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I learned to draw from my neighbour Harp we called him, although his name was Greg, but by the time he moved in across the street, the name Greg was taken by my baby brother who I wanted to call Max because of Get Smart but it didn’t work out. Harp stayed on his driveway and drew with chalk which he also ate and I howled to my mother he’s eating the chalk again and all she howled back was I know when I was expecting a solution. Among other things, I wondered about the colour of his poo and its buoyancy but when I got to know him, one step at a time, I saw that he was only licking the chalk so as to achieve a thicker, bolder, more meaningful stroke. I knew right away Harp was drawing at me and I watched through my bedroom window but this was the60s and suburban neighbourhoods were new and important so my mother hauled me out of the house and pushed me without being obvious about it across the street. I shook myself loose on the road just before Harp’s driveway and she kept on going, on the grass because Harp’s expression went like The Scream when her foot hovered over his canvas. Harp’s mother opened the door and my mother twirled inside and Harp put himself in a chalk box and I rode my bike up and down the street, all the houses except ours still under construction. All he drew were stripes everybody thought but I knew they were trees because, like I said, they were aimed at me and I saw the trees become forests so dense and secret like gnarled fairy tales until it rained and they were gone forever in a beautiful pale path of residue that lined our street always. We’d recently made plaster of paris hands at school for Mother’s Day gifts, gruesome things chopped at the wrist, and my mother put mine on her dresser so it looked like I was crouched inside, my exposed hand offering rubber bands, change, thumbtacks, bobby pins. There had been leftover chunks of the plaster – forearms and elbows, broken thumbs, knuckles and other appendages – and we pocketed the bits and after school a bunch of us drew all over the pavement. I made the letter m that looked like a bird one way and a bum the other, while braver kids spelled s-h-i-t and f-u-c-k. I went to the store sometimes with a note, for cigarettes or bread mostly, and one time I asked Mr. Wilkes if he had plaster of paris and he hauled out a big bag and I hauled it home in the carrier of my bike, my front wheel very wobbly. My mother yelled at me but I told her I wanted to make chalk for Harp and she stirred while I searched the house for shapes and we poured the lovely smooth goo into greased tin cans, cracker boxes lined with stretch and seal, paper towel tubes, toys. The food colouring was her idea and when I gave the big box to Harp, all the shapes and colours like pieces of broken castles, his blue chalky lips smiled. After the next rain when he drew his box he made the line at the base of his driveway dotted and I was allowed in. He let me populate the forest with birds and lizards. He pointed out swirls of chalk with pavement eyes and I gathered them into monsters. When his mother made us matching red capes, I introduced miniature Supermen into the forest, their horizontal capes like gashes. He watched like I was on TV while I rode my bike up and down the street my cape bubbling behind me. Eventually I got him through the dots and turned out he wasn’t so afraid as long as we went one step at a time. He started to talk about the same time my little brother Greg did and his ideas were far bigger than mine, maybe because they’d been hidden for so long I don’t know, but sometimes they were too big for words and he’d draw them instead, on paper with blue cartridge pen which blobbed sometimes and he’d hand the page to me so I could turn the blobs into monsters. Everybody got greedy when our trees got huge and there was a housing boom in established neighbourhoods. We sold our house and Harp’s family sold theirs. We kept in touch for a long time me and Harp. Last I heard he was a pilot up north, the crop duster kind, with a side hustle as sky writer and that’s what I think of when the sky is pink in the morning, like maybe it’s Harp’s beautiful residue again. Sherry is from the wilds of northern Ontario. She writes the kind of stories she longs for and can rarely find. thestoryparade.ca

Thunder Sound I grew up with thunder, lightning, with klaxon warnings to take shelter. Reaping whirlwinds for sowing heat, humidity, electric layers of air. Thunder that awakened at deep dark midnight. Thunder with sunrise veiled by wicked clouds. Thunder in choleric March snows. I heard thunder boom like dropped artillery, crack like a savage whip, rumble like an ancient rite. 🙒🙒🙒 I never heard thunder roll until we moved to California. It ricocheted off low mountains to playful ocean, from stout redwoods to flaring seaside bonfires. They said we brought thunder with us; before we came no storm split the sky. Disapproving powers made protest. Angry titans warred against our plans to stay. Far from compelling our retreat, their strivings put us at ease— thunder made familiar an unknown place. Thunder welcomed us home. Crab Shell I’ll dig up a cork-screw hermit crab shell. I’ll carry delights, discoveries— my burden of joy in the spindly-sure spiral. On my back, ever ready to shelter— always able to bear. Outside forces hold no dread for me. Internal distractions succumb to helix-hard constraint. The twist-tight innards of my moveable home— packed with every bright ornament I collect; nothing beautiful escapes my notice— nothing attendant is ignored. I scoop up particularities no one seems to see. They feed my love for this world— small, weighty things. Sarah M. Lillard is a writer living in northern Virginia. Her poetry has appeared in Black Bough Poetry, The Hellebore, and Nightingale & Sparrow.

