July 2014 | back-issues, fiction
In the wintery spring of 1945, World War II had ended but not the chaos and misery of its survivors. My mother received notice that her husband had been killed. She sought solace in the arms of the messenger, got pregnant, and remarried. The couple moved south looking for work. I was five years- old and left in the care of my maternal grandmother in the bombed-out city of Kassel.
These were the happiest times of my war-torn childhood. I never wanted to leave my grandmother’s side. Days were spent gathering twigs and branches for our wood-burning stove, source of warmth and light. We filled baskets with the white flower heads of chamomile, then dried them for brewing tea. We collected sugar beets in the fields, cooked and stirred them into syrup, a delicious treat over our watery oatmeal. But the evenings were the best. Warmed and protected by my grandmother’s ample body we snuggled as she spun stories of imaginary places and events.
Months later my mother called for me. My grandmother prepared me with allusions to a happy family life and as it turned out, I did thrive in my new environment. We arranged a meeting place where my stepfather waited in a horse-drawn wagon. The exchange was brief. I suddenly felt cramps in my stomach and barely had time to sling my arms around my beloved grandmother’s neck before I was hoisted onto the seat of the wagon.
That was the last time I saw my grandmother. She waved and then her hand covered her mouth as if to stifle a sob. She had to stay behind, war-weary and lonely, while I was ushered toward a fresh beginning. I still see her getting smaller and smaller, sinking into the shadow of the bright morning light.
Ute Carson
July 2014 | back-issues, fiction
It was blasphemous and immoral; they submitted to the thrumming rhythm of the ethereal emotions that curled beneath their rhapsodic boughs; it filled the cosmos between them with embryonic passion—the steps they took were almost predestined, as if they had been there before; the breaths they took were almost too heavy to be healthy; the chances they took were reckless to the brink of all that was and will be tomorrow.
She pressed her lips softly against the warm, yielding lobe of his ear and whispered.
“How can flowers bloom as if they will never wilt? Do they know nothing of futility?”
He smiled.
“They know nothing of futility, those lucky few. We could only dream to be so blind….”
Danny Judge
Danny Judge is an emerging writer who is currently at work on his debut novel. A former Marine, he lives in Iowa with his wife and young son.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Johnny Appleseed
A myth, a mistake,
raking sodden leaves into trodden ground
feeling dirt sift beneath his weight;
a nomad, a flake,
an illustration in a children’s book
planting the American dream, original sin;
a sexist, a snake,
sowing seeds into earthy wombs,
throwing them to absent winds
praying they catch, they root, they grow
bitter, sour, sweet;
a marvel, a fake,
a man
who tread across
the heart
of my own Ohio,
a man
who preached what he did not know.
A Madman’s Lullaby
There is a monster lives inside my head,
His eyes the yellow of the yowling dead;
I speak with him before I go to bed.
He sleeps, dark familiar, throughout the day,
Lonely, cold-fingered, molded from dread.
There is a monster lives inside my head.
He dreams where I should live instead,
Drawing the curtain from a summer’s ray.
I speak with him when I rise from bed.
He mocks the children for their children’s play
And bakes his misery in a poisoned bread.
There is a monster lives inside my head.
He speaks the words I would leave unsaid,
Wearing my skin weathered and frayed.
I speak with him before I go to bed.
He lures me in where no man dare tread,
Lighting the darkened path of an unlighted way.
There is a monster lives inside my head;
He speaks to me before he goes to bed.
Death, to Whom I Speak
For E. Springer
The phone rang yesterday afternoon
as I walked, dragging
my feet into the kitchen
because I could not find the cordless phone.
When I answered,
I heard — or imagined I heard —
You
answering from the other line, Your voice
whispering words with no syllables,
words in no tongue I could understand.
I tried to catch
a piece of Your voice
to bottle in a jar
like a sort of broken lullaby
to lull me to sleep on sleepless nights.
Before I could speak,
You — or the remains of You —
were gone
and I was left with a longing
and the dull tone
of static silence.
Pierce Brown
Pierce C. Brown is a poet, short story writer and translator. He currently lives and studies in Mainz, Germany.
July 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Once, I asked my mother “What is the worst part of a car to break?” She said it was the radio. Weeks passed since I inquired and the famous question why? taunted me more each time I eyed her attend to the radio before the adjustment of her seat. Finally, I gave up on wasting countless hours in a desperate attempt to figure it out. It was practically a pant by the time the words “Why the radio? What about the engine? My god, we live in Florida, what about the air conditioner? Or the wind shield wipers? Why the radio?” frantically left my lips. She sat her Breakfast At Tiffany’s mug down carefully and stared at me as if I were a foreign figure rather than her daughter of sixteen years. “You never want a radio to break because without it, you’d be able to hear all of the other problems rattling around.”
