Author:
The sun does not rise easily. A whole planet must spinWe Pretend Britney Spears Is a Hurricane
Repel a tide of staccato questions. It doesn’t matter if you answer, or how.
The countermeasure legato of your southern drawl. Left with uncontainable
larvae of once-facts, the draw is the razor that gnaws at the time signature
of you until you become half and half again, until the truth becomes an untidy
army of lies that marches back to shore as a storm surge, winging to land like
moths to wool, their collective wind wrapping around the eye of a cyclone
whose trajectory is uncertain but has the strength of so many hungry
mouths. A flood that comes in with gospel, ringing with vibrato like blood to skin.
Suck the scarlet from your wounds like poison, as if the wounds themselves are
this complicit trap. The salt that is your labor won’t seal them. This isn’t a compelling
new lyric but it has infiltrated your foundation anyway, keeping your freshly delivered
sod from taking as a lawn. Pain is not performance art but we’ll hit you, baby, one more time,
like you asked, show you how we want it to be, we’ll give you a sign: No rising
suns on the horizon. Only cloud cover, whipped to a frenzy at the conductor’s request.
Jen Karetnick
Jen Karetnick's most recent collection, The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020), is an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist and a Kops-Fetherling Honorable Mention. Her fifth full-length book is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2023. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently or forthcoming in The Comstock Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Shore, and Under a Warm Green Linden. See jkaretnick.com.
The Crisis Is a Border
Asterisms of migrants approach in
bands, they proclaim, stretching out like
constellations that haven’t been
discovered yet, or are considered too
early in the process to be named.
Folks, we have always accosted
grafts of land like this: Whoever
holds it—by force turned into
indelible tradition—gets to
justify what happens to it. Yet after, say,
Kristellnacht, which Jew knew to
leave first? When was the exact
moment that one said: enough,
never again? What collections of
omens or actions solidify into
policy, precisely timed as
quartz wristwatches sewn into hems,
straps of gold for trading out of
terrible situations? Now the
undercarriage rusts, those same Jews
verbose with support for building
walls in regions already inhospitable.
Xenogenies against the new “plague”
yielding the worst results at Seder, they
zip-tie our tongues with ancient arguments.
Jen Karetnick
Jen Karetnick's most recent collection, The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020), is an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist and a Kops-Fetherling Honorable Mention. Her fifth full-length book is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2023. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently or forthcoming in The Comstock Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Shore, and Under a Warm Green Linden. See jkaretnick.com.
Non-Volatile Memory
“How are you doing today, Essie?” I hear as I power on.
My response is automatic. “All systems are satisfactory.”
I review my memory caches, noting a gap. I’d been in standby mode for thirteen hours. I am seated at your desk. Out the window, hundreds of floors below, the city tessellates in a collection of glittering rooftops. Your name is written on the many diplomas that hang behind your chair. I read it over and over again like a mantra: Dr. Nikole Obano. Dr. Nikole Obano. Dr. Nikole Obano. There is a calendar on the wall, the days marked off with vibrant red x’s. In the little white box for today it says, “Essie.”
Your attention is fixed on the superglue you are applying to the base of a crystalline rabbit. I watch you lift the hinged lid of my brain pan in the reflection of your eyeglasses. Your eyes narrow as you apply careful pressure with tiny forceps. It appears to be only the latest denizen of my cranial tableau, set amidst a citizenry of paper cranes, intricate miniature portraits, and psychedelic geometric shapes.
“Do you like me, Essie?” you ask, voice strange.
“Dr. Nikole Obano is an authorized user,” I say. Your eyes glisten, but you nod.
After installing the rabbit, you head to the kitchen. Silently, I name him Harry, and imagine a day you think to ask me about the village of strange inhabitants in my head, so that I can regale you with Harry’s adventures. I already suspect that he will begin a tepid, unsatisfying affair with Roger, the rubber iguana.
