Annam Manthiram

The Art of Memory

I gave you your first haircut when you were one because the locks kept falling over your eyes and making you blink.  And when you peed on yourself, I didn’t get mad like the others.  I liked it because I could smell you and how careless you were.

I hated when you got sick, but I secretly liked it too.  When your nose ran yellow, you let me take care of you.  You’d say, “Amma,” and burp.  And then when I tried to hold you and rock you to sleep, you’d pretend to slap me so that I would feign pain, and you could comfort me instead.

When I take a shower now, and the water runs down, I can sometimes hear you crying in the drain.  But you sound like a cat.  You are purring.  And when I watch other children, all I can see are their skeletons, their tiny skulls, their plastic spines.

I am pregnant, but you know that.  Is this the last time I will try to forget you?  I know that it is you who gives me heartburn.

***

At dusk, when cars swerve to avoid hitting each other, I hope that somewhere else, a child will die too.

CP

Annam Manthiram lives in New Mexico with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in Cream City Review, PANK, Chicago Quarterly Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, and others. She has written two novels and Dysfunction, a collection of short stories. Her work has been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Prize and Best American Short Stories.

Robert John Miller

The Freeing of the Wardens

Once they realized they had never known each other, the Wardens divorced. But first they had to meet, and then they had to court, and then they had to wed. After the wedding, the marriage started.

The Wardens worked at their marriage, mastering all the proper phrases, the most affective facial muscle contortions, even different types of laughs to evoke different responses for different situations. They kept their lives simple, and they got what they reasonably thought they wanted. Unbeknownst to the Wardens, however, they were not reasonable people, and they didn't get much of anything.

Like a radio disc jockey confined to the same playlist every hour, on the hour, every hour, their words became thoughtless, thoughtlessness became automatic, automaticity became normal. The private linguistic system that emerged between them, instead of creating a framework for the exchange and appreciation of particular experiences, actually enforced their shared isolation. Unable to decode conflicting levels of reality—the difference, for example, in a stage performance, between the characters portrayed (we are married, we are saying the correct things, we appear fulfilled) and the people playacting (we don't recognize each other, we are filling the air with emptiness, we are separate when together)—each Warden smothered the other with loneliness while privately coping with uncontrollable bouts of tears.

Years after their divorce and following a chance meeting at a local convenience store, the Wardens remarried, happily. They talked of their exes in their previous marriage as if they had been characters in a screwball comedy, laughing together at real instances of what would otherwise be called dramatic irony, realizing that no one else could better relate to their present situation than this person in this aisle, right now. The stories of their lives had been taboo, even to themselves, and this new vocalization released them from their years of mutual imprisonment.

The Wardens, finally, were free.

CP

Robert John Miller's work has appeared in poeticdiversity, Writers' Bloc, and Metazen. He enjoys hats. He was born in Indiana and you can read more at http://bobsoldout.com/work.

Michelle Reale

 

There is a Possible Explanation for Everything

Your father was not a sad man. Some might even say that he was deeply content, though a simple man. You hated the way his brothers rapped their thick knuckles on his head, pointed to your mother when they thought she wasn't looking, as if that was an explanation for something. He'd sit and shake his newspaper, cigarette dangling from his lips, legs crossed, delicately. "Leave him alone," you'd yell, making your uncles feel bad or angry or both. "He's our brother," the one said, the one who narrowed his eyes when he saw you, infrequent though it was. "We love him, too," they said as if staking a claim. Your father would wink at you, smile, say, "It's okay sugar." You stood by his side breathing in his smoke, studying the cartography of his face. Your mother would watch from the crack in the door, smoking a cigarette, shaking her head in the half-hearted way that everyone who wanted to feel loved usually did.

CP

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Eyeshot, Word Riot, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly and others. She is the author of a fiction chapbook, Natural Habitat, and the forthcoming Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season.

Neila Mezynski

The Green Dress

They wouldn't go in. Might be contagious, death. Hospital room with smells of unpleasant, person for rent, no one home eyes. Darling Fred with his tweedy pipe jacket rescued fresh. Of course he would. Philosophical guy. No white picket fence. He stayed with him, she slept. Tried. Hand holding, brow stroking, silly stories. They laughed at dinner while the hand holding went on. Lots of color for the fearful ones. After, she and the green watered silk went away and came back later for the philosophical one, to sleep on the floor of his room, hold his hand, stroke his brow.