Taking, Care I was in the squares of Savannah, moon eyed and just-wed, honey-sunned, while relatives plucked my grandmother’s best things and flowers. After the funeral, before the big auction, familial teeth and their twice removed seething emerged in Ohio, gnawing the valuables faster than her cancer; beautiful objects and meaning sinking into the stomachs of their hungriest pockets. I returned on Thursday from the squares of Savannah, still shaded by October’s magnolia and southern live oak memories. I was a new wife missing the closest still-married family member. There was ease in our many midwestern days. I had to pick from an upheaval of leftovers, her once-loved possessions. I took the angel, the quilt. I grabbed LIFE magazines, writing paper, and slim books I’d never see her read. I missed the chance to rescue her heavy, most grandfatherly clock that clicked our time together while the pendulum hypnotized like rhythm of rain or rocking chair on our quiet after-church afternoons. I hear it even decades later in my umpteenth wave of second-hand grief. When I was in Savannah I absorbed each museum, riverwalk, and ghost. I was voracious: sneaking sand into my back pocket from Tybee Island; handfuls of Spanish moss slipped into my purse at the green and gray Bonaventure Cemetery. Sip-soaked Too much headwine and now our glarey stares: every clever rereverie sweat-glassed and fog-wet. Whose move now? Memory has strayed like a loose hen. Let’s go to bedlam. I love hate you in the way that you are in the way. Wake up to rooster-sad crowcrying. K Weber is an Ohio poet who has self-published 6 online poetry book projects. These are free in PDF and audio formats. Her projects, writing and photo credits, and more can be found at http://kweberandherwords.wordpress.com

Reminiscence is a necessary evil And the melody of love lingers Alas, we're now only strangers Oh, but that beautiful flower Bloomed only for that hour Alas, we're now only strangers Yet, those promises were prayers Bloomed only for that hour Drenched in a soulful shower Yet, those promises were prayers And the melody of love lingers Drenched in a soulful shower Oh, but that beautiful flower For the love basking folks They spoke of love as if it's true But, truth is a fluctuation too Yet, folks bask in that sappy Sun And the next moment, it's gone But, truth is a fluctuation too And tintless ocean turns blue And the next moment, it's gone All that was earnestly sworn And tintless ocean turns blue Heedless of all lovers, old or new All that was earnestly sworn Abides in the blossom, now worn Heedless of all lovers, old or new They spoke of love as if it's true Abides in the blossom, now worn Yet, folks bask in that sappy Sun

The answer in an envelope It lies on the table, lips pursed like a religious aunt in possession of the truth and the certainty that only a believer can deal with it. A believer like her. I am not a believer, not equipped for the awareness that, in another space, a disjointed elbow distant, such frail material can set my cells chattering. It can be under your fingers and a thousand kilometres away — an answer that was an itch before it became a question. My daughter is in her room, half-hiding secrets she carves out of plasma, sparks of dopamine reflected on the screen of her retina. She looks up as I pass, acknowledges my parental checking with a quick smile before returning to her episode. At least she still yawns like a child, rubs her nose with the back of her hand. Nobody has convinced her you don’t do that, yet. The answer is a tendon of love binding a muscle to its bone, the suspicion, that anything that can be torn, will be. And that tearing is deliberate — the rupture of particular fibres. He hides the answer with some other business: pensions untranslated, previous official things he wouldn’t know where to find, hopes maybe this will seem less important after time, that it might somehow lose itself in paper. Painted by numbers Your raincoat is a shade of wing-tips, the underlip of swell, contour of clouds compressed, certain stones; your face, the patient, arthritic, absent expectation of storm peeling off the Atlantic, familiar ache of island weather, the colour of resigned hostility — a shatter of mews rendered against a shatter of brine against a shatter of cut glass sky — grey raw waves of rain and gull; what you came back for, painted in a strain of white, after what you came back for had gone. Craven Man You come from the west, where a good part of the world ends, and the rest just drowns itself in winter. Surveying us with your voice of heath and shale Oh great clods of humanity, stroking your thatched moustache, wiping wisdom off your chin, deducing absence with great hands, you palpitate first your granite pockets, then a paper autopsy of poetry notes to find, what? A chatter of chairs, dulled spines contorted by wrought learning, some still busy with their Tippex poxing generations of boredom. Where you come from, soil sprouts heather and calls it surviving … … all these south Dublin boys have to worry about is which bank will put them out to golf. Have you seen it? Grey knit shrugs over darker grey shirts. Have you seen my watch? Watch? Other terms for stupidity include . . . The chronic incredulity on our faces, our resting, adolescent mistrust. Your watch? The watch you don’t have, because time is a word that takes care of itself. You learned that picking stones out of a field, counting them to make a day. You learned that as you brackened into age, the moss of your jacket binding life to itself, sandstone of your hair resisting retirement. And the day you aren’t here, there will be another drizzle of attention on the playing fields, more words put out to grass. Somebody, with a bit of luck, or a compass might carve a memory into his desk. Meanwhile, diminishing a ruler, you unseam one boy from nave to chops, fix his bemusement on your battlements. An English teacher most of the time, Simon Leonard writes short and micro-fiction in both English and Spanish, as well as poetry. When the desire for recognition overcomes the anxiety of not being good enough, he offers work for publication. Examples can be found in Orbis, Envoi, Ink, Sweat and Tears, What Rough Beast, Overheard and Sunthia, among others. Several of his pieces of short fiction have been shortlisted in competitions, although he has never won anything.

