January 2025 | nonfiction
Steam rises in swirls, wisps, moves like a candle snuffed out, then smoke curling. This road on a Wednesday night in the middle of Italy is dark except for the headlights that cut through the fog, barely, and the city of Macerata in the distance. I know this land. I left an entire country for it and now I have it mapped on my palm, penned out in ink, twenty years — the up and down, the hills that move, shift, medieval towns that cluster and roll to the Adriatic Sea. The soft grain, fields of sunflowers like matches lit, crimson poppies that carry the wind on June afternoons. It is a homeland perhaps, and for years now I’ve been pretending it’s mine.
But tonight the road is unrecognizable. On the drive from Ancona, where sunset strikes at 6 o’clock and you can watch ships sail into harbor, see the sky go blue, my American friend Ruth is still in the hospital, one more night and then she’ll go home to her Italian town — I am not myself. I didn’t know these years would pass so quickly. I didn’t know the waiting for home would turn to wonder, turn to this shape shifting, these fields like blankets on my own made bed. What if it’s time to get out of here, to leave this place behind, opt for Lesley Avenue, Washington Street, the Taco Bell on the corner of Arlington and 10th? What if I should have left years before, back when the maps were still open, unfolded, brand new? Would I know how to get home, if I needed to? Would I recognize myself, twenty years later, on the front porch of my city? Or will I live and die right here insead? I take one turn, then another. The radio off, silence beats as softly as a newborn heart. A cat huddles on the roadside. Power lines catch the light – a swooping pterodactyl. The night shivers, goes dead. A porcupine, pale and prickly, crosses quickly just as I start to drive by.
Jacqueline Goyette
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including The Forge Literary Magazine, trampset, JMWW, Lost Balloon, The Citron Review, and Heimat Review. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.
January 2025 | nonfiction
- I was born almost dead, the cord wrapped around my throat.
- A doctor(ate) actually said the words to me: “You carry Death close.”
- Death has stood by my side, time and again, and said, “It’s not her time yet.” I’ve accepted it.
- Damaged lungs from 9/11.
- Volunteering in Iraqi Kurdistan, mere hours from Mosul. The multitude of checkpoints along the Syrian border with masked men with guns far too large, held far too lazily in one-handed grips, leaning against their shoulders, as they confiscated my passport and tried to pull me to the small, windowless building that was somehow present at every one.
- A village decimated by ISIS, and in a small city where I was the lone American naively going on early morning runs and exploring the destroyed buildings, painting over the swastikas I found with paint “borrowed” from nearby construction sites, and still Death said: “Not yet.”
- The village elders of Duhola asked me to help spread the word of their people, of the Yazidi forgotten entirely by the international community. I promised I would. I still try. But I am just one, small person.
- So, Death, what is it exactly about me that you think I have yet to do? Is there a chance, however small, that you think I might make some sort of difference in this world? What is it that’s going to happen before you gently greet me, take my hand, and tell me I can rest?
Maia Brown-Jackson
After the incredibly practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, pushcart-nominated Maia Brown-Jackson braved the myriad esoteric jobs that follow, until straying to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes.
January 2025 | nonfiction
In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.
I live in Vermont, surrounded by giant sugar maples and white birch. I kayak nearby with a Blue Heron family and five turtles. My peonies are blooming. It’s cold today when three days earlier it was high in the nineties. I’m wearing a sweater, which I also bought overseas.
My mother always wore espadrilles all summer long. I have her last pair, long past wearing but certainly better made than the two pairs I bought overseas. Just because you’re in a sexy foreign country doesn’t mean the merchandise is sexy even if the guy selling it is. Once, in San Francisco, my sexy boyfriend bought me a gardenia to wear behind my ear. I wore it everyday until it turned brown. When I got home, on my doorstep was a large oval vase with six gardenias floating on top. That boy I lost my virginity to in high school and we’re still friends, unlike the two espadrille boyfriends.
