Curtis Rogers

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The HIV clinic
downtown marked
with pink triangles
like tribal symbols. Inside—paper pamphlets

and stickers, things
to take. A bowl of condoms sitting bouquet-style on the desk.
The receptionist grins.

I say I would call my brother, when they ask.
That’s a lie. No, no smoking. Drugs.
Never sold myself. No one offered. Sorry,
that’s a joke. The test just as it is. Plastic, gloves, time.

In the waiting room I never felt so small,
but on my way out I pass a man
like a finger passing through smoke.

23° 26'

The first package I didn’t
understand, bruise colored
beads packed tight,
with instructions to roll
twice daily.

The second with
two marble
colored geese,
preserved in salt and
soaked in mint
jelly to help with
the smell. Then,

over the next
few weeks others arrived, tinsel
and walnuts, deer tracks
stenciled onto papier
-mâché ornaments,
an axe head covered
in pine sap, and a pair of
sunglasses with
clips on the
temple hinges.

This morning I dug out the
letter you’d first sent
asking how I liked Florida and
I remember telling you
“It’s nice but I
miss the winters” and how
you called and said you’d send it
to me, winter, next time
it came around.

So I thought about writing to say
I miss you too, more. But I knew
that was your point, your perfect
cruelty to show me
what you consider
too great to give.

CP

Curtis Rogers is a 2012 MFA candidate at NYU for Poetry. Currently he lives in Philadelphia. His work has previously been published in Peregrine. He is a tea enthusiast.

Gary Presley

Deming

Billy Joel on the radio, "She can ruin your faith with her casual lies."

Damn, I think, but I still have my Navy duffel bag.

T-shirts, blue jeans, underwear, red silk dress shirt, black necktie, leather jacket, laptop, and a .38 Colt Cobra.

I hold the revolver, faded-blue-to-steel-gray, grip-nicked, sights filed off, remembering the kid who had it poking out of his pocket those hard years ago when I was the drunk who taught night class junior college English. I wouldn't have turned the kid in, a kid who needed a gun for balls. I never turned anyone in: booze or hash or pills were a decent bonus.

I find a black Sharpie on the hallway table, trade the house keys for it, and write "I don't think I'll come back" on the door after I pull it shut.

Into the sun, down into Texas, not stopping—well, except for beer and NoDoz and gas—not in the crush of Dallas, not out on the llano where the Comanches chased buffalo and stole women—not until somewhere before El Paso, not until her name flashes on caller ID, not until I toss the cell phone out the window and watch it bounce. Then I stop on the shoulder, wait, sipping at a beer, counting the number of lies it takes to burn trust to ash. Finally I back up, hear shatter-crunch, and move west again.

Deming, New Mexico. Lean against the bed dumping dollars into the truck gas tank, twenty hours into the trip not wanting to drive anymore, think anymore, forget anymore.

Red neon. Butterfield Stage Motel. A mom-and-pop, 57 Chevy I Like Ike place with little cabins. A slender fair-skinned Mexican woman, black hair cascading over blue western shirt, stands silent as I ask for the cabin closest to the highway. I pay cash, watch her count the bills twice, and then look up, dark eyes narrowing, as I ask, "Where's a liquor store?"

She points left.

"Gracias," I say.

Tequila, television, and my grandfather's Barlow pocketknife. Unloading the Colt, palming one bullet, and tossing five on the opposite bed.

Tequila Anejo, smoke-echoing fire, television-noise, and Barlow blade etching L I Z into the shell casing.

Tequila Anejo, sharp-green-sweet, and L I Z snuggled into the Colt's cylinder.

Another long sip, resting against the headboard, spinning the cylinder, closing my eyes, and listening to the television say, "The new Focus gets 34 miles per gallon on the…"

Sun. Shades glare open. Thirst. Bladder. Revolver on floor, empty, L I Z gone, and gone the five rounds from the other bed. Gone too Tequila Anejo…Un producto de Hacienda San José del Refugio, Amatitan, México.

Sleep again. Wake again. Shower. Dress. Wait. Eyes closed.

I smile, touch the Sharpie in my pocket, write, "Vaya con Dios," bold black, on a hundred dollar bill. I tuck the hundred under the Colt waiting silently on the floor, cylinder still open, as open as Highway 11 to Puerto Palomas on the border, and as open as all I might find down there among the haciendas or the cuidades or wherever a reformed drunk might teach English.

The slender Mexican woman watches, arms crossed, standing on the office porch as I turn onto the highway.

Our eyes meet. I drive south.

