Gwen Hart

Bat in the House

He dropped like a coal
down the chimney. 
Jittery and bold, 
he demanded to know
where we’d hidden
the moon, where we’d shut
the sky away. 
He mapped
the four corners
of the room, grimacing
up at the ceiling. 
At dawn, he balled himself
into the curtains
and covered his face
with his wings. 
If he couldn’t have moon, 
he wouldn’t have sun. 
All day, we drifted
like satellites
around the tight fist
of his refusal. At dusk, 
we hid behind the couch
with the lights turned off
and waited for the twilight
to reel him in
through the open door. 
Finally, he unfolded. 
Flapping like a piece
of carbon paper,
he raced up
to trace the stars,
leaving us huddled
there in the dark
with our caged
and fluttering hearts.

 

On the Perimeter

Harold Heidegger,
who was in my gym class,
liked to pretend he was a car.
While we played soccer,
floor hockey, and volleyball,
he drove around
the perimeter of the gym,
shifting gears, dodging
balls and insults
from the other boys,
“Hey, Harry! Watch
where you’re going!”
He never paid us much notice,
except for once
when he thrust his arm out
in a sudden signal,
turned, and ran smack into me.
The whole game stopped
while I said, “Hello, Harold,”
to which he answered,
“Beep! Beep!”
I took this to mean “I like you,”
or rather, “Quit distracting me.”
Before I could reply,
Miss Bryson blew
her whistle and yelled, “Harold!
Please stay on the road!”
He lowered his dark eyes,
backed up without a sound.

 

Gwen Hart teaches writing at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. She is the
author of the poetry collection Lost and Found (David Robert Books) and the chapbooks
Losing Ohio (Finishing Line Press) and Dating the Invisible Man (The Ledge Press).

Justin Holliday

Elucidation

Untangling words is repulsive work
like removing your lover’s hair from your own hairbrush: 
            different textures, sometimes
            even different colors.
To wrap my fingers around something so temporary
is to lay myself bare to any lasting damage: 
            promises turn brittle, 
with or without repeated usage.
Stare in the mirror, and pretend it will all fade to grey;
such intimacy induces a cold tingle when I reach for the brush: 
            Yes, I did want to move in
            Yes, I am sure, let me explain.

 

Sick Fuck

I’m suffocating in a bed of Kleenex
strewn like desiccated flowers
that crinkle at our touch. I shrink back,
look at your plaid shirt
as if it were a handkerchief: last resort.
The last time I got sick
I felt untied, alone with my bag
of honey lemon cough drops.
Now we are united in spasms and swelling.
Like teenagers we snicker:
Let’s get fucked up on cough syrup.
We pass the bottle until it’s empty,
and I want to write an ode to the red liquid
traveling to my stomach: no feeling.

 

Justin Holliday has been published in HelloHorror, Up the Staircase, The Adroit Journal,
and elsewhere.

Kate LaDew

once

when I put my arm out for support,
it's like a knife under the ribs
I can see it turn in you without my help,
grazing the heart, little drops of blood spreading inside,
reminding you through their drip drop you were so young once.
now I speak to you in sentences a child can understand,
voice raised, sugary sweet, my hands constantly around you, 
waiting for you to fail, and you were so young once, you were so young.
and a long, long time ago I was only something at the edge of your vision,
when there wasn't a thing stopping all you ever wanted.

 

if I could drink all day

I think I would
and it's not my body that's stopping me,
it paces itself like a long distance runner,
but my mother's face,
as she sees another drunk
falling down a well piled with bodies
the imprint of her lips on their sunken faces

 

Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a
BA in Studio Art.

Ralph Monday

Imagine

          Books tasted like the sun to her,
like earthy mushrooms sprouting
from cracked spines

          the words   the words
hibernating scenes stilled from
movie frames lacking a
                                        director.

          She liked reading them the best
after soaps where the sophisticated
guy elegantly swooned the woman,
or in bed with her sleeping
                                                  husband.

          There she imagined the perfect
man, composited like Kevlar
from all the ragged pages, tender
          bites, masticated morsels that were
really no more fun than the real
thing.

          That didn't matter, just climbing
the beanstalk while her husband
snored, never imagining that he
          imagined the perfect woman

          wearing angel wings and
vintage lingerie—for both the
unimaginable.

