October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
After hours traipsing through churches bogged down with cherubs and crosses and enough gold to filigree the planet, after hordes of us line up to clear the pathetic TSA amateur style provided by the cruise ship, in the elevator, the glass one overlooking the Mediterranean, I spot him.
“Professor Robert H. Raskin,” I shout. He’s at the back, pinned against the glass. To think I’d barely made it on before the doors closed. I’d know him anywhere. That bald head, that mole like a third eye lurking in the middle of his forehead. Next to him, his wife. I met her once, back when I was a freshman and he taught literature.
“It’s been thirty years! I called you Bobby then. We’d done it in your van that day, the day your wife showed up at school. That was a few weeks before the abortion. We were so literary. We compared my pregnancy to the girl’s in ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ It was much easier than thinking about a real child, you being married and all.”
The elevator is silent. I imagine the others are thinking the view isn’t worth a ride up with a lunatic. But I’m not crazy, it’s just that at 48 my estrogen supply is dwindling, and testosterone, more of it now, is coursing through my body, like some kind of truth and freedom serum.
“Oh, here we are, stopping. Is this your deck, Robert? Making your way through the madding crowd are you?”
As he slouches out, an old man with his head down, his wife looks at me, her gaze direct, but disinterested, as if I’m one more relic on view, after a day filled with more of the past than she cares to absorb.
— Linda Lowe
Linda Lowe received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of California, Irvine. A chapbook of her poems, “Karmic Negotiations” was published by Sarasota Theatre Press. Online, her stories have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, The Linnet’s Wings, Right Hand Pointing and others.
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Love at the Roller Rink
I can’t wait to get you on the floor and watch the wheels roll effortlessly, skipless, perfectly in sync with the music, beats that remind us of summertime in Jersey, the scent of sweat mingled with a popularity contest. The wood shines.
At the far side of the room, a gaggle of girls stands in a skewed circle, each of them laughing, looking to the girls on each side of them to see what their reactions might be. One of them, in green, looks helplessly to the side in an effort to find something to talk about.
I watch it happen. A sidelong glance. A click on the left side of his head, almost audible, telling him to turn around. The nervousness emanating off of her as he turns, his one eye catches her, a rope appears from air and wraps itself around their waists, pulling them against one another like tragedy.
How to Make a Million Dollars
Hire an accountant.
Wear fitted suits.
Kiss ass.
Read books, lots of books about stocks and investments and faraway places and war.
Don’t ever borrow money from anyone, not even if you’re so drunk the strippers look like wives and your wallet’s warm but dry.
Wrap everything up in a bow with curly ribbons, paper and flair.
Sit in a quiet room in a cliché place that smells like cedar and mold and actually think about thinking then practicing then doing then … folding the newspaper in a huff by the bus, smelling the roasting nuts on the corner, Christmas and desperation in a small, Plexiglas and metal box near Penn Station, wishing to hell you could go home.
Remember birthdays.
Follow the dollar down the hallway and into the elevator and up to the roof and high above everyone you know until you are looking down on them with small eyes, not really able to see what they’re doing, or the fact that their faces are frozen in fear.
Follow your wife down the car lane in the left lane near the other lane in front of the bowling lane in the back.
Eat noodles and baklava and pork.
Come up with an idea that no one can dispute, no one can heckle, no one can wonder why, no one can visualize, but that everyone needs more than companionship and air.
Hashtag Justice
Justice for him and for animals and for bugs that don’t fall into the sidewalk crack fast enough. For slammed backdoors and hurt feelings. For the way the phantom felt when you couldn’t see her. For uneaten, homemade rhubarb pie. For jealousy and tarnished, golden crowns. Justice for the abstract, the untouchable, the hopeful invisibility that comes with emotion and fear.
And for you, man, they’ll prescribe a serious cocktail of overwhelming guilt and public outrage. The mob will knock over your Christmas reindeer. But it’s too late for him.