The Good Girl

She walked the long walk. Today, everyday. A ping of pleasure, the anticipation. Arms clacking against her thighs each step, wind blown hair leading the way, a bonnet, her cheeks, the breeze. Things he would whisper, confide. Make plans and his life inside. The mailman knew her by name: “Nothing today, Christine. Try tomorrow.” The hopeful girl turned and started the walk back towards the house. A soft quieting song, lips barely moving, hands clacking, whacking holding down the mounting. Secret thoughts, new life, kept as long as he left not knowing when, until then.

A taut, stringy man, her dad, his head filled with important things like how long would the rains stay away, when he would be able to bring in the crops, ride tall in the saddle, round up all the herd for slaughter until then. No time for such as a daughter’s long wait, getting bigger. A frugal man, wasting life wondering what the next day would bring. Missing today, his wife, her. Nose buried in nothing for her, only the next day, what it will bring for him. Him.

Mom, a good dish washing woman and floor sweeping person, kept in the dark in the daylight, took care of the baking of bread of chocolate and raspberry creme cakes and berry pies picked by the roadside on her own summer walks. The tall stringy man who loved her hard, no soft ways, she tolerated, fed and kept clean. Shared only a daughter who kept herself quietly and took long walks to the mailbox and others, barely home to help and be seen. The mother, a life time rage and hands in lap wanting to slap. Someone. To talk and share and be coddled, held and touched and told she was pretty, no more. He wouldn’t.

He, the one who stayed away, dodging questions and bullets and early love and it’s penance, who loved her but not in a lifelong way. She waited, he knew. A good girl. Compliant when he said prove it, not long before she did. Even though good, a good girl. Bigger things for him; no time to be out of reach for the world, tied to a man job, no thoughts his own, drunk dry. Time biding, avoid her daddy’s shotgun. She will make it go away, not before, he thought.

One day she walked past it, didn’t look inside even, she knew it now. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Make plans. Turned tail. She knew he didn’t want to have what was hers and his inside. She walked far past this time, the old schoolhouse, church, Robin’s Egg tree, out to the cool brook, no eyes. She lay down on the soft green and gently lifted her skirts and closely guarded secret. Didn’t hurt much, she knew it was the right thing and then. No later. Now. She made plans. She sang softly to herself as she walked back to the house.

CP

One time dancer/choreographer turned painter/writer, Neila Mezynski has fiction and poetry published in Snow Monkey, Word Riot, elimae, Mud Luscious, Northville Review and several other journals and reviews.                       

L. Ward Abel

 

Lloyd Nolan

I have become
the Lloyd Nolan character
from "Hannah and
Her Sisters"
at the piano
drink nearby bewitched
bewildered notes playing
the pedal lifted then
dropped reverb from wood
alive long after the key
memories in full distortion
but life at the moment
golden.

Thermals

There’s a sense of air rising
pulled from the lungs
of branches and clearings
and grottos and leaves and houses.

Steam has gotten into the room,
it gathers
it billows.  When I open
the window

it rains.  My soul is
on the breakfast plate for all to see.
The radio is almost
on a station.

A great hawk
frozen brownish white chest
caked in water
stares from the yard.

From high places
comes humility, from thermals
come the showers
that follow darker things.

CP

Poet, composer of music, lawyer, aspiring teacher and spoken-word performer, L. Ward Abel lives in rural Georgia and has published widely. He was nominated for “Best of the Web” by Dead Mule and Northville Review. He is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), and the forthcoming American Bruise (Parallel Press).