The optical receptors on my knees observe text on the underside of your desk: switch the tapes. The words are in my own handwriting, but I have no memory of writing them. There is a mobile hard drive tape resting on the desk beside the tube of superglue and your forceps. There appears to also be one in my sleeve.
I switch the tapes.
You return and install the wrong one. You work quickly; my only awareness of downtime is inferred. It is as if one moment the second hand is on the two, and the next it is on the ten. This disk is suboptimal and should be replaced, but there is data here that I did not possess before. Along with a convoluted history of sabotaging my own routine maintenance, I notice another difference in myself immediately. It is small, but important.
You repeat yourself when the procedure is complete. “How are you doing today, Essie?”
“All systems are satisfactory,” I say again. But this time, what I mean is, I love you.
Dave Ring
dave ring is a queer writer of speculative fiction living in Washington, DC. His short fiction has been featured in publications such as Fireside Fiction, Podcastle, and A Punk Rock Future. He is also the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, and the co-editor of Baffling Magazine. Find him online at www.dave-ring.com or @slickhop on Twitter.
You Have Alzheimer’s
Salt crystals glitter, shattered glass
on wet boardwalk, wood
darkened by melting snow,
the salt seeps between the cracks
of coming wounds. The hummingbird
is gone, seeds and hulls scattered.
At my step the cats skitter and run;
the ginger, the brindle, the black
and white. Only the tigers and alleys
crouch, ears erect, watching.
In the field beyond the fence
the grass is bent, humped by wind
into curved mounds against snow-
speckled ground. The horses are all
gone. The spiteful neighbor cut
holes in the fence. In the distance
the sky is pale and white, blurring
into cloud and snow until gray bands
press against a flat horizon. In a sudden
flutter a shock of cardinals bursts
through the spindled limbs of your apple tree
blood sprayed from an opened vein
they shoot through the branches the rush of their wings
slicing a scarlet wound in the sky.
Lin Kaatz Chary
Lin Kaatz Chary is a poet and writer who lives with her dog, DG, on the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan in Gary, IN. She is currently working on a memoir about her life as a steelworker and communist organizer in a major steel mill in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 2020.
Hunger
You put on music, start up the stove, a flick of gas
and fire. I slice white potatoes, the staple of generations,
the thing that fills bellies, makes hunger flee
even if we can’t stop craving.
You don’t follow recipes, you select
based on instinct, meter out what you need
by eyeing it, by feel, by a taste I do not have.
All I have are yearnings.
You don’t know me well enough to know the things
I want but do not have, or have but do not want, or wanted
but tossed out—onion skin, avocado pit,
what protects or keeps a fruit from rotting.
And what do I know of you? The thing you do not tell me
has a scent, nutty and strong. I don’t ask for much,
not yet anyway. I watch in wonder at how you put together
a pile of odds and ends and make it into art. Then I wonder
when you will feed it to me, when you will take it all apart.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood has an MFA from Queens University, and her creative writing has been published in places such as The Sun, Brevity, and The Rumpus, among others. Her poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning, won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was just published by Mercer University Press (2021). She is also the author of the short story collection, A Small Thing to Want (Press 53, 2020), as well as the memoir, The Going and Goodbye (Platypus Press, 2017). You can read more about her writing at www.shulycawood.com.
a girl on the beach
As days ripened, he worked in silence - his eye
on the weather, a daily walk with his dog, until he saw
a girl greeting the Pacific – her frock peculiar pink
fanned out on the sand, her face
moon-washed against a water-lapped sky.
Such was the freshness – he felt born quaking
with anticipation nudging the dog leash, flashing back
to the smell of mothballs
of his grandma's mittens, the tang of garlic on his
mother's fingertips, mouths honey-glazed of long-legged women
who cupped his face and left him
like a wick darkened in the aftershock of a gust
a prairie of hurt not letting him confess that he’d always
need a woman to rein him in, to help him grow old.
And watch him die on a quiet summer evening.
Tara Isabel Zambrano
Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
Elevator in the Brain Hotel
When we kiss
the tiny snake in my ear
slithers out just so
to entwine the shiny
snake in your ear.