CP

Gary Presley's memoir, SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life beyond Polio, was published in October 2008 by the University of Iowa Press. Find links to his other work at http://www.garypresley.com

She Was

Issues

Outside it smells like diesel. It’s dry, the color yellow. Like silence I want to break, this summer has lasted too long. Time moves sideways and I move with it. In class I’m sixteen years old again, I’m not shy, but I’m bored and rolling my eyes. I’m not the first one out the door but I still feel embarrassed when he calls goodbye after me. As if I’ve been rude in not farewelling him. I wave and feel my face flush red. I’m mad at myself afterwards, this isn’t high school and I’m not a schoolgirl. I hate my breasts and my background. I hate that it’s early in the morning and I’m smoking outside in the heat. We share a class and he’s a customer at work, but he doesn’t recognize me. He smiles at me, then turns to smile again, lifts his eyebrows and says I look good. I enter the room five minutes after he does and he’s mid-conversation, he doesn’t see me at first and I hear him say that they’re trying to start a family, he and his wife. We make eye-contact and I raise my eyebrows. He shuts up mid-sentence and doesn’t speak for the rest of the class.

I do not believe anymore. I’ve lost my religion. And it’s not just this. I don’t write about the testing I do. How horrible it is. I am. I push myself and I test their boundaries. When they tell me they’re married, they’re engaged, they have someone waiting at home, it’s so easy from behind the bar. To be that girl. To see. Will he waver, will he say yes, will he cross the line? And they do. Time and time again. It’s so fucking easy. It shouldn’t be so easy. And it’s not the same type of guy, they’re not all drunk, young, or inexperienced, old, or jaded, they are not one type of man. It’s all types, and it’s easy. And it has nothing to do with validating myself, low self esteem or proving that I can. It’s some sick urge to see what it takes, how little it takes, how effortless it is–for them.

And the justifications, my god: she’s put on weight since we had kids, she’s not attractive to me anymore, she doesn’t notice me, she’s too busy with the kids, we never should have got married, we got married too young, I can’t please her, she doesn’t fuck me anymore, she won’t give me head, she wouldn’t mind–honest, she’s really cool like that, I’m lonely, I just want to be with a woman that I am attracted to, it’s all but over. And I’m sure that some of these reasons are valid, that there exists so much gray, but fuck, it shouldn’t take so little, it shouldn’t be so easy. All I’m doing is reaffirming my own lack of trust, playing out my issues, I know that, but then...to live with eyes wide open. I miss believing in fairy tales and if I could, I would go back to before. I regret knowing because I don’t know how to unknow.

It’s over in every way, but it’s not. I do it, because if it’s easy, then it wasn’t because of me, it was because of him.

CP

She Was going to tell us who she was, but decided she wouldn't. Still, she has a lot to say. Changing from day to day here.

xTx

There Is No Plural For Sorry

Which is funny because I’ve received three of them in one week so there MUST be a plural form of sorry but I get a red underline no matter how I type it.

All of the sorry(s) I get are from men. Some don’t say the word, some just laugh and stammer. Some say the word and hug over the place they just hurt. Others simply imply by leaping on my chest and burying their face into my breasts.

Three sorries do not a mountain make, but maybe they do because they are not crumpled balls of paper, they are meaningful for whatever prompted, for whatever came before. You cannot tell me three car crashes are not a lot or three child molestations is an insignificant number.

I will not answer your
I LOVE YOU
text message

Fuck that shit

How do I collect people
that feel the need to shit on me?

Just lucky, I guess

CP

xTx lives in California. Her work has been published in elimae, PANK, Smokelong, Dogzplot and many other fine places.

John Grey

COMBING HER HAIR

Her hair is long and gray
but with slow, steady strokes,
I comb some of the blonde youth
back into it.
She talks of twilights,
of the music wafting out of her,
of the plots and betrayals
of the heart.
But the loving fine teeth
soothe with appreciation
for the unaccountable joys
of even the most bed-ridden life.
Her own fingers tremble
at the touch of the implement
but she can have a little of my years
as I talk memory, preen love.
Some days, the truth of the matter
is in the grooming,
in the hands that descend like doves,
restore their roosting places.

CP

John Grey, born in Australia, has lived in the USA since the 1970s. His work has appeared in Slant, Briar Cliff Review, Albatross, Poetry East, Cape Rock, REAL and elsewhere.

Stephen Jarrell Williams

THE DAUNTLESS

Marching we eat,
licking our fingers,
blood and spots of spattered soil,
screaming still ringing in our ears.
We have leveled a city of so-called angels.

