poetry

The History of Amputation

Katlin Brock

a history of amputation
time began when the first man laid eyes on
Appalachia’s soft peaks and said in his soul,
I am home.

when the mountain ate him whole
and his bones became dust to
later be mined by other men.

when they took up the maddock and the shovel
to dig coal from the belly before they
learned to remove the skull. 

Beautiful

Amber D. Tran

A sky without clouds, that tissue paper blue
above a field of paperwhite and gold, the first day we met.

Poplars whispered to me your name, word of porcelain
on a breath of pine, and the mountains hummed with me
as I said it over and over again,
“Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca.”

From the peak of the Allegheny, I lifted
a charred sliver of bark and found our first kiss there,
among roots and larvae, tiny white bodies
filled with butter and salt. The taste all the same.

You promised to come back after your search for blackberries.
I watched the hills embrace you, your body swallowed
by more than just moonshine and music, the tang
of the bucket on your knees as you walked away.
The Appalachia had you.

I call for you every morning, hopeful of your return,
my voice an aid to the mountains that often forget your name.

Off Season

Karla Van Vliet

When your hands hesitated, circled the fields
   but never landed, stopped their tracing to winter
in the safety of know regions, silence filled
my mouth, a burning cold. My body was left land, 
                                  the birds flown northward. 

A season has its own torn threads. Mine are rushes
woven by wind, your hand in my hair, now empty nest. 

I pray for rain; rain, for that touch on my skin. Oh, 
let your fingers turn wing, let the urgency of instinct
                                            direct you back, let you remember. 

And be it that my lands warm, again, to you. That the
spring has not been too long in coming. 

Leaving the Geneticist’s Office

Kayla Pearce

after Yvonne Bobo’s sculpture Murmuration

In the cancer center’s
atrium, starlings flock 

toward an open sky, 
gliding on streams 

of steel. Up close, they’re
aluminum boomerangs, 

warning me: everything
you release will come back. 

Offering

Susan Moorhead

In the front yard, the pond folded
into itself, a mouth closing. Small
fish, gasping, strewn like a pocketful
of silver across the scrubbed lawn. 

I held the edges of the yard in each
fist, shook it hard, lifting and letting
it fall like a sheet, my ribs cracking
under the sod weight of it. Water

spread, fingering among jutting
rocks, turning serpentine, seeking
travel. In the cool clasp of water,
reborn in the river, the pleasure

of breath gasps, the glass- domed
sky. Houses tilted and sank in, plates
floating as the tea cups sank. A turtle
in murk water, watching, waiting,

and I studied that kind of acceptance
among the ferns and cracked flowerpots. 
The mosaic of dirt and roots entering
as the sky bled, I saw the waves 

returning to the shore, saw how to
breathe in the slice of moment under
each wave. I thought how much I loved
the paper of your skin as the sun
burned through, set us on fire.

Night, Now I’ve Come to Know You

J P Dancing Bear

Even before we get to our boat, let's review the moon
with Venus riding bareback, and how the clouds conspire so
to make it the only visible light. This is because the sky
remembers how we used to be, long after we have forgotten
our early shimmerings. And the lap-lap of the ocean
is a lullaby of currents that pull us in our rudderlessness.
Each pitch, roll and yaw are substitutes for our raw caress—
a memory of our hairs swaying with each touch like sea grass.
                 •
We ignored or took for granted all the birds with their white sky
bellies until they passed out of existence. Mist swirled around us, 
became our auras and we kept silence within ourselves, till only
the creak of wood and droplets of rain were our language. 
Now I cannot remember a single song.
Now we can discuss the boat of ourselves.

Construction Sites

Meaghan Quinn

boys chomped on scythed wild flowers
     twirled stems with their tongues

& lounged on old mattresses 

dragged out to the far end
of the dandelion field

a catcher's mitt tossed to the side / grass stains blessed their shins

                they were lost boys / boys whose elegies 

were already innumerable
                whose eyes were sliced
                from sawdust shavings
        
    all day I wanted them to notice me / to pin me down / to beast me into something I wasn’t
                & so I stepped on a nail
                poking straight out of a stray beam
                I screamed & I screamed 

    for I had always been the girl who cried wolf / only one lost boy came to me
        
& carried me like a slain wolf
into one of the unfinished houses 

laid me on a slab of marble
making snow angels
in sheets of sawdust

I could smell my foot
dripping with tetanus & blood

Blind Senses

Madeline Forwerck


This day holds little different
from the others, memory fading
into memory;
but you go into the kitchen and your hands
start to slice tangerines,
toast rye, spread butter on it
and you can’t stop them. You note
how beautiful it all looks
assembled on the plate,
and you don’t remember
how difficult this was
yesterday; tomorrow

you will wake up half-drunk and warm and full,
remembering flashes of the stove light on your hands,
juice on your lips, crumbs bouncing
across the countertops.

