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“Greenie” by Tessa Torgeson

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“Mother and Child” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

I am a terrible, obvious liar. My nose squiggles and my legs start to fidget. I feel like I’m about to implode. My cheeks are still chubby and rosy with childlike naiveté and sometimes older strangers pinch them.

So it is with truth I say I had been clean and sober for 89 days. But I let it all slip away from me. Because of my vulnerability, my thin skin and heavy heart, I felt the world’s pain as my own. In a flash of a moment, in a fraction of a fraction of a second, I forgot I cared about anything.

I left rehab that night in flames. My feet felt like phantom limbs. Floating on their own down seventh avenue, that pitch-black street with no streetlights even to illuminate or keep the street company. I knew better than to go down that street but I went anyway toward the seedy dive bar. The seedy dive bar alcoholic’s haven. People like us get looks at the bars normies hang out in. Normies are people that wait till after five to drink and enjoy the taste. At our joints, you feel no shame for dumping a bag of loose change on the counter with fingers crossed. You feel no shame if you just pawned your dead great grandmother’s sapphire engagement ring for booze money. You feel no shame if you tremble outside the storefront at 9:55 a.m., eagerly anticipating its opening. Shame vanishes after the first drop.

Vanishing. Next thing I knew, I was clutching a paper bag in that dark street. I hardly remembered if I paid. I’m sure the longhaired dude with a penchant for comic books was working. He stopped carding me long ago. I imagine my hands were shaking and he wondered why I hadn’t bought my medicine lately.

I floated on phantom limbs back to that alley. I ripped the fifth of Karkov because of the way it burned, because it ignited my throat like poison. I was trembling, barely able to hold my hands still. My fingers knew what to do but my body rejected it. I vomited bile. Goddammit, I wanted that blanket of intoxication to cover me. I chugged it. Then I was so consumed by crushing guilt, I swallowed a fistful of Ativans and Effexors. I took a razorblade to my wrists. My wrists became the canvas. My memory is in flashbulbs like the fluorescent lights with the whir of the ambulance whisking me off in the night. The ambulance is the stagecoach for alcoholics. We don’t lose a glass slipper. We lose our sanity.

The screeching sirens still burn in my nightmares and I wake up in a cold sweat, the blinding bright red and blue twisting and distorting into a fucked-up watercolor palate. My head spinning, brimming with chaos, I am in a stretcher again. A bright red wristband to warn others I was on a 72-hour hold for suicide watch.

~

In 403 B, I awake to the orchestral hums of the fluorescent lights and floor waxer. I expect a welcoming committee with clowns and fire-breathing dragons and balloons, but I roll over and realize by the cold sterility and lumps in the mattress that I’m lying in a hospital bed. They must have already given me Ativan because I feel like I’m tripping out of my mind. I think I see David Lee Roth over my bed shredding.

Instead I hear a soft, confident voice and feel the tightening of a blood pressure cuff like a noose to my arm.

“Hey, it’s Sandy I’ll be your C.N.A. tonight. Okay, I’m just gonna check your vitals and pump some more fluids into you.” Sandy looked to be a few years older than my mom. She had a weathered face with gentle blue eyes. I became aware of the acute stinging of the new IV in my hand.

“Your pulse is still 150, but the Ativan should help with your anxiety.”

I nodded. And tried to smile but then I remembered where I was (again) and couldn’t make my muscles move.

“It’ll be ok, just rest up. Anything I can get you?” Sandy asked.

I wanted to ask for my sanity back but my mouth was frozen. I really wanted home. I wanted home and it was impossible because I belonged nowhere. I asked her if my friends brought anything and she nodded. Before I could ask her to get it she was gone; she knew how much I needed home. She was gone like she knew where she was going. She held out my bright blue duffel bag. I found my blankie, greenie. In its shambles it was barely recognizable as a blanket. But it was my familiar. I reached for it.

“Sorry, but I can’t let you have that. It could be used in a way…” she trailed off. “Well in a way it shouldn’t be used here and it’s our policy.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks. I brushed them away with my sheet and offered a faint, “I understand.”