Sky clearing of thunder clouds and darkness,
meeting the morning birds chirping,
confused in their deafness, feathers mustered,
sleepless eyes watching our endless line of troops,
a giant gray snake slithering over a rump of country.

Our faces the same as grains of sand
broken down and polished by the tides of the sea.

We know the truth of ourselves, keeping it
a white comet in our black dreams.

Day always slapping us into the numbness of our training,
giving up our free will for a free ride of excuses.

Some of us talk in the stare of our eyes.
All blink and eventually turn away.

Tomorrow we attack again.
Shaking a city down.

Death rides a horse with bulging eyes,
clatter of hoofs waking the innocent.
Old songs in the once silence,
drifting with the wind across their bones.

Somewhere back on a road of craters,
I'm a little boy playing in a rut of rain,
bombs dropping in the distance,
my father calling me out to take a look
down the road at my coming future....

CP

Stephen Jarrell Williams was born in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to native Texans. He has lived most of his life in California. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications. He loves to write, listen to his music, and dance late into the night.

C.P. Stewart

The Telephone Call

I dig out the photographs.
Frozen faces.
Some serious,
some smiling.
Faces.
The much loved,
and the peripheral.
Faces.
Gone now.
Faces.
The list grows longer.
Endings known.
Deaths–date and manner.
Her glass fell
and her head lolled sideways.
Out like a light, he said.

Fifty-four.
It was my birthday too–
You couldn’t write it.
I roll another cigarette, reach for my drink.

The Search Party

Better days?
Yes, we have seen them.
Sometime back,
they passed this way.
A multitude, one April evening,
dressed in their fine bright coats
and singing.
Did they know that you were coming?
Run, we said, and don’t look back.

CP

C.P. Stewart lives with his family in North Yorkshire. Formerly singer and songwriter with the cult band Laughing Gravy, his poetry has been widely published in England, Canada and the United States. He is currently the poetry editor of Sotto Voce. His poetry volume, Taking it In, is available here.

Nana Ollerenshaw

Lorraine

Here, truth counts.
Sight measures the lonely course
from where she's come:
bones and hollows, sallow skin,
the ribcage of a bird.
Her mind, however, keeps its hold
guiding fragile friends
with more than manners.
She shares their shocked surprise,
the haste with which she's changed.
We meet now in the bedroom.
She seeks the closeness of another body
prolonging warmth against such solid flesh
but watches with precision
the drama of her transformation,
an accountant keeping track
of all that she has loved
in columns,
counting down.

CP

Nana Ollerenshaw grew up in Connecticut, married an Australian, and moved to Australia in 1965. She changed from school teaching to nursing in 1988, and currently lives in Buderim on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland.

Caitlin Foster

Capitulation

He insists upon the small three floor walk-up in Montmartre with the water-stained ceilings and grimy-windowed bedroom. “A fixer-upper,” he says. “We’ll work on it.” So they drag his orange sofa up twenty-four stairs, tack a nail into the wall for her Renoir calendar, buy baguettes from the bakery on the corner, make love with the windows open on sunny afternoons. Because this is what it means to live in this new place.

Four months later and he still can’t speak French. And after he sees the man from the apartment below them with his hands all over her in the alley behind their building, the baguettes start to taste like sawdust. And the way the whitewash curls away from the courtyard walls only makes him think of the time the metro car’s door shut before he could get on. He felt the doors begin to close and the train inch forward as she stepped in, him behind her. When he pulled at her hand, tugging her back, she gave him a flat, plain look and let go. Bereft in Abbesses station, he watched her corn-colored hair disappear behind smudged glass into the blank tunnel.

He buys a one-way ticket back to Omaha and leaves the sofa in Paris.

CP

Caitlin Foster is a high school senior from New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a handful of stones and Short, Fast and Deadly.

Len Kuntz

Grace

The kid in line looks broken, bent at the hip like a less than mark, as if he’s missing ribs on that side. He walks with a looping gait, ratchety, and kicks a stanchion so that it whirls before bouncing off the wall of glass and hitting me in the knee.

He doesn’t look up. He finds his wallet and buys his movie ticket just like anyone.

In grade school I wore Army Surplus clothes. I kept my bangs so long they’d curl at the ends, any way to hide myself, to camouflage the rash of angry acne craters.

The only one who talked to me had a body like this boy, but her chest was set up high, a stack of too many hard back books, swallowing her neck until it seemed she was nothing more than head and ribs and bird legs.

She never said it, but she loved me.

When the new kid moved to our town he didn’t know any better. He wore puka shells and polo-shirts and cologne that smelled like forests. He took me as a friend before the others could warn him, and then they quickly fell in line, too, acquiescing, because that’s how staying popular works.

