The Chaise

July 2023 | fiction

A young woman lies, shining, on a chaise by a pool. She tilts her head forward. This flattens the neck, turns it into a lovely puddle of brown butter. She examines her midriff.

At the same moment, a man passes. He is old enough to remember fresh footage of ayatollah-freed hostages. To remember their peculiar mix of weak and exulting. He has witnessed it since: an old dog caught in the rain and finally home sneezing, grandfathers at piano recitals.

He sees the woman arrayed, shining. He says to himself, Give me a weekend. I’d glaze that flat stomach Saturday night and Sunday morning I’d ruin it from the inside. He does not say this to her. He says to her, Good morning.

She does not notice the man until she hears him. She is young enough that she is comprehensively unsure of things. Where she should and/or will put her arms while lying down. What she could ever possibly do, possibly, to justify the sluice of self that runs through her head, that puts her ridiculously at the hub of the world. Her year in a children’s hospital did not change this. Losing her mother to the same bone cancer two-and-a-half years later did not change this. Nor the genes that stole from the family an implausibility to rage against. She is young enough that each thing is more different from the last thing than the same.

She says to the man, Good morning.

What she says to herself, in the meanwhile, is what she’s been thinking, and the words, were she to speak them aloud, would hardly devastate the man, though they should wound him deeper by multiples than his would her, even were he to stop smartly at the foot of the chaise and divulge the reason for his staring. The roach next to Descartes’ shoe crouched and crouched and still could not wonder after existence, and this man cannot begin to comprehend his pitifulness. For this man, a man pretending not to stare and staring, there is no change, there are tax rates and sensation, and the future is over. On the other hand, as he is not a roach altogether, hearing the thing might remind him he could never hope for such a thing.

To herself, as she watches her own skin blip out pearls of minute perspiration, she says, Soon I’ll be who I really am. Soon I will be who I really am. She says these things to herself, thought and not speech, but two thoughts, no mistake, and not because she does not want to be who she is, but because she is merely sure, freed from uncertainty by a curious mix of cowed and exulting, that who she’ll be will be more different from the last her than the same, as sure as the beads of sweat there, fat and quivering, tiny curving windows into a hazy future, right here, which is why we’re staring.

 

George Choundas

George Choundas is a Cuban- and Greek-American and a former FBI agent with work in over seventy-five publications, including The Best Small Fictions, Boulevard, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, and The Southern Review. His debut story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2 2018), was awarded the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His debut essay collection, Until All You See Is Sky (EastOver Press 2023), was awarded the EastOver Prize for Nonfiction.

Linda K Allison

July 2023 | visual art

Joshua Tree in Late November

After the Fire

Taos Autumn Leaves

 

Linda K Allison

Linda Allison is a recovering banker living in The Woodlands Texas with the love of her life, found late in life. She is a hiker, traveler, photographer, emerging writer, and terrible golfer who loves to play. In 2019 she decided to leave her heavy SLR camera body and menagerie of lenses at home and traveled Portugal for ten days shooting with nothing other than her camera phone. She’s never looked back. The photos included here serve as an homage to the journal’s name.

Delivery

July 2023 | nonfiction

Each time gets you instant skinny. As soon as the kid slips out. Okay, maybe not exactly “slips.” More like twenty-two hours of show-off stoic teeth-clenching stuffed-down guttural silent wailing, spring-loaded contorted spasming and twisted viscera vice-gripped wrenching, on all fours, crouching, bucking, crouching, bucking, butt-up then flipping, or being flipped, waxed pussy exposed to probing perineum massaging fingers stretching skin not meant to be stretched so thin it rips…. No! No! No! No! I changed my mind. Too late, can’t go back, can’t stop now. No epidurals for you. Just fifteen milligrams of morphine that do nothing. NOTHING. Get it out of me! They won’t let you push. Not now, just rest, just wait. The calm between storms. Worse than the searing stabs of pain is waiting for it to attack again. You’re doing great. Take a break, have a rest.… YOU HAVE TO SHIT IT OUT NOW! Why won’t the let you? Jerking, kicking, flailing, an animal eviscerated from the inside out, sinewed innards ripped apart like string cheese. You clutch Naomi Wolff’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood so hard it drips ink onto crumpled sheets, scream accusations during the exorcism to nurses checking vitals. Your husband’s face so close you could bite it off as he mansplains Lamaze-class breathing techniques. FUCK him and anyone else in the room not being ripped right now from sphincter to urethra by a live basketball trying to drive itself through a pinhole. He orders in Thai food and watches a crime show while you “rest.” Then, finally, spun on your side, legs held up and out, one final UGHHH ….  Easy. And you are skinny again. Or, at least not pregnant. Instant relief. You can breathe all the way. Your body torn, pulled inside out, is yours again. The infant placed upon your chest, slimed-alive pygmy alien crawls blind-eyed to the nipple and suckles.

