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YOU WERE GOING TO TELL ME by R. C. Barajas

YOU WERE GOING TO TELL ME
by R. C. Barajas

I’m sorry - you were going to tell me something shocking. I’m ready to hear it, but I may sleep instead. I know you won’t take it personally.

I’ve been listening to music. Tiptoeing across the albums of my recent youth, times so far gone they show themselves to me in crayon colors. Of late, it’s been 60s stuff, and my stereo serves up a docile, or raunchy replay of memories. Convenient, because as you’ve seen, I doze off so easily. I’m tossed back and forth from then to now without much warning. Sleeping and waking are so entirely alike that I scarcely bother to differentiate anymore.

THEY SHARED A FISH by Eva Lomski

Eva LomskiTHEY SHARED A FISH The girl wondered if he was naked under the sheet. The young man lay on his stomach on a bed trolley positioned in the sunniest spot in the courtyard. Weeds shimmied in the cracks. The…

NIGHT SWEATS by Jen Karetnick

Jen KaretnickNIGHT SWEATS They rise upon you, flood you in the neighborhood of sleep where once-solid canyons of breasts, hips, knees, parched from breath, west of age, have slipped, begun to crack. It’s not that there’s a lack of cool…

TURID by Rachel B. Glaser

Rachel B. GlaserTurid The girl was bored and wandered. She did not care if she was tagged, no one could force her to play. If she was It, she would not react, she would continue looking at the Wilsons’ plants,…

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…

THE SONG IN A CLOUD by Kate LaDew

Kate LaDewTHE SONG IN A CLOUD Willard was always humming to himself. Whenever Tom saw him, he was humming and looking up and smiling and sometimes not smiling, sometimes looking even sad, but always humming. Tom thought Willard might be…

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,…

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.…

CAREFULLY WRAPPED FESTIVAL OF DISCOVERY by Rich Ives

Rich IvesCAREFULLY WRAPPED FESTIVAL OF DISCOVERY There was a sadness and hearts went in there where it was waiting               a small boat on the riverriver of what’s next                 the rope you can’t see rope with a private moon at the…

JOURNALISM by John Carroll

John CarrollJOURNALISM No one in my family talks about Uncle Terry, or why there never was a funeral. We did have a wake. We gathered at his house. The priests came in turtlenecks and polo shirts. My mother hovered by…

ON BEIGE by Prairie Markussen

Prairie MarkussenON BEIGE She is a palomino in the Nordic countries, her hair scorched to a glow. She is the Northern ice floe, the delicate drip, the dusted broccoli top that slips downward into the sensual sliver. She is the…

THE PAIN by Caleb True

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…

THE LAW OF CONSTANT ANGLES by Jason Newport

Jason NewportTHE LAW OF CONSTANT ANGLES Illustrations by Sarah Andrew I prop one boot on the Mustang’s running board. The car creaks as I lean staring across its soiled white roof at the honey. Freezing November winds off Lake Michigan…

THE STRAIGHT WARP OF NECESSITY by Mark Mondalek

Mark MondalekTHE STRAIGHT WARP OF NECESSITY Seated on the examiners table, I hold a mouse pad-sized monitor in place over my left breast with assorted electrodes leeched upon my arms and chest and my pacemaker’s memory bank is successfully tapped…

OF SNAKES AND STONES by Jennifer Pullen

Jennifer PullenOF SNAKES AND STONES I Medusa still dreams of being beautiful. At night on her sheep skin-padded but still cold stone bed she remembers combing her hair, its dark sheen, the heavy still weight of it. She used to…

BEYOND THE BLUE RIDGE by Grace Maselli

Grace MaselliBEYOND THE BLUE RIDGE In spite of the anxiety that flares in my stomach, I get ready to move 300 miles away. The upcoming relocation fills my gut with disturbances—tiny cyclones whirring counterclockwise through the commonly known organ. These…

AFTER DINNER by Katherine Heiny

Katherine HeinyAFTER DINNER After dinner, Maya steered the minivan through the icy streets to their own house, Rhodes silent next to her in the passenger seat, Nash fussing in a low-level but constant way. When they got inside, Rhodes suddenly became…

THE TAO OF WORDS by Timothy Kercher

Timothy KercherTHE TAO OF WORDS To my daughter Buddha is a baby. Most everyone is a baby unless you are ma-ma or da-da or dog. Cows she knows, as they stand in high-mountain meadows in the Cimarron, laughter follows our…

