My dad knew directions.
How to make his way
without a compass.
I did not.
I could get lost in my small hometown
when it rained.
A whirling dervish of directional confusion.
How I made it out of the state,
I’ll never know.
Sands drift by,
unceasing,
but from which direction?
It gets in your eyes
preventing a purposeful journey.
Time presses on regardless,
affecting us all,
erasing us by degrees.
Knowing where to go
is imperative, yet
we don’t really know
the destination.

Nipping at the heels like a pup way too attentive, poetry has pursued this word student all his life. The muse has a funny way of showing up when it wants to make its presence known. He can do no other but to follow.

He wanted me to see the calves cut. A leather communion line funneled towards his fervent medicine. The chute would wring the wildness out of the boys.

I served to pin them in a welded ribbed vault. He ministered a headgate crown. Calico surges, and trashing collisions of the cage.

Muscles clenched then slack, heave of breath sharp and metallic, then lowing. Crimson. The vaccination needle. A scalpel flash. Eyes locked with mine.

Sex offal, soiled, to the Heeler. What did we know for sure? Horn holes cauterized. The ground stained. Ten cents more a pound.

Ed Schad is an exiled Texan living in Los Angeles who curates contemporary art at The Broad museum. When he is not working, he is fishing, line dancing, and making charcoal drawings of bulls, boars, and bison.

Surely there are consequences
to crying while driving.
Especially on the freeway.

Grace Ulibarri was born and raised in Southern California and studied English at Biola University. Alongside her literature studies, she took poetry classes at Biola University and at Oxford University. Though she is currently earning her Master’s in Teaching at the University of Southern California, she spends her free time reading and writing poetry.

This Shade of Red

Digs female vocalists of the 1970s.
Can spatchcock a chicken. Calls its niece’s dog
That Damned Thing. Is secretly leaving
everything to public television. Reminiscent.
Refulgent. Liked doing declensions back in the day.
Has a thigh-high stack of W magazines beside the toilet.

 
This Shade of Brown

Busts through crosswords. Excellent posture on its Vespa.
Soccer fan. Thinks it would have been happier as a botanist
but too late now. Gung-ho precision engineering. Simmer. Taekwondo.
Holds dear its youthful travel tales.

 
This Shade of Yellow

Normally even-steven but querulous under pressure.
Keeps the heat a degree below comfortable.
Thought it would be a lawyer when it grew up.
Penitent. Thinly. Formerly de rigueur. Never yearns in public.

 
This Shade of Orange

Double-jointed and ambidextrous. Drives a van.
All who wander, etc. Knows its Wordle
stats by heart. Diplomatic to a fault.
Homilies. Proverbs. Isms. Once cupped its hands
around a dying bird and sobbed, just sobbed.

 
This Shade of Teal

Listens to deep cuts of Spandau Ballet.
Troubadouring. Vast. Has a hoard
of discontinued lipsticks. Loves December best.
An enemy-less color. Super duper. For real.

Catie Bull lives in Tacoma, WA and earned appropriately literary degrees from Oberlin College and U.C. Davis back in the day. She has a Scottish Terrier and a lot of books.

Bob saw Jane looking at Dick, and suddenly Bob knew. Bob and Jane had been friends with Dick and Carol for years. Dick is a handsome man, the type of male beauty that stops people on the street, and his allure a running joke amongst the two couples. Tall and broad shouldered, Dick’s square-jawed face was topped with wavy golden curls that had yet to show signs of thinning, despite this being his forty-second birthday. “It’s like the three of us came from an assembly line of average, while Dick was custom made,” Jane once remarked, as they drove home from one of their many dinners together.

Carol, Bob, and Jane were of medium size and height, with brown hair. Not chestnut or honey brown, just brown. Their faces pleasant, but plain. Faces that blend in, convenient for a police line-up, yet easy to forget. Though just last month Jane surprised Bob when she spent hundreds of dollars at the beauty salon, having her hair streaked with blonde highlights. Jane never spent that kind of money on herself.

Carol carried out the cake, iced in chocolate and topped with a carefully constructed mound of fresh shaved coconut. Carol lit the candles and Jane led the foursome in a full-throated birthday song. Bob stood in the corner of the dining room of Carol and Dick’s 1920’s bungalow, and mumble-sang, off-key. Dick bent to blow out the flames, eyes up, lips pursed, gazing at Jane while he blew as if shooting her a kiss. Jane flushed, turned away, then smiled too sweetly at Carol. A flash of doubt stole across Carol’s face. Her eyes opened wide as if exposed to a flash bulb, revealing a ripple in her kind, placid demeanor.

Carol ducked her head, her slim fingers slowly extricating the extinguished candles one by one, careful not to disturb the sea of shavings on the cake she spent hours baking and decorating. Bob watched as Carol tucked the candles neatly into a happy birthday napkin, closing it with a clenched fist. She lifted her head and looked across the table where Dick had moved close to Jane. Bob followed Carol’s gaze and they watched as Jane and Dick laughed, as if sharing a private joke. Their foreheads were almost touching, their lips close, glistening. Jane was wearing a new shade of lipstick Bob had not seen before, blood-red.

Bob turned away and touched Carol’s shoulder, startling her. Carol’s eyes met Bob’s and he could tell she knew he knew too. Bob stood at Carol’s side as she plunged the knife firmly through the beautifully decorated cake, as if she no longer cared where the shavings might fall.

Brian Christopher Giddens writes fiction and poetry from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his husband, and Jasper the dog. His long career in social work and health care has provided him with much to write about. His work can be found on https://www.brianchristophergiddens.com/

For Mrs. Gruber’s fourth-grade class project Frank chose a fiddler crab. He would care for it at home. That was the point – each fourth-grader would raise a pet.