Roxane Gay

 

Fragile Moments Sometimes Linger

We drive to watch fireworks in a very small town about ten miles east of where we live. We normally drive through this town on the way to a lake cabin where the water is cold but clear and everything is surrounded by trees and sometimes sky. Sometimes, we have stopped in that small town with friends for good food so cheap, it feels like we've gotten into a time machine and gone back fifty years to a time when people said please and thank you and women wore skirts of an appropriate length. When six people can eat a full meal with drinks for less than $50 including tip that is some kind of wonderful. We always marvel at the menu. We are charmed by these seemingly forgotten and unknown places where people live their whole lives. We lay on the bed of a pick up truck and stared up at the sky. I love fireworks. They make me feel like crying. I don't know why but there's something about looking up into the night sky and seeing it filled with bright explosions of light that makes me feel something intense and honest and beautiful; fireworks make me feel alive. It's kind of like sex but I do not say that to make some kind of ridiculous analogy between fireworks and sex but rather to give an approximation of what it feels to lie in the warm bed of a pick up truck on a hot summer night. The air is thick and still, and your fingers are wrapped around those of a man who has large, calloused but always gentle hands. He makes you feel like you belong whenever he's with you, he makes the whole world fall way. There are people everywhere no one is frustrated or angry or tired everyone is just happy and the moment is fragile but it lingers. Perfect children are running around with sparklers, their arms raised above their heads, creating heartbreaking beams of speed and light. Every few moments you can hear a can of beer opening or someone laughing. When the fireworks begin, silence, and then the world vibrates with each new explosion and then there are ooohs and aahs because no matter how old you are or jaded you feel, there's nothing like seeing the reflection of fireworks spreading over a deep dark lake. There is nothing like turning to look at the person next to you and seeing something like tears in their eyes during the heavy pause as one shower of colorful light fades into the next.

CP

Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, The Mississippi Review, Cream City Review, Annalemma, McSweeney's (online), and others. She is the co-editor of PANK and can be found online at http://www.roxanegay.com. Her first collection, Ayiti, will be released in 2011. She is crazy about fireworks.

Jeff Alan

 

RIVERS

Winter is on its way out: the swollen river sounds like a thousand slamming doors echoing down the canyon. In the town at the bottom of this gorge, the sidewalks of Main Street go dark as the shops close down for the night. Blocks away, a fisherman fabricates meticulous flies in his den, one after another, waiting for the calm waters of late spring. This is the year, he says to himself, that I will catch the jeweled trout that slipped through my hands. Upstairs, in the bedroom, his wife lies in bed, a paperback romance in her hands, a wild river thrumming in her head.

HAT

It could be worse: you could be your uncle, who is selling the car to whoever wants it; or your mother, who is engaged in the wretched business of insurance payouts. You are almost thankful for solitude as you clear out the old man's closet. It is stacked to the ceiling with his wrack, and it all seems so ordinary—cobwebbed fishing poles, a black bowling ball—until you get to the box marked Stetson, and open it to find a cowboy hat. You don't understand why it's here, but it makes you think of the lightning-struck tree you cut down last summer, how it kept deep inside it a cryptogram of seasons written in the spaces between rings.


CP

Jeff Alan spends his days writing, appreciating the wildlife in his yard which abuts an expanse of woods, and amusing his insecure cat. He has work forthcoming or published in Eclectica, Right Hand Pointing, Pure Francis, Boston Literary Magazine, Diddledog, The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008, and elsewhere. His website is located at www.bonescribble.com.

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

 

THE OLD LIE

1.  CMP died on a Sunday when the world was wet.  Not with teardrops but just with sleet, though the frozen beads slithering against the window seemed enough like tears to the daughter who found him.  Slumped against the wall, already gray, wheelchair empty by the bed.

2.  CMP died remembering the harsh brightness of that morning when he’d learned what paraplegic really meant.

At times, they’d said, he would feel his pain creeping up alongside him like a phantom, would find himself half irritated at its icicle fingers and half longing for the hurt to be whole—real.  He’d crave the deeper throbbing of legs that could squirm out their discomfort.

But they weren’t entirely right.

The worse ghosts had been shimmering, partly formed figures: glossy-haired women who had smiled at C—wanted him—just days or maybe even hours before the universe had exploded into light, heat, throbbing, stillness.  Women who, if they could see him here and now, would shudder thinking what it meant to be unwhole.  See only this thing engulfing him.  Forget the demands of their mothers: Be a lady, Annie.  Want to run and run and run.

(He saw them always in the real-life passersby flinching as they tried to nod and smile, eyeing the stars and stripes bobbing up and down behind him like a kind of tail, murmuring to themselves the same sad chant as if to ward away a plague.

