11.2 / FALL / WINTER 2016

— Minying Huang is an undergraduate student from Cambridge, England, reading for a BA in Spanish and Arabic at Oxford University. Her writing has been featured in Your Middle East and she has been working as a blog correspondent for Stop Street Harassment.

    —   Kate Click is an MFA student of poetry at Oklahoma State University and the winner of an Academy of American Poets prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Apalachee Review, and The Head and The Hand’s anthology, The Bible Belt Almanac, among others.

I read today that a mountain lion was found in Idaho with a set of fully-formed teeth and whiskers growing out of the top of its head. Experts surmise that it could most likely be a teratoma.

  — Minying Huang is an undergraduate student from Cambridge, England, reading for a BA in Spanish and Arabic at Oxford University. Her writing has been featured in Your Middle East and she has been working as a blog correspondent for Stop Street Harassment.

He lay awake in bed and remembered being seven or eight at his friend’s house. The epic occurrence of those times, O glorious nth birthday—all the kids were over to sleep in bags on the floor, and he found out that night that he hated sleepovers.

We wear our work below our eyes. How can someone so young be so tired? my mother asks on voicemail, again. But I am too tired to call back, too tired to explain, too tired, even, to walk home and close my eyes. When’s the last time the sun rose? I don’t remember.

Night drive through Miami, I think the sky a dream not yet starred by bullets.     — Ariel Francisco is a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent.

-CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO-   When the gods review their video surveillance footage, she appears, round and hard like a butterscotch in her summer nightgown. She looks like trouble. Her cellophane wrapper catches the light and throws it all around.

Spectre scent, charoset, the year I break my father’s seder plate the April air is nuts, wine, cut sweet date Passover from my calendar like I don’t remember how he built a house of charoset, the lifting smell that held high his roof.

It would make me sad for my grave to stand un-pissed- upon. It would give me glee for my grave to be a suburban lawn. It would make me laugh if, flags at half-staff with a siren on, a long parade wove by my grave in the summer dawn.

  — Sidney Taiko is the Editor-in-Chief of Storm Cellar literary journal. In 2016, her work can be found in CutBank, Niche, and a Sage Hill Press anthology. She has a crooked spine and a potty mouth, but so far things are working out okay.

  There was a first generation Playstation video game about a young father who lost his child in a town where it snowed ash. Together you stumbled through foggy whiteness in the creature infested streets looking for her.

We stopped to take pictures on our way back to the airport, even though I had advised against it. That sounds lawyerly, doesn’t it? “I advised against it.” It’s funny the things that stay with you, the things you hold on to, so you won’t go mad.

Before you live you must remember every word your mother never said. Like here’s the most perfect hole to reach into because what remains is a space like the hands you’re beginning to forget.

I watch them wield a mirror under my mother’s wheelchair as if searching for a car bomb and think: well this is home. Home of the barefoot and bandit shampoos. All sanitary accomplices placed on the no-fly-list until further notice. My mother’s limp body in my solar plexus, resting.

10:55 am: just barreling through space at a million miles an hour on my swivel chair editing some dimwit’s proposal. Four conjunctions and five prepositions in one sentence. ONE SENTENCE. Non-sequiturs abound and it’s time for me to go full-fledge nausea so I begin to contemplate whether I’m more of a conjunction or a preposition.

For George W.   If it was my bush running the world, the only thing we’d have to worry about would be eating too much sugar or sitting around in a wet bathing suit bottoms.

 

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    — Momtaza Mehri is a poet currently in conversation with biomedicine, inheritance and her particular brand of transnational baggage. Her work has been featured and is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, Elsewhere, Cecile’s Writers, Bone Banquet, Poetry International, and other delights.

  — Momtaza Mehri is a poet currently in conversation with biomedicine, inheritance and her particular brand of transnational baggage. Her work has been featured and is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, Elsewhere, Cecile’s Writers, Bone Banquet, Poetry International, and other delights.

Like everything is not enough, she had to go and hurt her foot and a better one is never coming back and now the walk to school takes years.

