Issue 7

NON-FICTION

• Scallops on Credit, by Darryl Graff 

•  Filleted, by Anna Maxymiw

•  Coming Home, by Suvi Mahonen

• 10 Replies to Being Told to Forgive My Parents, by River Kozhar

POETRY

• First Crush, by Christina Thatcher

• Place Shape, Tonight, by Jennifer Whalen

• The experiment, by Peter Clive

• Mastectomy, by Matt Schroeder

• Dear Pen Pal, Death of a Code Talker, by Will Cordeiro

• The Tree in Our Back Yar, A Short Poem About Possible Muses, by Holly Day

EDITORIAL TEAM: John Jarred, Monica Nunez, Kyle Skebba, Stephen Pate, Malahat Zhobin

Mark Leflar

ADVISOR: Joanna Novak

The Glass Between Us, by Jan Price

     Jan loves entering literary competitions, both in Australia and overseas and enjoys the occasional win.   She was Guest Poet for Paul Grover, Editor of the international journal Studio.  Paul has published many of Jan’s poems, and has accepted several of her artworks for the journal’s covers. She also won the national annual Art Prize in Geelong Victoria Australia, with a painting, titled, Tenderness. Her painting, Raking, was featured on the cover of Literary Wallets, launched in Victoria. Jan sells her paintings at Art Shows. Her poetry has been published in Poetica Christi, Plumwood Mountain, Women’s Work, The Mozzie, (also art covers accepted). As well, Jan has been published in Snapping Twig, Stepping Stones, Time of Singing, (Wind &Water Press; Conneaut Lake, PA), Art work accepted by Brushfire, (University of Nevada, Reno), Underground Writers WA, Metonym Journal California and in Coolabah 23, for the Barcelona University for academic studies of Australian Lit. A painting titled, Mirror Mirror, is now published with Reno and the University of Nevada.  Eastern Iowa Review publishes Jan’s artwork, titled, Protection, online. Studio, Journal (International,) publishes two of Jan’s poems, Search (and) Self-Thinking Drones. International Art of Peace anthology, (Editor Anne McCrady, Tyler, Texas, USA,) also publishes Search.

      Jan sells her paintings at art shows. She leaves her poetry in cafes, railway stations and book-exchange locations.  She belongs to three writers clubs and reads her work at Open Readings. Jan studies Thought Distraction in regard to depression. Jan lives in Victoria, Australia. 

 Crossing and Obscured, by Jerome Berglund

Jerome Berglund graduated from the cinema-television production program at the University of Southern California, and has spent much of his career working in film and photography. He has had pictures published and awarded in local papers, and last year staged an exhibition in the Twin Cities area which included a residency of several month at a local community center. The most recent show featuring his fine art photography, at the Pause Gallery in New York, opened in early December.

 Divide and Fade, by Julia Forrest

     Julia Forrest is a Brooklyn based artist. She works strictly in film and prints in a darkroom she built within her apartment. Her own art has always been her top priority in life and in this digital world, she will continue to work with old processing. Anything can simply be done in photoshop, she prefers to take the camera, a tool of showing reality, and experiment with what she can do in front of the lens.

     Julia is currently working as a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum, Abrons Art Center, and USDAN Art Center. As an instructor, she thinks it is important to understand that a person can constantly stretch and push the boundaries of their ideas with whatever medium of art s/he chooses. Her goal is for her audience to not only enjoy learning about photography, but to see the world in an entirely new way and continue to develop a future interest in the arts.

NON-FICTION

_____________________________________________________________________

Scallops on Credit

by Darryl Graff 

    When I moved into the neighborhood, it was still Italian but already a shell of its former wise-guy self– like the old-timers on the corner in their pointy boots and creased polyester pants, smoking cigars and cigarettes and swirling bodega coffee in paper cups. Here, for now but not forever.

     Sure, there was still the coal- oven Italian bakery with its fresh- baked bread cooling in straw baskets and the old widows dressed all in black, counting coins from a small purse and laying them on the worn marble bakery counter. And Ann’s hair salon was alive and well, with the women in the salon chairs competing over whose hair could be more bluer, more bigger, more better.

      I got to drink in the wise-guy bar on Madison Street, not because I was a knee breaker but because I wasn’t. And it didn’t hurt that I used to help my old next-door neighbor, Sadie, do things around the house, like take down the heavy gold fake velvet winter curtains and put up the yellow sheer spring curtains, or change the shower head while her wise-guy son, Anthony, held court at the bar. He always bought me a drink, or two, and if anyone looked at me kinda funny, Anthony would say, “He’s okay. He lives in my building.”

     There were all kinds of characters back then, and I had names for most of them: “Pint-half-pint,” who was always walking around with a pint or a half pint of vodka tucked snugly in his back pocket. And there was “Chinese Charles Bronson,” a brooding Chinese guy who looked just like Bronson; and there was George, “the second-story man.”

