Category Archives: Issue 17:2

Volume 17, Issue 2

Following the Ghost

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Flash
Fran Laniado

Photo Credit: Estitxu Carton/Flickr (CC-by-sa)

I feel him in odd moments. He doesn’t haunt our house, or the place where he died, he haunts me. Just like he promised. Sometimes its a feeling, soft as a memory. Sometimes it’s more like he’s a truck that’s just hit me in my tracks.

I saw him for the first time at a hot dog stand, on my way to work. I never ate at those hot dog stands, for sanitary reasons. I just don’t trust them. But they were Dan’s guilty pleasure. He said that the risk made them taste even better. Which made me roll my eyes.

But the hot dogs didn’t kill him. A stupid fall down the stairs did that. For a long time I was angry for that. That he’d allow himself to be killed by such a stupid accident. Likely tripping over his own two feet. All I heard was the crash. I stop remembering then. Because I can’t allow myself to remember seeing him crumpled at the bottom of the stairwell. So I was quite surprised to see him at the hot dog stand six weeks later.

He wasn’t transparent, or translucent. There wasn’t cold air around him. His neck wasn’t tilted at that angle… He wore a green button-down shirt and blue jeans. My first thought was to wonder where he got the shirt; I didn’t recognize it. Then I remembered what happened. I walked toward him slowly as if he would disappear if I moved too fast. He stayed where he was, and then, as if sensing me, he turned around and gave me a smile and a small wave. When I was almost close enough to reach out and touch him, a bicycle went by, coming between us. By the time the bike was gone, so was he.

I’ve seen him since then. In the elevator at work (the door closed before I could get on). For some reason, I once saw him riding on the back of a garbage truck. I chased the truck for several blocks until I was forced to stop or be hit by a car. I sometimes wonder what will happen if I catch him. Will he pop, like a balloon, when I touch him? Or, will he take my hand, and take me with him, wherever he goes now, when he isn’t visiting me?

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Fran Laniado usually writes longer work, however she likes to write flash fiction as a way to clear her mind and her writing. A way to remind her what she needs on the page and what she doesn’t. She has had fiction published in Synchronized Chaos and New Works Review. She lives in New York and has a secret identity as a school teacher. Email: fl827[at]hotmail.com

The View

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Flash
Sabrina Hicks

Photo Credit: Jon Wiley/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

The fancy restaurant had been Robert’s idea, a way to make amends for his hectic work schedule and long hours—not a far cry from what my mother had to endure with my own workaholic father. While Mom painted desert landscapes, Dad tore them down, making real estate deals for more strip malls. Much like my flexible hours being a local photojournalist were a huge contrast to Robert’s days and nights spent at his law office.

“I requested a table by the window,” Robert said to the host, who was checking off our names on the reservations list.

“Certainly,” he said, gathering menus before leading us to the back of the restaurant where expansive windows took in the vistas and red rock landscape.

He pulled out my chair next to the window, and I sat, thanking him as Robert took his phone from his pocket.

“Just a client I need to get back to,” he said, texting.

As the shadows began to descend down the mountains, bathing in a blood orange sunset, I thought how much my mother would have loved this view; how her eyes used to hold the colors of the desert as she painted, interpreting the mood of the mountains; how her work grew darker as she grew older, until she finally left my father and moved to California to live alone in a bungalow near the ocean. She would have loved the view as much as I did, and suddenly I felt sorry I had ever been angry at her for her choices.

“Get anything you like,” Robert said, setting his phone on the table between us, just as it lit up again. “The trout is excellent.”

I perused the menu, but stopped to see the sun slipping below the mountains, staining them purple. The saguaros in the distance, standing like kings crowned in a halo of sunlit yellow thorns, begged to be noticed. Robert’s thumbs typed a furious response, and I watched his brow knit in disgust, leaning further away from the table, reflected in the large window before us.

“I need to use the restroom,” I said, hesitating a moment for his acknowledgement, but his mind was elsewhere. I reached for my purse and slipped away, pausing at the ladies’ room and back at the table to see his head still bent forward, fingers moving across his phone, and the sun dissolving into a thin pink line, pooling along the jagged peaks in a final gash of day.

