Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Posit, The Maine Review, and Diagram. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.

Hot

It is very hot and I am not
going to tell you you are beautiful
and I am not going to say I’m impressed
because you’ve read Proust or Goethe
or even weary Dostoyevsky who
contemplated certain corners
of the universe in worn boots.
It is very hot and you are not
more beautiful than Merve who
checks my eggs and beer and detergent
through register 3 at the grocery
and writes heartfelt letters to a man
in Bursa that say the weather is hot
and I am not as beautiful as you who
crosses the shadows of the Ulu Mosque,
a shadow yourself in dark clothes.
It is very hot and you don’t matter
and maybe I don’t matter
but a brick falls and a bat swallows
two or more mosquitoes and maybe
everything is just all right.

Metonymies

My father became a blue suit
that smelled of tobacco and mint.

My mother had a body, but she
became a library book, a mystery—

ink and use and coffee with milk.
They spoke adult things while I

rearranged my Legos into a thousand
definitions of what might be.

I was carpeting becoming cologne,
and that bad gum smell in packs

of baseball cards. Only later I’d be
the avocado lotion of the girl

I loved, and she a home long after
it had burned. On those summer days

when the frequent swallows tore
against the sky, we all were lake-

water and Welch’s grape juice,
and the plastic that seals tubs

of Reiter sour cream. My father
heaped it on his baked potato, feeling

sad, the jazz in his skull blooming
then fading. After dinner, dishes,

my mother rose, Dean Koontz
in her hand, the smell of impatiens

everywhere inside the Ohio dark
as the city gassed the mosquitoes

and that gas made us all the same—
doubts and intrigues and flesh.

Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. in Drama & English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry was awarded the Harry Hoyt Lacey Prize in Poetry (Fall 2015), and his writing has been published in 250+ publications in 28 countries. www.brandonmarlon.com

Country Barn

Cockcrow’s rays against red-painted siding
add a fiery tincture, stark and arresting,
to an otherwise monotone surround
of swidden and forests pruned and pollarded,
a quiet haven redolent of timber and hay
where each thread of sound
is distinctly discerned and townspeople
come to rusticate or else when lost.

At prandial hours, grazing livestock mosey
along through sliding doors, past tractors
in various states of disrepair, keen on ensilage
to supplement their diets;
they casually disregard the ranch hand,
immersed in the sudorific ardor of labor,
forging a brand in the refiner’s fire.

All the stalls and chutes are in adequate fettle,
although silos display the toll of the elements.
Pewter wind chimes, decorative and melodic,
taunt the aged weather vane with their newness
even as the windpump bemoans its missing blades.

Local folk, salt of the earth, humble as a pebble,
heave bales and inhale the breeze,
glad to disburden their backs
every so often and munch by the porch
smoked jerky, guessing at the spice rub,
an unorchestrated symphony of neighing,
lowing, bleating, crowing, and clucking
constant in the background, reverberating off
lofty rafters where spiders oversee proceedings.

Airport Lounge

Sometimes reaching the designated gate
is a micro feat that feels macro, a private triumph
for those surpassing the hectic havoc
of an international terminal at midday,
where people vie, jostle, queue,
sardines rushing to be canned in metal birds.

This assembly of assorted cross-purposes
is but a symphony of haste and angst,
a community of wanderers, random and non-replicable,
its members anxious for destinations
while reluctantly resigned to journeys,
the real price we must pay.

Many consider lounge a misnomer,
for this is a hall of tension and dread;
not all the duty-free liquor, smartphones, or flat screen TVs
looping muted newscasts can distract the mind
from its uneasiness, from the sense of being
corralled and harried, demoted to sheeple.

In such a way station, where there are alternately
way too many seats or none available whatsoever,
the wise befriend strangers so that time flies
faster even than the 747 now preboarding
passengers with small children or special needs,
its jets set to entirely alter the atmosphere.

Madeleine De Pree is a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She has appeared in five different publications, the most recent of which include The Thing Itself and Little Rose Magazine.

Peeling Teeth

When your adult teeth grew in, your mouth was too small to hold them. So the dentist had to pull eight teeth.

During this pulling, the dentist accidentally dropped two teeth down your throat, which you swallowed on reflex. I tell you that this is hilarious, because it is. You are missing a quarter of your adult mouth.