     And then there was the Italian guy who held court at the Greek coffee shop on Catherine Street; whenever he saw a pretty Puerto Rican girl, he would slide into the booth next to her and say, “ Did you know that any time I want I can go down to the Fulton Fish Market? I know everybody there and if I don’t have cash, no problem! They give me my scallops on credit. Do you know how connected you have to be to get scallops on credit?” So naturally, I started calling the Italian guy, “Scallops on Credit.”

     Jimmy, the driver, drove a box truck for the New York Post at night. His truck would be parked on South Street in front of the loading dock. I used to sit on bundles of soon-to be-delivered newspapers and smoke pot with Jimmy, and when the teamsters went on strike, I watched Jimmy drive his truck with one hand and swing a baseball bat at scabs with the other.

     The Italian bakery is now a Buddhist temple. The Fulton Fish Market moved to the Bronx. The Greek coffee shop became a Chinese noodle shop. Pint-half-pint disappeared, and so did Chinese Charles Bronson. George, the second story man, went back in the can, and the New York Post moved to the Bronx. Sadie died, and so did her son. The wise-guy bar is empty and for rent.

     The neighborhood changed; that’s what neighborhoods do. Everything is different now, everybody’s gone. Except for Scallops on Credit. I see him every morning on my way to work as the sun starts to rise over Catherine Street. Scallops on Credit is standing alone in front of the Arab bodega, frantically jabbing his fingers at his cell phone and wildly swinging his cane, and yelling, “How you doing?” to anyone who walks by.

                 end

____________________________

 Fillete

by Anna Maxymiw

There’s no way around it: fishing is like sex, and sex is like fishing. There are the same constants—the slippery, the tactile, the indescribable. Like when you’re pulling a walleye out of the water, trying to get a grip on its belly so it doesn’t stick you with its fins and make you bleed down your wrists. Like when you’re first naked with a partner and trying to suss each other out, feel what stokes each other’s slick and slide. There are textures and scents and physicality. You use palms, teeth, tips of fingers. You learn to be good with your hands, with the flesh, with the flick of a wrist. You hook and release.  

Put your knife behind the fin with the blade pointing down. Slice down to the backbone without cutting through it, then turn your knife sideways to point toward the tail. Cut straight down the spine.

It started when I was 22 and spent a summer as a housekeeper at a remote fly-in fishing lodge in Northern Ontario. I worked alongside a muster of sturdy young men who tended the dock, parked the boats, and guided guests on the lake. Who existed in the outdoors, free to come and go as they please, while the female workers made the beds and cleaned the toilets and served the meals. Who walked around in sleek-looking rain pants, had tanned hands with strong knuckles, bright eyes with white sunglass circles around them.

At first, I was skeptical of those boys. Coming from a big city, I thought my writing degree and my metropolitan upbringing made me more valuable, in a way. But this was the bush, the wilderness, the great equalizer. No one up here was better than anyone else: we were all just existing, working ourselves as hard as we could and falling into bed every night. And there was something about the movement of male fingers when sorting through tackle boxes or expertly threading a line through the guides of a rod. The waterproof bib, the parka, the tall boots: this was the uniform of the man who was willing to work hard, who would trawl through a fishing hole over and over again for that one sweet hit. It was new to me; it was thrilling.  

I begged one of the twentysomething guides to show me how to fillet a fish, and I accidentally and immediately fell in love with him, with everything, as we leaned over a splintery paddle on a sandy beach, a walleye in front of us. He knelt above me, his wide-brimmed hat casting a dark halo, as he guided me with the knife, his voice impatient but his hands forgiving. As we felt around in the silky pearl-coloured meat, our fingers grew glossy from the flesh, from how hard we were concentrating on the corporeal. Together we searched for the pin bones: those bones that float, unattached, in the middle of muscle. Bones that are designed to make a fish tense up and swim as far and as fast as possible. Bones that pricked my fingers in a plaintive rhythm as I moved my hands quietly along their curving pathway.

When it was all over, my fillet was poorly done, but it was mine, and I had the sticky palms to prove it.

A few years after our summer working together, his girlfriend googled me on a whim and found a poem I wrote about him teaching me how to fillet, me masturbating in my bunk that night thinking about his hands on mine, the texture of the pin bones across my fingertips. There was a bad fight, and we never spoke again.

Now that you have the fillet sliced off the fish, the next step is to take out the rib cage. Put your blade at the edge of the rib cage and slice along, about one inch in. Keep the edge of the knife close to the bones so you don’t cut into the meat.

Eight years later, I return to the lodge as a guest. I have a book coming out about my summer working there, and I want to see if I got my details right, if I’ve kept my love for long days sitting in a boat and the unforgiving land and the wide-open bowl of a sky. If I’ve kept my love for the housekeepers, the dockhands. For the guides.