A man once told me that I would be single forever if I used ‘big words’ while talking to people When I unhinged my jaw to swallow him whole, He also told me that I would be prettier if I smiled more. Megan Cassiday is a wannabe poet and education student from Michigan. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Where is the River, Phantom Kangaroo, Versification, and CLOVE. You can find her on Twitter @MeganLyn_

With everyone so busy Eaten up by nothings I wish we’d take more time For one another With everyone so busy Wearing masks I wished we could remove the pretense And just be our naked selves With everyone so busy Confusing masks for people Bamboozled by nonsense Is it any wonder We feel so alone and alienated? With everyone so busy Can’t we just laugh at our own cosmic absurdity? And realize We’re all on a collective road To nowhere Sebastian Vice is the Founder of Outcast Press devoted to transgressive fiction and dirty realism. He has short fiction and poetry published in Punk Noir Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Outcast Press, Terror House Magazine, Bristol Noir, and Misery Tourism. He contributed a chapter to Red Sun Magazine's forthcoming book The Hell Bound Kids (May 1st, 2022) and writes a regular column called "Notes of A Degenerate Dreamer" over at A Thin Slice of Anxiety. His flash piece "One Last Good Day" was nominated for Best of The Net 2021. His forthcoming poetry book Homo Mortalis: Meditations on Memento Mori will drop April 4th, 2022 through Anxiety Press.

A photograph taken in Vegas, his head tilts right to meet yours, you melt into him. Leather jacket, wedding cake smiles, your adoring, jackpot fuck me eyes. It is give up now, she is not worth the exhaustion of coming up empty written a thousand times in a language I don’t want to learn. James Roach (he/him) is most creative between the hours of up-too-late and is it even worth going to bed? He dug up his midwest roots to live in Olympia, Wa., not too far from some sleepy volcanoes and beaches to write home about.

