The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay First problem: nobody was home to help. Not her two daughters, off to school. Not her husband Robbie, who hadn’t been home for weeks, probably right this minute at that whore Gloria’s house. Second problem: she was seven months pregnant and bleeding like crazy. She pressed a cream-colored towel against her crotch; it bloomed with a red chrysanthemum of her own blood. She stood in the bathroom doorway, eyes sparking, knees shaking. Third problem: her damn husband had the car. Not that she was in any shape to make the seven-mile drive into Cheyenne, ten if you factored in the hospital which was downtown. Fourth problem: the telephone was dead, thanks to Robbie not paying the bills like he was supposed to. She had her own prepaid cell phone with a few minutes still left on it. But it was downstairs on the kitchen table. Just the thought of negotiating the stairs brought a throbbing to her abdomen. Fifth problem, or maybe it was the first: she and her baby boy might be dying. She tried to bite back the tears, but they came anyway, raining down on her nightie, the blood-soaked towel, the tiled bathroom floor. It was all so ridiculous. Why had this happened? She should have known better than to let him back into her life, even if it had only been two weeks. He came back to her, all humble and lovey-dovey. She took him back into her bed and then he was gone again and there she was, pregnant again, standing in the doorway, bleeding to death. Her main problem was getting down the stairs to the phone. Clinging to the wall, she made her way out of the bathroom and down the carpeted hallway. To the left was her daughter Kelly’s room. She grabbed the doorknob of the hall closet as she slowly passed. There were only twelve stairs but it looked like a million. Maybe if she just sat on the top step, and bumped her way down….She sat, a good thing since a swoon was coming on. She waited for her head to clear, then carefully slipped down the carpet onto the second step, then the third one. On the next one, her left foot caught the hem of her wool nightgown. She fell back, then felt herself slipping down the stairway; her feet, her butt, her shoulders bumping with each step; wincing in pain as the vibrations traveled to her belly. When she came to a stop, she noticed the quiet of the house. There was some sort of noise coming from outside the front door. She didn’t know what it was but she stood and, after letting her head clear momentarily, stepped slowly through the sparsely furnished living room toward the door. Which led to the morning’s sixth problem: she passed out, sliding to the floor like a wet sack. * * * Mrs. P! Mrs. P! She opened her eyes. A big hairy head swam in front of her. Maybe she was dreaming. Mrs. P! Mrs. P! It was the big head’s voice. For a minute she thought it was Robbie but her husband was thin and had a buzzcut in keeping with his role as a punk musician on the make. Who was it? And where was she? For a minute, she hoped she was safe in bed. But then she felt the rough carpet under her, the stickiness between her legs. There was a big hand on her shoulder, shaking gently. Mrs. P! The hairy head’s voice again. She wanted to say: My name is Liz, short for Elizabeth, and not Mrs. P, short for Politazzaro, Robbie’s last name which he had hung on her, presumably forever, and which everyone seemed to want to use in the abbreviated form, making her seem old before her time. She could see the man now. It was Big Ed, her landlord’s goofy son. The Retard, Robbie called him, as if he had a right to call anybody that. Big Ed was a lumbering overgrown kid, slow, who probably had a birth defect or something. But, last summer, he had been dedicated to mowing the weeds that passed for their lawn. That winter, he had pursued the snow with a vengeance. He unclogged toilets and hauled the trash. The girls had been afraid of him at first. Six-foot-five if he was an inch, and built like one of those no-neck linemen you see on NFL football. And that hair, a mass of wavy red curls that framed that moon face of his. But one summer afternoon he came over driving the tractor with the haywagon attached. He asked the girls if they wanted a ride and they said yes and they tooled around the property as she watched from the kitchen window. A few hours later the girls came in screaming, waving something that looked like a rope above their heads. Snake! Snake! they yelled, then told her how Big Ed had whacked the head off a rattler with a hoe and skinned it right there on the spot. He gave the girls the skin and the rattles. This is one big freakin’ snake, Mommy , said Kelly, the youngest, sounding just like her father, New York accent and all. Mrs. P? What are you doing here, Ed? Heard you yellin’ while I was shoveling the snow. Was I yelling? He looked puzzled. Somebody was. Call the hospital, Big Ed, she said weakly. I’m bleeding to death. Hospital , Big Ed muttered. It was strange voice that blended a kid’s cadence with the huskiness of a man. She felt his arms slide under her and, next thing she knew, she was being transported through the living room and out into the cold bright winter day. You’re light , he said, pressing her in his arms. Get my towel, Ed , she said. And I need the phone. Don’t have a phone , he replied. Big Jim took it away. Said it was costin’ him an arm and a leg. Big Jim was his father, their landlord, a big fat guy who seemed eternally pissed off at his slow son. Get my cell, she said, motioning back to the house. It’s on the kitchen table. And the towel, Ed, for the blood. I know where the hospital is, he said. I drove Big Jim there. Remember that time the tractor rolled over on him? She didn’t remember and it didn’t matter anyway. Big Ed had plans and there was nothing she could do. Die on the bathroom floor. Die on the way to the hospital. She opened her eyes and saw ice crystals glinting in a blue-drenched sky. She heard the crunch of Big Ed’s boots in the snow. The wind slapped her bare, bloody legs. I’m cold, Ed. Get you in the van and warm it up, he said. They stopped. Ed’s right arm shifted and she heard a door being pulled open. Crud , he said. Gotta move some things around. She could feel his indecision. This might be too much for him. We can still call 9-1-1 on my phone . No need , he said briskly. She felt a tug, then Ed was arranging something on the ground. He put her down on something cold and plastic, then placed a covering over her. Tarp and sleeping bag, he said. My camping stuff. I keep it in the van. Camping? Well, she was getting warm on the snowy ground. She could see Big Ed shove his body in the van’s side door. His shoulders moved like a machine. She had seen this van dozens of times. Usually she heard it first as it came down the county road and into the dusty drive, its rackety Volkswagen clatter floating in the window across the open Wyoming prairie. She had often wondered why he had this old hippie van and not a huge mud-spattered pick-up like his dad. Ed, I can sit up front , she said. We do need to get to the hospital. Take a minute, he said. Got a mattress in here and everything. She wanted to laugh. There was a racket of shifting and moving. Then she was up again, fitting neatly through the van’s open door. She was on the mattress, which was comfortable and didn’t smell, which surprised her. She looked up and saw Big Ed smile as he covered her with the sleeping bag. Hurry, Ed, she said. Please . A look of concern flashed across his face as he slammed the door shut. Another door opened, and she felt the van shift to the driver’s side. Big Ed was on the bus, taking her to the hospital. They would be there soon and all would be well. She wouldn’t die and the baby would be born and she would call him anything except for Robbie and maybe she would get a divorce and go back to work at a grocery store where she used to make pretty good money. Crud . That was Big Ed. What’s the matter? Van won’t start. Don’t worry. I know what’s wrong. So she was going to die? Don’t worry, Mrs. P. This happens all the time. She heard him fumbling around in the front, obviously