Cover image: "Magical Naturalism" by Sheree Wood
Gallery 3
Fresh Air
Cleo Griffith
When Morning Comes
When morning comes and sky is filled with smoke
of gray, each summer’s hard, indifferent curse,
I turn my head from sun and this dark cloak
on nature, bound to smite the universe.
At sunset’s twisted orange and red display
my heart must break for pain of earth’s demise,
once more I cringe, turn ’round, walk hard away,
in tears for damage, stop, apologize.
Here many stand, all solemn and contrite.
We pledge again to make our planet clean
as skies glow pink all through each fearsome night.
We chant our vows, we write the plan we mean.
Tomorrow we will clean the ashy ground
and sign our names to promises profound.
Cleo Griffith has been on the Editorial Board of Song of the San Joaquin for eighteen years. Widely published, her poems have recently appeared in Blue Collar Review, Lothlorien Blog and Wild Roof Journal. She lives in Salida, California with her guard-cat, Amber.
Zach Snyder Smith
Mausoleum
In a dim corner of Elmwood Inn, we convene.
You swill whiskey sours, the liquor stings & numbs
your tongue like hornets & morphine. How long
’til sap flows from old wounds? Not long
before that mischievous glint appears
in your eyes: the cemetery awaits us.
We scout bars of wrought iron fence
for crowbarred passageways. Mt. Hope
opens her abyssal mouth to let us inside.
In a warm fog, we lie in bluish glow
on the moon-scorched marble steps
& listen as the mausoleum whispers sweetly
behind jagged cracks in panes of stained glass.
You’ve bewitched me your horned marionette
sutured with moonlight eyes glass & black
ventricles pumping ash of burnt sugar
maple leaves through me like swarming bees.
Zach Snyder Smith is a poet living in Rochester, New York. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as Lucky Jefferson, Lilac Mag, Roadrunner Review, The Closed Eye Open, and Angles. He holds a BA in creative writing with a minor in film studies from SUNY College at Brockport. He has worked for several non-profit organizations, including National Lifeline, and is a former touring musician. You can find out more @zachsnydersmith_.
Storm Ainsely
You-Fall-Reminds
When we were here—when
doesn’t mean much now
Sky was gray & ground wet
& as we catapulted carefully each step
from patch of squishy marsh grass
to patch of tumbled flowers
We instinctively knew each other
In childhood—of course
the world is Africa
& as we climbed limb & limb it wasn’t with
Imperialist intent—we were not here
to hang
colors of allegiance
but indefinable alliances were made.
We knew in the crackling of leaves colder
than today’s golden sheen
purple-white & yellow bobbing heads
green gone orange, grass gone beige
Transformation in place
last fluttering wings in flight
Concrete left for better games
We forsook chalk lines
& hopping in place
for exploration
expanding realms
& we never jumped from the tree
believing within our definitions
it was impossible to leave.
What do you remember of me?
Because my mind’s eye is blinded
by a shifting world
diamond-shine on blades
& I remember silences
on our own stage when the next
act is too much to portray
& authenticity of future is an issue
dealt in time
& the same spades with which we played
when we wondered about lust & life
in open graves
are those which dug our trenches
& sent us out into the mud where even
pirate ships have sunk
& the question of what have we begun?
has turned into what clarity
was lost under other snows
when the dead leaves
memory & dreams
no longer stir us in silly circles
& fill slowly well-dug holes
coat our eyes & cover
moving mouths in dirt
Fall reminds me what I knew would come of you
& what stained the tip of my arrows
drew me into roads stretching Aimless—
a search for a self-sacrificed. Twice.
Blocks extended, worlds within words
glisten of yellow-fallen pressed against the streets
of our turning steps, faces away
Tails un-entwining
Storm Ainsely has lived in 9 of the United States but considers herself from none of them. Currently residing in California, Storm enjoys her already 9-year career managing claw machines and related amusement vending equipment. She can occasionally be found on Twitter @SAinsely, where she tweets mostly regarding environmental concerns and sustainable resource use. Storm completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and seeks publication for three completed manuscripts: Abandon, 38, and I Speak As I Will.