***

You think a lot about science and death. These are the only pursuits worth following: science and death. You tell me this while we sit in your parked car. And I disagree. What about art, I say. Doesn’t art matter. You tell me that art is too virile. Too nebulous. It is not wholly safe.

***

It’s dark again. We’re walking close along a sidewalk. You laugh. And I ask What. But you shake your head and smile, not answering. You point at my pink shoelaces instead. Double-knotted.

You laugh again. And again I ask why. You say Life. You say Life is a life experience.

***

You say Sometimes I feel ruined. And I ask How do you mean. I know what you mean. I see it moving around behind your eyes, not settling. But you won’t say it. So I think Fine. And I think Maybe I’ll just leave. But I don’t. And we stand outside by the water.

The air comes close and presses against us. It smells like cigarettes and nothing and lake.

***

I don’t think I care about you. You say this one night. Or if I do, it’s not in the right way. You say you are sorry. You know you are wrong.

I should say that I love you. That I feel like a naked grape. Peeled. With my nerve endings exposed to the air and everything stinging. But instead I put my hands in my pockets and shrug. And I think about your body. Cloth scraps. The feeling of pins.

***

Later that week you will buy a margarita. I will not see you before or after. And you will not have me.

But you will have someone. Someone and a salt rim.

Audrey Wick  is a full-time professor of English at Blinn College in Texas. There, she is a writing teacher who writes. Her first women’s fiction novel FINDING TRUE NORTH released from Tule Publishing April 12, 2018, and its sister story releases July 26. Her writing has also appeared in college textbooks published by Cengage Learning and W. W. Norton as well as in The Houston Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, Writer’s Digest, Southern Writers, and various literary journals.

She believes the secret to happiness includes lifelong learning and good stories. But travel and coffee help. She has journeyed to over twenty countries—and sipped coffee at every one. Readers can connect with Audrey at her writing website of audreywick.com, and on Twitter and Instagram @WickWrites.

Her Favorite Element on the Periodic Table  

That summer she became a chlorine mermaid. In a friend’s pool that overlooked the San Juans, strawberry hair fanned behind her, tresses like peacock feathers. Bubbles floated to the surface faster than her thoughts. She stayed suspended in counts that increased with each attempt.

Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four . . .

“Young and sweet and only seventeen,” her lungs fortified and her body adjusted to sub-surface existence every time she practiced. And for what was she practicing? Was this Stoicism? Or her version of it?

Sixty-seven, sixty-eight . . .

Awareness was hers but no one else’s. The audience rimming the deck of the pool had long dissipated. It was her, the water, and her breath.

Eighty-one . . . And then she could count no more.

Labored and spent, she parted her lips, accepting the rush of cool water. She tasted an altered state, change rolling on her tongue like waves of relief. She drank with tight-shut eyes the water that was not made for drinking.

Katharine Coggeshall is a technical writer-editor living in the mountains of New Mexico. She dabbles in everything from writing newspaper columns to R&D 100 applications to poetry. There is no adventure she is unwilling to try.

Inferiority Complex

I think it’s a nonrestrictive clause, I say, defending my twinning commas like a mother defends her children who are far too old to be dressed alike but desperate to receive attention, even if it’s negative attention, like a soggy potato chip or some other disingenuous psychobabble spouted by pediatricians with no kids. DINKS, they’re called—dual income no kids—living a life of caviar and feasting on their judgements, overstuffed to the point of no longer seeing their feet or seeing the path my feet have tread. Perhaps I have said too much with my commas, laying my hand on the table and revealing no more than a pair of twos. My cards slip from my clammy hands just as my colleagues all murmur their agreement, ending my lifetime inferiority complex.

First Date

“On occasion” is my go-to,
my red lipstick in my bag,
my speed-dial for all topics,
my translation for the perfunctory.
I spritz this two-word statement,
comb it through my hair,
before donning the obligatory
LBD and kitten heels.

You get used to telling half-truths,
to flossing out the rest
and finding all the depth
still plaqued upon your teeth.
But the words that I choke back
would only choke him more
as he suffocates from plunging
to levels down so deep.

I am sparing lives
every Friday, half past nine
with my reticent retort—
“on occasion”—
on my tongue.

Something Good

I need something good to happen today. I’d pay 50 cents for a miracle. Or use those silver circles to replace the blue-black ones beneath my eyes. Though the silver would drip down my throat and choke me like my silver spoon always does, eroding my molars with the acid, creating holes in my already cracked self-image. It’s a high price to pay, but we’re talking about a miracle after all.