 

The Silence of Words

          As a girl I was told that it was better to
sit in silence—because I was a girl, so
I sat in silence as a girl.

          Not to be denied, I knew my creative power,
made a box of words that in curvaceous moments
pulled muscle cars from the past that drove

          me along in perfect seeing silence. Those who made
me mute may as well have written an obituary of rocks.
They did not understand that my multi-colored 

          leggings gave tread to my wanderings
where I would someday embrace the PTSD, love
the past ripped pains. 

          In my hush I saw that most men would have
an Ithaca-moment, that metallic lingerie was nothing
but a subversion of surfaces withholding encrypted love, 

          that their glass gears, confectioned cogs
prevented them from ever knowing an intimate,
perfect tension,

          from seeing that from an off-center equator
Venus went gliding by, transiting the sun, making
of love scented inflammations.

          I sat in silence with my box of words, as a
girl in silence, because I was a girl, and knew
centuries’ afterburners

          where they only knew small gods whining
in their heads. When they talked they said
nothing— 

          could not gain immortality from the
underworld, but I learned, in my silence,
of a fire-crowned seduction

          sighed out by breath of the dead-young.
I mounted syncretism’s secrets, learned of
snakes that fondle prayer beads,

          spied a lake of ice on the moon where
dead skaters glide, plucked out the mystery,
for this is where Van Gogh painted, 

          where Stravinsky composes modern melodies
still, the place where the Alps are eating the oceans
and Josephine Baker taught Eve’s black moves. 

          These things smiled at me from my box of
words, where I sat in perfect silence, as a girl,
moving toward that day when I would be a woman

 

Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in
Harriman, TN., and published in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and
Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Lost Houses and American Renditions
is scheduled for publication, May 2015 by Aldrich Press.

Jon Riccio

Collateral Soot

Finding beauty in blood drops,
in children wrapped like corpse ravioli,
a wedding ring on linen knots
so ornate even the IEDs
clamor: what manner shroud
is fodder? you wonder
if eyelids are the last to die,
the schoolyard, if it
was foreheads anointed
in mortar, a canopy
to mend the deceased’s
cheek clasping an Adam’s
apple that perished all of age
eight; you wonder
if that rocket launcher
was prone to swaddling,
if shrapnel is the finish
line to a brigadier alley’s
sleep, if the armory
nicked the lunchbox
before it severed
collateral soot,
the chalkboard, whether
it fell childfirst, if conflict
depends on backstory
the way a missile
obliterates a birthmark
yet leaves the brow unscathed

 

Jon Riccio studied viola performance at Oberlin College and the Cleveland Institute of
Music. An MFA candidate at the University of Arizona, current and forthcoming work
appears in Redivider, Waxwing, Really System, The Writing Disorder and White Whale
Review, among others. A recent Pushcart nominee, he resides in Tucson.

Madaline Foglesong

Trivia

The public access trivia game show host tells me backstage that he'll sex me up real smart and I say okay because I want to beat Mary Lou McCartney who's dressed like a sunflower. I want my ex-husband and his new wife with the face that looks like a fingernail and all those stupid women I worked with at the party supply store and Mr. Leming who caught me cheating on a math test in seventh grade and Lenny my old boss at the restaurant who used to sneak his hand up my backside and down my backside and Sally my neighbor who's always calling the cops on my dogs Sunny and Poo Poo even though they've never done anything at all to her - I want them all to feel so bad when I don't say thank you to any of one of them when I win five hundred dollars and a year's supply of ham and lettuce and bread and ice cream and milk from the grocery store. I'm only going to say thank you to Sunny and Poo Poo when I win. So I say yes to that game show host's offer of smart sexing. Because I want to win. But then the taping starts and that game show host keeps asking questions I don't know the answers to - a question about penguins and a question about clouds and a question about the climate of someplace I've never been and won't ever go. He doesn't ask any questions about how you can tell when your husband of fifteen years is cheating on you with a woman whose face looks like a fingernail or how to empty a joint bank account and burn all of his clothes in the front yard before he gets back from a trip to Albuquerque with fingernail face. He doesn't ask how to steal sexy nurse costumes and sexy policewoman costumes and sexy devil costumes from the stock room of a party supply store to sell on the street without ever getting caught. He doesn't ask how to go on living with one kidney and pain in your knees and pain in your back and pain in your neck and pain in your little pinky toe. The game show hosts asks questions about dinosaurs and about some big superstar singer and Mary Lou McCartney answers all his questions right. There aren't any questions about how to clean up and go on living after the river floods and flows all through your house, leaving nothing unmuddied and unsoiled. The game show host doesn't ask one question I know the answer to and I lose to Mary Ann McCartney and I realize the public access trivia game show host really isn't that smart even if he thinks he is.

