Issue 10

Baby dreams

by Grayson Mack

I dream in genre: thriller, romance, pulp
fiction—all the ways I could fail
at motherhood. Scampering behind golden
curtain rods & green velvet drapery.
Call me Scarlett, call me horse. I have a question:
to give a thing a name is to offer choice,
yes? If a nameless child stares up
at me, I won’t burst into flames—
It’s one big blinking eye & its intent.
This is where I will start:
to describe its features after me,
him, perhaps god, too? Eyelashes & softness & finger
nails—like tiny teeth & yes, eventually
tiny teeth. They bite into my new skin.
We’re singing lullabies on a wide open lawn. 

the cat has been hunting the housefly

by Terence Degnan

my wife is in the kitchen
mixing batter

our daughter is in the den
nursing a soapbox wound

and I’m out back
watching the sun carve a shadow into a tin pot

a few hours ago
I was asking the guitar store clerk

for a bridge pin
and an E string

to replace the one
it had forsaken

the clerk said he only had
a nine pound version

and somehow I was reminded
of catgut

and the butterfly effect
of homegrown elasticity

how they used to dry pumpkins
cover them in goat skins

and string them with intestines
by the time this thought

has rooted out its neighbors
I have imagined whole symphonies

shivering
on the Zambezi

and the variations of these
ghost compositions

due to the dietary choices
of African goats

the cat has now caught the housefly
and is sleeping beside its corpse

Mosquito

by Mary Anna Rice

Yvette asks me to assess her blister, to tell her whether I think it holds water. It glows like an amniotic sac beneath the yellow pop of our flashlight, which we share along with our room.

The bubble gleams white at the base of her index finger, just below the scalloped upper edge of her palm. She has been hammering away all day, her skin slipping beneath the hold of her tool.

For the past weeks we have slept on pallets stretched across the tile floor of a large closet. We sleep in the mostly finished wing of what will be a school dormitory in the Western Province.

As I hold her one hand in both of mine, the warmth of the flashlight balloons between us like a gulf. “I think it would be better to lance it,” I say, “so it can heal overnight. Want me to do it?”

She nods and her hair spills over her shoulder like waves of wet ramen. She’s like a girl from a country song. Her mouth is pink and ridged as a shell. All our friends are on a beach in Florida.

Kenya is a tick on my college applications. Yvette is a true missionary, pure of heart and pale as a chicken breast. She was startled by the pleasanter conditions of Nairobi, the grocery stores.

“There is a split distribution of wealth,” I told her when we landed and she was disheartened, as we moved through the crisp airport. “Struggles we aren’t seeing. We can still do good here.”

She imagined we would be sheltered in a dirt hut in the slums, cradling big-headed, AIDS-having children as they prayed for forgiveness. I remain reluctant to tell her how small God is.

We were in Nairobi for a day, then left for our provisional home in the mountains. The adults sleep in communal bedrooms, mosquito netting gauzed across the mouthy, unfinished windows.

Yvette leapt at the chance to sleep in this storeroom because it has a closing door and she is terrified of contracting malaria. At night we check each other for bumps. Our skin is burnt, dry. 

Our ankles are tender and bruised from kicking around a soccer ball with the kids who approach us at dinnertime. A patch of skin on my jawline is erupting because I can’t adjust to the climate.

I extract a needle from the sewing kit I have kept hidden from the local children in fear that I will not have enough thread to mend every torn jersey. I pick her blister open and she whimpers.

A bead of water plumps up from the torn seam of skin. The lucent pocket puckers like a rubber coin purse. Drawing water from her is easy. We were baptized the same cold day in church.

We weren’t close growing up; went to the same Sunday classes, never talking really. We fled the continent and realized we are the only two from youth group so desperate to sacrifice summers.

I have been wanting to kiss her for weeks now, but she stops me from touching her anywhere above the neck. She has a boyfriend back home. I think we’re too young to know what we want.

