FOOLS GIVE YOU REASONS — SARAH SCHIFF

/

The aquamarine paper mask obscured the bottom half of the nurse’s face, but her eyes sparkled brown beneath ink-coated lashes.  The doctor regretted not weeding his salt-and-pepper monobrow.  The top of your face assumes so much responsibility for expression when you work in a hospital.
             The man on the table was mumbling—something about needing to stop.  Not many people enjoy a rubber tube up the ass, and even fewer must like it when it’s a welcome-to-middle-age medical procedure.
             The doctor wondered what the nurse liked.  He wondered if she loved her new husband—the man wasn’t much to look at, the doctor thought, but packed a lot in the wallet.
             So many marriages are forged out of something other than love.
             He wondered if he still loved his own wife, if there was a point to their communal existence now that the kids were grown and gone. 
             “Leave it alone!”  The man on the table was yelling now, not unheard of, but the doctor was intrigued by the unexpected.  The nurse increased the dosage of the twilight drugs then quieted the man with a pat on the back and a shushing sound.  The doctor imagined her lips in the shape of a kiss as he maneuvered the tube deeper.
             “Looking good,” the doctor said, tilting his head toward the screen televising the man’s lower intestine.  The nurse met the doctor’s eyes, then looked away.
             His heart lurched, and he imagined them together, smuggled in a mothy, anonymous freeway motel.  The thrill under covers.
             An aeolian moan escaped from the patient’s mouth.  He was bald except a ring of white hair around the base of his skull.  With the glow of the florescent lights, it looked like a halo.
             The nurse cleared her throat, her eyes angled toward the screen.  A polyp pulsed red and menacing.  The doctor welcomed the opportunity to brandish his electric wire.  “It’s pretty beastly.  Can you bring me the snare and cautery?”  He hadn’t meant to rhyme and winced at the echo.
             “What euphony,” she said, bringing him the mirrored tray.  He tried to convey a smirk through his eyes, a return of her witty flirtation.  But also to play it safe.  Coded flirtation may not be flirtation at all, but the doctor knew from experience that it usually was.
             The man on the table was mumbling again, fidgeting too.  Reluctant to begin the polypectomy with such a mutinous patient, the doctor opened his mouth to call for nitrous.
             “Stop that right now.”  The patient’s words were sober and clear, punctuated like the bullet points of a lecture.  
             The doctor heard the words, and the patient exhaled and lay still.
             When the doctor handed the nurse the seared polyp, she sealed it in the orange bag and asked him where he was eating.  The doctor pretended not to hear, said goodbye to the sleeping patient with his eyes, and left the room.  He was going home to his wife for lunch.

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is now a fugitive from higher education.  She writes short fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Arizona Quarterly.

ONE OF OUR MORE SERIOUS POETS — TARA ROEDER

/

She’s one of our more serious poets.  Seventeen affairs and counting.  (Several with Russians.)  Since 2003 and on a daily basis she has produced from 5:17 a.m. to 7:03 a.m. on a slice of gravlax and a cracked mug of black coffee.

Her tiny daughter Sophia Maria goes to a Montessori school.

No flippant ball of energy, no kittenish ingénue, she excavates deeply.  Her work washes over you like a brilliant benediction (claimed one reviewer), and leaves you panting and jealous.  Not a word is wasted.  Her vocabulary stalks you.

But she looks so good too.  The dirty sweater dresses.  The smudged, seven hundred dollar glasses.  That little V shaved on the back of her head.

Fuck.

Tara Roeder is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies in New York City.  Her work has appeared in multiple venues including Monkeybicycle, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Bombay Gin, and Haggard and Halloo.  Her chapbook is forthcoming from dancing girl press.

AT THE HOME DEPOT — REEM ABU-BAKER

/

Life imitates art, so I buy a lot of impressionist prints from the discount bin at Big Lots. I fill the apartment with them. Pastels everywhere, the green-blue dabs that I hope will make the air cool and fragrant, my home a place of peace and the safe kind of beauty. On the walls, the painted white ladies walk the parks and twirl their parasols. You must stay out of the sun! they chant, We all must stay out of the sun!, their voices like bells or wind chimes or some other cute metallic thing. I tell the parasol ladies they are being classist, that some people have to work outside because they have no choice, and did the parasol ladies ever think about that? The parasol ladies say Look in mirror, remember what the doctor said about skin cancer, how you have you have this risk inside you? I scoff at them, and throw shards of glass into their cardboard. How’s this for a mirror, I say. Later I feel guilty and I apologize. The parasol ladies say it’s fine but I sense some distance between us still.
             In the dermatologist’s office, there are also women on the walls. The doctors remove the problematic mole and express sympathy about the hideous scar they are leaving. We can fix that too, they say. And the women on the walls are like: I used to look this, but now I look this. The message is you can buy whatever kind of look you want.
             Me, I like to look like an impressionist painting. You can get some cheap-ass lipsticks and you can punch each shade against your vanity mirror and turn your reflection into a Lisa Frank kinda cloud. I’m saying you can be all pinks and purples.
             I’m saying you can even dye flowers now, even cacti. There are these gasoline rainbow succulents that catch my eye at the Home Depot. They are beautiful and I buy eight of them, hold them against my breast and stagger through the parking lot stroking their spindles with my chin, whispering: all you have to do now is stay alive. 