looking for something. Then he said Ah-ha and she looked up to see him brandishing a foot-long screwdriver. The sun glinted off its metal shaft, giving it the look of a knife. Go ahead, she thought, plunge it right into my heart and get it over with. The van leaped up as it lightened its load. She heard his boots crunch the snow, then a couple of grunts. The van shifted slightly, and she figured he was underneath, groping for some gizmo or another. Then came the dreaded word again—Crud— and after a few grunts and groans, he was back with his head shoved into the driver’s side. Got a problem, he said. Need you to turn the key as I do this. Do what? Bridge the solenoid. What the hell, Ed, she said. I’m bleeding to death here. Hospital , he said. Gotta get the van started. She breathed deeply. She had a tom cat for a husband. Her father abandoned her decades ago. Now her life depended on this dimwit? Men were such worthless creatures. And she was going to give birth to another one? It didn’t make any sense but she would be damned and damned again if she would stay here and die. She wanted to be with her girls. She wanted to be anywhere but here. Mrs. P pushed herself off the mattress. Fireflies danced in front of her eyes. Her big bloated body felt as if it belonged to someone else, or something else, like an African elephant or one of those strange looking sea lions she had seen at the zoo when she was a kid. But she moved, slowly, inching her way out of the van and onto her bare feet in the snow. Where you goin’? asked Big Ed. Inside to call the ambulance. Or walk to town. Anything but this. You can’t. I can. She still was bleeding, that was a fact, but she knew from experience that she wasn’t in labor, which was good, because the last thing she wanted to do was deliver this baby two months early in the snowy yard with only Big Ed for assistance. Although she hadn’t felt any of the baby’s trademark kicks this morning, intuition told her that he still was alive. The house was a hundred feet away and if she could just reach the door and get inside, she could get to her cell phone, call the ambulance, and then take her chances. But those chances were better than the ones she had now. She walked five steps—she was counting each one— before a whole flock of fireflies filled her vision and the house kicked up at a strange angle, flying off into space, leaving her on her side in the snow. * * * She was nineteen —that wasn’t even ten years ago—and home from college for Christmas break when she had met Robbie. He was bass guitarist for the group that was playing at the local bar on New Year’s Eve. She was with her high school girlfriends. They all thought the band guys were hot so they hung around after midnight and bought the band some drinks and at 5 a.m. they found themselves at some dumpy house in Jericho, she and her girlfriends making out with the band guys. Robbie was a good kisser. He wanted more, of course, but she wasn’t that looped and she liked him when he didn’t press her. He even gave her a ride home in the band’s van, startling her mother when she sashayed into the kitchen, carrying her shoes in her hand. I’m in love, she said, which surprised her and made Mom cry. The tear ducts really opened once she learned that Robbie was a rocker with pierced lip and nose. She shared that last part with her mother, just to see if the response would measure up to her expectations. It did. She was two months pregnant when they got married that June. Nobody knew yet, except her mom and maybe one or two of her closest friends. Robbie’s band, The Spectral Losers, played at the reception. The honeymoon was short. Robbie was awake all night banging away at her, even when she was dozing off from the champagne. She shouldn’t have been drinking. Her mom told her to cool it a couple times. She promised that she would quit right after the reception, which she did, except for a couple little sips of wine now and again. The morning after she puked her guts out with morning sickness while Robbie snored away in the motel’s vibrating queen-sized bed. Not a terrific start to their marriage. She and Robbie were split up when Katie was born. She was living with her parents and her mom took care of Katie when she went back to work a few weeks later. She was just getting back on her feet when Robbie came back into her life and she turned up pregnant again. That’s when her mother kicked her out. She and Robbie found an apartment closer to the city, so Robbie could go in nights and play at the clubs and not come home until dawn. She could not believe they were in that apartment for three years. Robbie brought home most of his pay. She was working, although a good chunk of it went to daycare for Katie and Kelly. Still, they were making it. Taking the pill helped put a damper on any more baby-making. Then Robbie came home one day and announced they were moving to Wyoming. She about hit the ceiling. One of Robbie’s friends owned a music store in Cheyenne. He liked the idea of going West. So they had moved cross-country and here she was, bleeding in the snow like some pioneer woman from the olden days. But she wasn’t in the snow anymore. She was moving along on some vehicle that wasn’t the van. She shifted her body and felt the crunch and crackle of something underneath. She opened her eyes to the bright sunlight. Hey! It was Ed’s voice. She pushed up on her elbow. She was stuffed in a sleeping bag, surrounded by a tangle of hay stalks. Weathered gray boards marked the wagon’s periphery. She craned her neck to the front to see the massive frame of big Ed bouncing on the seat of a green tractor. The tractor’s engine had a throaty roar that actually sounded good to her. At least they were moving. Got your cell phone, he yelled. What? Phone. Big Ed jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. She looked down and saw the cheapo black cell phone resting on the dark-green sleeping bag. Her mother had sent her a gift certificate and she had used it to buy this pre-paid cell phone which she kept hidden from Robbie, especially after the regular phone service was cut off. She picked it up. The plastic phone was cold in her hand. She dialed 9-11. It rang twice before a mechanical voice said from somewhere very far away: Your Celluphone pre-paid calling service has expired. Shit , she said. Had there been more minutes on her phone? Or had she just imagined it? What? yelled Big Ed. The computerized female voice said: Dial one if you want to add minutes to your service with your credit card. Fat chance, she muttered. Dial two if you wish to talk to a customer service representative to renew your service. She punched two. A few clicks followed. Then she heard a new voice: All our customer service representatives are busy. Please hold on and one will be with you shortly. Canned music came on the line. She felt like heaving the phone into the prairie. She imagined it sailing over the barbed wire fence and falling into a patch of snow-whipped weeds, right at the feet on those blankeyed black cows she always saw wandering the open fields. But not today. She liked the little phone. It was her only link to the outside world, which was very remote. She suddenly realized why Robbie had moved them so far away from town. She and the girls were isolated, dependent on him. He had the car 90 percent of the time. Got a gig, babe, he would say, then be gone for a week. They would be down to their last crust of bread when he would magically arrive laden with grocery sacks. Junk food, mostly, heavy on donuts and ice cream and chips. His idea of dinner was warming up some macaroni and cheese, maybe cutting up some hot dogs, mixing them in. She got queasy just thinking about it. Dinner would be over and Robbie would be off again to a gig or recording session or God knows where or, maybe, she did know where. You okay? shouted Big Ed. Just fine, she said. Just dandy, using one of the westernisms she’d learned since coming to Wyoming. She was not going to cry, no matter what. I am not going to cry, she said out loud. I am not going to cry. What? called Big Ed. Nothing, Ed. What? They moved slowly down the