Cleaver’s Emerging Artists

Cleaver Magazine publishes work by writers and artists at all stages of their careers. We are especially committed to celebrating work by emerging writers and artists alongside established practitioners. We define “emerging” as young artists (under 30) or those of any age who are still in the early stages of their careers.

Our Emerging Artists range from teenage poets to new writers who have established careers in other disciplines. Cleaver‘s Emerging Artists have been listed among The Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and selected for republication by plain china, a national literary anthology that showcases the best undergraduate writing from across the country.

MIGUEL'S SANCHO by T.S. Bender
T.S. BenderMIGUEL'S SANCHO It was some point early in August, a Thursday or Friday, some point at the end of the week that Miguel didn’t show up to work. And that morning, as the sun streamed into the garage of the grounds shop and mowers rumbled in place, the guys said that Miguel would be in.  “He don’t miss work,” Victor said, and someone else said to check the kitchen, that maybe he was in there with Mary, and Victor smirked and said it was too early for that. But later, long after starting at six, long after finishing the first jobs and then the second ones, Victor came by the golden willow beside the fourteenth green that me, Fin, and Gilberto had gathered under after push mowing around trees and benches and wherever else the rough mower couldn’t get to. Victor slipped through the dangling branches that swayed just above the ground, adjusting his pants as he told us that he’d heard from Miguel, in Alabama somewhere after driving all night, on his way to Michoacán. It was Miguel’s sancho, Victor said. The guy living in his house, spending time with his kids, and, of course, fucking his wife ... Read the full review
BABY, SWEETHEART, HONEY by Katie Tonellato
Katie TonellatoBABY, SWEETHEART, HONEY When I was young, they called me baby, sweetpea, honey, cherry pie, chubs. So often they called me these things, that when they called me my name, my real name, I curdled into myself, unfamiliar, anticipating something unknown the way animals cower in their homes, teeth bared. They called me those things until I grew teeth, grew wings, snarled at them.   My mom used to read the paper on Sunday mornings, curled up in bed, without makeup on her face, reading glasses resting on the rim of her nose. This was when I was small, in the way we were all small once, nestled at our mom’s feet under the covers of her bed, hand wrapped around her ankle.  Little Bear Cub, she would call me, taking stock of my tiny-ness: the bean pod–shaped ears, the jagged tic tac teeth, the slim transparent fingernails, sharp enough to leave a mark. A dishy daydream, swallowed by blankets, I could believe I was how she imagined me to be: cute, unreserved, preserved in my youth. Yet, even then, the sense bestowed in me, frantically crawling like a wasp through time to the surface, was that I would ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 45 /
SUSPENSION POINTS by Julian Shendelman
Julian ShendelmanSUSPENSION POINTS “I suppose you could DM,” Marine said, staring into her clipboard.  “Direct message?”  “Dungeon monitor. You essentially walk around making sure people aren’t openly bleeding on the carpet. It’s a violation of our lease. Here.” She handed me a laminated double-sided list of rules. The first three—no fire, breath play, or unconfined fluids—seemed straightforward enough. But I couldn’t wrap my head around interrupting a scene in progress.  “Are you sure there isn’t, like, a clean-up shift I could take?”   The goth shrugged. “We’re booked up. It’s DM or full price.”  Forty dollars was a lot of sesame tofu.   Marine rose to her feet, towering in buckle-encrusted platform boots. The wings of her black eyeliner extended into her temples, bisecting her face. Her teeth were small and crooked, brown behind purple lipstick. She handed off door duties to another volunteer, a nasally man in a snug, black neoprene button-up and matching sailor’s cap. Fleeting, uncomfortable recognition. I eyed the exit, debated running.   This was the biggest hazard of working reception at the queer clinic for a decade straight: bumping into patients everywhere and anywhere. For years, I’d exclusively socialized in private homes with my ex and her ... Read the full review
EXHUME by Sofia Drummond-Moore
Sofia Drummond-MooreEXHUME The bog body lies on the light table like an oil spill made flesh.   Curled on his side, knees drawn up, Avril can see the outlines of his once-bones under skin like leather. She can also see the creases in his forehead, a remnant of worry. She can see the folds of his eyelids, sweetly closed, the downturn of his lips. Copper hair still tangled at the back of his neck.   His hand, bare, gently curled as if in sleep, still with fingernails, still with the lines of his palms, lies so close to hers. Inches and her white conservators gloves between them.     Three weeks she’s been in Copenhagen, three weeks fled from her mother’s house in Boston. Fled from her college, the claustrophobia, her mother’s house, her mother’s house, her mother’s house.  This is what she’d come for. The museum internship, like a beacon.   She didn’t expect it to be like this. Back home in the boxy, stuffy libraries taking in everything she could—all the photos and essays, videos of the bogs, of the tools, of the bodies in cases. Classes and films and studying the formulas. None of that prepared her for this. For this ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 45 /
THEY ARE CALLING YOU AND THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE SAYING by Michael Grinthal
Michael GrinthalTHEY ARE CALLING YOU AND THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE SAYING  In the unsolvable sun Of a yellowing year All of the newest tunes Of tiredness are rolling About in the blacked-out trucks All of the yellowing trees Are blue with an emptying Outness (obviously This means me And my rapidly oxidizing Friends) my family Owned a yellow string Of cars so long Ago the memory Is brown An Opel A Skylark and a Dart It was easy To spot them in parking lots All of them wrecked Except the Skylark And the Dart Marianne Moore Supposedly invented Several names for cars Ford Motor Company politely Did not build The Pastfinder The Thunder Anticipator Pastelogram The Yellowing Sclera I made up most of those My very yellow hat Is gone I must get out There. If you strike the day Down it will become More powerful than you Can possibly imagine Michael Grinthal’s poems have appeared in Jubilat, The Los Angeles Review, Mudlark, Yes Poetry, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and has worked for twenty-four years as a community organizer and lawyer in the racial justice and tenants’ rights movements. He has ... Read the full review
Issue 45, Poetry /
A CONSTELLATION OF ERRORS by Sophie Nunberg
Sophie NunbergA CONSTELLATION OF ERRORS I study the events of my birth like astrologers do stars in the sky. I’m already late when, two days before I finally do break my mom’s amniotic sac, a 6.9 earthquake nearly splits our city clear in two. My parents’ marriage never had a chance and now, I never seem to be on time.   The morning after the shake, my father takes the only picture of my mother pregnant. She is in a royal blue cashmere turtleneck pulled taut across her stomach and electric orange pants. Now, my phone storage is littered with self-portraits.   When the contractions do start, she loads herself into the backseat of my father’s gray Alfa Romeo; he finishes a cigarette outside. The detours of closed roads twist them around the city right into San Francisco’s Castro on Halloween, of all days. The tiny Alfa is swallowed by the ecstatic air of the city’s favorite holiday. The rounds of colorful lights dive like comets into my mother’s lungs. Now, this is why I wear electric blue eyeshadow from brow bone to lash line every day in the sixth grade.   My father edged the car forward, the slow crawl through ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 45, Nonfiction /
A SUDDEN GUST OF WIND by Darcy Lohmiller
Darcy LohmillerA SUDDEN GUST OF WIND We step out of the truck into a bright October sun and a howling wind. In the field we have chosen to hunt, thick stalks of grass flatten and shudder against the gusts. Our two hunting dogs welcome the wind. It creates whorls of scent from all directions and kicks up dust in explosive bursts, and they clench their eyes against the sharp grass, snortle and snuffle the ground and air. Between their panting breath and mindless desire, Dan's whistle is a thin reed of sound in the wind. Unhampered by our control, the dogs are feral predators chasing the blood and breath of the game birds hidden in the field.  It only adds to the general chaos of a windy day in central Montana. In this basin, the wind is purposeful, sometimes malevolent, as it races through the coulees and veers around splintered fences and livestock troughs. But we haven't hunted in weeks, so we push past the wind. We try to get the dogs to stop for water, but they are in a frenzy, their noses driving them past basic needs of thirst and rest. Dan shouts something about the dogs, but ... Read the full review
Issue 45, Nonfiction /
PROXIMITY by Sofi Guven
Sofi GuvenPROXIMITY When I get home, I start to make bread. I open my window curtains wide and prepare the ingredients. Buckwheat flour, salt, sugar, and yeast stored in jars, scooped out with a ring of measuring cups. The windowsill is too narrow for my sleek new bread-maker, but I keep it there anyway. I touch the curtains of the sliding glass door as I pass, impatient.  I wait for it to grow darker. I turn on lights. Just yards away, she responds, raising the blinds to her own kitchen, shiny granite counters visible to me down to the mottled grains. I see her pour expensive wine into a glass. She lifts a record, tilting the Wagner aria slightly in my direction. She took a bit to build up to operas, but plays them almost always now, all grandeur and pretense.   When Michael lived here, the curtains would close before dark.   “We’re private people,” he’d say, “and it’s worse that we know the neighbors, people are more nosy when you know them.”   Not that you could see them very well then; a busy street with wide bike lanes separated the parallel apartments.   Not that we knew Silvia and Hassan ... Read the full review
HOSPICE INTAKE by Luke Koesters
Luke KoestersHOSPICE INTAKE I close my eyes and jump / off a stone pointed cliff. / I’m back to falling / into the gulch below La Quebrada. / I was high diving / only four months ago. / I open my eyes / to a room blanketed in warmth. / It’s too warm, / and I’m still falling / onto each word the doctor / chews and spits out / like stale gum. / The hunch in my spine / juts out like a rock. / It’s cold, / I tell the doctors / touch it. / I think it feels like the coastal breeze and seashore waters. / It points me / toward memories of falling / off more comfortable cliffs. / Luke Koesters is a queer, Asian-American poet from Omaha, Nebraska. He is working toward a BFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha, where he works as the poetry editor for the literary magazine, 13th Floor. He has poems featured or forthcoming in Main Street Rag, Pinhole Poetry, and Oakland Arts Review. Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #45 ... Read the full review
Issue 45, Poetry /
THE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT by Hannah Smart
Hannah SmartTHE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT “Hello, I’d like to report a fire at the Gerry’s Pizza off West Ninth Street.” “Okay, and your name, sir?” “Gerry Parker.” “Could you describe the situation?” “I am seated in the restaurant parking lot about twenty feet from the double-paned glass door customers use to enter the building. The flames have moved through the restaurant and are threatening to enter the liminal buffer space between the two sets of doors leading to the outside and inside of the restaurant, respectively—the area where guests wipe off their boots and queue to be seated on particularly busy days. The flames are licking the inside doors. I am sitting on the curb, smoking a cigarette within a safe distance.” “Anyone in the restaurant?” “Part of me wishes Rebecca were in there.” “But no one is?” “Long history with Rebecca. You wouldn’t want to hear it.” “I certainly don’t. So the restaurant is totally devoid of people?” “Roger that. I’m the owner. I was working late, cleaning up. We closed at nine. I figure not much to do at home, since—” “Do you know how the fire started?” “Since I don’t have anyone to come home to, I ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 44 /
A MAN'S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP by J. Bradley Minnick
J. Bradley MinnickA MAN'S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP My mother arranged for us to walk to school together. I didn't want to go to school; and, I especially didn't want to walk anywhere with Kate Wheeler. Kate Wheeler was my next-door neighbor. She was as persistent as she was pretty, as forthright as she was forceful. She had no shame, and I had so much. She appeared at my front door on the first day of 1st grade and rang the bell. No one ever came to the front door or rang the bell. My mother opened the door and Kate said, "It's raining today, Mrs. Why. Does Jason have his umbrella, or should I run home and get one for him?" I felt remarkably self-conscious as I hid behind my mother. As her palm pushed me through the doorway, she handed me my paper lunch bag full of all those sandwiches I could never stomach. Kate, who was my age, actually had the audacity to grab my hand like she was leading a little boy who couldn't possibly find his way without help. "Come with me, Jason!" Kate said in a very patient voice, showing off to my ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 44 /
FREEDOM TRAIL by Joshua Ambre
Joshua AmbreFREEDOM TRAIL In front of the visitor center, our tour guide adjusts his breeches. They’re slightly too tight to be family-friendly, but I’m relieved to have something to look at besides old buildings for the next hour. I watch him hitch them up a final time, the hem of his blue frock coat barely concealing the bulge. Beside me, my sister nudges me on the elbow. I grin at her, anticipating a lewd and hilarious aside, but all she does is point at Craig feeding a Nutri-Grain bar to a squirrel. I fake a smile while she snaps his picture, and another one when he runs back to join the group, just in time for the guide to begin his spiel. “Welcome ladies and gents, pilgrims and pub-crawlers, tea-spillers and turncoats! I hope you left your sea legs aboard the Mayflower, because today we embark on a walking tour of our nation’s most historic sites!” I dig the toe of my shoe into the dead grass, wishing I was digging my own grave. History is bad enough between the covers of a textbook, let alone acted out poorly between noon and one o’clock, my stomach already clamoring for lunch ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 44 /
TRANSNESS AS PERPETUAL PAPERBOY by Gideon Huan-Lang
Gideon Huan-LangTRANSNESS AS PERPETUAL PAPERBOY Imagine: Victorian hand-me-downs, black suspenders, tweed-lined cap. And he is holleringabout the end of the world. Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Call him doomsday cult, the way he had broken his voice already—the Titanic, the Wall Street Crash of 1929,how a Yankee had zipped across by bike and ruined a dozen of his Thursday papers. Late springs have been the worst. The downpours would drench his rags. But he is protectingthe headlines with his body. He has no money for a good watch, only telling time with days melting off the mushed paper sludge. Street corners become parking lots. He is still hollering, tongue dyedraspberry blue. An energy drink’s high-fructose corn syrup gallops into his throat. So much abundance causing so much echo. Dead cars sprawl across the supermarket cement. While his voice is no longercontorted by thirst, nobody hears him. The journals write afternotes—a proposed bill, an erasure, a bathroom ban, Florida, a book ban—he is begging to be listened to—a murder, an honorkilling, a murder a murder a murder. A family passes him, heading straight to the grocery aisle only searching for milk and steak. The plastic bag’s blood-stench is strong. But ... Read the full review
Issue 44, Poetry /
VASELINE SANDWICHES by Mark Schoenknecht
VASELINE SANDWICHES by Mark Schoenknecht During pregnancy, she said, Her most intense cravings Were for vaseline sandwiches: Soft white bread slathered with petroleum jelly. In a dream, I attend a dinner party At a lavish mansion. I’m having a wonderful time Until the unveiling of the roast, Which turns out to be an animal With the body of a hog And my own scalded head Clenching an apple in its teeth. Each day, I arrive at the feast of myself, Unsure of which fork to use, Of what sauce to slather overtop. What is it that drives a woman to eat vaseline? And if I threaten to run my car into an overpass When she says she doesn’t love me, What design has prompted that? ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
MOUETTES by Kristen Herbert