CW: violence and suicide Muted Voices Chris, the boss of ‘Wheels-to-the-Future’, a failing wheelchair sales company, organises an online conference call with his workforce. Each employee begins the session with a polite hello, then flicks off their camera, hits the mute button and carries on with their day. There’s Carl and Missy, a married couple who bicker as they scour their box spring bed and mattress for bedbugs. They try to kill them but they’re fighting an unwinnable war. The bugs have ruined their marriage. Stanley who watches cigar-shaped UFOs from his garden, calls the Home Office and warns them of an impending alien invasion. Terry who sits on a stool in his living room wearing latex from head to toe. Doing. Nothing. Then the twins, Jasmine and Florence who paint each other’s toenails while sipping fake cola. They’re so young and optimistic, maybe they’ll be fine. Davey who shoots pellets from his window at carjackers, toddlers and socialites. There’s Eleanor who smokes in bed as she composes a new surrealist manifesto about camels and perfume while recruiting an army from Craig’s list. Jessica logs off early without a goodbye. She’s going to kill herself with pills and barbiturates like all her favourite Hollywood movie stars. Terence sleepwalks to the store and back. He wakes and carefully parts his hair in the mirror then eats some cheese puffs. Tia has been gaslit by her husband, George, one too many times and is plotting to kill him with a mallet in the kitchen at dawn when he comes home reeking of booze and sweat and other women. Dan has a séance to contact his grandmother who isn’t even dead yet. Lana wants a baby so much she stuffs a pillow under her dress and takes pregnancy tests three times a day. And then the hour strikes five and Chris draws the meeting to a close, finishing his long meandering monologue. “Thank you all for your support during this pressing time for ‘Wheels-to-the-Future,’” Chris says. “I think we might have finally found a way to save the company. Any questions? Ok, same time tomorrow, have a great night.” As all the employees quickly type their goodbyes and log off, Chris feels a stark emptiness flow through his apartment, wrapping around him like a Boa constrictor. Maybe it’s because he misses the touch of a good woman (he’s been single for quite a while) or maybe he’s tired of being the boss of a mid-sized wheelchair company for ten years – it’s lonely at the top. Then he realises what the problem is. He suspects his employees are playing him for a fool. Could they be spreading malicious gossip about his Asperger’s, or his dyspraxia or how he likes to play Top Trumps with strangers’ children in downtown toyshops? Maybe they hate his overgrown facial hair and how he spits sometimes when he talks? But in the end, it’s too difficult for Chris to face the possibility of his workers’ betrayal. His business is all he has and doubting his staff would only ruin that. So, he tries to be more trusting – because everyone has their shady habits but, come on, just how irresponsible could his workers be, hidden behind their blank, muted computer screens, day in, day out? He simply can’t imagine. Hitchhiking to Oblivion A dinged Peugeot 205 - grey plastic hubcaps, duct tape covering the side window - pulled up beside Jessica, twenty years old, an athletic type, her skin salmon pink under the glare of the motorway streetlamps. “Where you headed?” said a middle-aged man in the driving seat, with a messy combover, smoking a Virginia Slim in a cigarette holder. “Seven Sisters, the beach.” “Well, that’s quite some way. But it’s doable. Jump in, I’m Terry.” She took a seat and began to text, completely oblivious to Terry’s eager stares. “What’s at the beach?” Terry said. “Huh? Oh, the sea,” Jessica said, absentmindedly. “You know, a beautiful girl like you shouldn’t be hitchhiking at night. There’s a lot of loons about.” Jessica continued to type. What could she say? She didn’t feel beautiful, her mum always told her she was a buffoon with a bulbous skull and a strange angular body. “Texting your boyfriend?” said Terry. “I don’t have a boyfriend.” “I hear that. I know what it’s like to be alone. I had a wife and kids but they died in a car crash on the way to the airport.” Terry picked up a photo of his family from the dashboard and showed it to Jessica. Bright smiles, honest eyes, a hopeful future. “That’s terrible,” said Jessica, finally prising herself away from her phone. “I’m sorry,” said Terry, “but I just don’t understand what a girl like you is doing hitching rides from strangers in the middle of the night.” “There are cameras on the trains. I’m on a secret mission.” But what she really wanted to say was, “I’ve been talking to a brilliant man, known as The Guru, a visionary who I met in a chat room and we’re going to search the sea and prove the earth is flat, once and for all.” After what seemed an eternity, they reached their destination. Jessica had been texting away nonchalantly, whereas Terry had become more and more strained. Finally, he blurted out, “Jessica, let me in, tell me who you are and what you’re doing?” “Don’t worry, one day you’ll know – everyone will. Thanks for the ride.” On the beach, as waves rhythmically crashed against the shore, a heavyset man stood in the shadows, leaning against a rowboat. Jessica trudged across the sand towards him. “Jessica?” The Guru said, stepping into the light. He wore a waterproof green shell-suit, thick prescription spectacles, and his head was shaped like a potato. “Hurry, it’s nearly time.” They climbed into the boat and began to paddle. The sea was calm and a sickle moon lit their way across the vast body of water. The Guru filmed the surrounding area with his phone and said, “The stars are perfectly aligned, Jessica. Tonight, we will prove to everyone what I’ve always known to be true.” “Mr. Guru? What’s out there?” “I believe, Jessica, we will find nothing less than ourselves.” “Wow.” They kept rowing and eventually The Guru declared, “It’s near, I sense it.” Then they heard a splashing sound and their boat began to sway. “Jessica!” said Terry, treading water below having quietly followed them all the way. “Come with me, please, this man only wants your body.” Terry tried to clamber onto the boat but he rocked it so violently that The Guru and Jessica were flung overboard and swallowed up by the sea. They grappled with each other, slapping and kicking, until they were caught in an undertow and dragged towards a mysterious reflective barrier, stretching out as far as they could see. Their bodies were catapulted up against the smooth, hard surface and images were displayed upon it like a neon-lit cinema screen. Terry saw his late wife and children floating towards him, looking grief-stricken and they reached out to touch him, smiling through their tears. Terry said, “My dear wife, my babies, I’ve missed you so much. All I’ve ever wanted is to see you one more time. I will treasure this moment forever.” Jessica was right next to Terry, experiencing her own vision. A mundane sight appeared - an image of an empty kitchen. Then a spotlight picked out a young man tottering into the room, carrying a half-empty bottle of wine. He sat at the dining table and took a swig. “Malcolm?” said Jessica. He looked up and said, “Your other boyfriends called, they want you to know they can’t stand to look at your wretched, deformed face any longer.” “There’s been no one else since you, Malcolm, you know that. I’m not a slut and I’m not ugly. I won’t be put down by you or anyone anymore.” “You and your jumped-up ideas – get real,” said Malcolm. “You’re a fool, I don’t know what I ever saw in you. You know nothing about me, this world, or anything. Don’t you realise you can’t get to me anymore? I’m free from your twisted mind games. Forever.” Then there was the Guru who was having visions of being the Son of God. But before he could truly immerse himself in visions of world domination, everything went black. The Guru, Terry and Jessica found themselves floating on the surface of the water gasping for air. A coast guard boat soon approached, and each of them processed their magical experiences silently while they were lifted aboard. As they all lay on the deck, Jessica finally said, “Did you see that?” Terry and The Guru both nodded yet refused to elaborate, compelled to keep their stories to themselves - maybe because it was too fantastical, maybe because they didn’t want to break the spell. One of the coasts guards drew a colleague aside and said, “I think...I think they saw it.” “Yeah, maybe, but don’t worry, they won’t speak. No one ever does.” So, they jetted back to dry land, their discovery hidden in the depths of the expansive ocean, their secluded dreams lost amongst the surf, never to be mentioned again.

