Remains

July 2019 | nonfiction

Six knives hang above my butcher’s block but the bread knife is my favorite. I love its heft and the way the black handle marries my hand. Wrist stiff, I saw a two-foot long ciabatta loaf into thick slices to bag and freeze. Back and forth, enjoying the rhythm and the crackle as serrated teeth shatter the bread’s exoskeleton. Watching tiny shards of crust tumble to the scrubbed pine board. The sweet relief when the blade sinks into the dough’s soft meat. The last cut that scars the wood when the slices separate.

Jack rolls orange sleeves over firm biceps. He’s missing a lower molar. “I’m a murderer,” he says after my prison writing workshop, not in a way that might intimidate, but more to provide an explanation.

“Oh, really?” I don’t know what else to say.

He’s done nineteen years locked down for most of each day. But that morning, he’d been pounding armored Arizona dirt with a pick-axe in the garden, knee-deep in lantanas that he’d coaxed to flower red and purple.

“Yes, but that wasn’t why I got thirty-two years. The judge didn’t like that I cut the body into eight pieces.”

I like Jack. He fishes for life. Although he lives in a place where men hoard the scent of weakness to hone into shanks, his smile radiates possibility. Every few weeks, he rips little pieces from the worst list of his life and records them on paper ruled with blue lines as faint as scars.

“The body was dead!” he says. “Why did the judge think that was worse than murder?”

In the windowless corridor where even shadows have shadows, sweat slicks our skins in the sweltering heat. He carries my clear plastic tub of books.

We reach the courtyard and the sun’s glare. Troubled that I don’t know the answer to his question, I tell him to revise his poem. Writers have to examine their motives.

After I’m waved through the gate, Jack spreads his legs. A guard bends low to probe Jack’s groin, he slides two hands down each long thigh as though smearing ointment. I don’t hear the joke Jack shares while fingers explore his armpits but I’ve heard his jokes before. They’re silly. Fit for the Sunday Times comic page.

Outside the final gate, the desert is parched to gristle. Mesquite leaves rustle like old fish scales. It feels good to exit that last prison gate and breathe untainted air. But I’m not cleansed. Jack’s story is stuck beneath my tongue. I hope the murder was quick.  I wonder where the eight cuts fell, I wonder whether they were chosen to facilitate stackable lengths.

My kitchen knives are old and blunt. They need replacing. When I slice a ripe tomato, the soft flesh bulges before it surrenders to the knife. Before the skin splits to reveal soft flesh, the color of gums. Before the sacs of tiny seeds rupture and squirt thin juice to moisten the front of my shirt.

 

Gillian Haines

Gillian Haines is an Australian who lives beside Sonoran saguaros and rufous hummingbirds. She has volunteered in Tucson’s federal and state prisons for eleven years because inmates only know the desert’s thirst. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her narrative nonfiction is published in various magazines including The Santa Clara Review, Bridge Eight, Biostories, The Cherry Tree, and the Tishman Review.

Self-Immolation: Fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris

July 2019 | poetry

“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” – Shakespeare

 

The power of fire is not that it burns

But that it distracts:

We save what burns because it burns.

 

What goes up in flames comes down in ash,

And ash is cremation:

We do not want to die.

 

There is no suffering in wood, stone, glass,

No Resurrection in their rebuilding:

Only flesh, blood, and bone feel pain.

 

Never has a candle saved a life,

And though the thirteen-ton bell rings clear

And the stained-glass awes,

 

Injustice has neither ears nor eyes:

The centuries grow heavy with war, revolution, poverty,

Buttressed only by a sanguine belief in tomorrow.

 

When the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris was ablaze

I did not cry. I was already sad, already felt the flames

Of great things breaking all around me.

 

I only wanted to ask the firefighters:

Could you have as quickly, desperately,

Brought clean water to the poor?

 

To ask the billionaires:

Did you sell your yachts, your cars?

How did you spare so much money so fast?

 

And to ask the leaders of the world,

The priests, the mourners, the press,

The Parisians, the tourists, the public:

 

In lighting myself on fire,

Might you be similarly moved?