Matins

Nan Macmillan

I see myself through windows,
stained glass in the church at my funeral, 
through the photographs, scrapbooked
on an altar. I am my mother, 
flipping through the pages of my
fourth grade diary where I first
wrote the word Amen.
Dear Lord, I see myself through the window
of my first bedroom, as the robin
on the maple branch. I never thought
to ask if she was lonely. 
God, I was so small then, so in love
with the frayed corner
of my blue striped baby blanket,
in love with the orchards I painted
and wandered when the house was quiet enough.
I see myself through the milky windows
of my black dog’s eyes as he died –
no, as we let him die – on the kitchen floor.
He loved me so much. I know
because his breathing would slow
to match mine when I rested my head
on his ribcage. I’m telling you, 
I see myself in frames
of the film someone made about me,
in loving memory of,
on the back of a horse named Rancher, 
when my hair was sun and dust,
my palms leather-calloused.
O Father, I can’t stop seeing myself through windows.
I’m so afraid of dying, of being pulled from
the red dirt in which I take root,
of becoming the small white bodies
below the orange tree that blooms
beyond my windowpane.

Our First Southern Winter

Jeremy Reed

Unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, we freeze.
All we’ve known until now shifts, slips, turns,
makes evident its sense of change, its tendencies.
We should have seen all coming. Even the birds
packed in their nests with our ragged fleece.
Crystal covers grass, pin pricked into burn,

what we feel, only now, as winter by turning
unexpectedly in the middle of the night, freezing
without sheets. Tomorrow we will wake in morn,
in sunlight, in open lawn – we’ll feel all seize
in crystal-covered grass. Pin-pricked into burn,
our feet will slide forward into quick-melt sleeves

of plant life, of breaking cells, of changing season.
We now live inland but I remember arctic terns,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. They freeze
in crystal covered grass. Pin pricked into burn
by northerly gales, temperature chasing, they head overseas,
creating ancient patterns, flying southward.

I look for how to recognize winter here. Ferns
cast sideways in morning light, no sound of bees
in crystal covered grass. Pin pricked into burn,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, dry eyes freeze.
Awake, cold lends a clarity we never really learn
to expect every year. We think we know yet still the trees

never quite foretell the slight shift, never appease.
In crystal covered grass, pin pricked into burn,
for the first time this year, here, in Tennessee,
this place appears as what we’ve known before. Returned,
unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, as if it freezes,
we encounter a kind of past, intact, interred.

The crystal covered grass, the pin-pricked burn,
melts before morning sun makes its appearance.
Last night’s recognition turns into not-familiar.
Instead of yearning, I make coffee, listen for singing,
leave lights off longer to learn to hear new birds as,
unexpectedly, what was the middle of the night unfreezes.

What Light Can Do

Caroline Malone

Here is what light can do.
It travels the distance we agree
equals a sum we cannot conceive
without the aid of something far more abstract,
and in it, we see a rainbow or a god
or a sign or a predictor of mood;
we see plants drink in particles of rays
sometimes nurturing sometimes destroying
the delicate organ of the tree, the grasses
the fruits, the ornamentals

and it illuminates a temple of cut block
the gradual brilliance of time
the stone body of a feathered snake
tail to head its linear journey down
the pyramid stairs, jaws open
for the blood and smoke that fills the night.

At Anne Frank’s House

Brian Koester

Even seven decades later
I need to dissolve the walls
right now and burst
into flight like flushed quail
even as I'm staying to understand.

A man as strong as a seawall
is nearly overcome
and his woman holds his hand
to get him through.

Yesterday in the Sistine Chapel
Cesare our guide spoke
of Noah's ark making landfall:
and the first thing Noah did
was plant a vine and get drunk.

The church bells just outside
chime a Lenten hymn.

I finally understand
we are sublime,
like angels and night --
which is not the same as good.

Named

LeighAnna Schesser

What claw and talon beast of wonder
hunts in the hills of my heart now?
A star for a face, lion-maned,
hawk-tailed, a runner's feet and
archer's bow--a body expansive
as billows blown between suns.

Rough wind, weather me down!
Long-fingered hands, be water! Waves,
carve a gully through my rock shoulders,    
sandstone belly, make me cavernous and
cathedral-grand, hollow-holy.

The long pant of noon. Twilight
star-tremolo. Join them, far-spread
hands coming together, and that
is the sky I've swallowed. 

I am heavy, transparent, light-borne,
wind-drifted. A lashed raft of desires        
and memories of places to call home.        
Bunches of perfect peach-halves,
sweet summer hemispheres, 
curled about a hard, tooth-cracking
hope for a warm-dirt banked, 
fresh-rooted, ivy-trellised spring.

Holler Rats

Adam McGraw

We shine shotgun barrels.
We toast iced milk.

And we are negated by the keep-on-coming
roll of rat-damning lips, stiff as crawdad shells.

The crawdads of my youth were revered,
orange-shelled fathers knowing only the toil
of digging holes, of draining the creek.

I drank from the creek, and the water was sweet.

And the water was polluted with deer piss
and beaver piss and the piss of blackbirds
swelling the clouds.

And I know a man whose eyes swelled
after a spider bit them shut.

He worried about blindness and blind Milton
feeding poems to his daughters, and the daughters
missing a caesura.  And blind, he strides
into the gymnasium and says:

“Should we build houses of animal skins?

Should we mainline coal dust
and moonshine, our fathers’ aqua vitae?”

For that blind man, the mountains ache
for drills and mines and songs, and I believe
one day he shall stand beneath
and say:

“My pockets weigh me down,
but I once bought a whore in Hanover
for less than the cost of sixty feet of PVC.
I have felt the lash of ages,
and I will gladly bear his whip.”

All Day Rain

Janice Hornburg

Clouds stroke hills’ pregnant bellies, 
sure sign of more rain to come—
rain that sets in before first light, falls quietly
from afternoon’s polished pewter sky.

