Lucia Cherciu

It rained all night. In the dark, from her window,
she saw somebody fall, curse, mumble,
look for something, dig through the mud
and give up when he figured out he was holding
horse dung. He left.
 
She threw the curtain back and went to sleep.
In the morning when the light broke with the roosters,
she opened the gate softly and in the muck on the road
she saw something glitter.
 
She bent and picked it up: somebody’s
full set of teeth.
She washed them at the tap in the yard
and tied them in a handkerchief.
 
For a week, she made it a habit
to walk. She picked a distaff with wool
and started spinning down the road
stopping to listen at gates in the evening
when people gathered.
 
She didn’t ask anyone.
She started crossing out
the men she knew wouldn’t go to the pub
for fear somebody would laugh,
until she figured him out.
 
She didn’t talk to him.
In the morning, she put his teeth in a box
and left them at his door:
no crickets, no fireflies, no larks,
no dawn choirs yet.
 
Listen to the poem here:

 
Lucia Cherciu is a Professor of English at SUNY / Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY and her latest book of poetry is Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag, 2015). Her poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.
Her web page is luciacherciu.webs.com.

Todd Outcalt

In the encroaching ward, among the old ways,
Perhaps our eyes will meet yet in that hall
Where artificial hips and hope allays
The recognition of the other half, or all
The light, now dimmed by passing days,
Revokes the wheelchair or the final fall.
 
Let your yes be yes, your nays, nays,
So at the last our honesty stands tall
Against the lies our weakness prays.
And in that weary place, wrapped in a shawl,
May we be parted where love stays
And learn to live together, after all.
 
Listen to the poem here:

 
Todd Outcalt is the author of thirty books in six languages, including his first poetry collection, Where in the World We Meet (Chatter House Press).  His poetry has appeared in many publications including Rattle, The Oklahoma Review, and Poetry Quarterly.  He lives in Brownsburg, Indiana.

From issue 8:
Marisa Mohi
Listen to the author read the piece:

He swaggers into the bar, sure of himself—an unapologetically American boy with his blonde hair slicked back like a rockabilly, and blue eyes that glow in the dim, golden light that reflects off the brass behind the tap handles. You sip at the beer you ordered, and you know you’re going home with him.
The wooden bar top is sticky with the residue of hundreds of drinks before, and the cardboard coaster beneath your beer is plastered in place. You don’t care though. You aren’t trying to sit there for long.
Placing his hands on the bar first, he sits down leaving one seat between you. You can feel him looking at you out of the corner of his eye, and you know he knows that you’re trying to read the words tattooed on his knuckles.
Hold fast.
There is nothing about him that screams sailor to you, though you get the distinct impression that he has been drunk on a float trip down the Illinois River a time or two. You envy him immediately and his ability to be himself. Kids with western parents are “free to be you and me”—a luxury you cannot imagine.
Of course you don’t know if his tattoos are a result of permissive parenting, but you assume. And that is what this game is about. You don’t want to know him. You want to create a backstory for him.
See, in your mind, he is the chorus to a Bruce Springsteen B-side. Working class. Strong. Meat and potatoes. Stereotypically American. That’s what you want.
You won’t ask him where he grew up, what his parents do, or what he does for a living. He is a Pony Boy—a tough greaser—embodying that wrong-side-of-the-tracks Americana feeling. He is James Dean if you want him to be.
He sips his beer slowly, then turns to you.
“I’m sorry, but what are you?”
All the episodes of Sesame Street you grew up watching and every white Gen Y asshole always leads off with that. You can’t fault him for it though. Your skin is too dark. Your hair is black and curly. Even though you were born in a nowhere state in the middle of the U.S., you’ll never be American. The backstory he makes up for you doesn’t fit with that.
You tell him you’re Persian, and you try not to mind when he raises his eyebrows in a satisfied way.
“Damn, can I buy you a drink?”
And there it is. It is always that easy. Because as much as you want to create an untouchable fantasy of American stereotypes, he also wants a so-called exotic fantasy for himself.
He will assume that you know how to belly dance and cook, and that you want to be a good wife someday, and that the black eyeliner on your eyes is natural and not something haphazardly smudged on before making your way to find a boy to fuck.
You won’t tell him about the time your dad got in a fight with a redneck in a grocery store parking lot. Or about how you watched from the front seat of the car as those rednecks broke his nose with a crowbar and blamed the entire Gulf War on him. You definitely won’t tell him how you cried in the parking lot next to your dad until the cops came and mysteriously couldn’t find the rednecks who did it, even though there were so many witnesses.
That’s not the exotic fantasy he is looking for.
To him, you are an outsider. He doesn’t need to know that you slow danced to Mariah Carey songs while wearing JNCOs in the seventh grade the same way he did. He doesn’t need to know that you have never been to Iran.
But there are things you don’t need to know either. He isn’t a John Wayne or a James Dean or any symbol of American masculinity.
But that’s not important. It’s not what the game is about.
The bartender places another pint on the cardboard coaster, and you turn to bat your eyelashes.

