​My Mother the Alchemist
 
I’d watch her transform stingy nettles into spinach soup after we picked them carefully, trying to touch only the underside of the leaves. We had no gloves. Dandelion shoots became salad with a bit of vinegar and salt. She magically metamorphosed a box of our silver flatware into a hundredweight of potatoes, her last damask tablecloth somehow converted itself into another hundredweight of carrots.
 
She brought water from the pump in two heavy buckets up to the second floor on stone stairs. That became soup, drinking water, and a bird bath for my budgie. 
 
After picking up the left-over stalks from fields the farmers had finished harvesting, mother dried the wheat and ground it in the coffee mill for a chunky morning porridge. 
 
One day’s worth of sewing underpants for the Russian army mutated miraculously into bread and sometimes butter. 
 
And at the end of the day, mother made the best magic of all: with a book on her lap, by the light of a glowing fire in the wood stove, she transformed a different hunger into possibilities.
  
Sentries and markers
The hinterland of dreams
Deliverance
 
**
 
This was first publishes in Silverbirch.
 
**
 
They Will Never Again Be As Now
 
Finland 1957
 
Huge tree trunks float downstream, bobbing giants. As matches they'll soon light advent candles in Stockholm, a fuse for a mining project in the Urals, or a cigarette from which the soldier at the heavily mined East-West German border will take a deep drag in the cold night of a cold war. From the old trenches I take a bayonet. Whose bloodstain on the stainless steel? In the farmhouse, the table coated with years of dust, a saltshaker, the knife black and sticky, the plate filled with shells of dead insects, a glass turned over, a crocheted doily crumbling. A tightly shut drawer finally gives in and spills tens of small black & white photographs: family reunions, women with aprons, men with awkward suits and big hands, children smiling or hiding from the camera.
 
They jumped from the trees
Halting the Russian advance
White suits like the snow
 
**
 
La Movida
 
The old portera gives her the stink eye. That cast-iron wrought ascensor door rattles shut, her heels click-clack down those last fake marble stairs. "Slut’," the old woman mumbles under her breath. Dolores wraps her fake fur a little closer, Madrid in October at night hints at the cold that’s to come. The chauffeur is waiting. Don Martín is a generous man. Dolores gets into the back of the beige and brown Citroën, falling into the luxurious, leather-covered seat. Their table is reserved at the Casino de Madrid.
 
In the entrance hall she looks around her: like moths around the light - her fellow phalaenas who sold their bodies for the fake jewels, rent paid, and the occasional pocket money bestowed from the rare winnings at the roulette tables, blackjack, baccarat, or poker. For a brief moment Dolores remembers a small stone bridge over a fast-flowing brook, the olive trees, and an orchard. Then she walks up those carpeted stairs, head held high, Don Martín waiting for her – or for anyone who is young and willing.
 
Bling and jazz – 
Nights of laughter and lust.
Love not on sale.
 
**
 
The Gifts
 
I admired her from when we were thirteen. Mixed into the admiration where some sharp little needles of envy. She had the gift. She was Marylin Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welch. No sooner than a man turned his eyes on her, sparkly lights ignited. She made a man hungry. 
 
Her mother was “Marlene Dietrich,” penciled eyebrows, blood-red lips and fingernails, a long cigarette holder, vertiginous heels, a black Mercedes. Her father, a fat autocratic patriarch with a loud voice who commanded and provided. Her clothes from boutiques, holidays on Capri.
 
She’d told me about having been stashed away on her granny’s farm during the war. Her grandmother would eat all by herself until there was nothing left. Her father soldiered at the front, her mother ran the business.
 
Husband number one: alcoholic, abusive. Beat her in drunken bouts of rage. Forced her to abort twice in back-street procedures. That was the end of kids for her.
            
Husband number two: couldn’t get it up for her, fucked at least 40 other women, never worked, made sure she believed she couldn’t survive without him. 
            
Now—mercifully—she doesn’t remember, barely remembers me. She knows, however, that I am benign. She is incontinent, can’t walk, delusional, paranoid, and I am grateful for gifts not given.
 
**
 
The Music I Used to Play
 
Chopin’s “Nocturnes,” Schubert’s “Kinderlieder,” the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” Bela Bartók, Stravinsky, Britten… My teenage years were filled with music that lived under my fingers and the piano keys. My mother made requests for her ‘helping-her-fall-asleep’ pleasure.  My first solo performance at a youth concert showed me that I wasn’t cut out for a musical solo career. Cold sweat dripped from my fingers, making them almost slip from the ivories. 
 
Still, even though there were breaks during my travels, a piano accompanied me wherever I settled, my musical interests widened, I lived in b-flats, d-minors, soared with rising chords or the secret sin of a grace note that winked at me.
 
Then my music slowly died. My left hand needed an operation, one finger didn’t bend easily anymore— limiting what I could play and how well I could play what was left—my need to play diminishing together with the lack of soaring and the grace notes on crutches, neighbours incensed if I dared to play outside the strictly enforced hours for making noise… I gave my last upright to a school in a poor neighbourhood of Lima. They sent me photos of happy faces singing around the instrument that had sustained me for many years. And now I have learned to love my silence.
 
**
 
When Everyone on Earth Went to Mars
 
At first there were only the billionaires. Their money would be useless where they were going but they paid for the rockets and took their gold. On Mars were pioneers who’d already prepared the ecospheres for the less able to survive. The earthlings asked themselves why their rich would invest in emigration to a hostile planet instead of delighting in the most magnificent place they had been privileged to call home. Then the billionaires hopped on the next rocket and the rest of us became radio-active shadows on stone. Once Gaia was cancer-free, she rejoiced, plants and animals thrived.
 
**
 
Ode to Modern Times
 
I never went to a mailbox by the road to retrieve my letter, catalogues, and the assorted publicity produced for the rubbish bin. My letterboxes where inside my house or apartment door, or someone had already sorted through the mail and put mine on the shelf that was gaining purpose.
 
Palpable excitement, disappointment, deciding what was for opening, what was for later (suspected bills and reminders for payment). The catalogues were for leafing through their pages longingly or often snorting with disgust. What was it today? A nest of shiny stainless-steel saucepans, the latest small hoover that fit into any broom cupboard, the Dior-inspired read A-line dress, a set of knickers for five pounds. Oh, and that beige coat that made an elegant wave at the back… The rest went into the bin. How much trees did we cut down in those days? 
 
Letters took up to five days from London to Düsseldorf, responses were slow in coming. By the time they got to me my problems were usually solved. Mum would ring once a week and spend a fortune (I couldn’t afford it, the kids were too expensive, the mortgage to high, the income too small. She’d worry that I divorce, that the IRA bombs would get us, cried, and when I asked her, she said, “I have remained sixteen inside, and every time I pass that mirror there is this old woman looking back at me.”)
 
That was the time when I lost all my friends, well almost all. They married, moved away, no address, no telephone number, working hard or having small kids that took up all their letter-writing time. I learned only at a 50-year class reunion (organized through email) that my best friend had years ago died of cancer.
 
In these electronic days I set aside a time after breakfast. I made a lot of new friends on my journey and open my email with anticipation, happy for friends who write to tell me they are well, that their husbands have recovered from the open-heart surgery, stroke, COVID, that their hip replacement went like a dream, that their son is getting married. Quick WhatsApp notes to send me a meme to start my day smiling. Short posts about their mum who is losing it, the pain they feel, the kids on drugs, or getting their PhD, the jokes about the ‘old’ days, the love, the hugs, the poems, the pix. This is my sacred time of the day, and I can respond immediately, sending hugs and kisses to those who need them.
 
**
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee. The most recent poetry collections: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?(Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), Saudade (December 2022), and Life Stuff (Kelsay Books November 2023) are available on Amazon. A new manuscript is brewing, and a new fun chapbook has been scheduled for publishing summer of 2025 (Kelsay Books).  https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
 
 

​Humans in the Water Cycle

I wanted to say something to you, and you wanted to say something to me and you’re in a plastic bag and I’m in a plastic bag, and both of us are rain and all of us are rain and the plastic bag of my raindrop is my watertight skin, and your watertight skin has webbed your mouth over, so you can’t say anything to me, and I can’t say anything to you and when we roll into the ground it will be the very plink of the stream of hot water first touching the dry floor of the teacup, and I will blossom open into the dirt and you shall do the same and we will roll into one ball together in the ground and so will everyone else and we will roar as an ocean sluicing through the soil and we will rise again like kids going up the cold metal ladder of the diving board, blue-and-rough bouncing under our feet, and I won’t be able to hold your hand anymore and you won’t be able to hold my hand anymore as we’d planned but we love all things vertiginous and tumble forth again without a word.

