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Issue 21 compiled by Averie Hicks

By Robert Wilder

Featured Art: ‘Avocado’ (1916) by Amada Almira Newton

Your right leg is shorter than your left.
There’s something funny happening in your left shoulder.
You should change your detergent and go fragrance-free.
Is this too much pressure?

You once had a girlfriend who threw bottles at your head.
You haven’t slept well in decades.
You store all the grief for your dead mother in your solar plexus.
Breathe.

You grind your teeth.
You have the musical tastes of a seventeen-year-old girl.
There’s tension in your neck which runs down your left side.
No one believes that you are not attracted to Rebecca.

Does this hurt?
Let me stretch you out a bit more.

For someone with such little flexibility, you have a surprisingly good vertical.
You’ve wounded more people than you’re willing to admit.
Your father will die soon and you’ll have no clue where to turn.
You and your brothers will drift apart.
Sorry about that. Just trying to break it up.

Nothing will get easier for a long time.
You loved the bottle thrower something fierce.
You can’t hear your mother’s voice anymore.
Turn on your side, please.

You still love the sun sneaking through cracked windows.
You have a closet full of clothes that no longer fit.
Holding your breath won’t help either of us.
There you are.

By Mark Kraushaar

“Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition
characterized by the intense desire to write . . . ”
“It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.”

It’s as if . . . , he says, It’s like . . . , or, It’s ABOUT
things being simply THERE, molecular,
blue, strewn, flattened, aflame.
He pulls up the shade and looks out.
There’s this kind of accounting he does:
sidewalk, hedgerow, phone pole.
He lists the round and the ready-made.
He notes the hand-carved and the curved.
He sorts by color and shape.
He lists by size and by brightness.
He notes the nautical, normal and nameless.
It’s Wednesday and he’s moved from columns
to rows: alphabetic, magnetic, majestic . . .

He lists the unowned and the changed,
the charged, unsuitable and smooth.
He leans forward turning the page.
It’s like . . . , It’s as if . . . , he says,
as if these THINGS, this STUFF:
hunk and clod, object and article, gizmo,
whatnot, doodad, exactingly placid, substantial
and actual, for knowing nothing,
know it all: guruish shoe-tree, savvy axle.
He opens the door and sits on the stoop.
It’s as if each thought over-laps the last.
A girl on a bike goes by.

By Gary Dop

“Come here—quick!” You know it, her serious, nearly
               whispered call. She says, “I think it’s a squirrel.”
Brown bulb of fur, it’s tucked behind an old chair.
               The kids sleep upstairs; you have both abandoned
your evening’s screens. You are here,
               a step away from a baby flying squirrel. You grab
the wicker hamper. She says, “Don’t scare it.”
               Hamper in one hand, towel in the other, you wonder
how to catch it without scaring it. The big-eyed squirrel
               knows you’re there. “Be careful,” you hear as you swipe
at the squirrel who scampers, fast as life,
               into the wicker trap you lift and close.
Then she says, “It’s in there,” a statement of fact
               that feels like a question. You say, “It’s in there,”
your voice an octave too high. She peeks through
               the wicker gaps to snap a picture. You relax
your grip on the lid, and the wild thing wriggles free.
                You scream. She smacks you
upside the head, a gentle reminder of the hibernating children.
               You both scurry after the squirrel
which seems so scared until it’s near the stairs—
               then it’s a feral beast between you and your offspring.
With animalistic ease—her leap and block, your swipe
               and scoop—the rodent’s back in its cage,
and you’re out on the sidewalk, clutching the hamper,
               waiting for your neighbors—just pulling away—
to be far enough not to see your business. You both smile
               and wave too easily, like stoned teenagers startled by cops.
A moment later, the flying squirrel is off:
               The thing that just happened is over.
And you are outside, suddenly together.

By Michael Bazzett

To make a good book you need what William
Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”
So before I started in I got some ground beef
and dropped it on the hardwood with a Spat! 
It felt wrong. Like dropping a baby. But I did it
for art. When my son came home from school
he said, Why is there meat on the floor? I said,
Art. He nodded like maybe that made sense
and said, It’s kind of freaking me out. I know,
I said, me too. We all have to make sacrifices.
Is that blood leaking out or juice? he asked.
I’m not sure I’m one to make that distinction,
I said, mostly to avoid answering the question.
I didn’t tell him how strange it was to unwrap
the meat so carefully, the plastic peeling away
like a onesie on a warm day, and then just sort
of hurl it down at the hardwood with a Spat! 
Are we still going to eat it? he asked after a bit.
I’m not sure, I said. I think it depends upon
a lot of different factors, a lot of ins and outs.
Is this a writing thing? he asked, because you
have that weird look in your eye. I’m your
father, I said. I held you as a baby. I’d never
use a moment like this just to make a poem.

—divination by names

By Mark Wagenaar

Like each of us, it could only guess at its own begetting. A careless cigarette, electrical spark, Molotov cocktail hurled by an angry senior who had his letter to the editor rejected, we never found out how the fire started. Only smoke suddenly billowing above the town. Shreds of ten thousand newspapers upon the air, in slow drift through open windows, coming to rest on the eyelids & lips of men sleeping off the night shift at the furnace. Embers floated for hours through the streets, through back alleys, & ended up in the black fur of cats, gray hair of old men playing checkers, on the tongues of children who didn’t know better. A shroud upon the impatiens & petunias in tire & barrel gardens, on the feathers of pigeons in rooftop cages. In the silos the tatters found space amid the grains, & our news made it across the oceans: liquidation sales, stories on the alderman’s affair, the mayor’s new dog. And one death—one obituary. Larry, the boy who jumped his dirt bike into the canal. His name now upon the air, with our questions for him. We looked up at a sky that whirled with clouds of his name, & saw on that air once more the arc of his bike between the bridge and the rest of his life. His name rained down upon us, confetti for a parade of his absence. For years we found his name—in our underwear drawers, in our cereal boxes, in the big hair of our pageant contestants. In the open bags of sugar in the Home Ec classroom, the ones that girls would name and care for, & come to remember when their own babies were held up, his half-burned name against the brilliance of the sugar crystals, these sugar babies, each one named Larry.