MOUETTES by Kristen Herbert Them you can ever hear, the mouettes. When walking by the sandy concrete of empty storefronts, the apartments next to the sea, with their windows closed tightly. Them you hear from your windows open as you write at the desk. Them you hear in the breeze, as you walk the overpass beside the colossal, four-story clouds. The clouds that swell up from the ground are pure. They are floating across the rails and they are making that you stop. They come from elsewhere and they are not staying. The mouettes you hear when the streets are quiet, when the air is thick, when everyone else is gone, boarded up, closed behind windows with only the low murmuring, the clinking of forks. ◊ It is raining and the walking people are shining in the puddles. The wind ruffles the ash trees speckled and furrows the silver leaves. The light is skittering between the shadows of figures who shuffle back and forth in the street. The university sits quietly behind the boulevard, the ugly, pushed-in windows covered behind the courtyard unruly. The tram is gliding slowly through the water, it is saying in voice robotic: Université. Then it ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 13 /
THE BABY TRAIN by Bryanna Licciardi
THE BABY TRAIN by Bryanna Licciardi The question is anything but casual. In this society, it more or less translates to I’m judging you! It’s always asked shouldering the answer, because everyone wants children, even if only “someday.” As a woman who has never enjoyed the company of children—who in fact has been known to hide when she hears one coming—I’ve found it easier to just evade questions like this with humor. Because the question is anything but casual. In this society, it more or less translates to “I’m judging you!” And it’s always asked shouldering the answer, because everyone wants children, right? Even if only “someday.” However, this was a serious decision I was about to make, so I answered truthfully. “I’m not much of a kid person.” “Do you mean infants? Toddlers? Young children?” the therapist asked. “All of the above?” “I see,” she said, writing something down in her yellow notepad. “And I’m assuming you’re not married?” Assuming? “Yes, I’m single.” “Why do you think you’re single?” What kind of question was that? Because men suck at dating me? Because I suck at dating them? Because I’ve become an expert at not dating? Instead, I said, “I’m ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Nonfiction /
GETHSEMANE by Aaron Graham
GETHSEMANE by Aaron Graham I’m learning to sweat—learning to swear. When I speak of God, edges of broken- glass words: the father who art elsewhere, thou cannot stitch together jawbones with breath breathing life in pierced tongues and barbed sentences. I don’t want mankind to work anymore at establishing communications or commandments thou shalt stop ignoring that I cry with and at your creation. In a no story neighborhood I read all the time, letters glyphed on a page like I am If I would ease into taking notes I’d find something to do when there was really nothing I could do ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
SUGAR by Meggie Royer
SUGAR by Meggie Royer When my mother takes us to the sea my father does another line. At night when someone comes downstairs for a drink of water the kitchen table stretches itself into shadow like a paper tiger. Once, at the bottom of the steps, wavering before the stove, I saw him take so much his eyes rolled back in his head. On some mountains, the bodies are never recovered. Just salvaged. A string of beads, a broken glass, bloodwork losing itself to memory. The things we do to ourselves trail like tire marks into snow ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
MOUSE MEAT by Rebecca Lee
MOUSE MEAT by Rebecca Lee “Let’s go downtown.” It’s the chant I hear every weekend. Downtown is where the lights are. It’s where the girls go. The makeup, the short skirts, the pot smokers and the boomboxes. They’re all there. “Let’s go downtown.” The teenage guy I have a crush on, Matt, is asking his friends if they’re going. His voice is slow, low, and slick like rain. They sit at the back of the bus and blast Sublime on a battery-powered radio. I’m twelve. He’s seventeen. It could happen if I wear the right clothes. “Let’s go downtown,” I say to my neighbor, Laura, later that night. Laura’s four years older and has a license. She can borrow her stepdad’s car. She smokes cigarettes and listens to En Vogue. It’s hot out and it’s close to summer. We’re getting older. I can feel it. I grab the black pleather halter-top with red lace stitching. Short skorts in spring tease the boys, but make me comfortable. I lace up my boots. Knee high and red leather. Just like the kind I see on Mtv. We go downtown several hours later. I sneak out of my house and she sneaks out ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 13 /
NIGHT OWL by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol
NIGHT OWL by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol Nuit Blanche I once loved a man who was a creature of the night. Like me, but more so. He slept through most of the daylight hours, his wily hair a halo on his satin pillowcase. Sometimes I stopped by his room between classes to curl up next to him and feel his dreaming body register mine. One night, before our bodies had ever laid beside each other, before I’d ever run my fingers through his curls, before I saw that pair of women’s shoes outside his bedroom door, before I tried to push the door open and found it locked, we shared an email exchange that ended with this message: “Meet me at the memorial in fifteen minutes.” It was four in the morning when we stumbled down the hill and across the football fields, into the dark forest where even the crickets slept. The crisp fall air kept us close. Half-bare trees guided our path, until thicket gave way to moon-soaked pasture. He dug a joint out of his pocket and we found a log where we sat, huddled close to the heat, watching stars streak across the silty sky, ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Nonfiction /
TIAGO by Emanuel Melo
TIAGO by Emanuel Melo When Tiago woke at first light, his thought was of his nephews, Tom and James, who were arriving that afternoon. He could already hear their voices, full of excitement, the way the little boys always sounded when they visited. “Titi, Titi,” they would shout as they rushed to hug him. He would lift each boy and twirl him once all the way round, eliciting squeals of laughter as each had his turn flying through the air. Already, Tiago felt the joy of it. Usually he spent his mornings painting and drawing, but today there would be no time. He skipped breakfast and fussed over each room in the cottage, organizing his pencils, paints, blocks of paper and canvases. And his alphabetized collection of leather-bound first editions were arranged so neatly that you could measure the straightness of the rows with a ruler. Lightly, he ran a feather duster over each shelf of the built-in mahogany bookcase. In the living room, an art deco rug with intricate designs in deep reds, purples, and greens, accentuated the polished shiny hardwood floor. On top of an art deco side table white hydrangea filled a Lalique vase. He hoped the ... Read the full review
Fiction /
PROPHET by Odelia Fried
PROPHET [prof-et] Definition: It’s bloody knuckles and skinned knees, it’s heaven’s fever slicing through the black with open jaws. It’s finding a swarm of locusts dead on your back porch, stuck to the screen door and crushed into the wood slats. It’s curling into bed, into not-sleep, because in sleep comes the Dreams, and with the Dreams comes the People, and with the People comes the End. It’s red-rimmed eyes and violently fluttering fingers. It’s painting the rocks with your blood, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim. When you were a child, you dreamed of meeting angel, all soft white halo and fluttering wings. The angels God sends to you in your dreams are nothing like this. They do not emanate a gentle glow and they do not have kindly blue eyes. They are knife-like wings and sharp directions, they lightning-strike fear into your heart, prophecy into your veins. You are named God’s vessel. God’s words are impaled in your ribs like a sword. His holiness rattles your bones ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
COCKCROW by Tyler Kline
COCKCROW by Tyler Kline Moment: a father inks the scythe above his daughter’s breast, a tail of bonfire licking a skein of braid. Moment: tractors rake light from crows and a goat blinks to count a storm. Moment knives are slid into boots like lures crossing a tiger-eye lake, moment hands covered in bees are pulled into light shaking honey. Moment: scapes are tied to a gourd, moment the gourd is hollowed until thirsty like a drum. Moment the boy asks which is his mother, the banjo or storm. Moment the boy eclipses whatever tower he can find. Moment: nothing has its name except straw-paper sun, moment the boy looks to the sky and begs for another ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
THE SCORPION by Erika Dane Kielsgard
THE SCORPION by Erika Dane Kielsgard We tear her limbs to divide our fear. Her mangled segments reflect hell mouths in mortal eyes. She does not inspire the sacred. Adorned with a swarm of insects, her myth is a mask for history. Her claws do not grasp haphazard or hapless. Do not let her slip through your fingers while your iris clings to the muse invoked: a stagnant self-portrait in a shallow pool, a shower of pearls she likens to foam. The scorpion is an ocean, the context of a wave. She sheds her skin seven times before devouring the dawn, carrying within her abdomen small heavens, the eternal call ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
THE LOVE NOTE by Svetlana Beggs
THE LOVE NOTE by Svetlana Beggs In 1988, when our city was still called Leningrad and kids wore red (always wrinkled) Young Pioneer’s scarves, my friend Natasha developed a crush on Yura, the tallest boy in 6th grade. She blushed whenever he walked near her, causing us to start feeding Natasha’s backpack tiny love notes bearing Yura’s forged cursive. I was the designated forger, Lida was the writer, and Polina the spy, but we jokingly called her “the assassin.” In two months we published seven short notes and made five crank calls to Natasha’s flat releasing Lida’s “deeply meaningful silence.” Around this time Natasha began to apply her sister’s eyeliner in the school’s bathroom and we told her honestly that her new look was “amazingly alluring,” even though Yura’s friends now called her “The Vampire.” She would walk into the classroom holding the backpack over her breasts, the boys would say, “Hide from the Vampire!” and Yura would chuckle because he wanted to continue being friends with these boys. One day, Elena Nikolaevna, our fear-and-trembling inducing algebra teacher we all called “The Guillotine,” pried a draft of our love note from Lida’s fist and mercilessly unfolded the crumpled piece of ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 13 /
ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM by Niyathi Chakrapani
ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM by Niyathi Chakrapani There is a room inside a paradox—the silence, the calm of grieving water, of lamenting purples in the sunset, the flecks they see, admire, but don’t love enough to remember. And yet the silence is there, waiting, surviving, dancing alone with a [temporary] smile. But—the paradox. The marooned silence in which I fill my bones with water, sustaining—yet barely— for there is an element forgotten in that moment; the silence, like water, runs alone, unfriended, falling into seas with vigor that shakes the nerves as it breaks apart into molecules, writhing, trying to come together, and yet, they are ... Read the full review
NEWS DELIVERY by Smriti Verma
NEWS DELIVERY by Smriti Verma Once, my brother set himself on fire, on a cold December morning. We were sitting on the front porch with a glass of sherry, a skull, arms, winds. Said: ‘my hands, the fingernails, the hair.’ And then, a pause. That was also the winter my mother, sixty now, came home from Delhi, limping straighter than usual. I gave her the news, you gave her a cup of tea. And in the corner, my brother’s hands- burnt, yet working. Moving in space. His hair, faulty ends, sticking out like remnant ashes we forgot to throw away. My eyes slowly dissolving, and your hand- grounded to bone. And my mouth, opening and closing, sewed with a fabric of glass. My body lost to me like the last vanishing oranges of sunset ... Read the full review
Issue 13, Poetry /
ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN by Samuel Hovda
ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN by Samuel Hovda Step out of the cave of my mouth. Wear your golden earrings like snakes eating. Put on your purple eye shadow. The daggers have mostly withdrawn, green of the vipers fallen off. A few stray villages at night with stones, palm-sized and ready, but you’re the robin in the morning unaware of the innards of their dark bedrooms ... Read the full review
Issue 12, Poetry /
TRIP by Rheea Mukherjee
TRIP by Rheea Mukherjee The door that led into the house my parents owned in Denver needed an extra nudge for it to open. Once prodded, a bell attached to the knob jingled before you could set foot on the white tiles. This jingle, the thrust of the door, was a short prelude to the potent smell of mutton being fried in canola oil. The smell of curried meat, intense and intrusive, compared to the odorless winter air outside. Clumps of snow would fall from the sides my boots onto the floor as we took off layers of sweaters and coats. For me there would be vegetarian dishes. My father always made sure of that. He wearing shorts that reached his knees, his elbow poking against the thickness of masala vapors, stirring his curry, a universe of flavors condensed into an offering of love. The TV in the living room was massive, reminiscent of the American suburban nineties. CNN or some other news channel would be blaring, and the house not yet warmed enough for a Colorado winter, would temper the spattering of oil. This is how I remember of my father. Not because there wasn’t more. Not because I ... Read the full review
Issue 2, Nonfiction /
ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Chua Yini
ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Chua Yini He spots her from afar because of the turquoise dress that contrasts with her tanned skin. She is walking along the colonial streets of Phuket town, her sandaled feet treading on tiles embossed with traditional Chinese designs. As a matter of fact, so is he, but at that moment he forgets where he is. He is overcome by a peculiar floating sensation and forgets that his feet are grounded safely on earth. Newton postulated the theory of forces to explain gravity, and Leibniz criticized it as action at a distance—a mere miracle, utter nonsense. The distance between a falling object and the center of gravity is of small importance: the falling speed is the same. She is about sixty meters away from him, approaching closer every second, and he is falling swiftly. He reads philosophy and his mind is jumbled with ideas—he gets a notion that gravity is love itself, a force enacted at a distance without physical contact between two objects. Why did Leibniz make it sound like a bad idea, he couldn’t for his life remember when she lifts her eyes and looks at him. Eye contact and gravity, both compelling ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 12 /
THE VERY DIVERTING HISTORY OF MAYA by Grace Singh Smith
THE VERY DIVERTING HISTORY OF MAYA by Grace Singh Smith Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.—Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali. It was Fate, Maya thought. Fate who got her married to someone she did not quite love, but maybe, she would learn to love. In the beginning, she woke up feeling as though he was her baby, this engineer husband her parents had carefully selected. She remembers the ad they placed in the city's best newspaper, The Shillong Times. The classified had described her as "wheatish in complexion" and "respectful of traditional values.” These, and other important details like: caste (Kayastha); languages spoken (Bengali, Hindi and English); height, weight, body type (average); and the occupations of her parents. Her father was "ex-Army" and her mother was "homemaker." And she was also a Capricorn. According to the pundit, Fate aligned her with the perfect match—Rajeev Majumdar—and the events that followed became in her memory like the pages of a book turned fast. All the rituals flowed into one another until she could no longer distinguish what had happened when. Did she fast all ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 12 /
A LITTLE HANDSY by Susannah Betts
A LITTLE HANDSY by Susannah Betts whisper: you’re my Jurassic juice when you suck my neck and that will be the word and the word will be With God and on the third date we will with hesitant hands like just-pubescent lesbians, hands stained of bleeding polish, juiceboxes sucked dry, save the date, my invitation, my God, the words birthday party, the words hope you’ll come, translated through hand in hair, eyes to God’s kingdom and heaven-sent nectar all mine. On the third date presunrise and pre-carbon-dated light fall and swell the word (hopeful you meant it) my sense dulled by improper forging, lubrication dripping through cracks in the warriors’ hall, fists clenching drinks, where toasts to Valhalla and prayers to God Above and God Below and Gods as versatile as army knives woo + crush + date + shag + marry + I’d like a glass of juice while we’re keeping our words ... Read the full review
Issue 12 /
STONE FOOD by Alex Vidiani
