April 2021 | poetry
Sound Effect
Come the dawn, clean through
my usual downstream drift
of random, qualm-suppressive
dreaming, there cuts a, not sound,
but sound’s hind-edge lull.
Stranger still, to be found
awake where the walls that make
for a house dissolve like doubt,
and all there is is our street’s,
bound in grief and not shamed
by its pain. Before this room’s accum-
ulations can again occlude
my gaze, I’m heading where, bare,
wrongs too embedded not to wring
their truth from song after song
prove how leadenly they’ll linger:
like granules in the tissues, but longer.
A day still loyal to its night.
White noise resumes while what illumines
dims. That, thus, seems that. Or
does it? Before fluming off
where next means same, let’s name
every hope this reveille hypes.
Let’s reclaim we will from you shouldn’t,
can from could’ve but couldn’t.
Let’s not wind up ended up
still deadending here. Declare
that we’re hearing rusty hasps
wrested off, and I’ll laugh, Yeah.
For those wondering whether or no
what needed breaking in fact
got broke, my take on it is
we should just make sure it did.
But as for you who long to hear
only the fist-eyed grunt
of a tightening grip, I won’t
cheer or chide such fear.
An hour ached-for as ours
blazes too briefly to waste
on a case as lost, a cause
as disgraced, as now is,
at long, long last, yours.
Confessional
Friends, I’m having one of those days.
Everything’s bad and getting worse.
It’s obvious by now that for all the valiant
and selfless striving, most of us won’t
change fast enough for it to matter.
The trash, the cars, the meat, the water:
do your part or don’t, trust science
or that guy on YouTube, it’s the same. Friends,
as a poet I shouldn’t be writing this, but
my mood’s in no mood to worry about
how it makes me sound. Well, challenge accepted.
Ask yourselves this: what were you expecting
when you breezed in here past a title
like the one above? Something squalid and personal,
all binges, breakdowns, and performative trauma?
Sorry to disappoint, but in my disclosure
the catastrophe on display is you, not me.
Fact is, friends, I’m ashamed for our species,
and for most of us as individuals too.
I wish it wasn’t like that, but it is. Boom.
So you can understand why I’m always
coming back here, this bright noplace
where I’m never too proud to remember
kindnesses shown me when I was poor,
or lonely, or foolish, by someone with nothing
to gain. Because here, the rinsed light of morning
never quite fades from the view out over
green quiltworked fields, orchards, a river
sweeping grandly off toward the sea beyond.
And today you came, which makes me glad
because why shouldn’t it? It does. It will.
Here I wish you, I wish us all, well.
James McKee
James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, The Ocotillo Review, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.
April 2021 | poetry
charlotte said
there are times when i feel like i’m observing
myself from a constellated distance in the same
way one would look at a starry sky or a pastoral
scene or a bloody gory picture show
and when i see myself
in this way
i am wearing a full length black dress
and my head is shaven in a haphazard
and misbegotten manner
and the background is so white
that it becomes a sort of nothingness
not quite an ethereal nothingness
but a quivering nothingness composed
of floating particles of debris that could be
flecks of white ash from raging wildfires
and so i wrap my quavering white
hands around my shuddering body
like a cowering child in a torrent of criticism
and all i can see are a set of white hands
wrapped around a flowing black dress
in front of a spectral white nothingness
and my chalk white face is emotionless
and my eyes are painted black coals
devoid of compassion or empathy
and i am struggling to keep my mouth closed
because i know if i open my mouth
i will release a stream of swarming plague locusts
and these locusts will be filled with lechery and greed
the sort of lechery and greed that devours defenseless
acts of kindness and helpless acts of tenderness
James Butcher
James Butcher’s work has appeared in Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, and Cream City Review.
April 2021 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee
If right now everything stops, and there is no longer re- but only de- (decay),
Autolysis: self-devouring. Your cells deplete themselves from the inside out. Within seventy-two hours, your swollen heart desists. Orange peels decompose six months later. Cotton socks decamp within a year. Wool sweaters and milk cartons depart in five. (Every carton of milk you drank in elementary school is already gone without a trace, and isn’t that surprising?) Twenty-five years later, your leather shoes defect. Tin cans and tissue (the kind which makes you soft to hold) take fifty to degenerate. Bones and batteries, a hundred years defiant.
Plastic, that twentieth-century debutant, carries on through the 2500s. Only the sun will touch it, photodegrade those polymers into microscopic morsels. Half a millennium to demolish the great graveyards of Dasani, Fiji, Pellegrino, Aquafina, Poland Spring, oh, La Vie. Half a millennium despoiled by every diaper you ever shat. And the ocean breaks down its microplastic detritus last.
