Issue 4 Summer 2013
The Levee by Greg Brownderville
3August 31, 2013
For a week farmers fished off their porches and said things like:
“Raining pitchforks and saw logs.”
“Yeah boy, coming down like somebody was pouring it out of a boot.”
They called the flood a “toad strangler,” a “chunk floater,” and a “first-rate gully gusher.”
January Moon
0July 30, 2013
If in the distance, a shrimp boat.
If in the distance, a hum.
If the dark be dark.
If the night, windless.
If thought a woman, not a man.
If it holds him close.
If beats a red heart, slow.
If the tail of an airplane.
If winter disappears.
If in his head, a roaring.
If beats a yellow heart.
If a [...]
They Promised Miracles
0July 30, 2013
Today we surf as we do almost everyday. Spring. And the wetsuits are getting thinner or not at all. Today the water is teal or turquois. Caribbean-like, nonetheless. But on dark water days, I get creeped out. This is why: the summer of 1976, while on vacation near the sea, my parents took our [...]
On War (1944)
1July 30, 2013
I say alone. I say among the troops—old men
and young boys—Klaus, sixteen,
from Berlin, loves American Jazz. When this is over,
he says, I want to lead a band like Tommy Dorsey. Play
in large halls where couples sway like sunflowers
to “I’ll Be Seeing You.” A town on the horizon burns alone.
I [...]
Kidney for Tom Waits
2July 30, 2013
I thought maybe my left arm, but that’s ridiculous. I love my left arm. I need my left arm—the tattoo of my Chinese zodiac sign, a rooster, and I play guitar and paddle a surfboard. Then Kim said, “How about your liver?” Not bad, I thought. Tom is a drinker or was at one time; he could use a liver [...]
Broken
0July 30, 2013
The clock on the wall: broken. The German cuckoo, it doesn’t anymore. Folded arms, I look at it and remember when it hung in my grandmother’s house in Bremen. As a child, looking up at it, it looked so big. There is a moon etched into the face. Happy is not the way I would describe it. Content is [...]
What Mothers Want
0July 30, 2013
I want a little black dress
that fits like it used to, spandex clingingto my love handle-less sides,
cradling my same sized breasts
that still bounce. I want a full night’s sleep,
perhaps a nap, a walk through my house
without tripping on Legos or Barbies,
the blond bitches taunting me
with their [...]
Suicide
0July 30, 2013
He held her
name on the edge
of the high-rise,
between city lights
and bone drizzled
hum before rolling
Isabella into
the alleys to hear
his own voice
echo, as if to say
my voice sounding
your name is
the only true
love, the syncopation
of two acappella
high-notes. Car lights
stutter on dotted [...]
Hourglass
0July 30, 2013
Time is running out. A twenty-
something girl in a dorm room slips
on a red dress. Another woman
lies on her velvet couch while
her lover paints her nude. Late
tonight, the moon will fall
and split into two curved pieces
of glowing glass. Dust will
avalanche down the middle.
A tired woman will look [...]
Re-Rooted
1July 30, 2013
What I look most forward to each morning
is not a gratitude journal entry or a cup of coffeewith cream, but your crying out in the darkness,
your desire to be next to me, and as I slip out of bed
to remove you, still in half-sleep from your crib,
a seed is planted in my heart all over again.
A [...]
Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Hoch’s View From a Bilge Pump on a Highrise
0July 30, 2013
Hoch cut out her collage with a sharp tongue.
She is a no-face woman with wild, wiry white hair.
She means no. Her husband pulls herup from the fringe of a building, screws
her onto the port side into a bilge pump.
She is secure and steady now, he leaves
by spinning on a downward spiral
of the [...]
The Creeping
0July 30, 2013
Our Crepe Myrtle creeps in
above my sagging porch screen
and magenta blossoms spiral,
settle beneath little bare feet.As I sit on my porch, my two children
fighting over a balloon string, I smile,
knowing that this is all that matters
knowing that this is all that doesn’t
and in fifteen years, [...]
Here’s to Freedom
0July 30, 2013
I get tattoos because I sometimes feel like a transvestite.
In May of 2012, I got my seventh. The tattoo artist was needling into my arm. He was the same one that did my sixth tattoo, and I enjoyed his work. He had a steady hand, and he was able to negotiate the delicate lines that I liked about [...]
Hooked on Algebra
0July 30, 2013
I was as surprised as anybody when I was hired to work as a math book editor. At the time, I viewed myself (accurately) as functionally illiterate in math. I also suffered from math anxiety – a condition that wreaks havoc on one’s checkbook and means that somebody else has to figure out the tip [...]
Songs for Ghosts
4July 30, 2013
Northern Mariana Islands, 1992
Late at night we sing, my cousin Laurena and I, to drive the ghosts away. Earlier we made our own dinner, fried eggs and SPAM and rice with ketchup. Now, sitting up side by side on the concrete counter of the outdoor kitchen, we smoke our mothers’ thin, menthol [...]
Nothing Wrong with the Radio
8July 30, 2013
For the longest time, I believed all radios must have looked like the one that sat in the corner of our dining room. That old Audiovox was about the size of a vintage hardtop suitcase. Its sides were decorated with a cheap wood paneling that perfectly matched the wall trim inside our new doublewide [...]
Red Ryder Says You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out
0July 30, 2013
The summer before I entered Junior High, and became more interested in boys than books, the man my mother hired to do odd landscaping jobs around our house tried to kill himself. It wasn’t that he was depressed, more so that he felt betrayed by the people and the town that he grew up in—the town [...]
In That Quiet Earth
2July 30, 2013
It was time to move. Victoria Karenin Stanford stood in the kitchen of the fieldstone farmhouse where she had grown up. She took the last glass from the cabinet, wrapped it and placed it in the cardboard box. When she finished taping the box, she walked over to the screen door.
Across the [...]
Freefall
1July 30, 2013
I took the apartment on spec alone because it was the last place available in town with a window view from the shower. That’s very important to me — I like to be able to look out of a window just a little bit while I take a shower. But this apartment also had a skeleton in the closet. Literally. A [...]
Alma Confesses
0July 30, 2013
I been good all my life. Even when I was a baby girl, mama said I never hollered. Growing up, I never missed a day of school, and I got eight certificates to prove it—one for each year of perfect attendance before I had to quit and take care of her. Even then, Doctor Brown said he ain’t never seen [...]
Cell Phone
0July 30, 2013
The children, Jason and Ashley, stood by the door in their swimsuits, waiting for him. Michael Frum turned to his wife, Judy, who was massively pregnant and eager to get back into bed. “Have you seen my cell phone?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to the beach, Michael.”
“I can’t find [...]