An online journal for small literature
swamp thing
I’ve done not all good things.
I’ve said not all good things.
I’ve been not all good – things
have made; things haven’t made see-saw.
Things have made more like an hourglass; not in
grains. Things have made more like a figure – the one we never seem to get, ourselves, quite right at the
hip.
Pull. Dip.
Sway.
Please don’t lock me away.
Please don’t lock me under eye and board.
Please don’t lock me away. Please stay.
Stay.
Away.
Aura Martin is currently a senior creative writing (B.F.A.) student at Truman State University. She serves as staff writer for The Index–Truman State University’s student-led newspaper–intern at Golden Antelope Press, and assistant nonfiction editor at WORDPEACE. In Aura’s free time, she likes to run and take road trips.
There is No Space for Anything (But Dreaming)
Last time I drove to a reading I brought a boy who wasn’t my boy but a boy from class. He stretched bungee sentences and overloaded hot cocoa with spices. He just didn’t know when to shut up, but talking wasn’t what I had in mind when I asked him out. He is that boy with the crooked smile and thumbprint lizards on his notebook. I never learned how to draw flames properly.
The second time I went to a reading, I asked a girl who was a girlfriend who I thought was alone but that girl now too has someone. She is the hot apple cider I needed in my life, and on the drive, she insisted I wear her mustard gloves. She read me her poetry, unknitting words from her tapestries.
When was the last time you kissed someone?
Read me something else. My eyes facing away from the red band on the horizon.
Didn’t you have your heart broken, from that boy at Blue Shed?
Yes, but even if that woman wasn’t in the way, he still would’ve said no.
To find love, the trick is to leave the door open, and then somebody will come along and stand there smiling and ask if you would like some company. I left that door open for two years, in sunshine and snow showers. The only ones who stopped by were peeping Toms and boys with dead daisies.
You’ve got to be desperate to approach the awkward tomboy who always says the wrong thing.
Several glasses of wine later, I realize that I am the person you feel sorry for. I throw away the heart locket and punch every light bulb till there is only darkness and bleeding hands.
Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.
Mail Order Fruit
At seven her favorite food was apricots. She liked the way the tiny fruit fit in the curve of her hand, even then. There was something about the lightness of the fruit, the juicy gush and sticky rush of that first bite that made her grin, as if the tart aftertaste were lifting up the edges of her lips. Her mother kept them in a glass bowl that looked like curving translucent palm fronds supported the mountain of apricots, their fuzzed backs rolling against one another like the hills of the valley they lived in.
At twelve her mother packed plastic baggies of dried apricots for her to bring in her lunch bag to school. She’d tried bringing the fresh fruit but it often got bruised by lunch time, a soft brown spot mushing against her teeth when she bit in before hitting the gnarled walnut of a pit at its center. The dried apricots looked, to her, like shriveled tongues and their insides tasted of velvet, soft against her mouth, smooth and rich as though filled with preserves. Her mother kept the dried apricots in a glass jar by the stove, the wrinkled flesh of the fruit piled high next to the Kosher salt.
At fourteen her mother met a new man and on the weekends she was shipped a town over to stay with her grandmother who had a floral wallpapered kitchen and a cuckoo clock that looked like a black cat. On the hour the cat’s tongue would dart out of its mouth and its tail would sway with the seconds. It bellowed like a ship’s horn instead of dinging and sometimes, on Sunday afternoons before her mother came to pick her up, she would follow the tail’s trajectory and nearly fall out of her seat at the blaring of the hour. Her grandmother made fresh apricot jam, slicing the fruit and boiling it down in a grey pot on the old gas stove, adding sugar by the cupful. She ate the jam, pale orange and quaveringly gelatinous, on scones her grandmother baked fresh every Friday. It sat rich and tart and sweet all at once on her tongue and the cat wagged its tail and stuck out its own tongue as though asking for jam.
At twenty-one on a trip with some girls from her college she tasted apricot-wine. They were deep in the valley surrounded by vineyards, grape vines crawling up the hills around them. There were four of them, all taking the same history course at the local university, and they stood leaning against the butcher block bar while men in white button downs served them quarter cups of wine to taste. The apricot-wine was a pale blush color with little bubbles of carbonation floating through it like clouds. When she took her first sip of it she swore that she’d been blasted back to seven when she bit into her first apricot and was met with an explosion of sweet unexpected flavor married with the smooth furred texture of the apricot’s skin.
At twenty-three her mother had signed her up for a mail order fruit delivery service that sent a carton of apricots to her door at the beginning of every week. At first she kept pace with the fruit. She ate it fresh, she boiled it down into jam, baked it into muffins. But when her mother got sick and she was called away from her small home, on the edge of the valley, to spend stretches of time in the hospital fetching ice chips, she fell behind. A neighbor, who’d been given a key for just such circumstances, brought the apricots into the house every week and set them on the kitchen counter to rest. These apricots never seemed to go bad as they had in her lunch bag as a child, they instead stayed perfectly round and sunset-colored, piling in the corners of the kitchen, spilling from what had once been the utensil drawer.
