October 2012 | back-issues, fiction
Strolling down Bridge Street my eyes wandered to a sign in a window reading, in big bright yellow letters, BOOKS WANTED. I walked in, greeted the man behind the counter with the highest grade of courtesy I could muster, and handed my CV to him with a casual assurance born of weeks of beating the city’s pavement looking for odd jobs. A manager was produced; we conversed. For this kind of position, you see, credentials don’t matter that much but eloquence, the gift of the gab do. And with these I am blessed, and soon I was offered my own office space, on the shelf, where to box in my chatter. What will I be, the brave man inquired. “A Mikhail Bulgakov, sir.” Of the worst kind, of course. A wild and purring mad Master and Margarita. A slight frown shot through my new owner’s face, then disappeared – he would have preferred a Brown or Meyer, a Rankin even, something he’d get rid of in no time. But as a man of taste, he soon muted his commercial concerns and congratulated me for the soundness of my choice.
So here I am, dear reader, sitting on this shelf as I have been doing for weeks now, and if you are reading this at this very instant, it is that I have started tearing up bits of myself, flyleaves, irrelevant front and back matter, to kill time and boredom and sending them for help. Nobody asks for a Bulgakov these days. I’ll grow old on this shelf. But hell, it’s still better than my last gig as a kitchen porter.
by Armel Dagorn
Armel Dagorn was born in 1985 in France and has been living in Cork, Ireland for the past few years. He reads and writes in his adopted language, English, whenever he gets a chance. His stories appear in magazines such as Southword, trnsfr and Wordlegs. He just opened a little place at http://armeldagorn.wordpress.com
October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
I did not know
the lighthouse was white;
it always seemed gray,
like the cold empty sea
to which it stood sentinel.
But, once, the sun danced
through the clouds
and the lighthouse beamed –
adagio of glow upon stone.
Soon, the tide ebbed;
bitter clouds closed in;
things returned to gray.
I am lonely, fearful of storms.
by Danny Earl Simmons
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals such as Naugatuck River Review, Avatar Review, Summerset Review, Burningword, and Pirene’s Fountain.
October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Hitchhiker
I’d seen him an hour or so earlier,
outside of Medford, before the
rain set in, and I’d hunkered down
at a truck stop to ease the dizziness
in my mind and the queasiness of an
empty stomach, too many cigarettes.
Must have gotten a ride soon, then
passed me when I was off the road.
Here he was once again; suede coat
now soaked to a seal-skin sheen.
His dog was soaked too; black lab,
no leash, sitting next to the bedroll.
That was about all I took in before
eased the gas and onto the shoulder.
I don’t know what possessed me.
Normally I don’t pick up anyone.
Something about his reappearance
perplexed me and needed an answer.
It was kind of a closed-in, dreary day,
a day when you look for company,
good or bad, just to share the rain
and the half-full bottle on the seat.
He didn’t run to the truck when
I stopped a bit ahead of him,
as a young man might do, but
merely bent full from the waist,
retrieved his pack, tipped down
the brim of his hat a lower, and
started forward with a purpose.
The dog came too, of course,
perhaps adding to my belief
in this man’s native goodness;
I can usually rely on dog sense.
Whatever the reason, I decided
to pick up this soaked hitchhiker;
he and the dog grew larger in the
right hand mirror, as did the knife.
by Richard Hartwell
Leavings
Four – or is it five? – lonely leaves
left dangling from the apricot tree;
wrinkled, yellowed ancients of the
ravages of late fall, early winter.
Seems sort of forlorn to be the
last ones left hanging around
when all the others have left
hurriedly, in the wind, weaving
away to the far side of the yard.
Leaves and fruit bunch together,
huddled communally, windrows
against the base of the wall as if
in group therapy they organize
to rout the wind and restrain the
ravages of snow, rain, and ice.
by Richard Hartwell
Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember, the hormonially-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California, with his wife of thirty-six years (poor soul, her, not him), their disabled daughter, one of their sons and his ex-wife and their two children, and twelve cats. Yes, twelve! He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing poetry, Rick would rather still be tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.
October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Your mother attempts to clear the bushes
A first infant taste of lunacy
that made me think I could jump the
4-foot porch over the thick hedge
into the yard, scratchless, blameless.
Kid, you’ll be jumping any day now.
You’ll get to know them folks,
them fellas, them naysayers.
You’ll see what I mean:
Always the wide- mouthed expressions,
always, “Are you serious, kid?”
when you come up bleeding
and mount the porch again.
But had you cleared the bushes,
toes in grass, knees unscathed,
family behind you on the porch, cheering,
that’s when you’d have given up jumping.
So anyway, what I mean is, though it
pains me to say it: jump. I still do.
With any kind of luck, eventually
we’ll both make it over.
by Lauren Shows
“Free canoe. Not seaworthy.”
The ad suggested that it could be used
for a sandbox, a planter, decorative piece
but no one, not those you hated most
should peer out to sea from its unworthy hull.
“I will help you load it.” We made the call,
joking as we bobbed down SR 343
then pulled in, gravel skipping, pack of dogs barking
and walked up in the dusk and no-see-ums hover.
We should have listened. The mosquitoes grieved
over a still black pond. We bit back laughs
as the red-faced man said, “Ain’t good for shit,”
and scratched his chin, days and days unshaved.
What else can we do? As the sound of water
enters our ears, our shoes, the pockets of clothes
we unmoor it from the porch, and the rain abides.
Step in. Hope the old man knew he was wrong.
by Lauren Shows
October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
One doesn’t intend to comment on
strangers lives, but when you wake
to a glass shattering on the floor
above you, followed by a scream
and then the words I refuse,
repeated, you know that sleep
will not return for quite some time.
They divorced and for a while
it was quite. The husband would wander
the neighborhood in white undershirts,
the wife presumably far away. Then
they discovered the phone and a whole
new kind of one sided argument erupted,
louder, with no broken dishes.
Our next door neighbors were happy,
and in love, which is a different sort
of problem. A different set of sounds.
by Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson
October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Invitation From Hopper
She leans forward into the bay window.
Water, a long way off and a loon cries.
In the room, a man speaks,
someone listens. Expectations
are set in motion. She remains
frozen at the window, waiting,
not a matter of time. The call
of the loon carries over the water.
Expectations have a way of shifting.
Though The Scream has been stolen,
Oslo keeps its appeal, the train ride
a preliminary. Formal introductions
have their own façade. Do you
bow or let your eyes reach
their own conclusions? So much
has entered, rushing to fill the gap.
Still she leans into the morning light.
The thicket, green and familiar,
doesn’t distract. Out there,
the air has a yellowness, lifting
from the tall growth gone dry.
Anticipation holds, a thread not quite sewn.
by Peggy Aylsworth
By The Grace Of
The orange moon
plays the banjo, hot tempos
over blackest night
as the city bravely lights its tower-tops.
The beat
presses through glass.
Ovens blister
the sleepless in New York.
All things interior
breed new eyes, opening to the unseen,
held for the perspicacious
to uncover in the star-hung night.
Delicate lights
signal windows, signal pauses
for thought,
a revelation luminous as the moon.
Country calls can almost
be heard,
but their value
escapes
the impeded.
Night birds have nested
in the lungs
of many born in tall grass
gone dry,
grown foreign.
by Peggy Aylsworth