**

Praise for the Adversary

No matter what else I might pretend you are brilliant as the velvet black fish glancing at me under the green water I saw in my dream last night staring forward each time I woke and slipped back down into the depths. Your glossy black head your feathery black hair faintly undulating your gills plucking oxygen from the mossy water. Eyes moving left and right like rough stones. I have caught you in the net of my lymph seeing you everywhere as I stare down from my half-waking days. New leaves on the tree I thought was dead but now gladly see among the living birches. The dog content on my knee sitting among the pines smelling twigs at leisure. You are all of this and my broken ribs too.

Or maybe last night in my dream there was no water but I waded through the grasses carrying bulbs of glass that had been my liver and my kidneys and my lungs to give them to you as you neither took nor spurned them but looked forward toward something else eyelashes tingling with messages received from abroad. I can hear them crackling a bit too now. I shall sit beneath you like a curious rabbit under a great black tree and I shall watch the sun come and watch the sun go and I will lie here sweetly now too, smelling lichen and mosses at leisure until you have finally become you and I have finally become I and the tree the tree, the dirt the dirt and the fish swims away freely without a sound.
 
**

What is Left on the Table When My Father Doesn’t Come Home Anymore
 
It wouldn’t have been possible for you to say that by the time I was in your body everything was terrible. By the time I was there, cells splitting, your mouth was choking on the terrible traces of other women’s flesh, nostrils stoppered with their drugstore perfume. The flesh of women, traces of natural scent thrumming stronger without washing. My flesh in yours, amniotic and all-knowing if we believe the sages. Throughout the ages the sages know that belly waters are the safest. Which might be why some days, now, I don’t wash.
 
I won’t wash, and I let the perfume of my skin thrum stronger every day because there is no water, there is no oil or clay or soap that could clean us then, during those days when the terrible engulfed you and therefore me. And so how could you possibly say it, howsoever I, grown and all-knowing, might interrogate you. Howsoever I might berate you and hate you for hiding it, how could you breathe it. That by the time everything was terrible I was only growing because you could not stop me. Because it is terrible, and it engulfs us, that it is possible for it to be impossible to love what grows inside you. Impossible to clean it, impossible to wash from it the traces of other women’s flesh, the clinging smell of perfume in plastic bottles. Bottles on the dirty table, unclean with pearling milk, hoping to be picked up and washed, and filled.
 
**
 
Why I Never Order Cappuccino
 
Because I didn’t like how our tour guide handed me the plastic cup. Because my then-husband took it down in one gulp and told me I was being a bitch to the guy. Because I didn’t care about the Napoleon pistols he promised us cheap. Because I wanted dinner at the old hotel instead, to dine on its prewar china. Because as we walked to the secret antique market our guide kept winking at my ex, saying She doesn’t understand, eh? Women . . . Because our guide had growled, drink it. Because after just one sip, all the bitterness was too much & I spilled it onto the ground. Because the market was just a big field with no end in sight and now it was pitch black out. Because plodding past me, my ex had grunted, You’re so predictable. Because once again in the darkness they wouldn’t turn back to me. Because when I finally caught up my ex was flat on his face, the little white cup loose in the grass. Because I was getting tired now too, and the ground felt soft and strangely wonderful under my heavy granite legs. Because I tried to call my ex’s name but there was a small warm shell instead of a tongue in my mouth. Because I could just make out the little silver knife in our tour guide’s hand. Because he was tugging the rubles from my ex’s wallet, then turned towards me. 
 
**

What the King Wants and What the King Gets

Those years when Louis XIV housed his three mistresses in adjacent royal suites at Versailles, the women’s doors gazed at each other across the marble floor. Her majesty the queen his wife had a pretty set of rooms, elsewhere in the palace.

Look, she doesn’t seem to be whining for a baby, he mumbles into her ear when a tall blonde passes their café booth. At CVS getting a birthday card for his mother, he steers her to the diet pills and stares at her. 

In the first suite, Louis visits Louise, Marquise de la Vallière, whose four pregnancies have taken their toll. Louis pets her English spaniels, teasing that the little beasts’ affection will make up for his waning love. He nestles his plumed hat on his wig, crossing the vestibule to the bejeweled Madame de Montespan, radiantly expecting for the second time.

On their second abortion, staying in his parents’ basement, he won’t stay with her as she inserts the tablets. She won’t remember, years later, why they got into a screaming match as she lay there, but it was likely for her to hurry up and stop crying. Possibly also her throwing up when his mother needed the bathroom. 

Having already buried half of his children and all but one grandchild, Louis secretly marries the Marquise de Maintenon. They read together by the fire, squabbling about keeping the windows open or shut against the palace drafts. She longs for separate beds, but her confessor thinks it unwise, since she has no child. 

At their old café booth, he says his mother’s happy to have him back home. Might even cough up and pay his taxes for the year. He asks her what she will do, now the divorce is final. Probably go overseas as they’d planned, but alone. A new country every two years or so. Above all, nothing confining. 

**
​
Kalliopy Paleos studied contemporary American poetry at SUNY Brockport. She recently completed her third full-length novel translation from Greek. Poetry publications include pieces in Mediterranean Poetry and Gnashing Teeth Press; her prose has been included in ERGON Magazine for Greek-American Arts and Letters, The Ekphrastic Review and Flash Boulevard.

​ 
Trail Blazer

Two thousand miles done.  The old man has dangled his legs over the ledge of McAfee Knob, feasted his clouded blue eyes on the flaming red sunset, clambered the Dragon’s Tooth pathway to the snowy peak of Cove Mount, looked down from Clingman’s Dome on a dizzying ocean of mountains, the treetops rolling beneath him like waves.  

He has camped in bunkhouses with skiers, hikers, hunters.  Slugged whiskey and traded tales with young men a quarter his age, of his lifelong adventures – trekking the Camino de Santiago, hiking the Te Araroa, scaling the Great Himalayas.  Now, with less than two hundred miles to go to vanquish the Appalachian Trail, the old man is tired. 

He has lost sight of the bright blue arrows painted on the bark of the luminous white pines.  A foolish thing to do at dusk, as any rambler knows, but so, so tired, the old man sits down to rest at the foot of a tree.  The pack of the trunk is comforting against his aching spine.  Before long, he drifts off.  

In a pool of moonlight, a family of black bears ambles by.  One by one, they sniff the old man - a streak of gristle, a gut full of indigestion - then pad on.  Silently, into the cold, clear night.

**
​
Spread Your Wings

Hilda flies over strings of grey washing.  Sweeps over factories, scrapyards, towers of twisted mangles and rusty stoves.  She swoops over buttercup meadows dotted with toy cows.  The breeze carries Hilda high over the white cliffs of Dover.  Below the English Channel churns and ploughs, brown as a field.  

She floats into Paris.  The Eiffel Tower a bracelet charm; the Sacré Coeur an iridescent pearl; the sparkling Seine a diamanté chain.  She flutters above a pavement café, where a pair of mademoiselle sip haughty green cocktails, name-drop authors Hilda has never heard of.  Colette, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir.  

The mademoiselle point and laugh at Hilda’s frizzy perm, cheap jewellery, nylon gown with hem come down.  

Hilda lands with a thud on the hard cold cobbles.  Dream wings battered.

**

Diving Platform
 
The dusk breeze ruffling the frill of my swimsuit, my fingers tingling around a rickety rail, all around the sky reeling and swirling like a cauldron, a murder of crows calling from the darkening trees, my mouth filling with damp roots and bracken, and down, down below the trembling black water, a tangle of reeds twisting and writhing like Medusa’s hair.
 
**

Moving 
 
All that is left are a few cardboard boxes.  

“Not a bad day’s work,” he says.  

From the pocket of his corduroy slacks, he pulls his Swiss Army knife.  Liver-spotted hands trembling, he slices an apple in two, hands the larger half to his wife.  She smiles but says nothing.  

They sit next to each other, beneath the ash tree, on their golden anniversary bench – a gift from the family.  Through the branches, the evening light mottles the lawn with amber splashes.  White cabbage butterflies flit like confetti over the neat herbaceous borders.  The garden has never looked so lovely, but it is too large for them to manage these days.  As is the house. 

She thinks of all those years ago, when they planted the saplings, seeded the lawn, the sweat and toil it took her husband to dig the ornamental pond.  How quickly time has passed.   The children grown up so rapidly.  The street now full of newlyweds, people they barely know, some expecting their first child.  

“Did you remember to cancel the boiler insurance?” he says.

She nods.  Recalls their coal fire; flames dancing.  How they’d sit in their dressing gowns, sipping wine and laughing.  She’ll miss their home.  All their wonderful memories.  The dreams and plans they shared when they first married.  That sense of embarking on an endless journey together.  

And yet, she can’t escape the feeling that over the years something elusive has drawn steadily away from her.  Why is it, she thinks, that we didn’t – that nothing had – that whatever we -?  

**

Urban Pest
 
When Xander was satisfied that no one was looking, he vacuumed up a plump mauve pigeon.  He watched with glee, as the bird’s glassy pink eyes, sleek plumage, red taloned feet, disappeared down the gaping gullet of the Glutton 3.

