by Ruth LeFaive | Apr 8, 2021 | contest winner, micro
Five of us dodge the storm in Tammy DeLuca’s bedroom, even Kevin, who stays dressed. One at a time, we lie back, spread-legged and flustered, approximating grit. Here, Tammy directs a ray of light between Maggie’s legs, is the birth canal. We see only skin and the wand Tammy won from the county fair, its star-shaped tip poking and prodding. Torrents of rain pound the window while we each take turns with the flashlight, the wand, the spreading, the telling: Tammy’s mom ripped open; Sari’s was sewn up; Kiesha’s auntie died, her baby cousin, too; Maggie arrived under water; Kevin’s stepsister took classes, huffed hoos and hees like on TV with nurses counting centimeters, snapping, Push, push.
We’ll bleed, Tammy says. More than last week.
She’s talking about the bus stop, about her flitting imitation of Wonder Woman. How she leapt to deflect an invisible force and smacked into the curb, busting her knee so bad we could barely look. With a glistening rush of blood down her white shin, the five of us went from being ordinary kids on Pinewood Drive to an unnamed club, a coven, a gaggle, rapt. Tammy bragged that her mom had heated a needle and pointed to the sewing box. Choose a color, Mrs. DeLuca said. And Tammy chose three. We saw the brave proof: snarled red, white and blue spiking from the thin gash under her bandage. Little scabby knots we’d follow anywhere.
We stuff our shirts when the thunder quiets. Sari and Kevin with throw pillows. Tammy: rag doll. Keisha: beach towel. Maggie: knapsack. Hands on jutted bellies, we head to the construction site behind Keisha’s yard, to the basement-sized dirt hole that used to be forest. The digger’s yellow claw, still dripping rain, is big enough to cradle us one by one, but we’ve come for the shallow pond the deluge created, for the tadpole of a house—this not-yet place flooded brown. Tammy wades in first, reports the bottom spongy and flops down laughing. When her contractions start, she squats, her bandage gone, her stitches muddy over the water’s surface. She pants and grunts, toiling brilliantly. We splash in around her, invigorated. The silt between our toes cold as sky, clean as we will ever be, braced for what will come.
by Deirdre Danklin | Apr 7, 2021 | news
Prisms
In my MFA workshops, sometimes, when something felt clunky or not-quite-right, someone would say, “is this just a device?” and my first thought would be: everything is a device. Life is a device. The key is hiding it.
When writing, we have to use tricks without seeming to. Devices that feel natural, like the device of life. I like to think of these kinds of “devices” as prisms. They’re the things we hold up to the light to catch the story. If held at the right angle, they’re invisible.
In “Rotting Mangoes” by Hema Nataraju, published in Wigleaf, the story is told through the most dreaded prism: the dream. Dreams were hotly contested in my workshop experience because they are the most visible of devices. In a dream, the reader can see all the strings. But we really dream! The counter-argument cried, drowned out by the concerned murmurings of grad students around an oak table. I like dreams. Sometimes, other people’s strings are a fascinating sight. The story begins, “I dream that my sister is dead. Her body is on a wooden pallet, covered in the white and pink bedspread she and I sleep on. She should have been studying for her calculus test instead of dying. Now she won’t get into Engineering and Baba will get a heart-attack.” Through this prism, we already know the greatest fears that our speaker has. Four sentences, and everything important has been dragged out into the sun. We also know that there’s no way to avoid the loss and disappointment. We feel a kind of anticipatory dread for the young narrator whose dreams tell her that, one day, everyone leaves. The sister in this story is already sneaking out at night with an older boy on a motorbike. Change, like the scent of rotting mangoes, is in the air.
“Under the Cherry Tree” by Minyoung Lee, published in Cheap Pop uses the poem “Azaleas” by Kim Sowol as its prism. The original poem is written from the perspective of a man who sends his lover away. The original poem reads:
Azaleas
When you turn away from seeing me
and go,
gently, without a word, I shall send you away.
From Mount Yak in Yongbyon,
azaleas
I shall gather an armful and scatter them on your way.
Step after step away
on those flowers placed
before you, press deep, step lightly, and go
When you turn away from seeing me
and go,
thought I die, no, not a single tear shall fall.
