Looley Wants to See his Nose

by Francine Witte | Dec 2, 2024 | micro, publications

Not in the mirror. Not in between his uncle’s years-ago fingers. Not running all over town like Gogol. Just something he could hold in his hands for once in his life.

He tried last month to see his heart. After so many years, he wanted to see the actual scars on it, the ones that were put there by bad love and poor choices. Looley slipped a rusty Gillette down his hairy chest but couldn’t make it through. Besides, Louise was making pork chops for dinner.

Looley wants to see his nose because frankly, he doesn’t trust the mirror anymore. How it has sunk him sudden into an old man. These days all the mirror shows him is a tinsel of whiskers and a nose that has grown longer, wider.

Looley can’t help but wince when he sees this. Is it possible for a nose to grow this much in the few short years since childhood? Louise’s nose has also grown, but he understands because his wife is an old lady. He appreciates her wisdom when she says, “You don’t want to have your five-year-old nose your whole life, do you?”

But he needs to see the nose for himself, and this is the morning he is going to do it. He will look into that liar of a mirror. Maybe, I will let the razor slip. Maybe, I will hold my nose in my own hand. Maybe I will not worry anymore about my own death coming for me.

Stepmother, Not Mother, Mother

by Avitus B. Carle | Nov 25, 2024 | micro, publications

Stepmother locks Daughter in the basement, chain keeping her prisoner to the furnace. Daughter tries to reach the window where Mother might be, watching, waiting for a kiss.

Mother is there until she isn’t. Until Stepmother pulls them apart. Until the policeman takes Mother away.

In the window, there is Mother, lips pressed to the glass, blowing Daughter a kiss.

At a gas station, Daughter cries into a bag of Doritos and tells the adult behind the counter she’s lost. He asks where’s your mother? And she gives him the only number she knows.

*

A knock at the door.
Mother in the window, a kiss left on the glass.
Daughter wants to run.
Not Mother sucks her teeth, tells daughter not to worry.

*

Daughter belongs to Stepmother now.
Father doesn’t come home.
His addictions, Stepmother says.

*

Daughter is addicted to gambling. With the tooth fairy. She tells Father over lunch. Because of Not Mother, she says. You two should divorce.
We’re getting married, says Father. Says Not Mother coming in from the kitchen with
homemade muffins from ShopRite.

*

Mother retreats into the street, as she looks towards Daughter’s window. As she blows daughter a kiss.
Daughter watches her from her bedroom window.
Mother asks Father if he’s sober.
Daughter doesn’t understand.
Father says “abuse” and “divorce.”
There’s so little Daughter understands.
Mother is at the front door, screaming.
The same fist Mother used to break Father’s nose now gives the door a heartbeat.

School Days

by Miles Parnegg | Nov 19, 2024 | micro, publications

They left the couch, a show about child prodigies gone insane in their twenties, and in her room he pulled loose her knotted drawstrings. Outside, snow. Frost clinging to power lines like cake piping, a blizzard fooling everyone and, for once, lingering. She breathed in and nodded, the hair under his palm short and prickly as iron shavings. Through the afternoon they touched each other, trading off—stopping now and then to make quesadillas, blush as they came out of the bathroom. He’d reach for Kleenex but she’d push up onto her knees and say, Let me, and bend her head to his abdomen, the way she did over a microscope in chem lab, curling her hair behind her ears, tucking the pendant on its chain into her shirt. Webs of ice spread from the corners of brittle windows, and the stuffed elephant on her bed—did he have a name?—was missing a marble eye, caught in a wink.

Wednesday came. Thursday. He drove down Edith with the heater on high, a beanie, a parka, ski mittens. His breath pluming in front of him as he waited for her to answer the door, the tongue of the lock licked slowly back in its bolt. They didn’t talk. They kissed and napped and felt their bare thighs pressed under sheets printed with royal corgis.

The last morning, as the thawing began, he hit black ice and floated into a ditch. He missed the telephone pole, and a neighbor in Carharts pulled him out with a cable and winch. He explained to her why he was late, pointing to the dented fender, the icy brush wedged in the radiator, the fan of mud up the left side—proof of gallantry—and they stood in the cold on her porch looking at the car, like it contained some answer, or a metaphor they’d draw on later. Inside’s heat moved out around their ankles and dissipated, and they stood on the frozen brick looking, afraid to move, as if they would dissolve if they drew their skin away and went back to what they could feel.