After I get off the floatplane, I make my way through the camp, hugging the people I know, shaking hands with the people I’m meeting for the first time. I feel like I’m existing in two places at once, because being back here is a wistful mix of stepping back in time and hurtling forward: I feel like I’m 22 years old again, but I’m not. I’m 30, and life at the lodge has gone on without me. The workers are still so young, but I’m older, harder, ostensibly wiser.

Eventually, there’s just one guide left to meet; I can see only his back, from where he’s choosing lures for his guests. From here, with the green of his lodge uniform, he could be any one of the young men from my summer, and my heart twangs. And then he turns around to shake my hand, and I’m frozen, unspooled between eight years ago and the present by the wide-set eyes, the tanned cheekbones, the angles of his face. For a dangerous moment, he’s my own lost fishing guide, the one who held my hands as he made me slice along a walleye’s rib cage on a hot beach, the one who cut me so close to the bone. The two similar male faces are overlaid in my vision: glinting teeth, teasing eyes, slow pike-like grin. And then he introduces himself, and I’m desperately grabbing for his hand, feeling my body try to anchor to him in this familiar and unfamiliar space.

Throughout my week as a guest, I get to know the staff. I quickly fall in love with all of them: their youth, their sleepy eyes, the storm of their raw emotions that pulls all of us into its thrall and reminds me so much of what it’s like to be isolated and worked to the bone for nine weeks. The housekeepers and dockhands and guides are all so vital and varied and kind; they allow me to befriend them and let me back into the staff dining room where I used to eat, let me play euchre with them in the staff cabins where I used to sleep and joke and waste time as best I could, just like they’re doing now. These young people are working so hard, as ever; they’re becoming fierce and funny and peeled, the truest versions of themselves.

And they have that same hope and humour. One afternoon, I’m reading a book and listening to the housekeepers giggle about who they have crushes on—at the moment, it’s a fortysomething guide they’ve nicknamed the Dreamboat. One of the girls tells me how, on a rainy afternoon, he taught her how to fillet in the back of the toolshed, so as not to let his catch go to waste.

I want to ask her: Did you fall in love with him then? Did you find yourself emotionally splayed? Do you know that what happens up here isn’t real?

Instead, I say: At least you know that if a man can fillet well, he must be good at fingering.

She laughs so hard I have to burrow my face in my book to hide my own smile, because I should know better.

Point the blade down on the other side of the rib cage and slice down the whole length; grab the rib cage and rip it out. Hold the thin end of the fillet with your fingernail, and cut to the skin. Keep the knife close to the skin and go all the way down to the end.

My own teasing guide follows me around camp for seven days. He yanks my braid when I’m trying to untangle my reel; he claims me as his partner when I invite the staff to play euchre in my room; he throws me over his shoulder to end an argument. He rubs me the wrong way, but I also look forward to seeing his snarky grin every morning, watching him dock his boat every evening. I keep thinking of eight years ago, the same problems: two people from different cities, different lives, pulled to each other in this spellbinding place.

On my last night, the two of us quietly duck out of a staff party; he wants to show me his favourite spot to stargaze. We sit on a rickety bench overlooking a bluff where the ragged northern shoreline meets the lake, craning our heads back, counting the satellites moving in dizzy patterns. I alternate between trying to search for the North Star and looking at his profile in the indigo-tinted darkness: the brim of ball cap pulled down, the strong nose, the flash of teeth as the occasional word unfolds his mouth.

The dark makes it easier to tell him how I see fishing and intimacy, how I find similarities in every small and slick movement. Still, I can’t bring myself to tell him how I fall in love with every guide I meet, how the sight of rubber boots and waders makes me hot and strange inside, reminds me of all the things I’ll never be.

Yeah, he says, moving a hand in front of his body, slowly, curling his first two fingers up and toward us. Our thighs are barely touching; I can feel only the slightest rime of his heat. My teeth are clattering, my hands wrapped around my rib cage. It’s all about the hook, isn’t it?, he says. He crooks his fingers, searching for the Gräfenberg spot, setting a hook on a finicky walleye.

After a moment, he speaks again. You have to find it, he says.

It?

The thing that makes you not think. His hand is still outstretched, fingers curled. Maybe it’s fishing. Maybe it’s something else. But you need to find it.

The situation feels thick and tricky, so I tear my eyes away from his hand and stare up at the sky to try to diffuse the swelling in my chest and the heat in my pelvis. That’s when the most beautiful shooting star I’ve ever seen blazes a creamy path across the Milky Way. At my delighted and dumb sound, he snaps his neck back, too, and we silently keep our heads tilted up as the cold soaks into our bones, as we understand our situation, as we sit beside each other, not quite touching, all the way down to the end of the night.

Now you have a fillet, but there’s still a tiny row of bones to cut out. You can feel the bones with your fingers: they go about halfway down the fillet. Cut through the fillet on either side of the ridge of pin bones and take them out.