As I peel back the damp oval of cloth, the cunt-stained bridge of her pajama bottoms, I think in another world we’re in a house closet after a slip of the bottle, our minutes in Heaven venerable. 

Her eyes are squeezed shut, as always, because she recognizes, as I do, that I want nothing more than to take her further from God. I press my lips against the stinging hole in her hand and drink.

Lilith and Eve Poems

by Elizabeth Stevens

Lilith and Eve are my best friends

We sit together at lunch, Eve crunching apples and Lilith tearing into a baby leg. I suck and lick at poems so tragic my teeth should shatter from the smell. Eve reads her favorite bit from Paradise Lost, where she sees her reflection in a lake for the first time and realizes that no man would ever be good enough for her. Lilith picks at Milton’s Sin: The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair, / But ended foul in many a scaly fould / Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd / With mortal sting… She stops and says, “John always was scared of vaginas. Too many folds, he couldn’t handle the complexity.” Eve agrees. “I’m a rib woman, remember? God couldn’t take me from Adam’s spine because he didn’t have one.” We all laugh. Lilith plays with her food, her face scrunched and thoughtful. She says, “Maybe I should just eat foreskins. I hear they’re particularly good fried.” “You only ever want what God doesn’t,” I say. Eve daisy-chains oleander into a wreath and crowns me. “I’ll only eat the foreskins from men I fuck.” Lilith plucks a petal from my wreath and folds it under her tongue. Eve says, “That’s just another kind of poison.”

Eve speaks of incest and murder

None, neither my husband nor my sons, ever kissed me, that intimate mingling of breath too close to sharing. Adam preferred me on my back, and Abel used to take me on my hands and knees. None bothered to please me, and yet Cain was my favorite. He always let me stand with at least one foot on the ground. Abel fucked as if he wished to grind me into the dirt where I lay – powder me into such fine silt. My breasts, heavy with milk, pressed against the ground as he would moan over the wailing of his newborn sister/daughter. “Perhaps I’ll marry that one,” he said between thrusts. Once done, he’d rub my back with some facsimile of tenderness. Cain, with his grit-lined skin and too wide smile, never pretended to do anything but take. He could grow such bitter honesties with his farmer’s hands. One day he said, “Did you know that blood snaps so crisply against churned earth?” Such hunger I felt then, when I saw my youngest son’s crumpled husk. What a sweet thing, to meet death. To know the hollow insides of a man.

Lilith and Eve take me to the park

Eve and I run barefoot through the grass, racing to the top of the hill to see who can roll down the fastest. Lilith sits crisscross apple sauce with a book in her lap, reading aloud to the wildflowers. Sharp teeth flash as she laughs. “Dante was always such a quaint man. He never would have been able to decide which circle of hell suits me best.” I lie down next to her and pretend to make snow angels in the grass. She tells the bluebells, “I can’t believe Ovid was good enough for Limbo. That prick.” Eve plucks pokeberries from the bushes, gathering them in her bunched shirt. She pops every third berry into her mouth; the juices dribble in pink trails down her chin. “You wear violence like a suit,” she says. “It’s the seventh circle for you.”  Lilith flips her off. “And you would back-float down the Styx till you drowned,” she replied. The scent of crushed grass paints the air in pastels. Eve says to me, “Where do you think you’d go?” I pull out my pocket King James with its tissue paper pages edged in gold and tear out whole chapters of Judges. They taste like milk and honey as I buckle the pages with my teeth. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Chinese Love Story

by Jinhao Xie

And they meet under a wu tong tree. Leaves - mothers’ hands crying for missing daughters. Wu meaning us; meaning not. Tong, the same. She and him both suited in shoulder pads, and their big eyes sparkle famine. They haven’t eaten a body for days. She conquers the wilderness of a city where her girlhood buries, with a woman’s intelligence.

Through the barber shop glass windows, she finds a father in his eyes; a lover wrongly. She enters. He cuts her hair and weaves it into Chinese knots. 