“Look,” called Frank on the second day with the crab.

“What is it?” His mother Frieda was in the kitchen. “See what he wants, Mel.”

His father went upstairs.

“What is it, Mel?”

“The things dead,” shouted Mel. “Not only that, but it smells.”

Next was a turtle. Mel Fromkin brought a small one home from the pet shop that previously sold him a crab. There was plenty of time to complete the project.

“Hey.” Frank pointed to the turtle in the bowl on his bureau. For two days, he’d fed the thing lettus and a few nasty pellets of reptile food. He called downstairs. “It’s dead.”

“Did you kill that?” asked Frieda after Frank left for school.

“No.” Mel shook his head. “But that damn thing smells as bad as the crab.”

A goldfish didn’t last much longer either. So, Frank ended up with a hamster he named Frank Jr. Mel bought Frank Jr. from the same pet store that had sold him the other creatures. Did Mrs. Gruber get a kickback from the place?

“Oh, no.” Frank pointed to the hamster cage. Frank Jr. was not running on the wheel. Frieda had come into his bedroom. Mel didn’t look forward to going to the pet store again. He didn’t relish putting a dead hamster in the trash, either.

“Look at Frank Jr.”

“Tell him I don’t want to smell him,” called Mel from the kitchen.

“Look,” demanded Frank.

Freda bent over the cage. “How about that?”

“What?” Mel called from the kitchen as he poured coffee.

“Come up.”

“No way.”

“Frank Jr.’s had  babies.”

Mel put down his cup.

“Babies?”

“And one of them’s still alive.”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

“Smells good,” said Felice.

“It’s risotto.”

“I know.”

Ralph was at the stove, stirring with a wooden spoon. They had been together for five months. That Friday night, he’d promised her a good meal, homemade and possibly romantic. Who doesn’t like risotto with mushrooms?

She closed the back door and went to the refrigerator with her bottle of Pinot Grigio.

“Have you seen Frodo?” he asked. Where was the Labrador retriever, especially with food being prepared? Some half-cooked rice had fallen on the artificial wooden tiles by Ralph’s left shoe. A Labrador retriever will eat anything on the floor. It can always be thrown up later.

“He was in the backyard as I came in,” said Felice. She made a face at the contents of the refrigerator, resting the bottle on its side. “He was chewing on your wallet.”

“My wallet?” Ralph felt for his back pocket.

“He’d gotten into your cards first.”

“My credit cards? Why didn’t you do something?”

“He’d thrown them up all over the back step by the time I walked from the car. I recognized a bit of your Visa, I think.”

She paused for a moment. Could it have been a bank card?

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

“Do you have anything you want to say, Uncle Frank?” Felice bent over the old man’s bed, talking in the direction of his head propped on a pillow. The lighting was dim. “Any last words?”

“Huh?”

“He can’t hear well,” explained the nurse in attendance. Only a few of Frank’s remaining relatives were there in his bedroom.

“ANY LAST WORDS?” shouted Felice.

“What?”

Not only was he fading fast, but he also had poor hearing for years. The nurse fumbled in his bedside table for his hearing aids.

“Damn.” She couldn’t find them.

“What?” Frank still had a few questions left in his final minutes.

‘I SAID, DAMN,” explained Cheryl, the nurse.

“I can’t hear.”

“WE’RE TRYING TO LOCATE YOUR HEARING AIDS.” That was Frank’s niece Fredda, who could shout as loudly as Felice, her cousin.

“Is that you, Felice?” The old man’s eyesight was going fast.

“Can you get his glasses?” Otto asked the nurse who’d given up on the hearing aids, now searching for Ativan.

“What?”

“YOUR GLASSES, UNCLE FRANK. WE’LL TRY TO GET THEM.”

“Who’s that?” The old man almost sat up. He had no more sit-ups in him, however.

“THAT WAS OTTO. HE TOOK A PLANE ALL THE WAY FROM CLEVELAND TO SEE YOU.”

“Otto?”

“YES, OTTO,” chimed in Fredda.

“First Fredda? And now Otto?” questioned the dying man who was down to his last few words.

“RIGHT. FREDDA, AND OTTO, AND…”

Uncle Frank sank into his pillow. “Forget about the glasses…”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

I am ankle deep in a stinking bog
which squelches, rudely pulling at my foot.
Stranded alone in so much sucking sog
I marvel at the places I’ve been put.

If I try to struggle against this slime
I know I shall go under with no trace;
perhaps I should surrender hope this time,
and, slowly sinking, muster dying grace.

Or, maybe if I, graceless, lay me down,
immersed halfway in lukewarm reeking muck,
and float, suspended, manage not to drown,
I’ll find myself aground on firmer luck.

   If, rank and damp, I knock upon your door
   will you mind my dripping on the floor?

Deb Levine is a (mostly) formal poet, scientist, and life coach. She is Academic Chair for Physical Science at Anne Arundel Community College. Although she majored in Physics at UNC-Chapel Hill, she also completed most of the coursework for the Creative Writing major as a short fiction author. Dr. Levine lives in Stevensville, MD on Kent Island with one cat, two parrots, eight chickens, and the neighbor’s rooster. She dreams in sonnet form.

“Bogged Down” was originally published in Sparks of Calliope

Dark multi-legged
feelings scuttle into the
light. Step carefully.

Deb Levine is a (mostly) formal poet, scientist, and life coach. She is Academic Chair for Physical Science at Anne Arundel Community College. Although she majored in Physics at UNC-Chapel Hill, she also completed most of the coursework for the Creative Writing major as a short fiction author. Dr. Levine lives in Stevensville, MD on Kent Island with one cat, two parrots, eight chickens, and the neighbor’s rooster. She dreams in sonnet form.