Besides peonies, I also swoon over orange blossoms. I’ve a tall branch of mock orange that comes a close second to the orange blossom grove I rode through on horseback, also overseas, with another boyfriend. It was summer then, in a desert, which enhanced the scent to swooning even more (if you were riding the other horse you would know what I mean). I keep searching for an orange blossom perfume that smells like that evening but they’re all imitations smelling acrid and cheap. The boyfriend was never cheap. He bought me a first edition of my favorite author, Jean Giono, with a woodblock print on the cover of a man shooting a boar with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning hill is ablaze in orange flames with little figures running around, their arms in the air, mouths wide, screaming. But the book doesn’t feel like that to me, more like velvet and peonies.
There’s no way around the past unless you think you’ve owned it which is like saying you have a contract signed with blood and drawn up by the State. My past with these guys is most certainly drawn with blood, thinned out crimson in the regions of my brain. I enjoyed each and every one even if they didn’t work out in the end. There’s no end to blood, or men, or memories, or the past. An ever flowing, changing bloodstream. Impossible to tourniquet, no matter how many sutures.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for the Observer, ArtNet, and other art publications. www.dianparker.com
January 2025 | nonfiction
CNN: American reality show contestant kills, eats protected bird in New Zealand
Clad in their best, their most expensive, Lululemon, Nike, P.E. Nation, Versace, or Adidas, flexing their abs on national TV, traipsing all over and screwing up the last protected wild places on this planet. A so-called reality show, and it makes a hell of a lot of money. What can they tell you about the amur leopard, the western lowland gorilla, the vaquita, the Sumatran elephant, box turtles, orang utan, the black rhino?
Blond, somewhat unkempt locks curl from under an expensive baseball cap, carefully trimmed three-day beard, blue mirror sunglasses. I HAD to Google the man: Spencer ‘Corry’ Jones, an American white water river guide.
An iconic, large, flightless bird, the weka, is famous for its ‘feisty and curious personality’. It has become virtually extinct over large tracts of the mainland because of changing climatic conditions and rising predator numbers. The predators, a species until recently unknown: the second-hand Kardashians and those who would love to be as famous and as rich. The show is called “Race to Survive” no less.
Spencer Jones said he was hungry.
Rose Mary Boehm
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and the author of two novels and eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a ‘Pushcart’ and ‘Best of Net’ nominee. The most recent poetry collections: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), Saudade (December 2022), and Life Stuff (Kelsay Books November 2023) are available on Amazon. A new MS is brewing. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
October 2024 | nonfiction
My wife sends a text: I love you. I’m sorry I take you for granted.
I text: Where are you?
Her text: Doctor’s office.
Fear. I call. She answers.
My wife mentions the call I received last night from my 99-year-old kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Merritt. She turns 100 in a week. She begs forgiveness for not doing something about my father. I touch an old scar on my chin as I listen. I stroke the seam on my cheek from the old fracture. I feel the bump on my nose. Old injuries yet still, sharp ticks of pain.
Times were different, Mrs. Merritt says. That’s what I say to myself. But I know now and I knew then. I should have told the sheriff.
Pause. I can hear her breathe. Labored breathing.
Alan, her voice quavers. Can you ever forgive me?
Of course I forgive you Mrs. Merritt, I say.
Silence. For a few moments I think the call dropped.
But? she prods.
Oh, Mrs. Merritt, I say. Don’t worry about it.
But? she repeats.
But inside me is a boy who will never forgive anyone. Never. Ever.
Mrs. Merritt cries.
Oh Mrs. Merritt, I say. Don’t cry. My brother and I love you.
She continues to cry. Oh that hurts, she says. So bad. Do you still love your father?
This horrible question. I grit my jaw hard. This question maddens. This question hurts. This question burns and wrecks.
Why, Mrs. Merritt? I say. Why does a child beaten and injured by a man remain attached to such a man? Because a child wants a father. But one day, a child wants a different father.
Oh, Mrs. Merritt cries. I know you do. I know your brother does too.
Alan? my wife says.
Yes, I say.
So, my wife says, a 99-year-old can have a crisis of conscience.
So? I say.