“Wild hair attracts
no man”

says the barber as he ties the knot around her neck. His fingers waltz in circles fastening her soul. Every strand of hers his hands’ lover. He shears her mane like a lamb.

“Ignorance
Is a woman’s death
(1967-1989)”

carved into her teeth. Wedding pillows embroidered with goldthread quails. Two love birds stitched together. So, she thinks. At their wedding, she wears red qi pao. Red as in lucky as in happy as in a celebration of a man’s victory. Red as in fire – a wish of a burning body: a mother at a funeral of her daughter. Red as in sunset, a fallen sky, a crumbling pillar, a husband a wife has to tower over. The dowry contains nothing but her mother’s hairpin-shut mouth and her wasted beauty. She puts on rouge lipstick the shade of her bitten tongue. Her eye-shadow fist-bruised red. In tears of happiness. 

On their wedding night, she thanks mountains of her future brothers-in-law and oceans of her newly found sisters, nursing their husbands’ damaged lungs and livers. Before she caves in their newly-wed flat, he shoulders her body like a piglet roast in ruby honey coat, perfumed in five spice.

The bride: a body
savoured on a stick.

In the bedroom, he peels her dress off like a scab. She sobs as he spits himself in her. Worn and dirty, she feels - senseless - the weight of her own worth. Outside, mah-jong tiles mimicking the tides; firecrackers applauding. A bedroom door stamped with Luck written upside down meaning:

misfortune.

Dope Baby

by Jonathan Clark

mama, you are the culprit culpable for my bladder boiling urine pissed with an acidity of pure ammonia for forcing me to scratch scars with my nails into your belly’s prison walls how could you birth me hooked to tubes pumping dope from my palm-sized body like a lab rat suffering a botched experiment nurses said for three weeks the detox room echoed like sailors cussing in a tortured tongue the price I paid to slither free from a womb of mud for being an heir to biological demons you demanded I involuntarily share how impossible to shed your shadow when I bleed the blood you spill when my throat quenches thirst from saltwater tears stored in the reservoir of your cheeks’ pores name another fetus anointed by the flavor of marrow stuck to his mother’s ribs who hums the lullaby of a hose attempting to suck a womb void who can charter the sea of a suicide voyage clouded by crystal rock vapors haloed above our hazed brains me drunk off the pool of toxins lining your womb’s tissue the stick’s stench of pregnant perfumes the air palatable, even now

Two Poems

by Alexandrea Robinson

On Becoming

I
It hurts when you rip the stitches from the corners of your mouth to sit open, hungry, and needing. A baby bird. You are new - soft and thin skinned. Pink bellied and crying to open sky for feathered wings and a wind to catch them. You’ve seen the mangled mess, jutting bones of sisters who jumped too soon. Stepped over the shriveling, chewed gum bodies of the ones who stayed. You turn again to open sky, pray for a hand to feed you. Or, at least, to find something in the air between you and solid ground.  

II
The Sun is morning yellow-- a color that looks like being alive, like warm winds coaxing open the buds of ripe spring flowers, kissing the tight petals of late bloomers. Sun’s light falls to the tip of your outstretched tongue and you wonder how she tastes so sweet. What it’s like to collapse yourself into being. She sings this in your ear as she sets:

 I am bright
and burning. Gas, dust,
and fire. I am creation
and destruction and creation
begets destruction and
vice versa.
I am creation and one day
I will be a black hole.

III
The night is a full and heavy black, save the Moon. She looks down on you, sharp and glowing like a cheshire grin. You feel the dark weighing on you-- grabbing at your ankles, your few soft and downy feathers. You tell the Moon that you could sever your own limbs if you needed to. Rip your feathers, eat threw your own leg like a coyote. She smiles wider, purrs:

 Then show me
your teeth.

