October 2021 | nonfiction
The pawnshop faced the traffic of Putnam Avenue. The people who went inside usually ducked their heads and moved with quick movements, but my dad liked to go in and wander around and buy things like old VCRs and televisions and dishwashers – a purchase he would forever regret after our house became infested with roaches. But Dad’s biggest regret came not from purchasing from the pawnshop but from selling his most prized possession to it.
I don’t know what lawsuit or worker’s compensation claim landed my dad with the money to buy that Gibson Les Paul. What I do remember is him giving each of us kids $100 when the windfall came down. I held the money in my hand, vowing to save it, but over the course of a week bought $100 worth of pickles instead because those Big Papa pickles were the shit.
He had guitars before but none as beautiful as that dark green Gibson. I watched him open its case and run his hands over the red velvet interior before picking it up and stroking its strings. One thrum and a dreamy sort of faraway look passed over his face.
Dad loved that guitar but pawned it on the regular because on the regular, we were broke. He always managed to round up the cash to get it out of pawn before they kept it. Then one time, he didn’t, and when we drove by the pawnshop, his Gibson was sitting in the window with a for sale sign slung around its neck. One day we drove by again, and the Gibson was gone.
Each time Dad drove by the pawnshop, he cringed a little until eventually, he wouldn’t look at its windows at all.
April Pride Sharp
April Sharp is an English instructor at Felbry College School of Nursing, and a graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. She often writes of her childhood growing up in Southeast Ohio. Her work has been featured in The Devil Strip, Rubber Top Review, and Appalachia Bare. When not writing she can be spotted stomping through the woods with her two dogs.
July 2021 | nonfiction
Style is born, I told my students the other day, when writers lose themselves in writing they admire. Gay, urban, sex-loving Jewish Allen Ginsberg could and did recite all 193 lines of straight, bucolic, prudish, Christian John Milton’s 17th century elegy, “Lycidas.” Clicking my way to Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl,” I added, “And see—Ginsberg’s style is unmistakable!”
I read the beginning aloud. I’d forgotten it contains the phrase, “through the negro streets.” As I read, I wondered, “will some student report me to the Dean for saying an offensive, racist word?” I asked myself how often I think of a writer whom I wish to mention, then find, while I’m already reading aloud, some term that could get twisted into a meaning neither I nor the poet intend.
The problem’s worse when I teach Maya Angelou and Mark Twain, both of whose writings contain words this journal probably won’t print. Consider how much the euphemism “n-word” undermines their efforts. Angelou’s writing cannot be separated from her experience as a black person growing up in the Jim Crow South any more than Mark Twain’s experience as a white person growing up in a slave-owning family can be separated from his experience as a writer. These writers have the right to expect readers not to censor their language. The words of those who have the literary power for these uncensored words to inspire sadness and joy in all of us should not be expurgated.
But if I use the word, and if a student complains, any discussion I might try to have about how I and the class vicariously experience the sadness, the terrors of either of their lives, about how I and the class, through our common humanity, feel identified with their writers, would be rejected—and would be rejected by a number of New York Times journalists who are writing, and printing, things like, “I don’t ever want to hear that word come out of a white person’s mouth.”
For writers, censorship and bowdlerizing remain signs of disrespect. I do worse than dishonoring writers by euphemizing their words. I create a fantasy dogma in which black people feel one thing and white people feel another, neither can understand the other, and both are filled with fear. The point of literature gets lost. Forbidden words become powerful, fetishized.
I know what Allen Ginsberg would say: “America, why are your libraries full of tears?”
Melissa Knox
Melissa Knox’s recent writing appears in Another Chicago Magazine, Image Journal, and WOW. Her book, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, was published by Cynren in 2019. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com
July 2021 | poetry
for Joel
There were fields around our homes, Joel,
some fallow for a season, others full of maize.
Around them were the woods, in winter
a filigree of witch-fingers clutching at the sky,
in summer, overgrowing every boundary.
Enclosed within the symmetry of corn rows
and houses, we slept well at night, although
boys’ thoughts drift and shape-shift.
We could see there was no reconciliation
between the earth and our back and forth
attempts at order. Fences falling groundward
succumbed beneath vines. An orchard grown wild
was our prototype for Eden. Its apples were picked
by deer, or left in the grass as God intended,
rotting with their wasted cider.
In the north country now, I imagine people are burning
leaves. Fire runs through them like a loose dog.
From the hillside, you can see smoke rising, a man
standing there beside the bonfire, watching. A woman
comes out from the house. It’s almost a ritual scene.
There are no leaves burning in this yard.
I hear voices from inside the cafe, but I’m alone
beneath a locust tree, drinking coffee,
watching two men in the next yard over
gather tomatoes they grew somehow amid the ruins
of a Brooklyn townhouse. Odd angles, old brick
mold-mottled, and those green, gaunt vines
that twist and zigzag, and branch out, emerald lightning.