It happened to ten people yesterday when we weren’t looking, when I had my nose in a book or my hands in my purse or my feet in the sand. We didn’t see it because we were living.
It could all be simple like the answers of children. He chose that jacket based on the weather. You heard something that wasn’t there, imagined a world that exists only in places that don’t exist, imagined horns and hooves and bright, bright red skin. Pop.
— Sarah Ghoshal
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
doctor no
1. “escape addiction,”
the doctor says,
I wait out the pause
the dot dot dot
(three little indians, no feathers)
before I ask “how?”
“you misunderstand,” he replies,
“that’s the diagnosis”
2. “Nurse Scalpel?”
“Yes Doctor?”
“prepare yourself…”
[a painted nail
takes the pulse
the color,
a thin layer,
really just a cover,
on which we judge
this pornographic literature
(and we HOWL)]
3. “lycanthropy,”
the doctor says
the moon is liquid
the moon is a peephole
on indeterminate skin,
the watching animals
claw together
loose change
4. at some point
in american history
there was a mass vaccination
against imagination
we were spoon-fed
warm bits of plastic
blister packs
about wounded hearts
(are you safe
up on your hook,
behind your barcode armor?
we hear the squeaks,
from a distance ,
rats on christmas eve
are we the gifts
or the teeth? and,
how do you ever sleep?)
5. “ugly duckling syndrome”
he says
turns his head and coughs
and pisses in my water
(I shaved this morning
so in the mugshot I wouldn’t
look like a lamb to the slaughter)
small town murder
1. you are
a small town murder mystery
and you don’t know why
“don’t touch they body,” they say
but all the fingerprints
stack into a photograph
of a shifting desert seen static
2. we went to church
to interview witnesses
they held their tongues
like leather leashes
pulled taut by rabid hearts
(“this is the blood
this is the body”
this is the aural wallpaper
in the room where
they’ve painted themselves
into corners
with the rudimentary tools
of sunlight and stained glass)
3. we touched the body
found a map cut into the skin
the cartographer: the broken mirror
rumor suggests
it leads to the fountain of youth
rumor goes
that she faced that full length photograph
and tried to shake herself awake
4. we went
about the anthill
looking for witnesses
but all the secrets are kept
behind each white picket fence
every outward semblance
of a smile
(the grass is always greener
when treated with chemicals)
5. this is the blood
this is the body
you are
and you don’t know why
(you’re young
but you’ve been dying
a long time)
mars
1. in the beginning
god opened his crayon box
like a missile silo in the middle of nowhere
used all the blue for the sky
all the green for the earth
all the black for the hearts
the brown for the dirt
(left us with just the red and
and a rusted sharpener)
“in school today
we learned “mars” as a verb
we learned of class
separation
the science inside us
that fights and creates the energy
we harness in our self-destruction”
(the cliques, the clicks, the boom)
(in the beginning mars
was the god
of war)
2. she calls it a map
of the first place she lost
control and/of memory
once it all made sense but
once is never enough
the presents leave paper cuts as we grow up
the present feels like a sad song
in the movie credits, all the black and all the names
and just one voice screaming
she wears a razor on a silver chain
around the vase of her throat
flowered once but no
longer honey
-suckle(the smallest part torn out
for the littlest bit of sweetness)
3. and maybe it’s just training wheels
cause baby it’s all down hill
from here(hold on)
“a self-centered elizabeth bathory
in a claw-foot bathtub
razor like a sliver of a moon
in the sky of her blue hand”
-quote the private eyes in the police report
and the black and white photographs
show the slashes as silver linings
a clouded girl who rained
but watched it evaporate
4. in the beginning
mars
was habitable
(she called it a map
of the first place
she lost)
— Joe Quinn
Joe Quinn is a 33 year old poet living in Kentucky. Author of four previous collections, all available at stores.lulu.com/welcomehomeironlung, the most recent collection entitled “escape artist.”