You Are Here

On nights I can’t sleep I find myself whispering to the sky, asking if she is empty. I’m a preacher’s daughter and I don’t know how to talk to God, so instead I speak my prayers softly into cupped hands - hold them tucked between my fingers like a small bird. Some nights I give them away - open my mouth, let my heart drip out like drool onto someone else’s pillow case. Some nights I find myself crossfaded in a bathroom that’s not my own, staring into the mirror at a reflection that doesn’t look like me. I press a finger to the glass anyway, think to myself You. Are. Here. I am the red dot on a mall directory. I’ll say another prayer for the girl in the mirror - try to get it all in the toilet and miss.

After Being Swallowed by the Gator

by Michelle Acker

I plugged the bath
with ospreys’ nests
of old socks and
taco-folded
license plates and
filled the tub with
water Then I
dumped into the
water packets
of mail-order
sea monkeys and
spirulina
and splayed all four
of my lanky
limbs over the
acrylic dam
walls to lower
myself into
the thick tepid
water ass-first
and shellac my
body in green
algae blooms I
stayed under that
water three days
or maybe four
and dipped my head
by the dead drain
to dissolve the
chewy funnels
of my ears and
the bath eddied
murky as ghosts

I could not sit
in chairs I could
no longer hold
a pencil but
I coiled on
the turtleshell
tops of cars in
hot parking lots
and brushed my branch
teeth with chicken
flavored puppy
toothpaste and I
abandoned speech
recessed into
my teaspoon brain
I atrophied
my football tongue
cut holes in all
my pants and all
dresses for my
new muscle tail
to slouch through and
I used lotion
hourly I
slathered it on
until I was
slick Until I
could move through crowds
untouched Painted
myself with all
my colors like

the stoplight rings
of a king snake

Smile Hunting

by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

Blythe and I were collecting smiles to take back to the house. It wasn’t bad work, just pulling the little critters from the dirt and dropping them into a bucket. “Be careful how you drop them,” Blythe warned, “you don’t want them to turn into frowns.” Blythe was eight and nearing retirement for smile-searching. Adults couldn’t find the smiles, only kids. Our fingers were just small and agile enough to worm their way into smile-holes and wrench the suckers out. Sometimes Aunt Joan supervised us, but lately she’d been dealing with the unidentifiable dread. The unidentifiable dread is that feeling like someone’s opened the backdoor of your mind and a cold draft is coming in. Aunt Joan liked to stay in the house and eat nabisco on those days.

I wriggled a smile from the dirt, brushed it off, and gave it a sniff. It smelled like the skin of a mango, fresh and earthy. I let it worm in my palm, skittering around, sniffing and trying to make sense of its surroundings. I placed it into the bucket with the other smiles, all crawling and bumping into one another like a basket of crawdads. Sometimes a smile would become a frown in the bucket and we’d have to be quick to isolate it so it didn’t spread to the others. We had a separate bucket for frowns, which we took to the river and tossed into the bed, just like our parents before us, and their grandparents, and so on. There must be thousands of frowns eroding at the bottom of the river bed. After we filled the smile bucket, we dragged it up the hill and to the porch where we’d show Aunt Joan. She’d meet us at the front door, pull one from the heap and hold it to her nose, taking a deep inhale. “This should be enough for today,” she’d say, “but only for today.”

Notes on Cruising the rest stop off exit 187 at 11:45 pm

by Jason B. Crawford

The ritual is simple
Sit in the second stall
And wait for the foot to spend the bottle towards you
Three toe taps to testify the open jury joints of the knees are ready for the verdict
The act is easy
Either by mouth or the shaft will slip it’s way into another
And this is where you hear a father’s desire spill from a closet
What a mess we’ve made of these throats trying to paint straight lines
Waiting for the watchful hands to slide under the stall
To say come here my child, I will hold you like I not able to for my lover
Let the symphony of sinks curtain close themselves into a dry, wanting sky
Beware of the attendants, or the officers, or the predators shaped like a soft tongue
If you’re lucky, no one here will eat you alive
Only to leave your spine and hands at the base of the stall
If you’re lucky, you’ll end up alone, full of another mans spit
If you’re lucky, you’ll find a toe spun towards you
A man that is not your father
But will abuse you just the same

