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Late afternoon heat makes a jungle of the canal. Curtained by purple Himalayan balsam, carpeted with sulphur yellow water lilies. The handle of a child’s bicycle reaches out in supplication. She stands on the edge of the railway bridge under a gun metal sky, looking down at the tracks. In the distance, the train rumbles like thunder. She counts, working out how long she has. One finger gently strokes her silver nose ring, the raw skin around the piercing, over and over. The thunder gets louder. She pulls herself up, onto the parapet, and becomes weightless, sitting on thick, water scented air like the buzzard above her head. It lets out a lonely, cat like cry that sends tiny, furred creatures scrabbling into the undergrowth, seeking the shelter of discarded beer cans and cardboard. The thunder gets louder, fills her heart, her head, her stomach. All the empty spaces. Sunlight glints on the sculptures running alongside the train tracks. Iron Horses, manes streaming in an imaginary wind, caught in a race against time, rust already eating at hooves and manes. Air pressure builds around her as the oncoming train pushes the air before it, pushing her to the edge. She closes her eyes and tightens her fingers around the nose ring, the one he had given her before everything exploded. The thunder roars beneath her feet. In the space between heartbeats, she rips out the nose ring and hurls it onto the track. Opens her eyes. Breathes. Karen Arnold can be found on Twitter @aroomofonensown

The itchy dress and the rented colonial manor are ill-suited. Which is to say, they are not the right fit. Still, she stands obedient on the raised wooden platform of an I Do day; its Norman Rockwell threshold propped open at her feet. But those aren’t her toes. The baseless white is everywhere: ribbon-wrapped chairs, wedding cake, guestbook. They form a muted horizon, wash away everything except her mother’s tight red velvet dress. With a black jacket, it dazzles. The bride waits for the groom at the altar; an arbor of well-intended, but not-meant vows cascading over her - a trellis. A note from the author: Forthcoming chapbooks: True North (Origami Poetry Project), Coyote in the basket of my ribs (Alabaster Leaves).

Swimming as Allegory for Living When I say I don’t know how to swim, I mean I never learned to do it properly. That they tried to teach me when I was eleven but gave up when I couldn’t figure how to turn my head just enough to breathe, yet not sink. I mean if I accidentally fell into a pool but forced myself to stay really calm, I could probably remain afloat, but it would be obvious to anyone that I was in a precarious situation. I mean I can do some half-assed version of the front crawl in which my face stays submerged for as long as I can hold my breath, while my arms slice through water in unintended tandem, and my feet paddle relentlessly like a runner duck’s, propelling my body forward in small bursts, until it feels like my lungs will explode if I don’t allow my head to break through the surface that very instant to take in as much air as I possibly can, even if the lost momentum causes me to immediately sink like a stone. When I say I don’t know how to swim, I mean I never learned to do it properly. Painlessly. Scar Instead of speaking your mind late that afternoon, you offer up pointless pleasantries in exchange for his polite platitudes. Just as he ignores how the heels of your brogues catch uneven cobblestone as you approach, you ignore the way his voice catches as you leave. Because it is summer, you don’t notice how late it is until youths in clubwear fill your still- bright carriage and one in a soft leather jacket jostles the Tesco roses wilting in your arms. Instinctively, you pull them closer to you, as if they were meant for better than two days in a stained coffee mug and one at the bottom of a bin ripping holes in the liner. Grief distracts, so when you exit the DART station, you miss a step, promptly slicing open the papery skin of your malleolus. And as you note the same ruby that marks your bouquet now trickles down your ankle, you wonder if this day will leave you with a scar, or just a poem. Allison Thung is a poet and project manager from Singapore. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Emerge Literary Journal, Brave Voices Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison or at www.allisonthung.com.

