Fiction: Issue Two

Rosanne Griffeth

The Cancer Woman's Beautiful Daughters

   Long ago and far away, we believed in magic. We believed in spells, totems, prayer, positive thinking and wheat grass. We believed the force of our will and sunny smiles could light the dark corners, banish evil spirits, bend enemies to our will and defeat death. We danced the special dance around her bed and nothing our mother said or did dissuaded us from our belief--and as long as a smidgeon of this came true, the smallest iota, we believed in the magic we wrought.

   In the Andes, the mummies of child sacrifices sleep on mountain peaks where they have rested through the centuries. Millennia ago, children hiked up the mountain to honorable deaths in a drugged haze. My sister gave me a handful of Valium, because I didn't want to offer my childhood on the altar of Mother's cancer.

   In Australia, the aboriginal people explore the dreamtime, disappearing into the bush for weeks and months and years. After delivering the child sacrifice to our mother's bedside, my sister disappeared into the wilds of Europe and Asia, emerging now and again without warning to tell us of macrobiotics, coffee enemas and juicing--wonders to behold--and say, here I bought a juicer and two thousand dollars worth of vitamins you are to give her these five times a day with the wheatgrass juice.

   Then she disappeared. I tended the mummy of my childhood, packing it in bitter salts. As it dried up, I resented my sister, though the sacrifice of her sanity was just as devastating. My days passed in darkness while I tried to see through my shrunken eyes, lids sewn shut. The sounds of parties and foreign men murmuring were room tone for my sister's phone calls. She came, she left, she came, she left, and she came--each time being less of what she had been…

   The beautiful cancer doctor with his blue eyes and Sloan-Kettering tresses attended our mother, weaving in and out of our lives, the tails of his white lab coat flying behind him as he ran. My sister and I sat in his office hanging on his every word, flirting with him, offering ourselves to him. We both slept with him, our mother's cancer doctor. His hands were so clean they smelled of chemotherapy.

   He left Mother's room one day and our hungry eyes followed him, certain he was our hero, undressing him, devouring him. Mother cranked the hospital bed to a sitting position. Her bedroom eyes, even more hooded by morphine, pierced us weakly.

   "I wish you two girls wouldn't be so promiscuous," she said.
With enough drugs, we could smile and my sister and I would dance around our mother, The Cancer Woman, singing and performing the ritual of daughters begging their mother to not die.

Poetry: Issue Two

Brian R. Young

In Praise of the Cow

1.
Star watcher, source of the Milky Way, unflinching gazer,
you are The Thinker not carved by human tools,
the patient mother and father, the worrier of cud, the muller.

You are the choir of gently humming mills,
the thunder cloud, the observer
of the sun as it falls and rises.

You are exposed to the elements, yet impervious.
You are the restless chorus the crickets ignore.
Blessed giver of fecundity, it was you

who conceived the first numbers—one
and two—it was you who kept count—one two,
one two—of the steps, and though others

have gone on to count higher, it is you
who keeps the first numbers
for when they return. Your heart

of iron knows they will. You are
the cliffs by the ocean of clover.


2.
If the spirit can be returned to the cut,
put it back. If the calf

can be reborn, re-forge her bones,
re-curl her coat, re-lift her ears.

If she can breathe again, re-flare
her nostrils, re-raise her head,

re-open her eyes, and re-straighten
her knees as she attempts to re-stand.

Unfurl the plastic wrap like the flag
of a country that no longer exists.

Let the blood re-pour through the veins.
Let the mind re-claim its consciousness.

Let the muscle return to the shank,
the tongue remember how to taste.

Let the hoof feel its place in the mud,
the skin be tickled by the brush of the grass.

It is not too late for the part to start living
again, like it wants, in the whole.

Poetry: Issue Two

Karen J. Weyant

The Girl Who Could Catch Echoes

It's easy, she explains, of her collection:
a snap from a single twig, a Strike!
from a little league umpire, a crack
of thunder ten seconds after the flash,
everything displayed in the hollow

of a tree trunk, moss clinging
to the damp bark. She pins down
a child's secret with a pine needle,
police sirens with old thumb tacks,
piano lessons with a bent guitar pick.