You can see your feet and roll on your stomach again. And the boobs, a puberty you never had, big and hard, so full and round they look fake, Instagramable tits producing life juice, immunity superfood full of nutrients. And you thought pregnancy gave you boobs? These are another category, cups so full they shoot way up the alphabet. For the first time in your life, you have a chest that sticks out, more proud and womanly than ever been before.

Then the shitting starts. The first day out for a walk, alone with your precious angel perfect infant snug-wrapped close against your body, swaddled in the all-natural fiber baby wrap, imbuing you with a preternatural youthful beauty, though yours was a geriatric pregnancy. You wear white slip-on sneakers, the denim maxi-skirt from a French designer bought on sale at a boutique you permit yourself to browse in only once every two years, if that. The air as alive as you and your newborn. A bright calm clean day bears witness as you mother life upon your very being when your body decides to go rogue, and your anus explodes, a poop right there on the street. Your butthole expels a warm soft-serve you feel ooze down your thighs. You want to run the block and a half home but must keep the legs closed, fast walk in urgent tiny Geisha steps. Squeeze sphincter, squeeze sphincter, hold it, hold it… Almost home, your body relaxes before you are ready; something opens, dribbles out a warm splurt again. You all but throw your precious days-old cargo onto the bed, work fast to extricate yourself from the muslin cloth and leap onto the toilet. With speed and care you pull the postpartum mesh underwear down and out, so as to not spread the excrement even more, a move you will come to perfect in years to come when changing infants and toddlers in the same predicament. An expert in the tender cleaning of messes.

 

A. Cabrera

A. Cabrera’s creative nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers’ Tales 2021 Anthology, Deronda, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company.

Featured Artist: JC Alfier

July 2023 | visual art

Elle s’est tue (She became silent)

penché vers la lumière

Vous semblez hésiter (You seem to hesitate)

Woman and Desert

 

JC Alfier

Some of the pieces depict partial, oblique, or frontal female nudity to illustrate Carl Jung’s concept of the Anima: the female part of the male psyche — sensual, often oblique female archetypes where allegories give shape to dreamscapes of the unconscious, even as the faint image of the female reflects an abstracted, fluid persona — the objective and the subjective. My intents touch upon transgender femininity. Overall, my artistic directions and aesthetics are informed by photo-artists Yoko Mizuki, Heinz Hajek-Halke, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

Featured Author: Christy Prahl

July 2023 | poetry

Seventh Summer

 

A not so rare November day

that impersonates June,

 

bisque of sun,

Ligurian sky

 

when Sylvia, from the mailroom,

who walks with a cane,

 

/diabetes to claim

her right foot by spring/

 

joins me outside for a forbidden smoke.

 

Beautiful day, I say.

How do we make sense of it?

says Sylvia’s face

 

before casting alarm at the glaciers

melting in Alaska

 

and I share what I’ve heard

about the snow crab season

 

Cancelled, I tell her.

95% gone.

I can’t stop thinking of the fishermen, I say,

about to lose their livelihoods.

 

And all those people just being born,

she pines,

never knowing the sweetness of crab.

 

 

Delicata

 

Leo [the farmer] will die this afternoon,

forehead damp with kisses

from Gene [the tractor supplier]

and Dusty [the grower of feed corn],

queer but summoned gestures

from sturdy men

who talk with their hands.

 

Home remedies for Leo

meant the clench of his gut

metastasized

like the summer squash

in his tomato beds.

 

Goddamn volunteers.

 

We knew Leo from his blue eggs

and spiral notepad in his chest pocket

and honor stand on the side of the road.

Take what you want.

Leave your money in the jar.

 

He stood tightwire

on wood ladders to repair the plastic

of his hoop house with duct tape

and fed composting scraps

to a blind raccoon

[who stuck around].

 

Leo will die as so many farmers die,

shallow of air,

tallying from his bed,

wondering if he should have returned to church

all those years back

[when his wife begged him to],

 

the spent soil
of hundreds of thousands of fingerling potatoes

making rich, verdant crops

of his nails.

 

 

 

Christy Prahl

Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include the Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal measure. More of her work can be found at christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.