Magic Theatre Poetry Reading I wanted to eat you. I did not understand your power, the slick sleaze of it. Your legs uncrossed, offered but not mentioned – what was it you wanted? You said: friendship, to repent and a chance to right the wrong – yours, which you tossed around like oriflammes, flares of orange. Are you fireworks? A chimney? What is it that makes red, the birdlike heart of you tick? You seemed careless, oblivious, or scared – you must have been running, running away from it awhile. Who told the younger you that she had to say yes, find ways to make others say yes, no matter the pricelist of cars, tickets, broken teacups, reputation. We could have been Siamese sisters, friends, or mere acquaintances, but desire, but lust: you wanted to be me, wanted to drink, to fill your cup, gorge on the sap, but found no anchor, no strip pole around which to tie that tether. You said you needed to cut it, took out the butter knife in tears – honey, honey, put it down, please: there was never a string. Springtime (Ada by the Shore) Pretty pile of white wooden cubes, red roofs: village we’ve left behind – elongating their shadows in the morning sun, the pine trees took us here. (The church bells ring, ding, dong.) The sun already high and white when we sit by the lake. Boatmen – they have gone out for lunch. In silence, we observe: large strokes of green, purple, on the opposite shore. (She leaned and told me a secret which I cannot write here.) Song of the daffodil, crocus, primrose, the pennyworth. Her eyes: the same blue as the lake, tranquil. Around, a line of purple, deep, seized from the crest of the hilltops ablaze. A gentle breeze. The pine trees stand silent. Time: obliterated. (The clock of my heart skips a step.) Lorelei Bacht (she/they) is currently running out of ways to define herself, and would like to reside in a tranquil, quiet form of uncertainty for a while. Their recent work has appeared and/or are forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Visitant, The Wondrous Real, Abridged, Odd Magazine, Postscript, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, The Inflectionist Review, Hecate, and others. They are also on Instagram @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter @bachtlorelei

I sit, You sit, We sit. You’re talking, I’m listening. I can clearly see your lips moving and I can hear the individual words you’re saying and my brain is processing them but much slower than normal, it feels like what you see when you turn the handle of a Victorian fairground zoetrope. My brain absorbs, the words flicker, in and out. Out. Out. The naked lady undresses again and again but I can only imagine her shape. Say it again. You’re talking, I’m listening. Once it sinks in and I’ve held my head in my hands again all I can say is, “I don’t know” Which is a lie, I do know. I know exactly. But we’ve just entered that part of the poem where the stillness occurs. The stillness where decisions are made. Once you decide, it’s usually over. No comeback. So it needs to be good. So here we are. There. At that point. I feel like I’m still wearing my coat, which makes me laugh. Because I’m not and you are. So, in the stillness where decisions are made. There is a choice. Choose your own Adventure is it? The books of youth didn’t cover this. Who did? Who does? Help! One more time. You’re talking, I’m listening, We’re still sitting. You’re saying the same thing. Again. With that sultry doleful look in your eye and I cannot… But you’re over there and I’m here. Maybe proximity is the answer. If I’m here and you’re here then maybe the words will come. Maybe the thing that I don’t know, I’ll admit I do know. And there it is. Step A. A minor decision, but a decision. And it turns out that we don’t need words. Everything we need to say is in our mouths, but we’re not speaking. Our hands are also talking, voraciously. The naked lady is undressed. So I’m here and you’re here and now we’re not sitting. You’re not talking but I am still listening. If listening is feeling and my heart is all I can hear in my ears. And I find that I can’t breathe, but that’s ok because I’m definitely alive. Alive. Later. I’m talking and you’re listening and then you’re talking and I’m listening and it’s easier than it’s ever been. The unsaid thing that was never spoken has itself spoken and while I’m still unclear exactly how. It exactly doesn’t matter. I sit, You sit, We sit. There. A word from the author: A poem about the distance between us, closing the gap and the space in time where the thick pause occurs. The space where decisions are made.

