July 2020 | nonfiction
The car idled in the middle of the street. With the glint of white sky reflecting on the windshield, I could not see a driver. Detour or continue? How suspicious I’d become. Murder, drugs, kidnapping. So much mayhem in my town at the edge of the Alaskan wilderness. I was headed to the woods to forget all that, and more.
I edged to the side of the road and kept going. Closer, level with the driver’s side, I peered into the window. A young man sat at the wheel, a boy really. Dark hair, a hockey emblem on his jacket, maybe on his way home from the local high school. He faced away from me, studying something on the opposite side of the street. I followed his gaze to a weathered wooden fence a few paces away. There, atop a post, a dark shape, foreign yet familiar. My brain struggled to explain what my eyes beheld.
The boy opened his window and leaned toward me. His skin was smooth and clear.
“Hasn’t moved,” he whispered. “At first I thought it was a juvenile bald, but maybe it’s a golden.”
A boy who stops to parse eagles.
Up close, the size and power of the bird stunned and unsettled me. Standing on the ground, it would surely reach my waist. Its beak curved sharply into a deadly tip that could rip my flesh just as easily as a hare’s. It seemed indifferent to us, focused on whatever lie inside the bounds of the fence. Cat? Chickens? Small dog?
A slight breeze rippled the rich brown feathers along its back, revealing the paler juvenile tones beneath. Surely a bald eagle, since we were far from the mountainous haunts of the golden. Last summer while driving to town I spied the unmistakable white head of an adult bald eagle perched on a power pole above the marsh. Maybe this was an offspring, here in late November when it should have moved south. With winters turned so mild these past few years, if food was plentiful in a neighborhood with easy prey, why leave?
“I’ve never been this close,” he said, eyes wide.
No one passed. For minutes we shared the street. The boy, the bird, the jaded woman.
At last, the eagle raised its head and glanced back at us as if to say, “What are you doing here?” Silently, it spread its magnificent wings and lifted off.
The boy and I stretched our necks to watch it soar over the neighborhood.
“Wow,” he said.
He put the car in gear and inched forward.
Yes. Wow.
“Have a great day.” he said finally.
As he pulled away I waved and followed the eagle into the forest.
Susan Pope
Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Writers’ Workshop Review, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless exploration of faraway places. Her essay entitled, “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.
July 2020 | fiction
It had happened before.
The first time, she was ten. It was an accident, riding her bike. She didn’t remember the hurt of it, not
even in dreams. Only the sticky cream
of blood on her chest. The limbo aftermath of being road-killed. The sound of a child, hospital bound,
crying in an endless, sputtering, roar.
God, it was
strange. The second time, at twenty, she meant to do it. It was easy enough with a handful of pills and a
locked bathroom door.
The chemicals diffused in her arteries like incense. A ceremony. At peace.
Until consequence shattered it all.
She awoke to the whispering. The stares. No one trusted her unguarded, alone. But couldn’t they see
the danger was over? She’d come back, like a cat with nine lives. Self-vaccinated, for another
decade. Brick by brick, word by word
by dinner and diaper and bridal concern,
she’d built herself back. But this self she had built–she wanted a new one. Not this wilted age, white
flower turned brown at the edge.
Her birthday was in June. This third time was due soon.
And she looked forward to it.
Samantha Pilecki
Samantha Pilecki’s work has appeared in Five 2 One, Kansas City Voices, New Lit Salon Press, Timberline Review (forthcoming), Yemassee, and other publications. She’s the winner of the Haunted Waters Press short story competition, the Writing District’s monthly contest, and was a finalist in both the New Millennium Writings Contest and the Writer’s Digest short story contest.
July 2020 | poetry
they are coughing in the high rises of New York
in the bayous of Louisiana
in the mountains of Colorado
they are coughing up wind
while God orders the trees to bend
with our breath
and our hope cracks
and stretches like rain
because to see death
is to scrape down a home
with nothing to build in its place
on the moody March grass
on the spine of a god
who won’t stand up for us today
they’re in a small room with white walls
fever dances in their eyes
a woman lays her face in her hands
the children are drawing houses
with trees on the lawn
lines of walls through the trunks
no erasers
there is always some line in the way
branch and wall intersecting
viruses crossing borders
world as global as the tides
as hungry as the days
counting coins for flour
while in our dreams
we walk on water
or light candles in a church
we can’t visit anymore
and in our dreams
we are always younger
they’re catching spiders
and throwing them outside
they’re wrapping themselves
in the sea-sweat
they’re watering the cactus
the cactus never bends to the wind
the cactus is fatter than God
spinier than his tongue
the cactus knows love
better than roses
because to know a desert
is to love the rivers
and I do not want to cross one today
I have a boat with no oars
and a God with no words
and children who climb trees
and a rose petal
pressed in a book
about a sea so red
it mocked our blood
a sea so parted
the fish drowned in air
so the ghosts swam west
where the sun gave up
and I’m on the shore
my river-boat
now a ship at sea
on a wave so big
I can’t see the horizon
Kika Dorsey
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets. Her books include Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections, Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and the forthcoming Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Currently, she is an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and tutors. When not writing or teaching, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
