October 2015 | back-issues, fiction
You must have had the same experience. You meet someone and in an instant, you know they’re the one. That’s the way it was with Maggie. The fact that she’s a ghost created complications, sure. But when you’ve fallen in love, you’re not stopped by the first hurdle.
Hugging was a challenge. I wound up caressing myself, and her arms passed through me. So I make a circle, locking my hands, and Maggie stepped inside. She doesn’t squeeze.
We close our eyes when we kiss and allow the mental image to transport us. Nice.
Now, we’re working on making love. We can’t unfasten each other’s clothes, so we strip ourselves. God, is she beautiful. A little pale, but a vision nonetheless. At first, I kept falling through her. It’s an odd sensation. I thought to rig up some sort of suspension for me above her, but that was too restrictive. Maggie had the solution. She got on top.
I think Maggie’s smarter than me.
by Joseph Giordano
Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. He and his wife, Jane, have lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and Netherlands. They now live in Texas with their little shih tzu, Sophia. Joe’s stories have appeared in more than sixty-five magazines including Bartleby Snopes, The Monarch Review, and The Summerset Review. His novel, Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, will be published October 8th by Harvard Square Editions. Read the first chapter and sign up for his blog at http://joe-giordano.com/
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
red drop
blur down
hover first, then
rush with helicopter
sound on mute, between
a Monday and the lavender
bush, aligned aside a
moment you forgot to even
notice; still, on wings, it
seems to rise in up and
down motion, the hope of each
becoming squeezed inside
the beat of wings, a
quantum fine that lasts for
you a glance or two but
for the hummingbird
a lifetime.
by K.C. Bryce Fitzgerald
K.C. Bryce Fitzgerald has been writing stories since he learned to read. A native of Los Angeles, he is inspired by the daily truths of the world around him. In addition to moonlighting as a bartender, he is an avid writer and filmmaker whose production company C4 Films specializes in visually groundbreaking, character-driven storytelling. He has had several screenplays featured on Hollywood’s prestigious Black List and was recently the featured author in Burningwood Literary Journal. When not sending rich producers and literary agents gift baskets, he is hard at work perfecting his craft. He has currently written numerous short stories, two books of poetry, a debut novel, and many screenplays.
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
The Eloquent Insufficiency of Poems
—James Woods, The New Yorker
They may begin with a stutter and a pause—
the interruption grows,
reality first distends then explodes
in silence, like a spider’s web struck on purpose
by a trowel.
The sun isn’t better seen
by the shredding of the filmic screen
but the heat I feel more intently is like a burn
rubbed sore
because pain is such a pleasure.
In a delicate moment
the beautiful web is sundered, over-revised and gone;
you search for but can’t find
its worm-like thread on the ground
where the earth is turning the color of excrement.
The Free Market
What shall we eat—high carb or low carb?
I want to tell you something you already know
but don’t know how to say—
the uncommon speech of the everyday, always a new routine.
Science is so imperfect and cancer in our gut so common.
Here’s the pitchman selling his speech
his thoughts like a harvest of grain,
each stalk a new solution, each harvest the same.
The MRI says it all, our shrunken lobes paddling in CSF
like poisoned fish, unnaturally thin and swimming out of habit.
We will die on the coasts swelling with melted frost
one limb at a time, charity floating away on a raft
of good intentions. You speak and I hear the cant of can’t,
how hopelessness echoes from shore to shore.
It’s late in the day; the orange sun seduces the sailor
with its adjusted color and a heat hotter than hot
spelling frost. The commentaries you read and trust
are cold eyed. The damsel in distress at the countertop pulls on
a chemise that will make her thinner, even serene
and the would-be boyfriend thinks her a queen, not rot.
I’m standing against all advice, to make it new or do it again—
life caught in the net or, if literary, trapped in the seine.
We are baking lies like Christmas pies and eating them
like a drug. The Greeks fell for ambrosia not heroin.
by Michael Salcman
MICHAEL SALCMAN, poet, physician and art historian, was chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, and Rhino. Poetry books include The Clock Made of Confetti, nominated for The Poet’s Prize, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011); Poetry in Medicine, his anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases has just been published (Persea Books, 2015).