When I fly out the next morning, I can’t bring myself to give him a hug in front of everyone, but he hangs off the wing strut of the floatplane until the prop is about to start and he has to let go and step back. And then I realize that fishing is not just sex, because it’s also, somehow, love: you catch them, and you lose them. You don’t set the hook and it slips from you. One of you gets cut to the bone every time.

****

Anna Maxymiw lives in Toronto. Her work has been featured in such publications as The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Maclean's, and Hazlitt. Her first book, a memoir about working at a fly-in fishing lodge, was published with McClelland & Stewart in May.

__________________________

Coming Home

by Suvi Mahonen

"I love you always and I forget you sometimes as I forget my heart beats. But it beats always."  

Ernest Hemingway

05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a moving tram.   

I lie here in the dawn’s dimness, with my dreams still lingering.

“I am a happily married man and I am not looking for any other arrangement. I would ask that you please do not contact me again.”

I reach for my phone.

The last words of his last message haunt me. It seems impossible that it is “over”, even if our relationship was only ever a virtual one.

“What time is it?” my husband murmurs beside me. 

“Early,” I say.

He reaches for my phone.  

“I’m in the middle of an email!”

He reaches for me instead.

With a grunt of frustration, I fling his arm off me and get out of bed.

06:14 am. I am preparing lunch for my three-year-old daughter – marmalade sandwich, sliced banana – when I hear the soft ping of an incoming email. I pick up my phone. Feel the familiar sting when I see that it’s not from him.

I stand, staring out the kitchen window at the long shadow of the neighbouring apartment stretching across the river’s waters. I wonder how I let it get so far. How it became all consuming. I think of the hours spent scrolling through his messages, especially the ones where he said he understood me.

“I get you,” he would say. “We’re on the same page.”

He was a marketing executive for an agency I write copy for, or at least I used to, and our contact, at first, was purely professional. But I quickly became drawn to him – and I thought we shared a connection.  

“Mummy.”

My daughter is standing at the kitchen entrance. Tousled blonde hair, unicorn PJs, her stuffed monkey doll dangling from her hand. Swamped in my thoughts I hadn’t heard her coming down the hallway.  

07:04 am. My husband is running late. And he has to drop off our daughter to kindergarten on his way to work. I sit down to try and help put on her sandals.

“I’ll do it!” she says defiantly.

She fumbles with the sandal strap. I reach over and raise the prongless buckle. She realises I am trying to help and squeals with rage, yanking her sandal off with both hands.

“For God’s sake!” my husband says impatiently. “Why didn’t you just let her do it?”

I give him the birdie behind her back.  

07:10 am. My daughter’s pouting face is the last thing I see as the lift doors seal.  

07:11 am. I turn on my laptop. Elsa from Frozen is my user icon – something I set up to make my daughter happy. What would it be like to have Elsa’s power? How long would it take before I turned my husband into ice?

I scan The New York Times, The Australian, The Guardian. My pulse begins to slow. I am breathing calmly again.

08:03 am. I get in the shower and stand there, feeling the cold needles of water hitting my breasts, causing my nipples to harden. I vaguely consider directing the nozzle between my legs, but the indeterminable time required of concentration, face grimacing, and desperately trying to break through the barrier just feels like too much to bear. 

08:21 am. After I get dressed I check my emails again. There’s nothing. Apart from two that require follow-up: chasing up photos, editorial changes requests.

I’m researching something on the laptop when I get distracted by a piece of clickbait in the right-hand column. “Toxic Liver – 30-second quiz”. 

It takes six minutes.

08:53 am. I am finally ready to start on my article. As I go to open Word, my cursor hovers over the YouTube icon.

I used to watch the marketing executive on YouTube. The same clip. Over and over again. He was part of a discussion panel on the future of advertising. I’d watch with the volume down. Admiring his profile, his jawline, the way he made slightly unshaven seem so neat and tidy.

I would touch the screen and watch the rise and fall of his chest. I would imagine I could feel his heartbeat beneath my fingertips.

I check my emails once more. Feel ground down by his absence.

11:15 am. I have a phone interview with a psychiatrist. It’s not the one I used to see. I need quotes for the article I am writing. It’s about how our modern addiction to smartphones and social media can be a social barrier for many.

“There’s no doubt that devices have been a wonderful aid to society,” the psychiatrist says to me. He is a professor. He specialises in obsessive behaviour. I love the drift of his voice, the deep thoughtfulness in each pause. “But for some people they have become an overly important part of their lives.”

Listening to him triggers a need inside me to unburden myself. While he talks I want to tell him about how my marriage is broken, and how numb and disconnected I feel.

“What would you say to someone who can’t get to sleep because they keep compulsively checking their phone?” I ask.