My twin brother Clem had a club foot but could climb like you wouldn’t believe. He’d swoop up trees like we were on the moon and if a ball went on the roof, any roof, he’d bound up the side of the building like a soccer field and next thing you know an entire galaxy of balls, one or two of them the superball kind, and he’d holler scrambles! which I was already doing like a cartoon. We were born before we were done if you know what I mean. I was the opposite of Clem and could fold myself into nothing and get completely flattened by gravity like I had a double helping and sideways bones. Clem would unfurl me sometimes and take me with him and off we’d go decades before parkour and about the same time as the Superman comics came out which our sister Sketchy Sam collected let’s just say, although Denny down the street who was in love with her in a desperate kind of way would later, when he came out of it, swear she stole from him. Sam liked to draw. She’d start by drawing a magic marker frame on the page, cells she called them, and she’d fill them with sketches of me and Clem mostly. She used cheap Woolworth’sscrapbooks at first until all the babysitting money, when she insisted my mother take her to the mall in the city, the proper art store, where she bought thick white paper pads and superior pencils, pale erasers that didn’t leave a wake, metal sharpeners with two holes, all of which she carefully placed into a new pencil case with a roll-up lid like the desk in the den and she started drawing for real then, mostly me and Clem like I said, Clem scraping the ceiling and me flat except for two eyes on the floor is how she drew us and I don’t know how she did it but those squiggles were portraits, true as life, exactly us. We called her Sketch and she was the most sought-after babysitter ever. Parents booked her months in advance, gigs for which she asked double pay at first until she rounded it all the way up to twenty dollars a night when her friends were making three dollars fifty cents with tip. She got pizza out of the deal, too, and called me and Clem when it arrived so we’d fly over for a piece which the parents knew about and the kids seemed to like. There was a no-piggy-backing policy in effect so the kids would have to stand on Clem’s shoulders for the tree-climb and keep it secret. At the end of the night Sketch would leave cells on the refrigerator, one for each kid, beautiful things indeed, the children transformed into superheroes with names like Mary Muscle, Suzy Smartly, Danny Divine, Mighty Mike, and the kids could hardly wait for a sequel which parents were known to cough up big money for as birthday presents and high-mark incentives. Sketch ended up going to art school in the city and me and Clem moved into a government-funded housing project when our parents had enough of us which we totally understood and were mutual about. In her third year Sketch got so much money for her work she was able to buy a beautiful old three-storey apartment building on Gladstone Avenue in downtown Toronto. She rented most of it out but me and Clem helped her turn the entire upstairs into a big studio apartment just for her. We opened the whole thing up except for two rooms side by side along the back wall and the next time we came to visit, on one of the doors was a cell with my weird portrait, and on the second door was a cell with Clem, or at least his flying essence. Inside it was just one room so the doors were a sort of trick and there were two matching beds side by side, two dressers, two desks and a big leather couch in front of a TV on the wall. The rest of the walls, all of them, were covered in cells Sketch had done from when we were all little to now, eyeballs and squiggles mostly but not all, and that was when it started me and Clem every Saturday morning we’d hop on the train to meet Sketch at Union Station, a four-hour ride. I used to wonder what we looked like to the cars stopped at the crossings, our excited faces through the window just like Sketch drew us. Sherry is from the wilds of Ontario. She writes the kind of stories she longs for and can rarely find. thestoryparade.ca

When I think about the day we met our daughter, I can only recall how much my stomach hurt. I had spent a better part of that morning squatting in front of the toilet, legs akimbo, bile dripping from my mouth in threads. The water was too cold to shower in, so I used a whole packet of wet wipes to cleanse myself, and the overwhelming scent of spearmint on my red plastic toothbrush made me hunch over the washbasin three times before I walked out of the bathroom. Meanwhile, you had already left our home. You were standing at the corner of the third street waiting for the bus, your stomach calm, and your ankles holding your calves steady. You knew that after six stops, a baby was waiting for you at the end of the bus ride. You were anticipating the cab ride home – awkwardly bundling her into the navy-blue car seat your sister loaned us, arguing with the cab driver about the air conditioning, hunching in the front seat with your slender fingers braided through one another. Meanwhile, I would sit up straight in the backseat, breathing in the scent of the driver’s packed lunch, and I would try to get her to wrap her chubby left hand around my ring finger, the one that is still bare after a decade together. Mira’s mother is beautiful, spent. Time blurs, and suddenly, we have a baby. You are seemingly in shock, and I am left sitting outside the recovery room gently holding a soft, sleeping infant, a child who carries an inheritance that we did not give her, a combination of genes that will never be fully ours. We don’t know it yet, but when we get home, we will discover that the universe quietly interceded as we attempted to make sense of something we weren’t sure we needed. We don’t know it yet, but in fifteen years, she will ask us about family heirlooms. You want to give her the keys to a kingdom, a first-edition copy of Jekyll and Hyde, and I want her to have the curves of our nailbeds, the stuffed cat you lost when you were eight. Instead, I will give her the plain silver band you slid over my finger at midnight on our eleventh anniversary. I will frame the faded Polaroid of her mother, grinning, six months pregnant, the carved wooden box with all the notes my mother slipped in my lunchbox at school, the first pair of booties I bought for the boy we buried under the mango tree in our backyard. Inheritance is sometimes shaped by loss, but a legacy of love is shaped by memory. Amelia David is an avid reader of fiction, a former student of English literature, and an individual who hopes to break away from writing personal essays. Her work has been published on Mag 20/20 and Esthesia. She drinks too much green tea, and blogs occasionally at https://pretendedconfusion.wordpress.com/.

