The eye looks out the window. It’s still free to look. Certain skies force the issue. Their blue, their soaring blue. But this is not what drives the contemplation. A ball of red suspended over the traffic of sunrise promises sport and possible violence. The trip itself is a kind of death. There goes another one. There goes another. One wonders what they have in common, these ill-fated travellers. Maybe they suffer the blues. Maybe they have never committed themselves to a worthy or unworthy cause. Maybe they have wearied of themselves, wearied of the music they play each morning, wearied of the slogans that corner their thoughts. All of it comes off too soft for my liking, a chamois cloth. You can roughen the surface of the day by rubbing it with sandpaper, I’ve found. Then it will properly hold the colours you apply. For now I rub my eye until it aches. I don’t know if this is punishment for looking out when the other eye is blind. In certain tellings, that could be the eye that gave offense, the one that saw the naked truth spread her legs and motion for her lover. A pianoforte riff would fit right here, or a piccolo trumpet blast. Within this speeding head, no time for doubt or self-reflection. The intensities are what they are. Living is combustion after all. Dousing the fire would kill it. Knock on wood. Am I still asleep? And then the blueblack pigeon lands on the balcony and you feel less alone than you have for a year. What would it be like to effortlessly land on a balcony? Hoping not to scare away the bird, the eye pulls back and rests upon a mirror, gold deep brown fringed with black and sad.
Saturday, 26 June 2021
'I Am Phosphorescence, And I Light Your Pain' by Amanda McLeod
Disturb me, and see a sky of splendid stars explode beneath your hand. Swirl me like the inside of you, send me spinning through the endless darkness of your inner oceans. Let each tiny point of my light chase the shadows back, so that what you lost and the cavern of emptiness it left behind are visible even in this, your midnight hour. I am the water around you, the life outside when there is no life within. Surround yourself with me. Go back to your beginning, to the spark, the moment existence began. Do not look away. Everything has a beginning and an end. Know this, and watch it all fade. Where there was light, there can be light again. I will show you the shapes of your hurts, make them familiar, soften their edges. Lie back in your boat. Release your fear and your anger. Throw them into the sea. Let me swallow them with my soft glow. Know that even here, should you jump, I will break your fall; transform you into a living firework.
'The Last Spider Lilies of Chester County' by Janna Tinley Miller
Water burbles white and angry, sucking our paddles into foam before the river flattens between angled boulders and wide shores. Spider lilies float in clumps, nearly drowned to white-winged tips. What we came to see – endangered flower beds growing smaller every year.
Essie steps from bobbing kayak to thigh-deep swirls while patting a petite tween hip.
“How can they bloom when submerged?”
I shift my paddle. “They flowered before the spring floods.”
“Will they survive?”
I look to her hands, clenching and unclenching. “We can’t help them.”
As a routine, Essie fills her pockets with opportunity: puffed seeds squashed flat, rusty keys, and crumbs of broken pots. Small thefts, mostly unnoticed. Now she picks a rock from her toes and holds it to the light.
Under sounds of a river morning, a truck revs its engine on a bridge beyond the bend. Essie lays down in the water to block the sound, her fingers sticking up like the white spiralled blooms nearby.
“Jeez, it's cold.” But she leans back again anyway, hands reaching over her head. Away from me.
When she stands, two bulges protrude. Balanced. One for each hip.
We get home and she strips for the shower. I pick her shorts from the bathroom floor, reaching inside each wet pocket before the wash. The yin and yang of us.
One side holds a river rock, smooth and sterile. From the other, I pull a lonely lily bulb, the paper casing thin and crumbled into dust.
'The Graffiti Maze' by Robert Vaughan
I.
Some people sleep on trains. I can’t because I’m waiting for them to fall asleep so I can do my business. Furrow the back forty, my Daddy used to call it. A stand of pines can make you blunder. Or a rusted out lawnmower overturned on its side in the weeds.
2.