STONE FOOD by Alex Vidiani My food was stones from a stone tree spoon-fed to me stones in my mouth slurring my speech so I couldn’t say love you couldn’t say daddy only stones I wonder if my father was also fed stones during a snowstorm in February I wonder what he thought as he smoked stone cigarettes before seeing me for the first time the only time I wonder how I felt newborn in my father’s stone hands marble-carved from winter ... Read the full review
Issue 12, Poetry /
WHY DRAW TREES by Laurel Hooker
WHY DRAW TREES? by Laurel Hooker Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complicated realm of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon emerge in the form of my higher education. When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art, drawing nice pictures was the farthest thing from my mind. In that four-year whirlwind of studio classes, I roved quite far from simple drawing. I took glassblowing, ceramics, on-loom weaving, and clay-figure modeling. As a painting major, I took drawing classes, but they were secondary to my painting classes. After graduation, I went home to my parents’ house in east Tennessee. where I listened to the drone of the cicadas in the evenings and slept until noon. For the first time in four years, my life slowed to a walking pace. I made a couple of paintings; I carried a small watercolor kit with me as a way ... Read the full review
Art, Issue 12, Philadelphia Writer/Poet /
MORE THAN A PAUSE by Nigar Alam
MORE THAN A PAUSE by Niger Alam It was spring in Minnesota, and the winter newborn babies were entering the outdoor world for the first time. There were many in the park behind the senior center that day. Mothers cooed as they bent over each other’s jogging strollers, their cropped yoga pants stretching over the mounds of their well-squatted buttocks. Christine watch ed from one of the few benches facing the playground. She turned her head away from the taut mothers and inspected the babies instead, the curled up little beings in the strollers. They were shaped like commas, but she knew they were much more than mere pauses. One was parked facing Christine. The single front wheel of the stroller was pushed against her bench, and the mother, facing the other way, leaned her back on the handle of the stroller and laughed with the group that huddled there. Her hair shone golden and strawberry, waving left to right, as she shook her head at the incredulity of some joke. The infant was belted, physically restrained, but its mind was scheming, wielding its power from behind glassy blue eyes on an egg-white bed. Its stare was unsettling, but at ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 12 /
THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS by Robert Henway
THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS by Robert Henway I don’t know why I remember walking down the stairwell that day. It was a practical staircase and extremely boring, not the type that stays in your mind years after. Gray walls, with only the slight confetti of shredded posters to add any color, covered with words imploring us to check out various clubs or work opportunities. Some sign stubs were completely gone, leaving the remaining paper looking like a spent shotgun shell; others had hardly been touched, looking like a primed firework that was later discovered to be a dud. The students in their white and blue Polos, with matching khaki pants or plaid skirts, having only backpacks to supply a sense of individuality, came and went as they always did. That afternoon however, there was an obstacle in our path, a roadblock. This annoyed me greatly because I only had two minutes to get to my next class. Who was this outsider who did not realize the system? Who was this nonconformist who did not follow the protocol? It wasn’t until I was very close that I could see through the huddled bodies that it was a freshman on his hands and ... Read the full review
Issue 12, Nonfiction /
TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST by Teniola Tonade
TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST by Teniola Tonade Think terrorism, my appetizer word, and watch the slide-show of interminable woes. For balanced main course, I’d serve you poor then sad, and oh—there’s got to be a drink—think blood. Your plate is full of images you love? Still, my steward’s training says I must serve dessert. So, think Africa; and I say: dream America. I guess I’ll pack my plates away, and leave you, as all men must be, alone to your purging now ... Read the full review
Issue 12, Poetry /
THE SECRET WORLD OF YAYO by Erin Victoria Bradley
THE SECRET WORLD OF YAYO by Erin Victoria Bradley Vanessa’s loneliness beckoned her to the white room, where the ceiling vanished into a mist so fine that it melted into six suns and the sediments were of pink marble with flecks of orange and white. So white. Not everyone could make it there. Only those pure-hearted lonely few who still believed in magic could ever find the door, the white hot keyhole, and they remained in life like the unicorns, all but extinct. She had found it in her fifteenth year, when she had looked into a mirror and for the first time understood what it meant for a smile to not touch the eyes. Her key was a metal spoon, stolen from the kitchen of her dreary first life, and a bag of white powder was the sacred artifact that opened her eyes to the magic. She escaped the monotony of the real world by pushing on the golden frame of the door and budging her way inside. The warmth crawling up her cheeks was instant and alleviated the sorrow knotted in the pit of her belly like thorny vines. Visiting the white room was riding a horse, playing ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 12 /
SHADOWS by Eliza Callard
SHADOWS by Eliza Callard The “y” on my forehead from the radiator. The early cooking accident with the knife. The shadow from the spark on my hand when I was six. It turned white and melted my skin. The odd dent on my thigh from the time I tried to impress a girl and fell off a fence. The teen wounds I made myself-- tiny white scissors scars; the popped zits, faded to a soft brown. And the big marks--the surgeries-- my belly a long road, and the port pushing the skin of my left chest like a short stack of quarters hidden beneath, like I may need them for the jukebox ... Read the full review
PINTO LOS FLORES PARA QUE NO MUEREN by Lena Popkin
Pinto los Flores Para Que No Mueren For Frida Kahlo Revolution coincides with your birthday. You open fire, unbound. Born of discontent, la casa azul leaves you no hope but you find yourself longing for its pain. Frozen disfigured limbs still look for love, and he wants to give it. You search desperately for passion, but none could be found among wilted flowers. Splintered metal, your broken body lies in a field of wildflowers. Blood pools freely; finally a part of you no longer bound by the confines of your skin. Screams echo around you and you smile, hearing only passion. In thirty-five parts, they try to stitch together your dying hope, empty promises hang like bloody limbs on the canvas, no more love left in your paintbrushes. No more pain. You drink dreams in shot glasses, thrown back quick, pills for your pain. Immobilized like you: broken stems and tired petals. You are fascinated by flowers; kaleidoscope of colors and temporary love. Your bed becomes your confidant, that most intimate lover to whom you are bound. Consolation comes in the strangest of forms. Drips of hope storm your bloodstream with liquid passion ... Read the full review
MY FATHER'S ARMS by Betsy Campbell Stone
MY FATHER'S ARMS by Betsy Campbell Stone At home, we covered up. Mine was a house full of brothers. A closed bathroom door meant it was occupied. Occasionally I’d find the upstairs bathroom door ajar and push in, only to catch my father shaving. He always shaved nude. The long mirror over the two sinks was shrouded in steam except for the watery oval he cleared in front of his face. His bicep — round as Popeye’s — flexed as he swept the razor downward to reveal a stripe of skin. Like a drop of water that knows to leap off a griddle, I pulled the door shut. Such squeamishness had disappeared by my father’s last year. One afternoon, I heard a heavy thump while he was showering and ran into the bathroom. I opened the glass door to see him struggling like a beetle on its back. “Are you hurt?” I asked. “No, but I can’t get up.” He’d fallen before, but on the thick carpet of his bedroom. I learned then that he didn’t have enough strength in his stomach muscles to roll over, much less to sit up. Fortunately, his leather belt made a good handle; I ... Read the full review
Issue 12, Nonfiction /
THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA by Paula Rivera
THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA Works on Paper and Beyond by Paula Rivera I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I've always had a strong feeling for drawing animals. Like many children, I believed I understood animals. I'm still fascinated with animals (although I'm no longer quite as obsessed with horses as I used to be, like many young girls.) I went to Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school for art students. I was convinced that an arts school environment would be best for me, even through I felt strongly that you cannot teach a person how to create art. The artistic environment was good for me in many ways, but the Western philosophy of teaching art messed with my head and feelings. When I graduated from CAPA I was accepted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. But after three years, I was completely sick of it. So I left, planning to work for a year and save enough Zmoney to move to ... Read the full review
Art, Issue 11, Philadelphia Writer/Poet /
THE DEATH OF A BABY by Kirsten Aguilar
THE DEATH OF A BABY by Kirsten Aguilar The day we went to see the baby it rained. One of those rains that dumps and then is done, leaves you soaked but not shivering. The family lived on the same road as Celia and worked a plot of land that now, in the spring, burst up in stocks of corn. The father of the baby sat on the porch and waved us in despite our dripping clothes and mud-caked shoes. I cannot remember now where we were coming from or whether we’d planned the visit, but I do know that it was evening and Celia had her camera and inside the little house, two boys sat on stools eating rice and fish with their fingers. The baby was small and warm and she slept while I held her. The TV was on. The boys ate. Celia took pictures. A few days later, I was in a taxi alone, just me and the driver. It was hot and my thighs sweat and stuck to the seat. We drove through the city and I watched out my window when Celia called and told me that the baby, Liza, had died. “Elle a ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Nonfiction /
ETERNAL CALM by Samuel Hovda A mother descends on a meteor. Her kids on a keychain attached to her pants. When she lands, the whole forest goes up in delphinium flames. The mother walks to a dust-grey town where the single stoplight blinks after nine ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Poetry /
VOLTAGE by Kylie Lee Baker
VOLTAGE by Kylie Lee Baker Ivy turned the living room lamp off and back on again for the eleventh time when Hal finally looked up from his book. "Should I read somewhere else, darling?" he said. The worst part was that he meant it. Ivy knew Hal would gladly get up and read in the bathtub again so that she could toy with the lights until the bulbs burned out. What was left of Ivy's fingernails gnawed into the doorframe, her other hand limp across the lamp chain. She turned it off again because she couldn't look at Hal's face in moments when she loved him. Ivy hurried to the bathroom and turned on the hot water, scrubbing lavender soap into the creases in her palms and under her chewed fingernails. The familiar restlessness sent electric currents prickling through her bones and charged her fingertips with static energy. She felt an absence, a missing brick in the wall, a cavernous negative deeper and darker than simple nothingness. She threw open the medicine cabinet lined with nail polish that she never used and pushed back one bottle sitting half a millimeter out of formation ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 11 /
SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET by Zoe Stoller
SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET by Zoe Stoller Adam, and how he thought I was 24 and how Erika didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. I drew red on my fingernails and it stained my shirt and I dream of falafel and my back turns to sweat. Backstage, and I remember dancing, and Molly kissed Peter too but I slept in his bed. My electricity’s off and the pencils are permanent. My tea tastes thick and it hurts to swallow. He grabbed me in the city and my virginity on the phone. Next I am who I wouldn’t ever really be, and maybe I would sing ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Philadelphia Writer/Poet, Poetry /
NATURE POEM by Eliza Callard
NATURE POEM by Eliza Callard Worrisomely fat dog--a silken nut brown ale color-- belly swaying near the bouldered trail, with his wolfish mates. A family under the budding trees, the girl twisting a butterfly net in her hands. “What are you trying to catch?” “Anything.” Pitbulls Hazel--with the wet grin--and Pele--licking and nibbling so vigorously he awakens the years-old bone bruise where a stranger punched my jaw on a crowded street. Instant friends with t-shirt-wearing Phillies fans, commiseration alone our ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Philadelphia Writer/Poet, Poetry /
TOUCHED FROM THE SKY by Shannon Viola
TOUCHED FROM THE SKY by Shannon Viola Whenever I read Tacitus in the Latin, I want to crawl underneath my bed with twelve cupcakes and curse myself to Dis and back. He’s a sassy Roman author. One time, Tacitus used an ablative absolute to lead into a result clause. You might not know what either an ablative absolute or a result clause is, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but trust me. Connecting those two grammatical constructions in Latin is mental. But Tacitus did it anyway. If you haven’t already guessed, I am a Classics major. If you don’t know what a Classics major is, that’s okay too. My roommate, Erica, has known my major since we moved in. One day in October, however, I was lounging on my bed, translating some Tacitus, when I peered up to Erica and said: “You know, I just really love Latin. Translating just makes me happy.” So Erica, with a face as sincere as a mother’s and in a tone as dulcet as vernal dew, said, “Well, Shannon, if you love Latin so much, you should major in it. Really. Just do what you love.” I squinted my eyes and stifled a guffaw ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Nonfiction /
GET BEHIND ME SATAN by Mica Evans
GET BEHIND ME SATAN by Mica Evans She remembers his daft voice ringing like a death knell: Beer, it’s beer you blubbering broad - you’re supposed to drink it fast. She’s feeling fat but not hungry. She’s full of beer but not ugly, and she knows. She’s looking killer in that cotton blend catsuit he bought her the last time she couldn’t stop crying. Whenever she cries, he causes then cures it, and she forgives him like bare feet in a crowd. When his caustic tongue takes it a lick too far, he flowers, fixes, flatters her like fluorescent lights in a sunny park. She remembers his pink lips spitting: She’s got a nice ass and an afro, she doesn’t know about Foucault, so don’t ask her, just bring a round of shots. She rarely talks. She thinks, Can someone get this broad a crock of soup and a lager? All hail the pale ale gods who got her here another night. Despite the seven white men drooling at her from their stools, she taps her toes, takes a glub, and anxious-glances at the door. She’s down down dumb drunk drunk and won’t eat until he waltzes in with that ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Poetry /
ALPHA ∞ OMEGA by Laurin DeChae
ALPHA ∞ OMEGA by Laurin DeChae Unveil, prophet. Write me the end first where you find comfort And tell me when the time is near to suck sweet from the vine. Feel that atmospheric friction, surge of pressure, curl of toes to shriek Just above our heads the rise and fall of history, of man deepening ravines. How the body changes form when it pleases, how it Shifts shape for both right and wrong reasons. Water to wine. Whiff of honeysuckle memory gently rests its head on your shoulder, Think of bread, of mouth dry, of want as tendrils touch cheek to vine. Let knowing lull you to sleep with fantastic imaginings of the end, All gold and glitter, razzle dazzle and stars, glitz at the end of the divine ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Poetry /
BIRDSHOT by Michal Leibowitz
BIRDSHOT by Michal Leibowitz After we’ve shot the swallows from the sky I tell you of the coast you’ve forgotten, memories turned legend, migrating inwards. I am the gluttony learned by leeching the ocean, all swallow bones and winter. Wait with me as I sift through this island, the almost-glass, the spirits they promised. Let me pick these splinters – murmur gentle things – let me make you stay. Here are the swallows and here are their feathers and here are the phantoms waiting, wasting: Let us take you to the grotto where the walls glint inwards, and the birds drop downwards, lose their faces in the swell ... Read the full review
Issue 11, Poetry /
MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER by Rachael Tague
MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER by Rachael Tague He was an alcoholic, a wealthy engineer, and a butterfly collector. He traveled all over the world, especially in South America, specializing in Southern California and Neotropical specimens, amassing a collection allegedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time of his death in late 2007. His house in California must have been nothing but walls and racks of display cases – wings ranging from the size of a buttercup blossom to an oak leaf. Splotched, banded, eyed, lined, swiped, swirled. Splayed and mounted, framed, flocking Emperors, Brushfoots, Daggerwings, longwings, snouts, and Swallowtails, sleek, fuzzy, feathered—frozen. It happened on a bridge—or rather, off a bridge—in the Kosnipata Valley of Atalaya, Peru. He ventured away from the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera early on the morning of November 4. As there were no witnesses, they can only assume that he spotted a rare butterfly – perhaps the one he traveled to Peru to find – misjudged its distance from the bridge railing, and flung his net too hard. Accounts of the height of the fall range from thirty to five thousand feet, frozen in flight for an instant, barely long enough to snatch a ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 11, Nonfiction /
WANING by Caitlin McGill
WANING by Caitlin McGill Saria rocked in her chair on the porch, wondering how the trees kept still on such fierce nights. The house had grown so quiet since her mother’s boyfriend left—since she told her mother what he’d done—that it seemed like all she ever heard was her mother’s wine glass clinking against the sink. Her mother had kicked him out right away, but Saria sensed her mother hadn’t believed her. “I don’t understand,” her mother had said. And later, once he was gone, when she was drunk: “Who started it anyway?” Saria stared out at the trees and wondered what it would be like to never speak again, to wave only when the breeze brushed her limbs, to keep the sparrows and robins and blue jays warm as they scampered through her, to open her mouth only when the wind grew so strong that her whole body trembled and his voice was there beside her again: Don’t tell ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 11 /
THE YELLOW FACEMASK by Tasha Coryell
THE YELLOW FACEMASK by Tasha Coryell She hadn’t been planning to rob the bank. Her face was cold. Or maybe she had been planning to rob the bank and her face was cold. Sometimes bank robbers feel a chill in their cheeks just like any ordinary person. The facemask was yellow. She couldn’t remember buying it or recall why she had chosen that color. There were a lot of yellow things in her closet: cardigans and dresses, a nightgown that bordered on an ugly green. She supposed at one time she must’ve enjoyed the color. Said things like, “Yellow is cheerful.” On that day however, yellow did not make her feel cheerful and instead made her feel like the top part of a banana, the knob that is peeled down to reveal the gushy insides. It was one of those winter days that was so cold that the car door was frozen shut and Elise, with her small body and yellow knob head was unable to open the door and had to return inside to get her husband who was still wearing his pajamas pants to come outside and open it for her. “You’re starting to turn into the chair, ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 11 /
CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED by Chelsea M. Harris
CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED by Chelsea M. Harris She told you she was driving to the bridal store to shop for dresses with the girls she used to babysit before you were born since she knew she’d never see you all wrapped up in a marshmallow mess surrounded by floor-length mirrors, asking questions like How does my ass look? and Do you think he’ll love it? your cheeks glowing in rose-colored blooms, eyes done up in sugar-coated sparkle, pupils wide, sipping down those strawberry cosmos, fifteen dollars a whack because you’re at fancy place with silk curtains and shimmer walls dripping in white, dripping in the things you ask your daddy for because that’s a man’s job and why’s he even living if not to pay for you to marry one under a string of Jell-O lights, your twinkle toes strapped into nine-inch heels, a thread of crusted diamonds kissing your chest, and whose to say you even love this guy with the charcoal mustache, with the beady smile, telling you one night when your twisting underneath him that he’s done a whole lot of fucking, a whole lot of banging pounding knocking nailing ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 10 /
ALINA by Svetlana Beggs
ALINA by Svetlana Beggs When I was young and living in San Francisco’s Sunset District with a roommate, I had a job selling underwear at Neiman Marcus. If I were to speak of this job with more reverence I would say that I sold “intimate apparel.” But “underwear” is more honest and also closer to “undercover,” because that’s what I was, an incognito undergraduate philosophy major, covered up by a lot of expensive underwear. I had to be a good salesperson to an occasional businessman who came in to grope La Perla panties (at $130 apiece). These men would ask, in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, “Where is the nearest restroom?” And I would say, “Straight and then left, next to the children’s department.” One late night I was working alone and had to close the register. I was putting bras back on their hangers. When I looked up, I saw a very attractive woman who dared to examine underwear a few minutes before the store had to close. She was a rare beauty, likely in her mid-40s, her body alert, her movements self-aware, like an actress or dancer. She was wearing simple dark slacks and a tan-colored, v-neck sweater and ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 10 /
JUDGING DISTANCE by Hannah Allen
JUDGING DISTANCE by Hannah Allen A word is flung into the dark from the sidewalk behind me, but I don’t recognize the voice it belongs to. What did he say? Tighten my scarf around my neck, hold my umbrella a little lower, scan the approaching expanse of parking lot for other students leaving campus. Night classes let out an hour ago, parking spaces vacant. “Slut!” The word, clear and hard, snaps against my ears. I sidestep a sheet of ice. Fingers involuntarily fumble in my coat pocket. Is he talking to me? I meant to sew up the hole in my jacket, the one that sucks change, lighter, and keys deep into the lining. Too late now. My fingers can’t make sense of the mess. Slow down to feel out my keys. Mom’s voice in my head: You should already have them out, dear. “SLUT! HEY SLUT!” The voice, closer. Coming from the right but from how far back, I’m not sure. Never been good at depth perception. It’s near enough that I forget about finding my keys. Why did I leave work early? Only had ten minutes left. Head down, I march towards my old Buick at the far ... Read the full review
Issue 10, Nonfiction /
PILLS by Eliza Callard
PILLS by Eliza Callard Every day, I consume many colors--white and blue, pink, translucent as a pale winter sun. Some I could crush to a powder, some I could puncture and watch thick red ooze smear my hands. Fat in the middle, round like a flat earth, capsules you could shake like maracas. I have ingested the weight equivalent of an adult male gorilla or an anoa, from Indonesia (similar to the water buffalo). I have swallowed one for every resident of Copenhagen or the South American country of Suriname ... Read the full review
THE ENERGIZER BUNNY LEADS A MARCH ON WASHINGTON by Kamden Hilliard
THE ENERGIZER BUNNY LEADS A MARCH ON WASHINGTON by Kamden Hillard its about rhythm which is always about noise because theres no better beacon for all the revolution’s bodies and because cable cant handle bass it damn sure wont be televised whats a hihat if you cant feel it rattle? the tipsy thirst of rhythm? its about reaching that soul and flirting it open because if you havent been scalped with sadness by a Four Page Letter or welded to anger by Brenda’s Got a Baby ... Read the full review
Issue 10, Poetry /
AFTER DONNIE DARKO by Megan Magers
AFTER DONNIE DARKO by Megan Magers As the water spilled through the spout overhead, she replayed the idea again and again. A constant rush of thought, unbroken and hot. Don’t worry. You got away with it. She imagined scattering herself across the bottom of the tub, letting the soap residue wet the jet-lagged parts she’d become, turn them soft. Let them slip down the drain, flood the pipes. But she could only breathe steam and listen to the whirr of the vent. Everything was being recycled right then. Time and life and fear and air. She was there, staring at the shadowed, tiled walls and she was already gone, waking up in a world without herself ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 10 /
black-wings-flapping
BLACK WINGS FLAPPING by Shmu’el Bashevis Ben’yamin I had the ingredients of becoming a perfect milksop, but it didn’t happen. Every day I carried to school an orange ball bigger than my head, and at lunch watched long-legged teenagers with patchy facial hair and funny white boots borrow the ball to put it through a bent rim. The ball was named after my uncle Wilson. I had found it buried under the yellow flowers of a California pepper tree. My hands itched all day after scrubbing it with laundry detergent, and my feet hurt when I kicked it against my aunt’s garage door. The young men multiplied faster than tree rabbits. They started as two-on-two, then three-on-three. After a few more days, they played a full court press of five-on-five, hooped back and forth while other children picket-fenced the sidelines, waiting to be picked. Girls perched on top of an aluminum bleacher. They had wavy canary feathers for hair. They hardly paid attention and did not cheer. I sat on the bottom row and absorbed their singsongs without looking at them. I didn’t speak much. I was immersed in ESL classes where Spanish became the lingua franca. That went on ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 10 /
SYNESTHESIA AND YOU by Charnell Peters
SYNESTHESIA AND YOU by Charnell Peters I hang from the last brick of August, and cold is tolling. I don’t hear you, but I remember your summer breath, and you still feel like the softest blue behind my eyes. The months we spent together sit catty-corner: June and July. July, bent in half, turns to face the other side of black space. Black hums, like the night under the chalk moon when we sweated and swatted at ants. I felt you for the first time, your blue warmth and dimpled back. June woke with us, orange and fiery on our skin ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 10 /
IN THE HEADLIGHTS by Agatha Hinman
IN THE HEADLIGHTS by Agatha Hinman When he first hears the baby is coming, that she is pregnant and already showing, he leaves second shift at the hospital early, and drives up the road thirty miles to Greeley’s bar where no one knows him, and if they do it’s probably too dark in there to see him. He downs two whiskey sours, takes the beer to a table for sipping. He sees through the plate glass a blue light blinking anonymously -- he can’t see the neon sign itself. Up and down Highway 101 headlights blur in the drizzle. He’s going to be a father, an “actually the real-father” as in “you know so-and-so is actually the real father.” A real-father says yes when asked if he has kids, because, dammit, he does. He’s heard lots of back-and-forth about who gets to call himself daddy later, when the kid is growing up, but he knows, and no one can take it from him ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 10 /
WOMEN AND LOSERS Jessi Terson
My dad always jokes that I can walk into a bar filled with 99 decent men and one scum-bag, and I’ll walk straight up to the scum-bag. Call it my one magic power. If there’s a loser in the room, I will find him. And even worse, I’ll probably fall madly in love with him. Most of my ex-boyfriends have been reduced to anecdotes over the years. Bitter stories told over too many beers at closing time. Like my very first boyfriend - now universally known as the “two-stroker.” Because two strokes into losing our virginity to each other, he had a vision of Christ. And of course, immediately dumped my Jewish ass. Mid coitus. Then there’s my physically abusive upstairs neighbor who still likes to flush his toilet when I’m taking a shower. As well as the homeless guy who spent all my money. There’s the gambler who started dating my best friend one week after I got out of the hospital. And the the one who told me he wanted to marry me when we were seventeen. But supposedly he pulled a knife on his mother and got shipped off to a behavioral detention center half way across ... Read the full review
Issue 10, Nonfiction /
DOUBLE FEATURE by Ariella Carmell
DOUBLE FEATURE by Ariella Carmell The letters on the marquee jammed against each other: Ingmar Bergman Retrospective, the billing read, words cohered into a smear of black. Greta’s breath clouded as she waited by the box office. She paced on the balls of her feet, toes pointed upward, arms outstretched. The theatergoers, trickling in like the drops of a leaky faucet, lifted their brows at her. She had seen them all here before, but they had never seen her. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Her fingers grazed the two tickets, snug within the fleece of her jacket pocket. Encroached within a glass box, the cashier slid another ticket across the counter. Lara had to work the box to keep her spot in the school’s film society. Today she forgot the issue of Rolling Stone she always had spread about before her, occupying her time during those long lulls. Now she lifted her focus to Greta with raised eyebrows; the girl’s constant strolling back and forth was giving her a headache. Lara pressed her face to orifice in the glass and yelled out, “Are you going in or what?” ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 9 /
HORSES IN THE WRINKLE by Cheryl Smart
Cheryl SmartHORSES IN THE WRINKLE On an island bigger than Manhattan rests the burned-out remains of the Carnegie mansion, Dungeness. The Gilded Age gilded the Carnegie family, so much so they could buy up pieces of the world to gold-plate. Cumberland Island is one of those pieces. The Carnegies may have bought the island but they filched the name of their fifty-nine–room, turreted Scottish castle from James Oglethorpe, first to build there in 1736. The word feels good in my mouth, Dungeness; even though the first part of the word is dungeon, the ness at the end somehow beautifies it. Beyond the Carnegie castle, forty other buildings were scattered over the island to house a two-hundred-person staff. But alas, the sequestered estate may not have been all it was imagined to be, because the Carnegies abandoned Dungeness in 1925. The mansion was destroyed by fire in 1959; most of it, that is. Dungeness burned for three days but the tall, tall chimneys and sturdy stone walls would not go down. Those walls would not go down and now they are home to rattlesnakes and overgrown ivy. The Dungeness Ruins will never leave you once you visit them. Photographs are not needed. I have ... Read the full review
Issue 9, Nonfiction, Travel Essays /
Tara Stella, Introduction by Raymond RorkeHIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Instagram Photography A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting subjects. Later, in the 1930s, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson painted his small Leica with dull black paint so that he could unobtrusively capture “the decisive moment.” Before the decade was out, Walker Evans was hiding his camera under his coat, the lens peeking through a buttonhole, to photograph riders on the New York City Subway just as they were. Today, in this time-honored tradition of street photography, New York photographer Tara Stella takes Instagrams. Her subjects, too, are candid moments, but her camera is a cellphone, hidden in plain sight. And while Evans didn’t publish his collection of subway photos until 1966, Tara’s photos are shared instantly online with a worldwide public. Tara is one of over 300 million active users of Instagram, the popular mobile app that enables cellphone users to grab an image and share it on social media. Since its debut in 2010, over 30 billion photos have been generated by users, ranging from the National Geographic ... Read the full review
Art /
QUERENCIA by Leticia Urieta
QUERENCIA by Leticia Urieta The first time my sister Mari lost her baby, only twenty weeks, the doctor assured her that she could try again. “The body is miraculous, it can bounce back from anything,” as though her womb just needed to be cleared of the cluttered, grasping mess inside. I was recruiting a student for my college, flipping through brochures in her living room. They sent me all over the South west as their official bilingual recruiter. The girl sat next to me and ran her hands over the glossy pictures of the campus. She would be the first in her family to go to college. Her mother, who sat on my other side, peered at the pictures of the dormitories. She paused over the listings of scholarship information and fees accrued over the first academic year and wanted me to assure her that they could afford it, that her baby wouldn’t be so far away. “Unas horas,” I reminded her, showing her the route from I-20 across Louisiana and into Texas. When the visit was over, the mother sent me off to my hotel with arepas wrapped in tin foil. I relished being among these hopeful families, taking ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 9 /
GEOLOGY by Patrick Ball
