Photography By Thomas Tulis
Poetry Dark Morning by Douglas Goetsch Rose, 1915 by Cecil L. Sayre Of Your Boyfriend's Attack. . .by Stephanie Dickinson A Common Occurrence by Kendall Dunkelberg Limitations by Livio Farallo Fiction (excerpt) The Dead Mother by John Richards 
Dark Morning By Douglas Goetsch Mom woke me. Power was out. She handed me a flashlight. Go in the bathroom and shine it on him. He stood there, his face lit by cream. I watched his strokes, how he fingered his chin, glided the blade past his jaw, turned the faucet on and off to rinse it clean and bloodless, the space between us worldless, just the chuff-chuffing on his sandy face, a face I can't ever remember touching, and the stinging smell of menthol. Back to top Rose, 1915 By Cecil L. Sayre Two young girls bouncing on their parents' bed up and down up and down a rifle in the corner shaken, falling, firing the bullet lodged in rose's brain the gunshot lodged in her sister's memory Back to top Of Your Boyfriend's Attack & St. Vincent's Hospital By Stephanie Dickinson You drop an overripe tomato, splashing seed and juice under his foot and he who hates stickiness drawing cockroaches in, swings his fist, fractures your rib, and punctures your lung as you scour the tomato up, its pulp slippery as blood. Once a novice so holy Our Lady appeared to him, he who wanted to be a Jesuit priest, cradles you on the cracked leather seat of the Yellow Cab, in the smell of fried hamburgers. On a bed of wheels they straddle you, smocks billowing as the blade cuts and a tube hard as a garden hose thrusts, parting your ribs as you gasp. For days while oxygen fills your lung you watch television talk shows. On the air conditioning vent your chilled piss sits next to his long-stemmed roses. Back to top A Common Occurrence By Kendall Dunkelberg The severed carcass of a dog on the highway. Or a possum; it's hard to tell, just four feet, an animal with intestines, a snout, teeth. I remember we drove through the two halves, blood smeared across our lane. You were asleep, no thud to wake you. I missed it, all but the softer parts, which were probably smashed already. I closed my eyes for a second, too. This was the fifteenth roadkill I had seen in two days. After driving twenty hours, they start to multiply. The hawk that flew within inches of the car was real. The other eyes later, and the wings, the deer leaping at me, these were signals. Back to top Limitations By Livio Farallo a metal cabinet standing pisa-like in the dank basement houses canned vegetables cake mixes dish detergent and several crusty-capped bottles of liquor which i ignore except on special occasions when i take them from the bottom shelf upstairs into the kitchen and pour a drink for someone else usually in a big tumbler on the rocks which for me i realized many years ago means capsized beached and bloating in the sun Back to top The Dead Mother (excerpt) By John Richards He was the cutest blue eyed thing, chewing bubble gum and throwing his ball against my step. I said "Why you throwing that ball on my step when you could just as good throw it on your own step and be home, too?" And he took his ball in his hand and looked up at me with great big end-of-the-world eyes and I said, "You know your mother would rather you throw that ball on your own step, boy. What if you bounce up here and put a dent in my screen and I had to go talk to her." His eyes got big and filled with salt and he said, "You can't talk to my momma," and I said, "Boy, you don't want me to, you better go bounce on your own doorstep," and he said, "My momma is dead," and those words coming from that child's lips was like touching death itself. You tell me how he come up with that. He scared the pants off me. You should have seen his crayon pictures in class: A big coffin and next to it, him and his brother and sister, little tiny figures with their hands full of flowers. Another, a nurse with a long IV running out to his mother who was laying in a bed and the blood was dripping down to the floor. Or his mother in heaven driving a long car and waving out the window to him. Jesus and his mother watching television together and kissing each other because, he said that's what his sister said boys and girls were supposed to do when they liked each other. He did a picture of his mother in the ground looking up at him through the grass and she's pushing a big red heart up through the ground to him. I've been teaching for seventeen years and I've never seen anything like it from a third grader. You look at a child's pictures and you can pretty much tell what they're thinking. And this kind of sadness, I've only seen it once or twice so clearly in a child's drawings. It comes when the child has experienced a terrible grief that they can't talk about. Which I didn't understand. Because when I called his house to talk to his father, his mother answered the phone. Back to top |