Water pools in furrows beside dripping cornstalks.
Earth sucks at my feet. 
Caverns under zucchini’s umbrella leaves
conceal a thousand darknesses.

Vermiculate roots unclasp waterlogged earth, 
trailing a deeper dark—always there, 
never noticed in sunlight; shadows
hiding under beds, in cellars, and closets.

Dusk quenches black pines. 
In the gloaming, woods crowd closer, 
houses fade into fog—
I flail the mist like someone struck blind.

fiction

Momma’s Broom

CL Bledsoe

Lonnie had been attempting the spitball his older brother Keith taught him all afternoon with no luck. Vandale was up to bat–or broom, which is what they were using for a bat–and Shug was playing outfield.

Lonnie squared his shoulders, put on his business face, and let it go. Vandale swung and connected with a crack. The ball soared followed by half the broomstick. Shug went deep for it, ran it down with pounding lungs, and threw it back to Lonnie who ran to tag Vandale, but he was just standing, staring at a Plymouth, easing up the road.

“What’s Judge Foreman doing coming up here?” Shug said. Lonnie watched Vandale and Shug run to the driveway, scattering chickens, as Judge Foreman pulled up and parked. They stood in the swirling dust as the door creaked open and the old man stood and looked at them. He took his hat off and held it in his hands as he stood, as if he were afraid to step away from the open door of the car.

* * *

The Judge took their momma in a room by himself, while Lonnie and the others waited outside. The girls looked worried, which made Lonnie worried.

“What do you think?” he asked Vandale, who was staring down the front door like he thought he could make it cry.

Lonnie nudged his brother who shoved him aside. Inside the house, Momma keened. It cut through the air, up Lonnie’s back. Vandale turned and was gone. Lonnie saw Shug watching their elder brother walking away.

“What is it?” Lonnie asked Shug.

“Keith,” Shug said.

* * *

The elderly lined the porch in rocking chairs, kitchen chairs, whatever they could sit on, canes leaned to the side of several, spit cans in their hands as they stared out over the flat farmland surrounding the house. Inside, the aunts and cousins who’d descended on the house wandered from child to child, worrying each in turn. Ever since Judge Foreman handed the telegram to Momma, Lonnie had stayed by her side. Now, he pushed himself from the wall behind her chair and worked his way through the crowd, looking for Vandale and Shug, the oldest two remaining brothers, but with no luck. He went out to the porch to get clear of it all.

“You going to enlist, son?” The voice belonged to Great Uncle Elijah, a rheumy man who liked to repeat stories from the War of Northern Aggression as though he’d been alive for it. “No, sir. I’m too young.” Lonnie felt flushed when he said it.

“Well, you’ll be old enough soon.” He showed brown, stained teeth.

“Thank you,” Lonnie said because it seemed like the thing to say. He stepped down into the vibrant green of the lawn. Off to the side of the house was the flower garden. He headed to it because nobody else seemed to be there.

It was the one extravagance Momma allowed herself. There were wildflowers she’d cultivated and cuttings from others’ gardens. Lonnie still had the baseball in his pocket. He took it out and gripped it a few times, mimicking spitballs. Keith had been the best pitcher around. And he could run faster than anybody. It didn’t make any sense.

* * *

Lonnie heard some noise on the other side of the garden, something soft and animal-like. When he got closer, he heard a girl’s voice, begging.

“Don’t go. Not yet,” she said.

“I have to.” It was Vandale’s voice. “I have to get those Jap bastards. Besides, it’s too late.”

There was commotion at the house, and when Lonnie turned back to where Vandale had been, he found his older brother standing, angry, hands on hips.

“What are you doing out here, Whistlebritches?” Vandale asked.

“Looking for you,” Lonnie said.

“Looking, huh?” He advanced on Lonnie, who fell back. “Looking at what?” The girl was behind Vandale, fixing her dress. Lonnie couldn’t remember her name, but he’d seen her around, before. There were always girls around Vandale and Shug. And Keith, at least there used to be.

Vandale grabbed Lonnie by the shoulders.

“Lay off!” Lonnie said.

“Van.” The girl’s voice was quiet and pretty.

Vandale’s face went hard and then softened. He released Lonnie and ruffled his hair.

“What’s going on at the house?” the girl asked.

Both boys focused their attention. The judge’s Plymouth was back. When they got a little closer, they could make out the judge with Shug.

“Aw hell,” Vandale said as the two brothers ran for the house.

* * *

When Shug found out Vandale had already enlisted, he’d walked into town to sign up, himself. He’d almost made it, even though he was lying about his age, but Judge Foreman caught him.

“Why in hell do you care?” Shug said to him. Momma walked over and slapped Shug on the mouth.

“You don’t talk to him that way,” she said, tears sliding down her cheeks. Shug sulled up and kept quiet. “I just wish I could’ve stopped Vandale,” Momma said.

“What’s done is done,” Vandale said. Momma glared at him.

“Keith is a hero, Effie,” the judge said. “Vandale’s a good boy. I’m sure he’ll do you proud.”

Vandale nodded thanks to the judge. Shug pushed past them all and threw the screen door open. Lonnie ran after him, keeping pace as his brother stalked up the driveway and beyond, headed who knew where.

