April 2024 | nonfiction
No one within hearing badmouthed the new town’s two ceramic frogs perched columnar on oxidized blue lily pads outside City Hall like they never did on Crenshaw Pond.
*
Sheriff Osprey couldn’t find or explain the missing pair of rattlesnake skin cowboy boots enshrined in glass once worn by Riddly Tucson, founder and first mayor of Burlington West.
*
The story told more often in schools, saloons, and after-church lawn gatherings had to be Roy Calhoun’s losing his battle with the bottle blamed for heaving him and his horse into Red Pine Canyon, Chester saved when hung up forty feet above the canyon floor by its titular tree, his rider not so lucky, pitched headfirst on a boulder the size of Paul Bunyan’s bowling ball.
*
The last to leave the deserted town, Pastor Wiggins, preached a sermon to a congregation of ants, mice, rats, and bats, advising them to learn the lesson God gave Job, to pay obeisance to the Lord no matter how stark their futures, without hope or food.
*
The developer stressed the new primitive, box over box, the way of the future born from the county’s Indigenous past for maximum efficiency, aesthetic nuance, and ambient preservation like no other in-town rural casual formal feel.
*
“Pond? What pond?” Mrs. Killibrew threw at the half-blind, nearly-deaf Claude Wiggins, her frosted flute meant for more than grocery store Chablis half empty, then lifted from her hand-me-down Brown Jordan chaise to emphasize her gift for leaving idiots to stir themselves thick.
*
When the residents of Cactus Butte Luxury Homes opened their manilla envelopes on Thursday, May 14, 2042, they might have felt a similar sinking feeling as Roy Calhoun when first pitched off the trail, Chester dropping beneath him as if he’d taken up flying, long-needled pine boughs slapping his face bringing him to an unwanted and unplanned consciousness until, upended, landing as he knew he must, the split second crack hatching a split-second memory of the Cowtown Rattlesnake Round Toe boots, squirming out of a coil as he liked to think of them, under three loosened floorboards in Pastor Wiggins’s horse barn over which Sheriff Osprey every day clomped like a man with little or no horse sense before everything went dark.
Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Chautauqua, and has garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). He holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from UIC, has taught English and creative writing on several levels, and lives northwest of Chicago overlooking Lake Campton.
Richard Holinger
April 2024 | poetry
This ash-gray mouse asleep in my pocket,
this miserable list crumpled in my pocket,
this comet rattling around in there,
in the cluttered pocket,
unable to escape.
No squeaks—shy twitching of gray wire whiskers,
no pencil or ink—tea stains on tissue,
no flight—burnt afterimage of circling gulls
mocking the eagles, mocking the sea.
At high tide, the mouse nibbles biscuits and jam,
at low tide, miseries tangle long black tresses
in kelp. The wrongs that are hidden, north and south,
east and west, fill the ever-rolling waves, toss
the coffins of crabs up on the sand.
Every morning the comet
hurls itself into the salty
bay and
disappears.
There’s a man washing dishes in my pocket,
There’s a woman longing to hear the owl’s flute secluded
in the cedars. In their own bed of percale
and sea grass, this man, this woman flash like comets.
Their arms and legs like ribbons
of lightning, burst through the clouds.
The slight, silver hairs of their souls rise like paddles,
moving the canoe out on the tide.
Diane Hueter served as the librarian for Texas Tech University’s The Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World until her retirement in 2022. She now divides her time between Lubbock and the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Nelle, Western Humanities Review, and SWWIM. Her book After the Tornado appeared in 2013. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her poem, The Stranger at the Door, received 3rd place in The Connecticut Poetry Award (2023).
Diane Hueter
April 2024 | poetry
After I share my secrets, I’ll remind you to
Burn them in a pyre when my body’s ash.
Carry my regret, silence in stone. Feel the weight.
Deny my mysteries. The loudest plead for light.
Euphemisms are hallucinations of language.
Forget what I tell you. No. Remember. But first
Give me time to collect my words before I go.
Hide them, shove them through the shredder.
If I said I never wanted to be a mother, would you
Juxtapose that with my pride in my child–
Known only to me. Time within time, waving away.
Love for a child unexpected. At 23, how did I?
Mothering, an obligation my body accepted.
Nature or nurture, the argument goes. I have no
Original answer. Unclear, I forced myself to think.
Perhaps, I thought too much. Or did I do enough?
Quit listening to me ramble. I’m in a frantic state.
Reality is outside my unsecured front door. Lock it.
Soon, I’ll write my story–the truth, and the slant.
Too much to unspool. I unravel, mostly at night.
Usually, I see my cracks inside your curiosities,
Vagaries, moods, quirks, like those rickety rides,
Whipping me around. My rag doll head lacks support.
Xerox my musings. Pursue my words across the page.
Yowling, I let my utterance, a long mournful cry, go.
Z is for Zebra. It’s understood it can’t change its stripes.
Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Argyle Literary Magazine, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, Minyan Magazine, 3rd Wednesday, and Mom Egg Review. She has work forthcoming from Action, Spectacle, Quartet, and One Art. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her mini-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. Find her at lindaladerman.com.
Linda Laderman
April 2024 | poetry
It is a ritual to bathe the daughter.
Baptized, she purifies dirty water,
rinsed over long hair that falls out between fingers.
Years ago, we handed her to a man over a vat
and believed him when he said she would not drown.
Face down, screams dull;
Reverberated from a dank vessel now lost
in the catacombs she sacrificed herself in.
This new life – it is of another world.
The kind where she does not crave the bitter cold.
A kind where she is welcomed into the body of her mother
instead of the ghost of a girl
whose father told her to sink or swim.
How holy is this veiled light
when she burns her lungs amongst it
just to find out she is finally alive.
And how heavenly is the father that cleanses and kills
in the same room.
When he washes his hands of blood under the halo of moon,
he turns his back to his children,
still beneath the water,
waiting to be absolved of their sins.
Sydney Greiner is an undergraduate at Susquehanna University studying English Literature and Publishing & Editing. She finds inspiration in the stories she hears, whether it be from a friend or a stranger. When she is not writing she enjoys watching Twin Peaks and spending time with her cat, Tokyo.
Sydney Greiner
April 2024 | poetry
The boy loves lying
in this open field, blinking
at the bowl of summer sky.
Heedless of wiregrass itching his neck, of ants
sizing up his ears,
he tracks the somber wings that float
and swoop in primordial arcs
as though suspended
from puppeteer’s strings. Still
as a graveyard angel
the boy believes he can draw them near.
The pitch-black hunters
wheel through the midday glare,
shadows skimming the ground
crossing the boy’s pale legs.
He can almost feel the first one
thump onto his chest,
feel the talons’ fish-hook grip,
smell the stench of outstretched wings,
poised as in a dream,
above this small emptiness
in the shape of a boy.
Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that require getting through to people who may not be listening. When he finally got around to writing poetry, his work appeared in literary magazines like Dunes Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Rockvale Review, and Third Wednesday Journal. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Fran.
Ken Hines
