Issue #12 Editorial & Contents Leaves - Issue 12.pdfIssue #12 Editorial & Contents Art and Photography Samantha Peterson ~ pg. 3 Amy Haas ~ pp. 6, 27 Sheri L. Wright ~ pp. 9, 12, 22,

Issue #12 Editorial & Contents

Art and Photography

Samantha Peterson ~ pg. 3Amy Haas ~ pp. 6, 27Sheri L. Wright ~ pp. 9, 12, 22, 24, 31Paul Francis ~ pp. 15, 19 Daniel von der Embse ~ pg. 29Terri Watrous Berry ~ pg. 33 Featured Authors

Danielle Susi ~ pp. 6, 22Bitter | Ceremony Dave Read ~ pg. 9Sunspots | Behind Trees

Ray Scanlon ~ pp. 13, 15Umbrella Man | What They Heard |How They Walked

Jo Malby ~ pp. 16, 17Her Hands | If She Were A House Sossity Chiricuzio ~ pp. 17, 28Research | Summer Of 16

Claire T. Feild ~ pp. 21, 30, 31Nomen | Elegant | Quarantined

Kim Peter Kovac ~ pg. 22 Hoopoe | Machete Vs. Yakuza

Olivia Stearn ~ pp. 24, 31, 36Cheap | Scent | Bug

Frank William Finney ~ pp. 24, 32Night Shuts In | The Predator Plays Piano

Robert Laughlin ~ pp. 26, 30 Men At Work #86 | Men At Work #87 Ralph Monday ~ pp. 28, 30White Towels | Revelation

Lauren Camp ~ pp. 31, 33 Cope | Our Neighbour’s Vegetables

When Love Is Too Big by Megathy Ryan ~ pg. 3 We Sorrow by Marie Slaight ~ pg. 4 Panic & Twitch by Nathaniel Heely ~ pg. 5 Oxy The Moron by Midnight Lawrence ~ pg. 7 Paul Simon by Rachel Hinkel ~ pg. 8 Smoke And Fog by Anne Whitehouse ~ pg. 10 Father Damian, 1956 by Dennis Vanvick ~ pg. 11 Watching Her Red by Amy Haas ~ pg. 12 Found And Lost by Howard Winn ~ pg. 12 Save As Draft? by Jacob Buckenmeyer ~ pg. 13 On a Rundle Mall Bench by Charles Leggett ~ pg. 14 I Can Still by E. Suzin Odlen ~ pg. 16 Floating Dawn by Tom Conlan ~ pg. 17 English Lessons in the Strawberry Field by Gina Williams ~ pg. 18The Bird Women of Wells-Next-The-Sea by Ingrid Jendrzejewski ~ pg. 19

Gum Scraper by Raul Palma ~ pg. 20Lanzarote Morning: The Canary Islands by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt ~ pg. 20Disclosures by V. Jane Schneeloch ~ pg. 21 Impressions: Searcy County by Ryan W. Murphy ~ pg. 21Express Lane by Brandyn Johnson ~ pg. 21Saatvik’s Masterpiece by Vaidehi Patil ~ pg. 23Keeping The Dead by Chanel Brenner ~ pg. 25The Veteran by Katherine Bonnie Bailey ~ pg. 26The House on Agate Street by Cyn Bermudez ~ pg. 27Photograph of My Father, Africa, 1943 by Daniel von der Embse ~ pg. 29She Comes on Tuesdays by Jane Downing ~ pg. 30Rain Swept by Fariha Eshrat ~ pg. 32Blind Date by Carol Cooper ~ pg. 34I Have Never Seen The Sky So Blue by S.G. Larner ~ pg. 35

The onset of Autumn often brings with it a sense of melancholy, a darkness that hovers like mist over an abandoned graveyard. Beneath the fi ery colours of fall, there is an underlying sense of sadness and gloom, an endless bounty of emotion that sometimes comes with change.

Whether it is the inevitable shift from summer to autumn, or a much more personal life event, change is diffi cult. Emotional. For Vine Leaves Literary Journal staff, most of whom reside in the Northern Hemisphere, this season—and thus this issue—is a poignant example. In the same breath, the team says goodbye to Senior Editor Amie McCracken, and welcomes back Co-founder Dawn Ius. Roles shift. Emotions overfl ow.

And in the midst of all of it, there is this—Issue 12.

Much like the changing of seasons, the bright colours of the cover mask the haunting artistry woven within its pages. Vignettes such as Nathaniel Heely’s PANIC AND TWITCH, or Dennis Vanvick’s clev-er and nuanced FATHER DAMIAN, 1956 will send shivers up your spine. We invite you to get lost in the haunting poetry of Frank William Finney and Chanel Brenner. To explore the stunning imagery peppered throughout the pages.

We invite you to fall in love with change.

photograph by Samantha Peterson

WHEN LOVE IS TOO BIGby Megathy Ryan

I flew on an eagle’s shoulders and I told him.As we were above and so I could see,

When love is too big, I cannot hold it.I cannot feel that it’s mine.

Maybe because,he says,

and I listen.

It is Everyone’s.

Maybe it is not the love,that you cannot hold.

Maybe,

it is yourself.

4

Vine Leaves Literary Journal

Issue #12

WE SORROWby Marie Slaight

We sorrow the lost legend.Standing by the grave side by side

We don’t turn, drop the spadeAnd walk away, parting.

We don’t lie on the graveIn the earth

Beating our palmsKeening for the dead.

We stand and days pass.The sun grows slow across the sky.

The earth is cold.

We tremble and talk,Commiserate, mumble, echo

Our frustration and griefFrozen in our knees, bitter.

One will leave the entrenchment,Leave the sweet, cold place

Brutalize against the scream.

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Issue #12

PANIC & TWITCHby Nathaniel Heely

They saw the shadows painted on the walls. The bodies came skulking and hunched, the skin ragged on their bones, the colour of their clothes deeply saturated the same hue of the desert and of the wall their shadows walked on. The entrails spilled out into a maze the two soldiers traced with their eyes. Occa-sional clouds of smoke came out through the window and there were two cans of Copen-hagen wintergreen open on the sill.

The one on the left, who still had his helmet on, and who everybody called Panic, nudged the one on his right. This was the one everybody called Twitch. Twitch’s eyes were bug-like, the skin tightly hugging the eyeballs that wanted to pop out. It had been fi fteen minutes since the last mortar rounds had kissed the desert. Panic and Twitch sat in a second story bedroom wrapped in the harsh shadow of the late afternoon. They sat on wooden chairs and held their rifl es to their chests. They watched the body in the street. The body parts in the street. They had heard low murmurs of agony for a minute or so after, but the diaphragm was shredding into the clay now. The head was fully wrapped. Scattered in the vicinity of the body were scarlet and brown streaks of shrapnel, cloth and innards. Already in fi fteen minutes these viscous rags of human were drying so that they looked as though they had the consistency of discarded corn husks.