When her mother died she brought home the glass bowl shaped of palm fronds and filled it with the fruit. She set the glass jar that had once held the dried apricots next to her own Kosher salt and filled it with the peach-colored globes. The fruit spilled from her cabinets, filled the entirety of her dishwasher, and carpeted the floor like a round-topped shag rug, soft against her feet. She tried calling the mail order company, tried telling them that her mother was dead, there would be no more payments, no more fruit, but the apricots continued to arrive. Each week a new carton of them appeared on her doorstep and she’d carry them inside. If they’d gone rotten she might have considered getting rid of them, but they stayed tart and sweet and tense at first bite the way they should, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw out the fruit that stayed, somehow, just as she liked it – on the cusp of ripeness.
At twenty-four the apricots began to taste sour. It wasn’t just the ones that filled her kitchen, and now dining and living rooms. She’d thought of that as she brought the fresh ones into her home and bit into them to find the fruit’s flesh gravelly and sour and so she’d gone to the market and bought a singular apricot. She’d wrapped it in the cellophane bags that were kept on a thick roll by the fruit displays and paid thirty-five cents for it. She hadn’t even waited until she got home to sink her teeth into the soft flesh. It tasted rotten. Cloying and muddy. It tasted almost of death, the way her mother had smelled in her last hours – musky and rank and yet somehow unbearably sweet.
At home there was another carton of apricots waiting on her door step. She kicked it away instead of scooping it up, as she normally did. When she opened her door she had to put her weight behind it and with a great heave she cleared a path in the maw of her home, a wedge devoid of apricots. When the door closed behind her with a creak and click that reminded her of the bellow of her grandmother’s cuckoo clock, she squinted against the dark to see the distorted shadows of her home cast onto the bumpy surface of thousands of apricots. They were everywhere. They coated her walls now, climbed her kitchen counters in pyramidic piles, they peered out of the crevices between her couch cushions and filled the gaps between her books. They sat in her kitchen chairs and lodged themselves in drawers and cabinets and appliances. They filled her sink. Still holding the cellophane bag from the market she first sat and then laid down on her kitchen floor. The fruits popped and burst beneath her weight and she felt the front of her shirt grow wet as they bled. She pressed her face into the rounded tops of the apricots and, closing her eyes, pretended she was skin to skin with her mother, feeling the soft fur of the apricots as the silken down that had once coated her mother’s cheeks.
Terry Has been painting for over forty five years. He just started creating Poems, he has had five poems in the Salt Lake City Weekly paper. Four Kindle E- Books. Variant and Tide S.L.C.C. Anthologies. A Sonnet in Rue Scribe.
Sleepy Whale 253
Agency of fire
Polyhedral masses of bituminous coal
Foliated fossilized decides
Omnipresent primeval forest
Aluminiferous vegetative existence
The sun uneven calorifloation
Unpolished dark surface of the moon
Double filiform rise in temperature
Simultaneously both sides want to boil
Double
Kettle lid ejection
“The world’s resource of choices are being depleted. For myself as a young adult, the spectrum of choice is a narrow one. Career paths are limited and stunted; movement and experiences have been similarly constricted by accessible time, money, and energy. In poetry, however, I have found a space of unlimited autonomous choice. My words can be placed and spread to communicate the deepest wells of myself or jumbled to the point of complete incomprehensibility. And so, I am an artist in the Hudson Valley, New York with work published in Penultimate Peanut Magazine and Genre: Urban Arts Journal.” Twitter: @workmarytr, Email: 217workmartyr@gmail.com
Omens
Sometimes I leave the door open
For a chance of a breeze
You might take it for an omen
But none in my home leave
Vern Fein is a retired special ed teacher who started writing poetry three years ago and, with help from poetry groups and friends, has had some success publishing, but really just loves the experience and learning in his golden years.
Leave-Taking
Does the mother bird rue
when her fledgling leaves the nest,
drop the worm while the
father squawks and squawks,
soothes her ruffled feathers?
We humans though scratch and claw
when one of ours moves far away
sad over
the very reason
we raised them.
“But I am not a bird,”
my wife cries,
as she nests in my arms.
Rising
Early in the morning
your mind a carousel
riding thoughts, memories
up, down,
round and round
on, off,
giraffes, unicorns, lambs
or
gargoyles, serpents, dragons
you must choose
hang on tight
face the day.
Exhilaration
That summer, a newly licensed teen
eager to drive anytime,
my Step-Mother remembered
what she forgot at the store,
a green pepper, sour cream.
Sometimes, on purpose,
I forgot some of her items,
anxious to drive back
when she beckoned,
handed over the shiny keys.
Years later, my wife and I retired,
after we drive together
on our little shopping trips,
she forgets more and more,
sends me back,
a green pepper, sour cream.
I am delighted to drive.
Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.
Just Another Long Goodbye
(Raymond Chandler)
There’s no easy out for discontent
at the office. Nothing helps,
not a bottle stashed in your desk,
not even girls from the typing pool
willing to help you slip out of your skin
for an hour in the afternoon.
Solitary drives up the coast and back down
only leave you where you began.
A dead end.
And writing? No help either
because the noir’s inside you,
not in LA,
and all the wisecracks, the cynical asides
never amused the demons that much.