Sheree Wood
Sheree Wood is a contemporary painter with studios in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Tucson, Arizona. From small nature-inspired watercolors to large acrylic abstract paintings, Wood’s art practice explores color and the way nature affects the human spirit. Wood attributes her manner of seeing the world to a childhood spent camping in the family’s red VW bus. Learn more at www.ShereeWoodArt.com.
Holly Kelso
Vocabulary Lesson
I introduce the word prolific to teenage students
with an anecdote about rabbits, they will remember this
when the test is given—the meaning, they’ll use it
in a sentence—the cottontail here in the desert
something they can conjure, the way the rabbits
unabashedly appear and chew the plants down to the quick—
the coral fountain, the lantana, even the society garlic
will disappear, that plant meant to be a deterrent—
and we will be forgiving of these animals because
of the summer heat, the dearth of water forcing them
to dig down and take it from the roots, the browning
stumps of once-green plants now ubiquitous,
one student will share he’s hunted rabbits
for food, for his siblings, he’ll try to describe
the sound a rabbit makes when pierced,
I’ll offer the time we ate shrimp on the patio
and a hawk swooped down and found the newborn
cottontail we’d been feeding in the bougainvillea,
the shriek that ensued something I could not describe,
and that afternoon the student will ask me to adopt him,
having been returned to the foster system—parents
dead to drugs—and we will talk about it, you and I,
that night on the patio, the sky dark, the moon rising,
we’ll hear the wings before we see their wide spread
across the yard, the Great Horned Owl taking roost
in a neighbor’s tree, something small and vulnerable
in its grip, you’ll recognize as the rabbit—an adolescent
living in the side yard—and I will immediately remember
another teacher, a language professor from college
who’d lived in Alaska and taught Inuit children to read,
the way she said they had no vocabulary for what was not present, daily,
how in their culture there was no equivalent for orphan.
Holly Kelso is a career educator, and she has made the language and literacy of children and adults her focus for twenty-six years. An English Literature major from Stephens College, she has had her writing appear in a variety of literary journals and publications. Holly resides in Boulder City, Nevada, the town that built Hoover Dam, where she teaches English to high school students.
Daniel David Froid
Unreality
I stepped quickly onto the bus, greeting the driver, a smiling bald man who issued, with a bob of the head, identical greetings to each of us as we climbed aboard. “Welcome, headed downtown. Welcome, headed downtown. Welcome, headed downtown.” Indeed I was.
I took my seat and unlatched my bag. The bag closes with G-hooks made of aluminum that, I read online, are airplane-grade. I was and remain unsure how to take that information. In what situation might the hooks on my bag be made to withstand equivalent conditions? To what end? Anyway, they secured my things, including my book, Ingeborg Nilsen’s masterwork A Metaphysics of the Unreal. The book weighed me down, and it weighed on my soul. It weighed, in fact, 2.46 pounds, as I read online when I made my purchase. It bore a bright red cover that displayed the title and the author’s name in a serif font. The translator’s name appeared much smaller, toward the bottom, in italics. I believed the book’s spiritual weight to be far larger, though to quantify it is, I fear, impossible. The book fell open to my bookmark, a small piece of laminated paper that featured a whimsical illustration of a dog. I liked its incongruity with the subject matter.
A certain sort of person likes to ask others, menacingly, what they’re reading on the bus. Surely they know that the content is largely incidental to the situation, that one reads on the bus to fill up the time and avoid conversation with strangers. This sort of person, spiteful and perverse, persists precisely because one is reading. They do not truly want to know the contents of the book; they do not care. They see in the reading a challenge, as though one were boasting of feats of literacy to all one’s fellow passengers. When really I wished for three things: to fill the time, to avoid conversation, and to get through this interminable book. And so I suppose its content was not entirely incidental, as I really did wish to read A Metaphysics of the Unreal or, at least, to have read it. But whatever it was that I wanted, the man in question would certainly have ignored me had I sat there in silence, hands clutching my bag whose enclosures might have found themselves high in the sky on an airplane but, instead, kept safe the magnum opus of Ingeborg Nilsen.
A man, beady-eyed and smirking, asked the question. I replied in gesture, holding up my book and tilting it to reveal the cover, which he carefully pronounced: “A Metaphysics of the Unreal.”
“What the hell’s that mean?” he said.
“It’s philosophy.”
“So what’s his philosophy? I’ve got one. What’s his all about?”