The two tiny fi gures were walking on bare-foot tiptoes. They bent their bodies in the tradi-tional fi gure of prayer. They lay there with their gaze trying to cut the cloth that entombed the body. Panic and Twitch could hear the higher register of their voices. The smaller one, the one with the curly hair and blue tunic went down to the bottom of the body and, for a moment, assessed the incomprehensible. Thereafter he tried to pick up the stout legs and push them together like dismembered puzzle pieces, scraping fl esh, bone and sand together, an incidental plaster. The taller one

stood up and took hold of the other’s shoul-ders. The legs were in that moment in the wheelbarrow position. Slowly the legs came down and rested in the dirt. The two children walked back around the corner.

The last of the smoke was exhaled and two pinches of black Virginia-grown tobacco were pinched and placed behind respective lips. Panic leaned back. He took the rifl e from across his chest with the barrel up and stood it upon its stock. He looked serene and calm and began to feel his lids grow heavy. Twitch leaned forward over his knees. He made a small pool of foam and brown spit between his toes, his weapon pointed crosswise at the ground and against his shoulder. They sat like that, speaking in spit and savouring the taste of home in their mouths.

When the shadows came back the soldiers moved their eyes but nothing else. There was a thin blanket laid on the ground beside. They each picked up a leg of the bottom puzzle piece and lay it slantwise against the cloth. The soldiers could see the spine now as the sole structure that connected the two pieces. The top was moved via the arms. They took the legs again and attempted to centre them according to the spine. They wrapped the other half of the cloth over so that now only the sandaled feet could be seen distinctly. Underneath there were only faint impressions of where the body curved.

The body was lifted to pelvic level and the two straddled it and shuffl ed away back around the corner. Panic and Twitch sat with home in their gums not saying a word. Sweat greased them over. They sat for twenty more minutes as noise and language familiar came from downstairs somewhere in the streets. Finally, Twitch looked over and Panic nodded. They stood up and walked downstairs into the dusty streets each taking a last, careful look at the scarves of debris and the wall that was now painted the colour of twilight.

photograph by Amy Haas

BITTERby Danielle Susi

There is nothing more important than putting your fi ngers in your mouth

after picking a dandelion.

A child’s obligation to wrap her tongue around the bitterness of pollen.

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Issue #12

OXY THE MORONby Midnight Lawrence

The scabs of scripture havingfl aked off,

Oxy turned and watched the priest—a stiff vestige of piety—

melt away into odd silence.

What then please? Well, he pondered long.

Finally he puckers and sharesin the bite of a kiss

and now intimate friendship with a stranger.

La-dee-da-la-dee-dahe searches for a point

which when found neveris there, never.

Walking certain borders as he doeshe vibrates

with sharp tugs of extremities

and learns the anchored voyage:this in a sea which

he infersis without bottom.

As time and place disappearhe calls out, When and spot!

Thus here Oxy sitsnow

on Victoria’s wing-backed chairdrowning in the artof blowing bubbles.

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Issue #12

I used to make love to Paul Simon; his body was slight, warm. In dreams, I can still feel his weight. In dreams, Paul still sings at noon and we eat Lucky Charms after with one bowl, two spoons. We eat fi ve or six servings while Paul’s baby gestates in my womb.

Awake, I recall the fi rst time Paul eyed me across a crowded room: My face lost in the fl icker of a candle to which I busily confessed homesickness. I was a stranger in Paul’s city, but we found commonality in being the only two party guests dressed in denim. He whis-pered jokes into my ear tangling my feet in punch lines and soon we rode the love we found like a luck dragon across the burden of a continent. We copied cooing from pigeons, borrowed howling from wolves, gave new names to constellations. We made benches throughout Boston proper blush scarlet and moms and dads covered the eyes of their chil-dren. We were wanted in Palm Springs. We untwisted a Joshua Tree’s branches.

Paul said, “You are a shiksa.”I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “We can never marry.” I said, “No, it’s too soon.” We fi nished our

game of shuffl eboard. I beat him by a lot. “Being dominated is cool,” he said, “Too

bad we have no future.” I searched his serious face for sarcasm, laughed then almost threw up. A woman walked towards us, grinning.

“Your love is beautiful,” she cried from a face old and grotesquely made-up. We thanked her, walked backwards to our hotel room, locked the door and watched reruns of Golden Girls on the Hallmark Channel.

The width of the continent expanded and compressed with dropped calls and heavy breaths. Togetherness wore on us like new shoes; absence wore on us like famine.

“I need a protractor and a compass,” Paul demanded with a sip of iced coffee.

“You can’t measure every angle,” I admon-ished, sniffi ng the holes in the receiver,

reaching for my sandwich. “Who is Jacob. What is the Ark of the

Covenant,” he muttered into his phone while mine was anchored between my head and a pillow. I fell asleep while his game show audi-ence applauded in the background.

My eyelids vibrated at ultra-high frequen-cies, his name always on my tongue, his voice always in my head. Then suddenly: darkness, silence—no candles fl ickered, no punch lines slacked around my ankles.

“Hello love,” I sang to stars before they dipped behind cloud cover. A day would pass too slowly. Another would take its sweet time.

“Are you trying to break my heart?” I scrib-bled on a Post-it note then stuck it to the tail-wing of a mourning dove.

“Goodnight,” I whispered into an empty soup can attached to a string.

Then, on the ten o’clock news: half of Cali-fornia bobbed in the Pacifi c, a rift formed along a fault line.

“I’m coming to L.A.,” I shouted into vulgar daylight, “I’m coming before it’s too late.”

A response: “It’s already too late,” Paul said, “You know we have no future.”

Darkness darkened; silence hissed. The east coast had seen the sun permanently set so I walked west. I walked until my legs said stop. They fi nally gave way outside St. Louis.

By then it was morning. By then I was someone different. ***Paul and I spoke recently; it’s been years. I

said, “Sometimes I have these dreams—”He said, “When can I see you?”I said, “When earth fi nally falters on its

axial tilt and each place where we loved smoulders under too much sun or withers under too much moon, and then, through the prodigious impulse of propagation, fl ourishes again under a new air, a new name. Then, then I’ll see you again.”

PAUL SIMONby Rachel Hinkel

BEHIND TREESby Dave Read

behind treesfolded like handsno one suspected

the forestwas bluffi ng

photograph by Sheri L. Wright

SUNSPOTSby Dave Read

upona wall of light

I read in sunspotsthe story of

my headache

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Issue #12

SMOKE AND FOGby Anne Whitehouse

On one side of the road was ice and fog,

on the other, smoke and fi re.

We were driving by the riverwhile the fi re burned above us

a quarter-mile away.

Cool on the driver’s side,and on the passenger’s,the closed window glass

was hot to the touch.

Suffocating smokebillowed into the air,

suffusing the atmospherelike waterless blood.

The river was clogged with fl oes of ice

melting in a sudden thaw.

Drawn out of the snowmelt,a hazy fog hung low

over the water.