Somewhere field workers collect body parts on the border between the U.S. and Mexico while I lay in bed with my hand between my legs, comforting myself and wondering if I will have more motivation to achieve my dreams tomorrow.

—   Mathieu Cailler’s work has been widely featured in national and international publications, including Epiphany, the Los Angeles Times, and The Saturday Evening Post. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he is the recipient of a Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and a Shakespeare Award for Poetry.

From my shoulder bag, the sidewalks, the bright, the stillness of. Dorm, dining hall leave five, bite of frozen air. But my breath. Is this, the pedals’ wobbly, the reflective snow, doorway.  Of air, on my cheeks. The looming stillness of the dorm. Is this what. The pink sheets three or five.

Hometown / Playground Swing-set / Met J Swam lake / Shucked rocks Sank ducks / Sang songs Grew up / Drank Jack Took drugs / Got dead Airplane / Overhead     — K.A. Webb is the co-founder of the Nitty-Gritty Magic City Reading Series.

The felons who speak regularly at twelve step meetings teach us to shove an arm into the mouth of a Rottweiler if attacked from the side. They teach us that if you’ve killed a man, you make amends by raising your grandchildren. That the kids will play in a small fenced yard.

Seven days after Grandma died and one day after the fire burned her body away, there was an infestation of holes that took over 53 Thornton Street.

  Our Lady loves like a dog. Four yellow chairs. Chirping from inside the mint green chimney in the kitchen. Small birds fly in and sing, fly out. Why is there a chimney in the kitchen? Fireplace in the living room. Boarded up, but the whole room smells like smoke.

  —   Kelly Grace Thomas is a Pushcart Prize nominee and 2016 Fellow for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Her poem “The Politics of Scent” was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest.

  This is a story about a woman who has good sex. It is told from the perspective of the woman.

1: What did you think the story was going to be about before you read it? Must a title have relevance to the proceedings?   2: Think about each of the characters in the story and how you felt about them.

          NOTE: The epigraph comes from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and may be translated, “seeing the ship sailing on badly equipped with dark sails.”   —     John J.

    —   John J. Trause is the author of Eye Candy for Andy; Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round; Seriously Serial; Latter-Day Litany, the latter staged Off-Off Broadway; and Exercises in High Treason, a book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts.

  I.

Do not get into the first car or the last on the off chance there’s a crash. Snag a seat. Don’t look at mothers holding babies. While standing, hold the pole. Do not stare at fathers who wear their babies in Bjorns, tenderly patting their backs. Don’t eavesdrop.

— Jennifer Fliss is a Seattle-based fiction and essay writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, Necessary Fiction, The Rumpus, WhiskeyPaper, and elsewhere. She is a recent Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop alum and occasionally does the flying trapeze.

  Your ex-lover has built a circus outside your window.

1:15 pm, Plum Key, Florida. The yellow taxi pulled up to 5555 Beach Harbor Drive. A shapely woman in a mauve Chanel suit exited the cab and walked into the building. Her heels made staccato clacks on the terrazzo lobby floor as she walked to the elevator.

between a Jew and a pizza?” and it’s not the punch- line but the lock of eyes that dare me not to choose White over Kike. A word I didn’t learn until eleven and something more I still haven’t.

At 23, she became a pastor’s wife. They held a small ceremony at the church where he was minister. It would take him four more years of seminary to become pastor, but that was the general idea. Her bridesmaids were two friends from college. One of them said: “I’m so jealous I could murder you.

My mother had me in Boston but really by the Beit El checkpoint. I trace my begats to the burning bush, just blooming henna but it makes me a citizen of the roadmap. I just have to fill out the forms.

There is another chapter entitled Grieving Your Estranged Alcoholic Daughter Who Has Just Died at the Age of Twenty-seven After Eighteen Months of Not Speaking to You which you should consult immediately after finishing this one.

I saw your skull in the Smithsonian today. Emmie warned me, she said I’d see you everywhere: hear you on the radio, spot you in the café, smell you on the sheets I washed a dozen times since you left.

Capitalism   Last night, for the second time and to the same person, I got married. At work. This was for simplicity purposes. Later I would regret this. There was some flirtation on my part as well as some guilt. But I was married and I felt somehow immune.