The Mystery of Water

January 2022 | poetry

Scientists find strange black ​‘superionic ice’ that could exist inside
other planets – Argonne National Laboratory, 10/28/21

Water, vapor, ice – glass

half full, steam from the kettle,

frost on the windshield

 

I thought I knew what

I needed to know about

water’s phases

 

But now scientists crush water

between two diamonds and heat it

with a laser

 

It makes weird, hot, black ice

they say, and there’s lots

of it in the universe

 

Maybe it’s how icy planets form

 

Maybe it shows how much

we’re still learning, how much

we still have to learn

 

And if there’s more to know

about water, just think of earth,

air, and fire

 

Sally Zakariya

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her publications include Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

Talk Therapy

January 2022 | fiction

He watched his bride of fifty years as she read Science magazine while nibbling a liverwurst and onion sandwich. He carefully avoided looking at the liverwurst. He wondered how two such incompatible people could stay married for fifty years.

He peeked at the article. Something about mitochondria or whatever. She never bothered with the astronomy or quantum stuff. Who would do that? How could two such incompatible…

He should let her be, but something else was nagging at him. “How come I never make you laugh?”

Irritated, she answered without looking up. “With, or at?”

“With.”

Now she looked directly at him. “You tell everybody you don’t know how to tell a joke or even remember an entire joke, and you ask me that?”

“I can’t remember ever making you split your gut, wet your panties, fall off your chair –”

“No thank you.”

“OK, how come you never make me laugh?”

“Baby, you laugh all the time. I hear you chuckling in the shower. Sometimes I hear you giggling when you claim to be ‘working.’ You are an infinite source of self-amusement. If you could cook, you wouldn’t need me for anything.” She turned back to her article.

That made him think. His favorite long joke of all time was the “European Heaven/European Hell” joke. He loved it, but he could never get it straight (“… and the Swiss… umm…”), so he carried a crumpled copy in his billfold. Looking back, he guessed nobody would be thrilled to hear some guy say “You wanna hear a great joke?” then see him pull something out of his wallet.

Then he remembered what she’d said about his dragging that joke out of his back pocket: “You just can’t keep it in your pants.” He laughed out loud and thought, Sometimes she’s wicked funny.

She turned another page, shaking her head. There you go again.

 

Thomas Reed Willemain

Dr. Thomas Reed Willemain is former academic who is swapping working with numbers for playing with words. His flash fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Granfalloon, Burningword Literary Journal, Hobart, The Medley, and elsewhere. A native of western Massachusetts, he lives near the Mohawk River in upstate New York.

Elegy With Vultures

January 2022 | nonfiction

On the day Scott passed, vultures soared the gray skies in dozens. When they first came

down to me in the yard, nearly to my roof, I could hear their wings fold like water.

I have found no evidence of a carcass.

*

This morning I awoke from a dream, the first one of him since he died, but I lost it in

a sunlight that rose and fell as if he were toying with my dimmer switch. Prankster. (He would

warm coins with a lighter to sting me awake from our hangovers.)

*

Home from college my first fall, we were driving with our windows down. Leaves adrift

crimson across the hollow, testing the wiper blades of his most recent car. Junkers that would

always break down before the next one.

*

I was making fun of the music blasting from his cassette deck when he started to cry. Just

one tear. Was he sleeping in his car again? Cut off from parents, all his siblings except a sister?

Lured into another dicey scheme or on the run from someone with a code?

*

Is this samsara? he asked me once, after I had given him my copy of The Tibetan Book of

the Dead, which I had only skimmed.

*

The pages of his old letters, some on the backs of court-order forms, float from my desk,

filing cabinets, rise from junk in random drawers: ghosts I’m only now answering, a loneliness

I so easily set aside as if it were my keys.

*

Written from jail, Scott’s last letter came with the Prayer of St. Francis. (Animals were

always following him.)

*

Vultures have gathered in the pines. Batting their wings in the dark conifers as if the trees themselves desired flight, held back in place by their roots. Each bird shoves the next into air. They flap, then glide, for a time.

But I don’t think that they’ll be coming back.

 

B.J. Wilson

B.J. Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, Naming the Trees (The Main Street Rag, 2021) and Tuckasee (Finishing Line Press, 2020). His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Frogpond, Gravel, The Louisville Review, New Madrid, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, a writing fellowship from The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, and a Pushcart Prize Nomination for his poetry. B.J. lives and teaches in Jacksonville, Alabama.

Watching the Bats Fly Out

January 2022 | poetry

This time, I will begin at the ending.

That house burned in the fire

along with all of the others

in Larkin Valley.

 

But by then, the bats were gone.

 

I keep returning to this poem

that draws me to a late autumn afternoon

when my niece and I sat in lawn chairs

facing her house. Just after sunset,

 

a dark shape appeared

from a crack under the eves,

grew larger and left

on its jerky flight.

 

Then came another

dark shape

and another until

the bats had all flown out.

 

We pulled on our sweatshirts,

poured white wine

and waited for the stars

to begin their display.

 

Patricia L. Scruggs

Patricia L. Scruggs lives and writes in Southern California. In addition to her poetry collection, Forget the Moon, her work has appeared in ONTHEBUS, Spillway, RATTLE, Calyx, Cultural Weekly, Crab Creek Review, Lummox, Inlandia as well as the anthologies 13 Los Angeles Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers, and Beyond the Lyric Moment. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, Patricia is a retired art educator who earned her MFA at California State University, Fullerton.

Paul Rabinowitz

January 2022 | visual art

5252/Constellations

 

Paul Rabinowitz

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer, and founder of ARTS By The People, a non-profit arts organization based in New Jersey. Through all mediums of art Paul aims to capture real people, flaws and all. He focuses on details that reveal the true essence of a subject, whether they be an artist he’s photographing or a fictional character he’s bringing to life on the page. Paul’s photography, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in many magazines and journals including New World Writing, Pif Magazine, Courtship of Winds, Burningword, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review, The Metaworker, Adirondack Review, Bangalore Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Oddville Press and others. Paul was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020, nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 for his Limited Light photo series, and also nominated for the Maria Mazziotti Gillan Literary Service Award. Paul is the author of Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, and a novella, The Clay Urn. Paul is working on his novel Confluence, and has completed a poetry collection called truth, love, and the lines in between. His short stories, Little Gem Magnolia, Villa Dei Misteri, Indigo and Half Moon and Poems in Morning Light With Cat are the inspiration for 4 short films. Villa Dei Misteri won Best Experimental Film at the RevolutionMe International Film Festival in 2021. Paul has produced mixed media performances and poetry films that have appeared on stages and in theaters in New York City, New Jersey, Tel Aviv, and Paris. Paul is a written word performer and founder of The Platform, a monthly literary series in New Jersey, and Platform Review, a journal of voices and visual art from around the world. Paul’s videos, photography, and poems appeared in his first solo show called Retrospective With Reading Glasses at CCM Gallery in New Jersey. He is currently at work co-writing a television series with author Erin Jones called Bungalow.