A week into summer, she moved away, proof to me of God’s existence, his mercy and his grace.

CP

Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington with an eagle and three pesky beavers. His work has appeared in Dogzplot, Juked, Rumble, Storyglossia, Word Riot, and many other fine places.

Louisa Howerow

Time Lag

After he says, this isn't about you,
she flicks away his hand, concentrates
on the small potted vine, an upper leaf.

She waits for the rest of the words,
for the yellow to creep down
leaf by leaf, the stems to wither.

The overhead light fixture, unable
to bear silence, moves outside, hangs
luminescent in the winter chokecherry bush.

Touch, move, leave, none of this is
personal. The crushed space between them
smells of mustard gas. She digs a trench.

—First appeared in Whistling Shade, 2005

Forewarned

At fifteen, I might have ignored the boy
from the Arab quarter who sold fresh figs,
tear-shapes in soft gold skin, small enough

to fit a young girl's palm. I might have
heeded my mother's warning
how Eve, eyes open to her nakedness,

wore an apron of fig leaves. But
the close of summer sent me back
to eat from the boy's hand,

sink teeth into sweet, pink pulp, seeds
blushed red. At dusk, outside the garden gate,
our mouths flowered, reclaimed grace.

—First appeared in The Pedestal #27, 2005


CP

Louisa Howerow’s poetry has appeared online and in numerous journals and small press magazines in Canada, England and the United States.

Dan Allawat

Working in the Rust Belt

Timecards standing loosely, at parade rest.
The formations arranged alphabetically
Waiting quietly for the tell-tale sounds
Of heavy work-boots shuffling sleepily
Across a cement floor that has carried many
Though now carries so few that spiders hardly notice.

Outside of the factory the sun still sleeps
Ignoring those who rise in confused darkness.
They don their chambray shirts and pack lunches
Kissing their slumbering loved ones softly.
Driving through streets once teeming with life
They pray that their timecards are still waiting.

In a paneled office above the factory floor
A weary spider looks for an adequate hiding place
As many women and men in suits begin to file in.
If he could understand them he would soon know
Life down on the floor will be getting much better.
Soon he and his eight-legged brothers will own the place.

CP

Dan Allawat lives in South Florida where he is enrolled in an MFA program. His work has appeared in Dead Mule, Skyline Literary Magazine, Flashquake, and others.

Christian Bell

Dale Murphy

Look, he says, my glove has Dale Murphy’s signature printed on it. That glove was magic playing school lot baseball. Snagging searing grounders, somehow stretching to catch flyballs that should’ve been just out of reach. His hand inside didn’t even sweat on blazing summer days. By the time the other kids looked inside the glove, the stitches had frayed and the webbing was worn enough to let balls slip out. One more inning, he’d shout, as night fell, as moths circled humming school building lights, their fake suns.

Clearing the Table

We’re old, bones creaking and cracking, and it’s just after breakfast and I said, who’s going to clear the table. You snap your fingers and say, how’s this, and there went the dishes in the sink, fruit husks in the garbage, table spotless with candle in the center. When did you learn to do that, I said. When’s not the question, you said, and I watched you as you stared out the window, the sky shades of autumn leaves.

CP

Christian Bell lives near Baltimore, Maryland. His fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Pindeldyboz, Skive Magazine, rumble, flashquake, and JMWW Quarterly. He blogs at imnotemilioestevez.blogspot.com.

Nicole Monaghan

New Age

I threw out the bent wand, the mangled pompoms, the sparkly belts. I tossed the beaded purse, like I was taking a free-throw shot, and it went in. I chucked the mesh skirt, its matching tunic, the transparent little shoes. I didn’t want them.

My sixteen-year-old daughter, still with the face she had at twelve was peeing again, pregnant. We’d get through it. She was smart, we had money. College would not be sacrificed. We were figuring out the logistics. My husband was grieving his little girl, but he would not turn his back on her. The boy was decent. They were not so stupid as to plan to marry yet, if ever.

She came out of the bathroom and rubbed her eyes. For one second, she was eight or nine again, a groggy girl about to hurry for the bus. But in a flash, she was thirty or forty, a woman with old wounds.

“Mom?”

“Morning, Sweetheart. How do you feel?”

I was tightening the drawstring neckline of the trash bag, satisfied to bring it outside.

“I think I had a miscarriage.”

CP

Nicole Monaghan loves words and finds inspiration everywhere. Her work has appeared in Foundling Review and is forthcoming in Long Story Short.