Surtevant stop- it’s the only thing that can never do me no harm. Jump off the train, silent, undercover, slip into the marsh. Be careful of cat-tails, they can cause severe damage. Eternal miasma. Find a place that will saddle you with fortune, helps to be armed in the dark, or loaded, or locked up like my Mommy still is.
3.
She isn’t my real Mom. No. My real Mom is Hiawatha. That’s what my Daddy calls her. Says you got her hair kid. Better off bald. You have to sleep above the ground. Snakes in the grasses. Find platforms or just sleep standing up like a horse. That way, when they come for you, run like the wind.
4.
Every restless night when I make a bed from cornstalks and sometimes sand or silt from the local grotto, I know I will rise. You could have left a light on. It’s just a power plant. Makes no difference what you say now. Here’s what the moons shows me: you’re still a liar.
'Double Duty' by Marie Gethins
She’s awful pretty. Like a dream, you might say. Those arms and legs of hers, shapely but firm to the touch. Strong. Dependable. With that body, she won’t give out on a man.
First time Ty caught a glimpse, he said, ‘She ain’t no American girl.’ Maybe so. Even he can’t deny she works these Iowa fields better than any home-grown chattel. From dawn until twilight, she’s out there doing what needs to be done. So, I said to him, ‘Come harvest, we’ll see who’s best satisfied.’
I’m watching her, standing out there in the field. Stalks hit her thighs and waist, but she don’t flinch. The sun dips low, caws fade into a grasshopper singsong. Those bug boys sawing over and back. The ladies can’t resist it.
I crack open a cold one. My sweet valentine. That long hair, smooth as corn silk. Her blue-sequin dress catching a few last rays. Specks of shimmer, frightening to some. Flickers of promise to me.
When the sky goes dusky, I’ll slip her off the post, give her a puff of new breath if she’s gone slack, then we’ll tussle between rows in dirt that’s still warm from the day. And sometimes, all going right, air whooshes through her and just at the end, I’ll hear her sweet sigh.
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First published in Fictive Dream (February, 2021).
'Climate Change' by Jay Kelly
In the forest at Tibradden, where we spent all our time that rare, real summer of 1995, we dreamed your dream of escape. If you don’t leave the place you grow up, everything becomes a monument, you said on the bus out one day. Imagine seeing the same stuff every day, all your life. That didn’t sound like a bad thing to me then. I thought nothing of the leaden outpost from which we’d sprung, only of you, and this abundant acreage in which, undisturbed, we improvised verdant bedrooms, studies, attics and gardens. Now you live in Bangkok. You live in colour; in greens, mainly, I suspect. I have stayed behind. I have chosen monuments.
I come here only in September, when the leaves themselves become sunshine, even on grey days, to grey lives. Now a “wooded area”, our forest has shrunk. We never carved our names on the oaks or beech. To do so would have seemed cruel, for we felt them as alive as our own bodies. Like parent and newborn, we didn’t know where they ended and we began. We branded our bodies against their bare bark. Each tree, a third party to our union, a gentle conspirator, both host and guest.
Like all things overly known, I have contempt for this town, particularly in summer. Its sewer scented streets on weekend mornings, dappled with hopeful travellers from more optimistic places, framing gentle fictions in their camera lenses. But then, another September, and with it, a quietness.
I take to the wood and the earth itself, with every radiant, death-defying fallen leaf, yields forth all it retains of you. You could have been my perpetual harvest, but I could not leave. Though in September, your light in each remaining leaf, I gather you still.
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First published in the Fish Anthology (2016).
'How to Change the Oil on the Car' by Kim Steutermann Rogers
We were taught to jack it up. We were taught to crawl underneath and unplug and drain the oil into a metal pan. To replace the old filter with a new one. To put the drain plug back in—don’t forget to put the drain plug back in—and fill the engine with oil, 5w30 for extreme Chicago winters. We were taught how to check the oil level and check for leaks. While Dad watched TV in the back room with the car keys in his pocket, Mom taught us this would make independent women out of us.