Issue #42
Paula Reed Nancarrow
Split Entry
I might be a homeless woman,
Standing in our Eden Prairie foyer
— the living room railing above
the basement garden level —
with that lump of anxiety always between us,
unable to decide what to do.
“Are you coming or going?” he asks,
home from his bright new job.
Home from his bright new job,
“Are you coming or going?” he asks,
unable to decide what to do
with that lump of anxiety always between us.
The basement garden level,
the living room railing above:
Standing in our Eden Prairie foyer,
I might be a homeless woman.
Restoration
Currents in the grain
of browned butter oak
on the parson’s table:
my father smoothed
their turbulence.
My grandfather
gave my grandmother
a black eye once
then hid inside
the Word of God.
Thick caramel
scabs of varnish
hit the pail. My
father sanded,
let the pores breathe.
With linseed oil
he anointed the top
the lyre-shaped legs
the shelf at the base
between them.
My father brought us,
fully restored,
the parson’s table.
He forgave the table
For being his father’s desk:
The desk where his
father wrote sermons. My
husband wrote sermons.
My father gave the table
a second chance.
He forgave the table
for being his father’s desk:
Like living water
the polished figure flowed
across the plane.
Just one
black knot
remained.
Forgetting
No one tells you that wrinkles
and age spots will hide childhood scars
That the white triangle which split
your bottom lip, making it mirror
Cupid’s bow – the trace
of a four-year old’s stitches –
will thin as your lips get thinner
so that you risk forgetting
what it felt like to have your father
spin an aluminum saucer round
and round on its tow rope
over the ice covering
the backyard pond, while you grip
the cloth handles screaming
in fear and glee. You risk forgetting
what it felt like to have his hands
release you into space,
only to hit a meteorite hidden
beneath the white snowbank.
You risk not being surprised
at the amount of blood
that could spill from your own
small body, even when your father
did not mean to hurt you
and you risk forgetting what it was like
to be held in what was left
of your pregnant mother’s lap
all the way to the hospital
And no one tells you
that this is not your first scar, which
came from the cutting of the cord
– that all first scars are umbilical –
and that you have already forgotten
what it felt like when you were first cast
into the universe, and that your father’s
grand gesture of release
was already late in the game.
No one can tell you
That the slow work of time upon
the quilted skin will soften
all the darned patches.
Or that in the end
you will offer up all the work
of your engrailed genes to reenter
the fecund darkness. Because love
allows this. Because love allows
even this.
Paula Reed Nancarrow is a poet and storyteller living in Minnesota. Paula has told stories at the Minnesota Fringe Festival and the Moth Grand Slam, and has read her poetry at Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts and the Loft Literary Center. Her first published poem appeared recently in bluepepper.
Ali Salzmann
We Selkies Dance
“[He] saw a number of these beings dancing by moonlight, and several seal-skins strewed beside them on the ground.”
—Folktales of Water Spirits, Kelpies, and Selkies
We’re away from the hunters and dancing
outside ourselves. Moonlight reflects off
the heap of slick skin we’ve left on the shore.
This is a celebration of all our alternate selves:
The waves rise and fray against the rock
and provide music while we’re left
dancing in a hiccup of time. We move inward
and upward at once, opening the hours
like a lover. There’s nothing romantic
here: just hips, torsos, blue lips. We’re untamed.
We’re always bad at writing things down. We always
want to swim in the wind. The mind’s peachy flesh
can be rotten, but we let this life soak into our skin
like a cure. We don’t run for cover here. We inhale
and drink it in.
Ali Salzmann is a Lecturer at Texas State University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Austin Community College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Star 82 Review, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, Third Wednesday, and others.
Wen Yi Lim
The Year I Tried to Subpoena an Earthquake
Here’s the thing — everyone will tell
you being from someplace else is exotic
but I promise, I swear, there is nothing sexy
about re-training a tongue to learn the American staccato
the night before a first major college
presentation or to be interrupted
by classmates demanding repeat slower, please. Meaning,
no matter how well I navigate your culture, sounding
like you is still foreign. That was the week I learnt
to bleach my tongue — swapped Ss for Zs,
rode elevators instead of lifts, measured
with inches not meters. Now each call with my family
is a vacation in absentia: my mouth a tourist fluent in half-
languages; my pockets full of coins I can’t spend.
Someone knocked my rearview mirror.
Dangling from the wires like hindsight. And if
I could do it all over again I’d start
in the middle, take a hard right off the map.
here’s to sending postcards of snow in Austin. London
without grey. New York, filled
with the soft smells of a forest floor, freshly rained.
Wen works for a London-based tech firm, which means she is a strategy analyst by day – but an accidental poet always. Having grown up across multiple geographies, she’s always had a shifting sense of identity. Her writing often explores the intersection of home, body, and language. Visit her at intercostalink.com.
Patricia Davis-Muffett
Night Terrors
There is no way to prepare you—
the way you will be able
to lift a car despite your weakness,
the way you will throw yourself
into the street to snatch your child back,
the way your body will turn
when you fall forward carrying that small body,
twist, resist the impulse to break your fall.
Instead, you will hold the baby close
wrench your back.
It will never be the same.
Those things are true
but there is also this–
the wails at two a.m.,
the recognition you’ll have
for teenagers who abandon babies
in public bathrooms, walk away;
the jealousy for those
whose time and money
is their own;
the loneliness
loneliness
loneliness
when the work is done
when it is too late
you can not reach anyone.
The person you were will die.
I hope the new one is strong,
fierce enough to survive.
I hope she will be content
to lay down next to a sleepy child
sing the same lying song,
promising pleasant dreams
though she sees night terrors lurking
just the other side of dusk.
Patricia Davis-Muffett holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including One Art, Bluepepper, The Orchards (forthcoming December 2020), The Blue Nib, and Amethyst Review (forthcoming December 2020). She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her family and makes her living in technology marketing.
Oakley Ayden
october snow in amarillo
in early morning glow the
white gold wedding bands
of men who rimmed around my
hyundai with ice scrapers raised
like chivalry swords glistened
wildly as the silver flecks that
peppered the freshly fallen
october snow in amarillo.
may we scrape
your shield
for you?
i never mind
the ask
if they can take
the no
Oakley Ayden (she/her) is an autistic, queer writer and social justice activist with North Carolina roots. She currently lives and works in California’s San Bernardino National Forest with her two daughters.
Lisa Elaine Low
Last Days
For Leander Rupert Morse
Oh, lump of cloth thrown down as if it were
a man. Oh, blazing eyes grown dim.
Oh, eardrums sealed incapable of hearing.
Oh, flapping tongue ground down by time.
I had to look twice to make sure it was you,
lying sideways in your grave, made small
by fetal kneeling; ready to be mailed; a loose
boat left adrift, its uncaught rope untied.
Once a Titan; now a dot beneath the moon.
You’ve fallen link by link, and chain by chain
from what you were to something small.
Your brain a ball of cotton, from cotton
further pulled. Your hands at rest beneath your
cheek, in prayer futile folded. The rumpled
reef you lay in once as if by thumbprint left.
Lisa Elaine Low’s poetry, reviews, interviews, and academic essays have appeared in many publications. She is also one of the editors of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism published by Cambridge University Press in 1994.