Berkeley Square

by Lori Sambol Brody | Feb 20, 2023 | micro

We took BART and then a bus down University Avenue, me in my jeans and black pleather jacket, as soft as the surface of my tongue, which means not soft at all, and you in your leather skirt, zipper down the side seam. Every man’s eyes snagged on your torn fishnet stockings. I don’t remember the band we were going to see, let’s say X or Lords of the New Church, but I remember you repaired the torn sleeve of your T by threading safety pins through the fabric. The velvet softness of the underside of your wrist when I dared to run my thumb over your pulse beating blue against your pale skin. Slow and steady, it didn’t speed up. In the club, someone rode a mechanical bull, and I wanted to hoist myself in the saddle like John Travolta, boot heels hooking onto stirrups, to show you how I could hang on, but, face it, I wasn’t wearing cowboy anything, just Vans and this cheap ass jacket with Husker Du’s logo painted on the back with Wite-Out. We drank Coronas bought with our older sisters’ IDs at the safe edge of the mosh pit, and the band played so loud, Exene or Stiv or whoever leaning into the microphone, your lips an O and the long curve of your neck as you drank. I wanted you to run your smooth tongue on every jagged lyric I yelled along with the band. The mosh pit a black hole, a maelstrom. A flailing arm, a stomping black boot, a fist pumping to the drum beat, a thrown elbow. You tried to smash your bottle to the ground, but I caught the heft of glass (your heart) in my hand before it could shatter. Then, you flipped your hair and stepped into the mosh pit, caroming off the bulk of a mohawked guy. You held your hand out to pull me in. Perhaps there was no riding bull, perhaps I didn’t wear the leather jacket that night, perhaps the band was Blood on the Saddle, the band you were really into that summer, but I remember this: when I didn’t clasp your hand, you moved away, one body in black among the other bodies, into the surging swirl.

THOUGH SALLY WANTS TO KNOW EVERYTHING, THERE ARE SOME THINGS SHE CAN’T QUITE REACH

by Abigail Chang | Feb 16, 2023 | micro

but she is always multiplying, like a rabbit. In this version of the universe, Sally is only nine years old but she is always afraid, afraid of food poisoning, of losing her sense of smell, of screwdrivers that twist in the night. Evenings, she sits on her couch and crunches a husk of corn, filling the carpet with yellow shed, she scoops powder and fills a bowl to the brim before throwing herself down a chute as a form of prayer. Sally lives in a house with a window too small to climb through. There’s a snake in her boot, but she doesn’t know it yet. Sometimes there is a girlfriend beyond the window. The girlfriend’s fate and Sally’s are intertwined very closely.

Sally will find the snake when the storm hits.

Sally likes to writhe and sometimes even writes.

At midnight Sally will go blue all over and maybe even grow a beard.

(Sally is allergic to the night.)

The sad thing is if the universe had wrinkled differently all those millennia ago now Sally might be the snake, or maybe the girlfriend would be. For the girlfriend’s fate and Sally’s fate and the snake’s fate are intertwined very closely. Sally has peely feet and there is skin left over in the boot. The snake feeds on it because what else could it do? It grows larger despite everything Sally has done to shrink it. Outside the wind is picking up and Sally peers through the window, looks fervently, watches the grasses wave in the wind. She unzips an air mattress. She puts herself inside it, in and between the soft duckling down. Sally is not superstitious but still she puts salt all around her body in little white heaps. One day Sally will be forced to eat all the salt.

Things grow larger even when we don’t want them to.

When the storm begins to splutter, Sally finally bunks down. She sinks. She wishes. She eats an orange, one of the ones that rained from the sky, and thinks about everything she has lost.

