by Cathy Allman
I pace in front of the mercury glass mirror,
hold her, try to memorize us,
if only a flicker. She’s surprised to see herself.
She studies our reflection
with those eyes that are like yours,
that are like mine in color and shape,
The Next Generation
Filed under Poetry
Jellyfish Season
by Naphisa Senanarong
The day my mother and her three sisters floated out to sea on an inflatable raft, the jellyfishes were on their annual, fatal pilgrimage to shore. A sea of white, she’d described. The storms parted, like in an animated children’s movie, revealing poison lotuses blooming as far as the eyes can see. I picture them: Ariel’s sisters, muted mermaids drifting onto a patch of hostile ocean—round eyes and naive parted lips, like posters of girls in the fifties congregating around some kitchen appliance. They were too young to register that afternoon as their first brush with mortality. No matter, because life had many more for them—at the hands of loved ones, behind doors too heavy for small fingers, Ohioan winter closing like cracks around frozen throats, in rooms with too many people, hospital beds with too few, restaurants that smell like chicken oil, bathrooms that smell like old blood—leftovers—fine mixtures of rust and self. Smells that linger—how they got used to those, always finding them in unexpected places: hair, collars, breaths.
Filed under Nonfiction
In Some Matter of Unknown Time: Love Song for a Coastal Town
by Julie Marie Wade
This story begins with salt—three and a half bushels of it—excellent, fine, strong, & white¹. That’s what the explorers wrote in their log, leaving Seaside on February 20, 1806.
These men had traveled from Missouri, army volunteers under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark. It was the first United States expedition to venture all the way west, across the Continental Divide and down into the Columbia River basin. But then the explorers met winter in the Pacific Northwest and found themselves dripping (some things never change), rain riding every gust of wind, the dim light heavy as a helmet on their heads, and the elk meat at risk of spoiling.
Filed under Nonfiction
The Fall of 2016
by Nancy Dickeman
We push the baby through the crush of waterlogged leaves, past
a slumped brick wall
seared by a swastika’s fresh paint.
The jagged white arms loom,
stark as hooded figures igniting
a tide of embers.
Filed under Poetry
Duffy Takes a Trip
by Robert Leone
Duffy woke up in a room that smelled of disinfectant, supermarket flowers, and urine. A mylar balloon in the shape of a heart lay halfway deflated on the floor next to his bed. ‘Get well soon!’ it demanded in flowing red script. “Fuck you,” Duffy thought. Through the metal-framed window all he could see were clouds and a thin edge of treetops shivering in the cold. “This is no way to die,” he said out loud to no one. Continue reading