So. So I don’t want to let things slip away, then bite me that way. I don’t want take you for granted anymore.
No no no, I say. No. Please. Don’t say that. You always can take me for granted.
Alan Nelson
Alan Nelson, a writer and actor, received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best Microfiction. He has work published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, Hong Kong Review, takahē, B O D Y, Blue Unicorn, Litro, Stand, Acumen, Maryland Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, Arc, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Kairos, Ligeia, Strange Horizons, Illuminations, Review Americana, Whale Road Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Eunoia Review. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on PEPFAR.
October 2024 | nonfiction
A single gleaming crow feather rises up in a tiny Danish vase on my mantle. It is there to remind me.
When she was too old to drive, whenever we got out of the car and my mother heard a crow calling, she would say, “There’s my crow!”
Crows shower despair in Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”; did he hear them cawing before he cut off his ear? Were they scribing in the sky when he took his life? Did he feel their intent to mark his days? Did he count them and their cryptic messages? The sky writhes in blue; the wheat is not bread but tragic gold. The painting is quietly apocalyptic.
In Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter Fields,” a dead crow claims the foreground, lying in a sere and open field with winter’s neutral sky above it, a house and barn mere specks in a faraway background. Soft and black, the body embodies the silence winter will impose upon us all. Thin brown grasses, its only covering. According to McCartney, his blackbird singing in the dead of night signifies hope for a black girl in the mayhem of the sixties, but of course his gentle guitar and night singing bird reassure all of us who need that hopefulness in equal measure to shore up against Poe’s unsettling raven.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens who brought him “bread and meat” in the morning and again at night. According to legend, the hermetic Saint Kevin in the 600s prayed with his hand out the window and was gifted, or cursed, with a blackbird alighting on it and laying its eggs. In Seamus Heaney’s poem the good saint “Is moved to pity” holding out his hand “Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.”
In photos, my young and still single mother in a short red-quilted jacket, smiles in front of a large caged enclosure. She has just fed a crow that cannot fly who she told me, “talked” to her in its curious crow speak; not the raspy caw-caw, but a series of multi-syllabic quiet chortles at excitement for its food, and she was sure, crow affection. She fed it raw hamburger until it was well enough to take off and fly. When I was little, I loved hearing this story and she was very good at mimicking what her corvid friend sounded like. The pictures are old and faded. My mother is gone.
The single crow feather on my mantle belonged to Cassidy Crow, as my daughter dubbed the side-hopping crow who recently descended in our driveway and stared into the sunroom windows, waiting. Of course I came out with some whole grain bread. She (yes, I am projecting my gender onto this bird) flew up into the locust tree then alighted near the bread as I returned to the house. She was there the next day and I did my research on what humans could feed crows: peanuts—who knew?! So now, it became a three month-long ritual to watch for her appearance, which was at least twice a day, then hurry out with shelled peanuts which she would eat. She was always alone and if other crows were seen or heard in the vicinity, she disappeared. We couldn’t figure out why she seemed to be used to being fed, or why she appeared to be a timid outcast among other crows who usually appear together, at least in twos. Another unsettling trouble arose: I had taken to calling her by cawing and saying her name. If she were close, she’d appear. But I was also signaling the squirrels who quickly learned that my cawing meant peanuts! It was upsetting to see that she would relinquish her food to these interlopers as if she were afraid of them. I wanted her to stand up for herself! But she remained timid.
Shortly after she appeared, I found one large sleek black feather near the peanuts and have kept it as the only token of her presence which I came to love, as she disappeared completely after three months. I still ponder the mystery surrounding her appearance and disappearance. Surely she was a sign, a marker that briefly inscribed itself on our lives. Surely, she could have been my mother’s crow, reappearing to let us know that hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and often comes in the darkest of colors if only we will look and see it.
Raphael H Kosek
Raphael Kosek is the author of American Mythology (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, Harmless Encounters (2022) and Rough Grace (2014). Her work has received 4 Pushcart nominations and was featured in The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate and teaches at Dutchess Community College. www.raphaelkosek.com