She demonstrates each capture,
her right arm above her head, hand
curled, or sometimes both palms swinging
ahead of her, cupped low. She doesn't talk
of the battles – the noon whistle that bit

her left wrist, the screech of tires
crushing her knuckles, the whispers
lodged in the back of her thumbnails,
the ones she scrapes out, tearing,
with the edge of her teeth.

Cover Art: Issue 02

davka

minutes after eating the apple, moments before kissing the snake

Cover Art: Issue One

Cradle

By: Heidi Richardson Evans

Fiction: Issue One

Only a Memory Away

By Jack Swenson

When Uncle Dan got sent to the Alzheimer's ward, the ladies licked their lips. Fresh meat. A handsome fellow, too, they all agreed. And nice; very friendly. And, oh, when he sang and played his ukulele, they came from upstairs and down. He knew all the old songs, all their favorites: "Skip to My Lou," "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," "Love Is Just Around the Corner," and many more. They were enchanted; they were smitten; they wanted his body.

Hoity toity Claudia invited him to tea. Carlotta tried to lure him to her room, promising to show him old photographs of herself when she was Miss Cedar Falls. Unsubtle Josie threw her arms around his neck and wouldn't let go. They had to call the charge nurse to get her loose.

To Dan it was all very bewildering. He liked the attention, but he didn't understand why they were making such a fuss over him. His family didn't understand, either; his wife and daughter were shocked one day when they were visiting to see one the elderly women headed down the hall carrying Dan's laundry bag. Alice, his wife, recognized it because, as she told her daughter, she had embroidered it herself. She popped to her feet, chased the woman down the hall, and took the bag away from her. When she examined the contents, she found Dan's socks and shorts mixed in with the lady's under things.

Another time when they got there they found Dan sitting on the floor outside his room. They asked what he was doing, and he said he couldn't get in. The door was locked, he said. Alice tried the door, and sure enough, it was locked. They had to get one of the staff members to unlock it. When they got the door open, one of the other male patients was in his bed. Rousted, he wandered out into the hall mumbling to himself. "He don't use it anyway," the man said as he shuffled from the room.

Neither the wife nor the daughter put much stock in the old man’s complaint. After all, consider the source. And after the younger woman told her mother the joke about the old lady in the wheelchair advertising “super sex,” and the old man replying that he’d take the soup, her mother laughed until she cried.

When Dan died just before Christmas, that put the kibosh on the annual Christmas party. Nobody felt much like partying. Mort sang Christmas carols in his quavering tenor, and Chester kept trying to grab the microphone away from him, but Mort kept it just out of his reach and went right on singing.

Then Dottie started to cry. Claudia, too. Then the dietitian wheeled in a cart with the ice cream on it, and everybody cheered up.

Poetry: Issue One

Molly Prosser

The Battle at Breakfast

Debbie stacks the toast and carefully cuts the pile into four thick strips. I don’t want
butter this morning – I want my soldiers sharp. It’s the first time I’ve waged war with
a soft egg.

Debbie shows me how to decapitate the head, how to firmly hold the egg cup and whack
off the top of the shell, jam my knife into the albumin and disrupt the yolk. Her thick
Glasgow accent pours over the carnage.

Sometimes, she tells me, she chips away at the outside peeling back layers to expose the
soft core, attacking where the egg is exposed and vulnerable.

Slitting my way through the firm white with my first soldier, I slowly probe the yellow
center. He cuts a path that others will follow. The incision widens as one by one my burnt
battalion gradually descends to the center, absorbing the wreckage, erasing
the traces of war.

Artwork: Issue One

Asase Ye Duru: From the Earth We Arose, to the Earth We Shall Return

By: Nashay Jones

Poetry: Issue One

Dana Guthrie Martin
Parasitic Cloaking
—for B.C.

What we hide:
cotyledons   villi   intervillous spaces

What was empty in you
fills with your blood

decidua basalis   chorion frondosum:
nicotine, opiods, alcohol, birth defects

What we can’t use, you must eat
or carry until it rots and falls off

placenta accreta   how it clings

The extraction must be manual
and leave no traces