God, hah! Oh, hah, huh. Hmm, sorry, can’t help it, makes me snort every time I remember that bit. But yes, my burns are still healing. Dear God, who knew screaming into a small transponder would cause so much hullabaloo. I forget how touchy the early Spanish empire could be.
I mean, I grew up Catholic, for Christ’s sake, but I never had to learn Latin, thank you, Vatican II. So when they asked me to prove my religion by reciting a few prayers, I busted out what I thought as “Profession of Faith,” but these guys thought I was spouting heresy because I was speaking modern Spanish. I did forget my Babelfish, which may have saved my ass. Wait – is it even programmed for medieval Latin? Well, lessons have been learned, that is all I have to say.
And here they are:
(1.) Double-check that your sublet to Andalusia’s Golden Era is for BEFORE 1478.
(2.) Remember to look at the profile of the person you are subletting from to make sure they aren’t a bored, rich sadist who wants to watch you suffer a bit AND pay for the “pleasure” of it.
(3.) Always, and I mean always, remember your Babelfish. Modern languages are always a tip-off and can mess with history. Ah shit, did I just change history? Has my guest rating gone down? Thank God for the fixed term on the sublet and automatic return to our time period. Not sure how the empty shackles will be explained to the Inquisitors. Hold on, I am quickly checking Spanish history on the network to see if anything has changed dramatically. Hold please. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!
Which leads me to
(4.) Always do a thorough research of the current understanding of the history of your destination and write that shit down or copy it somewhere where it cannot be altered in order to do a thorough comparison afterward.
And if all else fails,
(5.) See if there is a cheap ticket back to the immediate past to prevent yourself from buying the sublet in the first place.
Heather Bourbeau
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin. Her latest poetry collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
