January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
We’re sitting at an outdoor table
on the Broadway sidewalk watching
the rhythmic pause-and-go of traffic
through the Saratoga streets,
the hum and squeals of engines and brakes,
the hydraulic groan of the 473 bus as it unloads
its cargo of townsfolk and tourists,
their chatter filling the summer air
in the absence of birds. A boy sits
at the bus stop with a silent guitar in hand,
ignored by those coming and going.
We watch people board the bus
as you sip your Bloody Mary,
savoring the olives in your mouth,
turning them over like words
you’d rather hear than speak.
The waitress brings our food
and sets it down like the silence
between us. The small pink creatures
of your shrimp cocktail remind me
of the things I’ll fail to say––
laid out before us, untouched
and wholly intact yet
so obviously dead.
The boy still sits at the bus stop.
His guitar is still silent, its case
open at his feet like an empty wallet.
Passing pedestrians pay him no mind.
No one is giving me any money
he complains to no one in particular,
but he isn’t playing anything.
by Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco was born in the Bronx, New York, though he’s lived in Florida for most of his life. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a B.A. in English Lit. He’s also studied creative writing at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College and film at Charles University in Prague. He currently resides in Miami, Florida.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
My fingernail, your pancreas,
your palm, starving tribes in the Sudan.
My esophagus, Joan of Arc’s enflamed hair.
Your mother’s lungs, La Brea.
Your neck, a lighthouse’s spiral staircase,
my eyes, a beacon over turbulent waters.
Your conscience, below the surface;
my fingers, holding it there.
My heart valves, the locks along the Erie Canal,
reining things in, keeping things from getting out of hand.
My lungs, an orchard ripe for plucking,
my genitals, coals from the bottom of the fire,
my uterus, invasive, like mint, getting its fingers everywhere.
My disappointment: the iceberg, a lightning strike, a barbed hook. A super nova.
Yours: the Titanic, the Gulf oil spill,
a family of beached whales. No—a black hole.
by Emily Hockaday
Emily Hockaday’s first chapbook, Starting A Life, was published in June 2012 with Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Newtown Literary, Pear Noir!, The West Wind Review, Plainspoke, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU and has served as a judge for NEA’s poetry out loud program.
January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Marlene glared down the alley at the two pins in their corners, her eyes narrowed over the ball like a snake’s before it strikes. She stood tall and still and substantial, in her black pants and the white shirt with pinstripes and Marlene stitched in red over the left breast.
Then she moved, power under grace, just the barest hitch to her step, and this being only the sixth day out of the hospital. Today there would be no fat-ass comment to upset her four-step sequence. Today was about the clarity of the pins.
Between steps two and three she began to lean and lower, torso approaching horizontal, right arm back with the ball, left forward for balance, and if she felt the bruised ribs you couldn’t tell to look at her.
On step four her right arm swung forward and she didn’t so much roll the ball as release it—opening her hand as you’d free a bird. Marlene slid to a stop just short of the line and hung there, balanced on her left leg, her right raised behind her and folded in a delicate ‘L.’ The ball rolled straight until the english she’d applied took hold and curved it left, a pin-seeking missile. She liked to call it that: english. Most just said spin.
The ball kissed the inside of the seven pin and sent it caroming into the left wall and bouncing back and across in an arc, where it took out the ten and both pins dropped from sight into the back-alley abyss.
The sound it made was sharp and satisfying: de-ba-cle.
“Nice shot, hon,” Candace said.
Marlene blew cool air on her fingertips, then turned back toward where Harold used to score her and said, “Take that, motherfucker.”
by Richard Bader
Richard Bader’s work has been published by National Public Radio and by the rkvry Quarterly literary journal.