Unlock my body and move myself to dance Into warm liquid, flowing, blowing glass (Wilco - Heavy Metal Drummer) “Listen. This is the best sound in the world…” Anticipation for the glug of wine against an apple glass - Assured as a magician’s click, click, click Blacksmith-red; bending solids into shapes Of sunlight on kitchen tiles Half diamond, loosely hanging under the sink Your crisp white trainers nip between Day and night; May’s open-windowed fever to sighing fridge As basil, chilli, cherry tomatoes Rise from their slumber; settle on surfaces - Coiling around your jug of flowers, sculpting butter in the bell jar - Nothing here escapes their incense You take the volume up; Wilco gig to your quiet Belfast street Singing of your dinner-time Charleston; our sympathetic drink; These apple glasses it poured itself into; all a river, generating electricity - Flashing into this intangible moment of freedom You tell me about driving home over hills today, How the sun drubbed through the sky; gloriously smacked your screen - Germinating a whispered thankfulness for your life When you share this short story, stirring the rich sauce, I think: Yes, this is the best sound in the world Jessica Berry grew up beside the seaside of Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland. She is an English teacher at the Belfast Model School for Girls. In 2021, Jessica was placed in Bangor’s annual poetry contest hosted by the Aspects Literary Festival. Her work has also been included in publications such as Drawn to the Light and A New Ulster. She is working on her first poetry collection; inspired by Irish myths and fables.

I sit at my desk, a nice one – yellow wood, not in the best condition but well-made – and think, “I’m a fraud.” This has nothing to do with passing bad checks, lying on my resume, etc. though I’m not above, and may have performed, any of those things. It’s more essential, to say it’s more essential is to appropriate – what? – more dignity, grandeur even to my craven endeavors. “No!” I want to shout, “I’m a fraud pure and simple.” But I can’t shout, the kids might hear. They’re out of the house now, back-to-school shopping with their mother. “Well,” the wife said at breakfast, “do you have office work again this weekend?” I mumbled something, the kids laughed, one spilled jelly on her shirt. “I’ll get it,” I half-rose but of course, the wife beat me to it. These anecdotes, always distorted, the lies I tell to gain the freedom to confront. I mean to confront the world, to get at its essentials by understanding its particulars, but always something keeps me back. This isn’t Eddington’s desk nor Husserl’s that I’m sitting at, it’s something we picked up at a tag sale along with its matching chair. The project, the only one worth executing, is to face the world, that is, whatever is before my eyes, honestly, without abstractions, to see But always I back away. It’s not as if I don’t have the time. I can make the time. Driving to work, working, driving back, spending so-called quality time – it’s all there. It’s more there – here – on Saturdays. On the Sabbath, the daylight witching hour, we confront Outside my window, over the lid of my trusty, deceptive laptop: the outside of the sill, paint peeling off it, beyond that the man-made natural world: lawns, hedges, not topiary, the neighbor mowing his lawn, a nuthatch singing on a nearby bough, that’s not a nuthatch, it’s a titmouse, a nuthatch is something that I digress. Of course. I digress, anything to avoid The neighbor, parading back and forth behind his gas-powered mower, paunch hanging over belt, no cigar, he gave those up, looks my way, notices me, doesn’t let on that he sees. I should go out, my grass needs cutting, I should let it go, turn it to hay, this town was a meadow once, has it in its name, Menacing Meadow, that’s not the name of course, the menace is invented, part of my deception, I should go out, we’ll talk about the big game, last night’s, today’s, tomorrow’s, there’s