Quincy Gray McMichael: Featured Author

October 2022 | poetry

Stolen Gum

She has so much gum.

I have none.

Pained by my lack,

I count thirteen sticks

in that pink

Extra pack:

shiny foil tips make my

fingers twitch. I

skirt temptation, chasing

through the kitchen, trailing

tutus—to outside,

seeking freedom:

Spear Stream,

trampoline,

garden packed with crisp

green beans. But I dash

back, snatch that fat

pack. One touch

and I taste relief. Above,

the Elvis clock waggles

his hips. The King

feels my need. And only he

sees me slip:

just one silver stick.

Silly girl,

you think you’re hiding

your hand, hiding

that gum, running

to the bathroom, first,

then feigning

thirst. You return

from my kitchen,

 refreshed. But when

you roll close to me

 on the trampoline,

your whispers smell

sweet:

not the yellow-egg sulphur

 of my water,

 no bold whiff of our

 garlicky lunch. Nor can

crabapple season,

 weeks away, account

 for that cloying

bubblegum scent

on your breath.

Two decades on, as I drag

myself up

to Step Nine,

into the blinding shine

of Rigorous Honesty,

I see Caitlin’s

pink-cheeked face,

that stolen gum,

first. Why this small thing,

before uglier indiscretions:

lying through my teeth

driving only while drinking

selling coke to children

selling my soul for love

from coast to coast?

Perhaps Elvis, in his eternal

temporal wisdom, hinted

at what was to come:

me, holding drink, pipe, life

in my shaking hand,

already tasting the burn

in my throat?

 

Fire in the Hole

I hear the Jeep before I smell it.

I smell exhaust before I see it.

Before he sees me—before I know it—

I’m horizontal, ducking low

down below the windshield sight line,

one knee on the seat, the other

leg outstretched, just hidden

behind the unfurled wing of driver door.

I can almost taste the scratched leather on my gearshift

before the rising tide of fear catches in my throat,

creeps up my windpipe,

tugs at my tonsils,

trauma souring taste buds on the back of my tongue.

Even the tang of fresh-cut grass is no match

for this metallic panic the sound

of an old engine unfurls in me—

and only in this place. My mother’s house.

Her lawn. Her gardens.

Her perfect front porch

with its worn boards, grooved from years of zealous sweeping.

Where neither the eternal pack of dogs,

nor my mother’s love,

nor my own malignant bravado

could keep me safe.

Quincy Gray McMichael

When not at her writing desk, Quincy Gray McMichael stewards her farm, Vernal Vibe Rise, on Moneton ancestral land. Her writing—both creative nonfiction and poetry—has been published in Yes! Magazine, The Dewdrop, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, Greenbrier Valley Quarterly, and is forthcoming from Appalachian Review and Assay, among other publications. Quincy holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She is a Contributing Editor at Good River Review and is completing a hybrid memoir that explores obsession and overwork through a blend of poetry and prose.

Christopher Paul Brown

October 2022 | visual art

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15 (1974), Dilapidated Railroad Bridge, Carpentersville, IL, 2020, 08-11-2019HE

Christopher Paul Brown

Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious through his use of improvisation and his cultivation of serendipity and synchronicity via alchemy.  His first photography sale was to the collection of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, and his video You Define Single File was nominated for the Golden Gate Award at the 47th San Francisco International Film Festival in 2004. Over the past four years his art was exhibited twice in Rome, Italy, in Belgrade, Serbia, and his series of ten photographs, titled Obscure Reveal, were exhibited at a Florida museum in 2017.  His work is in two hardcover books released by Manifest Gallery and in Tusis, Manipulated Images, a Dek Unu book from 2019. Brown earned a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago in 1980. He was born in Dubuque, Iowa and now resides in North Carolina, USA.

She left the ring on the table

October 2022 | fiction

She left the ring on the table, watching the liquid pool. Wood meant five years. He’d used that excuse to buy it – a typical couple’s gift, where only one party wants it, but can’t justify buying it for themselves.

It was a thin, modern thing, sliced so fine it looked flayed. One set of legs was longer than the other, so it tilted slightly; not enough to send cutlery flying, but she couldn’t eat an orange without it rolling away. He said it was bold, artistic. She missed the old table.

Five years. He’d imported it illegally. Redwoods aren’t meant to be cut down. This one was a hundred years old, practically a child in sequoia years. She wondered where it had come from. Was there a hole in the ground now, a lacuna amongst the trees, or was there a stump left behind, its rings dating when it died?

‘They symbolise eternity,’ he’d said, polishing the varnished top. He promised he’d sand down the corners, but she still had a blue-black bruise on her thigh from walking into it over and over again.

