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Somewhere
between penning the cult-hit Too Smart
to Be Rich to her latest novel, Secondhand
Smoke, New Orlean Patty Friedmann earned
a reputation as skillful, dark comedian
who pitches the absurd and touching with
an equally deft hand. But let's be clear
on one thing: she didn't acquire her skills
from mere reading. MORE
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 Always
at Home by Robert Castle
Timelessness and childhood. Time consciousness
separates the child from the adult, the immature
from the mature, the savage state from civilization,
America from Europe. Maturity senses when the
fun and games are over. One must get things done.
Senses the end of time. On one level, Europe has
always cringed at the sight of a reckless United
States. Likewise, Christianity could never tolerate
the primitive tribes it encountered in Africa
and the Pacific. Better dead than immature. Christianity
had to hide its primitive ways from itself. The
crucified Christ signaled a new time, an era of
seriousness, recognizing death and simultaneously
trying to negate this recognition. Trying to have
one’s adulthood and childhood too. Immaturity
denies the seriousness of money, education, and
politics also. Identifying myself as a sardine
on vacation, I don’t want to give up my
immaturity. I want to write a travel book that
implicitly recommends the reader stay home.
Synesthesia:
The Dazzled Language by V.G. Krikoryan
The term synesthesia has long been in use
in regard to language, but only in its literal
application, referring to those metaphors which
combine material associated with one modality
of sense with that of another, as in the touch-visual
of cool blue, or the visual-aural of chocolate
tones. This narrow interpretation wastes the exuberant
potential of the term. A more illuminating concept
can be built upon that foundation. With a touch
it unveils the intriguing persona lurking within
our iridescent dome of language.
The
Zero and I by Patricia Tompkins
“The one who divides has to let the
other person choose first.” If my family
had a written Constitution, that statement would
be in its Bill of Rights. When my brother and
I both wanted the last piece of pineapple upside-down
cake and opted to share it, if Joe cut the cake
in half, I selected which piece I wanted before
he did. It’s a fair way to deal with greed.
That’s part of what math is, dealing with
greed. A combination of the pragmatic and the
philosophical, math or, at least, arithmetic,
introduced me early to the important lesson that
life isn’t fair. My worst subject in school
was mandatory through high school. I never got
to the bigger picture, the theoretical level of
relationships. And despite being a “word
person,” terms like hypotenuse and theorem
left me uncharmed.
Legacy
by Gokul Rajaram
She told them about the radio announcement, her
worry about Harjeet. Sharing her fears with them
brought a vastly reassuring calmness. Now her
worry was not hers alone.
Bauji’s face was set in stone. “So
it happens again,” he said softly. “History
repeats itself.”
He had been a young man in 1947, when the country
had been partitioned into India and Pakistan,
and half a million people had been killed in the
space of a few weeks. He had prayed then that
he would never again have to see that quantity
of bloodshed.
It appeared to him that his prayers had been rebuffed.
Dachau
and Oktoberfest by David Erlewine
You refuse to imagine your shoulders ripping out
of their sockets as you are latched to a tree
with your arms yanked from behind and then above
your shoulders. You do not punch a boy behind
you who whispers “that’s fake”
to someone because at his age you might have said
that. You won’t be nudged when she nudges
you to keep moving. You don’t smile or nod
when she whispers “Are these Nazis, Walter?
No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There’s
nothing to be afraid of.”
Set
for Life by Jack Conway
Edna was mesmerized by the bird’s
nest with the golf ball nestled inside it. Looking
down at the nest and golf ball she thought, you
can wait a long time for nothing to happen. Edna
never brought the nest to school and she never
told her students about the golf ball inside it.
It was something they would have to find out about
on their own.
The
Nighttime in Between by George Sparling
And when you click off the TV, then saying,
“Good night, see you tomorrow,” shaking
my hand, a gesture more attune to a jazz musician’s
return to the original melody rather than mere
habit, departing for bed, it must be your hope
to pass on the optimism of the near-utopian vastness
of western prairies, the belief and power held
intimately in Alberta’s sweet earth.
Miz
Tiga Does Not Play Holi by Rumjihum Biswas
Few teachers crossed words with her,
as she was one of the oldest teachers in the school.
Miz Tiga had been teaching Hindi and Moral Science
for more than thirty years. Nobody remembered
Miz Tiga as a young woman, though thirty years
ago she certainly had been young, and contentedly
married to Mr. Tiga. She did not live in her cottage
on the school grounds then. She came to school
in a Morris Minor car driven by Mr. Tiga, who
regularly dropped his wife at her school on his
way to office.
“But Miz Tiga doesn’t play Holi!”
Island
by Theresa Boyar
There are ships on
the horizon,
my sisters say, pointing, worried now.
But for all the
sails shredded against our rocks,
flapping through each day like gulls’ wings
(to what else can I compare it?)
I cannot see a thing.
Bathing
in Japan by Chelle Miko
She bows repeatedly, as if to say, It is time.
I am sluggish, move slowly toward the liquid fire.
Know I must not fail to dip my body, inch by inch
into the blue tiled bath. I extend a toe, an arch,
an ankle.
Radu
the Handsome by Ace Boggess
Brother, I too am son of the Dragon.
I wear a crown of art & charisma.
I flow, lifting on Islam’s blue winds.
Your papal fire burns
inside as if a second,
superior heart; runs through black veins
your god does not enter.
Letter
to John Wilson by John Gartland
So I’m moving on again: collecting
everything in boxes.
Packing up the books and rediscovering old markers
in the process, faded notes upon the margins I’d
forgotten,
insights overlaid with restless years; inspiring
chapters
that surrender up the postcards sent by lovers.
Nearly
There by Ace Boggess
It makes us better, happier,
more successful—dead or nearly there
until we are the writers we enjoy.
We lean into that poetic grave:
some get there first, faster; some died once
like Lazarus, now hope to walk again
toward dreadful self-discovery, die again
for the glory of their lives.
Pangur
Ban by Michelle Cameron
he finally will sing to me of me, that
small, sweet song he’s written out
and slipped inside his Virgil: “I and Pangur
Ban my cat …”
And I could not be more content even had I been
born
the darling of Nefertite, worshipped as a household
divine.
All
Things May Come by Harvey Stanbrough
Waiting seems a nobler cause
to some, just risen from a huddled doorway;
they’ve learned that rushing does no good.
In time
all things may
come to those who wait.
After
Theory by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
first i imagined only texts,
this was the way i had fought to know.
then, strategies exploded and i saw that bodies
would fall.
later i would come to question
and still later to longevity.
Lost
by David McFarland
that said get up, put down
a line, make a story
a poem, get something to save
a sparkling thought just
now burnt out, which left
its ash in these few lines.
Hydra
by Mia
I think of what squall must have
brought this woman to my door—the storyteller
with her gift of ruins laid bare across her ribs
and the words she had to share
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