* * *

They followed the road along the levee until it turned toward Wittsburg. Shug left the road and veered west to pace the railroad tracks.

“Reckon Van’ll be a pilot?” Lonnie said.

“Bug off,” Shug said.

“You want to be a pilot or infantry?” Lonnie continued, undaunted. “I bet Van could be an officer.”

“Officer School?” Shug finally said. “You take Van for some kind of fruit?”

“No, I just mean he could make good, you know.”

Shug turned on Lonnie. “Say, what are you following me for, huh? I ain’t heading to the Five & Dime.”

“I know. You’re going to hop a train into Memphis so you can enlist, there, where nobody knows you.”

That shut him up for a second.

“You figuring to stop me?” Shug said.

“Guess so,” Lonnie said. “Maybe we could go see a picture show or something. I got a nickel.”

Shug laughed. “Go home and play stickball, kid.”

“He was my brother too.”

Shug narrowed his eyes, but when Lonnie made no move to leave, Shug finally gave up and started walking again.

* * *

The land they passed was all cotton fields and dirt roads. The boys passed black field hands, mostly, with the occasional white one mixed in. There were more white farmers as they neared town. The sun sat high above them as Shug led his brother to the freight yards.

“It’s just two months,” Lonnie pointed out. When Shug didn’t respond, Lonnie added. “Unless you’re scared Van’ll have them all licked by then.”

Lonnie was on the ground before he realized it with Shug on top of him, swinging again and again. He could hear the thuds as his brother connected, but he couldn’t feel them. He’d entered some other place, and it was only when some railroad workers saw the boys and pulled Shug off, that Lonnie started to register what was happening. Even then, what he noticed first were his brother’s tears. He’d never seen any of his brothers cry, least of all Shug. It scared him. He tried to sit up, but felt an aching pain and realized one of his eyes was swollen shut.

The men had a hold of Shug, but Lonnie managed to get to his feet and wheeze at them.

“Let him go,” he said on the third try. “I was asking for it.”

“Hell, he’s twice as big as you!” One said.

“He’s my brother,” Lonnie said. He went to Shug, doubled over. Shug put an arm around him and helped him back up the road, towards home.

“Guess I did stop you,” Lonnie said as they entered their yard.

Shug laughed. Lonnie tried to, but it made him spit blood.

Shug bent and picked up the pieces of the broom. He examined the broken stick and tossed the pieces far into the yard. The two boys looked after it. “I can still go tomorrow,” Shug said.

“Yeah,” Lonnie said. He drew a deep breath that made his chest rattle. “Reckon so.”

Shug climbed onto the porch. A moment later, his brother followed him.

Jane Doe

Austin Eichelberger

1. The shallow hole is dug surprisingly close to the house despite the nearby woods, unlike most places bodies are found, which are marked by several things: soft soil, lots of trees for coverage, abandoned buildings, wildlife to eat remains, and no people for as far as possible. 2. As far as possible, it seems, even the remotest areas have been utilized for violence—one park ranger found a thumb nailed to a tree, another a nude corpse 70 miles from any road—meaning that really, though maybe not plausibly, bodies can be found just about anywhere. 3. Found just about anywhere well-populated, a dead body causes an anxious stir and everyone panics, but out in the country—where rural boogeymen still sing from the trees at night—no one talks about a body too much unless it was a friend or relative. 4. A friend or relative is almost always behind it—just like poisoned candy and deep-set psychological issues—but most of them never get picked up because once the victim is dead, who's to say what happened? 5. What happened here, though, is still being debated: the hole was only half-filled with soil, fingertips still visible, but also seems full to overflowing with something else: delirious ennui, predatory desperation, maybe a former lover's good luck and hope? 6. Good luck and hope never seem to be reliable enough to use as tools to get away with murder, especially now that forensic testing—white lab coats and petri dishes, trace samples and DNA swabs—is the first thing anyone does. 7. The first thing anyone does when they find a body is try to find ways to believe the body isn't really dead—even if it's cold and buried, even if they don't know the victim, have no ties whatsoever to whatever-the-fuck happened. 8. “Whatever the fuck happened depends on your perspective,” the lieutenant keeps saying, but everyone agrees this half-filled hole feels like a crime interrupted, like a gun left by the bed for self-defense used to take out the owners of the house or a sentence so lyrical and winding that halfway through, it simply unravels. 9. Halfway through it simply unravels, most detectives say, the best thread they had, the only one that clearly pointed to a believable killer, that explained what was happening on the night in question or before the gun was pulled out. 10. Before the gun was pulled out, the hole really did seem shallow, barely ankle-deep, but the moon through the clouds glinting off the long barrels made the hole grow so dark, the ground beneath it opening up, deep with shadow. 11. With shadow from cloud-cover blanketing the road, cut through only by headlights on the way to his place outside the suburbs, she had watched the city lights recede in the side mirror and told herself the night had been fun: a quiet date with an old flame from high school, the one who had hopefully grown out of being a little too rough during sex, who was still so handsome and acted so sweet in public. 12. Sweet in public but impatient and unapologetic afterward, some killers sexually assault their victims before yanking them outside, standing them at the edge of a hollow patch of earth stretched open like a ravenous waiting mouth, flashlight aimed at the victim's eyes to disorient. 13. To disorient the police, some killers take the victim's ID and plant false clues, little indicators that lead nowhere to make sure they have time to leave town, to sever ties—one last fuck, a final meal with a buddy—to pack their shit and hotwire a new car so they're as far away as they can manage to be when the body gets discovered, when all their accomplishments and mistakes are suddenly naked before the police. 14. Naked before the police—her arm still over her eyes like when she blocked the flashlight's glare, fell backward as screaming flames burrowed into her chest, her bare back and limbs smacking the dirt heavily—she tries to point the officers' stoic glances in the direction he drove off, to spit his name like she used to when he dumped her in high school, to cover her gaping breasts and the little bit of blood from his bedroom, to tell them her worried mother's phone number, to promise that she's nothing like the girl they must think: another case gone cold in a shallow hole.