Reem Abu-Baker lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where she is the fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Meridian, NANO Fiction, and other journals. 

THE BOOK — LUKE KOKOSZKA

/

You're going to love this book, his wife told him every time she sat in her chair reading it. When she had finished it a month later, she gave it to him. He sat under the orange glow of a lamp and read the entire thing in one night. Closing the book after finishing the last page he realized getting married to a woman who didn't know him at all had been a terrible mistake.

Luke Kokoszka is a writer and musician living a short drive outside of Vancouver, BC. He can be found eating Bánh mì and exploring the vast roads of Canada. His writing has previously appeared in Carte Blanche, Potluck Magazine and The Louden Singletree.

LITTERED LIVERS — LEXI SENIOR

/

I was drunk when I was told Palmer’s father was dying from liver failure. He was a large man, an ex-pilot, and an alcoholic with shiny eyes and a thick head of hair he combed in three strokes every half hour or so at their country club, where he would order the entire table beers and club sandwiches because, as he said, who doesn’t like a goddamn club sandwich?
             I was out with a new man, a man who treated me with something like respect, who found time to sneak behind me in the kitchen, kiss my neck, lift me to the counter, and tell me he wanted me and that all the bad things I thought about myself were untrue (and I trusted him when he said it). The night got away from us, our bartender heavy-handed, and me feeling ornery over work, and me also feeling like I should drink more as a result, only to find out in front of a white porcelain toilet that history does, in fact, repeat itself.
             I answered Palmer’s call in this new man’s bed while I bent my knees over his, just as I used to with Palmer, using smoky sheets to make a tent over our bodies, where the air stank of liquor and no one could tell us we were littering our livers. He wasn’t the type to call even when he did love me, falling asleep before I returned home and not waking up until halfway through the night, head heavy with whiskey and comforted by the whoosh of AC and a low TV, a drunk’s favorite lullaby. To call after I left him months before, when I, bottle-bodied, took all of his glass replicas of torso and hips and smashed them in the sink, beading it with what was poisoning us, seemed strange. And there it was—his father was dying, would I come say goodbye? Yes, of course I would, and this new man, a good man with clean hands and dark hair, held me as I cried for Palmer in his bed.
             At the hospital, Palmer’s father reclined in a sea of green sheets that covered once thick legs suddenly thin as a young girl’s. His face, always round and red, was emaciated. His arms were bruised, so weak that the IV caused injury. Believing him too feeble to embrace, I kissed him on the cheek, the skin familiar like leather of an old, loved purse. But he grabbed my wrist with a strength that surprised me, that I should have known he would show even then, and breathed, “Take care of each other.”
             But you don’t tell a dying man you won’t take care of his son because you can’t, because he cannot take care of you or himself, because you both share the disease that damaged his liver beyond repair. You just say, “OK,” and then you go home to the new man you know is there, awake and waiting for you to return.

Lexi Senior is a Florida-based writer and MFA candidate at University of Central Florida. She can most regularly be found roaming the country for inspiration. Find her on Twitter at @discoeternal and read about her travels at www.lexisenior.com.

JIMMY AND HIDEKI TALK IT OVER — KANA PHILIP

/

Jimmy Bartleman held his finger to his lips.
             “Shhh,” he said.
             The machine clunked and whirred as it came on, lighting up three bright blue LEDs.
             “I’m being serious,” Hideki said.
             “I know. So am I.”
             Hideki looked across a white meadow to the little beach town curling along the water and ran a comb through his black hair. “What I’m trying to say is, they have names for everything now. Know what I mean? Named it all, right down to the last bit.” He put the comb in his back pocket and made a chopping motion. “Extraterrestrial visits? Weather balloons, they analyzed the footage. Sea Monsters? We’ve been to the bottom of the ocean, nothing there. You got a new invention? Google it. Someone already had it,” he waved one finger in the air. “Ever tightening circles...”
             “Shhh,” said Jimmy. “You hear it now?" He adjusted the machine and the LED’s spun faster. "I think I hear it!”
             The wind pushed rows of nothing through the field.
             “I don’t know,” said Hideki. He cocked his head.
             Jimmy held his breath. His ears grew tired but he heard nothing. “I guess it’s gone.”
             Hideki was combing his hair again, “It never was.”
             In the distant town, tiny white gulls fought over McDonalds trash.
             “Everything’s been figured out, Jimmy. No room.”
             “That’s what you keep saying.” He shut the machine down and pulled his bike out of the tall meadow grass. ”I’m going home. You're depressing today.”
             “It’s not me that’s depressing, its all this” Hideki waved his hands around at nothing.