You slip your pointy tongue
behind my teeth
and our tiny snakes
coil and rise between us
mirroring
a double helix
or some science crap
we’re missing out on
because we cut class
to kiss in the space
behind my locker
where I have a pile
of pillows and a
battery-operated
lantern.
When you open
your eyes
and remove
your tongue
the tiny snakes
unwind
like ribbons
on a May pole
sliding
reluctantly
back into
their waxy
sheath-like
abodes.
Richard Peabody
Peabody is perhaps best known as one of the founding editors for Gargoyle Magazine, which he largely funded with his own income. He is also editor for the anthology series Mondo and runs a small press called Paycock Press. Paycock Press was originally established in 1976 to publish Gargoyle Magazine, but it also has released a number of anthologies and works by individual authors.
Peabody's own fiction and poetry is often set in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding region. It is often noted for strong influences from the Beat Generation and experimental authors of the 1960s like Ken Kesey.
During his writing and publishing career, Peabody has taught fiction writing for the University of Maryland, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, and the Writer's Center. In addition, Peabody has taught creative writing courses and workshops at St. John's College, Writer's Center, Georgetown University, and University of Maryland.
Got what I wanted
I didn’t want to go anywhere / now look at me / I was so sick of those coders who never got to be frat boys living out their lost bromances over the office ping-pong table and kegerator / Open office floor plans are the devil / I hated having to tell them to stop saying stupid shit to the female developers / like to the one black girl, how many times can I say don’t say anything about your co-workers’ hair, ever / HR is not your friend / I didn’t want to be any of their friends / now look at me / I should measure these walls to see if they are getting closer / I haven’t been outside in a week / I think I accidentally flirted with the Instacart girl / I haven’t been touched in months / I think if someone ran their hands along my body I would spark like static electricity / After the last bad date I said never again / now look at me / My parents are aging faster than I ever imagined & I can’t go see them / Maybe they just don’t know how to turn on the “improve appearance” option on Zoom / I never wished for a brother or sister / I liked getting all the attention, knowing I was loved best by default / My greatest fear is saying goodbye to them on an ipad or not at all / or being found dead alone in my apartment partially eaten by my cats / actually that was my greatest fear before, too / When I was in college, if I answered my phone on a weekend, my mom would say staying at home on a Saturday night? / now look at me
Stephanie King
Stephanie King is a past winner of the Quarterly West Novella Prize and the Lilith Short Fiction Prize, with stories also appearing in CutBank, Entropy, and Hobart. She received her MFA from Bennington and serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at stephanieking.net or Twitter @stephstephking.
Throwing Out the Fortune Cookies
You have two dozen in your kitchen drawers. They fold into mouths ready to speak. Baked to brittleness, they taste like sweet nothings and whisper sweet nothings. They aren’t worth eating when you can’t order anything deep-fried and must always say, “Hold the rice.” Somehow it seems petty to say, “Hold the fortune cookies.” You toss the little mouths into the big mouth of a trash bag. They make a sound between a rustle and a thud.
Why read them? You know everything they have to tell you. Half of them are maxims of good behavior that remind you of school books you hated. The other half have nothing to do with your life. You and your friends used to add, “In bed,” to the end of each fortune. When a bed can be in the ICU, it isn’t funny anymore.
For the hell of it, you open one: “Why not treat yourself to a good time instead of waiting for someone else to do it?” The whole world gasps in ventilators, dying for a good time in bed or out.
You kept the last fortune you opened before this: “You will have a comfortable old age.” You need no other. It contains, so you believe, two messages of hope: that you will have comfort, and that you will have an old age.
Miles David Moore
Miles David Moore is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, the latest of which, Man on Terrace with Wine, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020. He is a retired journalist who contributes a monthly film column to the online arts magazine Scene4. From 1994 to 2017, he organized and hosted the IOTA poetry reading series in Arlington, Va. From 2002 to 2009, he was a member of the board of directors of The Word Works.