July 2017 | fiction
When the birds and bees die off because of chemical misuse, where will procreation be, who will make love? Only the Doomsday Clock will keep moving and gasping.
Every field is being stripped. Big Dude tractors, and grain hoppers the size of two car garages. Harvest is part of mid-America; it’s what we do; it’s how we feed the world.
A slow and steady rain follows two days of harder rain, chides us for cranking up our diesel tractors and ethanol plants here in corn country, and causes this climate shift which accounts for alien-warm Midwestern winters with too little snow and too much gray. We call these downpours toad-stranglers.
It’s here where thighs turn thick as oaks in an abandoned field, where the waist takes on a tractor’s tire, and where breasts grow a valley between sagging hills. We don’t kill ourselves anymore like Karen Carpenter did because we know we must live with our choices. One too many flavored coffees and we forget how we once loved the pain, would do anything for a compliment. Now we find little shame in comforting ourselves in a weeping world where the only true love lingers along a crowded sky.
My gentleman farmer ages with the seasons. At fifty, the wear is evident. At sixty, a tractor becomes a ten-story building to scale. He wanted to climb Devil’s Tower once, but that was before his days ran together into a jumble of moments called Time.
See this mishmash of days, see it clear, this is life, this here and there. To forget to fight, to uncurl the fist, to close the lips, is not surrender. Peace comes to the quiet heart. And to pray upon the fertile land for an end to war is virtuous.
Chila Woychik
German-born Chila Woychik has bylines in journals such as Silk Road, Storm Cellar, and Soundings East, and was awarded the 2017 Loren Eiseley Creative Nonfiction Award (Red Savina Review) & the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award (Emrys Foundation). She craves the beautiful and lyrical, and edits the Eastern Iowa Review.
July 2017 | poetry
Recalling a melodious pitch,
or forms of movement, thus
Swarms of creatures the mind adventures,
the swooning of the thrush
And while I beckon hitherto
ineffable thoughts I ponder:
the motive of a person’s word and deed
when that one says, what’s wrong dear?
Further, have I not known
the brilliance of mind on earth
The one that makes me move in glory,
and relinquish undue search?
If not, I will declare
I must continue onward
And love that which is from above—
those objects and things we ponder
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus
a taste of pondering eminence
a taste of Nature’s Sexes
And while I sit, I wait
for Heaven’s inspiration
to be greater than the vile amorous
to rejoice in my long sation
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus.
Lance Gracy
Lance Heath Gracy is a retired infantry Marine, current graduate student, teacher, and tutor. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of the Incarnate Word, and has published there in the local literary arts journal. He is in pursuit of an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas-San Antonio. He has a passion for evangelizing truth through various means, but has an interest writing poetry in particular. He lives alone with his German Shepherd, named Dennis, and enjoys reading, studying, running, gardening, and time with fellows.
July 2017 | poetry
She had plugged
The holes atop
Her head with hair
To keep the brains
From knowing there
Was more to life
Than dark and matted skull.
But if she’d once
Considered the cold
Bare fish tail strands
A-dangling exposed
To brushes, combs,
Hot water, wind,
Men’s clutch, she’d
Maybe not have shrieked
When all the hairs
Sunk down to sub-
Skull, crowded round
Her thoughts, coiled
Tight – for warmth –
And lit a fire; set in.
The smoke, an alabaster
Hue – burnt bone?
That smoggy ouster –
Shrouded baldened
Skin, and left
An airborne trail
Like bread crumbs
For the damned
Behind her head
Where all she went then on.
Rebecca White
Rebecca White is a journalist based in New York City. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Her poetry is as of yet unpublished. Rebecca’s poems reflect both her personal experiences and the experiences of those who have shared their stories with her. Much of her work focuses on protest, pain, and power.