Lee flips this poem’s perspective and tells it from the woman’s point of view. She is a lover forced to walk over azalea petals, a metaphor flung at her feet by the man who jilted her. Lee writes, “The crunch of the frozen soil underneath as I sink into the earth, my femur mashing against my joints. I lean into the ball of my foot, until I feel the capillaries of the petal disintegrate, the cells holding onto one another minced into pulp.” Lee grounds the airy wistfulness of the original poem in the body of the walking woman – down to her bones. Far from stepping “lightly” as she is bidden, Lee’s speaker crushes the azaleas underfoot. Through this prism we see what gets left unsaid when men write poems of women walking away. I love retellings of this sort, from the many novels I’ve read written from the perspective of the women of Troy to Wide Sargasso Sea giving voice to Rochester’s captive wife. There is something transgressive and just about flipping an established narrative to give the voiceless their say.
Finally, “The Old Baby” by Elizabeth Crowder, published in Smokelong Quarterly, uses an event as a prism for the story’s action and meaning. Before the story begins, a baby has died. Through the baby’s death, everything else is filtered. Crowder’s narrator says, “This time, I rub my wife’s swelling feet and kiss her distended belly. This time, when her water breaks, I’m right there, clasping her clammy palms between mine. This time, when the other woman texts: tell me what you want to do to me, I say: fuck you.” We know that last time, the time the baby died, the narrator wasn’t there, didn’t clasp any clammy palms, was probably away, in some other bed with another woman. This guilt runs through the piece, reflected and magnified by the prism of the old baby’s death. This prism feels true to life because, as readers, we’ve all experienced something that changed us. There is a “before” and an “after” in everyone’s lives – usually more than one – life’s prisms that change how we see everything. That’s why Crowder’s ending is so poignant. After the wife’s minivan “is found belly up in the lake,” the narrator writes, “I try to remember my wife as she was, before the old baby, before the other woman, before me. Soft. Smiling. Sipping unsweetened Earl Grey from a chipped mug she inherited from her favorite grandma,” but we know there’s no going back. This kind of prism is effective because of how close it is to life. It’s almost string-less, seamless, in its quiet devastation.
In my own writing, the first thing I consider is the prism. Once I’ve chosen the angles of the piece, the way its light refracts, the shadows and rainbows it throws up on the wall, then the characters and metaphors can rise up and play. It’s up to the writer to decide if the lights will catch the strings of story.
Links to the stories:
“Rotting Mangoes” –
“Under the Cherry Tree”
“The Old Baby”
by Tucker Leighty-Phillips | Apr 1, 2021 | contest winner, micro
over the parking lot of Aldi’s. They bustle to snag unattended shopping carts, return them to the carousel, accept the quarter deposit from the locking mechanism. They position themselves like athletes or secret service agents, waiting for an old blue-hair to leave her cart in the parking spot as she pulls out to head home. Last year, the pair land-battled over the roadside aluminum on Golley Road, where they both trash-bagged mountain dew cans to take to the Burp-E recycling center. Gavin’s Dad says Merle is trailer-park-trouble. Gavin’s family lives in a trailer park too, but a different one. Nicer, his dad claims. At least they don’t leave Christmas decorations up all year long. That’s tacky, his dad claims. Gavin and Merle’s parents work for the same call center, where they’re paid on commission and a complicated series of metrics. They both have a script they must adhere to, repeating the same sales pitches and assurances as their supervisor listens on their calls. Gavin and Merle fight in the Aldi’s parking lot, which upsets the balance of the business, because Aldi’s is kind of the pastoral grocery store; the quiet alternative to supercenters. Maybe now that boy will get a real job, Gavin’s dad claims. A week after the fight, an attendant is assigned to gather loose buggies, and they’re not allowed to keep the quarters.
by Thaisa Frank | Mar 29, 2021 | micro
I’m in Flamineo’s trailer when we hear the ringmaster yelling that the fire-eater left to marry his high school sweetheart. We’re in bed, pretending I’m a stranger in the audience and Flamineo’s guessing my name. The ringmaster must knock three times before we pick our way over Flamineo’s sorcerer’s hats and the snake costume I wore last night.