“It’s likely to have a cost in terms of your normal circadian rhythm,” the psychiatrist replies. “And it’s likely to have a cost the next day, because you’re going to be less efficient. When you look at those costs, the benefit of knowing you’ve got a message at eleven o’clock at night doesn’t really look very beneficial, does it?”

02:12 pm. I finish another page of my first draft. I reward myself by checking the marketing executive’s LinkedIn profile. I pay for a premium membership so he won’t know each time I look at it.

It hasn’t changed from yesterday.  

03:42 pm. “You need glasses.”

I nod. It’s true. But I really came here to take my mind off the marketing executive.

“You can’t focus,” the optometrist says.  

He points to a large poster on the wall. It’s a drawing of a detached eyeball, sliced-in-half. “The human lens continues to grow throughout your lifetime,” he says. He traces the eyeball with his finger. “As the lens gets bigger, the ciliary muscle, which wraps itself around the lens, has more difficulty changing the lens’s shape.”

“Is that why I’m finding it hard to read at night?” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

He puts a heavy, black trial lens frame on my face. He pops two lenses in and stands back, looking at me. 

“Better?” he says.

04:07 pm. I take the long way home. I walk past two souvenir shops, a pub, a real estate agent. It has a tall model in the window of a new high-rise that is being built. I continue on past the supermarket, the bottle shop, past Condom Kingdom, Cold Rock.

I think about how, even during the strongest grips of my infatuation, I knew, deep down, how stupid I was being. It was like my mind had flipped back to my adolescence, swept up in a high school-like crush, as if the marketing executive was a movie star or rock idol or something.

I feel ashamed now as I remember the way I would pore over his press releases, searching for any secret messages he might have embedded in them for me. How I’d seize on code words like “open communication” and “rapport” as evidence that he was interested.

At the time I thought he was just being discreet. Which was very gentlemanly of him. He had the interests of the company to think of after all. And I knew he’d need to break it gently to his wife, to let her down easy.   

But when he put out a special release for a startup company called Firmest Bond, I knew that he was ready.

I dashed off an email to him. Aware only of my words, my quickened breath, the click of chewed nails on plastic keys. I gushed out my feelings. “I haven’t felt this way toward another human being,” I wrote.

“Ever,” I wrote.

The following morning he broke it off with me.   

I hear the squeal and clanking of an approaching tram. The low west sun searing brightly off the sloping window. The thick metal fender.

I have a sudden impulse to step out in front of it.

04:43 pm. I am standing on the balcony, looking at my phone. As a breeze blows in from the river I check Facebook again, even though I know he’s defriended me.

06:23 pm. A sludge of mushed peas. A soggy crust, black with Vegemite. Corn kernels floating in the dregs of the milk cup.

I plunge the dishes into the suds. Scrub them vigorously with the blue brush with the flattened white bristles.

As my gloveless hands chaff in the almost scalding water, I glance over the kitchen half-wall. At the blue Lawson-style sofa. The back of my husband’s thinning black hair. My daughter’s little blonde pigtails.

Sitting side by side. His arm around her shoulders. Watching Ben and Holly.

Happy.

Oblivious.

08:58 pm. After cleaning up, bathing my daughter, dressing my daughter and reading her bedtime story after bedtime story until my voice is hoarse and she has fallen asleep, I am feverish with a desperate compulsion to claw back my self-esteem. I am not revolting. There are other men who would have me.

I have an urge to go to the pub and get drunk. I imagine having wild sex with strangers, pushing them against the wall, pulling the zipper down on their trousers, inserting them inside, one after the next.

I go into the bedroom.

My husband is lying there in his chequered boxers and faded T-shirt. Reading an old copy of The New Yorker.

I slip off my underpants. I straddle him.

“Hey – ”

I start kissing him. Roughly. If I do this, without thinking, I might start feeling better.  

I feel him hardening between my legs. I reach down. I arch back.

He lasts thirty seconds.

“No!”

My hair is dangling into his eyes. I won’t let him get away with it.

I finger myself furiously, grinding away at his rapidly softening penis. I’m almost there.   

Almost … no …

I imagine the marketing executive beneath me.

I’m there.

Merciful. Sweet. Oblivion.

When my breathing slows I sense my husband waiting.

I can feel his heartbeat tremor against my breasts.

****

Suvi Mahonen is a freelance writer based in Surfers Paradise on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her non-fiction appears on many platforms including The Weekend Australian Magazine, HuffPost and The Establishment. Her fiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies including in The Best Australian Stories and Griffith Review. A portion of a longer work-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more from Suvi, visit her page here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/suvimahonen

___________________________

10 Replies to Being Told to Forgive My Parents

by River Kozhar

1) If you mean by the first definition of forgiveness, forgiveness as in acceptance of how things are and letting go of how you wish them to be, then I already have.

