January 2019 | poetry
Fuck immobility.
Fuck politics and divisiveness and apologists dressed as peacekeepers.
Fuck the world of white men.
Fuck the need for Pride,
the need for a celebration so vibrant
erasure becomes impossible.
Fuck loaded arms, deathly, bragging,
the pathetic “I’ll fuck you up” of people wielding them.
Fuck empty arms,
mothers, babies, partners ripped out of reach.
Fuck prayers drafted like business letters.
Fuck bad luck, the wrong day or moment or side of the street.
Fuck luck and survivor’s guilt and the lingering curiosity
for whether tomorrow will look different.
Fuck therapy and the gods that make it necessary.
Fuck the brilliance of storms from a protected room.
Fuck the protected room and its confines.
Fuck those who, protected, engender storms and then sleep.
Fuck me, and this bitten-down tongue, swollen and resentful and silent.
And fuck you, by the way, reading this,
or maybe just fuck the miles between us.
by Chelsea Hansen
Chelsea Hansen is a freelance musician and English graduate residing in northern Colorado. She has poems forthcoming in early 2019 for Door is a Jar magazine. In between creative projects and an 8-to-5 day job, she spends her free time walking river trails and marveling at the wide expanse of the plains.
October 2018 | poetry
Somewhere
West of the Mojave.
In a dream
I don’t remember.
In that space
Where water amputates,
Land,
And everything,
We cannot burn grows,
Wild.
I am Mother.
I am Mother
To a daughter, born
Early,
Composed in a turbulent sea.
Surfacing, with skin and teeth,
Umbilical cord,
Tied off,
Knotted,
Around her neck,
In protest.
I am Mother.
Child of the corner.
Lotus flower
I wear you like a wound
Struggling,
To understand
Your language.
I cannot turn away.
They say, a mother is always
Letting go
Of her children.
I hear you.
I see you.
In my daydreams
In my nightmares.
I cannot turn away.
She takes a Permanent
Marker,
Crosses out my name.
i am mother.
by Sheree La Puma
Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry appeared in such publications as the Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Mad Swirl, and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and attended workshops with poet Louise Mathias and writer Lidia Yuknavitch. She has taught poetry to former gang members and theater to teen runaways. Born in Los Angeles, she now resides in Valencia, CA with her rescues, Bello cat and Jack the dog.
October 2018 | fiction
So this bartender starts telling me about a story he’s writing. You know how back in the old days when salt was worth its weight in gold. When you could buy anything you wanted with a little pinch of salt. This newlywed couple decides to go back to those days on their honeymoon. There’s a Time Machine that will take them—on the installment plan, of course. They can pay when they get back. But they can afford the trip because they know all about the salt and will bring along a couple of boxes of Morton Salt. The dark blue round boxes with the little girl on it with the umbrella. So they go back. They are having the time of their lives at the Coliseum watching the Christians getting mauled and eaten by the lions. They dine in the finest restaurants in Rome and rent a villa by the sea. On Capri maybe. They have the time of their lives and pay for everything in salt. Or maybe they forgot the salt. The newlywed husband left it on the kitchen table. Or maybe the newlywed bride did. Oh god, they say. They can’t pay their debts and end up getting thrown to the lions themselves. I haven’t figured that part out yet, the bartender says. The ending. The twist. What do you think. I get up from my stool to pay my tab and slide a tiny glassine packet of white crystals across the bar. Half a gram ought to cover it, don’t you think. The bartender looks around the room with panic in his eyes. I can’t take this, he says. Don’t worry, man, I tell him. It’s good. Kickass shit. And legal. Hell, you people back here in the twenty-first century haven’t even figured out how to synthesize it yet.
by Robert Perchan
Robert Perchan’s poetry chapbooks are Mythic Instinct Afternoon (2005 Poetry West Prize) and Overdressed to Kill (Backwaters Press, 2005 Weldon Kees Award). His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000. His avant-la-lettre flash novel Perchan’s Chorea: Eros and Exile (Watermark Press, Wichita, 1991) was translated into French and published by Quidam Editeurs (Meudon) in 2002. In 2007 his short short story “The Neoplastic Surgeon” won the on-line Entelechy: Mind and Culture Bio-fiction Prize. He currently resides in Pusan, South Korea. You can see some of his stuff on robertperchan.com.
October 2018 | poetry
In the headlights, fingers of fog weave
over the road, a seamstress just beginning
to patch together the loss of hours and years,
the maybe not and the not there yet.
I drive three hours to my mother’s house,
arrive an hour later than she expects,
still she’s waiting with dinner. She’s
seventy something, I’m forty-six, we’re still
mother and son. Before I’m finished with
the salad, she wants me to accompany her
to two parties this evening: a birthday
and a retirement. Between the roast beef
and mashed potatoes, it’s all guilt. I continue
to say, “No,” mentioning the chainsaw and splitting
wood for the stove, playing basketball with my son
and friends, and, of course, the drive, and in case
exhaustion isn’t enough, I accept the label
of neglectful son, and whatever else she serves up.
Plato, Socrates’ prize student, when he was eighty,
attended a pupil’s wedding party,
and during the celebration retired
to a corner of the villa to sleep in a chair.
He stayed there until the all-night revelers
returned in the morning to wake him,
but he had slept too far into the Elysian fields,
leaving us with the question: Is it marriage
or a party that leads to the death of philosophy?
by Walter Bargen
Walter Bargen has published 21 books of poetry. Recent books include: Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (BkMk Press, 2009), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (BkMk Press, 2013), Perishable Kingdoms (Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), and Too Quick for the Living (Moon City Press, 2017). His awards include: a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009).www.walterbargen.com
October 2018 | nonfiction
My father’s father died four years before I was born. Dad reacted by hoisting a massive trunk containing the man’s every worldly possession into the backyard trash barrel and setting it on fire. Mom, who had talked him out of destroying family heirlooms on other occasions, arrived at the pyre too late to protest. She could only stand near the blaze, chastising my father ineffectually, watching relics succumb to engulfing flames.
“The antique trunk alone was worth a fortune,” Mom said. She recalls its contents: Dad’s baby dress, a shift of cotton lawn. A yellowed blanket. A gold ring set with a turquoise stone the size of a grain of rice.
Photos of his parents and grandparents. There was even one of Evelyn, the sister who had died of some unnamed disease at the age of six, leaving behind a corpse the size of a doll’s.
“Why’d he do it?” I asked.
“Because if it’s gone, he doesn’t have to think about it.”
My grandfather, according to family legend, was a layabout. He’d had a stroke in front of the television at the boarding house where he stayed, bottle of bourbon in hand. For half a day the other residents assumed he’d passed out.
I get my dad’s distaste for nostalgia.
There was that Christmas that was perfect. My cousins and I spun wooden tops on hardwood floors as the fireplace raged and cookies baked in the oven. It would forever hover there, a reminder of what Christmas would never be again. More often Mom and Dad, bound for grandma’s, would turn the car around after some knock-down, drag-out argument.
What will trigger tears is unpredictable now. I toss our wedding scrapbook into a pile in the garage but feel a pang when I throw away your moth-ridden Yoda shirt.
by Shannon Thrace
Shannon Thrace is an IT professional, a grad student pursuing a master’s in English, and a devotee of farm-to-table restaurants, summer festivals, all-night conversations and formidable philosophy texts. She is passionate about unplugging, getting outside and seeing the world.