There’s something in the sky that whispers no miracles are to be had today, by me or any other “worshiper-when-convenient” K-mart patron of God who only acknowledges His existence in dire times (or when wrapped around a toilet bowl). The Norse and Greeks harnessed the power of statistics when weighing their potential for miracles; my scale is far more lopsided and inclined to deny me donuts…and miracles.

So I’ll keep my 50 cents and try my luck at the lottery instead.

Farewell to Confidence

On a full moon fortnight,
wicked wind wills
up my spine, through my hair,
around my ear, and to my mind
where it spreads like cyanide
through the folded cornfield maze,
shadow cast upon the screen
camera-lensed against my eye
and focal-pointed straight at me.
I’m a precision shot—
arrows fly, daggers rain.
None survive the wicked wind.
From outside, a peaceful scene
while cornfields die in hurricanes.
Farewell, my confidence.
Until we meet again.

Elizabeth Kiem is the author of The Bolshoi Saga, which is like Red Sparrow, but better.

Discharge

It took him some time to locate his toothbrush, though he had placed it quite deliberately on top of a folded piece of notepaper on the sill. Discharge, he knew, would commence at noon. And though he had never, in all his years in prison, slept later than ten o’clock, and then only in the dead of winter when the light leant no indication of time passing or not, Jacob had carefully prepared for the event as if the scenario was a one-shot deal. Then he had laid awake all night, waiting for it.

When the screw came to collect him, the men were already on free-flow. A few – Handy and Pecker and Ousman – had stayed on the wing, giving up their gym time with a shrug. They wanted to play pool, they said, but Jacob knew better. None of those guys had never approached the table with anything like intent. But he was grateful for their company. They talked, again, about the meal Jacob’s mum would have ready for him. Gumbo and peas. Sorrel and oxtail. Twice Handy asked if he was sure he didn’t want to take the soapstone bird with the big tits. “Nah bruv, got no need of her now, do I,” he said. He had left the toothbrush on the sill as well, though it had been hard to do. He had become compulsively tidy in his years behind bars. Personal space and order were the only thing left in his control.

The yard, when Jacob crossed it at ten minutes to noon, was no different from any other day. He was carrying a small cardboard box of books and photos and he wore his green suit. He asked the screw again, as they walked to the front, about the warehouse in Swinden, the one they said held all the personal effects prisoners accumulate over the years. He asked whether they would deliver his clothes soon or if he would have to make the trip himself, and as he asked, Jacob thought specifically of the leather jacket that his cousin Peter had brought as a gift when he was moved from Bedford to Belmarsh in 1999.

“I’ve got a new address,” he explained. “There won’t be no one at the old address to take ‘em. My fam don’t live in Ladbroke Grove no more.  They’ve moved out to Easton.”

But the guard said, “I dunno. Not my assignment. You’ll have to ask discharge.” Then when he unlocked the gate from the yard into the front annex where the number one governor and the administrative staff was housed, the guard said, “You might not want any of that stuff any more, anyway. Styles change.”  They shook hands and the screw made his way back across the yard to A wing.

Melanie had arranged for the day off. She had achieved just enough seniority to sort it – even on short notice, which was all a prisoner was given even after a twenty-three year stretch, seven in D cat and a two month probationary. First thing in the morning she went out to Brixton market and bought all of the things they had talked. She bought plantains and snapper and jimaica. She bought a bag of sorrel and confirmed with the shopkeeper that she should bring it to the boil with sugar and nutmeg and leave it to steep for three hours at least.

Outside the shop she hesitated by one of the carts selling meat pies. She had never tried one; she had always been put off by the artificial orange of the pastry. But now the fish and the plantains seemed perhaps insufficient, even if added to rice and peas, which Melanie had practiced already and felt sure she could pull off. But what if she burned the fish? What if the plantain wasn’t ripe? She thought that Jacob was unlikely to care in any case. He had already suggested that they might go straight from her flat to his mother’s house, and there, in any case, there would be a veritable feast.

She bought three meat pies, just in case.

Melanie’s place was not far from the prison.  “The #26 will take you door to door,” she had told him, but he chose to walk.

The last time he had walked down Brixton Hill he had been on the lookout for trouble to make, because how else could he break his mum’s heart. He could scarcely remember that now. He wrapped his fingers around the travel card they had given him at discharge, along with an NHS registration and 20 quid in new, waxy notes. He rubbed the sharp edge of the travel card and wondered if it had enough on it to get him to Easton. He wondered why he hadn’t thought to ask.