When I Say Grief

by Ciara Alfaro | Nov 11, 2024 | micro, publications

after Meredith Martinez

My husband left me in February. He left with my love in his hands, and I walked to the pharmacy for a carton of eggs. The eggs were carried home in my dirty tote bag like a promise kept. I did not swing them, jerk them, or threaten to jostle them excessively. I walked past the K-Mart and the spinal specialist. The sky was pregnant gray, but passing the shops, all I could see was red. The thought of brittle shells crawled beneath the skin of my fingers. My hands felt stone cold then, the way a neck crack tastes. Once home, I placed the eggs in the fridge—cleared out a whole shelf for them. It’s not so hard, to make space for a fragile thing. All you have to do is open the cold, hard machine with an oath to move gently inside. That night, I could not sleep, for I could hear the phantom cracking of the eggs inside my ears. I felt them between my teeth. What happens to sadness grinded in the mouth? It never speaks. I hurried through the bodies that furniture makes in the dark, my stomach and pelvis slick with sweat. I kneeled in front of the refrigerator’s chill. Gently, I opened the carton of eggs. I counted them. I pressed my finger to their heads, sighing when I hit a special rocked groove. I rolled them around in my palm until I felt their insides move back. This was how I named them, how I loved them, how I vowed never to leave them first or even second. I bought ninety more cartons until April came. I broke teeth. I saw red. I had a man—a body in my arms—and then, I did not. What happens to an egg that is never eaten? It dries out. It becomes unusable. Spoiled, miscarried. When I say grief, this is what I mean.

This is the spot where –

by Nora Nadjarian | Nov 4, 2024 | micro, publications

The moonlight-sequinned sea says There’s something I want to tell you. I walk on, pretending not to hear, fling a pebble at her face, then another, as far as they’ll go. The sea says, Listen to me, please. I want to tell her, Shut your waves up, shut your waves up and leave me alone; I just came here to light a cigarette and moon-breathe, not to talk about the past.

Sunburned tourists sit on van Gogh chairs, rest their elbows on checked tablecloths. I almost choke on the ebb of my memories and their flow. The sea says I didn’t mean it; the sea says I’m sorry, repeatedly.

A-long-time-ago returns, not as the calm moon but as a fierce sun, the sequins now on fire, the skin-peeled, salt-stung, sunscreen-polished tourists on their sunbeds, eyes shut under their umbrellas. Nobody saw anything. Not a single person noticed anything wrong with the world here on the spot where two girls stood. Two best friends dressed in matching bikinis, with matching ponytails and chipped nail-varnish toes, wade in, giggling. There’s a whole sea we can hide in, and the sea asks, Where are your parents? And the sea asks Where? The sea asks are? The sea asks your –

Korean History

by Yejun Chun | Oct 31, 2024 | micro, publications

My lover says that they’ll give me 380 words before saying goodbye forever, and it’s
380 words because she’s going to be dragged back North across the border and I’ll have to be
separated to the South;

she checks her watch and tells me that I have 333 words left, so I grab a white brush
and dip it into ink, and I slowly write in traditional Chinese letters a poem from a Korean scholar
whom she likes very much, who wrote the poem during the colonial period, on her linen shirt
and then tell her of the time she was with me

when my uncle died and when he died, he died with a bullet to his innocent head
because he was wearing the color blood red which is the color of our hearts when we touched
each other’s skin, when we still had the passion and strength and courage to tell jokes to each
other.

We once went on a trip to see fields of rice and barley and we danced in the yellow
fields and it felt like a prayer, a message somewhat divine we were sending to the universe
through our bodily movements in the midst of that rainstorm and our recreation of our long-
lost childhood during which we never once saw the tip of a black gun.

I love you not only because of the small moments we spent together but also because
of the moments we didn’t spend with each other. The stars at night have never been so
bright to me, and the sound of pansori has never felt so sweet to my ears yet teary to my eyes.
Time can move so silently with you.

I have only 93 words now. Such a short time to do anything. It’s almost time to go.
She cries out as if words could last longer than a word count. Here’s an image:

Blue Han river flowing and carrying us on a wooden boat. Clear sky above us, and we
are holding hands: immortal in the moment.

Before she disappears and crosses the border, I kiss her lips, knowing that I have just
drank rice juice with her an hour ago, so she’ll think of my timeless love for her whenever she
drinks her favorite drink.