He didn’t even leave a fucking note, says the ringmaster. He just told the ceiling-walker he was going to Iowa.
He sits at the formica table and pours wine without asking.
Fuck high school sweethearts, he says. You’ll be a cobra for five more minutes to make up for his act.
I say I can’t manage five more minutes with my legs curled over my head.
Of course you can, he says.
But when Flamineo starts lifting him by the wrists, the ringmaster pulls away, blows his nose and says he’ll fill the time himself.
After he leaves, Flamineo says the fire-eater made a good bargain, trading fire for love. I remind him the fire-eater said that swallowing fire is like swallowing a comet and he’s sure to trade love for fire again. Flamineo says I’m just saying that to make him feel better because the fire-eater was lucky enough to have a high school sweetheart.
I remind him that all the women in the circus want him, but he kicks me with his heel and says he doesn’t want to be with someone who loves him because he can read minds, lift weights twice his size, and recite Hamlet backwards. He wants someone who loved him in high school before all that. But he ran away to be a circus freak and he’s nothing but a four-foot pill bug. He wraps himself in the quilt and won’t talk.
Flamineo isn’t a pill bug. When he introduces his act he’s a flaming tumbleweed. All the women in the circus want him and we never know whom he’ll sleep with next. Once he read that microbes were 90% of the human body and said he’d drink a bottle of antiseptic and be 100% himself–larger than any of us, who are only 10%. We took turns keeping watch until he said he was joking.
Eventually, Flamineo faces me and once more pretends he’s guessing my name. He guesses three times before he gets it right. It’s thrilling to be forgotten and remembered.
by Kathryn Phelan | Mar 26, 2021 | micro
The sugar beet factory across the street from my house exploded when I was eight. It flamed out in a blue blaze of molasses that lifted cars a mile away. This was panhandle Nebraska and such events were extraordinary: seven silos down, the eighth held erect by the sugar it still contained. My sisters and I ran outside and licked sweetness off the wooden deck, the trampoline, the grass. We could not believe our luck. The harvest was ruined but dessert was everywhere. My parents stood at the fence and watched us grow sticky with sugar dust, lobbing unconvincing protests about hygiene. It was the year they couldn’t hold themselves up, and neither could sugar and neither could we.
by Jamie Cooper | Mar 22, 2021 | micro
You stuff chunks of a frozen bird into your pockets. Outside, the world is spinning. A homeless man asks you for some change, so you hand him a headless bird. He holds it like a broken child. With the bird parts stuffed into your pockets, it almost feels like flying. You walk past a restaurant and see a man in a window eating a small bird, feathers and all. You walk into a store to buy a pack of gum, and you hand over three little bird heads with the beaks still attached. The clerk sweeps them up like change. He tells you that the summer is waiting for you.
You step outside onto a cold island. Birds wash up at your feet. You want to save as many as you can, but your pockets are already bogged down with frozen bird parts. You sit on a bench, and you try to piece together a bird from memory. Like the blind, you go by feel, until the bird takes shape in your hand. You sew the bird together with purple yarn. You start a fire in a trashcan to warm the bird.
The bird twitches in your hands. You feel the bones like toothpicks. It squawks to life, just a little at first, but soon it reaches an earsplitting pitch. It flaps its wings hysterically and pecks at your wrist until it draws blood. You throw the bird as hard as you can and lick the blood from your wrist. The bird bounces a few times and flaps until it gets its bearings and shoots off into the sky.
Warm from the fire, you lie down on the grass. You can feel other bird parts come to life in your pockets. You can see them move around under your clothes. The bird in the sky shoots off toward the moon. It flies so fast its wings melt as it leaves the atmosphere. It flies past the ice on Europa. Soon it will fly past the Sun. Soon it is no more than the memory of a broken bird you once kept in your pocket as you walked the streets of a small cold planet, littered with bones.
by Kathy Fish | Mar 22, 2021 | news
by Anita Lo | Mar 18, 2021 | micro
The crab apples had disappeared from Sophie’s grove across the street last week, but I didn’t notice until Sophie got lice. They were easy to spot because she pulled her braids so tight, scalp bright and taut in the hairline, a barren main street that the tiny crawlers crossed after looking both ways. Like we always did when her mom came home smelling of motel soap or when my mom nervously warned me not to get too close to her kind of family, we climbed into the throng of reddening trees to strategize.