“I can cut you off a corner if you want,” she said. “Let me go do that for you.”

“Please? That’d be so…” I tried to let the words of gratitude come out but Sandy had already bustled down the hall. I clung to my greenie, my piece of home.

 

 

Tessa Torgeson lives in Fargo, North Dakota. She recently graduated with an English degree from NDSU and hopes to pursue her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry has appeared in the Red Weather literary journal. Her blog can be found here.

Read an interview with Tessa here.

“I Dreamed Your Epic” by Gay Giordano

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I Dreamed Your Epic (Whoops)
“Whoops” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

Children roll out like oranges
from doorways,
you appear, neck slashed
by a red scarf.
Ugly matrons full of advice
yank their fleshy stockings by the band
then pour the principal’s coffee.

Your mother half expects you to have caught
your scarf in a wheel
garland of itchy regrets
her petticoats frozen
her hair stiff.
You retreat into your peel.
Poor little orange.

Your father comes home
throat stitched to his collar
gurgling into a martini
tossing olives at the dog.

That envelope in the attic, dust,
your father beating the days,
your dollhouse like ashes.
Everything is used, even the roses.

Your mother stares at the ceiling
listening to the house pleat.
She has only lent you her face,
yours is on tiptoe
waiting for an invitation.

 

 

Gay Giordano earned her BA from Carnegie Mellon University in creative writing and her MA in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. She has been published in Mudfish, Ghost Ocean Magazine, The Lullwater Review, Illya’s Honey, The South Carolina Review, The Oakland Review and other journals. She has been a resident at VCCA, The Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency, the Banff Center for the Arts, Bennington College, and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She lives in New York City with her husband, with whom she co- translates German-language plays and aphorisms.

Read our interview with Gay here.

“Heartbreaker” by Sue Staats

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Heartbreaker (Let's Dance)
“Let’s Dance” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

We stand on the sidewalk outside his house, watching his daughter, and my brother says every time I see her walking down the street it breaks my heart.

I can see why. It’s not a walk, really. It’s a lurch, a stagger, a shuffle.

His daughter is twenty-two. She broke his heart with joy when she was born and with fear when she was five days old and stopped breathing and again with terror when she had the surgery to fix that mis-made heart.

Since then, his own heart has been a construction zone: continuously broken and re-broken, patched together so many times it’s a bit misshapen. Yellow tape marked do not cross surrounds it: traffic cones warn of dangerous ground. Of holes. Of weakened areas.

She throws her long thin arms around me, cries when I arrive. She will cry when I leave. In her embrace, I watch my brother over her shoulder.  His light blue eyes are reflective, transparent, fractured in the sunlight.

My brother takes her to Pirates games. She loves baseball. He takes her to church. She stares into the high vaulted space with long-lashed brown eyes too far apart. Her mouth hangs open, her lips parted and loose, her teeth crowded.

He says close your mouth, sweetie and she does, pushing it shut with her long, lovely fingers.

There’s something I’d like to tell her about what she has done to her family. But she may already know. Or not. Who knows if it would matter.  Who knows what she knows of broken hearts, of disappointment. She doesn’t talk. It’s enough to break your heart.

 

 

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, The Mitchell Boys, and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and was published this past spring in The Farallon Review. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College. Her poetry was featured in the 2012  Sacramento Poetry Anthology and her short story “Marshmallow Empire” was a finalist for the 2013 Nisqually Prize for Fiction.

Read an interview with Sue here.

“Umbrella Mouth Gulper Eel” by Jamie McGraw

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Umbrella Mouth (Escargot)
“Escargot” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

Two nights ago my father found me

dead. My body formed like a metal scrap
malformed by extreme heat.
A beat of him in an ocher grave.

Outside a starling grappled with a whore of a bee.
Inside a syringe containing cotton shreds,
coagulated blood, bacteria, and smack
hugged my left forearm.

*

At age five I called ants my friends,
showed them my baby teeth collection.
They grew so fond of me,
learned it’s okay to lose things,
you’ll go right on living.