At the bottom of Brixton Hill, Jacob stood for some time looking at the place where the Roxy had been. That was a place where he had filled his head with smoke and drums and fought battles with his words but never with his fists, man – never with his fists. Now the Roxy was gone, and he watched the Indians and the Muslims file though the electric doors of a Waitrose, pushing prams so loaded that you couldn’t find the baby inside.

He turned left up Clapton Road and right on Stockwell and in ten minutes he was outside the building where Melanie lived. For a moment he stood on the pavement and wished that he had gone to Swinden first. Then he could have changed. He could have put on the leather jacket from 1999, and found, maybe, a pair of proper trousers. Then he laughed because in all these years he had never believed the legend of Swinden. “A fucking myth man, this warehouse,” he had said, “You must be outta your mind to think the government is paying to put your poxy old tracksuits in storage, bruv,” and yet here he was – fantasizing about the plenties of his wardrobe in a virtual reality.

He stepped up to the door and rang the bell. Her voice was bright. She met him at the landing. “You wore your green suit, Biscuit,” she said shyly. “I’m glad. It’s always been my favorite.”

Jacob stepped into her room and was at a loss for words. Because though Melanie had seen him a hundred times sitting in his cell in his favorite green suit, he, Jacob, had never seen Melanie outside of her uniform. He had never seen Melanie off the wing. For a moment he wondered if she had worried about what to wear and how to arrange her small home for his eyes.

Then he stepped forward and touched her cheek.

Robert Perchan’s poetry chapbooks are Mythic Instinct Afternoon (2005 Poetry West Prize) and Overdressed to Kill (Backwaters Press, 2005 Weldon Kees Award). His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000. His avant-la-lettre flash novel Perchan’s Chorea: Eros and Exile (Watermark Press, Wichita, 1991) was translated into French and published by Quidam Editeurs (Meudon) in 2002. In 2007 his short short story “The Neoplastic Surgeon” won the on-line Entelechy: Mind and Culture Bio-fiction Prize. He currently resides in Pusan, South Korea. You can see some of his stuff on robertperchan.com.

Atheogony

Why do trees have bark? So our archaic ascendants wouldn’t think of furniture when they climbed them. Trees, quite understandably, want to stay trees. But this worked for only an eon or two – until those hominid ancestors of ours stumbled upon tiny tchotchke shelves sprouting from the bole of a great oak like fungus. Now we have a world of sofas squatting on curbs waiting to be toted off by couch junkies in pickups. Treehouses may provide a compromise — what with Hybridity all the rage these days. Children lift themselves up into them and jabber down at us like chimps. If we bring them food and empty their waste buckets they might stay up there forever. As we learn to fill this niche and grow step by step more servile and imbecilic, we may one day come to revere these lovable Hanuman pranksters inhabiting the eaves of our forests as Gods.

The Horse’s Mouth

The Last Straw Man was the last because we had run out of straw.  Sure, you could use plastic drinking straws, and we tried that.  We even experimented with glass pipettes.  But the results were so  .  .   inauthentic.  Straw is straw, there’s no getting around it.  So for kickers we sat the Last Straw Man on the swayback of a Stalking Horse and gave the horse’s behind a slap.  Giddyap!  The Stalking Horse only looked back over its shoulder with longing at the Last Straw Man and whinnied petulantly.  Xenophon, I think it was, wrote of the flesh-eating horses of Diomedes, tyrant of Thrace, slain by Hercules in his Eighth Labor and fed to those selfsame horses.  Other sources contend the beasts ate only Red Herring Platters.  That, and steaming bowls of Mare’s Nest Soup.

Hack Sonnet

Dead Colonel! Where now you lie
staring me straight back in the eye
after the long struggle last night
when in its midst my wits took flight
and scattered on the field of battle
and abandoned you – O empty bottle
of Wild Turkey Kentucky Straight
Bourbon Whiskey – to your Fate:
trash basket casket in a corner,
my hangover your sole mourner.
I scour the closet for your label
to set a full bird back on the table.

Josh Anthony is an M.F.A. candidate (please vote for me) in the Pacific Northwest. Josh has appeared in a fingerfull of magazines including Crab Fat Magazine, Gone Lawn, and Slipstream. Contact them here: joshdanthony405@gmail.com.

