January 2023 | poetry
My mind is
a cluttered cupboard
a hoarder’s den
skyscraper-stacked
bits and chits
shiny scraps strident notes
on skin when there is
no room at the inn
no vacancy
for one more guest
nor even space
for oxygen
thirst is the strongman of needs
with many ways to drink
morning news with morning joe
the Times they are a-changing
podcasts preachers PSAs
Sirius no longer lit
but air-waved and ever-on
any cracks in the stacks
I fill with pages beloved
books poems of my own
and others (who I’d like to be)
all this mess
magpie-made
I’ll use it someday
but the cows stray
I’m too busy to fence
my mind is at capacity
I fear the thoughts
will overflow like the gentle man
I saw yesterday
at 4th and Main
deep in conversation
with the gentle man
in the glass of the bookstore window
Ann Weil
Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Crab Creek Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Shooter Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Life Cycle of a Beautiful Woman, will be published in 2023 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Read more of Ann’s poetry at www.annweilpoetry.com.
January 2023 | visual art
Whalebone Church
Logwalk
Rich Spang
Rich Spang has been connected to a camera for over 60 years. During retirement his art has become the focus of his life. Film double exposures have led him to digital double exposures, from an accidental to a purposeful creation of his vision.
January 2023 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
They played on the rug, Erica Hashimoto and her mom, they played the clapping game. Her mom said the words, and they clapped their hands across the empty air.
Willy was a German,
Willy was a thief,
Willy came into my house,
And caused a lot of grief.
Erica knew the game. Her mom had learned it in camp, where she and the other girls had clapped their mittened hands and laughed, and the only variation was to say it louder than the last, because in camp what else was there to do?
Her mom stopped playing on the rug. She got up. It was 1965, and there were lots of things to do. The moms were coming over for the big luncheon. Becky Sakamoto and Erica and the other girls were to play in the front yard.
* * *
Willy was a German.
Erica could see the moms through the big window. They were seated in the living room around the rug and talking. What were they talking about? Erica was bored with the girls’ games, so she went in to sit on her mom’s lap. She watched the women smoke cigarettes and talk in allusions she did not understand.
Willy was a thief.
“What is camp anyway?” she finally burst.
Silence.
Willy came into my house.
Erica slipped out of her mom’s lap and went back to the other girls, her bobbed hair bouncing. Click of white leather sandals. Erica was not curious about camp. Not really. And her mom never suggested that she should be.
And caused a lot of grief.
Erica found her dad on the front lawn, watching the children play in the street. He was standing on their half of the duplex lawn, beside the dried out vegetables patch with its little Popsicle sticks that told you what had tried to grow. Erica took his hands, and allowed herself to be spun, round and round, saying “Willy was a German, Willy was a thief, Willy came into my house…” Then Erica’s white sandals dragged in the brown grass. Her dad was done. They held hands. He said nothing. He fought for breath.
“We don’t say those words,” he wheezed.
And caused a lot of grief.
Erica didn’t ask her dad about camp. She knew the story, how they called him Charlie Hustle, the way he ran the bases, even when the dust was bad, he ran so fast, and the dust stuck in his lungs, and Erica didn’t ask because she knew. Walking out to the girls in the street, she held her dad’s hand. He didn’t hold hers back. She didn’t expect him to.
We don’t say those words.
We don’t say any words at all.
Evan Morgan Williams
Evan Morgan Williams has published over fifty short stories in literary magazines famous and obscure, including Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, Witness, and Antioch Review. He has published three collections of short stories: “Thorn,” winner of Chandra Prize at BkMk Press in 2014, “Canyons: Older Stories” self-published in 2018, and “Stories of the New West,” published by Main Street Rag Press in 2021. Williams holds an MFA, tattered and faded, from the University of Montana in 1991. He has just retired after 29 years as a Language Arts teacher in Oregon’s toughest middle school.