The Girl From Coral (Notes)

Austin Eichelberger

1. Whenever this One Guy comes through Alexis's checkout line in the Phoenix, Arizona Whole Foods, she can't help but imagine his tongue (flat and profound) positioned just below her belly button, skating along her clavicle, or their bodies emanating heat like stretches of road in the desert outside, hazing over imperfections and giving them each a flushed glow. Each time, just after she blushes when she first spies him, she can feel light-headed lust like slow smoke under her skin, seeping out the way she has seen coral (when scuba diving with her estranged father on vacations paid for by his guilt) release great silky clouds of eggs and sperm, surrounding her in ribbons of mist made of her attraction to this One Guy.

Coral is a simple animal, much like her desire for him: inspired by his narrow but muscular shoulders, the shapes in his curly auburn hair, face dappled with light freckles, lines of musculature drawn across his calves, the in-between-green-and-blue color of his eyes. She has paid such careful attention when he stands before her, absently tapping buttons after swiping his credit card or scooping his purchases into his eco-friendly grocery bag, that she knows what he'll buy to some degree based on the time of day he comes in: always apples (braeburns or pink ladies or Fujis), in the mornings a protein bar, most times at least one of those nasty Kombucha drinks, in the afternoon a large bag of chips, either hummus or salsa, and maybe a vegetarian frozen pizza, which always makes Alexis wonder—as she watches him leave, her head clearing like warm salty waters as the tide moves in—if all that is for him.

2. A New Mexican tourist has just smiled as she told Alexis about the bright red and soft pink coral in her silver rings and thick bracelets—"Coral are like us: what's left of the dead stacked into foundations for the living. One of the sacred gifts my pueblo received.”—and Alexis is twisting the ring of turquoise and coral that she got in her Gram's will, thinking of the mesas outside Gram's house and the Rio Grande flowing about a mile off, but then forgets the whole vast landscape when the One Guy is suddenly in front of her in a tank top—his arms looking especially solid and soft at the same time—looking right in her eyes and saying, “I like when you're working, Alexis. I try to always come through your line.”
A dizziness (like rising too quickly with a scuba tank or when she bums cigarettes while drinking) overtakes Alexis and her lungs feel a bit smaller than before as she pushes his items across the scanner and says, “Thanks. Nice seeing you. Too.”
He chuckles, lifts the pasta and tomatoes into his bag as she tries to conjure anything else to say, anything to prove that he just surprised her, that's all.
He slips his sunglasses over his eyes. “Well, have a good one.” Then he is gone and Alexis is still just trying to breathe (spinning her ring twice as quick as before), feeling like when a sudden tropical storm takes out years of diligent growth in a single unexpected wave.

3. All that evening until she closes out her register, she replays their latest interaction in her head, her legs still a little trembly as she sculpts what will surely be perfect replies for next time. She pictures the One Guy laughing like she knows he's not in a while, eyes wide as he's taken comfortably aback by Alexis's sudden confidence, her sense of humor, the way she plays right into his hand. His reaction (she knows) will be perfect, but she has to give herself the right self-image to pull it off, has to convince herself that she can put a hand on her hip and a smirk on her lips just right so that her One Guy never even realizes it wasn't natural—because if she doesn't believe it, how will he?

4. That night in her bed (nude because this fucking heat!) she watches headlights draw stripes along the ceiling and thinks of his lean body and almost-well-kept beard, the few light hairs peeking from his shirt collar, the ways she will impress him the next time he appears before her, bright as the desert sun. When her hands slide where his would go, she can suddenly see him more clearly than before, reaching out for her—his hair floating like he's underwater, crowned by small shells and pale crab claws long abandoned, and he's whispering to her like a bubbling spring—then pulling her by the hand: out the door and across the scrubby plains and rough mountains to the closest body of water, where it looks like back home, mesas like outside her old front door, a river beside.
Then Alexis sees herself, fertile as a reef: a school of little silver fish appear from behind her back as brittle stars and sea fans reach from her hair, soft anemones sprout from her hips, an eel snakes out of the cave of her loosely-held fist and bright coral branches from her elbow, thighs, the wrist of the hand still held in his.

5. But a few days later—after noticing that One Guy in the dry goods aisle with a girl she has not seen before who is definitely not his sister—Alexis decides that she likes the fact that coral is of all things immobile, could not pursue even if it wanted to, and seems to simply ignore mating but for the time and place when the seething clouds appear and collide, their substance coming together (a sweaty, cursing fuck in the backseat of his car or the community room on her break a few weeks later that neither of them could have planned for) only to then disappear with the tides like they had never even spoken, the singular proof of their union an anchoring polyp, swelling shoals, the layering bones of blossoms once met.