Above our heads,above the roof of the car,the smoke from the fi remet the fog off the ice.

The road took us straight up the middle,as if that were a choicewe were free to make.

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Issue #12

Father Damian sat at the solid oak desk in the rectory. He loved this desk, with its brass corner protectors and drawer handles and the mother-of-pearl crucifi x on its top, left as a gift by his predecessor when Father Damian took over this small parish. The desk’s inert gravitas granted him authority. It also served to garner respect and awe. A bit of fear was also part of the equation.

Father Damian was preparing words for a memorial service for a parishioner who had been a mechanic.

He pulled open the fi le drawer and fi ngered through the folders to fi nd “Manual Labourer.” It contained germane references about the dignity of working with one’s hands and the well-worn quote from Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

He would embellish, say something about God’s role as the great mechanic of the universe. He smiled. Perfect.

The mechanic left behind an alcoholic wife and a twelve-year-old son needing male guidance.

Father Damian wrote a note reminding him to call the mother and schedule a visit. Perhaps the boy was interested in becoming an altar boy.

Chuck, the latest, was simply not working out. Fourteen was too old for an altar boy. Eleven to thirteen was ideal, when they were still malleable, before they became too sure of themselves, before the testos-

terone began raging, when it was still possible to infl uence, to channel. Plus, the boy always recoiled a bit when Father Damian innocently draped an arm over his shoulders and he had refused a sip of wine after Communion, alone with Father in the Sacristy. He also neglected to sign up for Father’s camping trips for fatherless boys, up north in Itasca State Park, celebrated as the headwaters of the Mississippi. Chuck would never experience the joys of the outdoors and the undeniable thrill of male camara-derie out in the wilds and never hear Father Damian say, “If any of you are scared you can bring your sleeping bag into my tent. Don’t be ashamed, everybody feels afraid sometimes.”

Father Damian, known by his fl ock as a teller of fearsome ghost stories, sat on a log in front of a blazing campfi re, his fl ushed face unearthly and distorted by the fl ames below. The boys sat across the fi re while Father Damian spoke in a deep growly voice about the hunters who had recently come upon corpses ripped apart and partially devoured by beasts not found in the boys’ natural science texts.

After he doused the fi re—when his face had regained its innocuous who me aspect in the moonlight—he again told the boys not to be ashamed of their fear, simply unzip his tent fl y and come in.

Foreboding virgin pines loomed dark around the campsite, their higher branches undulating and keening in the wind, a mournful, wistful sound.

FATHER DAMIAN, 1956by Dennis Vanvick

FOUND AND LOSTby Howard Winn

Whydo we wonderthatthere issomethinginsteadofnothing?Is infinitybetterthan zero?


WATCHING HER REDby Amy Haas

Red polish slides from cuticle to tip;

the way a broom sweeps dirt.

She narrows her eyes under chandelier light,

humming as if nothing is happening.

But it is—and has before.

I watch her softness harden red

while wet polish reflects countenance in each crystal

the chandelier dangles and drops

in front of her.

WATCHING HER REDby Amy Haas

Red polish slides from cuticle to tip;

the way a broom sweeps dirt.

She narrows her eyes under chandelier light,

humming as if nothing is happening.

But it is—and has before.

I watch her softness harden red

while wet polish reflects countenance in each crystal

the chandelier dangles and drops

in front of her.

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Issue #12

She sent him a playful, sarcastic text message back––Fiiine without any punctuation––but he couldn’t remember what had been fi ne and he wasn’t at all interested in scrolling through their history to fi nd out. He was watching reality TV with the volume down––a show about a dysfunctional family business that maybe had to do with cars or tattoos, or maybe both––lounging on the couch in the dark when the text came through. He tossed the phone back onto the ottoman when he saw it was from her.

The matriarch of the family had her hands on her hips; she stood outside the family home or business, or both, in a gravel back alley and hollered in a shrill voice at one of her adult sons as he tore off in a shiny brown Nissan.

Eyes still on the TV, he reached again for his cell to check her message––still Fiiine. He fl ipped open the phone’s mini-keyboard and was about to text her back when another message came through from her and he opened it. This time it said, talk soon?

The whole family crowded around a little work table, eating dinner and talking shop; nobody agreed how they should move forward so everybody repeated their opinions three or four times, their voices rising until the son pushed away from the table and stormed

out. The shaky camera moved in close on the matriarch’s face and focussed there––her expression blank as she watched him go.

He hit Reply and a blank message popped up. He glanced from the phone to the TV and back to the phone, realized he had nothing to put there. He pressed Cancel and the phone asked whether he wanted to save the blank message as a draft. No. “There’s nothing even there to save,” he said out loud, to the phone or to the TV.

The matriarch came from the backroom into the parlour and caught the same adult son leafi ng through a magazine with his boots up on the counter as two customers wandered through looking at displays in glass cases. The son rolled his eyes at his mother and she stepped toward him and shoved his legs down to the fl oor. He stood up and towered over her and they got into a shouting match right there in front of the customers and the TV camera crew.

The credits rolled down one side of the screen and on the other were equally-dra-matic highlights from next week’s episode. He cycled through his other recent texts to see whether there might be one from someone else––someone he actually wanted to hear from––but he couldn’t imagine just then who that might be.

SAVE AS DRAFT?by Jacob Buckenmeyer

Beard, thin, black umbrella. Passes bench, sits on platform. Eye contact. Mistake. “It starts to rain, I open the umbrella, I’m okay. Stops raining, I close it, and I’m good.” More: found aban-doned, plastic ribs for good eversion recovery, sketchy runner jams, hangs it from a karabiner to dry. Didactic Gump leaves me in peace only when he boards the train. Haven’t met his ex-wife, but I have a theory about the divorce.

UMBRELLA MANby Ray Scanlon

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Issue #12

ON A RUNDLE MALL BENCHby Charles Leggett

God-awful techno disco sonic garbagefrom the Jetty Surf Shop to my right

but from behind me to my left I hear,forlorn and wordless, gently squealed, a chant

—indigenous?—of long, gnarled vowels drawnfrom deep within the singer’s bottomless

throat. People streaming past, on cell phones, pushing prams; in grade school uniforms; some smoking

cigarettes, some drinking sodas, holding hands or carrying purses, bags or backpacks.

The incantation dwindles and dies out

but soon resumes, unaltered—and transformsthe scene into a promenade of ghosts

the more affecting for their nonchalance,crepuscular in tones if not in light.

* * *

What I cannot explain is how I never found—was it time, as busy as I was

with notebook, pen, Cohiba, all the ghostsor was it more the nerve?—to turn and see

just who that prehistoric vocalizewas coming from. I couldn’t even tell you

if it was man or woman, let alone what had been worn, or what if anything

was sought, or in what posture. An omission I often question, and don’t quite regret.