Offertory

by Terence Young

It was our first apartment. Nobody was dead yet. A lot of people weren’t even alive. There was nothing to miss. I remember the bed, because we spent a lot of time in it. The rails were red, the headboard and footboard, too. Wrought iron. She had found paint somewhere. The thing was a piece of junk my grandparents had abandoned. She painted everything in those days. None of our friends had money, either. Wine was a novelty. We liked a picnic at night. Laid it all out on the quilt. Sardines, cheese, crackers. I’d roll a cigarette when we were finished.

One night we had nothing.

“Go,” she said. “See what you can find.”

The country had gone metric. Gas was 22 cents a litre. A war was going on somewhere very far away. Days were just days. I took my bike. It never occurred to us that we had disappointed our parents. I was healthy and strong. The job I had was stupid and temporary. It wasn’t far to town.

I felt as though we were a law of nature. When we fought it was like the end of the world. Even our friends said we wouldn’t last. Sometimes I wouldn’t speak for days. Only what was written down was true. The whole world was watching. Before we went anywhere we checked the weather on the television. Weevils ate our flour. The freezer had given up.  

Once we rented an aluminum boat and took it to an island. We borrowed a small girl we knew from a woman whose husband was at sea. It wasn’t the first time we wanted there to be three of us. The sun shone its rays. We took off our clothes. I rolled a log into the water and we paddled around a deserted bay. I said if God was looking down, he would bless us. She said what did I mean by “if?” What did I mean by “he?” How red our fair skin was at the end of the day! The girl told us her name was Windy. We never saw her again. We were married, we had bank accounts. Bread was cheap. People were always saying they wished they could do everything over again.

It was just another summer night when she told me to go. I headed into the dark. I wore a t-shirt and a pair of Australian army shorts. She wanted olives. She wanted Havarti. She wanted French bread.  She wanted red wine. In those days you had to tell the liquor clerk the name of the bottle. Nothing seemed impossible. The sea was all around us. Barber shops were suffering. Nobody went for tea anymore. We worried about everything there was to worry about. There were lots of bookstores. I stood at the counter and someone went to look for the bottle among the shelves. Starlings had infested all the boulevard trees. The man smiled at the choice I’d made. The old yellow buses were long gone. I had to show my identification. There was no middle ground between sad and happy. I rode hard because I knew nothing else. Street lamps cast the shadows of leaves on the pavement. Some people looked at nothing more than their horoscope then threw the newspaper away. I knew she was in bed waiting for me. In my head she was reading the Bible. In my head she was writing poems. She had only to speak my name. 

What I asked for was Rougelais, a litre of domestic red.  I didn’t know I would work in the same liquor store one day. How could I? There are other things I could not know. They kept the sacramental wine in a special room.  For example, I could not know that. I could not remember what it was like to be an employee and not a customer. I could not know that memories ate other memories and destroyed them. I could not know I would become friends with one of the clerks, a Dutchman named Jon. There was no way to know if he served me before I knew him. No one can imagine not knowing something.  He may have, though.

Before she disappeared forever, the girl we borrowed liked to play the opposite game. This was when I had a hard time calling my wife my wife. My wife worked in a library, for example. I couldn’t say that. Windy would come to the check-out desk at lunch.

“There’s a lovely moon out,” she would say.

It was June, nothing but blue sky.

“I’m so terribly cold,” she would say.

Perhaps her father at sea returned. It makes sense. Maybe he told his wife she shouldn’t loan out their child. The library was on the far side of town by the navy yard. A woman who worked with (my wife) became our friend. Her husband was a cop. For a while we had dinners together and thought of ourselves as a couple among other couples. 