2) If you mean the second definition of forgiveness—forgiveness as in I understand that this was a mistake. You hurt me, but it was an exception, or You hurt me, but I can see that you’ve changed. I want to work through this with you because you’re worth it.—then consider that you have an unhealthy view of abusive relationships. If I were covered in bruises from my husband, would you tell me to forgive him too?

3) Why is this important to you? Why, without knowing much about me, does the fact that I have cut off ties with my parents bother you? And more importantly,

4) Why is my parents’ supposed suffering what bothers you, and not mine? Why is your reaction Oh, your poor parents. They must miss you. I’m sure they tried their best, and not Oh, you poor thing. It must have been so difficult to cut your parents out of your life. I can’t imagine what they must have put you through.

5) Perhaps it’s difficult for you to understand because you’ve been lied to too. Perhaps your abusive parents told you that parents should always be forgiven. Perhaps you’ve chosen to believe this, because it’s easier to accept the suffering than to believe that the people you love are not worth your love. That the people you love don’t know how to love you back. That the people you love are the ones hurting you the most. Or

6) Perhaps it’s difficult to understand because you have parental privilege. In your life, arguments between children and their parents are normal, but not anything more extreme than that. At the end of the day, you have always known what love is. You have always been wanted. You have never thought that being afraid of people breaking into your house was ridiculous, because there are much scarier things already inside of it. Perhaps what is difficult for you is that

7) “Parents” can be a misleading word. To those for whom it means things like friend, advisor, confidante, a “parent” is never someone who you should turn your back on. Consider that “parent” is a word that means nothing, because of the scope of experience that can fit into this word. Consider that some people’s parents are serial killers. Consider that I was unsure whether my father would actually kill me growing up. Consider that your view of “parent” is privileged and narrow-minded. Consider that this makes you lucky.

8) Instead of telling me to forgive my parents, perhaps you should ask me why I don’t. Perhaps you should ask me what I am most afraid of. Perhaps you should ask me about the nightmares I still have nearly every night because of them. Perhaps you would learn how I would do anything rather than live under the horror of their roof again. Perhaps you would learn how I give thanks every day for escaping them. Perhaps you would learn something of courage and resilience, of those who survive despite all odds.

9) A better question would be: What has it been like cutting off ties with your parents? Am I glad I did it? Am I still afraid of them? Am I still afraid period? Did I have to give up nearly everything else in order to do this? Was it still worth it? Do I spend my holidays alone? Do I miss weddings? Do I have to watch every face coming up the street when I know my parents are visiting my city? Is them finding me again one of the scariest things I can possibly imagine? Do I have to fight to maintain my freedom every single day? Is never hearing from them again one of my greatest hopes? Does my trauma still churn my gut like blades twisted in old wounds when I try to sleep? Is facing the truth still worth it? Is cutting off ties helping me to become a better person? Is it clearing space for better people? Is it cultivating more love in my life? Is it giving me hope for a better world? Is it the best decision I ever made? The answer to all of these is yes. But if you insist on telling me to change my mind, then

10) No.

****

RIVER KOZHAR has publications of prose and poetry in 25+ literary magazines and is seeking an agent for a diverse NA/YA fantasy novel. Her non-fiction (under this nom-de-plume) placed in the finals of the 2019 Pen-2-Paper disability-writing contest, and has also appeared in Bacopa Review and the Deaf Poet’s Society. She is a young retired (disabled) academic and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

POETRY

_____________________________________________________________________

First Crush

by Christina Thatcher

When I was six you arrived

at my party on a Harley—

long hair, biker’s jacket, beers

in hand. You ate the wings

off my butterfly cake and laughed

long into the night with Dad.

When I was ten you sat next to me

as my hands, adept, moved Mario

across the screen. You touched my leg,

crept up my skirt until your fingers

were too high on my thigh

and I said you shouldn’t.

When I was thirteen Dad threw you

from the house. I thought he knew

what you wanted from me.

Just this once, a hero.

When I was twenty-six Dad called

to say you’d moved in

to his new place in Florida.

You had no money and he could help.

I never told him what you did. 

When I was twenty-seven

Dad died in the heat of July.

A week later, you followed. 

First I thought it was alcohol,

but later I learned you had starved.

When I arrived at the house

emptied of bodies, the neighbours

gave me a card: Sorry for your loss.

They said you’d bought it for me

just after Dad died, but never

had the chance to send it. 

****

Christina Thatcher is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She keeps busy off campus too as the Poetry Editor for The Cardiff Review, a tutor for The Poetry School, a member of the Literature Wales Management Board and as a freelance workshop facilitator across the UK. Her poetry and short stories have featured in over 50 publications including The London Magazine, Planet Magazine, And Other Poems, Acumen and The Interpreter’s House and more. Her most recent poetry collection, How to Carry Fire, launched in April 2020 with Parthian Books. To learn more about Christina’s work please visit her website: christinathatcher.com or follow her on Twitter @writetoempower.