I rolled down the windows as I drove away, inhaling the orange blossoms at dusk, watching the last of the shadows slip off the foothills, deciding it was a fine time to text him I wouldn’t be returning.

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Sabrina Hicks lives in the Southwest. Her work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Gyroscope Review, Spelk Fiction, The Drabble and Panoply. Email: desertdwelleraz3[at]gmail.com.

Four Poems

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Poetry
Judith Taylor

Photo Credit: Amy/Flickr (CC-by)

Hindsight

Funny how old illusions stay.
I want to write: when the long black car
came for me, curtains flickered
all over the building

and where I used to live
it would have been true.
They knew me better, there
than I knew myself, so they believed

but here in the city
it’s a different story. People go to the city
not to be known, or not
to be asked for.

Eyes don’t meet.
When even the most unlikely
awful thing draws up at your door
you know your neighbours will

turn up their distraction
so as not to hear how your footstep on the stair
is taking you out to meet
whatever it is that’s waiting.

And it finds you
as you chose to be, as you came here
in the hope you’d be. Unremarkable.  And
alone.

 

Underway

Dark water now. Water you find
when you descend to the foundations
a torch in hand, a handkerchief at your mouth.

It has been waiting all this time.
It knows about cemeteries

and timber piles in the banks of missing rivers
under the avenues.

It is water the fish would die of
water the rats go out of their way
never to cross. Not cold, precisely:

but where it touches you
you’ll never be warm again.

Its scent will cling to you,
evaporate with your footprints

and anyone coming close to you will know
you’ve been a cellar-swimmer, skin-to-skin
with shadows.

But what to do
when you find yourself surrounded?
Nothing but

step down
and into a boat as tremulous as an aspen leaf
hoping whatever steers it

is a breath of air that has strayed in
from the bright world

and not some ancient current
deep beneath it, taking you down-
stream

on a heading you find
you can’t change

so gently
into the dark.

 

The Gift

Somebody gave me
two trees, as an emblem of endurance
or permanence, or the like
without a warning.

I was living
in an unfashionable district of the city, then
at a small hotel
best described as spartan:

they were good about the trees though
which arrived while I was out.

They had a narrow strip of garden
off to the side. When I got back
they had already planted the holly
and were digging a hole for the sycamore

which lay full-length on the pavement
its roots carefully packed, its leaves
grey and brittle, traumatised
by the long way it had travelled.

I stroked its bark and wondered
if it was going to survive.
And since they had everything under control there
I went inside, to telephone the giver.

I was going to say
the gift had fairly summed him up:

more trouble than he was worth.
That the hotel and I were pretending
the garden was a temporary measure
but we both knew

I wouldn’t add a couple of trees to my baggage when I checked out.
Which day seemed suddenly nearer now.

He wasn’t there
and I didn’t leave a message. I took a long breath
and went to talk to the concierge
and organise some water.

 

Here I Go

the sun’s late
and the sky is still
indigo but I’m
not staying for fanfares
or a sunrise

I’m stepping out in the cool
morning
knowledge of where
these boots are walking

stepping out
in the dark of a night that lingers
as I do not linger

one bird
in a bush to give me
warning notes as I pass
but I’m singing bye
bye birdie

care and woe
and everything
in the blue bag
with the polka-dots on the lining

and an early train
my destination

there will be light above us
when we reach the river
full sun
when we find the sea beside us
for the journey

voyager
now
it’s time

for stepping out
with your low
shoes and your settled mind
a whole day
out there is
where you’re going

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Judith Taylor lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she works in IT. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines, and in two pamphlet collections: Earthlight (Koo Press, 2006) and Local Colour (Calder Wood Press, 2010). Her first full-length collection, Not in Nightingale Country, will be published in Autumn 2017 by Red Squirrel Press. Email: j.taylor.09[at]btinternet.com

Two Poems

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Poetry
Spencer Smith

Photo Credit: Daniel Damaschin/Flickr (CC-by)

Afterimage

That which has gone before
slowly seeps through,
new bleed from an old wound

or faint pentimento of some
framed landscape, with
artificial borders to hold in

water and wind, or less:
merely rumor of a memory
of a dream, but somehow

still present, taking up space
or the illusion of space, or
more precisely, the space

vacated by something else,
untitled as a poem or
royalty on the outer branches

of the family tree, withered fruit
with only vague recollection
of any existence at all.