“Hers. She’s a woman. It’s about—well.” Where to begin? Really—I didn’t know. I could have started with the title, famously subject to debate. Or her name, a pseudonym.
“She tries to define concepts like not-being, nonexistence, unreality…” I considered where to go from there. Did he wish to know the contents of the book? I could have delved into the volume that comprises an attack on novels, whose stock in trade is unreality—unless it is a defense in disguise, as some have more recently, and obstinately, argued; or I could have described the famous volume that illustrates her claims through the admittedly questionable medium of fiction, The Shadow-Corridor, the only part most people have read. Not that most people have read even that; but anyone who claims to be conversant with her work typically means they have read The Shadow-Corridor.
All of this ran through my head while, in the meantime, he said, “What the fuck does that mean?”
I shook my head and even laughed, chuckled actually. Then I returned to the book.
“So what does it mean?” he repeated as I continued to read. The sentence before me was a tangle: about a page long, with many clauses, it discussed the challenge that lay in defining a concept, any concept that does not exist, which was a pertinent question and an interesting one to pose 534 pages into her endeavor.
He repeated the question; his voice grew louder. In a moment that felt unreal, though not, admittedly, in the classic Nilsenian sense, he was shouting, “What the fuck does that mean?” at me. Nilsen’s tortuous sentence was lost to me, though I continued to stare at it. I refused to look up. The shouting devolved into unwords, a long unbroken cry. Other people on the bus murmured. I closed the book and returned it to my bag, whose hooks I secured. My thoughts turned, briefly, to the airplane to which those hooks had missed their chance to belong. But all thought of that redoubtable craft vanished, because the wordless wail seemed now to encompass the entire bus. I dared to raise my eyes and look beyond the man to my fellow passengers, who exchanged looks of unease and even terror. What he would do next lay on our minds, and our minds turned toward the direst of options. Collectively, we had begun to face our deaths.
Not long after finishing A Metaphysics of the Unreal, I recalled, Ingeborg Nilsen faced down her own end, an encounter that proved neither a success nor a failure; perhaps one might call it an impasse. Scarcely did she imagine that her book might ever provoke such an incident. Unless, it occurred to me, she had, a possibility that stunned me because it seemed somehow very likely indeed.
The screaming stopped. The man remained in his seat. Soon the driver arrived at our destination downtown, and I waited for the man to leave before I did myself. I thanked the driver, who said, “You bet.”
The street appeared empty. Neither sign nor incident disturbed my perambulation; nothing else as I made my way home turned out to happen.
Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Weird Horror, Black Warrior Review, and Post Road, among others.
Victoria Doose
Maybe you’ll give birth to a squirrel
This is what my mom told me in the car:
You’re so small, she said as I slipped into
the narrow back seat. How will you ever
give birth? Maybe to a small animal.
Maybe as a child, that was all I’d seemed
cut out for—raising hamsters and parakeets
until they died gasping in my hands,
their bodies just the right size to fill my
cupped, trembling palms. Maybe when
my hands never grew larger, she thought
my heart never did, too. Maybe my womb
shrank away from the attention paid to it
by early expectations to procreate in
God’s name, so my body shrank with it
and crossed its arms. Refused.
Or maybe she looked at me and saw every
family trait stored in my round cheeks, how
I held my indignities and fears between thin,
twitchy fingertips and darted my eyes
looking for somewhere to bury them. Maybe
she measured the length of my teeth and
saw the history lurking under my tongue,
and knew I chomped the same bitter seeds
she had been fed before me. Maybe when I
was born and my mom saw what I’d inherited,
she cut off my bushy tail and told no one.
Victoria Doose was born and raised in the watery climes of Charleston, South Carolina, and is now based in the Washington, DC, area. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and art history from Elon University. An editor by day and a poet by night, she is immersed in the artistry and technical craft of writing at all times. Her work has been published in Colonnades and is forthcoming in The Soap Box Press’s anthology Scream it at the Back Wall. Instagram: @vsd.poetry
Michael Noonan
Michael Noonan has had artwork published in literary journals in the US and UK, including After the Pause, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and Noctivigant Press. He has won a Runner-Up for a black-and-white line drawing in a competition run by Arts and Illustrators Magazine in the UK and had an acrylic painting hung in Leeds Art Gallery after entering a competition they organized. His drawings “The Pedestrian Centre” and “Fun Girl,” for which he has been awarded certificates, were shown at the CityScapes and Figurative art exhibitions run by the Light, Space and Time online art gallery in America. One of his paintings can be seen on the cover of a volume of his short stories, entitled Seven Tall Tales.
