Airport Prayer

January 2025 | poetry

If I count the times I cried today,

I would need more than two hands—

an 81 year old passes through security

and tells me her mother just stopped driving

yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter

hands me my coffee and says Here, baby;

and when we are lining up at the gate by letter

and number and I don’t know where to go,

a woman tells me conspiratorially that I should

just go behind her. Sometimes life feels conspiratorial.

Like we are conspiring to help each other despite the noise.

How can I explain why I am crying for the glassy-eyed

dog being carried in a tote? For the little boy being led

bleary-eyed to catch a plane I pray will land safely?

I don’t want to be a part of this world, but I can’t stop

negotiating with time, with flesh, audience to myself,

spectator to my own body. I couldn’t bear to be called

baby every day and poured a cup of something hot.

I think it would break me. I can’t bear to be be born

again into the kindness of each and every moment.

I want to believe we are not witless, just wingless,

trying to soar above the wreckage we have made.

That tears are never wasted. Is it foolish to pray

for something you know already exists?

For something that is everywhere?

 

Esther Sadoff

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has three forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.

Taegyoung Shon

January 2025 | visual art

Power Lines

 

Taegyoung Shon is a Junior attending BC Collegiate in Korea. She won several awards at elementary school science imagination competitions. She makes various pottery works inspired by looking at the Internet or Pinterest in her school. She also enjoys going to exhibitions held in the basement below her house.

Dinner parties

January 2025 | fiction

She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her parents over not hurrying to marry a nice boy and having his babies before her biological clock froze. Then there was one where her blind date stood her up. Soon, the reason to hold dinner parties gained as much popularity as the dinner party itself. Her friends couldn’t fault her since her hostessing skills were flawless. She was an extraordinary cook with a knack for chopping her feelings and emotions into itty-bitty pieces and adding them to her dishes. She preferred the food to tell us stories and hold all the intimate conversations while she  laughed, twirled her hair, and talked about anything and everything except what she felt

Like when the guy she thought was the one broke up with her, she held a dinner party and made her version of Cassata, a three-layered ice cream on a sponge cake, and served it with a sprinkling of pistachios. With every spoon we took of this dainty ice cream, we tasted her thoughts of that guy, her love, her heartbreak forming a bitter-sweet taste in our mouths, stirring our own uncomfortable memories of having loved and lost. We looked at her, imploring her to talk, to tell us what she felt but she kept pushing the Cassata in front of us. That night, we left feeling betrayed by love, and with a deep unsettling fear of layered ice cream cakes.

And the time her cat died, she had made Rogan Josh.  That dinner party, with candles lighting up the room instead of electricity, as we mopped up the soft naan bread with velvety Rogan Josh sauce wrapped around meat pieces tender as a child’s kiss, we digested her sadness. We could see her dicing onion crying, pretending her tears were onion tears and nothing else. Her heart was raw, her eyes swollen, and she smiled and chatted while shadows danced on her face. By then we stopped asking her to talk while we wrestled with a million conversations within us.

Happiness also occasionally found a seat at her dinner parties like when she passed her driving test after four attempts, and she made bitter gourd curry that tasted like a mother’s hug. We remembered when our mothers stroked our hair and cheeks and rocked us with milky breaths to sleep. With every dinner party we partook in, we felt, we were swallowing a part of her soul, her memory, her being; our souls blending into hers. When, at long last, we realized we needed these dinner parties more than she needed them.

 

Roopa Menon

Roopa lives in Dubai, U.A.E. but was raised in Kochi, India where swatting mosquitoes at dusk is considered a life skill, to be honed and perfected. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @RoopaMenon1

Interview

January 2025 | poetry

It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine…

Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance.

So, you’ve made it at last to the back of the line

and the candidate worth just a cursory glance?

 

Inconspicuous as the invisible man,

I’ve a resume anyone sane would ignore.

For occasions like this, I attend cap in hand

as I beg for your payroll’s umbilical cord.

 

My most recent employment?  I ran out of luck.

I was blamed for regrettable downturns, you see?

There’s a slope to my shoulders but passing the buck

is a little proactive for someone like me.

 

I’m the figure the folk in the staffroom lampoon

and the name on the rota that’s read with a smirk,

like I’ve stepped on a rake in a children’s cartoon,

I’m the butt of the joke for my colleagues at work.

 

While the suited and booted show brazen contempt,

I’m cold-shouldered by even the uniformed drones

but I’ve not got the courage to make an attempt

at sustaining an income by working from home.

 

A perennial misfit, I can’t find a match

for my dubious talents and limited skills

so the word on the street’s that I’m not up to scratch

and there’s no kind of post I’d successfully fill.

 

I’m an abracadabra away from my goals

(or perhaps it’s Hey Presto! away from my dreams).

My inadequacies are consistently droll

if I’m not indispensably linked to your team.

 

And so thanks for the great opportunity Miss

but I sense that I haven’t impressed you at all

and this isn’t a fairytale plot with a twist

so I won’t hold my breath while I wait for your call.

 

Chris Scriven

Chris’ poetry is heavily influenced by his own lived experience of mental health issues, although it is frequently also underpinned by an (often dark) sense of humor. As he lives in the UK, his poems have predominantly appeared in UK-based magazines and journals such as Acumen, Orbis, and The Frogmore Papers, among others.

Jean Wolff

January 2025 | visual art

WhiteBokeh

 

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 153 works in 104 issues of 61 magazines. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, and studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She received a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY, in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.