I already know who did it, she said, biting at the ends of her hair. It’s Mom’s new boyfriend Nikolai, who only showers once a week.
Ugh, I said, secretly imagining what it would be like to be so close to someone that a tiny insect could crawl from their crown to yours.
The only solution, she continued, is to cut it all down. By the time I realized that she was talking about the apples she was halfway down the trunk. We found the ax in the garage too heavy to swing, making only a shallow gash in the barklike a notch in a flute.
Sophie said we would think of something else.
The next week when I saw her she was very unevenly bald. She explained that Nikolai had suggested suffocating the lice with mayonnaise and clingfilm. That night, egg-haired and crinkly, Sophie had stolen into her mom’s bedroom and shaved herself with Nikolai’s razor.
We went outside with the crosscut saw I had reluctantly borrowed from my parents. The blade quickly stuck and I fell backward pulling it out of the tree’s stubborn new mouth.
Actually, Sophie, I don’t think you should do this, I said the next week, as she repeatedly scratched the matchstick across a rock. She knelt in the slimy October leaves while I stood yards away, running my fingers over the ax-gash in our first tree.
But it’s so perfect, she said. They’re Nikolai’s matches.
I just think you could get hurt.
Fine, she said, staring at me. You can just watch from your house.
I hesitated and then I ran. From my bedroom window that day and the days after I watched the sunset behind the inky boughs of the rain-wet grove, and Sophie squatting small and solid under her umbrella waiting for something to catch.
by Yasmina Din Madden | Mar 15, 2021 | micro
The End
Me at his door, trying to convince him I was a good person. But I wasn’t a good person back then, needy and egotistical, kind and then poisonous. On his doorstep that day, David told me I was like a creeping bellflower, a weed people mistake for a flower and let run rampant in their gardens. The problem is, he told me, a weed is a weed. I looked up creeping bellflower, and it did have beautiful bluebells crawling up its stalks. It also has an extensive root system, so it spreads quickly and chokes out the other plants. A weed is a weed.
Three Months Earlier
I surprised David with small gifts while I cheated on him with a fellow teacher, a writer who often dropped phrases like sign as both mark and meaning into conversation. I let him tease me for dating David, the school’s landscaper. The last gift I gave David was a cactus in a minuscule ceramic pot. The gift before that, a Zen garden with a Lilliputian rake. Before that, a dwarf Bonsai tree. That all of these gifts were miniatures seem a sign of the tightness of my heart back then, the smallness of who I was. Or maybe they signified nothing at all.
A Year Before
David helped me start a plot in the community garden, where we planted tomatoes and lettuces. When tiny leaves sprouted, he bent to inspect them, his hands deft as he pressed a leaf between thumb and forefinger. He gave me directions on watering and aeration, but I only half-listened, savoring the taste of words like bonemeal and humus. That I could grow anything astounded me, although I knew it wouldn’t be long before the plot burned out.
The Beginning
David and I ate lunch in the school’s garden—raised beds of beans, cucumbers and squash. He once plucked a fat heirloom tomato from the vine and held it up for careful inspection. Seeds are passed down each season to preserve desirable traits like juiciness or color, he explained, holding up the misshapen tomato, shades of purple and deep orange stretched across its skin. Each variety is genetically unique, and that’s what gives them a resistance to pests and diseases. The French sometimes call it pomme d’amour, he added, and offered me a taste.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 12, 2021 | news
Libertas Bayveen O’Connell
War Destroys A Man From the Inside Out Edie Meade
Look Sky, No Suburbs Meg Tuite
I Have Dreamed of The Divine Moustapha Mbacké Diop
Empty Words Kristen Loesch
Comorbidity Kim Magowan
Before She Knew Her Body Was the River Anna Gates Ha
Propulsion Maria Picone
Welcome to Our Home Kayla Upadhyaya
Heritage Michelle Xu
So you fall in love with the church girl Regan Puckett
The Vulture Bronwen Griffiths
Roadside Assistance Ra’Niqua Lee
Explaining Divorce to My Three-Year-Old Michaella Thornton
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