 

Madaline Foglesong is a writer from India.

Steve Vermillion

Four and 20 Blackbirds

Once upon a time, the girl, the little girl who lives down the lane. The lane, the tilted lane, both up and down. Yes, that lane. The one that empties into the well. She strolls, trips, falls into the well. The well is dry. In the darkness, she feels the cobblestone walls surround her. She thinks she is blind. Next thought: I will not graduate on time.

We've seen it all before, like an animated tautology. Sincerely, gently, we drop our wishes down the well, we let them float down. We offer her thoughts, prayers, the usual. 'Sorry you fell down the well.' 'Wish you were here.' She looks up. She's all eyes now, no longer blind, her eyesight returned to her, down their in the darkness at the bottom of the well. “How ever did you find me, find me in the well?” She cries. The little boy, a neighbor from down the lane replies, “It's all over town. There's a girl, fallen down the well. Everyone knows. You can see it for yourself.”

Sorry love. Sorry about this mess you've gotten yourself into, well, the condition we have found you in, in the well. Must be awful. What's your story? What's your tale? Tell us the one about the little girl who lives down the lane. The lane that leads us to the well. Tell us that one.

Black sheep loose, heads lowered, hooves scratching at the ground like instinctual goats, menace the rescuers at the well. A cow and a spoon arrive and no one pays attention. It's all a 3 penny opera. The little boy from down the lane is blue, nothing much for him to do but jump into the well, following his wishes, as rescuers and readers shower them with coins.

Another girl, a pretty girl, implores the crowd to giver some room, “OK, everyone stand back. Let me give this a try.” She unfurls what surely must be meters of hair, drops it down the well. Nothing happens. Silence. She waits, asks for patience, for more time. 

It is nearing dark when the prince arrives, dismounts from his horse and asks for the girl. The crowd is too sad to speak, they point to the well. The prince makes his radiantly handsome way through the crowd as villagers faint at the sight of him and vendors begin selling soft drinks and snacks. A reporter asks the prince what plan he has to save the girl. He smiles handsomely, the only smile he knows, and replies that his plan is to kiss her. No backup plan.

Sword drawn, asking someone to hold his waistcoat, he stands atop the wall which circles the well, holds his nose with his fee hand, and dives into the well.  

Overjoyed well wishers, who knows why, begin jumping down the well as well until the well is overflowing with wishes, sympathy, loose change, tears; and by nightfall, there is only the sound darkness, resignation, and all those people...those poor poor people, who lived happily ever after. 

The End.

 

Steve Vermillion is a writer and editor living in Northern California. He is a contributing editor at tNY Press. His recent work appears in print and online in a variety of magazines. In 2014 he was nominated for a 'Best of the Net' award in Short Stories, as well as receiving Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train Magazine's Short Story of the Year.

Jason Walker

Hydrangeas

The grapefruit-faced woman sits in her recliner and doesn't move. Her hydrangeas are
starting to wither and lose their blue. Her children come to visit from nearby towns. To
them, it's as if she's deaf. Today, she hears her youngest son whisper that the carpet
smells like mothballs and diapers. His wife, who is sitting on the flowered couch
watching a rerun of a talk show, nods. The grapefruit-faced woman knows that her
grandchildren are at home, unoccupied with schoolwork, maybe playing a new
videogame that costs too much. She's lucky that her kids have money to give their kids, 
she tells herself again. She rocks in her recliner, stops, her head tilted sideways, and
almost drools. She almost dreams that her children never were born, and that she is still
young and driven, before a car burns out in her driveway, cuts a donut, and speeds off
toward the sun. The car passes a quiet house two blocks down the road where a single
mom stands erect and numb, watering hydrangeas.

 

Jason Walker lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Other short-short stories can be found online in Monkeybicycle, The Café Irreal, Oblong, NAP, and elsewhere.