*

The day I died I studied photographs of deep-sea creatures:
megamouth sharks, fangtooths, vampire squids.
The most frightful ones filled with light.

They care not who sees their crookedness,
their orthodontic atrocities.
God damned them to the deep,
because they’re so damned ugly.

Not so unkind, though,
to be so deep in something
that God grants you your very own light.

Just so you can recall your body.
Just so you can remember
you exist.

 

 

Jamie McGraw lives in and sometimes leaves North Carolina. She is currently enrolled in Queens University of Charlotte’s MFA program. Previous work has been published in APA journal Families, Systems, and Health, Red Fez, and Beatdom. Her spirit animal is a lobster. Don’t ask. (Actually, no. Do. Do ask.)

Read an interview with Jamie here.

“Summer Kitchen” by Elizabeth Glixman

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The children threw us both away,
chicken feed to the birds when you passed.
The house for sale with the garlic press,
the copper pots I made clean sold for ten cents each.
The beige crocheted lace that outlined the front door window
your boots caked with field mud scenes.
our wedding pictures, the picture of Hunter the dog,
gone to a bidder visiting estate sales.

Nothing feels like earth in my new home.
I pull old apple tree silhouettes in memory
through the kitchen windows
frenzied black lines in the dawn without a crunch
walking dreams that take me to the
beginning when we were warm and full.

I am a chicken without fat in this grassless yard,
a bent woman tied straight in a chair
watching the nurses go by delivering
dried cod fillet. potatoes and applesauce
with a dab of fake whipped cream.
They promise me  there will be more minutes
to recall the stained potholders on the hooks,
and the red wine stains on the curtains in the summer kitchen
where we got drunk when you were ill,
where the peonies you planted bloomed outside the window.
It all drifts in my head, rivers before this frost.
No children visit me.
You and I grew in that quiet home,
ate curry in the yard, met the spitting Llamas
our neighbors bought. Loved well.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Glixman is a poet, writer and artist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in many publications including Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Her Circle Ezine, Frigg, Meow Poetry, Journey anthology and Velvet Avalanche, an anthology of erotic poetry. Her author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, Eclectica and the anthologies Chocolate for A Woman’s Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching (Pudding House Publications, 2008), Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2010), and The Wonder of It All (Alternating Current, 2011). I Am the Flame (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming July 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

“The Uneasy Voice of the Grass: Cuwignaka Duta Tells Her Dream” by Lisa Ress

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Dakota Territory, 1864

In my dream I am walking there
where the north fork of the Platte
and the Laramie meet, where the grass

grew thickest, tender and green.
as the dark heart shapes of cottonwood leaves,
as lacewings, delicate dragonfly needles,

fat hoppers, the killdeer’s sweet home.
I know red as the buffalo’s flesh,
woodpeckers’ crests flashing bright

tied in our warriors’ black hair, I know red
as blood, the color of my skin,
and my name: Red Dress.

And white I once knew as ice on the buffalo grass,
the winter cottonwoods’ ermine bones,
knew it sometimes as hunger.

Now I know white as treaties, as
bible tracts, bills of sale, the mission
schoolbook’ s icy pages,

In my dream I am struggling to walk
across endless white ground,
forcing my legs between stalks of ripped

parchment, the wind howling
around me, clawing to rip
sheets from the ground. This whiteness

has spread, it eats at the land. I look back
at my footsteps. “Tate,” I say to the wind,
I am here for a reason.

–After Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer (G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1994)

Lisa Ress first came to Appalachia (Blacksburg, Virginia) in the early 1960s and fell in love with the region, returned to go “back to the land” in Floyd County in the ‘70s and ‘80s and finally was able to retire to a co-housing community in Blacksburg after teaching college and university English and writing courses for a number of years. Over 100 poems have been published in a variety of magazines. Her first book, Flight Patterns, won the 1982 Associated Writing Program prize and was published by UVa Press. She was also awarded an NEA grant. Her second book, Object Relations, has just been published by Wilder Publications and is available at Banres & Noble and Amazon.

