July 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Diana Cage
This morning I really wanted you. I’m not sure if you wanted it and if you didn’t then it isn’t the same. You got out of bed while I was still sipping coffee, not yet awake enough to realize I should have moved faster. Should have made a move or even just asked.
Your brain is somewhere else now, sipping Kenyan coffee in a café that boasts about its hand pours, but how else would it get in the cup? My mind is on a dull, dual ache, a dichotomous throb split between my left temple and a spot considerably lower. Artifacts from last night. The beer animated me, your hand on my lap gave you away. You like me like that.
Other couples seem fragile. I’m worried about Julia and Allison’s fate. The west coast is mythical, until you are there and realize anything outside the city proper is as populated by strip malls as the midwest. Don’t go, I kept thinking. They couldn’t hear me. They weren’t tuned into the same frequency.
You were shocked when I told you I thought they were making a mistake. They are teetering. Why don’t I stop them. Their fragility fortifying us. Not to worry, we aren’t them. We aren’t moving to California.
You were tapping your foot, our glasses empty. Ready to go. We fell into bed too tired and drunk for sex but this morning I regret it. There aren’t enough perfect moments to let any get away.
Diana Cage’s most recent book is A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Ecstasy, forthcoming from Seal Press. She was formerly a pornographer, then a radio talk show host and now teaches Women’s Studies at Brooklyn College.
July 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Mary Cafferty
He looked at her and he asked: are you dreaming still? She closed her eyes and her hair burst into flames, sending shimmering golden sparks across the wooden floor of their tiny one-bedroom apartment. And his eyes were blue and they were pouring out water that could not quench her or drown her but hold her only, curving around her small smoldering shape. She looked in and in and into him and said, finally: yes, I think I am. And the day drained out of their tiny space and then there were no walls and then they were just fire and water standing together in a field of sunflowers. In the yellow field, the two wove entwined until they were one elemental rope, fire and water holding hands, arms against arms, mouths against mouths. And then they were steam – two bodies become one cloud. Recombined, they felt their atoms grating together as they floated up over a thousand wavering yellow suns, relishing that delicious atomic friction and he looked at her and he looked at her and he was water again, crying back to the earth, where she collected him in small galvanized buckets knowing the answer to the question he could never ask was: always, always.
Mary Cafferty enjoys the sound of typewriter keys. Her work has appeared in Borderline, as well as Westfield State University’s literary journal Persona, and has been presented at Sigma Tau Delta’s annual international conference.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Outside, herself again, effects of kill
and cure alleviated by the news,
she’s dancing early morning Braille grace notes
along the woodland ride. She pauses, high
on her consultant’s view, “Not visible,”
charmed by a ring-of-feathers fairy sign
against the broken stile. “Yon sparrow hawk,”
he answers to the question on her mind
as yet unasked; “her feeding post.” She knows
him from the local, captain’s chair, beer mug
above the bar; old gamekeeper, skin like
gnarled bark, wax jacket, corduroy, retired.
“Whole different world,” to poison, trap or shoot
all compromises to his grand design:
“I’d bide nest-side for hours, stock still. One day
she lighted on my gun, dark mantle, wing,
locked feet, mere inches from my gaze.” He peers
behind her fear-crazed eye and reads her pain,
admires her pulsing breast, life force within.
“I let her be that spring. Next year? Lord knows!”
–Peter Branson
Peter Branson has been published or accepted for publication by journals in Britain, USA, Canada, EIRE, Australia and New Zealand, including Acumen, Ambit, Envoi, Magma, The London Magazine, Iota, Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Nottingham, Pulsar, Red Ink, The Recusant, South, The New Writer, Crannog, Raintown Review, The Huston Poetry Review, Barnwood, The Able Muse and Other Poetry.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
human sky
tendrils of flaxen wind dance
unbeknownst,
billows & curls into incandescent
orbs, blinded-
blinks, and heaves open
the mouth and its million raindrops,
faint caress of song lingers, a heavy fog;
and shoulder blades beg to beat
faster
to the tune of flight, arms flail solo-
a slow push and legs swim
amid stratus
as naked moons peek toward a sunrise,
hail intensifying the mien.
holiness hurts
night and her mortifying
caress,
beautiful lightening-
I am lonely child
deserted and small,
insignificant to your power,
crouched without morning’s touch.
–Christina Borgoyn
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
When you breathe,
I see the map materializing
like it’s a cold day in winter.
I pluck it from the air,
and I am finally able to hold distance in my hand.
It’s a delicate, beautiful flower,
though poisonous to ingest.
But when I set the flower on the road,
it blossoms into mileage⎯
millions of feet of choking vines
sprout between our feet.
And it occurs to me that you’re breathing
an hour into the future,
five away from me.
And I want nothing more
than to lie tangled naked in the vines
and swallow the distance
until it kills me
–Sirenna Blas
Sirenna Blas’ short story “Maps & Men” was published in the 2011 winter edition of the Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poem “Paradelle for the Poet” won first place in humorous and satirical poetry in Purdue University Calumet’s Stark-Tinkham writing contest, and “The Sky Swallows Us All” won second place in their short story category. She is a freelance nonfiction writer, as well as a peer tutor at Purdue Calumet’s Writing Center.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Dispersing Luck
April wind whips tumbleweeds
across the plains of Santa Fe.
Some wedge in barbed wire fences,
others bounce along I-25
like children playing hopscotch.
Maybe that is what happens
to the souls of the dead. They travel
unfettered, gather the detritus of life
as they journey from ocean
to mountain to desert.
What we call luck
might be what a soul grabs
from one person as it passes,
delivers to another on its way out of town,
the way tumbleweed disperses seeds
as it spins across the plains.
Since You Asked
You want to know why I don’t
watch the news. The anchor
lays out local stories the way
a casino dealer reveals
the house hand. Puppy attacked
by machete-wielding neighbor,
three children dead in house fire,
college lacrosse player murdered.
You want to know why I don’t
read the newspaper. Train derails
in India, more than 70 killed.
U.S. military dead in Afghanistan
hits 1,000. Robbers distract
victims at cash machines,
squirt them with feces
before stealing their money.
You want to know how I spend
my time. I listen to Simon and
Garfunkel in the car, read poetry
out loud in the evening,
line breaks punctuated
by the call and response
of songbirds in my back yard.
–Nina Bennett
Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief. In 2006 she was selected to participate in a master writer’s retreat with the poet laureate of Delaware, sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts. Nina’s poetry has appeared in publications including Drash:Northwest Mosaic, Pulse, Alehouse, Panache, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Smoking Poet, Oranges & Sardines, Philadelphia Stories, Pirene’s Fountain, The Broadkill Review, and the anthologies Mourning Sickness and Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS.