Xander began whistling The Children of Piraeus. It was a bright sunny morning on Syntagma Square.  Bustling commuters flew out from the Metro; tourists perched for selfies on the edge of the sparkling fountains; a busker warbled away on the steps of the Parliament.  
 
In the distance, high on its rocky hill stood the Parthenon.  Glowing pink.   Magnificent, Xander thought.  He took great pride in his city and in his work.  If only the marble slabs of the Square weren't splattered with globs of emerald shit.

He set off on his rounds, dragging behind him like a faithful hound, the Glutton 3.  This model was phenomenal: ultra-lightweight carbon fibre suction pipe; two hundred and forty litre storage space; steerable front wheel for optimum manoeuvrability.  Cigarette butts, tin cans, plastic bottles, biodegradable waste – everything consumed and contained odour-free within its voluminous belly.   A little man, with little to show for his life, master of the Glutton 3, Xander  felt like Zeus.
  
Man and machine sauntered towards the perimeter of the Square, sucking up Styrofoam coffee cups, half-eaten baklava, discarded newspapers.  On the way, Xander surreptitiously scattered a handful of birdseed.  “Here, pretty birdies,” he cooed.  Soon, a throng of blue-grey pigeons gathered, greedily pecking the ground. 
 
Wh...oosh thump. Wh...oosh thump. Wh...oosh thump.  Clunk! Clunk!   

Five foul vermin in one fell swoop.  The Glutton 3 was hungry!  A few stray feathers fluttered to the ground.

Between the leaves of a fragrant orange tree, came a rustle and flap. Without hesitation, Xander swung the suction pipe upwards into the branches and exterminated three more flying rats.  

But then, there was a splutter, whir, loss of suction.  The smell of burning.  Xander pressed the Glutton 3’s emergency stop button; opened up its heaving drum to investigate.  A ginormous pigeon emerged.  It beat its golden wings, opened its massive beak and with a triumphant gulp, devoured Xander whole.
 
**

Dracula Attends the Whitby Goth Weekend

For a joke, he checked in to the Stoker Hotel as Count Wampyr.  He smoothed his paunch, swished his cloak, flashed a fangy grin at the ravishing redheaded receptionist.  She looked bored.  Slightly repulsed, he thought.  Perhaps he’d some spinach lodged between his teeth?  Lately he’d lost his appetite for meat and turned vegan.  He spent a miserable afternoon at the Bizarre Bazaar, drifting between stalls selling boot chains, studded codpieces, steampunk goggles.  He felt so passé.  Invisible.  At dusk, he floated past the Pavilion, where hordes of Goths queued for headliners, Inkubus Sukkubus.  Alone, he lay down in the Abbey ruins.  Communed with the bats.  

**

Moonbeam and Lightning
 
By the time we are cruising at thirty thousand feet, towards the Strait of Gibraltar, our new flight attendant, Cathy, has told me her entire life story.  

I’m Nelly Dean, by the way.  Longest serving cabin crew at Go Lucky Air.  I like to take newbies under my wing because I’m easy to talk to, folk say.  

Cathy tells me that like me, she grew up on the Yorkshire Moors.  That after her parents died, her brother was left in charge.  “Hindley’s a reet bastard,” she says.  “He likes a drink.  Got worse, after ‘is missus died.”  Dark grey eyes glinting like flint, her hobbies, she says, are outdoorsy things.  Bareback horse riding.  Wild camping.  Geocaching, whatever that is.  

Apparently, she’s engaged to a fella called Ed.  “Steady Eddy, I call ‘im,” she says, grimacing.   She shoves her phone under my nose and shows me a photo.  Yellow hair, pale face, waxed jacket and cravat.  Stood with a chocolate Labrador in front of a Range Rover. Bit of a numpty, I think, but say nowt.  I’m not the type to judge.   

Cathy says, “I want to see the world, shake things up, get some ‘eadspace, like.”
It’s on our descent, when we’re flogging Duty Free, that I notice the sprig of mauve heather pinned to her scarf, the hare’s foot gripped in her hand, her look of wild glee, as we hit a pocket of turbulence, and the trolley goes flying.

Captain Heathcliff comes over the tannoy.  “Passengers and cabin crew, return to your seats.  And fasten your safety belts.”  

Flights are never boring, when ‘Hothead’ Heathcliff is piloting.  None of us cabin crew will forget the time, when for a bet, he landed a Boeing 747 on the M60 motorway.   He paid hell for that. 

Cathy refuses to buckle up her seatbelt.  Instead, as if in prayer, she sinks to her knees, presses her face to the porthole, where outside the wind howls, clouds swirl, pebble-sized hailstones pelt against pane.  We tailspin and dive.  Men, women, children shriek like monkeys, as we plummet at breakneck speed towards the jagged peaks of the Rock of Gibraltar.  

“Oh Lord. This is it,” I think, but then, incredibly, the plane banks, turns sharp left and soars.

“Just a bit of bumpy air,” Captain Heathcliff says, a note of hysteria in his voice.“We’ll be arriving in Gibraltar in a few minutes.”

Cathy turns from the window.  Her face is glowing.  “Ee, Nelly,” she says.  “Tha’ Captain Heathcliff’s something else.”  And with a laugh, she unfurls her hand.  In her palm is a bloodied squish of tiny bones, broken claws, tangled fur. 

**
Note:  The title is from Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, 1847

**

Jane Salmons lives in Shropshire in the UK.  Her poetry collection The Quiet Spy about Holocaust hero Frank Foley, was published by Pindrop Press in 2022.  Her poetry pamphlet The Bridge is forthcoming with Offa's Press.  A recipient of Arts Council England funding, Jane also writes flash and microfiction.  After teaching for nearly thirty years, she now works part time as an international teacher trainer.  Read more at janesalmonspoetry.co.uk
 

We are over the moon to have prose poems from The Mackinaw honoured in Best Small Fictions and two honoured in Best Microfictions!!!!

Congratulations to Mikki Aronoff and Cassandra Atherton for the inclusion of their works in Best Small Fictions, to follow below.

Congratulations to Alexis Rhone Fancher and Francine Witte for the inclusion of their works in Best Microfiction, to follow below.

We encourage everyone to purchase each of these anthologies to support the small presses that publish them and the writers inside.

Best Microfictions
Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, guest editor Dawn Raffel
Pelekinesis Books

https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/

**

Best Small Fictions
Michelle Elvy and Nathan Leslie, guest editor Robert Shapard
Alternating Current Press

https://altcurrentpress.com/best-small-fictions/

​**

Thread 
 
1. Thread has no memory, thread has no mercy. Mercy is something you bestow. There is no bestowing with thread. Thread is dispassionate even though it is usually blamed for problems. Take tangling, for instance. You couldn’t tangle thread unless it was there to be tangled, so its presence makes it look guilty. Same for tethering. You could tie your dog or your uncle to a pole and they wouldn’t like it, especially if there’s no shade, but is it the tether’s fault? 
 
2. Cotton gin? Not what you think.
 
3. Playtime weaves jet and crimson dreams, takes her to the edge of the woods. A cowbell clangs her home. Her father is out back with the hose. He grows cotton plants, a dozen or so. It’s just a hobby. Her mother sits on the porch and waits for the bolls to open so she can spin and weave the fluffy fibers they encase.  Later, they’ll eat a dinner of leftovers off plastic placemats with scenes from Yellowstone and The Appalachian Trail, and then it’s early to bed.
 
4. To mercerize is to chemically treat fibres to impart strength and luster and reduce fabric shrinkage. Shrinkage is what happens when penis meets pool.
 
5. Break down a cotton plant and you get lint, seeds, seed hulls, stalks, stems or canes, roots, leaves, bolls, and flowers. Break down a flower and you get tears. When she (see #3) started to flower, someone stalked her. She was afraid to turn around and see who it was, but she was able to sense his shadow. She quickened her steps the closer she got to home.
 
6. Her grandmother took an old sheet, cut and sewed it and embroidered her a Russian peasant blouse for her birthday. She cross-stitched it red and black to mark the knots of their lives. The stain of revolution, of iron, weigh heavy. She is thirteen and wants a t-shirt.
 
7. Linters are the short fuzz on cotton plants. They provide cellulose for making plastics, explosives and other products, perhaps the tugging strings of tampons.
 
8. Ariadne’s Thread is a method for solving a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding. Take our flowering stalkee (see #5). How can she evade that person? She could disguise herself, but for her scent. The stalker’s nostrils expand to take her in. Okay, let’s get real. Throw that guy in the clinker. Do you really want to lock up a budding young girl? No, you’d sit her down and talk to her. A lot. Until, years later, tired of her sulking, you send her away to college, where she has a crush on her physics professor. She fastens her eyes on his thighs, invents theories about cotton thread and crucibles. Her heat is need, is threat. Later, a real lover leaves her for another. Miffed, she stitches his photo between two pages of her sketchbook. Trapped, airless. Empath that she is, she starts gasping for air, runs to the bathroom in a panic. Where are her pills? Arachne scuds across the shower stall floor. Thin limbs, fire on the belly. Black widow. She nearly slips on the tile floors escaping to the bedroom. She opens the window, sticks her head out over the fire escape. She cannot read the stars, as the city lights are too bright in the muggy heat. She unravels some, then some more, then rewinds her way back to bed. Problem solved.
 