—Adelaide, South Australia, March 2002

WHAT THEY HEARDby Ray Scanlon

A distant large-bore motorcycle does a slow glissando towards its red line. Some soul damns itself to perdition practicing on drums. A plain-tive killdeer patrols the edges of the paved acres. But mostly it’s the wind. An unlatched Plexiglass showcase door slams alternately open and shut. Gust-driven sand hisses off parked cars. Discarded plastic rolls, skids, tumbles across the asphalt. Scraping. Horseless clip-clops.

photograph by Paul Francis

HOW THEY WALKEDby Ray Scanlon

A guy with four days’ white stubble and gimpy leg soldiers on with his asymmetric rolling gait towards the train. A grey stooped woman trudges out of the funeral home, easing her fragile bubble of resigned inwardness through a universe suddenly sharp and viscous. A tall twenty-something woman carries poise, confidence, and under her arm a hula hoop. We agree that this amuses the cosmos and exchange smiles as we pass.

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Issue #12

Your bathrobe still hangs on a hook behind the bedroom door. I rub my face in the soft fl eece, hunting for the scent of you, but it’s gone. For comfort, I lean on the door and press my body against the robe’s length.

I remember when I bought it for you. It was the colour that sold me, a luscious shade of green, a cross between honeydew melon and kiwi. I could taste this colour but couldn’t name it.

The perfect word eluded me…this shadowy green.

Perfect.Eluded.It hid, like a cat under a bed, or something

stashed in the back of a cupboard, or a crab in the sand. “You have a way with words; you’ll fi nd it,” you told me. And then, “Asparagus?” you asked, trying to be helpful.

You favoured the robe for lounging, instead of sweats or jeans. I’d study you in it, dreaming of the right word, but it was always lurking.

Seafoam? Jade?And when I’d ask, “What colour is your

robe?” You’d smile and say, “Green.” “Is it similar to the ocean in the Turks and Caicos

Islands?” I’d ask. “It’s similar,” you’d say. But the colour didn’t matter to you. The robe was comfortable, easy to slip on, and that was enough. I was the one who craved defi nition, as if pinning down this colour could give it permanence.

Permanence.It wasn’t until a year after you passed that I

found the word. Did you point me to it? I was in bed, admiring little objects displayed in the room, tucked between books or perched on top of them. And there it was, not fi ve feet away…my collection of sea glass. And that indescrib-able colour popped into my head: sea glass.

Sea glass.I told you you’d fi nd it.We were on a beach in Nice. The sand was

dark and gravelly, not like the white silk that lines the Jersey shore. I searched for shells, as I did on any beach, every beach, while you bathed in the sun, and that’s when I spotted the tiny shards of glass, shimmering like emeralds in the rough sand. I can still feel the joy in my fi ngertips as I scooped them up. I can still hear them tinkle like bells when I shook my fi st.

I can still.

I CAN STILLby E. Suzin Odlen

A little girl giggled by the fountain as her daddy covered his face then appeared again. Her hands, small as buttercups, splashed him and their laughter peppered the air like chimes on a summer breeze. I watched, patient in the shadows. Like a crocodile cooling from the midday sun, except these tears are real. They fall like pins onto my dress, forever pricking my soul, keeping it in mourning. It doesn’t go away, my friend had said, but it does get easier. Memories such as these don’t fade. They linger in the body that once held life, however briefl y, and that emptiness, it stings. Her absence is still felt as sharply as the moment I woke without her soft strawberry heart beating inside me,

never again to see its red light pulsing on the hospital screen.

Life is such a fraud, a trick of the light. Don’t give up, they say, don’t give in, but my heart, that heart, it knows. It pounds deep in my chest and keeps waiting, like a tea set that is always there but never used. Though now it’s too deli-cate, its paint too faded. It’s long past being dusted down and drank from. Besides, no one drinks from those kinds of cups anymore. I watched again, the water and the girl. My daughter would be nine now. Her hair like mine, eyes too, wide and blue, smiling. Her entire life was like my mother’s engagement ring fl ashing only briefl y in the sun.

HER HANDSby Jo Malby

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Issue #12

RESEARCHby Sossity Chiricuzio

I love libraries. Rooms full of books, made just for books, with answers just waiting to be found. Stories and legends and science and magic. Love and sorrow and laughter and mystery. Safety. There’s no shouting or pushing or competing allowed. No little kids yelling, no grownups too busy to talk. Just helpful librarians and other people reading. Just the world I pick. Like a colouring book in my mind, I fi ll in the details, and the hero can look like me.

The smell of books, the hidden alcoves at the ends of rows, the formed plastic chairs like a cupped hand. My legs going numb from dangling over the hard lip of the seat, my shoulders and head all curved into the world between those covers. Squinting in the light when it fl ickered, automatically, all attention inward. Almost locked in more than once, so that the librarians learned to check for me in the depths of physical sciences or psychology, any books nobody tends to read, before leaving.

I read the entire Alice in Wonderland series, not just the fi rst part that they made all soft for Disney, the real story. The confl ict and the angst and the tension. The confusion. The real stuff dressed up as fi ction. I read every book of mythology and fi nd some hints of comfort in goddesses and amazons and warrior queens. I’m looking for the women that aren’t afraid. The girls that are smart. The way out. I travel to Narnia and Pern and Mars and am still disappointed when I get there. It still ends in a kiss I don’t want. A man who knows more. A woman who is a support beam. A cook stove. A baby carriage.

A stranger in a strange land. A woman on the edge of time. The last unicorn.

IF SHE WERE A HOUSEby Jo Malby

If she were a house she’d be a grand one with secrets, one with dark rooms and darker corridors to which no one knows where they lead. A house with servants that move around her like ghosts, humble and silent. With carved staircases and fi ne empty rooms with fi res that still crackle even when no-one is home.

She would stand proudly, no matter the scandal of her occupants, for there would be scandal. In a house such as this, the visitors would arrive in their motorcars a little too early and dine and laugh and dance a little too late, then something untoward would always occur.

Guests would fall out of their bedrooms and tiptoe together in whispers, their gowns and silken suits shim-mering in the candlelight, their faces taut and uncertain as they search and look and murmur in the dark.

Perhaps it was the butler, he always had an odd manner. Or maybe that maid…or groundsman or the footman. Did you see? For if she were a house she’d be as haunted as she is in life and the guests—like the servants—would keep moving around her like ghosts, even long after the visitors were dead and gone.

FLOATING DAWNby Tom Conlan

She wakes in darkness and rises slowly. Southern summer air hangs heavy over the pending day. Coffee, just one cup, is brewed, and she grips the cup, circles her strong yet delicate and tanned fi ngers around the ceramic mug.

She dresses light, for no-one will see, and steps across the sill. Grass slips between her toes. Wet with dew.

A broad, sweeping lawn breaks before her, and she ambles slowly down the slope. Finding the pointed vessel lying in tall weeds at the edge of the water, she lifts, then fl ips, and shakes remnants of rain. A lone spider scurries away but she does not see. Rather, she stares up at the grey sky. The fi rst signs of day begin to sweep over the bay, and like a mother, hold her thoughts warmly.