It only seemed like every corner had a Chinese store. Penny candy. Firecrackers at Hallowe’en.  Cigarettes. We never asked what the point of anything was. We took our bodies for granted. We saw no need to give thanks. I liked the smell of wax on their wood floors. The produce was always better than Safeway’s.  Children came down the stairs and into the store.  I put the food I found into my canvas pack. Pickles, too. The combination of the padlock of my bike: 53-31-8. Most of what we owned came from someone else.

We fought about religion when we fought. In the kitchen, we had no idea what we were doing.  Our parents thought we wouldn’t last, either. Eventually people forget what it’s like not to care about the future.  When she asked what I meant by “if,” I laughed. When she asked me what I meant by “he,” I laughed again. Once I made fun of Adam and Eve. Once I praised the devil. On the way home from the Chinese store, I regretted my words all over again. I pedalled harder. I tore up the street. My legs hurt. The air became a dark wind and I was afraid I would never get home. Telephone poles passed and I saw them pass and never once thought I was the one passing. Those streets used to be the streets of my childhood, I told myself. Now they’re something else. But they weren’t either. They were just streets.

We boiled cod. We peeled our vegetables. We bought sherry and drank it from small glasses. We made pancakes on Saturday mornings and fried sausages and eggs. Coffee didn’t occur to us. The good thing was we had a television. The good thing was we refused to listen to anyone but ourselves. The good thing was we didn’t know anything. Have you ever loved a woman so much you tremble in pain? Some man sang those words and I believed he was singing them to me.

One weekend we went without food to see what hunger felt like. It felt cruel and familiar. We returned to our parents’ houses when they were away and made love in their beds, on their carpets. We brought out their best china. We turned up the music. We sat in their chairs and ate their terrible food.

“How can you love me and not God, too?” she asked me once.

“Easy,” I said. “You’re here.”

“Do you still love me when I’m not?”

At a bend in the road, a woman ran out into the street and waved her hands at me. Stars were overhead. Salt was in the air. Terror covered the woman’s face. I would have driven by, but she blocked my way. I was in no mood. I was in pain.

“My husband,” the woman said. “You must help me.”

I thought she was talking about me. I thought a hundred years had passed.

She pointed ahead at something on the sidewalk, a crumpled pile. Her husband had fallen. His pants were around his ankles. I could smell him.

“Please,” she whispered. 

I walked my bike over to where he lay. “Get up,” I told him. I thought I might be talking to myself.  He did nothing, only moaned into the cement beneath his face. I leaned my bike against a fence and knelt down beside him. “You have to get up,” I said. The message wasn’t lost on me. In the light of the street lamp, I could see he was old, and when I turned to look at the woman, I could see she was old, too.

“He can’t hear you,” she said. “He’s deaf.”

She said this as though it was the source of his problems. But I could smell him. He smelled like a sewer. It would make no difference whether he could hear me or not.  I crouched over him and put my hands under his arms to lift him up. I was young, but even a young man will have trouble lifting a dead weight. Halfway up I dropped him and he banged his head against the ground. He began to bleed from a gash above his nose, and the woman started crying.

“Help me,” I said, and together we hoisted him to his feet.

I kept him standing while she pulled up his pants and fastened his belt, and then, like comrades in battle, we placed our arms under his shoulders and around his back and dragged him to the front door of the house. In a minute we had him on a sofa in the living-room. As I was leaving I saw her place a blanket over him and put a pillow under his head. For a moment I stopped and watched while she wiped the blood from his face. I could hear her talking softly to him while I closed the door behind me. Nobody said goodbye. There was no need.

I might have been gone an hour. I might have been gone a hundred years. I might never have left. Time teaches us that. I chained my bike to the steel fence at the rear of the apartment building. The stars had disappeared. A cat lay down on the cement in front of me. Across the street, the local rec centre was lit up like a cruise ship. I was bringing food and wine to a woman. I had much more to give. More than I knew.