______________________________

Place Shape

by Jennifer Whalen

Darkness hazed the nightclub’s bathroom:

women smearing liner into coves

of their eyes, every stall door painted black.

Someone ripped the mural of Jackie Kennedy;

I didn’t recognize these people

or the thoughts they made me feel.

With my eyes on my eyes in the mirror,

I fumbled essentialism:

I didn’t want Whitman to be wrong - yes,

yes, we have our multitudes,

but in that particular moment I thought

of the various shapes I take, this shape

is something like the realist. Hours later,

I tried to fathom Jackie as past tense,

reeling rooms as if to track an exact path

to the dance floor would slip me

closer to purity. Not purity

like white sheets & chastity

but purity like symphonies

dwindling down to the sound

of a single set of strings.

I wanted a song I could mouth words through.

I pretended invisibility. Even in reduced form,

I couldn’t fold inward slim enough.

Both the spectated & spectator,

I was too timid to look right alone.

Maybe I was just being hard on myself.

I’ve never worked up the resolve

to start clawing walls. Once I stole a candle

from a table to keep a single evening

near me. But to fling to a hard surface

stripping layers of Jackie’s face,

who takes that form?

She’s somewhere on that floor,

but not a shape I’ll take. Soon,

I missed weather, moved through

a backdoor: the breeze in the night,

the night rippling folds in my clothes.

There’s a lesson somewhere in here,

but I can’t pan high enough to see it

or zoom near enough to live it.

A man sat near me on a stone wedge.

I didn’t take his cigarette. He’s not a light

to carry with me. He asked what song

I’d like to bear. Maybe the night’s solace

is every shape has a chance

to change; it’s the everpressure

of possibility that rings the same.

Tonight

by Jennifer Whalen

If it was going to start, it was going to be small:

a perfect helix curl in my hair;

foot taps along a steady melody.

If it would happen, it might as well happen

like patchwork or not at all.

Lights dimmed to the edge of non-existence

as I swiveled my chair. Not a typical

debate of lingering or leaving,

rather the hazards of diving

& sinking. It wasn’t New York City

or L.A., but clusters of buildings scraped the dark;

their windows, tiny light-filled cardinals

patterning the night. When I picked diving,

I dove. If it was going to work,

it had to be barely perceptible:

my fingertips tracing water circles

on a wooden table, a glance

through strands of hair.

Someone turned a knob on speakers

the way stakes in movies rise alongside volume.

I wasn’t the femme fatale.

I wasn’t going to whisper life

into the lifeless. I wouldn’t return what’s lost

or forgotten, this night

or any. Like grains of sand found in old pockets,

we’ll remember it simply & fondly,

a red sequin snapped free

of a favorite dress. If I was going to love

this cherry-topped thing, or me,

or anyone, it was going to take years,

but this is irrelevant: it was tonight.

****

Jennifer Whalen’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Cimarron Review, Grist, & elsewhere. She was the 2015-2016 L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House writer-in-residence at Texas State University. She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

________________________

The experiment

by Peter Clive

We created it in the desert, from human debris

that survived the chaos of our last war:

scattered body parts assembled, stitched together

and brought to life with the accumulated trauma

of a million dumbstruck orphans.

It stumbled at first, a stranger to its own limbs.

We propped it up. Our allies bound its wounds.

We indulged its simple appetite for atrocity,

buying its plunder, plying it with more bullets.

Priests well-versed in hate taught it to speak. 

We directed its primitive sectarian urges

against dictators who did not yet toe our line.

We tell the world we are blending new poisons

to make a final cure for an old disease,

as if that makes any sense at all.

When the medicine we concoct boils over

and briefly spills and sizzles on the hob,

we sprinkle more bombs into our alchemy,

and distill more profits from the blood. 

War aims narrow to a cycle of retaliation.

Friends and enemies are rendered interchangeable

by every outrage. Ghostly children

emerge from ruins, pale with dust,

to find out whose side they are on now,

and another generation of human wreckage

is strewn across the sand, ready

for the next time we need to make a monster.

****

Peter Clive lives on the southside of Glasgow, Scotland with his wife and three children. He is a scientist in the renewable energy sector. As well as poetry, he enjoys composing music for piano and spending time in the Isle of Lewis.

_______________________________

Mastectomy

by Matt Schroeder

Hang me like a lightbulb

in a third world country(

barely-held-together wire

in a house handed down

unfinished

                          by generations fled

                          upwards in hopes of

                          fewer elevator doors

                     opening in shoddy

              hospital wings

not unlike hooded

crows that swarm in

an early winter sunset

              where we’re given a

              reluctant handful of

      change into the lives of

the unconscious & prepped

for surgery as the doctors’

smokestack orchestra tunes

in the wings forming an

ever-rising symphony of

dust tossing a plastic

bag whatever sense of

normalcy high into the air

             a cab driver apologizes

for his cigarette in a no smoking

zone as if such a thing existed

here worried eyes mouths tight

              a sparrow finds said bag

    singing heat wave distortions

only to realize it’s not its

lover but a Roma band

golden hour brass poorly tuned

drums breaking in the distance

setting over the horizon) & leave

me on until your mother comes home

****

Matt Schroeder is a poet and educator currently existing in the great humidity that is southern China. His poetry can be found in Thin Air Magazine and Dovecote Magazine. When he is not writing, he enjoys making friends with the other strays.

