April 2017 | nonfiction
I strut into Sephora—a large makeup store—“just to look” and come out with lipstick: matte mauve, glittering nude, a glossy green, daring, my mother claiming it makes me look ill, zombified, ridiculous. But I felt powerful, rebellious, a different me. I attribute her reaction to how the green lipstick looks compared to my Caucasian complexion that my friend Karl refers to as “pasty,” but I prefer “porcelain.”
My favorite gems in Sephora: eyeshadows and liners. Black liquid liner—if not the precise balance of pigment and liquid, will look like sticky roadside tar. It will stick to my lids and smear across the folds and creases, where eyeshadow hides after a sweaty dance. It disappears from the exact sweep I place it in the morning and by the afternoon, “sprite green” accented with “tiramisu” and “soiree” runs off to makeup heaven with one accidental rub of my eyes about 2 in the afternoon in class. Afterwards I walk with my boyfriend Alex who cannot decide whether or not my eyes are green or hazel, maybe jade or emerald with a hint of amber, or just somewhere to get lost.
Gretchen Gales
Gretchen Gales is managing editor and a staff writer for Quail Bell Magazine. She was recently honored in Her Campus’ “How She Got There” segment. Her work has also appeared in Yes Poetry, East Jasmine Review, Yellow Chair Review, and more.
April 2017 | poetry
1
Returning to their home town after 25 years
was surreal. They got lost trying to get to
the high school. The ice cream stand they worked in
was now a dry cleaners, while Old Smith’s Farm
was gone altogether.
2
Looking at the photos posted by George
the old swimming hole back home is now a fancy
water park with diving platforms and a wave pool
and roller coaster slides such a blight on that old
small town charm and I think I’m going to cry.
3
Contrasting today’s summer of yardwork
house repairs, car troubles and no money
with his youthful summers of dating, swimming
ice cream stands and summer stock theatre makes him sad
with longing and knowing you can never go home again.
Michael Estabrook
Michael Estabrook is retired. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms, able instead to focus on making better poems when he’s not, of course, endeavoring to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.
April 2017 | poetry
Hymn for Plenty
I believe in keeping what I want,
in dropping everything,
the briny taste of the sunset
yolking the raw meat of the trees.
I believe in throwing the baby out,
the jimson weed rolled tight,
waiting for moonlight, for a smoke,
a lithe trellis to tendril the air.
I believe in leaving it all unfinished.
It cannot be a deity until we make it
a deity, so nobody say a thing
about the wicked wisteria this year.
Something empty is something else
full, faithless, sunflowers
no longer turning away from shadows
to the light at the fencerow’s edge.
Miracle Pine
—after the Tohoku Tsunami
It survived the mess,
suspended over the splintered houses,
a last green asterisk to the Wave,
but then died shortly after.
I hear the townspeople plunked
a concrete likeness down in its place.
By god we find our ways to bring things back,
telling ourselves it takes a disaster.
An industrious bunch, we waste no time
fitting our handles to our little thumbs.
We get to work.
We blast, maim, pierce, and gut
to resurrect what we think should always be.
We fricassee and freeze out.
Afraid, we hang, starve, segregate, assimilate.
We neoliberalize and racialize—
memorialize, legislate, whitewash,
waterboard, roast, infect.
But most of all, we just make hay.
In fact, a man right now out the window
in the cold March will not yet give up
jackhammers some sidewalk into oblivion,
dreaming of his old neighborhood.
James Everett
James Everett has lived and taught English as a Lingua Franca for over fifteen years in the United States, Belize, rural Japan, and Malaysia as a Fulbright grant recipient. The people, languages, and landscapes of these places have led him to an inordinate love of international grocery stores, where Daniela, his daughter, Tania, his spouse, and he lose themselves for hours whenever their budget allows. Their kitchen smells of assorted fermented pastes, boiling daikon, patacones, tortillas from an old family recipe, Ecuadorian caldos, and popcorn they raise themselves in a community garden. Over coffee cups of pilsner and guayusa tea, they celebrate journals that have kindly published James’s work: the Evansville Review, Alimentum, Unsplendid, The Cortland Review, and many others.