TWO POEMS by M. A. Schaffner

M. A. SchaffnerTWO POEMS WE HAVE TO TALK Returning to this planet from the road I find the plate tectonics have become disturbingly unfamiliar. But you know how Teddy Bears come home to roost, and how it just becomes awkward…

BOX SCORE by Kevin Varrone reviewed by Anna Strong

BOX SCORE
by Kevin Varrone
Digital Earthenware, available from iTunes

Reviewed by Anna Strong
Kevin Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography spans across form — from autobiography to history to visual art to the baseball rulebook to the prose poem — content, and reading experience. Presented as a highly interactive free iPad and (by early June 2013) iPhone app, Varrone’s text, which he calls an autobiography, does almost everything in its power to thwart that somewhat restrictive classification. “Box Score” is made of a series of prose poems, each of which invokes Philadelphia history, baseball history (e.g. the first night game ever played between the Phillies and the Reds) Philadelphia baseball, a speaker’s personal recollections (“police your area my dad would say as he smoothed dirt around the first base bag w/ his foot after a bad hop ate me up”), baseball terminology (page 78 is simply a line of a batter’s statistics: g: 1 ab: 0 r: 0 h: 0 2b: 0 3b: 0 hr: 0 avg: .000), found language (Harry Kalas’ famous “outta here” long ball call appears on page 73), and lyrical, evocative images that seem disembodied from — and beautifully juxtapose — the rest of the language (“I’d pick dandelions & snap their heads before they turned to wishes,” page 19).

OUT OF THE BLUE by Renée K. Nicholson

Renée K. NicholsonOUT OF THE BLUE Shorthand we just called it “Bluebird,” but technically the role was Princess Florina. Hers is the tale of a maiden who wanted to learn to fly, and about the prince, disguised as the blue…

GONE by Miriam Sagan

Miriam SaganGONE After photographs by Nell Dickerson This needs narrative– Who left, and why, And who came back– The photograph The house completely covered in vines, Or vines in the shape of a house. I once lived Where creeper pried…

WORKS ON PAPER, by Ira Joel Haber

Ira Joel Haber WORKS ON PAPER I have always made art including drawings and works on paper. This selection is from 1972 to 2013 and is a good sample of the themes, images and mediums that have always interested me…

IN HEAVEN by Rachel B. Glaser

Rachel B. GlaserIN HEAVEN they could have lived in clouds but so missed houses that they actually built some they missed roads though in life, roads hadn’t really appealed to them in a nostalgic, industrious phase they assembled a touristy…

HEAT by Marybeth Rua Larsen

Marybeth Rua-LarsenHEAT for the first thirteen days of August. I’m swimming in lemons, squeezed within an inch of their lives, waterlogged, pressed to the bottom by ice. My lips curl around the straw, suck down the pits in waves of…

from FLIGHT OF AUGUST by Lawrence Eby

Lawrence Ebyfrom FLIGHT OF AUGUST 6. A desk melts into the tile floor, the windows cracked and browning. A forest of homes caught fire to dry cold, lightning struck Joshua tree, build the fire, son build the fire, son chilled…

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…

JAM by Kelly McQuain

Kelly McQuainJAM At dusk, they come haunting to slake their hunger: doe and fawn threading autumn brush. Down hillside, through hollow, they search for fallen apples—rotten spoils of the abandoned orchard Mom’s lived by since Dad passed on. The deer…

THE DILETTANTE’S DEVOTIONAL by Lise Funderburg

I stayed up 'til 1:00 AM a few weeks ago, and where was the party? At my desk, with everything but the keyboard covered in postage stamps. Polish stamps, Poczta Polska, all issued between 1928 and 1969. Musty old stamps honoring tanks and trade union congresses, marking six-year plans and newspaper tricentennials and the 1000-year anniversary of the country itself. Clumps of stamps memorializing uprisings in Silesia, the recovery of territories, and planes, lots of planes, carrying mail or flying over cities. New steelworks, new electric plants, well-muscled and barefoot coal miners, studious children, Curie and Kopernik and korfball, Chopin and Paderewski, Stalin and Hitler, zoo animals and butterflies. Not one stamp memorialized or honored or even acknowledged Catholicism.

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