Tantra Bensko

4 Chapters

My old father's world is going into 4 cabinets, which he rearranges constantly in the air, wanting us to organize whatever it is. He reaches his hands in the air, while we hold his blankets down. His mouth is open wide, as always, horrible sounds coming from it. 4 chapters, he says. We took care of 1 and 2, now it's time for 3 and 4. But they're out of order. He says they always get things mixed up. I ask who and he says God. I know what he means. But I don't see the cabinets, or know how to put the 4 chapters he's talking about today into the drawers that are invisible, floating, above his bed he's been in for a year, me sitting next to him, becoming a spinster. My love went away long ago, left me sitting here. I don't see the chapters. But I can make them up.

1. We die.

2. We become like snow.

         3. We drift.
         4. We become the thing you forget, turning crystalline, sparkling, clean, and fresh, and melt away.


          3. we drift  2 like snow  1 and die  4 and you forget  1 you ever loved us  3 you thought we were beautiful  4 we want to die  2 we dressed like snowflakes for Christmas  3 you thought we were beautiful  4 you went away, felt like dying  2 we used to melt together, be one flowing water  3 we were like beautiful crystals  4 I am dead to you. So I am dead to me.  1 I am you, melted snow. I am no longer we.  3 but you don't care.


CP

Tantra Bensko, MFA, teaches Experimental Fiction Writing online. She is the editor of Exclusive Magazine, runs Experimental Writing at http://experimentalwriting.weebly.com/ and is the author of Watching the Windows Sleep, published by Naissance Press.

Ashley Maser

 

Daphne

The motel carpet is mottled with bleach, yellow constellations
in deep indigo. Her legs stretched across the bed, thin as cypress needles,
cool under the fan, it's blades struggling in the room's heat, clicking
like the buckle of his jeans. His skin drips like the wax figures she saw
as a kid, with her mother, at a museum in Buena Vista. The foliage of Apollonian men—
red-white hyacinths that line the parking lot, the solid-bodies
of highway pines, the bills he pulls from his wallet—
green as laurel leaves, stripped from the branch.

Arriving

She picks through the living room
with her miniature, pink shopping cart, prepares a dinner
of weightless, plastic produce and hollow rubber steaks.
Empties dry brownie batter into a silver tray,
her mother wiping down the counter as she stirs.
Her narrow hips swinging side to side
to shake the heat lamp's coiled filament.

Tonight she'll dig through her brother's toy box—
the bodies of half dressed pilots, hard jawed firemen,
needing to feel the muscles
in her own hands.


CP

Ashley Maser is currently pursuing an English degree from Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. She has previously interned with the Dos Passos Review and her poetry has been published in The Foundling Review, Word Riot, Midwest Literary Magazine, INCITE, Foliate Oak, and other fine places.

Kate Brown

After Lourdes

"Lemon Jesus," said Siân. A perfect, heart-shaped tear rolled down her face as she told me the statue's flavour. Jesus, his stigmata oozing, reached out and took me in his arms. We were on a school trip to Lourdes and, on the steps of the chapel, we'd both dropped a tab of acid.

Jesus put me down. Siân and I ran outside, giggling. On the steps, we crashed into Robbie. Well, it looked like Robbie, but we didn't know if he was real or not. The night before, he'd nicked a crutch from the youth hostel concierge and he'd said he was going to stage a 'miracle' at the Grotte de Massabielle.

"What you doing here?" asked Siân.

Robbie turned bright green while she was speaking.

"Lost my nerve," he said, and turned blue. "Lads took the piss when I bottled, but you know, all those people, queuing for hours, they were really sick."

He looked at Siân more closely, then he looked at me. "You two all right?"

Robbie was sweet. That's why Siân married him. She started seeing him on the trip home.

Jesus doesn't reach out and touch me today. If he has a flavour, it's bitter. They removed both Siân's breasts.The cells in her body must have been changing, even in Lourdes. If Robbie had staged his 'miracle', it wouldn't have helped.

Caitlin, Siân and Robbie's little girl, is standing in the pew next to mine. She's looking at Jesus, too. Caitlin's face is pale, her eyes grey and serious, just like her Mum's.

CP

Kate Brown is a British film-maker and writer, living in Berlin. Her films Julie & Herman and Absolutely Positive have been shown at festivals and on television in Europe and the USA. Her short stories have appeared in The Linnet's Wings, Blue Print Review, Eclectic Flash, Staccato Fiction, BLIP, Cinnamon Press and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 2010.

David Oestreich

Aubade

Take this with you; it may be
all we can keep of our dalliance here
in this quiet valley of rumpled sheets
and twining limbs, briefly verdant
with our cries. Already the sun’s light
motets (first strains of our mourning)
warn us how the coming day
would cast this latest budding instant
far into the past, beyond this precipice,
the present—insistent cliff edge
from which the uncertain rubble
of moments cracks and crumbles,
chasing us up the stony face of the future.

New Year’s Day on Country Road

Was it the brick red-shingles
of the farmhouse roof blazing
above fields of yellow stalks,
the sweep of barren trees sloping
down to meet the iceless stream,
or the faint imprint of winter’s moon
on the afternoon’s pale atmosphere?
Perhaps it was the sight of all these
met at once that stopped my breath
as we crested the hill.

My wife tells me
these thoughts lead nowhere, that beauty
must transcend full understanding
or be marred.  She smiles at me,
lips like camellia blooms, hair dark
as a bay mare, eyes little umber stars,
her face—her face just like this road.


CP

David Oestreich lives in northwest Ohio with his wife and three children. His work has appeared in Ruminate, Umbrella, Minnetonka Review, Eclectica, among others.

Vallie Lynn Watson

 

The Vacant and the Bored

Veronica shouldn’t have brought her husband, hadn’t known Van was going to be in Indianapolis. The two colleagues sat opposite each other at the conference table and mostly watched each other. She wished she were dressed better. Her lips were chapped.

During a break they sat at a table by the coffee kiosk. Van had been behind her in line and paid for her latte. She dreaded telling him that her husband was there. He suggested dinner and she said no, but maybe the two could meet for a drink in the lobby, later.

Her husband was fine with room service. She didn’t eat much of her beef burgundy, said she didn’t want to be sleepy for her last meeting, and left him with the television on.

Downstairs, she and Van found an empty corner with a chair and a loveseat. A waiter in black and white kept gin and tonics in supply, and soon they were both tipsy, laughing. It was the first time she’d seen him not in rigid control. Once he leaned over and put his fingers across her throat, then pressed. She closed her eyes.

When the bar closed at one, they went to a stairwell and walked up a few floors, holding hands, and sat on a stair. They leaned together and finished talking.

CP

Vallie Lynn Watson received her PhD from the Center for Writers and teaches creative writing at Southeast Missouri State University. Her writing has appeared in Staccato Fiction, Metazen, Women Writers, 971 Menu, Moon Milk Review, and elsewhere.