The Pawn Shop on Putnam Ave.

October 2021 | nonfiction

The pawnshop faced the traffic of Putnam Avenue. The people who went inside usually ducked their heads and moved with quick movements, but my dad liked to go in and wander around and buy things like old VCRs and televisions and dishwashers – a purchase he would forever regret after our house became infested with roaches. But Dad’s biggest regret came not from purchasing from the pawnshop but from selling his most prized possession to it.

I don’t know what lawsuit or worker’s compensation claim landed my dad with the money to buy that Gibson Les Paul. What I do remember is him giving each of us kids $100 when the windfall came down. I held the money in my hand, vowing to save it, but over the course of a week bought $100 worth of pickles instead because those Big Papa pickles were the shit.

He had guitars before but none as beautiful as that dark green Gibson. I watched him open its case and run his hands over the red velvet interior before picking it up and stroking its strings. One thrum and a dreamy sort of faraway look passed over his face.

Dad loved that guitar but pawned it on the regular because on the regular, we were broke. He always managed to round up the cash to get it out of pawn before they kept it. Then one time, he didn’t, and when we drove by the pawnshop, his Gibson was sitting in the window with a for sale sign slung around its neck. One day we drove by again, and the Gibson was gone.

Each time Dad drove by the pawnshop, he cringed a little until eventually, he wouldn’t look at its windows at all.

April Pride Sharp

April Sharp is an English instructor at Felbry College School of Nursing, and a graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. She often writes of her childhood growing up in Southeast Ohio. Her work has been featured in The Devil Strip, Rubber Top Review, and Appalachia Bare. When not writing she can be spotted stomping through the woods with her two dogs.

Jim Ross

October 2021 | visual art

Black Sand Beach

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in six years he’s published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 150 journals and anthologies on four continents. Publications include 580 Split, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Lunch Ticket, The Atlantic, The Manchester Review, and Typehouse. Recent photo essays include Barren, Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, So It Goes, and Wordpeace. A nonfiction piece led to a role in the documentary limited series, “I, Sniper.” Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.

Fingers

October 2021 | poetry

The Autumn leaves of the maple tree

died. Standing at the tired roots, the basement pottery wheel still spinning,

I vulnerably vowed that the red finger with a long nail growing out of your eardrum

sliced the “I” in half and stuck the pieces back together sideways

into an “H,” that you heard something about hell

when I said something about us.

 

What always changes

doesn’t. Faithful, I parted my lips to release

the substance of things,                                                           “You (mis)heard me.”

and you heard everything

but one wor(l)d.

 

Words are creative fingers that slither

in throats, striving for vomit

or to make all things new,

trustworthy and

(                       ).

 

They are in skulls, nyctinastic,

ready to flick a new Gaia

back into the light, out of three tunnels,

where the power of life and death can rest in peace

as sound.

 

You didn’t hear                                                            (“It’s not over”)

again. Angry, you were not obligated to listen,

and it was Christian for me to apologize

for your deafness, for lacking a miracle—

out of love.

 

You thought the fingers were mine, for they were made

in my image. I should have spoken

outside the house we shaped children in

as a stranger, for everyone hears correctly

what matters not. Central,

I should have said that I hated you.

After promises of affection, wondrously,

you would have finally heard

what wasn’t hard to believe

 

and been free to live

with a sliced extremity                                     floating within.

 

Now, far apart, I hope that bits don’t grow like maple seeds

or letters that could float in dark, deep, and cerebrospinal waters

and bump-merge in(to) inner speech,

but rather that fragments miraculously become

that which never existed—nothing—

metaphoric parentheses which do not suggest “fill in,”

a hope which can only be desired if

the hope is lost. At the very least,

is it wrong to think (and think and think)

wor(l)ds could be noise?

 

O.G. Rose

A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize and 46th Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Streetlight Magazine, Ponder Review, Iowa Review online, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho Journal online, West Trade Review, ellipsis, Poydras Review, O:JA&L, and Broken Pencil.

Let me tell you

October 2021 | poetry

Plug Nickel and Red Cent

met on museum steps and, inside,

mysticked with blue innocent Della Robbia,

rhythmed the light-shine white

of beyond, above, bright,

orisoned warm-milk fired clay, like flesh,

god-child in supple mother embrace.

Sigh of centuries.

 

Out straight west, they drove

their wood-paneled station wagon,

out past the 30-hundreds, the 40-hundreds,

nearly to the 52-hundreds

on the table-top Chicago grid,

out to Leamington to meet the gray-pants boy,

sitting on front porch steps, in full view — a

white-red-striped t-shirt buzz-cut good-boy,

out from inside, away, at large,

watching ant-gang heft cornbread crumbles

except this one alone, down sidewalk square

to an insect Promised Land.

 

He looked up at the two men,

vaguely priestly, vaguely outlawed,

said: “I’m looking to flee captivity

for the sin I don’t recall committing.”

 

“We’re guilty, too,” they said, and

the three walked to afternoon church,

for Stations of the Cross,

flaming altar candles, up, reaching always up,

echoes, shuffling, Latin abracadabras,

plainsong up, incense up from censor,

from burning coal, straining up,

cloud of unknowing, cloud of Mount Sinai,

cloud of breathing and not breathing.

 

After Amen, the three split up

and went home by a different path.

Patrick T. Reardon

Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of ten books, including the poetry collections Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay) and Requiem for David (Silver Birch Press) as well as Faith Stripped to Its Essence, a literary-religious analysis of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. His poetry has appeared in America, Rhino, Main Street Rag, The Write Launch, Meat for Tea, Under a Warm Green Linden and many others. His book Puddin: The Autobiography of a Baby, a Memoir in Prose-poems is forthcoming from Third World Press.

Joe Lugara

October 2021 | visual art

v470 (Faux Spirits Series)

Joe Lugara

Joe Lugara took up photography and painting as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms and objects, inexplicable phenomena, and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital photographs and digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey. Mr. Lugara’s work has been featured in several publications and has appeared in more than 40 exhibitions in museums and galleries in the New York Metropolitan Area, including the New Jersey State Museum and 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University.