“The Uncropped Photograph— Nick Ut’s Vietnam, June 8, 1972” by Gary Dop

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Four children with little, naked Kim Phuc
run down Route 1 by Trang Bang. Seven soldiers

in uniform behind little, naked Kim Phuc
lift their boots away from Trang Bang.  One

often-cropped photographer, four steps beside little,
naked Kim Phuc, loads his Canon to shoot Trang Bang.

The children burn and run.  The soldiers walk,
but one, far off, a miniature ghost, talks to the cloud

and refuses to follow as the children dance away
from their pluming rose garden.  The helmets pull

the men toward the space between the fire
and the naked nine-year-old flying, her arms wings

of the fallen.  Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s family
are behind the firewall, among the dead.  Some

of the soldiers blur like the clouds
they called down.  One, who can’t consider the ground

of boiling blood, faces the smoke of freedom.  We all
look away.  Only the youngest child, a little boy

in a white cotton shirt, orphan of falling fires, looks back,
his eyes blistered away from time, toward Trang Bang.

 

Gary Dop—a poet, scriptwriter, essayist, and actor—lives with his wife and three daughters in Minneapolis, where he teaches creative writing at North Central University. He received a Special Mention in the 2011 Pushcart Prize Anthology, his essays have aired on public radio’s All Things Considered, and his poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Agni, New Letters, Rattle, and North American Review, among others.

Read our interview with Gary here.

“Fishes and Their Fathers” by Elizabeth Glixman

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Glixman-Fishes1
When the fish bowl needs scrubbing from your small handprints
I take a damp cloth dipped in castile soap
contemplatively wash around the outer curve of the bowl
like my hand followed the curve of my belly
when you were inside me feet kicking.
You need me to tell you its okay
that your father is not here as the
snow falls like fastballs thrown by a famous pitcher.
When your father is not there, when the pond is covered with ice

You want me to tell you he will return soon.
You ask where is the fish’s (the one in the bowl) father.
I tell you he is all grown up and does not need a father.
You ask about the other fish that are not grownup
and their fathers
under the ice in the pond.
I tell you the fishes and their fathers are underwater
telling stories to each other.
They will come to the surface in the spring after the thaw.
You say watching me wash the bowl
I want daddy to come home
So small a mumble I can hardly hear.
I take the cloth follow the roundness of your face
with my hand smelling of lavender
wanting to protect you from ice

I am your first teacher
I cannot teach you the way gases change from solids to liquids
and back the cycle of change
(you have conquered your shoelaces this week)
or how people never come home
Even when it is spring and the ice has thawed.

 

 

Elizabeth Glixman is a poet, writer and artist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in many publications including Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Her Circle Ezine, Frigg, Meow Poetry, Journey anthology and Velvet Avalanche, an anthology of erotic poetry. Her author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, Eclectica and the anthologies Chocolate for A Woman’s Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching (Pudding House Publications, 2008), Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2010), and The Wonder of It All (Alternating Current, 2011). I Am the Flame (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming July 2012.

“The Shrink Who Killed Gazoo” by Michele Whitney

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Whitney-Shrink Who Killed Gazoo1

“It’s all my fault.” When I say this to my  therapist, she frequently replies, “Seriously, Michele, you are not the center of the universe. You don’t have that much power.”

I’ve heard that choosing a therapist, counselor, or more affectionately known as a shrink is kind of like choosing a mate. Luckily I have been more successful in the shrink department than the mate department, but that’s a whole other story. So yes, I admit to having psychologically courted a few counselors until I finally found The One.

There is no shame in this.

Or maybe there is.

But at least I am working through my issues.

The surprising thing is that after years of going back and forth with different counselors, I found my “one” in an older white lady who had years of experience, but in my mind would never be able to help someone like me. When I say someone like me, I’m not saying I’m an alien or anything, but our culture and background on the surface is different. Or so I assumed. I am black, she is white. I am young, she is old…or older. I soon found out that I was wrong.

Once I was in a session where I was crying over a man who, for whatever reason, did not want me, but who I knew was perfect for me. Why oh why? What is wrong with me? I don’t understand why he won’t give me a chance.

My therapist simply told me, “He’s fucked up.”

“What?”

“It’s not about you; the guy is just fucked up.”

Is my therapist supposed to use the F word?

It didn’t matter because that was the recipe I needed to get me out of my rut. The main course was “the truth” for a gentle jolt out of my pity party. Add a side order of compassion to nudge me back into reality. And finally a shot of laughter to wash it all down.

Moving on to a different therapy session and me sulking over the same guy. Perhaps he really wasn’t attracted to me; maybe he just slept with me because he felt sorry for me.

“Did his penis work?”

I laughed. “Yes.”

“Then I would say he was very much attracted to you. The penis doesn’t work if there’s no attraction.”

Oh yeah.

~

A couple of days ago, I was in a therapy session where I was blaming everything on myself. I’m just the kind of person who thinks that everything is my fault. Perhaps it’s the conditioning of my conspiracy-theory-filled mother or the paranoia I formed from growing up in an alcoholic home. Or perhaps I’m just crazy. But if there is a conflict, I think it’s my fault. If there is tension, anger, sadness, or fear being expressed…it is my fault. If I experience loss…again, it’s my fault. An otherwise sane person would not think this way.  But I have associated myself with every bad thing that occurs. And it gets really extreme sometimes.

I could probably find a way to blame myself for the war in Iraq.

I never said it made any sense. It’s just what I do. I think it provides me with a level of comfort when things happen that I cannot explain.

My therapist told me that this “all my fault” thinking is called “magical thinking.” I was intrigued. I like to think of myself as a pretty magical person, so I thought at first it was a compliment.

But then she explained to me that I was thinking like a child…

I was a bit offended. But then I thought, I kind of feel like a child when I think this way. Children can be pretty self-centered.

You are not that powerful.

My therapist went on to ask, “Why is it that you believe you are at fault for so much?  Don’t you know the truth?”

I didn’t have a concrete answer. I sat there for a few minutes. Dammit, I was going to explain to this woman why everything is my fault! What kind of analogy could I use? And then the craziest thing popped into my head. “Do you remember Gazoo?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Gazoo. Do you remember the cartoon The Flintstones? Well, there was this little character called Gazoo that used to fly around and sit on Fred’s shoulder.”

“I remember the Flintstones, but I don’t remember Gazoo.”

The character’s name was actually the Great Gazoo, and he came in the last season of The Flintstones. He was this little, cute, flying green guy from outer space that spent most of his time with Fred and Barney and constantly caused trouble. He wasn’t bad, just a bit of a pest, and when he tried to help, he would always end up causing more harm than good.

So I told my therapist that my thinking goes that way when I’m visited by what I call the Bad Gazoo (as opposed to the Great Gazoo). So this little green guy sits on my shoulder and fills my head with guilt, shame, and blame, even though I know the truth. He thinks he’s helping me, but he’s really not. Gazoo is the little bugger that causes me to “magically think.”

I was satisfied with this theoretical explanation. But my therapist was not.  She leaned forward and calmly said, “I think you need to murder Gazoo.”

When she said that, I had the best belly laugh. I laughed so loud that I’m sure it echoed through her waiting room. My soul was smiling.

My shrink had done it again.

And so, as I write this, my shrink and I are planning the capture and ultimate murder of Gazoo. Rest in peace.

 

Michele Whitney is a writer, blogger, and musician from Chicago. She is currently a PhD candidate for public service leadership at Capella University where she is working on a dissertation titled: The Human-Animal Bond: A Phenomenological Study of People’s Attachment to Companion Animals. Her writing has been published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and other venues. Michele’s message of emotional healing, recovery, and connection can be found in her blog, Words of Compassion, Creativity, & Knowledge. Her free time is spent playing the flute, cooking, and practicing aromatherapy. She resides with her mom and her feline kid named Samson.

Read an interview with Michele here.