***

Jimmy stood in the shower for ten minutes. He opened the bedroom window, sat on his roof and watched the lights of the little town blinking out in the darkness. A pale finger of reflected moonlight shivered in the ocean, pointing, pointing.

Kana Philip was born in the great state of Michigan. He currently splits time between up and down state New York, where he is the creative director and co-founder of a mobile media startup.

THE END, IN THREE ACTS — EMMA WILSON

/

1.
Walking to church, the birds crank circles in a flat, low sky. I’d like to shoot one with my rifle, drape it like bastard pearls around your neck. I knew I’d fall hard for someone born in May or named it, the way you hurtle towards the heart of something like the ocean deep-throating a plane. Everyone mentions the weather before bad news. Before bed I touch myself and think It’ll rain tomorrow. Everyone misses out. I moan and a black hole opens on my palm. I come to visions of birds dropping from the clouds, gagged by acid rain.

 

2.
I lost it in an abandoned trailer. It hurt; frost and ash collected on the windowpane. He held down my wrists in case they made wings. His whiskers scratched a rash on my neck, a devil’s continent. Afterward, I stole a cigarette from his soft pack. “It’s like talking to an asteroid, being with you,” he said, pulling on his boots. Crunching through the dead fields on my walk home, I shivered, I smoked, I coughed. Later, I ignored my mother when she yelled at me because of the smell. When I boiled my clothes the next day, my underwear predicted a galloping red dawn.

3.
When they sent me away, the ash fell like snow. They strapped me down and I wanted to run away to Antarctica with you, every morning skating on wild ice. After sex we could lift our shirts, scrape off more fat to burn. Maybe Antarctica is where we came from, the land where we were full. Let us rewrite our origin stories: Me, I was born packed in snow. My mother cut the umbilical cord with her teeth, said it tasted like horse hooves. And you came with crystals dotting your collarbone, a full beard covered in frost. We crawled from our mothers and chose our own names, blue though we were.

Emma Wilson is a writer and editor living in Central Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in Magma Poetry, and she blogs about creative recovery at mentalthrillness.com. 

NAME DROPPING — CHRIS CAMPANIONI

/

Story of your life                      

                           Or three minutes & forty-five seconds ago, later, until you switch tracks on the M, the part where we go above ground, rising higher through clouds, sky, factories repurposed as luxury lofts, pipelines intact, autographed with an artist’s insignia, anonymous warnings, a sign that says

   THIS IS A SAFE SPACE

   PLEASE KEEP IT FRIENDLY & NICE

There are two types of people (amid the image of the Hudson rippling through brown-gray glass; everything caked with specks as in an old film): ones who float down the river & ones who are the river (deep breath, switch track). Unable to ever really choose a hymn to play to its end even as the end nears, a fascination with strangers, places & names dropping at the speed of the brief recess between chorus & refrain—Did you hear? People talk & people talking through typing, fingers poised as on a trigger, each in our own seat keeping to ourselves. Silent except for the trembling of the train car, only its trembling to give           

   Gap, break, interlude

Only one more stop to go, a pause & prayer for permanence & permeance, to be everywhere

& all at once, to be all the time as if a liquid, what you always wished for even as a child, one lone tear traversing a cheek (rub it out, or in). You’re feeling the feeling of feeling’s return, where you find yourself when you think no one is looking. Because you could not stop you kept moving, at least through the mix you made, sixty-three seconds till eternity curated to turn from one thing to another, jubilant/wistful as the sky turns too from pale purple to soot black, equal parts imitation & pastiche of a picture you remember seeing somewhere else. Looking from the Hudson (out of view, with another high-rise-about-to-be but for now a bunch of bricks, scaffolds, skeletal rods, discarded tape, more warnings) to the people on streets, thinking about a line or lines, how we move &what moves us, if not only song, if not only a hand on one’s hip, moving slowly, the sun slowly disappearing again. All that it takes as the disc skips, finishes, repeats.

You could sit like this forever (murmur, respire), slowly disappearing out of you, name dropped to live again as someone else.

I could sit like this forever. Life imitates art, do you know

The meaning of life is to pass it on.

Chris Campanioni’s recent work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Quiddity, and Prelude. His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world was awarded the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize. He co-edits PANK magazine and lives in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.