rural road, but she felt each bump. The clouds were traveling faster than they were. Any increase in velocity and she might go flying from the haywagon. A man’s voice finally came on the other end of the phone. Thanks for calling Celluphone, he said cheerily. How may I assist you today? She almost laughed at that. Assist? Hah! Get me off this wagon and into the nearest hospital. Hello , said the voice. Hi , she said weakly. I’m here . I see that I am talking to a Mrs. Politazzaro of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Yes , she said. Nice Irish name, he said. Listen…. Call me Mark , he said. Mark Aloysius Kincannon is my full name, but they tell you to use only your first just in case we piss people off. Listen, Mark, I’m in a bit of a fix here…. We have a variety of payment plans to fit your needs. A wind gust rocked the wagon. Mark, are you reading that? They give us a script, if that’s what you mean. Where are you, Mark? Denver , he said, in a little airless, windowless room in the basement of a gray building. Guess where I am, Mark? In a cozy kitchen baking cookies? Don’t hang up, she said. Please. I got a real problem here and I’m asking for your help. There was another pause. This is real, isn’t it? His voice had changed, serious now. It’s real. She gave him a condensed version of the morning’s events. A haywagon? he said. Riding to the hospital in a haywagon? Down a nice country road, she said. Nice winter day. Can you go faster? It’s an old tractor, Mark. Are you passing any houses? You could stop at one and get some help. Nice suggestion, but Big Ed won’t stop. He’s determined to get me to the hospital. He’s a little slow, in the head. Is that what you mean? That’s right. You’re not going to make it. That’s right, she said, trying to imagine, for the first time, what Mark might look like. Okay , said Mark, suddenly businesslike. Give me your position and I’ll call it in. Promise? Promise. Now, where are you? On a country road north of town. Which one? What do you mean, which one? Listen, uh, what’s your name anyway? Mrs. Pol……… Your first name. Liz. Listen, Liz, there’s got to be more than one road north of town. What’s its number? She raised her head and looked for a sign along the side of the road. Nothing but fence posts. Hey Ed! she yelled, taking the phone away from her ear. What? he said, turning to her. His shaggy red hair billowed like a wind-whipped fire. What road is this? She could not see Ed’s face, but she imagined it scrunched up in some sort of thoughtful look. But this thought was taking its time and she was running out of it. Ed! she barked. Some call it the Old Chugwater Road. The Old Chugwater Road, she repeated into the phone. What about a number? She cursed under her breath. Does it have a number, Ed? Don’t know a number. No number , she told Mark. She heard chatter on the other end. Look , said Mark, coming back on the line. I’ve got another CSR on the phone to the Sheriff’s Department and the dispatcher says there are two Old Chugwater Roads. Two? Yeah, one still goes to Chugwater and the other doesn’t. Which one are you on? It’s north of town, she said brusquely. It’s where you go out north on Yellowstone Road and it turns into a two-lane and you come to a stop sign and you keep going out that rural road another five miles or so. Our little farmhouse is just before you come to that big curve…. Hold on, Liz, Mark said. More chatter on the other end. County Road 237? If you say so. We should tell the ambulance to look for a tractor pulling a haywagon, right? Can’t miss us, she said. Green tractor, with Big Ed driving. Me bleeding to death in the haywagon in the back. He laughed. Not so funny, Mark. Right. I’m sorry. More chatter on the far end on the line in Denver. The ambulance is on its way, Mark said, almost breathlessly. No joke? No joke. Stay on the line and talk to me. Okay, sure, I’ll talk to you. Then he was so quiet she thought the line had gone dead. Got a family, Mark? she said weakly. Got a five-year-old boy who lives with my ex-wife. That’s nice, she said. Think we’ll get our names in the paper? Ha ha, she said. Names in the paper. She removed the phone from her ear. Ed! What! Big Ed answered. Ambulance on its way. What? At least that’s what she thought he said. The wind shredded the words on their way from his mouth to her ears. Waaa , it sounded like. Then wawa , just like the word the girls used for water when they were toddlers. We want wawa Mommy , and she would get them water in those little paper cups she kept by the kitchen sink. The girls would spill it and there would be wawa everywhere. W awa , she said to the wind, the sky, the wagon. She was so thirsty. Her head ached. The cold crept through the folds of the sleeping bag. She heard a voice and didn’t know if it was Ed’s or Mark’s or the lowing of a cow or something she had never heard before. Waaaaa! she heard, wondering if it was just in her head or maybe, just maybe, was the distant wail of an ambulance. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I wrote “The Problem with Mrs. P” for my first collection, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006). It was included in a 2010 Coffee House Press anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams . It’s about a real event that happened to a friend. I transformed it into a short ction with invented characters. It’s set during winter in Wyoming, a season for adventures and misadventures. When I read it in public, I like that it elicits both laughter and gasps. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL SHAY writes short stories and essays. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press. His first book of short stories is The Weight of the Body . He recently completed an historical novel set in 1919 Colorado with the working title Zeppelins over Denver . Next - That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival by Michael Shay Next

Karin Anderson < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Blood Draw Karin Anderson 00:00 / 25:59 Blood Draw Karin Anderson My first whole image of my mother: my just-older sister Marti and I sit on our knees on the window seat at the front of our “nursery school” on the high end of C Street. Our teacher, a thick-shouldered woman with a European accent, has set us there to watch for our “mama,” and here she comes, walking slender and composed up the hill: knee-length white dress, white hose, white shoes. A stiff white cap with a black stripe pinned to her dark brown hair. We wave madly. We fog the plate glass. Our mother sees us at the window and smiles, happy to spot her little girls. Then, as now, she is amazed that she is an object of love. The teacher holds us back until our mama reaches the stoop, then releases us to run into her arms. My memory fades there, but I know we trekked on up the flatiron slope, a maternal hand for each of us, home to the basement apartment above the blue-green desert city. Our dad went to work too, but what he did there was unimaginable. He came home to kiss our mother. He threw us high and caught us. He’d put one of us in the rattletrap kid-seat strapped to his ten-speed to ride the steep pitches of the Avenues. Dad was either not here or he filled the atmosphere. But I knew that when our mother was gone, she was a nurse. She made sick people in white beds in clean rooms in long hallways get better. One day after work she told us about delivering a baby, following through with placenta, cord, and clean-up all by herself in the delivery room, because it just came before the doctor managed to arrive and wash his hands. She said she was fine, knew exactly what to do, but when the shift was over she had a shaky little breakdown in the parking lot. Before she was married, she’d worked with the Red Cross, traveling in the Bloodmobile from rural town to town. In that circle she was notorious for her aim—she could find a vein and enter it when no one else could. Also she once rebuffed a man who hung around after giving blood: he was waiting to tell her she had the most beautiful breasts he’d ever seen under a uniform. I don’t think he said “breasts.” Once, as she walked toward the hospital doors, she thought an enormous bird was flying overhead, but she looked up to see a grown man falling through the air. He’d jumped from a high hospital floor—my mother’s arrival was coincidental. But I believed this was the sort of thing my mother did in general: run toward people who dropped from the sky. It was kind of true. She had a way of being at the perimeter of disaster, as if she attracted it. She may believe so too, somewhere in the vault she won’t—can’t—open. It started young. Her mother died, dead winter night in their Idaho farmhouse, heart failure at thirty-three. Mom doesn’t remember her but recalls her father sitting at her bedside, pre-dawn, bearing the news. Mom was four. Her sister was eight. “Daddy” said he was going downstairs to call Mr. Kiser, the undertaker, and then she understood he wasn’t teasing. When she was sixteen she fell in love with the high school Apollo. His name was Keith, which sounded to me like teeth. She’d taken some abuse from local mean girls, so she was amazed that he loved her back. He proposed, gave her a ring. Her father and stepmother weren’t as thrilled as she’d anticipated. He came from a good family. An upright boy. Girls her age got married all the time. But her parents told her to go to college for a year. She was about to turn seventeen and had skipped a grade, way back, so graduation was near. She was a good student, a good daughter. She obeyed her parents and returned the ring. Next October she rode the bus home from college classes, thirty miles. She was eager to dress up for a date with her guy. She stepped off the northbound bus with her younger sister, crossed the train tracks on foot a hundred yards from their new home below town. Mom saw Keith’s car coming south, stopped to wait. Somehow no one saw the train, right there. It was just getting dark, light swirling snow. Aunt Karleen says the train’s lights should have reflected on the steel rails, but it came from the Underworld: no lights, no horn. The boy turned at the tracks. The train slammed into his car. Mom ran to him, half- ejected from the shattered window. His neck was broken and she wrapped her coat around him as he died. Our mom told us this story when we ran our hands over a pieced lap blanket draped over the back of our sofa: squares of burnt-orange felted wool. Pieces of the coat that comforted the dying boy in the smashed car. Her stepmother had cleaned and crocheted them together as a keepsake. When she was heavily pregnant with Marti (the first of us), Mom was walking across State Street in Salt Lake City, two steps behind an older man dressed in a suit and nice shoes. A car ran the light, hit the old guy, missed Mom’s extended stomach by a few inches. Mom watched in slow motion as he flew up, face to the sky. His glasses dropped at her feet and shattered. And then the man came down, she said, with “a sickening thud.” I could go on with this; my childhood was street-lit by other people’s disasters. My parents settled, three more siblings beyond Marti and me, in a small Utah town fifteen miles of no-shoulder roads from a hospital. Doesn’t seem that far until a kid spurts blood from the head after falling off a horse, or a jagged tibia sticks out of a sloshing irrigation boot, or a baby comes too quick in the house across the street. Or a middle-aged father of six is gasping through a deep-night cardiac arrest. People in our town knew the first thing, before calling an ambulance or piling a bloody mess into the car for a drive to the hospital, was to call Nadeene Anderson. … For all the blood, the only time I saw my mother saturated in it was the Sunday she backed the station wagon into, and almost over, my two-year-old sister Teri. It was the first time I saw my mother descend into paralysis, like other people did, in the face of horror. Where we lived, everyone went to church together. Neighborhoods belonged to the same congregation, attended meetings at the same time. Walking home from church with the girls my age—fifteen—was a way to free-wheel an extra hour of a waning weekend. Halfway home on long, narrow Grove Drive, my friend-enemy Melinda said, “Is that your Mom and Dad?” just before I saw our brown Ford station wagon coming back from driving the rest of my family home. I saw my dad honking the horn, scattering cars and people as he sped past. Incapable of discerning between a gag and a crisis, I waved as my parents blazed by. I laughed it off, maybe nervous, until our neighbors, following more slowly, stopped to address me. Sister Seeley said, “It looked like something happened to your little sister. Do you want to go to the hospital with us?” I got in, stunned, and was more shocked when I saw the station wagon in the Emergency drive-up. My father stood in the corridor, pale. He said, “Come sit with your mother.” I dissolved when I saw her, cowering in a dark sitting room, her gauzy dress soaked in blood at the cream-colored bodice, spreading down to muddle the floral skirting. In a weird way now this is just a run-of-the-mill five-kid family story of losing track of a toddler at the wrong moment: everyone thought someone else had seen her in. Teri wandered around to the back of the car. Mom backed out for yet another church meeting, and the bumper knocked the baby to the ground, a bad thump to the head—still gives Teri a look of gazing in different directions. The chassis went over clean but then the turn of the front tire scraped her face along the concrete until my father came out, shouting as he ran. Mom hit the brake, Dad picked up the bleeding child, held her as bait to make Mom move to the passenger side. She held tiny Teri, barely conscious, as Dad rushed them to the hospital. A story like this acquires many renditions, and we’ve all spun it in the decades after our little sister recovered. But I don’t think Mom did. Recover, I mean. I think it was the first irreversible crack in the stone. Dad cuffed it off on the other side with, “It’s hard to kill a kid,” but Mom never found a way to speak of it. We’ve come to understand that there’s a lot she will never speak, never release. Her mouth tightens into a lipless line, compressed at the corners. Primal, livid smoke behind the eyes. Fierce and strange as her people are, I’ve never seen this in anyone else—no one related to her, no one raised with her, no one who emerged from her. It's not just awful stuff like almost killing her toddler daughter. She presents the same livid blankness when her fine hair grows too long and “clings to her neck.” When she used to reach to brush my ragged teenage hair out of my eyes, restraining herself, I think, from slapping my cheek. When we folded towels the wrong way. She cloaks when we smirk at her idyllic portrayals of our father, the fairytale man who rescued her from the bleakness of what she also, in dissociated stories, portrays as her happy, glorious Idaho origins. … She returned to hospital nursing the year I went to college—partly to keep her license from lapsing but probably also because I was expensive. Marti was halfway through her two-year nursing degree. I was a flighty maybe-art / maybe-French lit major . Dad was doing fairly well as a small-town real estate guy but the enterprise was always up and down—another story but it called on my mother’s talents for consistency. She worked part time on the medical floor of the local hospital for less than a year before being recruited as Director of Nursing at a new long-term care center. It pushed the final decades of her career into geriatric care, and Nadeene slayed as usual. Wherever she took charge, state accreditors ranked her work as the best in the state, again and again. Like her house, my mother kept her institution spotless, efficient, calm. Her staff, like her children, knew what she expected and found it inarguable. She loved the residents in the pragmatic ways my mother loves—never sloppy, a little strict, undramatic. Everyone showered, or got a thorough bath in bed, every day. Everyone ate, at least a little bit. Everyone got dressed, all the beds got made. Everyone who could possibly get up, got up, at least