She nudges the kayak along the ground and into the water, steadies the gunwale with both hands, both arms taut and extended, and slides into the cockpit, while at the same time, she reaches for the two ended paddle, and pushes off. Dark waves emanate from the movement of the vessel’s hull.

Gliding now, she paddles out, ever outward, ever deeper into the fl uid, water world. She leaves behind fettered, earthly ties and fl oats free. Forgets the hurt, and nothing matters save her pacing, her concentra-tion, and her balance.

She loses time, and looking up after moments or years, sees the sun beginning to break the horizon, and sees the pink and purple and gold refl ected on the bay, through dimples of wake her vessel has created.

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Issue #12

ENGLISH LESSONS IN THE STRAWBERRY FIELDby Gina Williams

The woman does not speak until noon. She is small and thin, her face soft, eyes too creased.The smell of smashed berries and earth and sweat rises.

I watch her hands fl y.

The lunch horn sounds. The sun is high and hot. I pull a sandwich and a mason jar of milk from my backpack, push my hat down low.

She sits cross-legged four feet away, slowlyeating rice balls, sipping from a small thermos.

There are other kids my age scattered around, telling stupid eleven-year-old jokes, throwing bread crusts at each other.

She looks up, points at my jar of milk. “What name?” she asks. When she smiles, I can see one black tooth.

“This?” She nods. “Milk.” She repeats it, “Mirk.” No, “Miiilllk.” We laugh, and so it begins,

new words, pointing. Sky, grass, cloud, spider, sandwich, apple, rose.“Me, Rose Vu. From Saigon.”

A home, after supper, my Dad puts on his old reelmovies taken in Vietnam, his war

fl ickering in one dimension.We sit in the dark eating popcorn,

laughing at his silly mustache,how skinny he was then

in his white sailor’s uniform.

But now I think of Roseas fi ghter jets take off from the aircraft carrier,

the Victory at Sea soundtrack swelling in the background on our old record player.

I think of how her hands fl ew, how she never dropped a berry.I think of new words to show her tomorrow.

photograph by Paul Francis

THE BIRD WOMEN OF WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA

by Ingrid Jendrzejewski

They lie in flocks on the beach, tangled amidst the seaweed, their sinewy, sun-stained bodies sprawled amidst sand and terry cloth. They watch the ships with unblinking eyes, nictating membranes twitching with the breeze that comes in from the sea. Their limbs are wet with oils, and the smells of herring and coconut emanate from their crevices. I walk awkwardly among them, blanched, puffy, foreign. I am from a different clime, a place where the sun is weak and clouds rule supreme, a place where feet are cased in leather and briefcases are wielded as weapons. I am afraid of them, these bird women of sand and salt. When they see me, they point their sharp beaks in my direction and stare with the forward-facing eyes of birds of prey.

20


Issue #12

The boy has learned to appreciate this time of day when commuters caught in rush-hour begin to fl ick on their headlights even though the sky is not yet black. Streetlamps grad-ually hum to full brightness. And palmetto bugs, enamoured by the light, swarm, clum-sily bumping around. Hundreds gather under the yellow canopy at the 57th Avenue Shell station, seeking out mates, warmth, crossing antennae. Below, commuters form lines. They wait to pull in and refuel.

This isn’t the best time to drag out the orange cones and block off a pump, but the manager’s grandson has little else to do. He sits on the smooth concrete, pouring paint thinner over globs of dried gum. Though he has a scraper, its blade is dull and not so effective. Too often, the gum doesn’t let loose of the ground, so the boy digs into it with his blade or picks at it with his fi ngers. But there is so much dried gum on the fl oor, so much dirt packed into it—black circles upon black circles—mint interposed with cinnamon or bubbalicious, fruity-tutee.

Some men lean against their cars, ties undone. They browse through their phones, or smoke cigarettes in spite of the “fl ammable” warnings, or consider the relationship between gallons and dollars. They ignore the boy, the roaches, the sound of the blade digging into

the concrete, the slums that surround the fi lling station.

The boy pounds at the concrete while male and female hookers pace back and forth on the sidewalk, while sirens blare in the distance, while his grandfather sits inside and counts money.

A grown man, bearded, barefoot, sits with the boy, asks him if he needs any help. The boy ignores him. “Estas haciendo lo mal,” the man says. He takes the scraper and the paint thinner. Using his thumbnail, the man indents small crosses onto a piece of dried gum, pools paint thinner over it. “Ahora esperamo,” he says. “We wait.” And so they watch the paint thinner snake along the concrete, and watch cars enter, fuel, and depart. After some time, the man gently slides the blade under the gum, which rises and curls up like a hollow cigarette, revealing a pink underlining.

The boy takes the gum, looks through it like a telescope. He sees the city lights, the patrons paying, and his grandfather rushing out to the pumps. His grandfather yells at the man, tells him to leave the grounds, and so the man does, walking south, towards another well-lit station. The boy watches him, walking past all those cars stuck in traffi c, on a sidewalk that is also caked with gum.

GUM SCRAPERby Raul Palma

The water is violet, turquoise, and there’s a strip of white at the horizon, edging into a fresco blue sky. It is early morning; the only sounds the insistent coos of doves and the wind sifting through feathered leaves of pineapple palms. I am waiting for the lustrous stream of silver on water that will wash over the sea when the sun burns away the early morning clouds.

Behind me are sand hills, burnt ombre, sienna, rising to the sky like pyramids. Here there is so much stark colour: the thick green of cactus, the bright yellow of the prickly

pear blossoms, the magenta of hibiscus, and the fl aming orange of birds of paradise. The colour is a savoured taste, a breath of plea-sure caught in the throat.

This is a landscape that stops time, memory, loss. Settles my restive heart. For others it is a barren badlands of volcanic earth, lava and ash, and jet black slabs of boulders stag-gered to the sea. But for me this petrifi ed land absorbs my body, my fl esh, my past. I dissolve into the scene. There is nothing left to mourn.

LANZAROTE MORNING: THE CANARY ISLANDSby Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

21


Issue #12

DISCLOSURESby V. Jane Schneeloch

Reading my wordsin an old journal,I am stopped bythe word “minute.”Somewhere in the joiningof the n and the uI see my mother’s hand,her careful Palmer methodslipped into my casual scrawl.She surprises me like that nowpeeking out froma chip in an ironstone dish,whispering words from an old song,calling my name as I wake.

IMPRESSIONS: SEARCY COUNTYby Ryan W. Murphy

This is cloud countrycrack of rifl esetting sunhowling dogwrinkled men at the lumber store in stained shirtshickory trees on a ridgedry creektumbled stonethe cut of cliff high on 65county history in the library basementmusty leather volumes of deedsthe barefoot motherher blue dressin line at the grocery store.August fogsmake December snowsThe lifted fi ngersin passing trucks a limping woodchucka bird of paradise snatchesa dragonfl y in the breezeby night,the steady west windthe whine of a distant engine.

