July 2015 | back-issues, nonfiction, poetry
The Dying Sister
You fell in slo-mo like a mimosa petal caught in a small breeze, sprawling, nearly soundless, on our parents’ speckled linoleum. I, five years younger, didn’t know you held your breath to make yourself faint. I didn’t know you’d whittled yourself down to taut skin over sharp bones by spitting meals into your napkin. I cried because I thought you had the “C” like Aunt Ceil. When you slept until 4:00 p.m. and Mother put a mirror to your parted lips, I never expected breath. Those “slashes” on your wrists, grazes that didn’t need stitches, healed to pearly stripes.
Black widow spider, you wove us all into your worry-web, yet went on to outlive a husband and three live-in men. How old were you when you first fell in love with death?
Somewhere I remember you and me leaping from your twin bed to mine, the bottoms of our nightgowns ballooning, your chestnut hair flying up from your shoulders. You, airborne, born of air. We had to grip your arms to stop you from throwing yourself into Father’s open grave.
When a doctor would tell you to see a psychologist, you’d switch your doctor. I changed my phone number, returned your letters unopened. Then Mother would say, “But she’s your sister.” I would phone, and soon your silky thread would begin to spool itself around me.
Hatching your latest death, you bought a mobile home in a trailer park smack inside a hurricane belt. I startle at loud noises, as if your house had just blown here from Florida and thunked down in my yard.
Last night I dreamed you were laid out in a coffin on palest blue satin, your hair in tendrils on the lace-edged pillow. Dry-eyed, I felt myself take full breaths.
by Rochelle Shapiro
Eating With Ghosts
Here I am, eating with my son, daughter, husband,
reminding myself to chew, to not cup my hand
at the rim of my plate to shelter my food,
as if my dead father could reach for it again.
In Russia, he sucked on bark, even stones.
Here I am, asking everyone about their day,
leaving some food on my plate
to please my mother’s ghost.
“This way you won’t get broad in the beam.”
Her hand pinches the small fleshy roll
at the waistband of her girdle.
At night, when everyone is in bed,
you can find me in the dark kitchen,
bending into the open fridge,
the glow of its cold bulb,
eating leftovers with my fingers,
choking on unchewed food.
Shh, don’t tell.
by Rochelle Shapiro
Rochelle’s novel, Miriam The Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. Her short story collection What I Wish You’d Told Me (Shebooks, 2014) is just out in audio. She’s published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek-My Turn. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as The Iowa Review, The Doctor TJ Eckleberg Review, Stone Path Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Stand, Inkwell Magazine, Amarillo Bay, Poet Lore, Crack the Spine, Compass Rose, Controlled Burn, The Griffin, Los Angeles Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, The MacGuffin, Memoir And, Moment, Negative Capability, The Louisville Review, Amoskeag, Pennsylvania English, Rio Grande Review, RiverSedge, Peregrine, Gulf Coast, Existere, Passager, and Willow Review. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and I won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Currently, she teaches writing at UCLA Extension.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Notes To Myself
When you are an American in a Middle Eastern country,
do not walk alone;
your bare arms will betray you,
your sandals become stone.
Walk lightly;
the shadows behind you are not yours.
Anyone can change in the blink of an eye.
When in another country,
do not fall in love with a countryman.
It is your children who will love you least:
your sons who watch you with knives.
When you travel by bus through the mountains,
the roads seem always upward;
only the brightness of children pulls you along.
When I tell you this,
I am shaking the travel dust from my body;
I know it is the edge where you thrive.
Do not go there, just as I have done.
Even in my own country,
it is the past I live on.
When Water Leaves Us
What fool marches upward for streams,
thirst made from the dimmest of dreams?
They labored up the small hill,
buckets knee-high:
Jack, shirtless and chilled,
Jill, narrow and strong.
The well was cracked and dry.
Vines ran through the stone and earth;
famished roots mined deeper into the ground.
The lad tumbled down,
the lass soon after.
They lay in the shadow of the sky,
their bodies made of clouds and doubt.
They were young enough for hope.
The buckets stood on top of the hill—
an empty sound.
Who knows the secrets of rain
from a make-believe sky?
Who knows when they will fall again?
by Ann Robinson
Ann Robinson’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Coachella Review, Chagrin River Review, Compass Rose, Connecticut Review, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The GW Review, Fourteen Hills, Freshwater, Hiram Poetry Review, Inscape, Jelly Bucket, Natural Bridge, New York Quarterly, Nimrod International Journal, Passager, Poet Lore, The Portland Review, RiverSedge, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Serving House Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Storyscape, Streetlight Magazine, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Weave Magazine, Whistling Shade, Willow Review, and Zone 3, among others. Her book of poetry, Stone Window, was published by Bark for Me Publications in 2014. She has been the recipient of the John Spaemer Award for Outstanding Fiction, a Marin Arts Council grant, a Pushcart nomination, and a scholarship to study at a Hofstra University conference.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
It is winter
a street sweeper sweeps
leaves up from Main Street
I’m sitting with my notebook
writing a poem about the symbolism of phlegm
remnants of furtive strategies
the morning tries to wake me
the cars to support me
the cold ground to go around me
an idea passes by about a man
addicted to self-help–he reads two
to three books a day
paralyzed by memories
I stop to wipe my nose on my sleeve
*
It is winter
the Post sports a picture
of a boy juggling kiwis
before I enter the office
a dwarf steps out of the drugstore
someone suggested he came from the subconscious
I argued he was a messenger
I ask him if he tends bar
request his business card
*
It is winter
and fall
I’m not degenerating
actually, almost fully marinated
I flex out my fingers
squeeze into a fist
unhitch the gate
unscrew the top of a baby bottle
squeeze in some carcinogens
insert my bristle brush
twist and tug
with only a tinge of despair
by Alan Katz
Alan attended the Tupelo Press Writers Conference on Barter’s Island, Maine, where he studied with Jeffrey Levine. He writes at the Brooklyn Writers Space, a collective in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