He’d thrown out the pine table that their friends had grouped together to buy. She hadn’t wanted to put anything exorbitant on their registry and she liked the soft grain, easily pitted and dented through use. What’s more, it lived in the kitchen, where a table ought to be. The kitchen was the heart of the house, a place for kettles and chatter, singing along to the radio and consulting the diary. Dining rooms are a place for performing. The kitchen felt empty now.

She stared out of the French windows, coffee on the table, an orange under her palm. He would wince if he caught her not using a coaster, but he wasn’t here now. She watched the overflow tumble down the mug’s side. She’d taken the coaster he gave her and ripped it in half to rebalance the legs, on an even keel at last.

Five years. She peeled her orange, watching oil jettison from the broken skin, a fine mist descending. It smelled of their honeymoon in Crete. She rolled the coffee and citrus round her tongue, relishing the sweet-bitter contrast. She smiled when she saw the circle; round peg, square hole, a new ring to join the hundred making up that too-soon-slayed sequoia. She picked up the mug, the skin and the suitcase, but she left the ring on the table.

Eleanor Kowol

Eleanor Kowol lives and works in Oxford, England. As a philosophy graduate, she likes to play with ethical and metaphysical quandaries in her work, along with silly puns and flights of fancy. She publishes100-word stories once a week to her Instagram and Twitter, @KowolEleanor.

Forecast

July 2022 | Best of Net nominee, fiction

Kevin’s father stares out the window at the clouds rolling in instead of the photo album Kevin brings today, cracking it open next to his bed, thinking it would help. Plastic pages unstick from each other as he turns the frozen moments, but no one is watching. The nurse says tomorrow might be better, that he’s not having a good day. Yesterday was worse. Day-to-day is hard to predict at this point. Strangely, month-to-month is easier. The coming years, if he gets them, all but certain.

Not that any day now is anywhere near good. The forgetting is getting worse. Good days, Kevin knows, are just quieter, pass faster. Bad days feel endless, are full of outbursts and fits—tantrums from a grown man stuck in a present he no longer feels welcome in. It’s not his fault. Kevin knows this. It’s not anyone’s fault. Kevin thinks to himself It is what it is and hates it less than when others say it, though he can’t recall if anyone has said it about his father. It’s after visiting hours now, and he needs to come back another time. He isn’t sure what the hours are, when he can, or if he wants to just yet.

A mist begins to fall as he walks to the car. He stops, remembers the forgotten album on the check-in desk left on his way out, looks back and sighs—the nurse already holding it up, blurred through the wet window next to the revolving door. She’s waving. If time froze, it would look like saying hello or goodbye, though it’s really neither—the same with these visits.

Back home across the couch, bathed in the TV’s bright-then-dim splashes he isn’t watching, Kevin calls his dog’s name. The dog lifts her head in the dull glow, meets his eyes, waits to see what happens next. But Kevin has nothing more to say, is tired, is out of words and ideas. He can’t remember when she last went out and it worries him. He can’t remember how many things he’s forgotten recently. It’s a cold and steady rain outside anyway, and he doesn’t know if he wants to walk her just yet. He hopes it’ll blow over or clear up soon.

In the silence that lingers, the dog lays her head back down between her paws, lets out a sigh. For now, something left in Kevin’s life remembers its own name. On the TV, the weather forecast drones. It predicts the rain will freeze to ice overnight and into the morning. A green, blue, and purple shape slides over the state line getting closer as it grows across the screen—a widening bruise blotting out what’s waiting below. It is, he knows, what it is.

Kevin sighs too and tries, for a moment, to forget what tonight or what tomorrow—or what any future—might bring.

Aaron Sandberg

Aaron Sandberg will remember memento mori later. He’s appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s, No Contact, I-70 Review, Alien Magazine, The Shore, Plainsongs, West Trade Review, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Halfway Down the Stairs, and elsewhere. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his writing posts—on Instagram @aarondsandberg

If I Didn’t Have My Thousand Acres

July 2022 | poetry

The old man tells me, “If I didn’t have my thousand acres,

I would die.” He doesn’t realize he is in the hospital

emergency waiting room. “If I didn’t have my wife,

I would die.” He looks at me sincerely, clearly unaware

of the situation at hand, his hand trembling

on the arm of his wheelchair. “She’s at home

making supper for the hired help, you know,

when they come back from driving cows to pasture.”

But he hasn’t had cattle for over thirty years,

and his acreage now only exists framed in pictures

in his small room at the nursing home where his wife

also was full of life before she died five years ago.

I know because the man’s caretaker told me

when she wheeled him in to wait, just in case

he needed to say goodbye to his daughter

rushed in by ambulance an hour before.

Aware the woman’s heart attack was massive,

I casually ask if he has any children. He hesitates,

tries to remember, then settles, “No, I don’t think so,

but if I did and anything happened to them, I would die.”

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook, Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Weber: The Contemporary West, About Place Journal, High Desert Journal, Clockhouse, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Terrain.org, and many other journals. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has served in various capacities as an educator, a researcher, and an editor.