From the issue:
Ron Singer
My wife said, “I reached across the bed for you.
I reached farther, farther, across the wide bed.
I tried to reach all the way to Africa.”
“Be careful you don’t fall off.
The world is square, you know.”
Just then, a half-grown cat, an older kitten,
a black and white tiger, on the thin side,
hurried across the tile floor of my room.
Appearing from nowhere, like a loving wife,
he must have jumped in through the window.
Read the full issue here

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From issue 8:
Richard O’Brien

I was twelve years old the summer my father helped our neighbor Victor Metzger tear down the old wood shed in his backyard. That was back when we lived in the Fairview section of Camden, New Jersey. The houses were row homes, and the yards quite small. Mr. Metzger’s shed took up half his yard before he and my father tore it down. After the junk man came by and took away the shed scraps, Mr. Metzger poured concrete over his entire backyard. When the concrete dried, our neighbor painted it kelly green. We lived in a house on the end facing Sumter Road. Mr. Metzger’s house was on Kansas Road which was perpendicular to our street. From the front of his house you could see the top of the water tower at the Camden Shipyard across Newton Creek.
In our neighborhood many of the men worked in the shipyard: welders, pipefitters, painters by trade. Most of them were Korean War vets. My father had been too young for that war, and too old for Vietnam by the time that conflicted started. He was not alone. Several fathers in our neighborhood back then fell into the category. Unlike other men in our neighborhood who worked at the shipyard, my father was employed at the post office in Camden. Before I was born he had been a letter carrier, and worked his way up to a supervisor position. Whenever the subject of war came up, my father remained silent. He had many misgivings about war, and none of his opinions were popular in our old neighborhood.
Mr. Metzger had been in the infantry in Korea, and he still had a cold-hearted stare even twenty years after the Korean conflict officially ended. He kept his salt and pepper hair cut short, military regulation style, and in the warmer months, after the set behind the houses along the common across the street from his house, he liked to sit outside drinking Rheingold Lager Beer and smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes one after the other. He was most peculiar; the kids in the neighborhood were afraid of him. It didn’t help that Mr. Metzger’s wife Gloria vanished before I was born. Later on, when people told the story, they acted as if she had been the victim of some magician’s trick: now you see her, now you don’t.
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C.C. Russell
In this morning’s fall
rain, the houses across
from the cemetery
look more haunted
than their partners.
 
It’s a strange sort
of cold here,
the sky opening itself
like a confessional.
 
We’re out here driving,
thinking of calling home,
wondering
if it’s too late.
 
C.C. Russell lives in Wyoming with his wife and daughter.  His writing has appeared here and there in print and online in such places as Rattle, Pearl, and kysoflash.com.  This year he was nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.  He can be found on Twitter @c_c_russell.

From the issue:
Jeremiah Moriarty

It was the morning after a snowstorm, when hours
are quieted by atmospheric baby-breaths,
a sublime nearness best with coffee—the sugaring season.
I pressed my hand into my coat pocket,
backpack light with everything
I had given up on,
and watched the snow descend, slowly and
without much fanfare,
on the dove gray dome of the cathedral.
Marshall Avenue is a crawl of headlights
and dark sedan curves, the windshield wipers
working through the white like
the dogged Minnesotans within, hardy souls
trying to reconcile all this cold
with all this beauty. A lamp-post bulb goes out,
but it’s daytime, I guess it doesn’t really matter.
I look both ways,
and cross the street, catching flakes on my face,
on my shoulders, on my bones. I’m trying hard
to keep moving forward, I really am.
There is a city in my head and I think it looks
just like this. Blinking the snow off my eyelashes,
I briefly look up: a plane heads east.
I continue on.