9. A Harlequin Dane lugs his tonnage past her and a Vietnam vet in the coffee line, gets them talking of their fondness for oversized dogs. Both of them now too old to manage. Their thirst knits them till they get to the counter. She drives home, not recognizing the flesh and fur that flanked her that morning. Someone’s walking little dogs just like mine. Her dog-walker on his phone. All sense spooling from her head. 
 
10. Cotton belongs to the genus Gossypium but learned early to keep its mouth shut. It knows what kind of trouble telling tales out of school can bring (see #1-9). 
 
11. She careens between the moistness of stream banks. 
 
Blessed thread, holy filament, 
tie my heat to my wanting, 
flame my dread,
make safe my travels.  
 
Skeins of copper wire bird-nesting the dark. 

Mikki Aronoff

**

Tokyo Panorama Suite
 
1.         Century Southern Tower
At 5am the sky wraps the bottom of our king size bed in a thick lavender stripe. Your hand is resting on your cheek, fingers fluttering against your eyebrow, as light from Docomo clocktower tints your pillow lemon and lilac. I have grown into a deep silence, and into the cramped voicelessness of morning. Time presses, but I’m the only one who feels its weight. I smooth out crinkles in the bottom sheet with the balls of my feet and you turn toward me—too early to rise, too late to dream, you fill the space between my arms and thighs in a tight enfolding of skin and bone. Later, we wait for the sound of the trains, imagine their coloured stripes snaking through the mazes beneath us. Just above the tip of my toe, Mount Fuji is a tiny white triangle.
 
2.         Kama-Asa
In an intimate handshake, the saleswoman fits the knife’s thick green handle into the crease of my palm. It nestles there as my fingers encircle it. I chop the air in rocking motions, imaging onions, heads of garlic, habaneros; and the rhythm builds in my hobbyhorse wrist. When I hold up the blade, my face is a bisected, matte rectangle. The woman places the steel in a vice, hammering my name, before I trace the hiragana’s indentations like reverse braille, learning its inflections and gradients. At the airport, as the exit doors slide open, the customs officer asks if the knife is for cooking. My fingers curl again into my palm.
 
3.         Yomiuri Land
On the ferris wheel, you pop a button on my long coat as you press your knee between my thighs. I hear the clink on the bottom of the carriage as the disc spins off the edge. We’re a third of the way to the top and the shadows of spokes and struts snag on our bodies. With your olive coat pulled up to your waist and my stockings binding my ankles, I free fall in your arms. Turning my head, I see the roller coaster climbing its track before catapulting into a cloudy sky.
 
4.         Narita Shrine
Your arm is a question mark around my waist, a curve that begins at one hip and ends at the other with the round of your elbow. We walk from the hotel lobby into the lucent morning as darkness lies between your arm and the small of my back. It’s a sort of beginning—squeezing down sloping paths as our footsteps count the years like a series of stretched ellipses. When an ending nags at my collarbone, I sweep it under my hair and touch the back of your neck. At Narita-san Shinsho-ji temple I perform misogi, rinsing my hands and mouth. You feed the gosanke koi in Ryuchi pond and I watch mottled sunrise bloom on their cycloid scales.
 
Cassandra Atherton

**


​Cruel Choices
 
When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie, and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favourite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher

This was also published in Askew, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

**

Where Did You Go?

I went thin as pears, all sliced-up and see-through. I went halfway to happy. I went to a place where I don’t have to answer. I went sniff in the air. I went to the arms of another. I went bent as bones. I went to a job without a computer. Where I stand in a field and the sun wets my back. I went behind the numbers on a wristwatch. I went hundreds of miles from your eyes. I went all unmarriage and you cannot stop me. I went where your questions stop smack in the air and long before they can get to my ears. I went to before I even know you. That spot in the morning about to begin, that curl of a mouth turning into a smile, that moment a flower opens up like a hand.

Francine Witte

This poem was first published at Unbroken Journal.

The Onset
 
The first moment screams crippled. Hurt ovals its small, cramped mouth. Previous health vanishes, an unleashed dog, the owner with his sack of cheap candy, a silhouette at a Halloween door. Winter’s end is a season of shots. Memory yammers while he shuffles to the elevator that rises to where syringes grow like the green onions his father salted like hard-boiled eggs. March withers until its shadow goes out. Each night the grins of animals enter his room like memorized prayers.  They rhyme their breath with his, reciting. His mother, dead before his age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering his house requires a ticket.  For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over.  She’s dreamed his body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, his breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper sack, she’s brought twelve pounds of pennies gathered from sidewalks and carpets. She asks him to arrange them in rolls for the teller she knows by name, the woman who lost her husband in Korea.  She shakes his clipped hair and nails from her purse, spelling his name with her finger in the thin dust.  Only after she knows the exact sum of her savings does she allow him to moan his symptoms.  Lie down, she says, so I can love you.  In two places, she ties her green gown behind him. There, she says, now finish undressing. And yes, she examines him, saying, “Relax now, close your eyes. This is where the past ends.”
 
**

Subsidence

It’s not the end of the world, the eclipse shifting foundations, the cinderblock cracked where corners of houses keel over like drunks. It’s not the atomic bomb. It’s not fallout, the despair that covers homeowners in the helpless housing plan built over the long-closed, anthracite mines.  It’s not a firestorm that ruins these roads, not a shock-wave that creates refugees. It’s not my father inside the fire hall huddled with his neighbours.  It’s not his hands that straighten the map where his modest street shows so large he believes it’s a river. It’s not cancer in every family. It’s not decades of dying, nobody returning, not ever, not even to the half-life that they endured, measuring themselves by mortgages that outlive them. It’s not the apocalypse.  It’s not news, watching while my father walks his hallway, measuring slope with his body, leaning.

**

This was previously published in a different form at 100 Word Story.

**

During the Plague Years

For his appointments, two years and counting, the woman who cut his hair was always masked when she unlocked the door and recorded his temperature like a dedicated nurse. She opened early on Thursdays to accommodate his fear, the salon empty, her partner not due for half an hour, his hair self-washed just minutes before. Her mask was always leopard-spot print, his black, the radio flush with current pop songs. With what he often felt was tenderness, she lifted the loops of his mask from his ears to trim. Years before, like his daughter, she had failed algebra, the two of them miserable, but together in summer school. For six weeks, they had been friends, a coincidence that made conversation easy. “Solve for x,” she said. “Solve for y,” and they laughed about no longer remembering which function came first among addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. In late spring, the third year begun, she said, “It’s been crazy” before murmuring the details of how her former husband had been shot and killed while outdoor-eating chicken wings, the gun home-made by the jealous shooter. He did not interrupt her. Most of all, he did not admit that he had no idea the dead man had been her husband. That he knew her only by her high school name, the one brought home by his daughter more than twenty years before. Before she brushed his loose hair to the floor, she showed him a photograph of her two daughters, their father no longer absent, but gone. This daughter, she says, drives her dead father’s car to work and washes it by hand each week. That daughter wears his shirts to bed. To solve for three unknowns, he thought, use simultaneous equations. Something he kept to himself like a terrible perversion as she allowed him a moment with the hand-held mirror. And though her ex had been with a woman who was also dead, the first to be shot, she confessed she had been sleepless since. That she was thinking she could live without cutting and styling hair. His spoken sympathy, he knew, did not comfort her. He paid, in cash, the tip, as always, pre-calculated to minimize the chance of contact. Already, he was telling himself never to speak of this and yet, weeks before she vanished and his hair was cut by a young, beautiful stranger, he betrayed her.
 
**
 
The Everlasting
 
If he used a rotary phone, a man believes he could dial the long nines to his mother’s voice, breathless from her downstairs hurry and failing heart.  He’s years alone, three weeks sleepless with waiting that whirrs like locusts.  His house has learned a language he cannot translate.  All morning its strange monologue chants the vowels of threat and fear. By noon the rooms darken for rain. The windows seal like lids on lungs.  Light flees to where everlasting breathes promises without people. Already he is months older than the dead he wishes to heal with his hands.  The familiar moans its daylong emergency song. On the kitchen table, papers and books, the small, reusable place setting.  The heart of a king, he’s read, was mummified with mint and myrtle, frankincense, daisy. After centuries, it’s a thing that travels like a campaigner. In each room the unbearable waits like a woman he’s paid for.
 