Your teeth do not decay for tens of thousands of years. That is not as long as it takes to depose the skyscrapers, debris fields crumbling down to quartz for the wind or the water to disperse. Anthropic fossils press patterns into stone: earth’s interior design. There are mosquitoes deposited in resin, resins deposited in rock, rocks deposited in water. Pirates’ gold fillings do not depreciate, and neither do the diamonds of the brides. Glass bottles, those stubborn webs of silicon, take a million years to deteriorate to sand.
Then finally it is the deathless age of Styrofoam. A quiet planet blanketed with desiccated snow.
And a plaque on the moon still bears dear Richard Nixon’s name.
Hannah Story Brown
Hannah Story Brown is a writer and dramaturge based in New York, dreaming about green cities. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2019, and her work has been published in The Seattle Times, the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, and the Columbia Daily Spectator.
April 2021 | fiction
The Windex was disappearing at Hunky Mike’s Sports Pub. Gallons each week. Ever since the Skin-Melting Bacteria had flown in from Peru on the beaks of white pigeons, we were obligated to perform rigorous cleaning routines. Most people held their pints with latex-gloves, but the occasional Hunky Mike insisted on riding bareback. We disinfected extra hard for those guys. Those guys thought their skin couldn’t be melted. Oh, but it could! We’d seen the flesh fall off the face of the Hunkiest of Mikes. After, we’d have to shut the whole pub down for two weeks—no tips.
Windex was not on the CDC-approved list of cleaners, but we used it anyway because Fred loved the smell. Fred was the Boss. He was an alcoholic. He’d worked in restaurants his whole life. It was an occupational hazard. Sometimes Fred forgot to put on his gloves—because he was drunk. We’d all watched in horror as he went to touch some un-sanitized surface with his bare skin. Fred! We’d shout. Hey, Fred! The Bacteria! Then he’d look at us like, what bacteria? until his memory got jogged and he started crying.
Fred’s wife divorced him a couple of years ago after he smashed his Corolla into a tree while their son was in the backseat. The son drinks his meals through a straw now. Fred’ll be paying back medical bills for eternity. Before the Bacteria, Fred’s ex-wife used to wheel the son into Hunky Mike’s. They’d sit at a table by the window and she’d spoon-feed him mashed potatoes while she drank a glass of Chardonnay. When the son saw Fred, he called him Daddy. Those nights, Fred got blitzed.
It was Marcy the Prep Cook who found Fred that morning. The night before he’d had a run-in with a glove-less Hunky Mike who’d called Fred a Loser. Fred took stuff like that to heart. Marcy said Fred was passed out in the mop closet, an open gallon of Windex in his lap, the blue stuff dribbled all over him. Marcy said when he woke up, she’d had to pry the bottle out of his hands. He kept trying to drink it, she said. He kept on saying, I just want to be streak-free.
When the white pigeons first appeared, we thought they were doves. We thought we were entering some new epoch of peace and calm. That people were going to start loving each other. That we were going to stop spewing smoke into the ozone. That we were going to stop killing each other and everything else. Now, government gunmen crouch in the corners, and the birds get sniped. Not just the pigeons—the doves too. You can see them out there, falling mid-flight, white smudges in the blue sky.
Elizabeth Mayer
Elizabeth is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her previous work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, CHEAP POP, Bodega, CRAFT, Fiction Writers Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her daughter Ruby.
April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Like eyes in a skull,
riveted on me,
I see the windows
of a white van
in my rearview
mirror.
I speed up
so does he
and we keep
going like this,
the sweat of fear
stinging my eyes
till I am racing,
a rabbit, with
a fox that covets,
gaining.
A sign for a business district–
the car, and my heart, slow
down. I turn off, spy a gaggle
of little boys headed home
from Cub Scouts or Bible School.
Grateful to them, I stop, roll down
the window, tell the nearest child:
“I am being followed.
Could I use your parents’ phone?”
“OK”, the kid says “I live over there,”
pointing down the road. “Get in,”
I say, “I’ll take you all home,”
and seven small boys
climb in.
I am driving slowly
when the sheriff
curious
at the sight,
of a white lady’s car
bursting
with black boys,
stops me.
I look back and see
the white van
at the turnoff
to the town,
waiting.
E. Laura Golberg
Laura Golberg’s poem Erasure has been nominated for a Pushcart 2021 Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places. She won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.