Elastic

Darnell Arnoult

April was born in the month of her name. Perhaps that was the exponential factor. She had grown into a willowy girl. Her dresses draped from her shoulders. Her scrawny legs were cartoonlike in the clunky saddle oxfords her mother made her wear. “Good for your feet,” her mother said. With the heavy weight of black and white, the red sole, her feet felt like pendulums as they swung across the living room floor or up the sidewalk or down the hall at Wide Spot Elementary. It gave young April momentum, like her gyroscope. If she wanted to change directions, she simply banked her foot in a new direction. Eventually, the leather upper softened and shaped itself to her feet. The white scuffed, and her toes got too tight at the ends. Then she slipped herself into the new pair her mother gave her and started again.

One day, April felt imbalance. She needed her arms across her chest or a pillow in her lap, something she could hug and hide against. Her center of gravity had shifted. Her father didn’t notice, but her mother pulled her aside one night after dinner, held April’s hands out away from her body and said, “Oh my.” Early the next morning April’s mother took April to the department store downtown. A tall woman with red hair fitted April with a training bra.

“What am I training for?” April asked her mother as they stepped onto the department store elevator. Her mother clutched the bag with three other training bras just like the one April had kept on in the dressing room, looked at the elevator operator, a tall man in a suit with lots of brass buttons and wearing a round box for a hat, and said, “Ground floor please.”

Before long, not a single sweater in April’s closet was elastic enough to button at her bosom, not even the pink sweater with mother-of-pearl buttons she received on her thirteenth birthday. In what seemed like a short season of bees and honey and birdsong, April had blossomed, as her mother called it. And yet, April was not comfortable being a blossoming flower. She would rather have been inorganic—a pale pebble, a glinting chunk of gravel, a thimble full of golden sand. Instead she was bursting open, not even like a flower, but like an October bean, speckled and rubbery. A bean pod, swollen and shrunken all at the same time. Paper-thin skin stretched to breaking, while the sphere of bean only grew rounder, fuller, weightier.

April’s breasts began to enter the room ahead of her. Her mother was forever standing in front of her, getting between her and other people, such as the priest at St. Mary’s, the bag boy at Kroger’s, or the long line of servers at K&W Cafeteria. April’s mother chose everything from seven-layer salad all the way to lemon chess pie for the girl. April longed for chocolate chiffon as she peeked past her mother’s shoulder, but it was always lemon chess.

Soon April’s shoulders curved and her back bowed and cupped the weight of her globed chest, and her feet, what she could see of them, finally in black ballerina pumps, her mother’s sweet-sixteen gift, became her view of the world. As her feet swung out in front of her, now always following behind someone else, the low-slung vamps of the black flats revealed cleavage leaking down even between her toes.

April’s arms, so often folded across her body, became a gate that seldom opened, and April became a closed garden gone to seed. Her feet fell behind. More and more April slept in the shape of a child in a womb. Her words became unintelligible and far away. She disappeared, a syllable here, a vowel there, one atom here, two molecules there, until there nothing was left of her even to hide. Only traces of her chemical remains and a set of pearly pink buttons from a sweater she’d tried to fasten years and years before.

creative nonfiction

From Roots to Fruit

Kiyah Moore

Soft dirt—squish, squish—beneath tiny, milky feet. They will never find us. Sandpaper, prickly cucumber leaves break my tiny, fattened legs out into rashes. Itchy. Warm Tennessee red clay, broken and cultivated into soft, plowed ground bursting open with corn rows and green beans and squash lay before me, a fairy-sized-barely-four-year-old. What would it taste like to the lips? Small eager hands continue to search. At last, purple has been found. Yummy. Mustering all the might a small force of nature could, I lift this glowing orb from the ground, and after taking a moment to triumph in the success of my hunt, sink my teeth into layers—dirt, skin, turnip. For a moment, this sits on my tongue, and then in a violent retch, it lays before my feet. I thought I had a good idea.

This failed attempt at feeding myself would propel my curiosity forward throughout the years, but never lessen my love for foods that grew in the earth, particularly the foods that grew in my grandfather's garden. Curiosity and exploration were the marrow of a life spent behind the confines of the chain-link fence on Snodderly Drive. Each day moved forward similarly—we all load up three doors down in the cobalt Super Beetle. Mama opens the door, carries me in, and lays me to fidget in the squeaky brass bed of my grandma and grandpa's home. And while I waited for my grandma to wake up (she truly never rose until 11 o' clock in the morning due to tired nights of watching The Jay Leno Show), I would toss on restless seas of chenille quilts, and imagine creating.

Thump, thump, drag, thump, rattle, rattle, sizzle. Those were the alarms of a grandfather emerging from his cigarettes and coffee in the basement. Quietly and carefully, he would stir up quick, creamy pots of gravy, and large platters of glistening sausages and buttery biscuits. I'd pretend to sleep, and then I'd hear the soft door of the tiny room lightly press open and I'd hear him call my name. Breakfast is ready. He needn't say it in a ring, like my mother said it to me; he merely would say it as a matter of fact. Choice. I would hobble up to the tall, tall counter, and grab my plate full of the savory breakfast (the only one I've ever enjoyed). But as we would eat together, I could feel a promise ensuing—today we were going to learn something as we did everyday, but what today?