for an hour, because it was good for them . I don’t think she particularly liked being in charge of things. She didn’t crave control over other people—not even her children. She was generally reluctant to call us out, resented confrontation more than the inciting crime. … Her career kept arcing as my father’s disintegrated. In their late fifties, our charismatic, gregarious Dad dipped into a years-long depression no one was allowed to notice. It must have been garish for him and my mother. He read Time and Sports Illustrated on the sofa in the open loft of their late-life foothill “dream house” while the TV blared ESPN. Sometimes he’d buck up but mostly he was in the loft, TV so loud no one could speak over it. Mom worked so long into her sixties I thought she’d never retire. She must have been exhausted, and fearful, and I know she was simmering over her children’s religious defections. The vulnerability made her more impenetrable. She came home after work to make dinner for her husband, clean it up. She went out to the yard with Dad to plant flowers, or pull weeds, or help with a little construction. After a pipe broke and their basement flooded, they worked together to clean it up, repaint, get it ready for Teri and her husband to move into the apartment they made of it. A lovely endeavor until Mom lost her footing on a stepladder, went down hard on the concrete floor, broke both arms at the elbow. Teri moved in, wiped Mom’s butt in the bathroom until the casts came off. … Our mother just turned ninety. We threw a big party for her at the condominium clubhouse. Dad died twenty years ago; they had a sweet final season after she retired—sold their house, bought the rather murky tunnel of a condo and paid for it, no mortgage. Took road trips to national parks, slept together in a pup tent on an inflated mattress. Spent a year teaching medical and business English in China. Went to Europe with Mom’s sisters and their husbands. I picked them up from the airport when they returned from Europe. Dad came down the escalator pale. Disoriented. Mom, in a state of denial that rendered her unrecognizable, insisted it was just travel fatigue. She had to know better, but the next day she drove him to Idaho for her class reunion, of all things. He slept in the back seat both ways. Marti, who became the fierce RN she was taught to be, insisted against Mom’s addled protests that they meet her at the emergency room. I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven Marti for that; maybe in some thread of magical thinking she believes that if the whole thing had remained unsaid it would have not become real. The ER, where Marti had once worked for eleven years, transferred Dad to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City for testing. How it takes a full week to discover a melon-sized bleeding tumor in an unnaturally distended stomach, I don’t know, except protocol is test by test, elimination by elimination. And, maybe because Nadeene, who acquired her clearest contours when disaster hovered like a leering corpse, who managed mortal and immortal crises step by step, was suddenly amoebic. This isn’t the story of my father’s death. It’s a wincing glance at my mother’s living death twenty years beyond—another boundary fight as she clings to the diminishing phrases, anecdotes, and insistences that cloak her in being-ness. … She remembers her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s names. She recounts a rote repertoire of memories that make church people coo at her spunk and charm. She knows her accounts and bills to the penny. She calls to remind my sister and me of upcoming medical appointments, and she’s dressed and ready to go when we arrive to take her there. Lucid. But there are eerie lapses. Ten years ago Marti and her kids took Mom, eighty, to a Fourth of July fireworks show. An older man a few family blankets over had a heart attack in the melee. Medics arrived to administer CPR and prepare the man for transport. Mom stood up like a sleepwalker and homed in, hovering unsteady over the medics, staring but saying nothing. Marti ran to her, took her arm, eased her away before anyone had to shoo her off. Mom followed, expressionless. She sat down contritely but as soon as Marti turned her attention, Mom paddled right on over again. Stood silent and entranced at the edge of the action, as if trying to recall something. A medic told her to stand back, but Mom held position, transfixed, until Marti reached her again. … Since then Mom has shattered both shoulders, one by tumbling backwards down her basement stairs because she insisted on carrying up a snowman jar. Again by falling hard on the asphalt as she walked the short distance to retrieve her daily junk mail. The falls were so brutal, the surgeries and recoveries so debilitating, I don’t know who but Nadeene could have bounced back. The bones in her hips (one artificial) and in her spine are rubble. The battle over her car keys nearly put me down for good. I told her I was terrified that she’d crash into a car in another lane, or worse, hit a neighborhood child. She said, “Well, sometimes terrible things just happen. We can’t control everything, you know.” Until just a few weeks ago she’s insisted on lurching along with her walker when we show up to do her shopping, or go to the drugstore, or to the many doctors (why she sees an ophthalmologist—two of them, in fact, when she’s almost completely blind, her irises silver as her hair, I do not know. She won’t let us take her to the dentist to tighten her lower teeth). But this month the pain has kept even her from clambering into the neighbors’ car for a ride to church, from coming along to “do her own shopping.” After the second shoulder break, our brother Tom said, “Look, we’re all bigger than her. We outnumber her five to one.” We assembled at her house—Tony and Teri took long drives—to lay down the law. She needed full-time access to medical care. We were there for her, always would be, but we couldn’t attend every minute, night and day, trying to prevent the next fall, the next terrible accident, the next internet scam, the next social media fiasco. Straight from the black hole: No. She doesn’t want to spend our inheritance. She “doesn’t want to be a burden.” She just won’t drink very much water so she won’t need help getting to the bathroom on painful hips. She has a nice supply of vanilla protein drinks, so she won’t need to wield a knife, or a can opener, or raise her stiffened arms too high to retrieve a plate that she won’t leave on the counter, or turn on the stove. She gives herself a “sponge bath” every morning although it’s clear there are places she can’t reach, or forgets to. She’s disintegrating in place, in her formerly spotless house she can’t see to clean. Watching it is my personal definition of Hell. … Marti ordered a hospital bed for her, bendable in ways Mom perfectly understands and knows how to operate, complete with a bubbling vinyl pad to distribute pressure across the skin. Handsome young men came in and set it up quick as a wink near the bedroom window. Marti had a wheelchair brought in, and a commode that fits high over the low-slung toilet. The commode: sure. The bed: Mom won’t even look at it, won’t even deign to say no . It just isn’t there. She sits in her green armchair, gazing over the invisible bed toward the window. She still prays out loud at bedtime: Please, dear Heavenly Father, help me to endure all that thou requirest of me so I may return to… … My mother is a high-def constellation of hyper-specific recollections. Behind the bright stars: dense velvet black—not because she’s ninety but because she became herself, at four years old, by learning what to configure and what to shroud. No memory beams forward from the event horizon, that winter night in 1939. Whatever Nadeene was or might have become before her mother vanished is erased. Here in her place is the child who shielded herself behind a tapestry of perfect compliance—good girl who did her chores, smart girl who skipped first grade in a one-room country school, resourceful girl who walked ten miles home along the darkening