**
 
The Martyr in our Town
 
The martyr in our town is scouting the public places where we gather in great numbers.  He enters our malls and notes the busiest stores; he scans the food court’s longest lines.  Fridays, he watches football at the high school; Saturdays, a blockbuster film. Sundays, there are churches to attend, sitting with families on wooden pews. He studies prophecies and commandments.  He reads only the holy translations. At last, when winter justifies his knee-length coat, he thickens his waist with dynamite, develops a nails and ball-bearings paunch, and enters our one restaurant where every diner has three forks, two spoons, and wine on ice. He is ticking as he gives his reservation name, deciding that the tables nearby are perfect with capacity use. All this, he prays, will spread and go airborne like a pandemic’s contagion. Before he steps forward, the hostess displays a complimentary hangar for his heavy coat. She begins with the word the word “sir” just as he triggers himself, ascending.
 
**
 
Robbing the Pillars
 
In the Pioneer Tunnel, the tourists learn about robbing the pillars, how those seams of anthracite were blasted and stripped, how pillars of coal, left thick as support, would tempt the owners to send miners back down to shave them. How there, in those caves, men decided to take one more inch, then daring one more, the last thing the guide says before turning out the lights to make them eyeball the dread such darkness conjures. Think what's overhead as unstable, the guide says. Think of thinking that when you're blind. He listens for crying. For whispering between couples. Near the end of the minute, he reminds them where they are and what was done to the pillars among them. Often, he hears a scream. Always, someone applauds when he restores the light, the group more compact, appearing to be thicker than before.
 
**
 
In the Attic                                                                                       
 
My father, the magician, rose, without alarm, at five-fifteen to ready himself for night shift. My mother, his accomplice, materialized from work of her own at six-thirty. And I, seven years-old, mastered the tricks of straight-home, relock, and silent play. Before he descended to the brief privacy of water, my father, overhead, was a marvel who made the ceiling speak with his feet, his stage forbidden as matches, one more commandment I kept until the afternoon when stillness stayed sprawled above me, his performance so late I freed myself from fear’s handcuffs and climbed, sweat soaking my school shirt as dark as each corner of that barren room. I kept myself quiet while my father’s breath stuttered. I coughed and heard something snag in his sleep-drugged throat. My mother floated three miles away. She carried our phone. I might have called out to wake him, but that attic wheezed with prophecy, my father’s slack mouth suggesting death, nothing in that room but his body and the unkempt bed, not a book, not his flour-dusted clothes left downstairs as laundry, my terror a secret shame, its cry stifled by the heavy, mote-filled air.
 
**
 
Bloodletting
 
Missionaries came to my door this morning, speaking through the screen about the end times that are running, one said, on fumes, grinning like the bright dot on my Celica’s fuel gauge when I am fifteen minutes from stalling. Those preachers hoped to stir the fear I’ve stored since a thousand Sunday sermons rooted it so deeply I could imagine a soul. They spoke with the fervor of plague year priests, the certainty of bloodletters draining two pints to cure diseases embedded by a chronic imbalance of humors, the four I studied once, remembering the barber, past seventy, who had cut my schoolboy hair, how thirteen years later, he had stood with me outside his long-closed shop and recited the contours of my head, the way the strands nearest the crown needed special tending, and I, at twenty, confessed how much he’d frightened me with his story about the symbolism of barber poles, how his father and his grandfather had cut the blue veins of customers who believed their sicknesses could be emptied with their blood, that even boys like me had a pint to spare. The street was becoming a plain of absence for an approaching thruway. My hair curled over my collar, something to cut; the veins in my arms seemed swollen the way they felt when I watched those two terrorists enter the house of the woman across the street, admitted by the daughter who cuts herself daily, drawing a blade across her limbs as if she were lancing the boils of fear, squandering herself on anticipation.
 
**
​
The Biblical Epic, with Intermission 
​
Some Sunday evenings, while he sat between his parents like a prisoner, God was the deep voice that shook trees and billowed the cloaks of bearded men. Jesus was always the back of a head, a spotless hem of robe, or a lifted hand. The Old Testament women were full of lust, the men overcome by violence. The New Testament women were never blonde. But whether Old or New, the stories were so long that his parents watched them, during the waning days of the double feature era, one by one, those films turning epic, an intermission included at a cliffhanger moment. His parents never spoke; they never used the rest rooms. They contemplated. They considered. They turned introspective and thoughtful. At last, the rest of the movie-goers took their seats and shut up for the last halves of the holy films. Suffer the little children, Christ said, but soon he was suffering, too. The boy’s mother passed him a ham sandwich and a cup of milk from her blue thermos. When Jesus turned, his white robe fluttered at his top-of-the-screen cut throat. When he spoke, his back was turned, his face, in those films, never shown, his voice issuing soft sermons toward a void beyond the crowd. Sometimes, when the heathen women leaned forward and their loose clothes opened to a hint of breasts, the boy wished for a glimpse of the face of Christ, a way of knowing whether his eyes shifted down despite the tilt of his holy, upturned head.
 
**
 
Gary Fincke's two latest collections of poetry have just been published: For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books), his fifteenth collection, and The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53). His latest flash fiction collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). His full-length story collections have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
 

She lives next door and                    

when she opened the door to his curious  knock in shorts with sleeveless blouse, wide  gumdrop blue eyes and moist tulip lips, his mouth dropped in freefall while she stood undisturbed by his discomfiture -but how could she not hear the thumping heart, the sizzling blood, expanding veins, and when he sputtered, muttered excuses to prolong their exchange of prattle she played along and worse  she smiled.
 
**

Innuendo   

a ripe atmosphere of denigration, insinuation as they insist that they are being persecuted by Them, those Others who are hell-bent. A hush as the air swirls with hints, a cloud of cinders drifting as if wood is burning, the air turning dark with spite in spite of declarations of peace of unity. Listen. Echoes of cursing, loud, harsh reverberate as if the clouds are amplifiers, reflecting back our words, our taunts, our sly derogations. It is deafening yet we listen to the repetition, dulled, our ears flooded, the wax melted and dripping with accusation. Is it too late for an insertion of ear plugs, for an intervention-source unknown-but surely it must come. Perhaps those unknown fliers, those unworldly saucers that observe us, and perhaps pity us will help, will cleanse the air with an acoustic device or maybe not. Listen, the voices grow louder, bickering-it’s sickening.

**

Tears     

There is a rent in the sky and the rain pours down relentless, unrelenting. Are those rips from the claws of a humongous dragon escaped from some online streaming series or are those beasts creatures from the other side of the sky streaming in through the ripped curtain that separated our world from hell? And those drops that touch us scald like acid rain, not the torrent that made Noah build his ark but water made toxic by us. We shiver as the liquid turns cold and hear a voice crying. Looking up we see two enormous blue sky eyes, round, vaporous, moist, looking at us and weeping.

**
 
The end of science  
 
Its terminus began centuries ago with Banaji. Opining logically, he revealed our brains are inherently narcissistic; we’re cognitively subject to implicit bias.  Unconsciously all humans are not objective. Therefore, there are no hard and fast facts only subjective sentences uttered or iterated by speakers either real or artificial booming from the Internet.  Since science prided itself on non-subjectivity, the establishment along with the populace decided it did not exist. This allowed folks to engage in as much
unhealthy behavior as they pleased. Plague followed.

**
 
Choice Point   

Frost’s frosty roads had no apparent terminus so to decide which path to pursue, which meandering gravel strewn roadway to traverse in hope of finding a  paradisical world was as arbitrary as a coin toss in the absence of change. And this absence of change results in the absence of change-immobility. This causes mental conflict and anxiety. Either this fork in the road is a Freudian approach- approach conflict where two equally good alternatives present or avoidance- avoidance where two equally objectionable possibilities present. The outcome: resentment. In this there is a presentiment of disaster as, frozen, indecisive, and resentful, there is paralysis, ultimately self-punitive with progress halted. Hmm. Are we at such a choice point now?

**

Author writes in New York City USA under the pen name Jan Cronos. The New York Metropolitan area provides a vast resource for creative writing, including backdrops, prose poetry, rhyming poetry, hybrid or experimental forms of poetry. The  author also writes flash fiction, short fiction and science fiction as well as various uncategorizable forms of writing.

​Not Only Wolves

I’ve heard tell there are shape shifters in the forest preying on men and women alike. Sometimes they are cunning foxes who lure with their sharp wit and quick tongues, charming their victims into submission, holding even passing acquaintances in silvery thrall. Or they can be lazy cats who never change their shape, sitting on laps and feeding on morsels of fish freely given, as a respite from their usually wild and vagrant ways to which they soon return. They only temporarily use human bodies to accomplish a task or catch a free ride, abandoning the husks, still warm and alive, wiped clear of memories. These hapless souls are often found on a garden bench, mumbling and confused, but with blissful smiles emblazoned on their blank faces. These stories emerge from the melting snow or are carried on the summer wind. Perhaps mothers want to warn their daughters, or fathers their sons to be wary of handsome or beautiful strangers because you never know if the body paying such close attention on the bar stool next to yours or on the yoga mat inches from your heart, eyes and teeth unnaturally bright, has secrets and tastes you could never imagine.
 