Hollywood’s just another oil company:
nothing to choose between an intractable plot
and a ledger that refuses to balance
when it’s always you
failing to make them come out right.
Studio execs keep the hooch on hand
(an unwritten codicil)
as you scribble in your closet.
And Marlowe’s there in a dark corner
sneering at you.
So you’d better go home to La Jolla, Ray,
and lay your throbbing head once more
on Cissy’s lap,
calm at last—a weaned child,
except for the whiskey at bedtime.
Shopping at Guarantee Shoe Center
(Seamus Heaney)
Brando in sandals and then scuffed boots
as an introspective Zapata,
who went barefoot most of his life;
Fred Astaire’s scuffed brogues
with metal taps, dinged and nicked
like worn out Kantian philosophers;
crepe-soled brothel creepers,
geriatric Birkenstocks
and the has-been rocker’s brogans;
those bankrupt penny loafers
in the dust of my closet,
crouched in despair, abandoned
for Spanish leather driving moccasins:
Shoes of all kinds, but none
compare with the hand-stitched high-tops
Seamus Heaney wore
at that post-reading grad student party in ’72:
Shamrock green with yellow scroll work,
glistening leprechaun footgear
that no one mentioned—
those timid poets
blathering loud nonsense over their beer mugs
as if they were outré.
And no one got close enough to Heaney
to risk stepping on his toes.
Phebe Jewell lives in the Pacific Northwest. When she’s not writing, she can be found walking her dog in the woods.
Crosswalk
“I’ve always wanted to meet an angel,” she helps me to my feet.
One hand in hers, I stand and look down at broken glass littering the street. I must get a broom. No one should be hurt because of me. Her hands are small, but strong. Her eyes meet mine. I could stand on this crosswalk forever, holding her hand. She found me. Knows me.
“Cmon, Gabriel,” tugging me toward the sidewalk. “The light’s gonna change any second now.”
“But the glass,” I point to the shards at our feet. Even angels drop things when they’re in a hurry.
Pulling at my tee shirt, “Cmon.”
I can’t move. The glass is teeth
knocked out of the mouth of the sky. I must stay with the pieces until I can
put them back together. The sidewalk is crowded with people looking down. I
want to tell them the sky is blue, the earth is round, that we are air, but my
voice is broken.
“Move, asshole!” a large man
shouts from his truck, hand on the horn as he slows into a right turn. Speeding
uphill, he leans out the window and gives me the finger. Bits of glass caught in his tire treads catch
sun and wink at me.
I reach for her, but she’s gone.
Carolyn Asnien has worked as a welfare caseworker, teacher on the Navajo Reservation, probation officer, astrologer, substance abuse counselor and hypnotherapist. But she has always been a poet.
In Russia
(Therapy Session)
“In Russia…” he said of his nighttime dream
as his head tilts into a perfect Modigliani oval
“In Russia…”
My own dream last night was of a lover leaving
my heart sinking.
So now my dream looks at his dream
our night images walking back and forth between us
This frigid morning he comes to his appointment
bringing me black sugared coffee
and says he had a bad week
drinking
starting fights
watching porn
because his father died a year ago this January
in Russia
and he needs to let him go
How cold it must have been when his father died
And never before have I thought to picture my own father
as a boy
in Russia
the snow falling…
Randal A. Burd, Jr. is an educator, freelance editor, writer, and poet. His freelance writing includes assignments on the paid writing team for Ancestry.com and multiple online blogs, newsletters, and publications.
Randal received his Master’s Degree in English Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Missouri. He currently works on the site of a residential treatment facility for juveniles in rural Missouri. He lives in southeast Missouri with his wife and two children.
Humblest Apologies
Too personal a thought to be laid bare,
A naked truth now shrouded in cheap rhyme.
No less profound to stand the test of time
Than those the masters once saw fit to share.
Why should a random stranger deem to care?
Expression via sonnet is a crime–
To use such an archaic paradigm
And then expect one’s talent to compare.
Consider, then, emotions found within
And surely found throughout humanity
Have meant enough to someone such as me
To risk unwanted feelings of chagrin.
And thus, with ample warning, pray begin
To reassess conventionality.
Prematurely Blessed
I watched her come too fast into this world.
I heard those faint unhealthy infant cries.
And as they checked her length and weight and size,
Her little fingers ’round my finger curled.
Untimely from her mother’s womb was hurled
Our premature and sickly sacred prize
Who, we would later come to realize,
Became the star ’round which our planet whirled.
Her sickliness received intensive care;
Pneumonia left her lungs and let her thrive–
So lucky and so blessed to be alive!
Our lives were changed forever then and there.
And ever since our daughter did arrive,
There’s never been a day that could compare.
While Waiting
While waiting for the Greyhound bus,
my dad and I, the two of us,
recounted pleasant moments passed:
the memories we had amassed,
experienced, and oft discussed.
Our dialog continued thus—
light-hearted and extraneous—
until we saw the bus at last
while waiting.
We said goodbye without much fuss;
I stepped into the ominous,
uncharted future from the past
not knowing how my die was cast
and feeling I grew up too fast
while waiting.