GEOLOGY by Patrick Ball How fast are we moving do you think. She’d been lying back with her eyes closed and with her sunglasses off and above her head on the ice, nothing between her and the cold bright rays but as I spoke she reached to the glasses and crunched forward at the waist. Her legs pivoted upward a little in reaction then back down and she pushed the sunglasses onto her face. Not far to her left the ice was clinging to rock and in places it was cracked and fissured with slow pressures but to the right the side of the valley wasn’t visible beyond the hump of the glacier and down further at the valley floor, sunk in green and surrounded by trees and heat the house did its fairytale thing. Stacking upward turreted from the land. She brought her knees toward her and hooked across them and peered down the slope. I don’t know. A half metre a day maybe. When I touched the ice my fingertips came back dry. It was pitted and uneven and it had had specks of dirt and grit ground into it by footsteps or deeper down by the building ... Read the full review
ZUMBA FEVER by Nadia Laher Saturday at Zumba there was a new song, one with a thumping electronic beat. Marie hated when there were new songs. She still had difficulty learning the routines they did every week, mastering such simple moves as simultaneously throwing her right arm in the air and kicking her left foot up. The instructor, Sierra, bopped around at the front of the room, clapping her hands together. “It’s a new song, ladies! Time to jive!” Marie could feel sweat sticking to her back underneath the big white t-shirt and loose black capris she wore. She’d found them on sale at Marshall’s, next to the racks of bright athletic clothing and spandex. Lenny had bought her a gym membership, insisting she stay active. She’d protested, but he used his trump card, said, “I want my kids to know their grandma for a long time, Ma” and she gave in. Now she watched the young girls dancing in their sleek running shorts and wished it were possible for her to feel less unappealing. She imagined them whispering about her, the fossil in the back row wearing all the clothing. Three rows of girls in front of her, and ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 9 /
JEEP, RED by Donald Collins
JEEP, RED by Donald Collins She was the Mail Lady, an aging bleach-blond in jeans and bright fleece. All around campus there are poorly cropped images of her smiling face like “missing” flyers. I pass by one fast, and realize I am running. My run finds me on the precise, mile-long road that surrounds our high school campus. The sun is rising, and everything is so beautiful and shines so brightly that I have to keep blinking. I don’t remember starting the run, but it’s easy to forget things you’ve done many times. There is something else I’m forgetting… I’m late! I cut my loop short, sprinting through our common up to the front of my dorm. I tug on the resistant handle, locked out, and recall the picture of my ID sitting on my desk. There’s no one around so I break in, scaling the familiar lattice up to the second floor balcony. I pop the summer screen, and shiver through a thirty-second shower. At 8:30 A.M. there is a memorial assembly for Jackie, our Mail Lady, who is dead. ◊ ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 9 /
JUST READ by Rebecca Lambright
JUST READ by Rebecca Lambright When the power goes out, empty the refrigerator and put the perishables in a cooler full of ice. Assume that the bills weren’t paid and don’t ask questions. Light candles and do not speak. Time your showers, keep them short, ignore that they’re cold. When there isn’t enough food for everyone some nights, drink water to silence the hunger. Do your homework, go to bed. Take the foreclosure letters from the mail, put them in Dad’s briefcase, pretend you didn’t see them. When Mom is sad, hide the books. When Mom looks tired, hide the books. When Mom gets angry, hide the books, every time. You hide them because you know that she’ll look for them. Because you know that there is no money, Dad got them anyways. For you, he says. And once everything is calm again, read. I grew up with these as my principal rules. I followed every one except for the rule about words. I wasn’t supposed to have them, read them, want them, or write them. Mom said words took you away from school, took you away from work, too you away from what you were supposed to be doing ... Read the full review
Issue 9, Nonfiction /
TONY by Elizabeth Alexander
TONY by Elizabeth Alexander We were running through the Shepherd’s Woods down by Yalloway Creek and across from the schoolyard. We were running because Tony had said he wanted to and I had said that that sounded fine, and so we ran. When we reached the Gap, that’s the wide space between one side of the Woods and the other where the ground falls away and you can see the Creek squeeze through rocks at the bottom, I jumped over. Tony stopped and wouldn’t do it, so I said “C’mon Ton—! Don’t be a chicken!” And he hated when I called him that, and I suppose that’s what did it. And I suppose that’s why his mum won’t meet my eye when I look at her across the pew ... Read the full review
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS by Charlie Keys Bohem
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS by Charlie Keys Bohem His Royal Highness was a tweaker who hung around outside the convenience store where we used to go to buy booze. He always had his hands shoved wrist deep in his pockets, and there was always a twenty four-ounce Miller Hi-Life in a brown paper bag sitting on the newsstand next to him. His face was covered in black, some mixture of sweat and ash that stuck in his stubble, and he wiped it often—long, greasy drags across his cheeks that left them dirtier than they had been before. The management let him stay because he gave them such good business ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 8 /
THE HERD by Annika Neklason
THE HERD by Annika Neklason The cows are clustered together at the crown of the hill. From where Priya stands on the shoulder of the highway they look like shadow puppets, dark, shifting silhouettes backlit by the harvest moon. They seem small enough, insubstantial enough, at this distance to be knocked over by a strong wind, or even swept away entirely. Beside her, Amo cups his hands around his mouth and moos at them. The low vibrato of the sound makes Priya shiver, but the cows are too far away; they can’t hear him. They don’t lift their heads ... Read the full review
NO-BAKE by Charles Ramsay McCrory
NO-BAKE by Charles Ramsay McCrory It would be Bridget’s first Christmas without alcohol, and mentioning this fact to her sponsor she was conscious of using the seasonal language of loss: “My first Christmas since the divorce,” “Our first Christmas since Rachel died.” Gratitude, or the pressure to feel grateful, compelled her to admit she’d been spared such tragedies. Trent had stayed married to her through Blendergate and the ensuing six weeks of rehab, and Selena, their daughter, would be meeting them by train from her college for Christmas dinner at Rob’s. She’d managed to keep the bakery (though one pushy counselor had cautioned her not to reenter the melee of the food industry), along with the upstairs apartment, and her hand had healed nicely, leaving just a few silvery crosshatches and numbness in her index tip. The blender was nonrefundable, but then she was only counting blessings ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 8 /
THE SLOW ACTS by Sanaë Lemoine
THE SLOW ACTS by Sanaë Lemoine 1. In the autumn when the summer heat has burned to the ground, my father drives me to Elsa’s home before school. Her house is old and tall with peeling white paint. It reminds me of my mother’s flaking skin. Plump-armed vines crawl the walls and the windows fight for territory, small gaping mouths into Elsa’s house. Elsa hasn’t dressed yet and I help her with the buttons while her mother trots around naked. She is pale other than red elbows and knees from the cold weather. Their plumbing is rusty. I don’t know if the heat works. Their house is by the seaside and holds humidity year round. Its floorboards ripple from dampness and patches of black mold grow like soot in the bathroom ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 8 /
BERGAMOT by Alina Grabowski
BERGAMOT by Alina Grabowski “I wish my sweat smelled as good as yours,” Nellie told her grandmother when she was little. She still remembered asking, sitting on her grandmother’s lap on the porch, carving a frozen Hoodsie cup with a wooden spoon. Her grandmother laughed. “That’s not sweat,” she said. “It’s perfume. Bergamot.” “What’s bergamot?” She liked the way the word was unfamiliar in her mouth, a new twisting of the tongue. She whispered it when she said it—it seemed like the kind of word that held secrets. “A bit like an orange, a bit like a lemon. We don’t have them in the U.S., really.” Nellie hadn’t realized there were things that didn’t exist here. Everything, it seemed, was contained in the world that stretched from her house to her grandparents’ ... Read the full review
A REPLACEMENT by Ingrid Claire Wenzler
Ingrid Claire WenzlerA REPLACEMENT On a narrow street in Berlin, all cobblestones, I remember turning, seeing first, the morning light on the rubble someone had swept against the curb and then, a child alone in a doorway. “What’s that you have?” our second lieutenant called out. The child, a little German girl with fine brown hair, looked over and in this sweet, sort of hesitant way waved. I have a hard time, even now, believing what happened after that. The lieutenant went over to the little girl and grabbed the doll she was holding. “I asked you a question,” he said. Then he threw the doll to me. I caught it and, without a thought in my head, tossed it like a hot potato to another soldier. It was a baby doll small enough to fit inside a hand grenade. I remember it was dressed in a baptismal gown with a lace hem. I remember its features were painted. I remember its complexion reminded me of white powder, of something solid and not solid. The other soldier threw it to a friend of ours, who was ahead of us, and, if you can imagine, this tiny porcelain doll moved through the air like ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 8 /
THE WEEKLY VISIT by Emanuel Melo
THE WEEKLY VISIT by Emanuel Melo Every week for the past five years, Jake has approached the front door after a slow walk from the bus stop. He gets off several stops away purposefully. The long walk to her house gives him time to decompress after a long day at work and ward off the resentment of duty that brings him here to her front door in the first place. The weekly visit, after his father died, to his aged and disabled mother, has begun to wear him down and now he shows up at her door as if in front of a trap he consciously, and dutifully steps into. He stays overnight, too, only to spare himself the exhaustion of a late night trip on the bus and then the subway and then another bus home ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 8 /
metempsychosis
Caleb MurrayMETEMPSYCHOSIS John Henry made circles with his bare feet on the carpet. The overhead light was on a fader, which was set low and gave the room an almost hazy affect. Against one wall was a purple couch, its frayed and shredded fabric covered with overlapping blankets and old bedsheets. Against the opposite wall was the television, which was off. The classical music station was playing some minor baroque drivel; it was set on this station because the jazz station, with its squeaks and honks, bothered John Henry’s cat, Felix, who was currently transfixed by the concentric undulations of John Henry’s taunting foot and the disembodied violins. His eyes were like black saucers, with only a faint hint of silver, a mere suggestion of an iris. “Have you eaten all my drugs again?” John Henry said in the high-pitched, playful voice he used for Felix when his girlfriend was not visiting; no other cats had heard this particular voice, though they had each received their own unique inflection. “Are you tripping balls, murder pants? Are you tripping balls?” The cat, crouched behind the legs of a dining-room chair, eyed him, then returned his face to John Henry’s feet. You’d ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 7 /
CATS by Alli Katz
Alli KatzCATS “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” —Mark Twain Mark Twain never met my cat. Five seconds with Albany, watching him throw his body against our kitchen cabinets early in the morning (and again in the afternoon, and at bedtime) for six ounces of “classic beef” or a scoop of prescription urinary health dry food, or watching him raise his leg to lick his crotch and then forget what he’s doing, or him leaping on a tiny table that would never support his girth to try to press his face into a cactus, is easily enough to dispel the idea that a cat has any kind of dignity at all. And it’s not just Albany. You can watch my friend’s cat Walker slide across a wood floor to play fetch with tiny foam balls, or my mom’s cats Egon and Janine spoon, pressing their back paws awkwardly into each other’s face. My childhood cats, Strip-ed Tiger and Super, would attack our toes under our blankets as we tried to sleep. Even my dad’s dearly departed Jessica Rabbit the ... Read the full review
Art, Issue 7, Nonfiction /
Emily
Jan-Erik AsplundEMILY Desire not the night, for that is when people will be destroyed. Or perhaps: to drag people away from their homes. Or maybe: when people vanish in their place. (Job 36:20), variations The speed was a natural solution to Professor Flowers’s death. The only thing left to do after we had laid it out on the table and crushed it up and all was talk—and it turned out we could do that for hours. It was a beautifully orchestrated display, a symphony of run-on conversation and exuberant denial. We talked shit about the neighborhood, and what it was like to extort your parents for thousands upon thousands of dollars a year in the guise of receiving an education. We wondered if we were doing the right thing. We understood each other even when we didn’t. “It’s so messy in here,” she said. “I don’t really like cleaning,” I said. “I didn’t say that because I disliked it.” More long, thin, white streaks appeared on the table. Insufflatio in the Latin, she told me. Up and away. “Your eyes are so big right now,” I said. “Really? Yours are too.” “Well, it’s bright in here.” “Do something about it ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 7 /
Space and Time
"Space and Time" was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015 Amelia FowlerSPACE AND TIME 1. Since very early childhood, I have had a recurring dream of a white room so bright it is dimensionless, boundaries of wall and ceiling bleached invisible. It is a nightmare, a preoccupation that bleeds into waking. I think it could be real, hidden under the opacity of matter. Awake, I imagine tearing away the black paper of the night sky; a wall of cold starlight stretches immense and glaring—at my feet, scraps of night. Or, I scratch at the dark paint, freeing shreds of light; outer space gathers under my fingernails like ink from a pen or blood from a scab. I feel I could even peel my body back, starting at the fingers of my right hand. What is left: white absence, a perfect silhouette cut out of my bed or bathtub, the patch of grass outside my apartment. No body, no crime. I prefer dreams of family death, faceless chasing men, crimes committed and forgotten, suicide—the white room is too stark, too static. Almost violent in its silent bright thrust. Immensity startles me: oceans, miles of flat ice or ... Read the full review
Issue 7, Nonfiction /
MAKING EGGS by Carly Eathorne
Carly EathorneMAKING EGGS A thousand ways to make an egg, and I’m attempting one: over-easy. But there past the blotches on my kitchen window gleams the hourglass on the belly of the black widow – she, too, is making eggs. Her process commences with the drape of her naked legs against her homespun silk, and the swell of her abdomen silhouetted against the sunrise, hot and full like my skillet. Her suitor comes running like yolk. She only eats her mate if she is hungry — what woman isn’t? We finish our meals together, comrades in breakfasting for one. Carly Eathorne recently received her BA in English from Western Washington University. In the past, her work has appeared in Inkspeak Magazine, and she received a Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest Merit Award in 2012. She is happy to call several locations in the Pacific Northwest home, and cannot think of a better place to be inspired. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #7 ... Read the full review
Issue 7, Poetry /
BORDERLAND by Amber Officer-Narvasa
Amber Officer-NarvasaBORDERLAND The rainwater dripped lasciviously—as rainwater in New York will do—through the sidewalk gratings and down through the mottled, cracked, brown-stained ceilings of the Grand Street subway station. He was standing near the MetroCard machines, begging. Good writers, so they say, show rather than tell. So I will show you my mother doing a double take, being struck by his youth or his voice or that mysterious thing which stops us now and then and renders us unable to walk away. I will show you the three of us going back up the subway stairs into the tepid light. I will show you us walking down the street, around the puddles and past the fish market, into a crowded little canteen that no longer exists, where noodles and tea could be had for two dollars. There are few places in this city where noodles and tea can be had for two dollars, and the very novelty of the idea seems to indicate a loss of some kind, a deficit, though of what I have yet to discern. The other day I walked down to Grand Street in the cruel heat of an October day, meaning to sit in this ... Read the full review