To Begin
from Vulture Tree

among the varied crush and chaff
Vulture Tree stands bare and fractaling
branches trace darkness in the path
where sky meets sight

to the north the spread of wings
sun so new and crisp shadows
you thought hawk until
until the multiples and eyes

blackened Vulture Tree from fire
a hill became pyre and we walk
close to get an idea of ruin
among the varied crush and chaff

woods and shrubs regain except
the Vulture Tree singing
through wind and creak

Dimple Shah arrived in Hong Kong 10 years ago and promptly decided to forego a lucrative career in Banking and Finance for the unquantifiable joys of writing. An avid consumer of words all her life, she has only recently officially assumed the mantle of producer of words and spinner of yarns. Read more about her and her work at www.dimpleshahchronicles.com,

Confiscated

The bright lights shine, like beacons of hope. They are, instead, the harbingers of doom. Our black clothes, meant to evade detection, etch our shapes in sharp relief against the low-lying shrub.

The guards are in black too, not dusty and dirty black like us but an official looking Black, with important looking letters on their chests and backs.

My heart thrums with dread. I pull Julio’s trembling little form closer to me. Cold tendrils eviscerate my gut as the harsh reality sinks in. We’ve gambled and lost. We wanted to trade in a decrepit future in the warm sunshine of our homeland for the American Dream. What we will get instead is a nightmare of bars and cages. I’m glad Julio is wearing a diaper; my bladder feels as if it could give way any moment too.

One of the men in Black approaches me; I must hand over everything I have. I see his hands run over Julio. The man is gentle, smiling even, but it seems wrong, this man patting my son who is whimpering loudly at this stranger’s touch. Whose hands will comfort him when they take me away?

I bend down to remove the shoelaces from his little feet. They join my belt and my stash of eighty-three dollars in a plastic bag marked ‘Homeland Security’. Gone for good.

A phone rings. The man in Black fishes out his mobile. “Hi kiddo,” he replies, smiling. “Daddy’s coming home soon.”

Sarah Holly Bryant lives in New Jersey with her two ill behaved dogs and her nice husband. She majored in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sarah loves to fly fish and see the world, preferably at the same time.

The Water Closet

“I’m here for the drug test.” I feel like a junky. “The employment one.” I add.

“Fill this out.” The mean lady, who might not actually be mean, says meanly.

“Sure.” Done.

Bringing the forms back to the mean lady I smile and make eye contact. Hopefully I look bright and engaged, not manic and pie eyed. “Here.”

“What’s this?” Meany points at a box I’ve marked under other medical conditions.

“It says MS. I have MS. My handwriting is bad. But not because I have MS.”

“Where do you have it?” What a mean question.

“Everywhere.” It’s the truth.

“The restroom is there.” She points to a door with a sign on it that says, WC. I can’t remember what WC stands for. It’s something with wash I think. Wash Center. Wash Corner. Wash Closet. That’s it. Maybe not. I leave my sample for the sample checker on a shelf above the toilet labeled specemins. I haven’t done any illegal drugs in almost a decade, still I’m rattled.

“Hey, look who it is.” Crap. It’s my neighbor. He’s definitely done drugs in the last decade.

“I’m just finishing up.” I offer and close the Wash Closet door.

“That’s funny right?” He points at the WC. “So formal.”

“Right.” I reply.

“You’re nervous.” If he were standing closer I’m sure he would nudge me with his elbow. Eh, eh, eh neighbor. If I were holding the sample I’d drop it on his foot and the mean lady would have to clean it up.

“Can I leave?” Permission to leave Mrs. Meany?

“What does MS stand for?” She asks and I notice she has a rip on her eyebrow. It’s a scar that looks like a tare. Maybe an eyebrow ring that was grabbed out from her face in a fight. Mean.

“It stands for multiple sclerosis.” I say.

“Think I’ve heard of it.” She scowls.

“What does WC stand for?” I ask.

“Water Closet.” She replies.

She’s right. And mean. My neighbor is right too. I’m nervous.  I’m nervous because I’m starting a new job. I’m nervous because I have MS and it makes me nervous. I’m nervous fatigue will make working impossible. I’m nervous I will be forgetful. Get overwhelmed. I’m nervous I will have a relapse and feel like my brain is on fire and my feet are asleep.

“What’s the matter? Think you’ll fail?” My neighbor asks.