**

The Wisdom of Naming Meteors after the God of Destruction
 
Theoretically, a large meteor could strike earth probably near Japan or China in 2027: Tsunami’s, earthquakes could affect everyone. But just like in the movie Don’t Look Up, Washington  will probably just hem and haw congressing about how to avoid this or that and come up with a dozen useless solutions destined to fail, while the Asians will be busy marketing their T-shirts and go-karts, and insulated cups and blankets emblazoned with the comet, little toy laser beams that aim to shoot it out of the sky before the imminent land disaster and all the while, NASA is busily planning for the real-life event of Apophis, a huge asteroid which will actually be close enough for us to see without a telescope in 2029, and hoping to land some little planetary explorers on it just to gather some data, like the composition of the thing itself, where it came from, when it was born and from what, so they can further study the whole universe and all its mysteries, and then . . . well, then, everyone on the planet will be busily making T-shirts, and wind-up astronauts with fake laser rockets, while the doomsayers will be marching across the land, once again, carrying their heavy placards, searching the skies for a sign.  

**

Gabapentin Dreamin'
 
Toy trains wind their way across my bed. Little black cats jump and chase the monarch butterflies fluttering by. I reach to grab them, wondering why, knowing nothing is there, try to pluck a raisin passing by. Later, the nearly full bag of straight-cathed urine comforts my leg with its heat as it forcibly leaves my bruised and rebellious body. Two hundred fine, four hundred fine, eight hundred cc’s “no bueno” as they say on the block. The nighttime dose kicks in and would someone please catch the iguana chomping my flowers up there on the corner of the bed pushed hard against the wall? And yes, the skies are grey.

**

Moving Backwards​

The earth’s core has reversed its magnetic pull, backtracking (like politics the world over) and slowly, the days are getting longer (it doesn’t just feel that way, what with news cycles endlessly repeating—it’s really happening), ticking extra seconds into our standard 24, which eventually will add up, though by then, we’ll have been smashed by the next asteroid that will hit this planet, and then poof! Snuffed out like a bad bulb, up in nothing but fizzle and pop and darkness. The pundits are all warning us already, about how dire this backward spin into our own futures will be but it seems the slap happy Kool-Aid drinkers have not enough imagination left to face the truth, so largely, like the lightbulb, have been left in the dark, where they fumble their own machinations toward the death spiral that is our beloved democracy, going extinct. 

**

Little White Lies Should be a Plant

Just sitting in the sun, actually not sitting, but exercising in the pool, the sun on my face, the only sitting done after the pool to drip dry the suit, which reluctantly, I must wear due to other people walking around my house, and even then it’s a lie because I don’t just sit, I go about the yard, clipping this errant branch or pulling that noxious weed, leaving the flowery ones, because even though they’re weeds, there are these little yellow flowers which look at least colourful in the area I call a garden, which is really just a set-back, grass-less strip against the fence where I have pots of various blooming plants whose names I can never remember, even though I wrote them down, but misplaced the paper, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which name belonged to which plant, which come to think of it, is a lie, too, because I do know the Impatiens, and the Dianthus, and especially the Marigolds which are supposed to ward off white flies and other pests that lay eggs all along the leaves wilting them right off the jalapeno peppers and micro cherry tomatoes, remembering the Ginger plants which have some long, odd name I do not remember, which surprise blooms every summer right through the other plants I invariably place over the bulbs each Fall when all the Ginger stalks have wilted, and of course my herbs, Rosemary, Thyme, Basil and the Sweet Mint I cut daily for my water, contemplating the skies before I drag out the hoses and water all these adornments that brighten my spirits every time I walk outside.

**

Oxygen Hunger

​I can’t help but picture those giant koi piled one on top of the other as they fight for the crumbs we’re throwing off the bridge. They stay up so long we can hear their gasping for breath, the watery kind, the kind that goes into their gills, back out as bubbles. We watch with macabre fascination as they choose first food, then life, then food again, not certain which will bring them more joy if fish are ever joyous. With humans, joy is—was—evident, a widespread smile, a giggle of mirth, but not this open-mouthed gasping when nothing is working right, too much water inside the body, not enough oxygen coming in, CO2 going out. They tell us these are end stages, code words for all the cliches we imagine: at death’s door, leaving this world, going to the other side. Perhaps you are only transitioning from man to fish, back to the waters you came from, long, long ago.

**

Something Wicked This Way Comes


Like death. Not always the cloaked and sexless figure holding a scythe; sometimes a white-winged angel with a mournful harp. Not always unwelcome, but always wicked, snatching what it wants, who it chooses ready or not, willing, or not, always a battle. See the crow on the windowsill? Death. The dark and angry sky? Death. The leaves shriveling off the trees? Death. Hear the long, low then high-pitched wails? Death is singing its final song to those left behind, for those it’s taken hear nothing ever again. Death is the mother of sleep, the father of eternal dreams, death is agony, release, comfort and affliction. Death never looks both ways before crossing over, it plunges ahead, sharpens its senses, instinct all it knows, all that matters in the long and the short of it all, until finally, it disappears, taking everything you loved leaving nothing but dust.

**

Barbra Nightingale’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Rattle Narrative Magazine (Poem of the Week, nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Gargoyle, Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, The Apalachee Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, Birmingham Review, Chatahoochee Review, The Comstock Review, Poetrybay.com,  The Mississippi Review.com, The MacGuffin, Crosscurrents, The Kansas Quarterly, Cumberlands Poetry Journal, Passages North, The Florida Review, Swimm.

​The Visitor 
 
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
  
The sharp shot of brass knocker searches room to room—not an echo but a bullet. As I leave my chair, it ricochets again with unsettling vehemence, a swearing. And opening the door, there, in blinding sunlight, is a face with the familiarity of the actress to whom I’m sexually attracted.  I hesitate to invite a scammer or proselytizer into my home, but that is exactly what I do. We sit in the living room just off the entry, but she declines my offer of tea with a women’s-college graciousness. A satchel of business gray disguises its spiritual contents. She talks in aphorisms while retrieving coloured folders from its darkness. I am ready for her spiel, but she pleasantly chastises me for my many failings. She seems bitter. Pleading ignorance, I squirm, ask questions to tie connotation to her words like bundling insurance to save money. She handles my cleverness with ease, countering with a few metaphors I don’t quite catch. Only a few minutes later, she rises to go like a retired school teacher. The air between us glows. We are un-bullied friends by now and we shake hands to prove it. She says that I owe her with a measure of meaning, a compelling art, and leaves one sample on the coffee table. It is a collection of poems I could have written; covers frayed, marginalia smudged. After she has smiled, the door closes; I flip through the pages with a thumb. A love-letter flutters to the floor. I can’t recall her name now, but my signature wrote itself neatly in the space provided like an alcoholic unaware he’s in a liquor store buying death for himself and others.
 
**
 
 Mischief
 
Somebody has taken the fork in the road— the stainless steel one noticed on my walk two days ago, lying brash between yellow lines dividing northbound from southbound, ignored by the coming and going of eastern promise and western regret. Yet, not meant to confuse by its accident, but amuse I suppose, the ordinary thing made special by odd context. Now in an absent choice, the sense of loss is profound. Someone saw no humor in leaving it: trash is trash and took it.
 
**
  
Images in Aggregate
 
Sabbe samkāra dukkha. (All conditioned things are unsatisfactory/suffering.) 
The Dhammapada  #278
  
Unweathered replacement boards in the junkyard’s grungy gray fence read like a bar-code for the sun to scan—parallels that will never meet. White Thanksgiving turkeys crammed four to a cage, stacked onto tractor-trailers litter feathers for many miles— sacrificed to tradition. Dozens of pelts or fish hang in old black and white photographs, buffalo bones piled saloon high—abundance bragged to extinction. Behind vinyl siding, houses rot the way politicians barter their integrity— secrets reside in black redactions. Cynicism cannot be our only hope. Coffee-soaked, layered with mascarpone, lady fingers are placed side by side for the tiramisu of our hunger—decadence divorced from suffering. Discarded Christmas trees are laid at the landfill’s edge like stacked bodies of a genocide, alternated stumps to stars— innocence drying out. 
 
**
 
No Boots for Arizona
 
but I must go. She called me near midnight, EST. I packed some heavy consequence a few lessons in grief. The internet has unbelievable pics of gold-pink and lonesome cumulous. She is a destination which needs no map, no GPS required. I could tell by her voice it was all westward horizons after blue mountains, blue grass. The only blue is the ink that rambles the contours. It all seems the same except for the cacti begging. I recall she said there would be three dusty arroyos on the left: Go far enough. Don’t question where you are, the men in those crusty towns wont know. I started early; it took too long. My anticipation felt guilty; in every mirage I saw a body to die for. The roads become less complicated, a few curves like nearing the end of an I-pad brain-teaser. A wand of second sunrise zipped through the slot canyon of hotel curtains, lit a Curtis photograph of Walpi, a Hopi village. I arrived in Flagstaff, unusually warm for evening, ponderosa, aspen, the train had come and gone, its bullion of history unloaded tar-smelling sleepers; gamblers with six shots at scoring. I hardly recognized her but I was her prayers answered like spirits down from the San Francisco Peaks, a vision perhaps, a cowboy smile Buddha could put on. The stars could not have been brighter, the moon was rolling on the tracks pissing itself out. We played poker and drank our joy sneaking into pockets of dark alleys. She showed me her art, gave me her penciled doodles: we’d buy boots tomorrow so I could kick them off before bed.
 