Issue 7, Nonfiction /
Small
Michael HeadSMALL He stood staring out the peephole and waiting for the girl who said she’d come. She was three days late and he didn’t have a television so he mostly stood staring out the peephole and counting the seconds. It didn’t bother him that the power had been shut off for five days or that the rent was a full week overdue. He had twelve thousand dollars in a backpack and he was waiting for the girl who said she’d come. She would bring one thousand grams of Small and they might fuck and she would leave. He was thirsty and wanted to run to the vending machine down the hall but if she was on Fast she might come and go before he got back. So he stood staring out the peephole and waiting for the girl who said she’d come. He started getting Small when he was thirteen because it made him feel like a little kid again. Before the cliques and FCATs and divorce and death slurped away his best chance at a childhood. Before puberty turned him into a small giant with enough personal volume for three average humans. Before he became a two-time college ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 7 /
Brooke SchifanoTHE INSIDES In the train, you listen to a story about a shaman, feet braced against the wall in the part where you stand on the circle cut into the floor. If this were a human arm you’d be standing atop an elbow, encased in fluid and surrounded by the mess of nerves and vessels pushed up next to you, as close as the satchel of the stranger standing in the middle. The shaman performs psychic surgery—jams a steel rod up the nostril of the woman and moves his arm, back and forth, around the cavity behind her brain and the satchel man catches the grimace on your face as you imagine a spatula scraping spaghetti sauce out of unfinished ceramic and want to vomit, or grab his hand and tell him what you’ve heard. In the ocean, you were afraid of the otters. Your foot would slip underneath, catch between kelp stalks, and the kaleidoscope of fins, claws, and tails would spin and spin and reach and you’d feel the otter against the skin of your kneecap tracing the outline with his long black claws as if examining a shell along the sea wall, ready to pull it ... Read the full review
Issue 6, Poetry /
THE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS by Erin Peraza
Erin PerazaTHE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS Two figures sit on the bamboo gangplank jutting off a model pirate ship. A man and a woman. They aren’t quite to-scale, and slightly over-sized as they are, they can’t explore the cabin space below or stand lookout in the crow’s nest. So they dangle their legs over blue-green silicone that feigns at ocean waves beneath them. Their relationship is more fragile now, contained in glass, than it’s ever been before. She’s a wide-eyed citizen of the world—packs a light suitcase, counts passport stamps—and he’s just grateful to have found a way to get out of town without ever having to leave it. Time feels different inside a bottle, on a ship, at sea. There’s no telling how long they’ve been inside. “Balmy,” Faye had said when she first arrived. She emerged through the bottleneck, jumping with two feet onto the hardened-putty ocean. Lance sealed the entrance quickly behind her—he’d grown accustomed to the quiet—gripping the cork like the wheel of a car as he guided it back into place. He walked Faye across the sea to his pride and joy, his masts and sails. “It’s modeled after a real English ... Read the full review
Self-Portrait in Profile, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014
Ilana EllisPORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP: Oil on Canvas These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the world as if I have never seen it before. After a few days of being stunned by the overwhelming beauty of everything, I am desperate to capture what I see in paint. Which leads me right back where I started, because inevitably there is something wonderful about the physical world that I don’t yet have the skill to reproduce. This cycle is what led me to produce my most recent body of work. In these past few months, I painted a series of three portraits: a self-portrait accompanied by portraits of two of my close friends. These paintings are very ... Read the full review
Black Rat Snake
Shaun TurnerKENTUCKY SNAKES Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we'd cut our share of trees. In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually men from McKee—would split a paper-bagged six-pack around noon and just relax. A bird-call would echo, and the foliage would brush against itself, and the insects would hum just behind the brush, and we would puncture our cans with a long metal churchkey in a way that felt smooth, natural. Two years ago, Dorsey was buzzed and he spotted this black rat snake coiled on a pine branch about five feet up. “If it were a copperhead, it could've bit me on the neck,” he said, pulling a piece of line from his pocket. “You place the snare where they least expect it,” Dorsey looped the wire into a noose. “You place it in the middle of their run.” To make a good snare, you must become the animal. You can find their signs near to water: the fresh wet scat, the muddy tracks, the light crushing of brush. Once you see one or two of these signs, you can ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 6 /
GROWING UP by Devin Kelly
Devin KellyGROWING UP She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short bursts. She cannot determine if the screams are pained or joyful. All things contain a little of both, she thinks. Twirling, orbiting around the living room, she laughs as only a child can laugh at the midnight hour when her parents are asleep and the dark, turning world seems to house a different sort of life. Pale moonlight filtered in slatted lines across the floor. A painting on the wall of a high-heeled woman in a red dress with legs splayed in mid-dance. She recalls something her dance teacher said just a week ago: “All life is a delicate balance between love and hurt.” She did not know what that meant. Hurt for her was the lingered ache of her red behind after sliding naked down the railing. The crater slowly caving into her chest as the outline of her breasts began to introduce itself. She dances. Music rises from the wood below. She does not know who is playing ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 6 /
On the Q
Tricia ParkON THE Q Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the NQR stop at Prince Street. “I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife; It's lonely out in space; On such a timeless flight.” The black pillars stand tall, sprouting like steel trees from the train tracks, holding up the street as the singer’s guitar competes to be heard over a trumpet wailing at the far end of the platform. Now the downtown train blows its horn, a loud f-sharp, and through my earplugs it sounds like an amplified cello. I look up, expecting to see a cellist somewhere and wondering if it’s someone I know, someone I went to school with. And I think of you and the day you played your cello outside in Central Park and how that brown beagle stopped and wouldn’t leave, holding his owner steadily in place, ignoring every tug and pull to head home. Children and animals stopped and stared the most. When we were still students, you and I found a shaded spot in the park and played there all afternoon. Young mothers with strollers, laughing schoolchildren, businessmen in suits trudging their way across to the ... Read the full review
Issue 6, Nonfiction /
THE OLD MAN AND THE POOL by Anastasiya Shekhtman
Anastasiya ShekhtmanTHE OLD MAN AND THE POOL Regardless of which creative field you look at, there is always talk about process. This postmodern world has rendered form and content inextricable in many ways, so when I look at work, it is always the same question that comes to mind: how does the form inform the content? Are there traces of the process in the work the artist presents? Much of the writing that I love does not humor such inquisition. Even lines related through a colloquial voice are likely to have been subjected to meticulous editing, were crafted in the grand scheme of the piece. Without access to the revision process of admired work, I often find my own attempts to write plagued—paralyzed, even—by self doubt. This project began very much like every other attempt, which is to say, by an overwhelming of imagery and inspiration from the world, and the unsuccessful attempt to wrestle it into the screen. In order to contain some of the ideas and connections speeding through my mind (which came and went at a much quicker pace than the “official” writing), I began to collect these shorthand notes in a document. In the first submission ... Read the full review
IN MY TIME
Shannon ViolaIN MY TIME I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. Sometimes when I’m writing, he’s over my shoulder. He seizes my hand and slashes the Latinate adjectives on my page while I wince and moan. He tugs at one of my curls every time I craft optimistic characters. When I really anger him, his hot fist squeezes my shoulder. Then he prods my side. “What are you doing? Get at this.” All I have to do is flutter my eyelashes at him, and he releases his grip. He always did have an Achilles heel for women. My youthful face, however, is useless when he sees that I have concocted an eighteen-word sentence. He grabs the entire mass of my hair so hard that my neck bends at an unholy angle. He holds my head below his. “Would you like to omit some words there?” Hating, hating, hating him, I pare my sentence to a fragment. He sees that tears totter in my eyes. Deleting lovely words is death to me. “But don’t you want an In Our Time?” he says. I nod and sniff as he dabs my eyes with his smudged handkerchief. “I want my own In Our ... Read the full review
Issue 5, Nonfiction /
Gabriel Ojeda SaguePLACES TO WALK OUT TO I read the note scribbled wildly on torn paper: “Language is not the signifier nor the signified. It is the significance.” The only constant is the height of buildings. I hate the way you find things like that and I’ve just now realized it’s the smoke that’s making that taste of oranges in my mouth. A yellow cat bolts through a black street. I am drunk and swinging through concrete paths, my legs twisting and stumbling, pivoting and sliding. Billboards sneak into my field of vision. “For tough cleaning, toughen up with Husky brand paper towels.” “No more pests with Nomopest bug spray.” “Feel the fragrance. Be the woman. Rise. Rise, by Vaudlin.” The night is long and I hate the names of streets. “Washington St. Mulligan St. Perricone St. Franklin St. Jefferson St. East St. Hawke St. Levi St. 15019 Levi St. 15021 Levi St. 15023 Levi St. 15025 Levi St.” My house is simple, affordable, and gray. I remember to smell the coriander that I’m growing on my porch. My welcome mat is damp and tattered. “Robertson Home” Two weeks before he left, he wrote a poem about my breasts. What ... Read the full review
How to Master Social Media
Brennan CusackHOW TO MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA Take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror because it’s got a frame like a photograph and you need the practice. Move around and play with angles until you find the most flattering position. Now practice snapping into picture position. Repeat until it’s automatic. Practice makes perfect. Smile perfectly. The next day you sign up for a photo class with Abby. Pick up your rented cameras and practice your photo smile as Abby points the lens towards you. Click. You look pretty, she says. Make it your profile picture. You’re on the right track. As the professor drones on about camera settings, begin laying groundwork for network popularity by scrolling through your newsfeed and liking pictures and statuses accordingly. Watch as your name appears across the newsfeed as you click, think of footsteps in the sand, think of I came, I saw, I liked, think of a like for a like. Someone has liked your comments. It’s Tara, a girl from your IR recitation last semester. You click her name and scroll through her recent pictures. She looks fun outside of class. You’ve almost made it through a year of photos when ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 5 /
Juniper GreenDEGENERATIVE DISEASES OF THE BRAIN When I walk into her room Mrs. Goldberg does not recognize me. Every morning I help her out of bed, clean her up, and dress her. Every morning we meet for the first time. Some days she is thankful for my help. She calls me love, sweetheart, darling. Some days she curses me under her breath, scratches my arm when I try to steady her and cries out for a husband long deceased to come and chase the stranger out of their house. "Did she give you any grief today," Sam says as we meet by the bin in the hall. "Nope," I throw away a dirty nappy. "Sweet as a kitten." "That kitten has claws," he lifts his forearm. Three thin scars protrude from the skin. They're smooth and translucent, catching the light as Sam flexes his arm. I want to reach out and touch them but Sam moves his arm away as he stuffs dirty sheets into the hamper next to the bin. "Are you almost done with her?" he says. "Almost, I've just got to get her down to breakfast." "Just put her on the settee," Sam points to a worn ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 5 /
Scorcher
Alina GrabowskiSCORCHER June had been eating a creamsicle on the front porch when she saw them. It was the third week of July and the entire house was sweating, drops of condensation sliding down bookshelves and chair legs. Her father was having his annual boys’ weekend with some college buddies, and her mother was at an artist’s retreat in Vermont, working on her new series of collages. June was left to babysit Lily, whose tyrannical seven-year old behavior she’d only expected the heat to magnify. Instead she had become drowsily acquiescent, content to sit in the shade of the porch as long as she had a constant supply of chocolate milk and coloring books. June laid on her belly on the shadowed porch, coloring mermaids and dripping creamsicle syrup onto the page. “No mermaid has brown hair,” Lily said, leaning over with turquoise stub in hand. “It has to be realistic.” If Lily hadn’t intervened she probably wouldn’t have seen anything. She wouldn’t have looked up from Coral Casey and her sea critter pals. She wouldn’t have glanced at the maroon Lawson Shrub Service truck speeding down the road. She wouldn’t have bit her lip at the sight of Tim ... Read the full review
Better
Molly McGinnisBETTER I am salt and champagne. Salt and dirt and stars. Two-sided story, double-edged knife. Dinosaur bones and tambourines. I have walked into town by myself at dawn and seen my face reflected in the windows. I have danced down the aisles of the grocery store and blown kisses to the pharmacist with the one blue eye. I used to count tiles from the produce section to the checkout line, because I thought that if I didn't, my sister would die. In school, I learn this is some kind of misfiring, and am warned that it could come back any minute, but for now I breathe carefully and wash the idea down the bathroom sink. I am on the brink of a brilliant war. Each morning, I move in spheres. I contain mirror neurons and sunshine. Porch lights and beer cans. July. Miss Irene lives next door with her ghosts. She reads Time and The Harvard Review and washes her car on the lawn. I know a boy named Max who moved here from Louisiana last December. He has fiddler crabs tattooed on his left arm, and rough breath that makes me suspect he speaks harshly. One day he ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 5 /
Peter LaBergeTESTIMONY AFTER THE VARICOCELECTOMY My mother changes the bedpan, the evidence of life. Stomach, definition of withhold, overripe plum I did not purchase. I would never crave this heaviness, the way she folds over my body with braided fingers. Meanwhile, I dream about a god shaped like a subway station. From the surface, she blames a dose of codeine. She is careful in her faith-giving tread, knowing morning is installed and foreign as a catheter. I wonder if there is a word to describe when your mother empties the evidence of you down the toilet, flushes. Peter LaBerge is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent work appears in such publications as The Louisville Review, DIAGRAM, The Newport Review, BOXCAR Poetry Review, and Hanging Loose. In the past, he has been named a two-time Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Medalist for Poetry and a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, among others. He grew up in Connecticut, and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Adroit Journal. Image credit: MIT-Libraries on Flickr Author photo by William Sulit Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #4 ... Read the full review
Issue 4, Philadelphia Writer/Poet, Poetry /
THE FERRY by Emma Greenberg
Emma GreenbergTHE FERRY “So your mom told you about the new houses?” “Yup.” I lunged too aggressively for the volume control and my seatbelt tensed and slapped me back into my seat. The second verse of “Livin’ On A Prayer” blasted from the speakers. He reached for the dial and turned it down slowly, eyes still on the road. “What did she tell you?” I shrugged and clenched my teeth. “Not much.” “They’re only a few minutes away from each other, we’ll all be close by.” “Cool.” I had been playing 80s music in the car since I got to boarding school the year before—before that, actually, after I had visited for a night in ninth grade and all of the girls on Hall II played it from their laptops as they got dressed for a dance or geared up for a field hockey game. By now I knew all the lyrics too, but Bon Jovi’s hopeful words and electronic guitar solos suddenly sounded idealistic and whiny. It made me angry. I skipped to the next song, the next, the next—they were all annoying. I switched to the radio. “I think you’ll like the new house. You’ll have to share ... Read the full review