EXPRESS LANEby Brandyn Johnson

After the bald man emptiedthree items from his basketto the conveyer belt:foot powder, mouthwash,hemorrhoid cream,the young cashier erupted with laughter

that broke into sobs.She disappeared into Employees Only.He shrugged & stared downwiping his palms on corduroypockets, raining fuzzto the tiles at his feet.

While her replacementbagged his items,holding out his change:snapped up into yellow fi ngers,the glass-eyed girl peekedthrough the plastic

ribbons of curtain.The automatic doormalfunctioned, he wrungthe air from his bag with a twirl in the moment of pause,ready to get homewhere nobody would ask.

NOMENby Claire T. Feild

Her name is Love, for she not onlystitches lightning’s edges, butshe also savours the taste of a heapof tornadoes.

After she dies, she is left to becomeone with soil’s worms, thecaretaker for her woundsnonchalant, having beenmentally lame since birth,a fl oater from town-to-town.

a fl oater from town-to-town.

CEREMONYby Danielle Susi

I mourned for you before anyone else. Abandoned your patterns in the doorjamb. Here are footprints and fi ngerprint fossils left in dust. We collect their image for an album. Perpetual motion of memory. Careful curatorial eye of gatherer. Ceremony of the air.


MACHETE VS. YAKUZAby Kim Peter Kovac

Alone between the cellblock and danger, the enlightened escap-ee, fl eeing the guardhouse, handily instigates a Japanese jail-house killing, lancing with a magical machete, neatly offi ng his opponent. With precise quickness, he reverses course, sprinting toward an uber-unearthly vanishing point, a way to a walkabout in western Oz: Xanthippe, a yakuza-free zone.

HOOPOE by Kim Peter Kovac

The Hoopoe circles over desert cliffs like a soaring Farsi poem.

23


Issue #12

SAATVIK’S MASTERPIECEby Vaidehi Patil

Each layer of Saatvik’s disintegrating canvas exposed an older trend. For a decade he had waited—letting the canvas get ready, poster by poster, outside the city’s most reputable art gallery.

And now he greedily worked away; revealing hidden strokes, forgotten colours, disputed originals and debated interpretations. Long, knobbly, rubied fi ngers removed strips and patches with dexterous care, painting without paints, keeping a remnant of one show, removing a sliver of another.

He did not answer the curious public, not even those who seemed genuine lovers of art. “It may bias what is in my head, the struggle for explanation,” he said through confi dent rips of paper.

That night, an opportunistic media-man posted a snapshot of the unfi nished piece on the web. By morning, the art world had debated itself out on what it conveyed. And so the decade-long wait to create his masterpiece was wasted, when Saatvik hadn’t even unveiled half of what he thought his brilliant mind held. But minds change fast, in the post-modern world.

“A snapshot of our city’s art history, through the last decade, layer by layer,” he told the media-man and got away with it, having been famous for decades himself. No-one said he pulled a Duchamp. The original was carefully removed from the wall and auctioned off for a grand sum. The excited curator documented the masterpiece on a beau-tiful print. Outside the now even more famous gallery, the print stayed for a week before the artist for the next exhibit covered it with his shiny new poster.

A decade later, Saatvik worked at another try—after being cited as an old fraud by some; by others, a much debated, misunderstood artist. Long, knobbly, dirt-lined fi ngers removed strips and patches with dexterous care, painting without paints, keeping a remnant of one show, removing a sliver of another. This time, he wouldn’t let it be clicked. Nor would he expose the bottom-most layer of his new canvas.


NIGHT SHUTS INby Frank William Finney

The night nurse scares my veins apart.Under the staircase the games are in gear.

The curtains exhaleas I creep down the hall.The fl oorboards complain of side effects.

The shape appears. The trial begins.Under the blankets I cover my tracks.

CHEAP by Olivia Stearn

i live on fi ngernailsand boxed wine.

by forced complimentson my shoes.

they used to be nicebut then the streets cut them up

and ate them.

25


Issue #12

KEEPING THE DEADby Chanel Brenner

1.

Desmond fi nds a hummingbirdon our front porch,

kneels over its stillness.

I don’t want to bury it in the dirt, he says.

2.

He wants to put it in a box,keep it in his room,

take care of it

forever, he says.

3.

At night:Mommy, is Riley with me?

I think of his brother’s clothes

resting in the drawers below his bed,their little carcasses all lined up.

26


Issue #12

From here I can see the wrinkles etched deeply into his leathery skin. Not faint lines, but grooves. Grand Canyons. I can see how faded his blue T-shirt is, almost grey. And I can see the gaping holes in his tattered jeans, exposing already reddened fl esh to the sun.

He paces back and forth on a square of sidewalk then turns and makes his way to the street corner. His shuffl ing gait makes it obvious he’s suffered some injury. His hip, maybe? Or his knee? Something is wrong, but I can’t pinpoint it.

From the park bench across the street, I can’t make out all the details. The grime—the fi lth that must cake the man—is not visible at this distance. But I know it’s there. The dark smudges under his eyes, produced by many sleepless and uncomfortable nights, aren’t distinguishable. But I know they must be present. The sadness, the pain in his lowered gaze, is aimed at the ground, hidden from my eyes. But his hunched shoulders give it away.

A lady with a shopping bag passes him on her way to the crosswalk and ignores his outstretched hand. A businessman in a suit, probably on his lunch break, is close on her heels. He gives the man a glance. Nothing more.

Several others follow. A mother with two

children, a young man in slacks and a button-down. An occasional dollar, a handful of change. But no words are spoken, and the smiles are one-sided.

As I watch, the man sits down on the blazing hot concrete, his head in his hands, his cardboard sign propped against his knee. It reads “VETERAN PLEASE HELP.” The large letters are written shakily in black marker.

I could go to him. I could ask him about his life. Where did he grow up? Who does he love? And, maybe more importantly, who loves him? How many stories does the man on the corner have to tell?

He looks up, maybe because he feels my eyes on him. He catches my gaze and smiles, the wrinkles receding even farther into his skin.

He raises a hand. A friendly gesture that seems strange coming from this abject fi gure.

My breath stops short. My heart races. I am overcome with embarrassment and shame, and not just because I was caught staring. Why, then?

I attempt a smile, but it isn’t much. I don’t cross the street. I don’t ask him about his life. I don’t even offer him the change that litters the bottom of my purse.

My gaze falters, and my cheeks grow hot. I look away.

THE VETERANby Katherine Bonnie Bailey

Nelson, a restaurant owner

The two factors that matter most are prevailing wind direction and nearby foot traffi c. That’s why the location I picked was perfect. Our fans are designed to direct cooking aromas outside, and the wind usually blows them at the people going into or out of the street entrance of the busiest subway station in town. As our motto says: churches promise salvation, Nelson’s Steak House promises salivation.