**
 
Stealing Away 
 
She sews patches on argument, places buttons along the edges like hubcaps, highway found and hung from barbed wire fences: a vengeance only the passing of miles can soften. He burns evening fields as if in anger, splashing flares across the cold winter sky. Starlings congregate, recite a subversive homily. Man and wife recede into complicated sleeps. At dream-break, he sneaks through night-fallen snow to let out the smell-spooked dogs, to free the chickens into the genius of their fox; goats that believe in a garden of delights somewhere else: she will not need the bother of them. Inside, she fabricates a pungent-hissing breakfast, hashes leftovers, bakes butter-soaked biscuits. Her monologue is peppered, with small forgivenesses, but apologies, like sheds, collapse now in storm. He ventures into no man’s land where tracks vanish without trace. Unchained, she slips back into the dust of a farmhouse hell; his last sigh escapes from the envelope she opens at the kitchen table.
 
**
 
Appearance at Everson’s Creek
 
Brian, the neighbour’s boy, found the body lounging by the swimming hole—no sign of struggle, no mark of pain, as peaceful as a stranger could be. Sheriff and deputy showed up with guns  and a betting humour, reluctantly poking the man as if there were danger in his lifelessness. No one admitted seeing the man around town though the boy’s mother turned her face to sob, fearing he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. The ambulance brought coloured carnival lights, the urgency of crackling radios, and the state police to make death official. The boy wanted the man to have a son who didn’t need him anymore: the zip of the body bag lengthening his spine.
 
**
 
Neighbours
 
One has sunken to his comfort level with wife number four, fifteen years younger. Across the street, Mr. Hernandez has filled-in his swimming pool to tend tomatoes and morning glories. Two doors down, dogs bark at the kids coming home from church as if at strangers. On Dogwood Lane, Mrs. Jane Dough bakes Jesus into every pastry, pie, every prayer. Her husband, Jack, of laughing stock, is proud to be a redneck in the post-pejorative sense. His sport is a cock-fighting humour. Over triple garages of the corner house, a copy-center banner droops--Don’t dump your damage on us--in snide black and white. Mr. Leo Nardo is offended, roars constantly, writes vituperative letters to the editor. Miss Jones, of woman’s college degree, talks in thread count using sterling vowels, maintains her green roof immaculately, but is horrified that trees suck her up each spring in their rebirth, sweet as she may be. Twyford James plays horseshoes with himself on moonless nights, his pitch lit by halogens that pollute the heavens. He forgets for a moment his son, a suicide. It’s a wonder that angels don’t hang out with us much anymore, giggling like silly teenagers, harmonizing with snippets of song, openly talking about sex. They don’t decorate urns or obelisks, advocate for remembrance much anymore.
 
**
 
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine.
 

A Dry Leaf 
 
In the grocery store parking lot, one recent afternoon, I spotted a brown, papery item on proud display on the dashboard of an older, blue Honda Civic. At first glance it appeared to be a large, single, curled-up, dried leaf. Wondering if my eyes had deceived me, I stepped closer. Yes, it was a dry leaf, brown, rounded in on itself so tightly I could not discern maple from oak or sycamore. I wondered at first “What would make a common dead leaf  important enough to merit such prominently display? Was it from a favorite tree?” Then I stepped away, into the store, to attend to my grocery list. 
 
As I rolled through the aisles, I pondered my own relationship with dried brown leaves, curled or straight, windblown on a path or lawn. Even a single leaf blown onto my path, crackles with remembered laughter when I walk through or step on them. It’s my son’s laughter that resounds in my ears as when he ran, his feet crushing and scattering dried leaves with all the delight a toddler could effuse. 
 
When I returned to my car, I saw that the blue Civic and its curled dry leaf were gone. On subsequent visits, I’ve looked for the car, but it’s never reappeared. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if the leaf’s significance for blue Civic was like mine, a portkey to a past (for me) when my son was alive and would run into my arms still laughing after dispersing the fallen leaves with his tiny feet. Lately, however, I’ve become skittish about  even if I do see the blue Civic again—not for fear of encountering another grieving parent but because the owner might answer,  “Leaf?  I guess the wind blew it into the car when I last opened the door.” I don’t think I could bear the weight of a dry leaf that has no meaning.
 
**

Whispering Hope
 
My father’s birth village was on a mountain in the Abruzzo. When we visited, on a late May afternoon, our car carefully climbed roads with no guardrails. Our tires hugged the part closest to the mountainside farthest from the scenic views. At last we stopped in a place where there was a cut-out that would keep us safe from passing trucks, looked down on trees, mostly bare, some still glazed with white, made and then photographed the mound of spring snowballs we’d made.
 
In Pittsburgh, we lived at the bottom of a hill, a hill I climbed when the roads were closed because of snow and ice and sledded down when there was no danger of careening into traffic. To reach the home of my Nonna, I had to climb one hundred steps (or so it seemed). Steep climbs are a part of me, so it is no surprise that I feel a kinship with mountain dwellers everywhere.
 
In our North Carolina home we lived with a river in my back yard, water that rose into the drive, penetrated the back rubber floor guard of our garage. Our rescue was easy—from large State-owned vehicles—the land was flat, easy for them to get to us. Afterwards, cleaning services came to erase the stink of foul mud from our property, even though the memory remained. Not so with the mountain folks, who have suffered the winds and ice of winter, lived through the green of spring and summer, only to be betrayed in what is normally their glorious season of ruby and citron leaves calling to visitors, betrayed by rain and wind and raging waters. Rivers that meandered through villages became behemoths, swallowing these places whole.
​
Chimney Rock and Bat Cave, Asheville, Swannanoa, places in Tennessee and southwest Virginia, places all along the misty Blue Ridge, crushed by water wielding trees and rocks and debris like weapons to take back the land from the people.

My tears push me to action for they are not distant from me—and although , as far as I know, my father’s town has never suffered so, water is everywhere and the possibility of disaster is equal to the possibility for joy no matter where one lives—so I must help in the only way I can—writing, telling stories, sending a check to those who are young enough to slough through the foul mud and bring supplies, bring out survivors. I, from here,  whisper words of hope to those whose lives were swept down the mountain that is so like the one where my father was born.

**
 
Nightmare Voices
 
Anyone who heard him call out for help as he clung to the tree while the river swirled around his place of safety, water lapping against the bark like the paws of a rabid bear trying to pull him down and into its grand maw, those who tried to save him, those who cried for him on the bank—all of these likely hear his cries in their nightmares. As for me, my body was not there but my mind traveled to him, like the dream figures in a Chagall painting, and his cries like brushes dipped in sorrowful black paint notes of screams into my ears each night, as if I had heard them with my own waking ears. I still hear the voices of the Hamas victims, of children caught int eh war in Gaza, of Holocaust victims who died before I was born, even voices of victims of Johnstown flood and the Titanic. All these still call to me in the ripples of every river, every stream, waves that roll up onto the beach. This is the poet’s blessing and curse—to be haunted by terrors in the tenor of voices in trees, in our sleep, and even in our waking hours, for as much as we fell joy, are compelled to share joy with words on paper, so we feel the pain even of voices no longer heard by others, both in our dreams and waking hours and share those voices on paper not simply for the art, but to give help others hear those voices, to ensure that they are not forgotten. We hear them all and it is our duty that with our pens we make them known.

**

Listening to Crow’s Morning Call
 
On our last morning of beach week my sunrise walk was primarily a watching  exercise.

Waves were foamy curls riding across the water from the horizon line to my toes on shore as if sent by the rising sun to meet me, carry shells to shore as gifts.

This was a calm day, ocean’s roll, the occasional call of a gull or sandpiper were expected background noise, but I hardly noticed even those as I focused on the sand in my hunt for shells.

Then an unexpected, “Caw, Caw!” sounded out and made me turn—a crow at the beach?

I turned. I saw him in his black robed majesty, sitting on the top of a rental beach chair, a visiting crow, beak still expelling his harsh call.
​
I smiled at him, turned away, and took a few more steps down the sand.
 
A songbird’s melodious trill floated over to me. Turning I saw only the crow. Had he imitated a songbird? I smiled. Walked on. Then, as plainly as one could hear such on a playground a child’s voice called, “Look at me!” “Look at me!”

Again I turned and this time I laughed. Crow, yes, crow, that consummate mimic had finally hit the language that made me listen, not simply hear, and go on.
 