At the Clown’s Birthday Party

by Brad Barkley | Oct 28, 2024 | micro, publications

After cake and ice cream, the guests, in their painted smiles and polka dot attire, settle in to watch the man they’ve hired to entertain them.  An actuary analyst!  So much better, already, than last year’s accountant or the year-before-that’s linguistics scholar.  In his narrow dark tie and shirt sleeves, he opens his briefcase of tricks, produces an over-large ledger sheet and pencil, and, while the clowns watch open-mouthed, calculates a number of profitable, competitive insurance premium levels while determining the amount of cash reserves needed to assure payment of benefits and then— before they can even catch their breath—withdraws a dozen manila envelopes and reviews employee claims activity to see if premiums are adequate to cover losses.  Hurrah!  They laugh when he extracts a large seltzer bottle, lifts it high, and uses it to water down his scotch because he explains, Jill thinks he is drinking a little too much lately, though he can quit anytime he wants, and with a flourish, he sets up a cardboard bar and sits at it and lights a cigarette and runs his hands through his hair, opens his wallet to a picture of Jill, who (surprise!) left him last week, the kids, still in their braces, and while his magic In-Box slowly fills itself and after he breaks five pencils with one hand, out come the skinny balloons which he deftly twists into a variety of shapes, including the 5-alpha reductase enzyme that is causing both his baldness and that little twinge in his prostate, and the Q-shaped ucler growing in his duodenum.  He leaves one balloon uninflated but won’t talk about it.  The clowns are not, he tells them, his fucking therapist, and he never liked them anyway.  The clowns cheer and laugh; this is so much better than anything, despite the bite of pathos they feel as the man cries now, sobbing into his open palms, and the clowns all know, know in their hearts, that this funny, sad man is really laughing on the inside. 

***Originally published in Hotel Amerika.

Mausoleum of Gloaming

by Aimee Parkison | Oct 24, 2024 | micro, publications

Crypt 1: Broomstick Skirts

In robes of shell pink sunset over woodland hills, girls float the river to dance on hollow logs. Their gossamer gowns, devoured by fungus, release spores in the wind. In broomstick skirts, my sisters float skyward with petals on water. Soft as fleece, the faces our mother wears, one of them mine, smile as she walks away, strung out, outraged by a summer meadow at sunrise. The sunset bounces off her studio walls as she paints shadows.

Crypt 2: Shadow Painter and Man of Wood

In her shadow paintings, a man of wood dives into the ditch. Faceless in the trees, he rises to devour pears ripening in the moths of autumn, as delicate as hummingbirds, courting death in fire glowing like morning. A corpse acts with repose, cradling an unborn in a blanket as velvety as rabbit skin under a veil of silver stars.

Crypt 3: River Crows

Taunting the shadow painter with gray flowers, my sisters haunt gregarious crows purplish in strong sunlight, their woodland nest, a bowl of sticks in trees. Awakened, these intelligent ebony-hued large birds caw-cah-kahr the devious route that cuts through a muddy river slipping through a song as rhythmic as time.

Crypt 4: Women of Vines

A month, a year, a lifetime out of its depth takes hold like a drug. Whispers descend like the river luminous yet rooted to the earth. Women, many women, and girls wear faces like knives sheathed in dark vine. Girls ebb from communal dwellings where their mothers have no names but evening.

Crypt 5: Deadwood Rain

Like rain into deadwood, insects vibrate into hollows of the willows. Wood ants and roaches walk the trail like an old man’s necktie, where I linger in shadow painting, longing to become a shade like her. Leaning among the rocks of the morning, I encounter the monstrous blacksnake oozing digested blood, raising his head. My dancing tongue glitters with scales over his body.

Crypt 6: Fungus

Childhood memories fall like shawls over tabletops to disintegrate with visions leaching into damp soil where fungi grow.

Crypt 7: Anthropomorphic Girls

On my bedroom walls, the shadow painter paints a woodland world of wonder where girls like me become mushrooms and mushrooms become girls. She populates my room with the Questionable Stropharia, the Hooded Helevella, and the Capped Amanita. They skip with the Rose Coral and the Purple Laccaria toward the Prince and the Man-on-Horseback. Anthropomorphic, they linger happily under the trees with Wooly Chanterelles.

Crypt 8: Those Who Drink from the Death Cap

The mushroom girls pet a giant white human skull in the dark of the wood’s shallows. A giant Puffball. Is it good to eat? The girls begin kicking it like a soccer ball. Its spores mist the woodland painting toward the Death Cup, the Destroying Angel, fetid as forgotten dreams in the gills that sweat onto an Anise-Scented Clitocybe, laughing in a girlish manner.

Crypt 9: Gnomelike Foragers

At night, the shadow painter creates murals of fungal joy on my walls. In patterns of spore prints, she paints my sisters walking under the oaks holding large mushrooms as shaggy parasols. Lepiota rachodes. Gnomelike, sauntering behind the girls, foragers wear mushroom caps on their heads.