TELESCOPES by Kristen Sharp
Kristen SharpTELESCOPES In a dress with sequins the color of champagne, her legs like bone, she crouched on the beach and dug her hand under the packed wet sand. The New Year had been mostly Manhattans and whiskey-gingers and drunk finance hotshots from Murray Hill and Stuy-Town trying to buy girls out. The salt-cold wind blew grit down the face of the dunes. She drew her knees to her chest and drank vodka. People were getting engaged. But still she clung to her brick building in Morningside, to the holes in the walls where the electrical wiring had been gutted, to the hall light that was burnt out, to the bathtub where she’d bathed in two inches of water boiled in a pot on the stove, flopping around on her stomach like a beached whale to wash the suds off. She remembered being seventeen. As denim shorts and bare thighs on the scorched hood of a Volkswagen, and joints rolled on hot leather seats. Somebody slept on a blue and yellow beach towel at Sauvie’s. Somebody lay underneath her with his hands under the strings of her bikini, the 24-year-old drummer from the Satyricon. Somebody had gotten high with her ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 4 /
IN THE ABSENCE OF CULINARY MENTORS by Kaori Fujimoto
Kaori FujimotoIN THE ABSENCE OF CULINARY MENTORS Mom When I was growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo, every evening at five my mother donned her white apron and set about preparing dinner. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling and over the sink illuminated the whole kitchen, which was dismally dark during the daytime, and they attracted little geckos that flattened themselves on the outside of the widows. I would hear a clack-clack of the kitchen knife on the wooden cutting board and then, in twenty or thirty minutes, my heart would sink as I detected the usual smells of fish or vegetables seasoned with soy sauce, sugar, and sake—conventional Japanese dishes I never found appetizing. She also made Western dishes, like a beef stew, potato gratin, and spaghetti Napolitana, because my father loved these rich foods and so did I; I felt exhilarated whenever the aroma of gravy or white sauce wafted into the living room. Sometimes I hovered behind Mom to help, but she would nudge me out of the kitchen and do everything herself. She didn’t have the patience to teach me how to peel potatoes or cut up onions when she could finish the task in ... Read the full review
Issue 4, Nonfiction /
Christmas 2009 by Catherine Mosier-Mills
Catherine Mosier-MillsCHRISTMAS 2009 The family was crowded around the small white gazebo in the middle of the yard. There was a map, too, pasted on the corkboard floating high on the gazebo’s walls, confining the chaotic compound in abstract squares and rectangles. Ruth didn’t touch the peanut brittle, the haphazard compensation present from her middle child, the feminist from Philadelphia, who’d brought her two kids. The conversation was a facsimile of previous email exchanges that she’d intercepted from her late husband’s computer, carrying the buzzwords of a telltale worrywart: college search, apnea, bullying. Whenever Ruth tried to make her way in and say the words she wanted so desperately for them to hear—state’s coming to get me. I don’t belong here, Russ is having an affair—they all looked away, like she was some kind of contagion that would spoil their perfectly planned afternoon. And then she stared at the tin box with its pastel Victorian design, remembering the gray barn. She wanted to open it, everyone could tell. Her fingers trembled and then returned to her sides, where they dangled limply over the top of her sweater. Pea green, just like old Mama had worn, before Papa took out the ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 4, Philadelphia Writer/Poet /
FRANCESCA by Mohammadreza Mirzaei
Mohammadreza MirzaeiFRANCESCA I was exhausted. It was an hour since we parked the car down the mountain and came up the slope. I had spent all my life in Tehran, but I had never been in Tochal, which was one of the city's tourist attractions. And interestingly, this time, I was there with someone who was from elsewhere in the world. Her name was Francesca. She was an Italian girl, from somewhere near Naples, a student of Eastern studies in Naples. She had been to Iran several times, once as a tourist, and again as an intern at the Italian embassy. She was here now to take a course at the Dehkhoda institute to improve her Persian. Maybe it's not right to say, "to improve”. She could say "hello" and "goodbye" in Persian and she might be able to learn "How are you?" and "Fine, thanks" this time. She had been in Tehran for a few days when she called me, and said: can we go to: “Tochal?” And I answered: “Tochal?” A few days after that conversation, we were in Tochal, on the side of a mountain. We went and sat at an outdoor cafe. The waiter brought a ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 4 /
HOW A HEART by Sean Lyon
Sean LyonHOW A HEART Tricia the three-toed sloth started to slipper my hand into her undergrowth. “Wow,” I clickered, “I’m in love with this rainforest.” Then she maffled her tongue down some other toucan’s throat. How a heart emflampers under such circumstances! “O,” I lunkered, “The bananarama is cancelled, it’s over.” I clambered up the stairs, my beak petricuckolded, clorping like a gaunt gibbous moon against each step on my sweltering accent to smither canopy. Just then an ocelot corrustickered my eye, slimmering over her tree-house-porch card table and trucing me hence with her manicured claws. I wallifer-fluttered, with all the agility of a milk frog whose leg’s been snippered by a plurching boa, to this ocelot’s treetop abode. She enfolded me. How a heart carditisizes under such circumstances! “I’ve been at solitaire for too long, kid,” she volupurred, “Let’s get to know us better, what do you say?” She crisply whurfed me in to a game of gin. We whiled the rainy season talking about grandmothers, our first bicycles, grub worms, plumage fashion and fur coats, horticulture, the lingering despondence of our previously stulfilcensed hearts, and our mutual distaste for gum fwaffter-plapquenmoppupfgurters. After that, aloft in spirit and luck, ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 4 /
VINYL by Brian Druckenmiller
Brian DruckenmillerVINYL I was ready to die, so I jumped off the highest bridge in town, the river a dark frozen mass ready to accept my mangled mess of skin and insides. I detached from my descending body and watched it fall lifelessly while I drifted through the air with the winter breeze and the stars and those snowflakes that instantly melt when they land on you. I saw or imagined my mom’s house from the sky, about six miles from the bridge. Her house had been empty since I left nearly four years ago. Well, that’s not true. She lived there. I drove by occasionally but I don’t know why. Well, that’s not true either. I did know why. I wanted to make sure she still existed. Did she know I still existed? One time I drove by and she was unloading groceries or something from her trunk. I didn’t shout or stop or honk though. I didn’t want her to be disappointed. Or I didn’t want her to know she could have been right to worry about me. She was right, and she’d be real disappointed if she found this out. She may have to answer the standard ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 4 /
NAVIGATION BY SPOONLIGHT by David Poplar
David PoplarNAVIGATION BY SPOONLIGHT Six hundred thousand children in the Horn of Africa are dying from ribcages bloated with hunger. They wait for helicopters filled with peanut butter. –from “To the father at the restaurant” by Julie Krystyna Cheng Helicopters of peanut butter stick To the marshmallow clouds. Like raisins In pristine white dough—the type of bone-ground Dough that will someday become fine china. No, you see, the sky is not the limit; The sky is just a small round bowl. We bounce around the edges, Never finding the corners. But in the serrated light of the spoon, I hear a voice. It sounds like someone old And very, very tall. I’m not sure If he is the one with the spoon, or if I am. He tells me I have high cholesterol. I don’t eat enough fiber, almost no fruit. David Poplar is a graduate student at the Brandeis University, where he studies Philosophy. He has published work in Boston Literary Magazine, Apiary Online, and PennAppetit, as well as more avant garde publications, such as the Dickinson Law Review and the New Jersey Law Journal. Image credit: Julie Jablonski on Flickr Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #3 ... Read the full review
Issue 3, Philadelphia Writer/Poet, Poetry /
THE WASPS AND THE QUEEN by Sarah Van Name
Sarah Van NameTHE WASPS AND THE QUEEN In the back of the house Sherry and Miranda were playing in the plastic swimming pool. It was blue on the inside. The plastic made the water seem blue. Sherry stepped out of the pool, shards of grass and flecks of black dirt clinging to her feet. Her knees were brown and red with unhealed scrapes, and her hair hung wet from her head. Over the course of the summer, it had faded from white-blonde to green, a color like the sky when a tornado is approaching. The heat of the sun had warmed her shoulders to fever pitch and now set about drying the damp parts of her body: a hip here, a hand there, the bread dough curves of her calves. It was a warm August day and the third straight month of mornings spent playing with her sister. “You look like a mermaid,” Miranda said from her cross-legged place inside the pool. Her skinny body folded in upon itself like a paper fan. Her eyes were slits, catlike in the sun. “I am a mermaid,” Sherry said after a pause. “My name is Queen Esmeralda, the mermaid. And you are ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 3 /
http://pixabay.com/en/shoes-depend-leash-sky-beautiful-93732/
Hannah WhiteADVENTURES IN GYM CLASS Put your feet in my old sneakers for a minute. They’re nine years old and smell like a pubescent locker room, so hold your nose and just do it. Now, let me take you back to my middle-school gym class. Every day in “physical education,” as the euphemism goes, you are allotted five minutes to do the following: change into your uniform, lock up your stuff, tie up your hair, and sit down criss-cross applesauce in your assigned seat on the gym floor. This is all easier said than done. First, see, you have to remember to shove your gym uniform and your Asics into the bottom of your backpack that morning. (Your backpack is purple, and monogrammed, and you’ve had it since the fourth grade. It’s embarrassing.) Then you have to remember your combination lock and—crucially—your combination. Then you have to navigate the crowds into the gossipy girls locker room, the haven of wiry track stars and sinewy-thighed volleyball players, and undertake the harrowing task of getting naked in public. Strategically, you face the lockers, hunch your shoulders, and start removing your layers. White cardigan, American Eagle polo shirt, tank top, ribbon belt, stretchy ... Read the full review
LINEY’S SENSE OF IT by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
Ashlee Paxton-TurnerLINEY’S SENSE OF IT It was the not-so-early morning, coming on about nine o’clock, in the early spring or end of winter, whichever one prefers, and Dr. Naismith’s game the Saturday prior had just made the town feel alive and made its boys feel like they could be men going somewhere, elsewhere. Dismissing the papers on the desk, it was decided that today Sherwood Anderson was more important. There is no sense in trying to explain just what that means, but it is something one can’t help feeling, something one might try to explain nevertheless. That Saturday, like all of the other Saturdays of the season, had brought the town out of its kitchens, living rooms, and Main Street offices. Of course, that Saturday’s game required a drive to a dusty gymnasium in a slightly bigger town. The hour’s drive to watch the boys play Dr. Naismith’s game had been spent differently by the different citizens of the town. Some had clambered aboard a bus, freed by the absence of seatbelts. Others had chosen to ride privately in their own vehicles, enjoying the ride, the accompanying conversations, and radio stations. In the gymnasium, crowds filled the bleachers and the ... Read the full review
Angel, Kiln-Cast Glass, Plaster, Paper, Wax, detail
Morgan GilbreathTHE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET My artwork is a product of the ground beneath my feet. I do not own a car, so my experience of a place is created entirely through biking, walking, and the occasional use of public transportation. Because of this, I have a very intimate relationship with sidewalks, as well as the buildings and streets with which they are connected. I am endlessly curious about the things that people discard onto the streets, a no-man’s-land of both public and private space in which no one is held accountable, allowing for a strange sort of freedom. This concrete space between roads and homes has proven to be one of the greatest influences in my work. In the morning I go to buy milk from the bodega across the street, where the shopkeeper’s knowledge of English is limited to “hello” and “thank you.” I like them there. People loiter in the doorway of the tiny corner store, socializing with the shopkeepers who talk to them from behind scratched bulletproof glass complete with transparent compartments with every sickly sweet candy wrapper meticulously organized into its own secure drawer. In this wonderful community gathering space, however, people are constantly ... Read the full review
Art, Issue 3, Philadelphia Writer/Poet /
Lydia PudzianowskiGHOST STORY “Were you looking for ghosts?” The police officer inspected the three of us—twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old. There was no way we could tell him the truth. Earlier that afternoon we’d passed my hardcover copy of Weird Pennsylvania back and forth over takeout Thai food on the floor of our apartment, which was getting emptier as each newly graduated roommate moved her belongings out. Between forkfuls of pad see-ew, I pointed out that we weren’t far from one of the book’s allegedly haunted places. Under the right conditions, Irwin Road, in Pittsburgh’s North Park neighborhood, was said to be permeated by a blue mist and any combination of witches, evil dwarves, hanging ghosts, deer-human hybrids, and lonely dogs. Up until then, we’d had no post-lunch plans. We didn’t have post-college plans either, but this would at least occupy us for an evening. Twelve hours later our mode of transportation, a black Toyota Corolla, was askew off the side of a dirt road. The dirt road led directly to the main road. All we would have had to do was put the car in reverse and back up in a straight line. This was attempted, but did ... Read the full review
Issue 3, Nonfiction /
REMNANTS by Julia Hogan
Julia HoganREMNANTS The day my father’s friend, Wade, tried to build us a screened-in porch on the front of our house was the day my mother decided to move out. Wade made his living by selling muscadine grapes and handmade cowboy hats. He lived in a trailer off of I-85, on a piece of land that used to be large but had been whittled away as he sold acres to pay for his liquor without having to get a regular job. Wade enlarged his trailer with plywood and sheet metal and duct tape. My mother called him a redneck, a bum, a white trash ignoramus, but my father saw it as ingenuity. “My friend Mary Ann has a screened-in porch,” I said. I was about ten, and to me, that was about as close to luxury as you could get in a town like Kite, South Carolina. “She’s also got one of those above ground pools. Sometimes her daddy finds dead baby mice in it. They try to go swimming and get killed by all the chlorine.” My parents were arguing about Wade the night before he was supposed to come and build our screened-in porch. “Why are you guys ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 3 /
S. I. AdamsPESANTE CON MOTO/ALLEGRO BARBARO Street signs reflect neon blinks on and off and on and back from the turn signal click-resting-pause between inhales drawn shallow between chapped lips and flaky nostrils. “East” – off – “East” – off – “Ease” – off – “ ‘e’s off” – “’e’s off” as the traffic light changes from mid-October to early spring and the policemen waves pedestrians to their apartments, chins tucked to their chest like sleeping pigeons, making church balconies their homes when all the trees have been uprooted and turned into desks and dressers pedestrians pile their lives into and I clamp my crooked teeth onto the steering wheel and let love and all its offerings change lanes without signaling – I'm too old to chase after them, clenched fist waving in the air. S.I. Adams was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in southern Ohio. A Cornell College graduate, Adams now writes poetry and tends bar in Cleveland. This is Adams’s first publication. Image credit: Tiago Aguiar on Unsplash Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #3 ... Read the full review
Issue 3, Poetry /
ON (AND OFF) CONSISTENCY by J. Michael Mumme