Yellowstone Highway in winter after a piano lesson, because she missed her ride and didn’t dare call her parents to come get her. That child became our mother. That child is gaining on our mother. Not the one who must have acquired form before the morning her father called Mr. Kiser. The child who is our mother is secretive and wily. She plays us against one another. She lies low, keeps a mild face. We’ve each been taken down by it at one point or another, or another, but there are five of us, and we love her, and up to now we’ve been able to spell each other off. Bring our separate kinds of best to her. A bedsore was not the breakthrough any of us wished for. Mom knows what a bedsore is, and she understands the cause. But she eats, sleeps, sits rapt for the next Masked Singer episode in that heinous green armchair, week after week, night and day, waiting for Dad to come shining through the window right there above the nice bendy hospital bed. After seeing that nasty mess, Marti, the sibling who deserves the most validation from the mother she emulates, called me to say she needed a change of guard. I drove down a few hours later. Mom greeted me from her chair, blank and benign. Didn’t say a word about the broken, festering flesh she was sitting on. Didn’t yield a wince, a grimace, a tear. … But it’s ruptured something besides the skin. She’s fallen into a simpler, more contrite childlike state. Last week we convened in her room, a couple of us sitting on the comfy hospital bed, to hear her wishes for resettling into assisted living. For leaving her home. She said, “Whatever you decide will be fine,” and then she gazed over our heads and breathed, light. … I’m convinced she’ll live forever, in incremental forms only she can inhabit. That tight cable of self-protection, the defiant thread of vitality she spins like a spider is all I’ve ever known as Mother. We’ll come together soon to help her move, and she’ll continue to drive us crazy and break our hearts. But nurses will surround her. We’ll make the little apartment look like her own house, with her own dishes and sofas, kitchen table and all the framed photographs of our father, of our father and her, our parents and us, enshrined. Her own TV, pre-set on America’s Got Talent. We’ll bring the monstrous green chair, because it’s hers. … Oh, wait. Never mind. She’s feeling much better! She’s not going anywhere. No. No. … This morning I drove the forty miles from my house to hers on ever-nasty I-15. She needed me to drive a check to the bank, bring back the cash. She wanted me to stop by WalMart, which I hate and she knows it, to buy a box of cheap apple fritters. We go to her, errand or none. We check on her. We sit out the excruciatingly dull but dangerous hours, because we love her. Mom was on the bathroom floor, leaning against the tub. She’d fallen backwards trying to pull on a clean pair of pants. Didn’t hit anything but carpeted floor but she couldn’t get back up. She guessed she’d been down five minutes. She’d already pushed her little emergency button, so I sat with her against the tub until the fire truck roared up. Seven calendar-worthy EMTs jogged in. She looked up at them, burly angels, nearly swooned as they picked her up—so gentle, so powerful, so handsome (she knows handsome, even blind)—and helped her balance at her push-along walker. They followed her back to that damned green chair, settled her in, and disappeared. I texted my siblings. Everyone called. The neighbors flocked in to make sure everything was okay. Grandchildren texted, told us to read their messages to her. Mom says she wants to die; she wants to be among the people she believes will greet her in heaven if only she endures what she’s been called to endure. But I think she’s also terrified—this woman who has forever skimmed the boundary of death, one corpse after another after another. She’s not the one who dies; she’s the angel of death. And times like this—everyone gathered, everyone swooping in, all the reassurance that she matters even though she’s a burden : she’s radiant as a four-year-old child, astonished that we love her. She wants to stay forever. Usually I measure a little cooling time for certain experiences before I try to write about them. I’ve written about my mother before—more detailed or episodic renditions of some elements of“Blood Draw.” But writing about her now, in the deep stream of this painful, dire yet deceptively serene season of her very old age, feels unruly and surreal. Previous KARIN ANDERSON is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do (forthcoming in 2025), published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. karinandersonauthor.com Next

The Black Flies of Home by Brock Dethier Black flies dance in the air between my head and my brother’s, distorting the view. We sit on pinkish granite smoothed and sloped by retreating glaciers ten millennia ago. Below us, the Rocky Branch of the Saco River, then the ridge that leads from Stanton and Pickering all the way up to Davis, Isolation, and Washington itself. Farther west, the ski trail scars of Mt. Attitash, still the new ski area, though it opened in 1965. Black flies are small, hard to see, quiet. They like warm sheltered places-- behind your ear or knee. They follow the blood others have left. And bite. I react with large hard itchy welts that I scratch bloody in my sleep. Mosquitoes are everywhere but I’ve never seen black flies outside New England, so their presence is a special “welcome home!” to the region. Around us, blueberry bushes with subtle flowers-- little cream bells that will become the fruit of the New Hampshire gods-- rhodora about to brighten the ledges with cerise blossoms, grus eroded from the ledges filling the cracks between them, sweet fern. I wasn’t aware of being bitten but I find blood behind my ear. Within our view, we’ve skied both downhill and cross country, canoed, floated, kayaked, swam, hiked of course. We were born just out of sight to the left. We’ve come in search of iron mines and leave with sparkly ore, black fly bumps starting to itch, and a few crystals to take back west to what still seems after 26 years a temporary home. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Issue 1 Few who have experienced New England’s black flies would argue that they make the world a better place, yet for people who have grown up with them, the flies mean home. Having spent half my life in New England and half in Utah, I’m interested in how we think about “home,” and this unpublished, personal poem tries to illuminate the complexities of the concept and to highlight the irony that sometimes what bugs you may come to signify home for you. .................................................................................................................................................................................... BROCK DETHIER retired from Utah State University after directing the writing composition program for 11 years. His publications include From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music (Heinemann, 2003), First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers (Utah State University Press, 2005), Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them (Utah State University Press, 2013), and two books of poetry, Ancestor Worship (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015). Next - Fireflies by Kevin Prufer Next

Nominations for the Pushcart Prize Anthology Best of the Small Presses From Issue 1 "July" by Shannan Ballam "Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room" by Paul Fericano "Missa Brevis" by Kimberly Johnson "The Little House: Crystal City, Texas" by Jeff Talmadge From Issue 2 "Knotted Wrack" by Maureen Clark "Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us" by Kase Johnston Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link