_______________________________

Dear Pen Pal

by Will Cordeiro

Dear Pen Pal,

                  Sorry

I haven’t written.

It’s enough to be

smitten by fleshy

catalogs from long-

gone lingeried sub

-letters. I toss chits,

circulars, alumni

donation pledges,

bulk-rate “current

resident” or “you

may already be a

winner” solicitations

in a kinked up litter

bin. My box is flush

with them; you might

as well address my

junk. No: at this rate,

I’m better putting off

peeking in. I must’ve

chunked a check for

my fear of rejection

slips; I jettison puff,

guff, & bureaucratic

missives. Listen, kid,

I’ve refused the past

due notices & third-

class scams. Hey pal,

I’m sure I’ve cast off

years of Your Best

Wishes; trashed Save

the Dates & a Merry X

-mas. Lost plenty of

your postcards drunk

with tropic vistas. So,

let this be forward if

not forwarded: I hope

you’re moved. I have.

I’ve eked these irk-

some lines; come to

my point, no return

address & stamped

with postage due.

                      Always,

                      Y.

Death of a Code Talker

by Will Cordeiro

          Crammed in a doorjamb as part of the public

where a draft sweeps by, I’m shiftless in standing

          room only, behind stiff Marines, hushed hosts

of Diné, blonde teens buzz-cut and dressed up

          with pressed beige fatigues who keep shuffling

in more fold-out chairs to seat the over-

          flow of neighbors and elders, a storied

tribe assembled here for Keith

          Little—big man, rancher, chief voice

for code talkers whose unbroken crypt-

          ography once converted their language

into a weapon. Underage, Keith enlisted

          by goading any friend handy to lend

him a thumbprint. “Now what

          was that for?” the man who gave it

pressed him. “We’re going off to war.”

          The man’s skin already inked: I should’ve given

you the finger, I imagine his comeback

          since the gravelly eulogist switches to

Navajo. Half the congregation laughs.

          This is a speech which may well stand

at the threshold of extinction in a lifetime

          or so. Uniformed in bolo ties, these soldiers,

now older and fragile, helped raise the flag

          at Iwo Jima and saved the whole Pacific

theater. The services done, I’m driving over

          barren ground, thinking of my abandoned

family; my ancestors who wrested this land,

          this country which has never not been at war

with its people. As for the tours and the rest,

          I’ve many misgivings about any nativist

bluster of American strength. Why

          are raptured young soldiers transported

into battle with only a bystander’s

          notion of their histories—but pride

for a nation that’s never loved

          anyone back? A flag stuck at half-mast

snaps in a storm blowing up. My truck

          passes a face concealed below a shadow

of Stetson, held fast against the traffic,

          trying to hitch, his thumb offered out

to switches of dust—chaffing—quickly

          lost, a ghost crossed in the gust, translated

to wind… And maybe you’d be right

           to ask what part I’ve played in all of this.

****

Will Cordeiro has recent work appearing or forthcoming in Agni, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will’s collection Trap Street won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, forthcoming in 2020. Will co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

__________________________

The Tree in Our Back Yar

by Holly Day

She kneels on the ground beside me, and I put the tiny earpieces in her tiny ears

hold the silver disc of the stethoscope up to the peeling white bark of the river birch

press it firmly against the tree. I hold my breath and watch my daughter’s eyes

grow wide with delight

as she picks up the slow pulse of the sap moving through the tree, heavy and regular

as a heartbeat. “I hear it!” she whispers excitedly, reaches out with one hand

to pat the tree as she would a large dog, or an elephant, or something magical

from one of her delightfully incomprehensible dreams.

Once, her brother knelt beside me where I lay on my bed, this same stethoscope

dangling from his own tiny ears, the silver disc pressed against my swollen belly.

“I can hear her!” he whispered excitedly, finally, the pinch of worry gone from his face

as he felt his sister move. There are so many other things I could write about here

of all of the days I waited to for the tiny fish wriggle of my daughter to come

but all that matters is that we are here now, by this tree. All that matters is this moment, right

now.

A Short Poem About Possible Muses

by Holly Day

after the repair man leaves

I start to wonder

how many of my recent poems

were inspired by the gas leak in my office.

****

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and The Tampa Review. Her newest poetry collections are In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit.net), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), and Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing).