“at goodwill (radiation, day 32)” by B.J. Best

radiation day
“Pathways in the Sea” by Mia Avramut, encaustic and gouache on wood, 8.5 x 11.5 in.

we wield our squealing cart, ready to rifle
through the detritus of other people’s lives:
the fritzy stereo, the german bible,
baskets, scarves, puzzles, bent butter knives.

our son wants to visit the toys, buried
like a graveyard of childhood. broken parts,
electronics no longer batteried:
o birthday, o christmas, what callous heart

would want to be bereft of you? it is my wife
who finds the vintage cat pitcher made in japan.
we will take it home, let it purr in our life,
now a little brighter than when the day began.

thrift stores, like cancer, serve to remind:
you never know what’s hidden. what you’ll find.

 

 

B.J. Best is the author of three books of poetry: But Our Princess Is in Another Castle (Rose Metal Press, 2013), Birds of Wisconsin (New Rivers Press, 2010), and State Sonnets (sunnyoutside, 2009). I got off the train at Ash Lake, a verse novella, is forthcoming from sunnyoutside.  He lives in Wisconsin.

Read an interview with B.J. here.

“Life Saver” by Mary McCluskey

City Morning
“City Morning” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

The thing about living with a guy who’s just out, who’s done his time and just hasn’t settled back in yet, he jumps and twitches and doesn’t sleep, and his eyes dart left and right and he’s always turning in the street, looking behind him. The thing about living with this guy is that even when his voice is soft, a whisper, the razor blade edge of it seeps through. When he’s saying oh, you’re so hot, you’re special you are, there’s something else.

I hear it, this thing in his voice, but I think – he’d never hurt me. He just wouldn’t.

We’re watching TV late on Friday afternoon when he kicks the wall and says – let’s go out. I jump up and we walk fast, him five yards ahead of me, and right there in town there’s a charity fair. Stalls with hand-made sweaters and jams and pickles and booths with goofy games. He laughs at the old ladies and he has a go at the shooting range, just for the hell of it, and moves the gun to the right trying to whip it around as if he wants to wave it all over the place but the guy looks at him hard, and it’s chained anyway, so he can’t budge it. He wins two goldfish. One boy, one girl. Well, that’s what the old gal said. I name them after him and me – Ted and Jackie, because Jackie has this streaky bit on top, like my hair.

I buy a proper bowl for them. He says it’s waste of money. He says they’ll be dead before you get home. Turns out he’s right. Half right. Jackie dies the next day. All her colors just vanish. She’s fine at first, then there she is, floating on top of the water, her gold bleached out. The boy fish doesn’t seem to notice. Keeps swimming round her.

In the pub when I tell Ted that his fish is still swimming but mine is dead, he gives me a look, picks up his drink and drains it, his eyes all funny and contorted through the bottom of the glass.

At home, I wait until I hear the TV go on, then I pull Jackie out of the bin, flatten her out on the kitchen counter, looking for some deliberate injury. I know he killed her. Then he’s there behind me and I scramble about hiding Jackie’s body in kitchen towel, throwing her in the trash and he wants to fuck now, and he says – you’re different, nobody gets me like you do. And when he says that, as if I’m the only one in the world who does, I give in. I can’t help it. In bed, afterwards, when he seems calm, I ask him, I say – tell me what happened with that girl. Not what you told the jury. The truth.

I expect him to yell at me, say shut the fuck up but no, he wants to tell me.

Saw her in the club, he says. She was hot. Really hot. And gagging for it. I was just fooling around. I push her up against the car and she yells something and then she’s got this thing in her hand, some kind of spike and I grab it, and push it towards her neck, just to shut her up but she moves and – He stops then, turns away from me. Stupid bitch, he says.

It’s when I think of her there, all her colors bleeding out, that something goes click in my head. My body cools. I don’t want him touching me. He doesn’t notice, he’s limp now, relaxed. I want to get up and run. Run away, like she should have done.

And the next night, when he’s gone to the liquor store, I pack my bag so fast and I think – that goldfish saved my life. I don’t know how, but she did.

 

 

Mary McCluskey’s prizewinning short stories have been published in The Atlantic, The London Magazine, StoryQuarterly, London’s Litro Magazine, on Salon.com, and in literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong.  Her novel, INTRUSION, is scheduled for publication by Little A in March 2016. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon, in England, and Los Angeles.

Read an interview with Mary here.

 

“You Belong” by Tina Pocha

You Belong
“Wax becomes fire” by Mia Avramut, wax on masonite board, 6 x 6 in.

She gave me a gift
her disclosure
her addiction
She laid it out
as if to say
here
warm your feet on this
And I do
each time I feel
the world rise up
to swallow me
I remember
I am not alone
on that cold tile floor

 

 

 

Tina Pocha was born and raised in Bombay, India. She is a scientist by training and a writer by avocation. She currently works as an academic in the field of language and literacy, and is a new and emerging poet with publications in Cadence Collective and Eunoia Review and more publications forthcoming in Hyacinth Press and East Jasmine Review. You can find more of her writing at www.tinapocha.com

 

“A Taste of Peppermint” by K.A. Wisniewski

Taste of Peppermint
“Forest of Red Birds” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

Peppermint Harris never walked too far from home; he didn’t like things he didn’t know. Still had his ’72 Gibson standing up in the corner of his daughter’s living room and only changed its strings when its rust and grunge cut through his calloused fingers. He nicked his face that morning shaving and dabbed some peroxide over the cut. He didn’t wash before he left and, as he waited for the light to change at the street corner, he smelled his hands. His black suit and cowboy hat hid a tired, aching body, the purple splotches on his legs, the red in his eyes, the beaten skin hanging onto its face.

And when he crossed the street, nobody knew who he was. None of the neighborhood kids called out Hey Peppermint, how ya doin? No one tapped him on the shoulder and asked for an autograph or sang one of his songs back to him. Not a soul even asked him for a light. After he picked up the pack of Camels, he’d stop at the bar next door for his usual: no famous imported beers, just two Buds and a double whiskey. He’d strike a match from the bar stool and he’d smile, remembering how he once enjoyed being recognized.

 

 

K. A. Wisniewski is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, the Managing Editor of Roving Eye Press, and an editor at Calypso Editions.  His creative work has most recently appeared in Toad Suck, the Tule Review, Third Wednesday, the Chiron Review, Genre, the Sierra Nevada Review, and basalt.  He lives in Baltimore.

Read an interview with K.A. here.

 

Contributors Fall 2015

David Alasdair
David Alasdair (The West Elm Sofa) earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA, has seen the Loch Ness Monster, been in the world’s longest chorus line, and occasionally makes Shrek-like noises with his right ear.

Mia Avramut
Mia Avramut (Illustrator) is a Romanian-American writer, artist, and physician, who worked in laboratories and autopsy rooms from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. Her artwork has recently appeared or is upcoming in Prick of the Spindle, saltfront, The Knicknackery, The Bookends Review Best of 2014 Anthology (cover), Up the Staircase Quarterly, Buffalo Almanack, and Sliver of Stone. She lives in Essen, Germany.

Roy Bentley
Roy Bentley (Walking on the Effing Moon) has received fellowships from the NEA, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One Man (Bottom Dog, 1992), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House 2013). He has taught creative writing throughout the Midwest and south Florida. These days, he teaches at Georgian Court University and lives in Lakewood, New Jersey with his wife Gloria.

BJ Best
B.J. Best (At Goodwill) is the author of three books of poetry: But Our Princess Is in Another Castle (Rose Metal Press, 2013), Birds of Wisconsin (New Rivers Press, 2010), and State Sonnets (sunnyoutside, 2009). I got off the train at Ash Lake, a verse novella, is forthcoming from sunnyoutside.  He lives in Wisconsin.

typewriter
Shaula Evans (Fred) is a writer, editor and translator. Born and raised in Canada, and educated in Montreal, France, and Japan, she currently resides in New Mexico after spending 6 ½ years traveling around North America in a Mini Cooper. You can find her online at shaulaevans.com and on Twitter at @ShaulaEvans.

Robert Fieseler
Robert Fieseler (New Miserable Experience) grew up in Chicago and graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School. He is the proud older brother of William (Billy) Fieseler, who also appears in this essay. Robert’s journalism has appeared in Narratively and The Big Roundtable; W.W. Norton will be publishing his debut book of nonfiction. Tweet him @wordbobby

Avital
Avital Gad-Cykman (Fulfillment) published a flash collection LIFE IN, LIFE OUT with Matter Press in 2014. Her stories have been published in The Literary Review, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. They have also been featured in anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s International Flash Anthology, Sex for America, Politically Inspired Fiction, Stumbling and Raging, Politically Inspired Fiction Anthology, The Flash, and The Best of Gigantic. She won the Margaret Atwood Society Magazine Prize, placed first in The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, and was a finalist for the Iowa Fiction Award for story collections. She lives in Brazil.

Ting Gou
Ting Gou (Excavation: Mobile Alabama, 1996) lives and writes in Ann Arbor, where she is a student at the University of Michigan Medical School.  Her poems have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Best of the Net 2014, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere.

Beverly Lucey
Beverly Lucey (Good Will) has had work appear in Zoetrope All Story Extra, Vestal Review,  Absinthe Revival, and Feathered Flounder. She was the winner of the Fiction Contest for Estonian Public Broadcasting  (2013) Print anthology:  Friend. Follow. Text.  #storiesFromLivingOnline  (fall 2013 release) “Voice Mail for the Living” in the anthology Up, Do Flash Fiction by Women Writers, (spring 2014). Landmarks: 2015 National Flash-Fiction Day Anthology (UK)

Laura Moretz
Laura Moretz (Rules) lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with her husband, two teenage sons, two dogs, and a cat. A previous story, “Philo Goes Home,” won the Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Prize in 2012 and was published in Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, in March 2013.

Mary McCluskey
Mary McCluskey (Life Saver) has had prizewinning short stories published in The Atlantic, The London Magazine, StoryQuarterly, London’s Litro Magazine, on Salon.com, and in literary journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong.  Her novel, INTRUSION, is scheduled for publication by Little A in March 2016. She divides her time between Stratford-upon-Avon, in England, and Los Angeles.

Tina Pocha
Tina Pocha (You Belong) was born and raised in Bombay, India. She is a scientist by training and a writer by avocation. She currently works as an academic in the field of language and literacy, and is a new and emerging poet with publications in Cadence Collective and Eunoia Review and more publications forthcoming in Hyacinth Press and East Jasmine Review. You can find more of her writing at www.tinapocha.com

Heidi Siegrist
Heidi Siegrist (Out of the Nest) is currently trying to make it/fake it in Chicago. She is also an MFA student at the University of the South, and is working on a collection of essays about entanglement (whatever that is).

Jennifer Williams
Jennifer Williams (Europa Hides an Ocean) is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA Program. Prior to writing, she worked as an engineer in Phoenix. Her short story “Gore Junkies” appeared in the Oregon anthology, The Night, and the Rain, and the River and she lives in Portland, Oregon.

KA Wisniewski
K.A. Wisniewwski (A Taste of Peppermint) is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, the Managing Editor of Roving Eye Press, and an editor at Calypso Editions.  His creative work has most recently appeared in Toad Suck, the Tule Review, Third Wednesday, the Chiron Review, Genre, the Sierra Nevada Review, and basalt.  He lives in Baltimore.