The property was abandoned back in March
when they cut the chainlink fence. Together,
they cleared as much of the soil as they could
of stones and glass. Boards protruding from the ground,
like the bones of a half-buried animal, they pulled loose
and set up to hold the twine they used
for a makeshift trellis. They planted their sprouts.
As the season advanced, they appeared more
at home. One of them hung art on the remnants of a wall,
portraits painted by children, his own, I guessed,
faces composed of bright colors that matched
the beans and peppers, and tall sunflowers whose
big dials of yellow petals counted down the hours.
Someone mid-summer tried to mend the fence.
A sign was posted: NO TRESPASSING!
PROPERTY FOR SALE.
It didn’t stop them. Today, they are laughing,
picking the ripened fruit and vegetables,
gathering the good in baskets, tossing the bad away.
Their joy, their exuberance in their work,
how could it be for just tomatoes?
Whenever I saw them weeding in the sun,
shirts off, sweat curdling through their skin,
they reminded me of the parable about a man
who sold everything he owned in order to buy
the field where he found a hidden pearl.
Have I misunderstood them? Maybe that heavy, red fruit
is more than enough. But we lived according to the poem:
living within, / you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless, / the pearl of great price.1
Joel, we haven’t talked in years. I can’t guess anymore
what you are feeling, if your optimism we shared survives.
Addicted to the opium of poetry, I foster in myself
that one impurity, hoping to work it into luster,
but it’s funny to think that all it takes to undo a pearl
is one cup of vinegar.
_________________________________________
1 H.D. “The Walls Do Not Fall” 4.43-46
William Welch
William Welch lives in Utica, NY, where he works as a registered nurse on a critical care unit, and also as editor of Doubly Mad, a literary and visual arts journal published by The Other Side of Utica, Inc. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most recently in Thimble Literary Magazine, Rust+Moth, and Stone Canoe. His poem “The Border” was a finalist for the 2020 Adelaide Literary Award for Poetry.
January 2021 | poetry
After sleeping
for hours, I am still waiting
to exhale
morning breath,
so I can spit
into my bathroom sink
with a healthy squeeze
of toothpaste.
I breathe in again
and hold it again,
like noxious-fumes avoidance
or a morning bong hit.
I waste scant time
gargling mouthwash
like pickle shots,
popping placebos like Xanax,
sucking fresh air,
changing my paradigm,
changing the font
on my nameplate,
changing my password
to something less accessible
but honest,
changing reality itself.
I am frantic to exhale
and spit.
Because, in the morning,
I gasp for breath.
Eric Blanchard
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Eric Blanchard dreamed of dropping out of high school, but when the haze of adolescence cleared, he found himself in law school instead. After being a trial lawyer for a decade and a half, he ran away to Ohio, where he taught school and lived a mindful life for about a minute. Eventually, he returned home to help care for his parents. Eric’s poetry has been included in numerous collections, both online and in hard copy. In 2013, his prose poem “The Meeting Ran Long” was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net anthology. His chapbook, The Good Parts, was published in January 2020 by Finishing Line Press.
July 2020 | nonfiction
Some remembered the final crackle of radio transmission like campfire. Others, the explosion over the Everglades. The chrysanthemum of combustibles: orange and white and red at the edges of the clouds. The terrific noise that had no echo. Some insist to themselves the travelers died of oxygen deprivation, as in falling asleep as when their mother or father read that long bedtime story, never completing it, tucking them in as they drifted into sleep.
Some will remember the sound of riveted seams wrenched apart. Some might contemplate the ease at which falling metal crumbles in collision with an immoveable object, such as the earth. Airplane parts folded like sodden origami underfoot.
Numbers that accompany the crash: the barometric pressure as a thunderstorm builds, the velocity of the aircraft in descent, the latitude and longitude of the crash site, the few ounces of fuel left in the helicopter when the wreckage is discovered.
What came to rest, charred and indiscernible––a precipitation of sorts: women’s embroidered handbags, men’s hats punctuated with guinea hen feathers: key limes, Miccosukee patchwork, contraband Cuban cigars. Within twisted luggage, clothes folded meticulously as a nun’s hands in prayer.
In years to come, remembered at the oddest moments: set in the nestlike hummock of sawgrass growing in brackish water, a perfectly filled and intact plastic bag with 50 shimmering tropical fish, some orange, some white, some red at the edges.
Catherine Sutthoff Slaton
Catherine Sutthoff Slaton is a West Coast writer graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in English/Creative Writing. In July 2017, she traded in her REI raincoat for a longer REI raincoat and her Doc Martens for a pair of ultrahigh Bogs and moved from Seattle to the small farming community of Chimacum on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where in addition to writing she works her bee hives and raises dairy goats. Her poems have been published in Soundings Review (Pushcart nominee), Switched-On Gutenberg, Till, Hummingbird Press, Raven Chronicles, Tupelo, and King County Metro Transit’s Poetry on Buses Series. Her essays have been published in Inkwell, (February 2020), and WORK Literary Journal (Spring 2020). She will also be published in Rumpus, Fall 2020.
