Branded

“Do you see the donut,” the cancer specialist asks, sounding suddenly anxious, “or just the hole?” My eyes burn, though tears are 98 percent water. Once cancer touches you, you belong to it, you’re marked with the herd brand. It would take something like a miracle for me to recover. Yesterday, to the shock of tourists, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a fourteenth-century cathedral in Linz appeared to go into labor. Belief is contagious. And so, I lie in bed at night with all the windows open, listening intently to the gregarious insects at ease in the dark.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

In A Waymo

The doors automatically lock as we settle into the Waymo self-driving car riding to the restaurant from the hotel. It’s strange riding without a driver. The Waymo jolts to a stop in the middle of the street; its computers seem confused by the police cruisers. Heavily armed cops bang on the windows yelling, open for a drug search. Not knowing how to unlock the doors and looking around, there’s a black bag on the floorboard from the last passenger. There was no driver to remove it before we got in. Gasping awake, I throw the bedside lamp at the window.

From Guest Contributor Michael C. Roberts

Super

You’d probably call it spying, but how else to know when I should come? Sounds are a bit muffled after all this time. My body feels battered; too many buildings leapt at a single bound wreaked havoc on my joints. I’m not as fast either, for speeding bullets whiz by me, and this famous cape I still wear drags in the wind. Lois passed years ago, and where is Lex? Running some nursing home into the ground; I’ve no doubt. Yes, I fly lower and peer through your windows. I need you all now, more than you ever needed me.

From Guest Contributor Colleen Addison

Wiser Now

As I listen to him lecture in the big hall surrounded by white boards full of equations, I know I can only swallow small sips from the fire hose of knowledge that flows from his mind and mouth, flooding the audience with his insight until it streams from their eyes, light filling the room and bouncing off the windows; and I must turn my mind from his most recent threat to divorce me to how it all started: a campus lawn, a daisy, the Quantum Uncertainty of petals on the subject of love─ he loves me, he loves me not.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

Autumn’s Menace

A plainclothes policeman, using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, cut the face of a boy who was wandering the city in a hospital gown. The sirens got louder. Windows rattled and the pictures on the walls shook. Sometimes I think it's not true that teaching a child to not step on a caterpillar will make you a better person. Sometimes I think the plainclothesman is going to walk through the door, so I just keep waiting. The city streets are deserted – no St. Patrick’s Day parade, no people. In these slow days of unease, everyone is a biohazard.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest poetry collections are The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro-Press, 2020).

Brumal

“I often find myself laying still in bed with the ceiling fan on and windows cracked. I’ll wait for the cold air to shrink the tissue in my joints, for my nerve endings to cool, and to feel the agony of hypothermia even though I am perturbed by all things cold; snow, door knobs, the hands of people with poor circulation. I am fazed by freezers; and those stainless steel stretchers that will latch the cold onto my body.

I don’t think I’ll mind dying as much as I’ll mind sleeping in a freezer—my brumal body boxed beside strangers.”

From Guest Contributor Shanique Carmichael

The Dollhouse

is custom made to look like my house, our house. My new wife’s idea—for Sarah. Same front elevation. Duplicate floorplan. But my step daughter’s attempt to match furniture placement is off. I nudge the miniature hutch to its true location. She frowns, pushes my hand away, makes me move to the front yard, so to speak. I look at her through the windows. She appears as if a Goliath child. My sling: empty after repeated attempts to penetrate the four walls of her heart. I lean low, peer inside the front door. “Knock, knock,” I say. She never answers.

Keith Hoerner lives and pushes words around in Southern Illinois.

Swimming Sterility

HUBRIS CONTEST:

I’m a fish, except I swim between kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.

I sterilize, wash, wipe, dry. Watch episodes of Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm, semblances of entertainment before the virus.

I’m swimming in sterile fishbowls.

Some nights, I open windows. I absorb tree branches shifting, the tenderness of a fleeting breeze. I absorb the thump of distant speakers. Wear widened eagerness, an expression I thought I suppressed.

Some nights, I try to step out among bars, laughter, bodies.

Some nights I make it a block. Two, even.

But I retreat. Wide eyes sink into submission.

Brave fish are always doomed.From Guest Contributor Yash Seyedbagheri

Yash is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in fiction. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.

This Message Cannot Be Delivered

Old friends’ emails become inactive, enveloped by electronic monsters. My message cannot be delivered, electronic gatekeepers proclaim.

I can’t tell them of being alone. I can’t hear their off-color jokes about paraplegics and suicide, youth at its most delightfully stupid. Tell them of empty, sterile walls. I can’t confess I absorbed their stories of family, an electronic voyeur.

I keep trying. Messages come back.

I drive to distant homes. But staring through lit windows, I feel like a magazine, an obnoxious knickknack among order and precision. I imagine them discarding jokes, smiles replaced by starched replicas.

This message isn’t delivered.

From Guest Contributor Yash Seyedbagheri

Yash is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in fiction. His story, "Soon," was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, 50 Word Stories, (mac)ro (mic), and Ariel Chart.

Last Dance

Rain blackens the windows, dime-sized water balloons of toxic ash. We haven’t had sun in months, and now this. You look up and say, Think it’ll stop? I love how you still look up, that instinctive angle of hope, of God.

It doesn’t matter since ration deliveries have ended, but I don’t say that.

We stand on the porch and watch the rain. Our last neighbors emerge from their house, wave, then slow dance down the street. By the time they reach the corner they’re convulsing like punk rockers. I ask you to dance but you pull me back inside.

From Guest Contributor Charles Duffie