Crypt 10: A Dead Man’s Foot and a Dead Man’s Hand

Along a roadside near the trees where girls walk, a Dead Man’s Foot leads to a Shaggy Man. A Dead Man’s Hand emerges from the sand. By the light of dawn, I wonder if the shadow painter is warning me of death, then I realize all these dead parts are named after fungi that grow in the wild.

Crypt 11: Lithographs

Shadow paintings spread like lithographs on my bedroom walls where the radiance of water disappears around a big fir tree on the hill with the crudeness of realism and the graveness of graves.

Crypt 12: The Bone Princess

Shadow paintings smudge: shaded drawings scratched into caves. In my little room of morbid curiosity, the shadow painter confronts her captor. Her kidnapper puts her on display, exhibited, posed like a bone princess on a stone throne bearing no name. As if what happened to us was midsummer madness, we vanish without a trace.

Crypt 13: Nightmare Child

I was a child of thirteen when the shadow painter painted the bone princess at night on my bedroom walls. Night after night, she labored on a portrait of the bone princess. I sat up in my bed, watching in silent wonder, not daring to interrupt her.

My father assured me it was only a dream. A nightmare.

Crypt 14: The Unspoken

At night when the shadow painter visited, I wanted her to speak to me. I wanted to speak to her. She was always completely silent, afraid of light and sound. Shy. Being a shadow, a shy shade, she worked in silence and spoke through shadows. In her paintings, the House of Fire in the woods became a cottage of unspoken words where the lights turned off and on, producing a masterpiece of whispers painted on the walls. Unspoken: Mother. Daughter. Trees. Mausoleum of Gloaming.

Crypt 15: Evergreen Night

Staring into the mural, I found the nightly mystery of the shadow painter’s velvety chalk marks. The abstract patterns of the shadows beneath the trees seemed like witches flying above creatures, half human, half animal. They rise in graduations of tones of the evergreen night.

Crypt 16: Ebony Abstractions

She doesn’t try to duplicate the night woods but its moods and abstractions, communicating like children of the wind opening leaves as the maples quake and shiver out the fragrance of the trees after rain.

Crypt 17: The Moons of Her Eyes

Tonight, the moons of her eyes become a part of me.

I want to tell her that I missed her, but she’s shy. More than anything, I want her to stay because I suspect she’s my biological mother. Sarah Janowitz, the painter. Or rather she was the spirit of my mother. In particular, she was the shade of Sarah Janowitz, who had been a painter in life before she died in the woods.

Crypt 18: The Shade

As a shade, she had become one with her art. If I had not known her in life, I would have the privilege of knowing her in death, since she came to me at night. In her paintings, she spoke, showing me visions.

Crypt 19: The Slippage

Like all art, her shadow paintings were open to interpretation, and I often misinterpreted what she was trying to tell me about what happened in the woods, the way her body became an ecosystem all its own. In dying she fed many lives through the slippage of epidermis, putrid gas collecting in her distended abdomen, purging bloodstained fluid from her orifices. Exposed to animals and air, she was reduced to bone in ten days.

Crypt 20: The Body House

Her body housed insects. House flies entered her mouth, nose, anus, and eyes. Flesh flies gave birth to maggots that fed the blowflies. Maggots migrated in masses. Hide beetles, carcass beetles, and ham beetles arrived as her bloated body collapsed in the dirt of the mossy stones above the drop-off.

Crypt 21: Coffin Flies

Consuming maggots, large-jaw beetles tore open the pupal cases of flies inside her as she sat on a stone throne. The beetles carried mites that devoured the eggs of flies.

My putrefying mother decayed as her odor invited cheese flies. Wasps flew out of her mouth before coffin flies and beetles cleaned her skeleton, making her into a bone princess as moths came to devour her hair and clothing in a mausoleum of gloaming.

Crypt 22: The Old Mural

Light hides the mural from me. In every room, the shadow mural connects the walls in a silhouette, life-sized, incorporating the girls in the woods. It was always there in the background to befriend me when I was young. I often wondered who painted it and why. Every time I asked my mother, she told me there was never any mural in the house.

Crypt 23: Love

I wondered why others couldn’t see what I could see.

It was plain to me that I loved the shadow painter.

I love you, shadow painter.

I miss you, shadow painter.

Come back to me, shadow painter.

Crypt 24: Erasure

When I find her in the woods, the perfect skeleton scares me because I’m seeing someone who isn’t supposed to be there. Once again, the bone princess sits before my eyes. She’s in the woods on her throne of stone in the mausoleum of gloaming. She’s in the shadow paintings on my walls when I wake at night. Tonight, when the shadow painter arrives, I’m trying to stay awake long enough to watch her finish, since her paintings will be erased by the light of dawn.