 

How You Feel

I know exactly how you feel:
like an anthill trampled by stampeding hooves,
or a pinecone exploding in forest flames.

You feel like tender shoots masticated
in the maws of grazers, or the lonely blades
ignored as restless cattle feed all around.

You feel suffocated in dark trenches
of foreign seas; you gasp for air
on airless moons of distant worlds.

You feel the hunger of month-long fasts,
the thirst of desert exhaustion,
the accumulated weight of sleepless midnights.

You feel the bright sharp pain of days
and the dull aching pain of months
and the tired quiet pain of years.

You feel as if poets of no consequence
who do not know your name
are always trying to tell you how you feel.

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Spencer Smith is a University of Utah graduate and works in the corporate world to pay the bills that poetry doesn’t pay (i.e., all of them). His work has appeared in over forty literary journals, including Main Street Rag, Potomac Review, Plainsongs, RHINO, and Roanoke Review. Email: paiute6[at]comcast.net

Dog and Man

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Poetry
David Sermersheim

Photo Credit: Devin Smith/Flickr (CC-by)

the man thinks
he is leading the dog
but the dog knows
the opposite is true

where the dog goes
the man follows
when the dog tarries
the man waits patiently

collecting warm souvenirs
the dog left
in its wake

a subtle reminder
of the man’s
function and presence

the dog has mastered
all of the tricks
of the trade

entangling himself around impediments
probing crack crevice and undergrowth
for evidence of those
who came before him

pausing at random moments
to leave his trace
off the beaten path

straining at the leash
like a kite
catching a whiff of air

hoping to pull free
bound off and away
leaving the man
holding the dangling leash

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David Sermersheim taught at The Hotchkiss School (Ct.) for 33 years; has had poems published in the Aurorean, Ancient paths, Sacred Journeys, Cloudbank, Iodine Review, Everyday Poems, Writing Raw, Poetry Pacific, Poetry Superhighway, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Blue Collar Review, Miller’s Pond, Blueline, Oddville Press, Third Wednesday, Wild Goose Review and other journals and quarterlies. He was a MacDowell Fellow and has a book, Meditations, listed on Amazon. He lives in Westbrook, Connecticut. Email: dsermersheim[at]snet.net

Reading the Bones

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Poetry
Marchell Dyon

Photo Credit: Chocorayto/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

She said open your hands
When you did
Her black hands held your dark palms

She began to trace the lines
Every stitch of DNA in your hands
She tells you to flexed your fingers

She tells you,
To hold your fingers straight like a ruler
You watch as she reads the bones

She tells you more than a gypsy’s fortune can
That these are not lines in your hands
It’s your life tree

Branches connecting you to your history
The lives lived before your time
This is your life tree

She said branching out into your existence
Through this life and into the stars of the next
These are your life lines

Roads bending and cross with few dead ends
She considers your hand like a pool of water
A watery veil of knowledge raining down from heaven

“Look!” she assures you, “your lines are long
Your gray hairs will be many
Before your soul spirits away from this world.”

You look to your hands, your eyes all glassy
dancing with wonder, dreaming out loud,
envisioning for one long moment that maybe she is right.

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Marchell Dyon is a disabled poet. She believes her disability has inspired her creative spark. Her poetry has been published in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Full of Crow Poetry Magazine, and Rainbow Rose Ezine, Blue Lake Review, A Little Poetry, Medusa’s Kitchen, The Stray Branch, Strange Horizons, Mused Bella Online, Convergence Literary Journal, Silver Blade Magazine and Torrid Literature Journal. She is from Chicago, IL. Email: marchelldyon[at]yahoo.com

 

Celebration

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Poetry
Deborah Bacharach

Photo Credit: Lauren Treece/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

If you are celebrating silence, I will bring you snow.
If you are celebrating happiness, I will drive
you to the beach in a red taxi and give you a green
daiquiri and a yellow umbrella. I will sing
morning drum songs for you.
If you are celebrating your first period, I will wrap
fear in a blanket and caress it slowly.
I will whistle long and low just for you.

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Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in 2River, Arts & Letters, Calyx, and Blue Mesa Review among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com. Email: debbybacharach[at]me.com