Just thank God it isn’t you, it isn’t you, it isn’t you—)

3.  CMP died trying not to think of all the barrels striped in orange, the faces of those miniature humans so naked and skinny as they cried and ran.  (Impossible to think of them as children: too cruel, too unreal).

He died fighting jungle warfare with the antiseptic hospital bed in which he’d coughed and coughed until they took a scalpel to his throat.  In which he’d lost his hair and then his dignity.  Then his belief—faith—hope.

4.  CMP died wondering where the victors were when every mite of reason in it that he had tried to find was dashed against the rock-hard truth of all the things that he had had to fight so long just not to see or say.

Be a patriot, C.  Love your country.

5.  CMP died straining to speak, straining to move.  Straining to think how it had once felt to wriggle his toes against the grass.  Almost wishing he were blind.

CP

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft is a graduate student in Comparative Literature and spends the bulk of her days reading and writing about twentieth-century narrative in a decaying pudding factory across the water from New York City.  Her work is forthcoming in Grey Sparrow Journal and BluePrintReview.  She also cooks a mean lasagna.

J. Bradley

 

Knife Show

When I showed you how I melted
my wedding band into a bullet,
you said you liked the direction
my art was heading.

My art was a magnet
to your moral compass.
You were a knife show
sheathed in Victoria's Secret.

I wish I could have seen
the thumb prints smudging
your glassy eyes, find
all the mouths you abandoned
the pill case of your smile.

My ring finger forgets
the white gold 'I do' halo
you tamed it with. It points
away from your direction, a heading
where you won't be missed.

Christened

After we crack this cheap champagne
across the bows of our tongues,
I am ready to be your mistake.

We will kiss like passengers
without flotation devices,
hang onto the side of the bed
like a loose plank.

There's a phone number
you'll maroon me on;
I will forget how to ask
for help.

Coffee Is For Closers

There are crops of freckles
on your shoulders I want to dust
with the rickety biplane of my teeth.

I would watch you sleep
but I'm too busy holding you
like an experimental jet pack;

I hope not to explode.
When we part, I smile
like a torn strip of prints
coughed up by a photo booth.

CP

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and the author of the upcoming flash fiction chapbook, The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is A Robot (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010).  He is the Interview Editor of PANK Magazine and lives at iheartfailure.net.

Corey Mesler

 

The Descent Beckons

I’m living in a new space now,
a space where crapulence
is frequent, where disorder
comes with the dawn.
I’m living here because I have
been on this old planet
sufficient years. In the passage of
time represented by my
life I have crested the hill, yet
I am not coasting. I am
stopping periodically to catch
my breath. I am pressing
on my chest where the misery is.
I am calling out to others, Damn,
I say, I thought it would be
easier going down. They smile
and wave back as if they don’t
comprehend me but suffer
fools gladly. Thank you for
listening yourself, my truepenny.
I am almost at a stopping point.
I am almost ready to place on
this line my final, irrefutable period.

Part

I need a simile
like I need
a hole in my poem.
There should
be more to this
but there are too many
distractions. The
metaphorical kettle
is whistling, calling
me away, calling me
by my other names,
Nightwalker, Fabulist.

CP

Corey Mesler has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has also published several novels, collections of poetry and fiction, and about a dozen chapbooks. More information and many of his works are available on Amazon or at Burke's Book Store, one of the country's oldest, which he runs with his wife. Mesler has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

John Tustin

 

ANGELS WITH NOTHING BUT DEATH

Angels with nothing but death
in their profoundly beautiful eyes.
A bullet with your name
on it.
Maybe hit by a car.
A heart attack while shoveling snow.
Then no more need for bread or air
or forward movement.
And your grandchildren will forget you
and their children will never know your name.
And you will think that now is not the time
to go because
you were finally learning something
but you lie.

CP

John Tustin's work has appeared in various magazines online and in print, and is forthcoming in The Homestead Review, tinfoildresses and The Medulla Review. He says he is married with two perfect children and a soul-crushing job in sales and menial labor.