MEN AT WORK #86by Robert Laughlin

photograph by Amy Haas

THE HOUSE ON AGATE STREETby Cyn Bermudez

When I was eleven years old, I packed a small plastic bag with a week’s worth of clothes and my favourite book and stayed in an old abandoned house down the street, something I had seen my older sister do when she was angry with my mother. Two other teens sheltered there—a boy and girl—they took a spot near the ashen fi replace, charred wood scorched the fi rebrick. They held hands and kissed and asked me questions: what my name was and why was I there; we all slept under a thin cotton throw on cold con-crete, the wooden fl oor boards ripped from the ground. The smell of dust and mould fi lled every corner, every break in the wall, the crumbling popcorn ceiling.

A teenaged boy named Mason, who rode around the neighbourhood on his bicycle, brought us scraps of half-eaten corn ears and burnt tortillas and day-old cold chicken. We feasted on the fl oor, a turned over crate the fi nest table, our food on plastic bag plates. Mason called the lovebirds Elvis and Marilyn and every time they’d chuckle. Elvis played music on a guitar he had bought with six whole dollars, money he saved cleaning yards and cashing in plastic bottles at a Five and Dime. He strummed the chords and Marilyn watched him dreamily. Elvis was going to be a big star someday, Marilyn his wife. He’d build her a house in the woods; she’d be safe there. He said I could come too. Marilyn put her arm around me and said of course. Mason said he’d bring the food.

28


Issue #12

Clean white towels were all she ever used.No coloureds, no stripes, no beach towelswith tropical designs set to create an imaginaryvacation.

After the morning shower a white towellike an artic snowstorm ballooned abouther damp form, and she wiped dry asthough an athlete toweling down from a race.

They sat everywhere in baskets like nestinghens, the living room, bedroom, bathroom,den. Sometimes I thought they followed heraround like a genie riding a magic carpet.

At the morning toilet, towel covering her hair,draped around her slender form, she wouldsit with a snow hand towel and wipe her faceas though rubbing through the skin to erase

something buried deep, some inner tremorthat shook her like earthquake aftershocks.I always wondered why this obsession withwhite, but I never asked.

Until one morning rummaging through the closetfor shoes, I struck something hard as a doornailbundled in a white shroud. I removed the cloth.Beneath, an oak chest painted white.

Opened like a discovered ancient tomb, mothballsmell whispered out from a chest fi lled withwhite towels as though this was a burial shroudnot meant to ever be seen.

Underneath the milky fabric was a smaller box,when opened more hand towels, and in those,white envelopes now yellowed, sitting silentas observant snow owls, fi lled with letters.

Trembling like a thief afraid to be discovered,a voyeur peering in the window at her nakedform, I sorted them through my hands. Mostwere postmarked from over a quarter century earlier.

I read through the words of an angry lover,mad words, insane words, hurtful phrasesrocked in bitter cadences. Hate and scornand sorrow and bitterness as alive now,

fresh as a morning fl ower opening to the sunpreparing for another day of experience beforethe night closes in with dark sounds and forestvisions.

The text locked away in white like the bridalgarter at the bottom of the box, a fi nal noteremoved from smooth skin, two messagesno longer read.

WHITE TOWELSby Ralph Monday

The stars seem closer than usual, even accounting for the fact that I’m up a tree. The storm pushes them towards me, or me to them. The leaves fl atten against the wind, dream of fl ying free. Or maybe that’s me again.

The lightning stretches blue white light across the length of time worn mountains and the back of my eyelids. My skin is tingling from widows peak to toes curled tight against peeling bark.

I’m snugged into a thick crook, hugging the trunk, head back and mouth open to better taste

the ozone. To better smell the creosote, wet for thunder.

Want is deep in me like a jagged splinter, invisible pressure on a bundle of nerves, impos-sible to grasp with my fi ngers.

All I’ve known of sex is pain. Passive and stolen away. This rough tumbling of air and electricity, this press of sap and breath and gravity, is another channel entirely. I want to open up like roots to water.

Want to climb the sky.

SUMMER OF 16by Sossity Chiricuzio

photograph & poem by Daniel von der Embse

You sit thereyour eyes saying thingsI never heard when youwere hereThis is the only imageI keep of you

In the photograph you are always twenty-fourdaring with a cigarettebalancing in your mouthand a .45 in your handIs that a dead bodyat your feet?

Did you kill him?Did he try to kill you?I forgot to ask youbefore you left

Next to you, your lieutenantthe man for whom I am namedis saying something,funny perhaps,to take your minds awayfrom the killing workyou did today

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER, AFRICA, 1943

30


Issue #12

REVELATIONby Ralph Monday

When you swam naked toward me and climbedgolden and dripping onto the pier, I thought of

several things: where you had said that birdseedis like thoughts, the husk must be peeled away

to fi nd the electronic core, eaten, digested, passedthrough day’s system as something fl edgling

like a star bursting from its gaseous cocoon, ormicroscopic creatures swimming in a raindrop—

all unnoticed until the moment the ordinary is stripped awayand we see with unabated eyes.

Like I spy you now, an ancient story of a woman bare inher glory moving not toward a sexual moment,

but of amber honey in a jar, bee churned out for winter’sfrigid desolation.

Your smile when you towel long auburn hair is likethe bee kissing the fl ower’s liquid thoughts,

and I know that there is faith in the faithless,pebbles rubbed raw by tide’s unceasing swell.

SHE COMES ON TUES-DAYSby Jane Downing

She comes on Tuesdays, sometime between fi ve and six, depending on the traffi c. I hear her tread on the gravel and have the door open before she gets there, even in winter when the cold nips to the bone. Hello Non-na, how has your week been? She bends to kiss me, and lately she needs to lean in farther because I am shrinking. Age pushes down on you so. It’s always the best china and the teapot with the roses—the things we brought with us from the Old Country. I tell her how far the cake plate under the lamingtons has come, and who gave us the spoons as a wedding gift. She’ll often scald her lips, she drinks her tea that fast. Nonna, you should write these stories down. She says this every week. Her words smell of chocolate and coconut.

It is only as I sit here at the table with Giorgio’s foun-tain pen in my hand, the one they gave him when he retired, that I realize why she says it. Write it down, Nonna. She has been brought up well: she is far too polite to say her Nonna’s remembrances bore her. She cannot bring herself to tell me to simply shut-up with the stories. The only irritating noise my writing makes is the scratch of nib on paper.

ELEGANTby Claire T. Feild

She holds her teacup a certaindistance from her nose,her Mother counting inher head each time herdaughter takes grand bythe hand.

But the daughter resents thistherapy her mother callsdivine by diving into anold pair of jeans andstaying that way, evenwhen it is time to go tochurch.

The word compromise fl oats inthe air between the twoextremes, two helpingsof fi g preserves betweenthem producing just theamount of sugar neededfor a long-neededamendment in theirlives: a reconciliation.