I went to bed satisfied with her response. She must be right, too. For it wasn’t until a silence fell around our shoulders that I realized we had been malfunctioning for quite some time.
Abby Kalen Belanger
Abby Kalen Belanger is a junior in high school, attending a School for the Arts for Creative Writing. She has been writing short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction since the age of eight and aspires to continue as a professional upon obtaining a Master’s Degree for Creative Writing.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The Wintry Wait to Work
A cold eight degrees at eight in the morning
as a mourning dove perches on the telephone wire,
Mona’s conversation with her new man
running under its talons. I see
a shattered flowerpot, glazed with ice,
lying in a lawn of discolored grass,
the long and twisty roots of its winter-dead
creeping along the ground.
At the corner bus stop the 58 doesn’t come,
the line that gets me to work,
to the flashy downtown high-rise,
to Louisville Gas and Electric.
Cars stop at the traffic light like in a video game,
stuffed with grey-haired obstetricians,
chubby day-care staff, and middle school math teachers.
I don’t breathe their smoke or feel their heat. I’m cold
to their George Strait and Stan Getz, can’t drink their coffee.
Above the avenue sits another dove,
a cooing stranger to the first, and the cars
scatter each time the light turns green,
whipping wind and pumping exhaust into my face.
Common advice says worry only about what you can control.
So I recall Kaufmann’s window ad on Market Street:
“$19.99 Solid Sweater Sale!”
Green, not grey, I think,
only because that’s what Mona would say.
Television Light
In the autumn forest I could
not find the screech-
owl that night, the rotating neck
in the moonlight, the fool’s
gold pupils hunting in
the crypt of darkness. But I
headed back at the usual
time, ready for a cup
of tea and the warmth
of blankets. My sister was
up, her leg hurting again, changing
channels on the tv. “Only movies
on are ones I’ve seen
before.” Our father came
down from bed, needing
an alka-seltzer. “Stop staying
up so late.” He turned and
left, squinting, in his white, holey
underwear, showing crack, and sister
asked why I had a lizard leg stuck
in the corner of my mouth. On
the screen two grouse pecked
in a thicket. I heard hands feeling
around in the dark hallway,
feeling for the switch.
The Girl on the Wall
The rural route winds
between clear brooks and wafts of manure
on this bridge connecting
livestock to distant modernity
where we delay for potholes, not tolls,
cattle, not red lights.
At the third stop a girl
sits barefoot on the stone wall,
idyllic breeze over healthy hair,
left hand in her aunt’s,
curious of the motorized giant
taking her mother in its belly.
Crystal blues peer into
the next world’s toy.
My memories reflect in the window,
the mysteries I boarded long ago:
Appalachian hollow turned to crowded metropolis,
suburban subdivisions to sub-Saharan Africa,
sickly pigs to stately pork, moonshine to Grand Marnier,
Budweiser commercials to Georgian supras.
Her venture will not take my route,
but neither can I return to hers.
If we stay put, do we shrivel?
If we go, do we lose our core?
I look closely at the girl,
see her through the glass.
She desires her turn
for a world of lights, of leaves.
Would I take all my photos down to start again?
The Withered
The heated fields bleed
in yellow brimstone,
framed by the perfuming farms
of our fatty nipples.
Crows, lost
and uncountable as they
waver in the sky
like the dark,
winged contours
of a dyed moustache
over a glib lip.
I have stumbled into
this golden age,
seeing its plastic
bifocals and chorus
as packs of dogs
howling through the dusk
of the heart,
bargains desired
for the fields forgotten.
Timothy B. Dodd
Timothy B. Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV. His writing has appeared in Yemassee, The Owen Wister Review, Main Street Rag, The William & Mary Review, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas El Paso.
July 2014 | back-issues, fiction
I think of my grandmother’s skin—warm creases, her hands rinsing off a peach, its hair smoothed from the softness of wellwater just eat from my hands, can you taste how ripe it is? I just picked it in the orchard this morning.
Or the first day I met Rebecca in that cold café and how the overhead lighting made her nervous, so she pulled and stretched at the bottom of her shirt whenever she talked, and sometimes even when she listened these lights make me itch.
Or the time Keith and I sat on top of Angel Ridge, his legs hanging over the ledge, his dark hair dissolving into the thickness of the night, sitting by my side, his thumb softening my ear, his words frightening me we are all alone.
And no matter how much I try to remember the warmth of my grandmother’s hands or the way I saw myself in Rebecca’s nerves, I can never escape the night of Keith, the night he made me believe, made me see—that we are no more important than the roots of the trees below.
Bethany Freese
Bethany Freese is a writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest.
