Issue 2

Contents

    Fiction

    Congratulations to Grant Gerald Miller

    We want to extend a huge congratulations to writer Grant Gerald Miller whose short story “We Should Have Named Him”  (published in our first issue) was selected by Robert Olen Butler to be included in the anthology The Best Small Fictions 2015. We’re so proud!

    Ward

    Curtis walked until West Girard turned into East and his feet hurt. It was 5:15 in morning and the sky was still as black as it comes when he went through the bright blue door with the sign above saying PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPT 26TH DISTRICT. Inside, it was too hot and crowded. He felt itchy. But he kept still as he waited his turn. When it came, he unfolded the flyer with the pictures and put it flat on the counter with the thick scratched glass between him and the cop. He said, “I’m the one killed them kids.” He turned the paper around so the two children in the black and white photo stared right up at the policeman on the other side of divide.

    Godly Bodies

    When Brin Lambert started her first Regimen, she began to have visions. Unlike other dieters, who hallucinated slices of black forest cake or supersized French fries, Brin, in the fever of hunger, saw Jesus. The more she gave up—sugar, fat, dairy, carbs—the more elaborate the visions became. Neighbors and co-workers took notice of her transformation, complimenting her new figure and beatific glow. In a matter of months, she went from a mediocre real estate agent to the firm’s top saleswoman. With the extra income, she bought a bigger house in a better neighborhood, a 4-2 with a small above-ground swimming pool for her daughter, Laney.

    Non-Fiction

    Keys

    Mrs. Condell’s hair is a fizz of gray and blond, like yellow chalk that’s been left on the board too long. She wears a pale pink v-neck blouse that slides slowly underneath her breasts when she walks the hallways of the elementary school, and her tiny red Keds don’t squeak. As I sat in the second row of her fourth grade classroom, I would watch the line of silk venture slowly upward, hoping with some strange fascination that one day the blouse would rise up to the point that I would be able to see the thin line of skin between the cloth and her pants. Possibly I thought it would be funny to see such a private body part exposed, like when Mr. Isbell would roll up the sleeves of his starched white button-down to conduct “El Tango” in music class and I would stare in awe at the hairless underside of his thin arms.

    Churchyard’s Agog

    Benjamin Britten heard a bomb in Suffolk. He heard the graveled burst, the field golden green, whole, then not. Or perhaps what he heard was muffled, the grate of steel wool together, the scrubbing of pots. He knew though, the eventual composer, the someday lord, that he heard the explosion, his first remembered sound. In 1916, German ships bombarded Lowestoft, striking two homes neighboring Britten’s childhood road. Britten, towheaded, was two and a half years old.

    Poetry

    Constellation

    Who is my mom’s secret first husband to me? No more a landscape feature than the Zuiderzee. What can I say? I caved when asked for a family history. They are to me a collective mystery, a game that is a book in which we all write results that are as strange to us as a dull butter knife with its florid handle patina obscuring bright plating, for special occasions only, in a family that celebrates nothing.

    The Sail

    I imagine my hair in a different era. Coal-strewn and tobacco scented.

    Trash Day at the Park

    Bottles full of exhales landed drunk on their sides.

    The Indian Woman Reading on the Bus

    I’ll take, always, a gander at the beautiful: this time at the long black hair, the short black skirt, the razor thin pantyhose and the black high heels.

    The Best Funeral Ever

    Why doesn’t everyone think of this? His daughter is a minister herself, perhaps that gives her license; perhaps it’s the art he loved, or just the indelible imprint of a person on the people who love him.

    The Year of Reading Yeats

    My friend went back to reading Yeats the year she went back to the farm, claiming the land as land, leaving a smart, well-dressed career for dirt. This was her home. She’d planned how what had grown tobacco now would bear (a mile below where grinding, snorting bands of bulldozers pawed the earth and air grew thick) the fruit suburbanites would pay to pick.

    Press

    As a quavering leaf is struck down slabs of iron in miniature, hewn to exactitude do a double take.

    Landing Craft

    They staggered thirsty over the reefs with a calibrated zeal that made nude the native hall-dwellers. A sustained loss from the exploits, the cleaving, filling of the earth and the graves were dug and recorded in the collected hours before dawn. These leaves, an almanac of conciliatory efforts to placate the sacralized grain.

    Sign of the Rat

    They control the world but defer to a light bulb’s parallel presence as object and event.

    Chief Pontiac Answers Lord Jeffrey Amherst

    I understand that your piece of parchment is an act of war, that the little sticks you’ve scattered upon it are a type of language.

    Stage/Screen Writing

    COME BACK TO ME

    Scene: A room with glass panels on one side and a door. Shelves of books cover the back and sidewalls. In the foreground, a girl in her early- to mid-twenties sits in a leather armchair. In her lap is an open book. She is lit softly by a light from above. To the back right corner of the room, a redheaded man hunched over a desk, working with great concentration. He is a shape in the darkness.