Ervin Brown
Fourteen
When the attendant locked the door, the neon sign reading the word “open” stopped flashing. As he walked back into the arcade hall, his disguised figure faded out of focus. I looked out into the parking lot, where two rusty pickups had been parked since the afternoon. Many hours had passed since then.
I pushed my cheek against the glass, longing to be indoors again. The gray skies swirled, and a strong September breeze blew. I sat on the curbside where an old homeless man drew near, looking at me as he bent over some trash cans. It reeked of garbage, stained with years of rotten bubblegum. The sun melted over the horizon like a popsicle, blurring the border between the sky and the heavy backlog of traffic. In an hour, it would be hard to see. I didn’t want to be left stranded in the dark.
When I realized my dad wasn’t coming for me, I started walking east on Route 9 towards the mall a mile down. The headlights of the passing cars tinted the air a lemon yellow against the dense thickets on the side of the road. An assembly of honking horns and screeching tires rang like a disoriented orchestra.
When the mall finally came into view, I walked to the side entrance composed of two steep concrete walls and a narrow in-between pass. I shoved through the double doors into a large, empty area with crystal-clean walls reaching three stories high. Pipes blew air at me from all different angles. I fastened the laces around my hoodie and hustled down the corridor. The floor tiles were white and shiny, reflecting so calmly the orange light of the sunset. My shadow quickly outgrew me and stretched like a creature across the ceiling and windows. The footsteps of the few who passed echoed down the long passageways.
A recording of a female voice came over the loudspeaker, “The mall will be closing in fifteen minutes,” with a counterfeit enthusiasm.
I slid my back down the wall, holding my legs close together. Waves of bright markings and pointers suddenly died, extinguishing all but the natural light outside. As I left, I noticed the sky had gotten about three shades darker, now displaying waves of magenta and dark blue. I walked in the direction I came from, searching for the motel my dad and I were staying at.
***
I entered the lobby. There was a set of matching burgundy wingback chairs and a water dispenser with tiny paper cups. The incandescent lights over the register were blinding, headache-inducing. I rang the bell. A short woman came to the desk. She yawned, ruffling through some sticky pads in front of her.
“How may I help you?” she asked, examining me with weary eyes.
“I need to use the phone.”
Lightning struck. The two of us looked outside. It was just beginning to rain.
I waited beneath the shelter of the second-floor walkway. I sat still, listening to the rain tap down onto the poorly-paved lot, cracked white paint skimming the surface. I felt like Charlie Brown leaning against the brick wall with Linus after another dreadful Halloween, except it was my birthday, and no one was there to comfort me. It was a shipwreck. There was no laughter or celebration.
When he finally arrived, my dad laid a chocolate cake on the table and went to take a leak, slamming the door on his way in. I was prepared to hear some loud and bitter speech about how I should have acted differently and how I was the source of all my disappointments. But he didn’t have anything to say. We ate. He handed me some presents afterward, for which I was thankful but only deepened my longing for real attention. I received them like I would if he was settling some debt, and now we were square. He turned the television on and fell fast asleep. I stayed up staring at the screen for the rest of the night.
Ervin Brown is a fiction writer. His other works can be read in Art Block Zine, Willows Wept Review, twice in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and Drunk Monkeys, among other places. He is a fiction MFA student at the University of New Hampshire.
J. M. Eisenbrey
Sometimes a Crowbar
We had just moved in
when the kids from up the street
rode by to warn us
“There’s a ghost in there
The old lady died in that house”
But Mary had made a clean break
as expected from someone waiting
too long to be done with it
Twenty years later
when I pull the kitchen cabinets
one of her addictions
tackles my head—
the coppery stench
sticky tar of her pack-a-day habit
blooms like an angry djinn
fills the room
and stabs its fingers into my chest
before dissipating on a draft
It’s my own ghosts here
carted from across the country
seeping up when called
obedient to common poisons
I feel I know something of Mary
and of her children
the quality of the air they breathed
the weight of silence
where careless spirits reigned
We’ve done our best
with bright paint and whimsy
and the kids are awesome souls
well-loved, vibrant
This exorcism is a life’s work
of revision
of laying on color and music
for a birthright reclaimed
J. M. Eisenbrey is a Detroit native, father, Humanities teacher, activist, survivor, and handyperson. His short fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry appear in The Nonconformist, Pif, Wild Roof Journal, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor for Clockhouse Literary Journal. In poetry, the author often works the raw edge of news and underreported events, tapping the emotions and language at the margins of suffering and privilege. Science, history, the natural world, and metaphysics frequently collide or collude in his work.