How does being absent only make your presence more imposing? I remind myself of your boyish frame, the way your shoulder is level with mine. But somehow you’ve become a skyscraper. A shadow living in the periphery of my vision. I try to vanish my feelings of delusion, re-read a birthday message to serve as a reminder, I didn’t hallucinate our tender bond. A seminal phantom in life, you brought me first experiences of grief. In cursed adolescence, I sat in the pew and watched you falter at your mother’s funeral. I cherished you then as I cherished you at twenty-three. Stomach sick, unrequited ache. Even when we materialized romance from lifelong friendship, spent weekends together, loneliness loomed. You kept me at restless perimeter, believing I couldn’t reach you because I was unworthy, framed you on a lifelong pedestal as too cool, too smart to see me. But now I know your distance is a worn identity, one you owe more loyalty to than you could offer me. I’ve transformed since your final text, charmed my skin with more rebel ornaments. Got a haircut and a stable partner that doesn’t drift or vanish in a capricious shroud. Stopped seeking answers, I even gift understanding to the scar of you. Yet, there are tantrums of journal pages screaming your name. Your imp face greets me in meditations, haunts me in dreams. Of course it does. I fell in love with an untouchable apparition. Forced myself to swallow a lifetime of affections, now they overflow in ink. I greet your absence with these words, compose lines where we don’t break. In secrecy, and humiliation, I try to conjure your response.

Untitled II The skin across my face Is hot and dry and drawn The hairs of my beard Itch in singularity And I just can't Stop Scratching These are bad moon days When my skin doesn't fit And my fur won't fluff And I flex the muscles Which hold my body tight In hopes it will all split And fall away And shed And slough And die And be left To an abandoned corner Of the old shed The one with the moss On the old gray doors Perhaps one day Tonight or tomorrow Or one day next week My eyes will focus better And my bones Will not shiver Without cause Untitled III Strip somber sleeves and show scars of Scared and sacred sanctuary where Old ghosts drift back and fro and down Through muslin hallways hanging onto Bits of broken wax fruit that cling to Black velvet paintings like a Rembrandt Against the walls of the glassy sunshine. Pull the pile of shag through knotted up toes Green as golden brown Bermuda grass That never quite grew as well as on the Golf course just yards away from the house That we all lived in for just a couple of Sad and worrying years before fortune Found us and told us we were special. If I could do it all over again at least once more Maybe no one would write my name down In their little black books for black-balled Writers who just wanted someone to praise Stories and poems that dripped from Fingertips onto cathode ray computer screens In the wee hours when they were truly alone.

Mother takes her bath at nine and is benevolent enough to allow me to reuse her bathwater. I sat there for a long time just staring. Uncle Larry phoned about the annual softball game. Third base is fluctuating between parody and metaphor. Read the newspaper obituaries on the porch. Ninety-five percent of all thought is conjecture. Post was late again so I read the comics, that little red-haired girl is still enticingly noncommittal.