It could have been simply loading up in his burgundy truck and searching for old dresses in yard sales. It could have been visiting JohnGray and Ruth and Tootie. But one day, on a day the June bugs buzzed and would fall to the ground and smoosh beneath your feet, and one day when the sun beat down on fallen fruits on the ground, and one day when grandma's pressure cooker whizzed and buzzed, we sat beneath a pear tree and he handed me a tiny, wooden hook and a cotton ball of twine.

Any other child, who hadn't grown up in the company of sages and mountains, would've thrown this down out of impatience, but I had been in a world apart from quickness, a world apart from computers, a world not modernized, not yet conquered, and I took the hook and he slowly taught me how to crochet. Careful, sunburnt, hairy white hands moved awkwardly with the hook, and then passed the tools onto me. Stitch one. I struggled. Stitch two. He smiled. Stitch three. Six years pass and I'm in middle school, throwing up every morning out of anxiety. Stitch four. I learn how to knit as well, and carry my love into a knitting club in high school. Stitch five. I am knitting my grandfather a red and navy striped chemo hat. Stitch six. He passes away. Stitch seven. I accidentally knit myself a pair of pink baby socks; they still are in my closet. Stitch eight. Pain drives me forward in a world where my chain-link paradise is lost to a new kind of fence: anxiety and mania. Stitch nine. I look into the mirror and realize that I have breasts and hips and I am a woman—it's the day I graduate. Stitch ten. I wake up, in a rattling dorm bed to this rhythm, the stitching, and I wonder where time goes to hide when you discover you enjoyed the moments you lived in.

This sound, this rhythm, perpetuating my curiosity, sustains my desire to learn and instills the belief inside of me that there is never a bad exploration, and that no matter what, impermanence is real. Time moves on, like the stitches on my lap. Time moves on, never to be unraveled like the velvety green bean vines that tug me back into these moments. Time moves on, but moments pass away like the sleepy dust that has settled on the plot of land that was my grandpa's garden. Time moves on, and I rest here, amongst the wispy brown cornstalks and the bone-dry hay, waiting for spring to come back again.

Burnt Sienna

Sarah Robinson

“Wake up! Waffles are ready!” John appears next to my bed; his stuffed monkey clutched in the crook of his elbow like a ragdoll. I’d been waiting for him to wake me ever since the sun’s rays came peeping through my bedroom window.

“Is today Sunday?” I ask, sitting up. John holds the monkey to my face; makes it nod. I yawn as I push his friend away and hop out. “After breakfast, we have mass.” I scurry down the hallway after my brother, toward the sound and smell of sizzling bacon.

“By the time we get back,” he says, pouring syrup all over his plate, “Dad’ll be in the workshop.” Dad never attends church with us. ‘Pray for me,’ he always says. He spends Sundays making things, and drinking glasses of bourbon.

“I’m gonna see if I he’ll let me use his measuring tape,” John says. He just wants to see how much taller he is than me. Finishing the last bite, he takes a gulp of milk and wipes his white mustache away with his hand.

He may be fourteen months older, but we’re equals. Mom and Dad have four other kids, and we’re the youngest; we band together like teammates. Mostly, he lets me lead. Especially after last Easter, when he got us both in big trouble, after suggesting we load up all the pastel, hard-boiled eggs—the ones Mom had made from scratch--from a platter on the kitchen table. We filled our jacket-pockets with the entire dozen. Mom was washing dishes with her back turned when we hauled them outside to crack-off their shells.

One-by-one, we threw the sticky eggs at our brick house, as high as we could, just to see if they’d stick. Oh, they stuck alright. Once we were discovered, our brother Phil had to get up on the tallest ladder Dad has, and scrub away the mess.

“Go straight to your rooms, right this minute!” Mom scolded, her arm out-stretched. “There’ll be no Easter dinner for either of you,” she added. Our time-out was worse than a switch or a spanking. The scent of ham, potato casserole and homemade rolls wafted down the hallway. In the future, I’d have to take charge.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dad’s shop isn’t exactly a basement; more like an over-sized root cellar he and Phil dug out when our house was built, when Mom was still expecting me.

Once we enter the windowless room, it takes me a minute for my eyes to adjust. Maybe that’s why Dad always keeps the door open to the outside.

The floor is as tight as cement, packed-down from Dad’s size-eleven work shoes. At 6’3” he has to duck a bit as he moves about. We don’t dare get a toe in his way when Dad goes across the room, searching for something in a shadowy corner. He picks up what looks like a ruler from some shelf. He sits down on a low stool at his plywood table and goes to work sharpening a saw with the ruler-thingy. The shop air is cool; the hard ground glistens in reddish-brown, Virginia clay. It leaves a stain on the bottoms of our bare feet, like the burnt sienna crayon in my Crayola box. John searches for the measuring tape while I stand still watching Dad tighten a bare lightbulb. It hangs straight down from a black wire attached to a hook in the dirt ceiling. My brother loses interest in the tape when he can’t figure out which end to start with, or how it even works, so we wander back outdoors, leaving Dad to tinker all by himself.

It’s an Indian summer’s day, dry and sticky, with no rain in sight. I fill my short pockets with black-walnuts in their shells, gathering them from underneath our gigantic tree. Then I find a white rock that can act as chalk, and make a hop-scotch board on the driveway. I hop on one foot, drop a walnut shell into a square, and turn to pick it back up, never once losing my balance. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Dad leaving his shop. My “Fun with Dick and Jane” reader page comes to mind, the one with the dad mowing the lawn.