Amy Marques
Amy Marques penned three children’s books, barely-read medical papers, and numerous letters before turning to short fiction and visual poetry. Her work was nominated for Best of the Net by Streetcake Magazine and published in journals including Star82 Review, Jellyfish Review, Red Ogre Review, and Sky Island Journal. You can find her at @amybookwhisper1 and read more of her words at amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Emily Perkovich
Rewriting the 27 Club
“Do you know how many artists died with a white lighter on them?”
There’s weight buried here. And now every time my thumb drags across a metal wheel, begging to ignite a flame, I dig it back up. I think of your mouth. Toxic drip of alcohol fumes. Of the way your fingers kept tugging at my waist. The white plastic, an SOS in the thicket of the night. How you thought you’d save me. The way you were just slightly too disoriented to grab the bad omen from my hand. I feel the way your thumb sat at the crook of my thigh. And how when I hid my hand behind my back your other arm slipped around me to grasp on air. Too short to steal the lighter from my clenched fist. How the second your fingertips closed on the palm of your own hand the empty air between us felt more like water clinging to my throat. Something denser than the smoky way you had been laying heavy in my chest all night. Your hand stealing at empty space. And your eyes stealing at my face. Catching at the mouth. Becoming lost as they crawled their way up to my eyes. My closed fist, a missed opportunity, sending yours to burrow into the small of my back. Kneading its way up my spine. Pressing me into something close to the shape that I was meant to be. And I remember thinking that this was it. Pressure-shift, inevitable. But then you pulled me too close. And in my surprise you tore the lighter from me. Tossed it out the window. One fluid moment. Your albatross, my beacon of hope. My mouth was disappointment-dripping. And you misread that ache. Your face pinched. The back of your hand brushing away any traces of me-disheveled. You slipped me off your lap and stumbled out of the car into the streetlamp glow. And that lighter didn’t steal my life like you thought it might. But it stole your mouth on mine. So when you held it out to me, I threw it back out into the night, thanklessly. I held my tongue between my teeth to keep from screaming. But the cheap plastic didn’t care. Your skin kept drifting farther from mine. But the cheap plastic didn’t care. Maybe when they find me wasted, rotting, that lighter will be there after all. Cheap, white plastic. Plastic-you and flameless-me. Without a care.
Emily Perkovich is from the Chicago-land area and is the Editor in Chief of Querencia Press. Her work strives to erase the stigma surrounding trauma victims and their responses. Her piece “This is Performance-Art” was a finalist for the 50th New Millennium Writings Award and she is a 2021 Best of the Net nominee. She is previously published with Cathexis Northwest, Coffin Bell Journal, and Awakened Voices, among others. She is the author of the poetry collection Godshots Wanted: Apply Within and the novella Swallow. You can find more of her work on Instagram @undermeyou.
Samira Shakib-Bregeth
Capacity
I hadn’t said anything all morning, so I assumed I’d be okay. Akio ate scrambled eggs with his hands; Adina poured herself a glass of lemonade; and Amir, uncaring of flying water droplets or dishes clanking, held my leg, waiting for me to pull him up and sing our morning song. I threw the last dish onto the drying rack and knelt down to get him. I was late for work and resented the routine.
Akio yells, “Stop it, Adina!” I look over my shoulder to tell Akio to chill but slip on the edge of the matted blanket Amir has dragged into the kitchen.
“Adina!”
“It wasn’t me!” She closes the fridge door and turns toward her room. “I didn’t bring that here.” The back of her hair is temporarily purple, but all I can picture are her eyes rolling. Her body, shaped like mine but with her dad’s Korean backside, flat like a pancake, walks away from the scene.
