October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
For the Ghost in My Bed
Negotiating the sheets, playing my feet —
an instinctive prelude! You’d been once
a wholly authentic person: fingernails, aquiline nose.
Now there’s a chilling patience
to you: half-exposed, half-sparkling.
We build our nest like a sleeve of jazz. There’s company
and a cake and some words no one
means or hears. We speak a language
of soft bullets, a code of violet rats. Where truth
is not dissolved it is kept fuzzy. You (my soft friend)
watch me eat. Tonight overflows
with stars and wishes not for
the good to start happening but for
the bad to finish. The scary may remain
with a person (however
discreet). I’d been lonely
a lot as god sent
very little. There are those
in this bleeding world who need
ritual but now I have you
my ghost and we let
what’s terminal coexist.
Love
The night of the party, at three am, nobody knows if you’re using the bathroom or lying in a ditch five hundred miles away. You call 911 and hear she’s leaving home after living alone for so many years. You call Sanctuary but you can’t use electricity today. Shabbat Shalom. The ditch looks like you can fit two or three people inside. Writing this means you’re not healthy anymore. It’s a pretty good party. Everyone’s drinking gin buckets. The last time they made gin buckets you lost your underwear.
— Christine Reilly
Christine Reilly lives in New York and teaches writing at the Collegiate School. She used to work at Tin House and Gotham Writers Workshop. Christine has been published in over fifty journals. She received my MFA from Sarah Lawrence and my BA from Bucknell.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
Red coat. That’s the first thing I see when she walks into the elevator. She’s pretty. She sees me there standing between six others in a cramped elevator. We lock eyes. She smiles. I blush. A scent passes my nostrils. Spring time rain. I envision lying in a field in a soft springtime drizzle. I look up and see her. I smile. A loud conversation carries around us, but her and I stay silent.
She reaches to press her floor button, 6. I see mine, 9. Damn. Not enough time. The elevator stops at the third floor. The crowd around us leaves. We make eye contact as the door closes leaving the two of us alone. We both look back down, smiling to ourselves.
Fourth floor. I start to sweat. I check my phone out of habit. The silence is stifling. I gulp nervously.
Fifth floor. Wait what could I do? What can I even do now? Is it too late to start a conversation? No! I need something more direct. This girl must obviously be someone special. She’s even wearing rain-scented perfume, I love the smell of rain!
Sixth floor. She looks at me, smiles nervously. I smile back hesitating. The door opens and she starts to leave. I grab her by her hand and she looks back at me surprised. I smile and pull her in to kiss her. Inches closer and closer. She snaps out of my hand and slaps my face disgusted
“Oh! Sicko!” She yells.
She grabs her bag and guards her body as she strides quickly off the elevator and out of my sight.
“Well I misread that,” I say to no one but myself as the elevator door closes behind her.
— Bryan Crumpley
Bryan Crumpley is a Chicago writer, currently studying fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. He has spent half his life in California and half in Chicago, but he’s spent the entirety as a writer both in craft and soul.
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
1. A Steinbeck Aha
Peering upward from the apogee
of infinite soaring mirrors
I watch you stray far off course.
Thus is produced an aha moment
as luck exits the equation.
You’re exposed like a water lily
that floats on thick firmament.
I fix my focus on
your dusty gray work shirt
as you stoop to pull chickweed
from ever widening cracks
in the pavement.
A bitter wind whips waves—
the lights of Seaside
cauterize Monterey Bay.
2. Transmogrified
He was kept after school
due to acute insubordination.
He fought substantiation,
a train at the roundhouse
getting loaded with coal.
He weathered transmigration
across riven continents
to make a stand as a race
that in time gained ground.
He tossed formulas down
crevices of secret canyons,
learned his lessons
devoid of impressions.
In accordance his teacher
made him recite ABCs
backwards endlessly.
3. Hat Trick
My shoulders pressed firmly
against the back wall
of McFly’s nightclub
on Saturday night.
Capitalist ESPN beams
Giants battling Dodgers.
Budweiser ubiquitous,
the assembly salubrious,
will reach fever pitch
once music commences.
Then a commercial:
the black bear
bounces a basketball
between its hind legs
like a Harlem Globetrotter.
The best mudder won
the Derby this afternoon.
Subway cars ramble,
rattle in my ears
like bulletproof cobras.
Predatory
There are quite enough scallywags
and false prophets among us
to swindle any god
out of every drop of blood.
We evidence ostentatious laissez faire
connoisseurs of exotic wines and fruits
along the palatine boardwalks
that span massive galaxies.
Surrounded by scoundrels, would-be
devils and and ghouls we’d just as well
skedaddle, lest lay black tracks
while evaporating in a vapor trail.
Resonance is tested as resistance
evinced by the rooster’s boisterous
cock-a-doodle on a dim chilly morning
when coastal fog gives up the ghost.
— Thomas Piekarski