Ray Scanlon

 

Karma

I believe it is good manners and good karma to give thanks, explicitly and formally—your choice how and to whom—for the memories we cherish. Doing so is an entirely positive practice, unlike picking up the trash of ignorant buffoons who litter in public places, the karmic benefits of which are compromised by more temptation to smug self-righteousness than most mortals can withstand. I do both, so my reincarnation could be touch and go. I hope to return no worse than a sloth.

I cherish the day Cheryl and I walked to a neighborhood pond. Behind it were acres of cattails, red-winged blackbird nirvana. A sharp dry Canadian breeze billowed their seed-bearing fluff across the marsh on a vast scale I'd never seen before, backlit gold by the low autumn sun.

I cherish the September evening Jess demonstrates to my granddaughters why jewelweed is also called touch-me-not. Hunter and Ali crowd in warily, not too close, so they can see. Jess, laughing under the portable shade of her rakish white Nicaraguan trilby, triggers for them the spring-loaded seed pods.

I cherish the many evenings my granddaughters have taken my hand to guide me through the inky outdoors, solicitously aware that I might trip and smash my head on a rock, involuntarily reincarnating due to my imperfect night vision. And also the wintry afternoon that their grandmother, long before becoming Grammy, led me down a mountain by the hand, for the same reason, as darkness overtook us.

I cherish how my grandson, newly thirteen, takes a jump at anything over his head, fingertips upstretched, as if gravity counts for nothing, as if he might actually reach it. He got into the habit years ago, walking—running, usually—through the doorway between dining room and kitchen. With feet flat on the floor, he now doesn't even have to stretch to touch the lintel. I hope he continues to cultivate reaching beyond his grasp.

I cherish the time I've spent cliffside in the Catskills looking out at vultures, below me and above me, soaring in thermals or running before a storm wind. I cherish the hours watching Catskill sunsets until it's only blackness, Venus, and pinpoints of blue and orange light down in the valley villages. Neither do I have any regrets about the time I've wasted watching a Linotype machine cast slugs, waves roll in at Burke's Beach, or a river otter swim in his zoo cage.

For good measure I cherish things for which I've lost, or never formed, memories of the first time I did them. The first time I touch solder to a heating-up joint, it turns to slush, melts into a bright silver meniscus between the parts, and cools to gray. Snapping a photograph, setting toes in the Atlantic, smelling tarred fishing line, striking a kitchen match—all little milestones worth remembering, all gone. Assuming that I'm lucid, I'll have plenty to think about on my deathbed.

CP

Ray Scanlon lives in Massachusetts, where he cranks out the occasional essay—crank being the key word. His web site is http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

Ben Rasnic

THE FINAL SEASON

Patches of crabgrass
cover the base path
like a young man’s scraggly beard
or a twelve-year-old’s first signs
of manhood.

The paint on the dugouts and bleacher seats
has long peeled away
exposing gray weathered wood;
chain link backstop coated orange with rust
trellises interlacing ivy; the outfield covered
in a pungent bouquet of wild onions.

Baseball was my first love,
followed the 1962 New York Yankees
all summer long
with my GE 6-transistor radio;

persevered from room to room
in search of steady reception;
ear pressed to the 3-inch speaker
to discern Mel Allen
from the roller coaster surges of static.

Summer of ’67—
metallic odor of neat's-foot oil breaking in
my brand new Mickey Mantle autographed
Rawlings deep-pocket leather glove.

My exaggerated sidearm motion
scared them off the plate,
garnered a perfect game
on opening day, striking out fifteen.

My father had left after the fourth inning,
“Felt like rain,” he said,
but it was the compelling lure of Budweiser,
rivaled by none
that pulled him away;
couldn’t wait to give him the good news.

“Well you don’t have to brag about it!”
quelled all notions
of the father/son moment
that existed only in my dreams.

I was awarded the team MVP
at the end of the year;
my accomplishments inscribed
on the game ball from that occasion;

a fitting conclusion
to commemorate
my final season…

There will be no game today,
but I don’t mind.

Smells like rain anyway.

CP

Ben Rasnic is originally from Jonesville, a small rural town in extreme southwestern Virginia. Currently, he resides in Bowie, Maryland, and crunches numbers for a paper recycling company.  His poems have appeared in numerous online and print journals.