“I meant Akio. I meant Akio! You guys know what I mean! And stop messing with your brother!”
She closes her bedroom door to ignore me. Akio shrugs and grabs the tv remote.
“Go get ready for school right now, Akio.”
He throws the remote on the table. Its clunk is rude and defiant. He looks at me. I don’t say a word.
“I didn’t mean to throw it. It slipped from my hand.”
I don’t say a word.
“Fine, I’ll go.” He walks to his bathroom and pokes his head out of the door. “Mom, did you sign the field trip form?”
I don’t answer him.
“Did you?”
I look at him but don’t want to say what I’m thinking because I am trying, or I was trying, to stay quiet today. If I speak up, I’ll yell. I hear it in my head:
Did you ask your father to sign it?/ When did I have time to fill out the form and put a check in the envelope?/ Where’s my checkbook?/ Will they take Venmo?/ Maybe I could have done it before swim practice/ I ordered groceries online then though/ Maybe I should have signed it after you all ate dinner that I cooked with all your taste buds in mind—chicken tenders for Amir, no chicken for Akio because he only eats vegetarian Korean food like his father, and a smoothie for Adina because she read an article about how we should skip chewing after 6 pm/ Is Adina starting an eating disorder?/ Akio spends too much time on his iPad/ What’s that monitoring app I’m supposed to install?/ I need to figure out what’s happening with my logins/ Autofill on my passwords aren’t working/ I over-drafted my bank account/ We need to save money for college/ Did Joon pay tuition for Amir’s daycare last week?/ I don’t want to pay the late fee or feel the shame of a sloppy parent/ Will my kids favor him because I’ve turned into the mean one?/ I used to be silly/ We haven’t gone on a date for years/ I don’t even know how to talk to him anymore.
Instead, I bite my tongue. I take a breath. I remind myself of the quiet I’ll have in the car on the way to work and how I’ll inevitably feel bad for not sending them off to school in peace.
Still on the floor, I rub my ankle. I’m at eye level with Amir now. What he waited for has happened after all: he has my attention. For a second, I imagine that I sigh and lean back on the kitchen island. In that gaze, I’d realize life is short and that he’s only young this way once, take a minute to just hold him in my arms, and be proud of myself. I resent that thought, its friction more than I can bear today.
I yell at him instead.
“What did I tell you about dragging your blanket out of your bed? You’re four now, not a baby anymore!”
Amir runs out of the kitchen to find his dad who is still in bed. Joon waits for us all to leave so he can make his coffee in peace. Sometimes when I walk by the bedroom on a hectic morning, I see him looking at the ceiling, one leg bent and the other stretched as though he’s in the shadows on the beach. Yet another action he commands without doing a thing. He never says it, but I know it. He doesn’t feel responsible. I’d been making it easy on him to silently disappear from parenting for years.
Amir and I wait for the bus to pick up Adina, in a skirt two inches shorter than when we bought it. The hem is unevenly cut and a string dangles down at the inseam. I dig my fingers into my palm and don’t say anything. A few minutes later, the elementary school bus stops by to pick up Akio who is so excited because I packed him chopsticks with his lunch.
“These are for eating like you do at home. Do not let your friends take them and poke someone’s eye out.” I mean it when I say it; his friends are rude little kids with unbrushed hair.
Akio laughs, and I feel for a second that his laughter erases all my shortcomings. Maybe he didn’t notice my outburst. Maybe he doesn’t sense my aggravation.
Maybe I didn’t fail this morning.
When Amir and I turn around to walk home, Amir points to the lamppost and says, “Akio’s bag, Mommy.”
There it is. A yellow, shiny Pokémon backpack. No bag, no lunch.
Joon is brewing coffee when we walk in the house. His back is to us as he stares outside the kitchen window.
“You need to take this to his school right now,” I say as I take Amir’s shoes off.
“Sure. He left it? Did you guys not see it before he got on the bus?”
“No.” Obviously.
“Okay. Let me drink my coffee and send a few emails first.”
Amir finds two toy cars under the table and jumps on the couch. I grab my coffee mug off the foyer table and take the first sip, now tepid after sitting out for an hour.
“The school won’t allow drop-offs once the bell rings, so please go now,” I insist.
“Can’t you do it on your way to work?”