always something on. The games aren’t an evasion, they’re part of being human, the Aztecs, for example Because those others lived in the distant past, I consign them to the state of nature, as if I don’t live in a state of nature, however denatured. And my purpose I look at my computer, notice I’m signed in to my work account, then I didn’t lie, I do have work to do, I even have an email I could read. My cursor hovers over it, I click, get up from my desk, refresh my coffee, venture out. “Sure is a scorcher,” the neighbor says, wiping his protruding brow, it parallels his stomach though it’s harder, stop seeing correspondences, I tell myself, see the particular, that’s where “Sure is,” I say, reviving the flagging conversation. Grass covers my sandals. The neighbor glances at my feet as if to accuse. “I’ll mow my lawn tomorrow”, I say, “I have office work today. Sunday’s my chore day.” I don’t want the neighborhood association – what association? – running us out of town for improper home maintenance. “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” he says. Ah the charming simplicity of these suburban folk, so sure of what can’t be known for certain! “I’ll take my chances,” I say sauntering off. A few blocks later I’m in a street, I locked the house with something on my key fob, unless I pressed it wrong, not sure if I should go back and check, I know how this ends, that’s part of my scam, how does that fit in? Something’s sniffing at my toes, I made it to the curb somehow. “Why hello, I haven’t seen you in a while,” the old woman says looking up at me. We’re both on the sidewalk now, it’s not that I’m tall, she’s short, the archetypal little old lady, it hasn’t been that long, I saw her last weekend. “I’ve been working,” I say as if to put her in her place, the retiree, she worked all her life, unpaid unsung work tending to her husband, a stalled locomotive, dead now, raising kids, occasional grandkids, now her dog, a toy version of some pedigree, I know the breed, I forget which, can’t ask her, she told me months ago, she’ll think I wasn’t listening, I wasn’t. “And how are things at?” I can’t believe she knows the name of my firm, we were just acquired a few months ago, I don’t recall telling her, it’s not the sort of thing that makes the papers. “Oh you know,” I say, reaching down to pet her pooch. It snarls at me. “Alfreda!” she snaps. “Well, we’d best be going. Alfreda wants her din-din.” She pats my stomach with her free hand, ambles off. As she goes, I see the clear plastic bag holding Alfreda’s poop that she carries in lieu of a purse. I go too, angry at myself for this diversion. Head down I notice my fly is open. I can’t zip it up, the neighbors will think I’m doing something obscene, one of the perils of the meadows. I untuck my shirt, it covers half the offending gap, nothing to see here, ladies, keep it moving as the cops say. Instead of observing the well or ill-trimmed lawns about me, I ruminate upon my encounter with my lady friend: was that a twinkle in her eye? Was it because of my unzipped fly? I wonder about her platonic, lascivious, materteral interest in me, I should be observing nature, nature isn’t natural here, even the hawks are shaped by people, people are natural, nothing to confront, too much to confront, focus: focus is always focus on I make it home, the driveway half empty, I’ve the house to myself, no telling how long. I skirt the fridge, no I drink juice straight out of the bottle, cover my tracks that way, I have to keep my belly taut as I can manage for the ladies. I sit at the laptop just as the car pulls in, I refresh the screen, “Don’t bother Daddy, he’s working!” my wife says, she opens the door a crack, I press a key, I was timed off my account, no telling what the wife sees, the kids rush through the crack, I stand, they embrace my midsection, my fly’s closed now, the youngest looks up, “Look what I got!” she says waving something before my eyes, and I’m there for her though absent.