And what if Notre Dame,

 

Old, venerable, and angry,

Had intended to burn to the ground

As you watched with awe-struck eyes?

 

Sunday, May 5, 2019

 

Andy Posner

Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.

Flagless

July 2019 | poetry

Separated from herbs and rice,

by knife and rifle, a fish in a fracture

of Caspian and Pacific. I remember

nothing of departure or arrival,

nothing of language lost or found,

nothing but this place of both

and neither, a wound of salt surrounding

as threats trill across desert and sea,

an orchestra of terror looming,

leaving me an orphan, flagless.

My name torn in half and sutured, yet

when someone asks how to pronounce it

the accents all scatter and hide,

because there is no right answer in a war

between the one that made me

and the one that raised me,

the one that shamed me

and the one that shames me,

between the chador

and the razor blade,

yasmin and jasmine,

tea and coffee.

There is only a dash,

a gash,

and I lay there,

Floundering.

 

Niku Rice

Niku Rice was born in Tehran, raised in California, and now lives in the suburbs of Detroit with her husband and three children. She is a doula and childbirth educator

Cedric van Eenoo

July 2019 | visual art

Untitled

Cedric van Eenoo

Cedric van Eenoo is an award-winning artist, musician, filmmaker, and scholar. He is a member of Brooklyn Arts Council and affiliated with Manhattan Graphics Center. His art is represented by Tokyo Art Agency, Gallery 104 and World Fine Art Gallery in New York City.

All Is Well

July 2019 | nonfiction

A teenage boy has never worked a day in his life. He drives a brand new Mercedes to school each day. The parking lot at school is full of shiny new cars, driven by children who have never known a day of hunger and can choose not to work. Ever.

BMW told us if you buy one of their cars, you can end hunger. Really. It was in their commercials. “Drive to end hunger.”

More than half the population of the greatest country on earth is made up of the impoverished, the poor and low-income citizens. The percentage is about the same as Indonesia.

For a hundred dollars and up – way up – you can go to an NFL game, where they dress the coaches and staff in military garb and denigrate anyone who dares to protest injustice.

There are about 645,000 homeless people in America The Beautiful.

Jeff Bezos rakes in one hundred ninety-one thousand dollars per minute. His philanthropy is an affront to altruism and a pittance of his assets worth one hundred sixty-three billion dollars. He’s not alone.

Grocers in the Land of the Free throw away tons of perfectly good meats and vegetables every day. The waste is ten percent of all the food we produce. When I asked them why they didn’t give it to food banks, they said they could be sued. Many of those grocers sit on the boards of directors of food banks.

For $440 per month, you can buy individual health insurance through the ACA. Of the developed nations, the Greatest Country On Earth is one of the few without universal healthcare.

Our military budget for 2019 is 716 billion dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of 177 of the 195 countries on earth. Bombs and bullets, murder and mayhem drive our economic engine.

We spend those billions of dollars in part by bombing schools, hospitals and mosques, murdering tens of thousands of men, women and children, in hopes there is a terrorist in their midst. Then we bomb the funerals. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not terrorists.

With our approval and assistance, the Saudis have murdered hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, including the starvation of eighty-five thousand children. We’re focused on the murder of one Saudi journalist.

In 1990, the US ranked sixth in the world in healthcare and education. We’re 27th overall now, and 38th in math. We’re way behind Cuba, if anyone’s counting.

With 2.3 million prisoners, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Wave the flag. We’re number one.

Our prisoner tally boasts of 14,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. Our Department of Health and Human Services says we’re keeping them safe from harm.

We’re obsessed with Russian meddling in our 2016 elections. Like this was their first experiment. We don’t just interfere with elections around the world. We overthrow governments.

We elected a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, narcissistic, incompetent megalomaniac to the office of President of the United States.

That, my fellow Americans, is a small sample of what makes us great.

All is well…all is well. We’re the best there ever was.

 

William Lanford

Outdoor Writer and Photographer, Novelist and Story-teller. Fisherman, Outdoor addict. Official Oldfart. Student of sunsets, campfires and dawns. Companion of dogs. Highly appreciative of fine food and drink. Fond of napping. Comforted by silence.