I don’t say anything. Thirty seconds in the microwave should be good enough/ If I wear jeans and that blouse hanging in the laundry room, I can put my hair up; that will save me time/ I need to get gas on the way/ Adina’s dance class starts early today/ Oh, shit. I have to pick up her uniform from the dry cleaner on my lunch break/ The new dance shoes better be on the doorstep; the app said they will arrive before 5 pm/ I haven’t sent the RSVP to Joon’s cousin’s wedding/ If I eat only 1200 calories from now until June, I’ll fit into the fancy blue dress again/ I need to go to Macy’s to get the kids wedding clothes/ I need to put extra clothes in Amir’s bag/ He’s regressing again/ If I have to buy another bag of Pull-Ups, I’ll have failed/ I can’t be late to work, not today/ I should at least look like I’m ready for the promotion I applied for/ But I don’t want to work/ I need to work/ I should work/ Didn’t Mom say to major in accounting instead?/ I did so many things wrong/ I need to talk to the kids about college/ Don’t be that parent, not yet.
“So, can you…drop it off?” he asks.
“Sure.”
“Something wrong?”
“No.”
He walks closer and rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “You sure?”
“You don’t have the capacity to understand.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Alright.” He’s content he asked, and that’s good enough for him.
I drive to Akio’s school in silence with the Pokémon bag on my lap.
You should talk to him/ You don’t want your marriage to end up like your parents/ You don’t want your kids to be surprised when you eventually get divorced/ Divorced? That word doesn’t feel like this situation/ I remember when my uncle got divorced. The cousins were in their 40s. It shouldn’t bother them, but it did. How do they handle holidays?/ I wouldn’t mind. I’d give Joon the kids on all the holidays. I want a quiet house on holidays; it’s all the other days that are full anyway, so what’s special, the lights?/ I’m ten minutes late/ I’m four months late/ I’m twenty years late/ I should have been like Adina, rude and bold/ I’ll cry in the car just a little, but then I’ll start again tomorrow and do better/ I can make this better/ I’ll just get up earlier tomorrow morning.
Samira Shakib-Bregeth is an Iranian-American writer whose fiction and non-fiction focus on a range of domestic tensions—especially in multi-ethnic settings. What interests her most is the underbelly of marriage, intimacy, and womanhood. Some of her work can be found at Heartwood, Parhelion, Hungry Chimera, and Fig & Quince. Her current manuscript was a semifinalist in 2021 for UCLA’s Allegra Johnson writing prize. She is a teacher in northern Georgia who is inspired often and has a soft heart for creatives and dreamers. Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.
Charlene Murphy
Charlene Murphy is a self-taught hand-rendered mixed media artist. She creates fine art pieces that have either an abstract, eclectic, surreal, fantasy, or steampunk feel to them. She uses Photoshop to composite her ideas and also uses Daz Studio to create, pose, and render various models, scenes, and creatures for use in her art. This allows her the freedom to create altered realities, which are her way of expressing the correlation between reality and the subconscious (fantasy). Her artwork is imaginative, deep, dark, expressive, emotional, and whimsical, and sometimes consists of an unexpected, peculiar, and eccentric sense of humor. She has been published numerous times in various national and international magazines. Website: www.charlenemurphyfineart.com / Instagram: @charleneamurphy1
Antony Di Nardo
Twenty-Four Horses to Midnight
Let us go, the lot of us
deeper into our own mistakes,
our minor keys,
peccadillos that nary leave a tooth
or stain on Sunday shirts,
those we get dirt cheap
out of the Blue Box
as we go shopping thriftily
down the stream
of restlessness
since life for us is but a dream
this close to perfection—
the cracking novelty
of electric beats, smart phones and
decommissioned fossil fuels—
consumers of our very own
eco-certainties, conceived
to co-exist
and make a shelter
out of where we live
with what we have
in the glad gallop of our cars,
thoroughfares that take us back,
way back to bare beginnings,
barren tracks,
the firsts of all we had,
as we make our way forward
to get as far as possible
and closer to home.
Antony Di Nardo is the author of seven books of poetry; his most recent, Forget-Sadness-Grass, was published in Fall 2022 by Ronsdale Press of Vancouver. The recipient of several awards, his work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been translated into French, Italian and German. He divides his time between Sutton, Quebec and Cobourg, Ontario.