Despite the glares from the two officers, I thought we’d escaped. Once the twins got on the bus, we’d be off. Then, with one foot in, Jackson, the verbal one, turned and yelled out to Marshall, the physical one, “Kick the car!” Which he did. Hard. And put a motherfucking dent in the side of the police cruiser. This action was not appreciated by Rochester’s finest. Before I could speak, both twins were in the back of the car, officers in front. I was still frozen when they peeled out, shouting, “Follow us.” It’s not easy for a school bus to tail a cop car driven by an infuriated officer, and we had no GPS to direct us from the corn field to the station, but somehow we made it. In the parking lot, I sent the bus with twelve remaining kids and three staff members home to Ithaca, an hour and a half away. I turned toward the police fortress, worried about the twins’ fate as well as my own. It was the summer of 1990. I was 24 and the unofficial director of the Access to College Education (ACE) summer program. I’d taken the city youth worker job the previous fall knowing very little. Nine months later, I only was just beginning to understand. I was beginning to understand how the forces of institutional racism and class structure led kids in the sixth grade to garner suspensions leading to academic failure. I was beginning to understand that not everyone in my Ivy League hometown could reasonably aspire to its hallowed halls. I was beginning to understand the struggle of families borrowing to pay the light bill or gathering shingles in the front yard in hopes of one day reroofing their trailer. But I was also young, full of idealism and energy. And I did know the twins well. I’d found them tutors, driven them to school dances, commiserated with their mother at 8am when they wouldn’t get up for school – on one occasion, I’d rousted them with a broom, maybe not my finest moment. On this day, we’d come to Ganondagan, an American Indian heritage site located in a cornfield on a two-lane rural highway outside Rochester. I’d heard it was a good place to visit, but there was no internet to look at pictures, and a lot of open stark nothingness turned out not to be a great choice for fourteen rambunctious city kids. It started with baseball caps on a dirt path. Jackson and Marshall were tough but no match for Robert and Evan, the biggest boys in the group. Some months later, Robert, a quiet kid who lived with his grandparents, would melt down in a group session becoming violent without a target. It would take most of my strength to restrain him, my arms hugging him tightly, no words sufficient for the pain he was trying to let go. Also in the future, it would come out that Evan was involved with his stepsister in a bad way. I would make the call to Social Services, the call which would break up the family. On this hot day, however, those boys were merely bullies, grabbing the twins’ hats and mocking them for their inability to retrieve them as they jogged down the road. “Get them, Francois, get them,” the twins yelled at me. A grown man chasing kids on a sacred site felt inappropriate so I demurred. “Ignore them, we’ll get them back. They just want attention.” This answer was wrong, very wrong. The twins, half in tears, told me I didn’t care about them and headed back toward the bus. The bus driver was there as well as Leslie, a staff member who’d stayed back. I let them go. I didn’t know the bus driver was asleep. I didn’t consider that Leslie was physically unable to keep up with the twins as they continued walking down the rural highway becoming a shimmering mirage in the summer heat. I could have known two young Black kids on the side of the highway would draw attention. I wouldn’t have guessed that when the cops picked them up to return them to Ganondagan, the twins would yell obscenities at the officers for the duration of the short drive, making the cruiser dent the absolute last straw. The officers disappeared once I was inside the station. The twins were in the care of a female sergeant, a woman with a tan face and calloused hands. She let me make a call to my boss. I wasn’t going to be fired. He was sending Michael Thomas to pick me up in one of the program’s cars, a retired cruiser, the irony not lost on me. I felt relief at keeping my job and grimaced at the prospect of the shit Michael would give me the whole ride back. The sergeant did the paperwork with a smile while maintaining eye contact with the boys. “What you two need is to spend the summer on my farm. Shoveling hay, mowing lawns, and feeding the animals,” she told them, the twins subdued for once. “Fuck, yes!” I wanted to yell. And I know their overwhelmed mom would be okay with that. With the paperwork and details of transferring their probations to our county done, the sergeant moved on to her next case, and the boys and I sat quietly waiting for Michael. I was exhausted though I knew sleep was hours and many beers away. The boys were too. They were twelve. I worked with Jackson, Marshall, Robert, Evan, and the others for another year and a half. Objectively, even before high school, the ACE program was a failure. Chronic absenteeism and behavioral issues plagued many of the kids. Teachers who seemed like partners in sixth grade grew indifferent by eighth grade. I wasn’t sure if I’d accomplished anything but knew I needed to move on for everyone’s sake. But there were wins. The only