“Away I go,” said Father.

I spy him a few minutes later, walking back into his cave with a drink. I plop down in the middle of the driveway, and black walnuts spill out of my short-pockets. I need Dad’s hammer to break open the shells, but I hesitate when I hear the screeching buzz of his electric sawblade, and see sawdust flying out the door like a swarm of gold gnats.

“Look, oh, look. See them go.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next time I see Dad shuffling down the yard, he’s freshened his drink again. Maybe he’ll give me a sip. But he stops to make a funny face when he sees me staring. I giggle when he juts out his chin, using his tongue to pop out his false teeth. His bottom dentures hang at the end of his lips like they’re gonna fall out. Then he sucks them back in, but not before I spy the shiny pink plastic underneath his fake teeth. John and I laugh as we pull at our own teeth, but they won’t budge. As he ducks back into his shop, Dad whistles a tune, and we file in behind him like we’re following the Pied Piper. When he sets down his drink after taking a big swig, the liquor is the same burnt sienna as the shop floor.

John’s and my eyes light up when we realize Dad’s latest project is making us a Santa Claus: a life-sized, mechanical, battery-operated, super-hero! He will rock side-to-side and wave to our neighbors every Christmastime from his perch on the side of our house.

John and I stand on tiptoes, watching Dad concentrate. He applies a generous stream of wood glue across the middle of Santa’s red suit, then affixes a trim piece of plywood, tightening a vise around the jolly old man. Every rotation by Dad’s thick, strong hands is precise: turn, turn, turn…not too tight.

Waiting to see the finished Santa is like waiting for Christmas Eve, so we head to the house and wash up for quick peanut butter sandwiches.

Back outdoors, a not so itsy-bitsy spider, a Daddy Longlegs, crawls up the back of my brother’s white undershirt. I’ve seen hundreds of them, so I just reach up to wave the spider off. But when John feels my fingers brush his back, he turns around, following the Daddy’s path as it high-steps along the yard on its own stilts.

“Don’t lose him, he’s mine!” John yells, picking up the weightless creature and mimicking him. John high-steps out into the field, letting the bug crawl up his hand, and smiles as it tickles the hairs on his arm. When he finally flicks it off, John finds a long stick like the switch Dad sometimes uses on the back of our legs. Scratching it along the driveway, John pesters a wooly caterpillar, coaxing it out of a crack. But the creature doesn’t like the switch either, so he curls up, refusing to play with us. We run back into Dad’s cave to check on Santa’s progress.

He stands frozen, propped up against the wall next to a fan slowly drying his glue. The piece of wood scrap has become his belt: Dad’s already painted it black, with a silver buckle. Loose arms and legs on hinges will be attached like real joints. Dad grabs a hammer off the shelf, and with a ping…ping…ping, taps the hinges into place.

By late afternoon, Dad has made countless trips indoors. When he returns the last time, the sun is low in the sky. His lower lip is swollen, but no drink this time. Just a can of Zippo lighter-fluid, the one he usually keeps under the kitchen sink for filling his and Mom’s cigarette lighters. I don’t think much of it when he holds the can in one hand, a stick with a rag wrapped around it in the other, and staggers to the base of the black walnut tree. He reaches up with a lit torch, catching a branch with a big worm nest on fire.

A gust of wind catches my attention, blowing up dirt in every direction. The unexpected air current clips-off the dead branch, along with the cluster of white cobwebs, the ones with sizzling worms. When I look up, the leaves on the black walnut tree have sprung to life, clapping their hands like tambourines. The breeze coaxes the leaves to become partners in a fiery, autumn hoedown. I hold still, shielding my eyes with my bent arm from a sudden assault of smoke, but it finds its way up my nose. I pull my t-shirt up over my face, and run towards the driveway.

Moments later, adults come running outside screaming, “The field’s on fire!” I smell lighter-fluid, and spy flickering embers like daylight fire flies. Maybe Dad should’ve picked a calmer day.

John and I obey Mom’s voice, urging us toward the house. We run with our heads turned back toward the spectacle: pop-up blazes light new fires along the dry reeds in the open field, the one we run in with our friends when we play cowboys and Indians. The fires play Leap Frog above our favorite hill, the one we sled down in winter.

Mom unwinds the garden hose and pulls it taut to the back yard. Is she crying? Neighbors come running with pails.

“Over here!” someone shouts. People form a line from a neighbor’s water spigot. Ours is at full throttle. Buckets-to-hands, hands-to-buckets; turn and pass them quickly to the next person, like a game of Hot Potato. Mighty small buckets for such a big fire.

In the distance, a screeching siren rings out. In minutes, a gigantic red fire truck pulls into Lebanon Manor, sounding like my whiny cry, over and over again. It barrels up our gravel road where our old dog had been lying. Willie lazily got up, and moved in the nick-of-time!

“Run, Spot, run!”

John and I stay indoors at the picture window as the firemen smother the last of the flames and rewind their hoses. By nightfall, everyone returns home.

Mom says it was a “close call,” but Dad is awfully quiet. All that’s left of the field is a wet, smoky expanse of charred sticks. But our yard, the house, and all of us remain unharmed. Santa is still intact. And we all survive, even the black walnut tree, from what I remember.