MEN AT WORK #87by Robert Laughlin

Doug, a junior executive

I owe my perfect GPA—my grad-uation, really—to a sure instinct for fi nding professors in need of a boytoy. The company started me above the usual manager trainee step, and frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing, but with any luck, I’ll be off the payroll before they notice. I vetted the company offi -cers before I applied here, and there are plenty of unmarried lady execs looking for the right man or recovering from the wrong one. I’ll never get rich any other way; being a trophy husband is all right with Yours Truly.


SCENTby Olivia Stearn

i bought an atomizer.a-t-o-m-i-z-e-r.

at a fl ea marketit’s broken.

but i couldn’t spell itso now it’s mine.

COPEby Lauren Camp

At her job in the city, she tended a strict list of events and occasions while her employer shook fi stfuls of anger and paced with impatience. The girl dreaded the spreadsheet of vocation, the dolling of self, the clothes and approach for a cause. She never could pose in a posture of perfect remarks. She ate slices of insults and tallied her future.

The work gave her headaches and hungers. When each day ended, she tasted a small loss of position then entered the subway, the number 6 train travelling towards a nude night to the north, her ride home emp-tied of stars. Sun dropped over corrugated shoulders of buildings like wool, and her heart grasped new reasons to hide.

QUARANTINEDby Claire T. Feild

Set apart because she has MERS,she wonders if she will

ever get well.

She thinks of her immune systemas a set of defective cells,

all arguing with each otherto see who will take its

learning to scientists andand who will drop like fl ies.

32


Issue #12

THE PREDATOR PLAYS PIANOby Frank William Finney

‘Madamina! Il catalogo.’ Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Rigoletto turns red and takes a bow.A suite in A minor follows the gigue.

He takes blues to breakfast. A maestro on a mission.Takes the Trout to lunch in Tupperware.

He seasons his supper with tempo robato. Imagines dessert spiced with Kinderscenen.

Now I’ve heard that he’s fond of the Glockenspiel.But they say he plays God on a baby grand.

He’s promised a concert in the garden this evening.He’ll tickle the birdbath

with a surge and a splashdown—

He’ll make waves in the dark all the way to Bulgaria.His Moonlight Sonata will tickle the stars.

RAIN SWEPTby Fariha Eshrat

It started as a tapping on the car bodies, the wind whistling between the palm leavesbeckoning for more and then it went rampant. A wave of exhilaration must’ve been

thundering across the skies, maybe the clouds were venting my overwhelmingsensations… probably not though.

It’s been a fi ne few years. But now my soul’s turned as barren as this desert’s farms,and my sweaty palms no longer suffi ce in bridging the moisture between my lids and

this air.In Nigeria, we’d let the trees hide us from the rain—watch it as it invaded our fi elds,

our rooftops, our hearts. All the rain tells me now is that we haven’t been “us” inforever, none of us go home anymore.

Maybe if I returned home, if we all returned home, we could dissolve our worries inreliving our childhoods. We could hide under the banana leaves and watch the rainsteal our breaths. Soak our sore hearts in the even stillness of rain drops smashing

against mud.…

It’s 4 p.m., the rain’s still tapping, my window’s still clear and my phone hasn’t rung inages.

photograph by Terri Watrous Berry

OUR NEIGHBOUR’S VEGETABLESby Lauren Camp

We drive the two-lane road past trailer clutter

and chickens every Saturday through summer

to oversweep of storm and undershelvesand drying racks, sacks

of chile.

The farm will fl ood, willdry out. He will plow

potatoes under.Squash will set to seed. In winter

the sun will thinin lonely phrasings. And rise again, already

overcomewith the next seam of green.

We will drive the two-lane road

next summer.

34


Issue #12

Blind Dateby Carol Cooper

(an excerpt from the novel, One Night at the Jacaranda)

Christ! The fucking woman with her fucking notepad. She wasn’t writing now. But she was asking a shit-load of questions. Like ‘Whereabouts in Slovenia?’ Her eyes shone with enthusiasm. What kind of enthusiasm, he couldn’t tell. He just knew it was the wrong sort.

“I was working in a tiny village. You probably wouldn’t know it unless you’d travelled around the country a bit.”

“I’ve never been to Slovenia.”That was a relief. “But you should. It’s a beautiful country.”“So what’s the name of your tiny village?”“Kika.” Smooth recovery, that. Kika was no fucking village. It was his fi rst

dog, the one they’d had before his dad legged it. “Tell me about it.”“Not much to tell. Mainly farms. Couple of shops. Oh, and a school.

Education is taken very seriously in Slovenia.”“Is there a church?”“Sure, there’s a church. And a place that fi xes tyres. Everywhere’s got

those. Because the roads are so bad, you see.” Nice touch, he told himself. Pat on the back. If you didn’t pat yourself on the back, nobody else was going to. The most basic life lesson ever.

“What were you doing there?”“I was helping with some construction work.” “Really? And did you get to see much of the country?” “A bit. It’s pretty, especially the north of the country.” Nope, nothing wrong

with the Slovenia story. It sounded just right. Nobody ever asked him what he was doing these days because they were so impressed by his little travelogue.

“So what’s your job now?” OK, almost nobody. “Well, basically I collect, categorize and deal in

classic computer games. They’re very popular.” Pure fucking genius, he told himself. Nobody who was that brilliant should have ever ended up behind bars. “Vintage computer games are so in right now.” Better be. They were the only kind he knew.

She wasn’t taken in by this diversion. “Do you work for a small company? Or a large one?”

Christ! She must be a copper or a lawyer. Whatever, she was exactly the type of woman to be avoided. “Well, it’s a newish company, not that big.”

“I might know it. What’s it called?” That hooter didn’t come a moment too soon.

35


Issue #12

I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE SKY SO BLUE

by S. G. Larner

The chair wobbles under me. I toss the rope over the beam, and stare at it dangling, snake-like. It offers a return to ignorance, a rejection of the knowledge Eve grasped in both hands. Birds are singing. I don’t know what kinds of birds, and now I never will. I close my eyes and remember the YouTube instructions: hold the rope this way, pass it over, make a loop, pull it through. My hands are trem-bling but by the end they’re steady. A quick yank reassures me the construction is sound. Someone is cooking lamb. I hate the smell of lamb, it sinks into the pan and you can’t wash it out. Like depres-sion. You can’t wash that out, either. A cool breeze sighs; my skin goosepimples and I shiver. I slip the noose over my head. The rope is rough and prickly against the skin of my neck. I gaze out at the world. The leaves of the eucalyptus are dark shadows against the oceanic sky. They sway with the wind.

I have never seen the sky so blue.

photograph by Samantha Peterson

BUGby Olivia Stearn

he was stuck on his backlegs flailing.

i wouldn’t help.i wanted to see how it

would end.he finally flipped over and died

right then and there.i think i saw god

in a beetle.

Documents

Issue #12 Editorial & Contents Leaves - Issue 12.pdfIssue #12 Editorial & Contents Art and Photography Samantha Peterson ~ pg. 3 Amy Haas ~ pp. 6, 27 Sheri L. Wright ~ pp. 9, 12, 22,