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The Worrier by Nancy Takacs Now that you are her, what will you do? I’ll walk across the swinging bridge and light a clove cigarette. How will you roam? I’ll drive a Packard convertible, my man in a long dark coat beside me. In the countryside, where will you land, and what will you eat? We’ll find a bar in northern Wisconsin. We won’t eat. What are you wearing, and what do you look like? An indigo dress, a little black cloche. I’ve outlined my lips to look like a sweet maroon bow. What songs will you sing? “Heart of My Heart” And “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard.” Who will know you better than anyone? My silk chemise. What undergarments do you wear? None. What tree do you wear instead? The plum. Why? Because it’s a palm full of dusk. What word will you use? Flagrant. It’s time for this. Where does the word go? It rises from under my bare feet when I leave the beach. What is strange about you now? There is nothing strange. What is common? I have loved the first light. Where does the light go? It goes under the letters in captions of what I say. Where does the scent go? It goes into my eyes, my mouth, the way I turn my head so that you will imagine lilacs. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Initially printed in The Tampa Review and The Worrier: Poems (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). I guess this poem is a favorite of mine, as it’s the first Worrier poem I wrote, and it called me back to write more Worriers, that became a book. I like the film star because she is strong, even though she is, in a sense, voiceless. However, in the poem, she has a voice. She takes charge of where she is going, is confident about her choices, and plays with the reader a bit. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water . nancytakacs.org Next - Junk Email by Nancy Takacs Next

Predictions of the Past by Alison Moore Maybe I need an excuse to come here. The dog needs a walk, and during the day nothing is half as haunted as night. There’s evidence— the dead have been reading, not nineteenth century novels not personal letters or sweepstakes rules, but the Northwest Arkansas Times. The pages are all over the graves. Not the section called “Living,” not the horoscopes, certainly not the future which no longer concerns them, but the wants ads, all those vacancies: rooms with views, sublets, yard sales, must-sees and have-to-sells. Possibilities of one sort or another. Are they planning on coming back? Or simply curious about the places that have opened up now that they are gone? I wonder— is there such a thing as the Reincarnation Times , a deity writing the personals: Middle-aged couple in Des Moines looking for eleventh-hour child, orphans a plus all expenses paid. Lonely heart takes a beating, apply within. My dog runs among the papers, spooked by the way they ride the wind, rustle and snag on the tilting wire stands that once held ribbons and wreaths. She flushes a cardinal and it lands in a nearby cedar, a red gash in the wood, watching. There are families here, but none of mine. My father, who art in Virginia, a drifter reduced to ash. I threw him to the wind five years ago, from a rusted bridge over the Rappahannock. He’s drifting, still. He won’t stay put, certainly not beneath the stone that bears his name in Orlean, in the family plot next to his sister, the one he didn’t mean to kill. He was nine, lifting his father’s shotgun. She was seven, and simply walking up the stairs when the bullet met her, one step below the landing. And so—is this why I’m here— to summon my father, former journalist, to a cemetery in Arkansas to read the paper? He won’t look for a job; he never did. For once he’s not going to comment on the headlines, give a lecture about the whims of the gods, the cost of hubris, or the Real Reasons for the War Between the States. He will concern himself, finally, with what he might need, beginning with minutiae, the useless and marvelous he can now afford: Hermes Typewriter (letter X sticks, otherwise excellent condition ). Printing press (needs work, runs good ). Trunk of Confederate Bonds (like new! ) And best of all, a 1912 Remington rifle (never fired). He can barely bring himself to lift it. It’s heavy and I have to help. It’s all right , I say, I’m right behind you. He closes his eyes, squeezes the trigger. The sound that should have been thunder is no more than a harmless click, the most beautiful of vacancies, the empty chamber. No child will fall. The bird watches from the tree, a red ribbon with wings, ready to disappear. It won’t. It stirs; it stays, sings. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Predictions of the Past,” was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Patterson Review for the Allen Ginsberg Prize. The title came from a billboard in North Carolina advertising a palm reader who offered “Predictions of the Future and the Past.” It struck me as ironic and perfect. We think we can predict the past with some certainty, but what if we could revise it? This poem is ultimately about a family tragedy. My father, as a boy, accidentally killed his younger sister with a double-barrel shotgun. He never spoke of it. So I did. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALISON MOORE is s a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, and tours with the multi-media humanities program, "Riders on the Orphan Train" which she co-created with the musician Phil Lancaster. ridersontheorphantrain.org Next - The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson Next

The Concrete Poet by Jim LaVilla-Havelin I. this is the first trans mission of the con crete poet report on exhibit at co-op gallery no press release no postcard no crackers no brie II. the alter native paper critic who is sometimes too smart for words but still uses them found her way there wrote: “_______ has found an alphabet of disaster.” III. somewhere between the calligraphic epics of Cy Twombly the incised mud-silica of Dubuffet the Rosetta Stone and J.G. Ballard’s CRASH IV. was this my fifteen minutes of fame? hiding in the basement while the police streamed through the sleek gallery asking everyone my name, my des cription, my whereabouts V. the art critic for the daily who also reviews restaurants, books, and covers the auto show describes them as “a grammar of happenstance or perhaps mishappenstance” VI. I don’t know when I first began to see them as messages scraped by metal onto barriers stories in stone VII. out with the truck with the pneumatic lift cones, flashers the jackhammer and the blow torch it comes to me we’re not in art school any more more dangerous than pastels VIII. it is the opposite of graffiti I remove de-construct re-contextualize present an outlaw aesthetic that makes art-speak go tongue-tied IX. I am so tired of the language meta phor I went to the wall to escape words I hacked out these sections of barrier to see silence as much as any markings deaths or near scrapes with it may have left I’m not telling stories I’m hammering away at walls Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue THE CONCRETE POET is the third volume of a five-book sequence. Though this section was written in 2010, the book is just now (2024) reaching its conclusion. This was the first section I wrote. It’s a favorite because it lays out some of the extent of what the long poem will include. A road map? A first shot of a voice? A catalogue of possibilities. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JIM LAVILLA-HAVELIN is the author of eight books of poetry, including two forthcoming in 2025, Mesquites Teach Us to Bend (Lamar University Press, 2025) and A Thoreau Book (Alabrava Press, 2025). He is the co-editor of the Houston University Press, Unsung Masters volume on Rosemary Catacalos (2025) and as Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, he is assembling her unpublished work for a volume Sing! . An educator, editor, and community arts activist for over 50 years, LaVilla-Havelin coordinates National Poetry Month activities in San Antonio. Awarded the City of San Antonio’s Distinction in the Arts for Literary Art, he teaches at The Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center for Gemini Ink’s Partners Program, teaches senior citizens in the Go Arts Program through Bihl Haus Cultural Arts, and high school students as Poet in Residence at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Next - Bruce by J. Diego Frey Next