Prison in Hawaii

by Michael Czyzniejewski | Feb 6, 2023 | micro

The air raid sirens sounded and my brother Bruno scrambled, demanding to know where my basement was. I didn’t have a basement and informed Bruno it was the monthly test, that there was no attack, but Bruno started stacking canned goods, rifling through cupboards. I told him it was ten a.m., second Wednesday of the month, but Bruno only looked more convinced, said this would be the ideal time for an attack, everyone thinking it was just the test. His arms were full of soup and chili and vegetables, and he said I should coral the dog and all my bottled water, that we could come back up for the radio and first aid kit if we wanted to risk it. I didn’t have a dog but did keep an old iPod and some Band-Aids. The sirens stopped after two minutes like normal, and Bruno announced this was it, the siren tower was kaput, to fuck the radio, that we had to get downstairs ASAP. Bruno had just been in prison in Hawaii and hadn’t been to my house, at least not this one in LA, where no one has basements. A can of corn fell from the top of his stack, and we let it roll. I tried to get Bruno to calm down, but he started with, “Here, boy. Here, boy,” whistling, then switched to, “Here, girl. Come on, girl. Hey, girl,” trying to get the imaginary dog to follow him down a staircase that didn’t exist. I told him I didn’t have a dog, and he said the cat was probably already downstairs, that they’re smart, unlike dogs, and know all the best hiding places. I told him I didn’t have pets, and for the first time, Bruno stopped, or at least slowed down, and said, “Really, Henry?” like I was too sad and pathetic to take care of something, to love something, which may have been true. I asked Bruno what would happen, in prison, if the sirens went off, implying that he’d be in his cell, unable to go to a basement, go anywhere. Bruno looked mad, or maybe hurt, that I brought up prison, but pointed out that Hawaiians called air raid sirens hurricane sirens because they were much more likely to be hit by a hurricane. I thought it was obvious to mention Pearl Harbor but didn’t because that wasn’t the point. Bruno continued, “Since we’re on it, I might as well tell you what I did,” even though just that morning, he’d requested that I never, ever ask him what he did. “Last year, I stole a shit ton of …,” but Bruno was interrupted by an explosion, a massive thundering boom, followed by another and another and another, growing louder and louder and louder, closer and closer and closer. I peeked out the window and could see black smoke billowing, fire in the sky, planes in the distance, flying our way, little black dashes falling from their bellies, triggering more explosions. I picked up the corn and grabbed my glasses and phone charger. I steered Bruno into my bathroom, setting the food on the toilet tank, inviting him to sit with me in the tub. We perched toe to toe. I wondered what that was like, prison in Hawaii, to be so close to all that beauty, to paradise, but to be kept from it. It was worse, I would guess, than prison anywhere else. “I don’t have a basement,” I told my brother, and again, Bruno looked at me like he’d never seen someone so alone.

The Newborn

by Kenny Tanemura | Feb 2, 2023 | micro

The swaddled newborn startles awake at a quarter to midnight. I plug his mouth with a powder blue pacifier bearing an elephant with a right ear so large it emerges stone soft, shaded blue, white sharply outlined. The eye drawn in a horseshoe shape makes it somehow female, downward-looking as if charmed by the field of starry campion and flat-topped aster tucked away in the semi-shade behind her.

He sleeps, and I wonder why the last thing I notice about him is the ruffled breathing, little breaths trying to mass together but cresting like a stillborn wave in the lake belonging to the port town with streets so small, they look like they should be on the board of a children’s game or in an old cartoon. His breaths build up to nothing more than half sighs, and air snagged in the throat a second—a satin cape torn by a rose’s thorn hidden in the oblique dark.

The sour milk smell of him fades when I untangle my nose from his few tufts of hair as if sprung up between flowers or in the cracks of sidewalks. The arm jerks up half or fully asleep. He wriggles spasmodically as if he’s trying to break out of a shell or shake free of this world.

I almost always forget about how kissing his cheek leaves a soft impression on my lips. His skin, cool and taut, lingers there until I wipe it away with the back of my hand, the hairs sweeping the impression into a bin.

The last thing I always think of is the taste of tiramisu and chamomile and watermelon still in my mouth. An afterthought, as I’ve never known the taste of this world until my son came screaming into it, making the abstractions (no more of this world than rabbits are of hats) fade into the savanna where light spreads across the woodland-grassland as far and wide as it wants.

The Made Boy

by Chris Haven | Jan 31, 2023 | micro

This little boy has forgotten how he was made. He is old enough to know he can’t ask his teddy bear, but he is still young enough to love that bear and believe that it can feel the same pain and joy that the boy does. This boy knows he can’t ask his mother because she would lie to him, as she always does. The boy can’t ask his father because he is sure the two of them cannot have been made in the same way, judging by their likes and dislikes, the different ways they smell, and all that coarse hair. He is a smart boy but not trusting, so he relies on his powers of logic. He must have a poor memory because it’s strange to forget something like your origin. He can’t have been built like a chest of drawers, or sewn together like a flag, or forged like a sword. He wonders if he was made of something like ice, so that whatever water he was made of was unrecognizable because of his current state. And maybe that unrecognizable something doesn’t even have to be, say, a bone, or a heart. Maybe that thing can be laughter, or the sound of a wet finger against glass, or a wish. Maybe the one who created him is seated in the cup of the moon, looking down, still wishing. The boy has wondered if maybe he was a mistake, and that’s why he can’t remember, why he’s been left alone with these thoughts. Or maybe those wishes from the moon are nice when they leave but turn to troubling thoughts when they arrive. Maybe that distance causes interference, so the result is like a glitch in a video. He picks up the glass of water beside his bed, dips his finger in. He rubs it against the rim of the glass until there’s a whine, and another. He wonders how long it will take the little boys he’s making to find him and what will happen when they meet. When the time comes, he knows they will have a lot of questions. He wonders if he will tell them how much glass we must all be made of.