I waved, smiled, walked a few steps toward him and spoke: “Hello Mr. Crow. You look very fine today.”

Acknowledging my compliment, he bobbed his head. He had wanted to be noticed and had called me until I did, choosing first his own language, then songbird speech, and finally the words of a human child. As I walked on, I wondered, how much better would the world be if like crow we could shift until we found a language that would reach another, cause us to listen, not simply hear the noise of their voices.

**

Camellias
 
I will miss my “winter’s roses.” Their profusion of pink, red, white petals scattered over mulch, grass yellowed by lack of rain, made carpets of colour that spread to the sidewalk when chilly breezes spread them about—like tea leaves swirling in my cup, in too hot water, scattered by the bubbling hot liquid, tea I drink to stave off the cold.
 
How appropriate that camellias, albeit different types than those of my North Carolina garden, are the plants that offer their leaves for tea. Now, in my Virginia home, bereft of flowering plants but enjoying snowflakes covering my lawn, I will recall the pastel and deep red beauty of those bushes in my former yard as I brew cups of tea to warm me against a more frigid clime. Cold has many faces but tea’s a constant.

**

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Internationally published as essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist, she’s a two-time nominee (fiction and poetry) for Pushcart and Best of the Net, nominee for Western Peace Prize, and a 2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Joan also performs folk and personal tales of food, family, strong women on stages across the country, UK and Europe. She teaches classes on writing and presenting, and now offers a one woman show bringing Louisa May Alcott to today’s audiences. You can find her on Facebook contact her at [email protected]

Roadster
 
The RPM's whine rises an octave, thus I depress the clutch, slide the car into fourth without much fuss, just throaty rumble.  At 60 it can be difficult to smell anything but burning petrol, but all of today's apple pollen fills the cockpit, some resting in my hair. Dusking sky reveals the first star to the south east, and cool air rubs back of my right hand almost seductively. Home is both ahead and behind me, just numbers on a street, really just a concept. Like responsibility. Like freedom. Like love. The passenger seat remains empty. The radio's lit up but mute, static hidden in silence. There's no song but engine roar, at least not tonight, not anymore. 

**
 
In Search of Quasimodo
 
Maybe we all walk around, the heart a silent bell in the steeple of our chests, and we’re just waiting—really waiting—for someone to pull the long, strong rope to set us tolling. These days most new churches program their bell songs, we can hear them blasting over our small town every hour, as if god is in the machine. Imagine the minister swiping left for the hymns to choose.
 
And who hasn’t felt like an abandoned church out in the sticks, dilapidated and derelict, the deacons and congregants dead or moved on. White paint peeling like strips of an old poster in the wind.
 
The loneliest among us pray just to be touched, to be heard, and, yes, I’ve lived among them in my cloister, those lean years, meditating, libidinous yet alone. Or worse, those night club Saturday nights, all of us forlorn, so many beautifully monstrous individuals, the heavy ropes from their bell towers just out of reach. We weathered those nights, those long, lonely rides home. How horrible, at breakfast to hear the Sabbath bells calling.

**
 
Creeps
 
Creeps are everywhere, my mother warned.  You know them: the neighbor scowling at every kid on a bicycle (a bat with a glove angling over a shoulder), the three-card-monte dealer & his partner who whispers doubt into your left ear, breath reeking of sexuality. Even in the mirror–I’ve been the model son, boyfriend, husband: lured you in only to bust your heart, so now I can’t stand to look at my reflection.  I’ve told lies, too, & there went another one.  The creeps creep us out, as the kids used to say, like the guy in the last car of the subway smelling like stale piss & something funkier, more primal, perilous.  Sure, there are benign creeps–the over-indulgent, the false lavishers of praise, the seductive smilers (how often did I practice that gesture). I’ve prayed to survive & preyed to survive, & what has it gotten me?  I see how you shy away now, but let’s face it, even my remorse might be a ruse. Barnum (that creep) knew a rube was born every minute, & a creep, too, Darwin might insist because isn’t that survival of the fittest?  Don’t think about it too deeply, it might just give you the creeps, might just get you to forgive me.
 
**

 Achtung Katzen!!!    
 — sign outside a house in Eschen Liechtenstein
 
The notice, no doubt, meant to caution drivers about pets on the loose. Or maybe to beg birds to be vigilant, for it’s easy to believe in this Alpine town that birds can read. We’re in serious Brothers Grimm territory, and we all know how smart crows can be. The cats in the sign are cute, cartoonish. In the windows they’re ominous, scheming, purring for pets one minute, then tonguing their chops when a collared dove or plover lands on the lawn. The warblers warble out warnings. Swifts fly by swiftly. The sign reminds us the cats know how to get outside. Maybe, they’ve killed before. Wouldn’t that explain the carrion raven who roosts nearby, talking to itself, waiting.

**
 
Groceries
 
I saw a man in the market today wearing a cape and I didn’t imagine he was Batman or some magician on his way to an audition. This was no cosplayer in costume. No, I thought James Brown. That’s right the Godfather of Soul, though this man just pushed his cart among the produce, such a sorry occupation for a man in a cape. The cape should make every floor a stage. The cape says, Amen when we say, Sock it to me. The cape says, I feel good even among the headache meds and muscles balms. The cape said to Bootsy Collins, wear me when you meet George Clinton. I know what’s good for you.You got Elvis in a jumpsuit in the juice aisle. Buddy Holly glasses by the ice cream. The cape says nothing to these two. He’s no super hero, but the man in the cape is the hardest working shopper in the supermarket. He loads groceries on the conveyor, pays his bill, loads it all in a sack. To the cashier, the cape says, Papa’s got a brand new bag.

**
 
A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster
 
As with so many stories, this one starts with a singular hurt—some slight or harsh words, a profound irritant that can never be spat out. Instead it remains, a sharp sand grain held against the tongue for decades. Imagine how it sits and shifts, scratchy, cutting. Imagine how it scrapes and how, too, over time it loses its edge, gets smoothed over even as it grows and calcifies. A hurt like that defies logic. It gains luster there on the sea floor, hidden and sealed shut, waiting for the young woman who can hold her breath the longest, the one who dives down to pick from the beds, plucking mollusks ‘til she gathers a whole mesh sack of them. And later, shucking them open, that smooth and simple iridescence must astound her. Picture her rolling that small orb gently between her fingers, wide-eyed by the opalescent beauty of endurance.

**
 
In the Distance
 
Smoke stack smoke roving behind the shroud of trees; the scenic railroad with its four old-fashioned carriages moving into October. At this distance it seems so diminutive, no bigger than the models I played with as a child, those HO scale boxcars and tankers. How like God I felt after a derailment, when I’d lift the locomotive back to the tracks, set it all in line. I’d pick up the plastic people, realign the cars, return the tiny trees to their places. I had built this world after all and wanted to set it right most days, wanted to be heroic, beloved. Yes, how like God I felt. And then those days of frustration and despair came, days of hormone and heartache, days when I’d knock past the puny traffic, lift the train from its rails, and roar. How like Godzilla. 
 
**
 
In the Black Square
– Vasily Kandinsky
 
I’ve been in Columbus Circle and Times Square both on the same day, well past midnight, and still been unsurprised—the taxis, the digital billboards with all those pixels, the lonely guy walking on the other side of Broadway. I was, of course, on the other side of from him, also alone, southbound. No one remembered me in Herald Square. At Union Square the city police warned against loitering. In Washington Square they fined me for littering, throwing as I was the confetti of her last love letters to the wind. Find fault with that. I believed in so much then. Someone had planted a flag on the moon, after all, and although it went unheralded, the subways moved thousands underground every day. The night sky like a hematoma. In the black square where I lived, too many sharp edges! Too many lines I could stumble over. Careful careful, I mumbled to myself. The Circle Line circled tourists around Manhattan. I circled the squares of the calendar, never figuring out what went awry. Yes, there were any number of bridges off that Island, but in that light they seemed both crooked and askew.

**
 
Found Diary of an Unknown Adolescent
 
So many entries are entertaining entreaties to a wannabe lover, a classmate he wanted to mate with apparently. Long treatises on longing: how long the evenings were, how much longer the weekends without her. Did they ever even date? Her name like a treat, written over and over for weeks, but never tasted. The dated pages of this edition don’t say, but how he treasured (his word) her comic treatment of their math teacher in the cafeteria. The rest is mundane—the names of bands and friends, a refrain of complaints and petty slights. It’s a life I remember, a life I can’t recant, even though it’s not mine, except in the slightest ways, that handwriting, for instance, that stupid sentimentality, the way he kept sentry over his secret desire deep into the suburban night. 
 
**

Gerry LaFemina is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His most recent collection of prose poems is Baby Steps for Doomsday Pressing and the anthology, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures, both from Madville. A noted editor, educator, and arts activist, he teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA program at Carlow University, and serves as President of the Board of Savage Mountain Punk Arts. In his spare time, LaFemina is also the singer and principal songwriter for Punkerton recording artists, The Downstrokes.