we've been out dancing by Gabriela Halas Throb of blood flows like sweet sap to rhythms both old, and unorthodox. Could the pluck of grass be set to measure? The pull of water from an upturned palm be set to song? Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Currrent Issue Sometimes the beauty of poetry is in its simplicity—the ability to convey a lot w ith so little, in tangible, literal words. Nothing shrouded, nothing obscure or abstract. The word 'simplicity' is not often used in a positive way with poetry but I feel like that can be such a strength. The poem "we've been out dancing" is just that, a way to celebrate movement in our bodies that feels both ancien and like we are experiencing it for the first time. .................................................................................................................................................................................... GABRIELA HALAS immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in British Columbia. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review , Cider Press Review , About Place Journal , Prairie Fire , december magazine , and The Hopper , among others; fiction in Room Magazine , Ruminate , The Hopper , and subTerrain, among others; and nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review , Grain , Pilgrimage , and High Country News . She won first prize for her poetry chapbook Bloodwater Tint from Backbone Press (forthcoming). She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. gabrielahalas.org Next - northern climate II by Gabriela Halas Next

The Little House: Crystal City, Texas by Jeff Talmadge By the time my parents arrived at the prison after the War and with their first son, the 10-foot barbed wire fence was down, the towers and corner spotlights gone. The rifle-carrying guards who, around the clock, circled the perimeter on horseback, had returned to their old day jobs in that desolate place, not quite Mexico, not quite America, thirty-five miles from the border. When the Alien Enemy Detention Facility closed in the War’s shadow, the school district got most of it, opening the houses to others like that young couple and their toddler, who arrived from central Texas on a teacher’s pay, probably surprised that he, my father, was alive—and grateful, having come from nothing, to be living in what they called The Little House. If I could wish someone well who is in the past, I would wish it for them—that at least for that moment, they know some happiness in this life, believing, as they must have, inside someone else’s prison, that the worst was over, and they survived. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue After World War II, my family lived in what had been part of an internment camp for people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent in Crystal City, Texas. This was before I was born, but my brother remembers it well, and always referred to it as “the little house.” It must have seemed like a miracle for my father to have returned alive. Here they were, having come from nothing, with a young child, starting a new life in that dry and distant place. I have few memories of them being happy and like to imagine that this was a happy time for them. Some of my description is indebted to Jan Jarboe Russell’s book, The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II (Scribner, 2015) and her related article in Texas Monthly . .................................................................................................................................................................................... Next - The Dream by Shanan Ballam Next JEFF TALMADGE was born in Uvalde, Texas, about 70 miles from the Mexican border and grew up in small towns like Crystal City, Wharton, Boling and Big Spring. At Duke University, he won the Academy of American Poets Award, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. He was a civil trial attorney in Austin before becoming a full-time musician. Jeff has received numerous awards for his songwriting. His most recent record is Sparrow . jefftalmadge.com

Pissing Toward the Sky by Jerry VanIeperen We’re watching the eclipse though we don’t know our astronomy. And it’s not warm enough to try kissing even in breezy May. I cannot sit bladder full of movie soda. Step out, look down ridge, unzip, without car lights or street lamps. Just our stillborn shadow on the moon above. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Published in Black Rock & Sage, Idaho State University’s creative writing journal. It has since become an ISU-enrolled student publication, but 1000 years ago, it was open to anybody. A few months before this poem was accepted, I had won the undergrad creative writing contest for poetry at Utah State University, and it felt like I was on a roll and it was a special time, which I didn’t appreciate until the benefit of hindsight. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JERRY VANIEPEREN lives heartily in Utah with two children, two dogs, and one wife. He earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska and was a founding editor of the poetry journal Sugar House Review. Next - Application for the Alien Exchange Program by Naomi Ulsted Next

Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room by Paul Fericano I can plainly see they are grateful and relieved to be inside off the streets where most of the neighbors are cautious suspicious troubled by their persistence their appearance their door-to-door politeness these two young gentlemen barely adult dressed in handsome dark blue suits slightly larger than their almost grown-man bodies clear sweet-voiced messengers who sit close to one another on my sofa enjoying the cookies I just baked the familiar aroma hanging in the air drifting into conversation like a memorable prayer in truth they can’t quite believe their good fortune their luck in finding me someone who really wants to hear what they have to say in this cozy container a refuge from the cold biblical ambiguities of this day thrilled actually to share their knowledge of God’s chosen plan for his people and so I bring it up I serve it up like holy communion: I want to know about men who marry other men I want to understand exactly what it is what it really means when we choose to be with one another without complaint I want to hear from these eager young missionaries I want to know what the question is but first I coax them to try the oatmeal raisin foolishly boasting that I use only the best ingredients just the right amount of sugar no coconut pointing out that when it comes to oatmeal cookies or anything else for that matter using coconut is the real sin here and I smile and I give them a wink and suddenly they both stand as if on cue startled these two sweet melodic declarations of truth on fire rapidly turning the pages of ancient texts in their heads searching for cautious pronouncements that arrive without warning these visiting angels who now ask in unison: Are you gay? Of course this is hardly the question I was expecting to hear and equally surprised I also stand now wiping my hands on my flowered apron and reply: Aren’t you? Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This favorite unpublished poem of mine was written way back in 1980. Since it’s always been a lot of fun to perform, I’ve particularly enjoyed sharing it at a number of public readings over the years. For some reason I never felt compelled to submit it for publication anywhere (until now). It was initially written a few days after an unexpected visit to my apartment by the two young missionaries mentioned in the poem. It wasn’t until much later that I happened to learn that they had apparently tracked me down after following up on a tip from an old girlfriend of mine. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PAUL FERICANO is the author of Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance (Poems-For-All Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Bulitzer Prize. yunews.com Next - Sinatra, Sinatra by Paul Fericano Next