John Michael MummeON (AND OFF) CONSISTENCY Objective Statement: For the last two years, I worked as a Staff Assistant for the Career Services office at Cedarville University. My job was to review résumés. A student comes in for a peer review, feeling little confidence in her ability to write a résumé and none in the merit of her past job experiences of baby-sitting, lawn-mowing, and cafeteria work. When she leaves, though, together we have crafted a pristine portrait of her, dressed her in words and white space perfectly suited to win her the job of her choice. She simply needed reassurance, and who could not be reassured by watching all the best things about oneself slowly fill a single piece of paper? In “Strangers,” a song by the British rock band White Lies, lead singer Harry McVeigh recalls a lonely one-night stand. “I pressed my ear to your chest,” he begins, “and heard something personal. A whisper that knew my name.” McVeigh seems disturbed by this sudden, unexpected intimacy. “Is this how your heart treats all strangers, with love and affection? Then I feel cold and empty.” Most of the people who visited me at Career Services were strangers. We ... Read the full review
Issue 3, Nonfiction /
DAISY by Chris Ludovici
Chris LudoviciDAISY Rebecca Saunders was mean. She was the meanest girl in the fourth grade, the meanest girl in school, maybe the meanest girl ever. It wasn’t that Daisy wanted to think that way about Rebecca Saunders, or anyone else for that matter. Daisy liked to like people, her mom always said to try to see the best in everyone, and Daisy did her best to do just that. But some people… some people there was just no best to see, no matter how hard she tried. The truth was, Rebecca Saunders was a bad word. She was a word Daisy wasn’t allowed to say but that Aunt Casey said all the time. It rhymed with witch. Aunt Casey used it to describe Rebecca Saunders even though it made Daisy’s dad mad when she did. “Did that stupid little (bad-word-that-rhymes-with-witch) start anything today?” she would ask Daisy when she got home from school. Most days Daisy would shake her head no, Rebecca Saunders had left her alone, and it was usually true. Mostly. She didn’t bother telling her aunt about the little things Rebecca did, how if Daisy accidentally made eye contact with her, Rebecca’s face would go into this ... Read the full review
from APOSTROPHES by Anna Strong
Anna Strongfrom APOSTROPHES "Hockey" This poem will be mostly about force. With one finger on my knee my science teacher tells me I can skate better than half the guys on varsity and I should really try out for the team. In class I’m called on (caught doodling) and asked which muscle group is most responsible for the slapshot and all I want to know is what happens when you give a poet a stick of gum, twenty cents, and point to the cigarette burn on your wrist? "Mouth" In my yellow room, I slipped a spare button into my cheek and held it there all through dinner. Between bits of carrot there was also button, peas and rice were also button, ice cream and spoon became button despite the cold that should have frozen all else away. I was discovered when I let it click against my incoming molars. She said there would be drastic measures. I learned drastic means winter and all the things people will do to touch clouds with a fork. "Nausicaa" At the podium the poet says that she’s always talking to the Victorians. She even invites them to dinner when she needs an idea ... Read the full review
CROCODILE HANDS by Amber Lee Dodd
Amber Lee DoddCROCODILE HANDS Like blind men feeling for pictures Anna and Chloe had felt for differences in their matching faces. Eyes closed Anna could feel the little kink in the bridge of Chloe’s nose, a dimple when she smiled that she could not duplicate and lips that curved higher into a pert cupids bow. Eyes open they were identical but eyes shut they knew every variation. As children they had played their game of reflection as if an act of praise. Hours spent mirroring each other under the plastic garden table. Capturing each other’s grins, grimaces before turning to hands that mimicked and mocked each other. Two sets that touched fingertips before twisting and turning into other shapes, one hand trying to keep up with the other; hands that turned into white knuckled fists before springing back to open up into flowers petals. The fingers stretched back, palms cupped, only for the other to respond with finger tips that suddenly snapped against thumbs, turning into hungry crocodile mouths. And snap, snap they’d go with their crocodile hands at the people who tried to tell them apart. It was a cruel turn of fate that separated the two then. Left ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 2 /
WASH, RINSE, REPEAT by Carly Greenberg
Carly GreenbergWASH, RINSE, REPEAT There are so many cycles to choose from. Bulky, delicate, perm press. The dial shifts from one setting to the other. Darks, whites, colors. It turns clock-wise and back. Hot, warm, cold. A tablet is loaded, a button pressed, the lid lowers with a click. Time seems to drag on with just a few grumbling quips, this metal box mocking you for your peculiar fixation. A few moments more until you hear it- the rush of a miniature tidal wave. The metal cube begins to shift and scrape and tear at the Spanish tile beneath its feet. It is time. You slowly lift your hands until they hover over the clear yet reflective lid. To hold them for a moment, to feel the humming of water, metal, and tile on the soles of your hands. A forceful push past the magnetic hovering and you transcend the barrier. Your delicate palms lay flat on the glass. You feel it buzz through your skin, through your veins, and into something greater. A young soul vibrates with power that cannot be obtained outside of this small yellow room. Face presses to glass with eyes wide. You have entered the ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 2 /
BiPRODUCT by Leah Koontz
Leah KoontzBIPRODUCT: Drag, Societal Identity, and Gender Equality BiProduct is a project I embarked on which considers drag queens, art, female expectations, and the media. This series features four of my works which address gender roles, equality, and social construction. BiProduct features sculpture and performance, created from nylon, spandex, foam, digital media, and plastic. Drag Queens possess many progressive qualities. However, I feel that certain aspects of Drag should require more careful consideration. Over the past two decades, drag has transformed tremendously. What exactly is drag in 2013? A drag queen is a man, usually homosexual, creating a female illusion through clothing and performance. This illusion ends when the costume comes off. There are many genres and subgenres of drag. Not every drag queen agrees or identifies with all of the categories and genres that have been named. Some queens do not approve of various terms that are currently used in certain gay communities. Sometimes these categories can divide the drag community, which some feel is unproductive. Certain genres of drag queens aim to be “fishy,” meaning as close to a biological woman’s aesthetics as possible. Other genres are more “androgynous.” This genre relies on gender bending, the act of ... Read the full review
BEATING PLOUGHSHARES INTO iPODS by Anya Lichtenstein
Anya LichtensteinBEATING PLOUGHSHARES INTO iPODS As a Conserva-dox Jew by upbringing and agnostic by nature, I don’t know whether I believe in the afterlife. Sometimes I’m certain that we are all just worm food. Other days I can feel my grandparents looking down on me from heaven while I’m opening a grad school acceptance letter or trying on dresses at Bloomingdales (my maternal grandmother believed above all in the god of retail). In my hunt for a compelling afterlife scenario, I found that several cultures have done a thorough job figuring out where to send their dead and how. The ancient Norse believed the soul could wind up in a number of places: Helgafjell, the "holy mountain," where the dead go on with their lives pretty much as usual; Hel, which is not as dreary or painful as its fiery Christian homophone; and Valhalla, which is essentially a Gold’s Gym, a predominantly male realm where fallen warriors pump iron in preparation for the last great battle, Ragnarök. Much like the Egyptians and their pyramids, the Norse sent the dead off on a 1,400 ºC funeral pyre with practical instruments. The packing list often included weapons and the dead person’s slaves, ... Read the full review
Issue 2, Nonfiction /
Caleb TrueTHE PAIN I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. At the moment it was pain but sometimes it was just a sensation. I sat down at the edge of the sidewalk and leaned over to puke. Didn’t. I stood, continued to walk. The twinge came back. I pressed two fingers into my abdomen. Pressed and pressed until I felt bone. I googled appendicitis. Scrolled through symptoms. No excruciating pain. No vomiting. The pain wasn’t getting worse, and sometimes it wasn’t even pain. I wondered if I should stop weightlifting with my neighbor. I knew he had an anger problem. Weightlifting is no anger management strategy, but he also had a gym membership, so. Did I work too much, masturbate too much? Too hard? I thought constructively about masturbating. Zoning out, I cupped my hand near my dick, deep in thought. Like this? I thought. Like this? I thought about calling my doctor. Called my mother instead. She said to call the doctor. My doctor was a wonderful woman, looking good for almost fifty and coming out with another book on the joys and wonders of natural birthing. I woke early for the appointment, took a hot shower, put ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 2 /
BETWEEN THE FRAMES by Kristen Martin
Kristen MartinBETWEEN THE FRAMES My parents never owned their own video camera—in the 1990s, it was the sort of luxury item (like a snow blower) that could be borrowed from a relative or neighbor when needed. With my Uncle Joe’s bulky camcorder hoisted on his shoulder, my dad would record birthdays, vacations, and Christmases. The camera was a heavy machine, much too big for John and me to ever play with; it was obsolete even by 1990, when handheld camcorders became the tool of choice for doting parents. Nevertheless, my dad ignored his bad back on those special occasions and accumulated hours of footage of us running through the sprinklers in our backyard and ripping wrapping paper off presents. The impulse to document stopped around 1997—by that time, I was 8 years old and John was 11. Maybe we weren’t cute enough to immortalize on moving film anymore. More likely, life just got too busy—who could remember to borrow a camera in the endless cycle of dance recitals, baseball games, First Holy Communions, and trips to the beach? About the time that my dad stopped recording our major life events, I started watching our home videos. Back then, when I ... Read the full review
ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT, Photographs
Eleanor Leonne Bennett PHOTOGRAPHS This series of images were all taken at the Michael Allcroft Antiques shop in Disley, Cheshire. I was born on the Cheshire-Derbyshire border and have lived there all my life. I love to take photographs in museums and in cities, but as I am not often able to travel alone long distances, I have to look for subjects a lot closer to home. The red lion sign is a favourite of mine and makes me think of all the old pubs and of the social life they used to generate in local towns and villages near to me. Only across from the road from Michael Allcroft's, lies an abandoned pub which will now probably face its future as living accommodation as apposed to a busy hive in the community. Here is a photo of the sign in the Michael Allcroft catalogue. And here is a photo of the rocking horse in the catalogue. Contrast with my version of the rocking horse. The luminous chairs are a wonderful vibrant contrast. The blue tinge and the vicious red match together well. The white running over the red and the almost flour like covering to the blue makes me want something this vibrant in my ... Read the full review
Art, Issue 1 /
GARY'S SISTER by Max McKenna
Max McKennaGARY'S SISTER The same way we didn’t know, way back when, that mom and dad couldn’t stand their “friends, ” so we didn’t know that Gary’s sister wasn’t interested in either of us, which starts to explain why she kept mixing up our names last Saturday night in the busted stretch limo that cut through the grey-blue soup of Pacific Avenue, with the winding path of a rocket about to be decommissioned, after she pulled us into the back of it where she was already singing along with the radio and pounding the ceiling that snowed bits of dried-out upholstery on our heads and where her skirt kept flying up—though, yes, you were right, there were three other guys in that limo with us; it wasn’t in the cards; and weighing it all out now, we did do the right thing to leave and drive the forty-five minutes from Atlantic City back to mom and dad’s though it was late and I’d been drinking, because in the end I don’t think it would be healthy for us anymore to have a girl come between us, and this way you got to sleep in your bed and I in mine, ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 1 /
AND WE SLEPT IN A WIGWAM by Darlene P. Campos
Darlene P. CamposAND WE SLEPT IN A WIGWAM Getting kicked out of my house wasn't a surprise. It happened to my ancestors, my parents, and to me several times. I lost count pretty quick. The landlord left minutes before Javier came back from his latest job search. He saw me standing in the middle of the street with everything I could carry from our former place. “Kicked out again,” I said when he pulled the truck up to me. “But we asked the landlord for two more weeks,” he said. “It’s been two weeks,” I reminded him. Javier helped me into the truck. He gave me a kiss on my cheek and we went to grab some food. We split a Navajo taco from Joe and Aggie’s Café. Our stomachs were still grumbling when we were back in the truck, but we learned to deal with it by making out. “Maybe we should go to my mom’s,” Javier suggested. I told him no way. We had been at his mom’s several times in the last year and she was bound to figure something out. Mrs. Bluehorse was a sweet woman who lived doors down from my childhood home. My mom ... Read the full review
Fiction, Issue 1 /
CORMAC by Martha Cooney
Martha CooneyCORMAC I was kicking my football along the road in our estate, timing my kicks to each time the curbstones changed color. They were painted in the Ireland flag’s green, white, and gold, just to let anybody foolish enough to get lost in North Belfast know they were in a Catholic estate. I turned into the alley and kicked the ball ahead, prepared to chase after it past imaginary defenders, but stopped short. Standing in front of the rubbish bin halfway down the alley was Cormac Devaney, from my year at school. He was holding a teddy bear, not even looking my way. He laid the bear on the edge of the bin and held it down with his elbow while he lit a match. Then he picked up the teddy, pressing the light against its fat stomach and dropping the ball of flame into the bin. I walked toward him. “What are you doing?” “What do you think I’m doing?” he said. Smoke started to billow up, thick and black. “Is that yours?” I asked. He laughed. “You think I play with teddies? I found it in my neighbor’s garden.” “You’re burning some wee kid’s bear?” “Aye. They ... Read the full review
Samuel ThompsonSONATA FOR CLAVIER AND VIOLIN, K. 526 (September 2008) The day of playing with Mr. G.'s transitional bow-- yes, the one that they used in Mozart's time-- is fresh in my psyche as I work to taper and bloom, stepping away from the vertical and the punctuation-marked strokes made with the extended index finger. Winner of a Participation Prize in the 2011 Padova International Violin Competition, violinist Samuel Thompson has established a career that spans solo, chamber music and orchestral performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and arts journalism. In addition to performing regularly with the Delaware, Roanoke and Harrisburg symphonies, Samuel has been presented in solo, chamber music and interdisciplinary performance throughout the United States, Canada and Italy. This is Samuel's first poetry publication and he shares very deep thanks both to his friend Deborah Needleman Armintor for her advocacy and support and to Jorja Fleezanis who encouraged him to keep writing. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's All Flash 0.5 Preview Issue ... Read the full review
Issue .5, Poetry /
DEAR COUCH by Anna Strong
Anna StrongDEAR COUCH Dear Couch, I want to zip myself in a pocket and watch baseball. You say sit down and stop moving the furniture around. A square of light hits my palm from the gap in the curtain teeth and I want it to fill my creases with more than skin. Despite spiders, my name is safe in your mouth. Grain by grain you’re putting salt on your tongue. The game ends, there are questions, outside it’s all purple and traffic. When you’re asleep on my knees and it’s just me and the crushed end of chips and the street below wide awake, I remember my first god was my mother, my second, the light switch. Anna Strong is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and is forthcoming in Peregrine. Currently she is working on her senior honors thesis, a collection of prose poems tentatively titled Apostrophes. Anna also helps teach Penn's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's All Flash 0.5 Preview Issue ... Read the full review

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