April 2017 | poetry
The night was yellow. A city of light bulbs, ready to blow out. At the top, the Ferris wheel stopped sharply with a rust-covered clank heard across the park, and a woman screamed. Couples held hands a little tighter. A white-bearded man with missing teeth said it was the end of the world.
Meredith Boe
Meredith Boe is a writer and editor residing in Chicago. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Mud Season Review, among others. Her critique has appeared in World Literature Today, Chicago Book Review, and Chicago Stage Standard. She sometimes writes poems on a typewriter at events around Chicago with the poetry-on-demand group, Poems While You Wait.
April 2017 | nonfiction
The setting is in and around Harvard Law School, 1973. It’s a Sunday afternoon. Although I should be spending my time working on my law review article, I sit in the library writing a note on reasons for ending my life. Phil, my editor, is near me in Langdell Hall. I finish my note and show it to him. After he reads it, he walks off quickly, a worried look on his face. I sit with a heavy law reporter in front of me, reading a case that might or might not have to do with civil commitment of the mentally ill.
Later, Barry, the president of the Harvard Law Review, Phil, and Faith, a fellow editor to whom I’m mildly attracted, invite me to join them for dinner at a cheap restaurant. We order beer and drink. We order food and eat. We talk about nothing important. No one mentions suicide.
Then, as if on signal, my friends become oddly quiet. After a few seconds, Faith announces out of the blue that she’s getting married the next morning to a man she doesn’t love, a spur of the moment thing.
A beat.
Then she turns to me – putting her hand on my arm – and says, “Well, look, if you don’t kill yourself, I won’t get married. Deal?”
We trade promises and finish our dinners.
Bruce Berger
Bruce J. Berger is an MFA candidate at American University in Washington, DC. His work appears in Wilderness House Literary Review, Prole, Jersey Devil Press Anthology, Black Magnolias, and a variety of other literary journals.
April 2017 | poetry
It comes to me in the watch museum.
It’s weights, hammers and gears.
Action, reaction.
The thud of an escapement.
The dominoes of a story.
I stand inside a pocketwatch
and lose myself to inevitable design.
A plan well engineered
leaves nothing to emotion but the joy
of cog after cog, falling in track,
ticking toward the unalarmed achievement
of another hour struck. Zen empty time.
Our story is like a watch,
weights, hammers, gears.
Little gears for instant gratification,
Huge gears that circle in years with minute changes.
And I know that your actions are reactions,
along a path which matters like another hour struck.
Nothing personal.
Wren Tuatha
Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover a Literary Rag, Driftwood Press, Five 2 One Magazine, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Digges’ Choice, and the anthology Grease and Tears. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd goats on a mountain in California.