boy Robert and Evan couldn’t bully, a boy who’d seen his father killed as a child, came to live with my family. He went back to his mother sooner than I wanted, but we remained close for many years and he became a good father to his children. Another boy did very well in high school and even made the football team as a lineman. I went to a game to cheer him on and sat near his father, a Greek immigrant who owned a diner in town. When the boy missed a block leading to a quarterback sack, a guy near us yelled, “Bench that fat ass!” I had to leave before I got arrested. The boy’s football career was short-lived but he did make it to college. I spent a long time thinking about how the afternoon in Ganondagan could have gone differently, finally realizing it was just a proxy for the lives of those kids, lives I dropped into and out of, lives with forces causing far too much struggle and pain. Those kids would be in their forties now. More than half my life has passed and I’m still hanging out with kids, this time as a volunteer in another emerging program for families who’ve come to this country from troubled places halfway across the globe. The young woman who coordinates the program is the age I was at Ganondagan. She seems so much smarter and more composed than I was then. Perhaps memory can be overly critical, but I think she is and I’m happy about it. I don’t need another arrest story. A word from the author: The events here occurred so long ago but remain fresh in my mind. I wonder how the lives of those kids have unfolded. You can read more of my work here: francoisbereaud.com

Pearl Divers We’ve crossed two states to be here on this shiny, blue Saturday afternoon of hot cosmic winds and A.M. radio crackle, chrome, clouds and melting tarmac, eye to eye with ears of corn, drunk on beer and pollen. And way over there, on the side of the road, is the U.S.S. Chevrolet, looking like it’s been run aground and abandoned somewhere off the coast of what surely must be Nebraska (the captain and crew very possibly searching for native girls or scavenging for food). Yes, here we are, sifting through someone’s cornfield, as if we were pearl divers, perhaps, diving capped and flippered, swimming in a sea of yellow and green (confessing our sins to crows as we go) recalling again and again what surely must have been an ancient Chinese maxim, that a man’s soul is a pearl. Everywhere around us is the sound of the friction of the wind filtering through this field of tall corn, an all-encompassing hiss like the electric crackle of static, haunted with distant whispering or the dry, dusty rustling of a million newspapers that read nothing but old news. Madame Laveau, Fortune Teller and Police Psychic, Has a Vision And this time, for some reason, there’s a Charlie Chaplin of a scarecrow standing in the middle of a crossroads, staring, blankly, up at the sky, arms outstretched with a pipe-bomb in one hand and a bottle of Pernod in the other. And the sky itself is a living, breathing, billowing fishnet of a tapestry woven of starfish and moonflowers, star fruit and banana peppers and little jade lions with smiles as wide as the seas of time. In the bottom right corner of the scene, there’s a pile of rictus-ly grinning carnival masks blooming with cherry blossoms and someone’s spare change (some kind of foreign currency, it seems). And just to the right of that (and down a little), we can see your classic hoary country preacher-type, with a rainbow variety of snakes crawling from his pockets and sleeves, shirt-collar and pant legs, staggering his way towards his unsuspecting flock (not shown here). And, just a few years from this very spot, there’s a hobo clown with a hernia and a stove-pipe hat, smoking a clove cigarette and sipping, solemnly, from a bottle of Applejack. And he’s sitting atop an aging rhinoceros (that, by the way, is just about to do its business from a steel I-beam, thirteen floors up on a swaying skeletal structure which, the locals say, will one day be the federal memorial something-or-other dedicated to some fancy so-and-so). And, finally, there in the background, just behind (and up to the left) of the Night Blooming Cereus, if one squints hard enough (as if peering into a painting by Van Eyck or maybe one of those Where’s Waldo dioramas), one can almost see it … Life, itself (portrayed here in some vague, anthropomorphic manifestation), lurking unnervingly beneath the pale orange glow of the streetlamp and the churning cloud of Death’s-Head Moths.

He sang Gershwin as we strolled down Montreal sidewalks, past budding trees confined to boulevard boxes, where dogs peed against them, and trash swirled around them, trees that would have a better chance in forests, but were still plucky in their snug quarters. He held my hand. We kissed on Rue Saint-Jacques. I melted. In the glow of a streetlamp, his blue eyes flickered. He left me when the ground was icy, when winds whipped my hair over my eyes, when leaves tumbled and were crushed underfoot. Come spring, he returned, as seasons do. It seemed we needed the sun. A word from the author: I write overlooking Lake St Clair in Ontario, Canada. My work has been published in literary and lifestyle journals, including Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Talking Writing, Read650, Southshore Review, Canada's History Magazine, and Dreamers Creative Writing. Find me at: virginiafoley.com