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The audience, crammed shoulder to shoulder in tight, neat, curved rows, stared upwards, mouths agape like stunned goldfish, semi-chewed popcorn clogging up the crevices between their teeth. They were captivated by the two acrobats a hundred feet in the air. They defied gravity, flinging themselves and each other around on perilously high trapezes attached by gossamer-thin wires to the roof of the big top. A safety net would break their fall if a trick were to go wrong, but collectively the crowd ignored its presence to avoid detracting from the thrill. The trapezists, Freya and Federico, were an item. A couple of years of hurling themselves at each other, wrapping their arms and legs sinuously around each other, trusting one another with each other’s bodies, had eventually led to them sharing first a kiss, then a bed. Freya had dared to believe afterwards that Federico might be the one. Now they shared a trailer, travelling from town to town together, their own little moveable hideaway among the other  circus performers. Freya leapt back to her starting pedestal and pirouetted to face back out towards the void. ‘Hup!’ shouted Federico – trapeze artist terminology for ‘go’– from across the void. She flipped herself from her pedestal to her trapeze, swung 360 degrees once, twice, three times, then used her momentum to rocket herself forwards and upwards, flying freely, serenely, oblivious to the unknowable faces that stared up at her. Then she began to fall, arms above her head, certain to plummet to the ground – until she was snatched from the air at the last moment by Federico, who dangled from his bar by his feet. The audience oohed and ahhed in appreciation. Federico winked at her from above. The only thing preventing Freya from falling was his powerful hand around her slender wrist. The protective warmth of his grip sent Freya’s mind flying back to a few days earlier, when she’d spotted Federico emerge from the trailer belonging to Leanora the lion tamer, his hand in hers, before scuttling away in the direction of the trailer the two acrobats shared. She’d confronted him later. She’d expected denials, excuses. Instead, he’d just shrugged. ‘I never promised exclusivity,’ he’d said. ‘Freya.’ Her name coming from his mouth returned her sharply to the present, just in time for Federico to blow her a kiss and say ‘See you in the trailer later’. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. Freya hated him for it, but his arrogance had always been part of the attraction, and she hated herself too for that. She shimmied up Federico’s body, trying not to enjoy the feel of his contours beneath her fingertips, hopped from his shoulders onto his trapeze, then leapt over to her own. Hup!’ yelled Freya, fists clenched and fingernails tearing into her palms. Her voice echoed loudly around the arena. ‘Hup!’ Federico knew Freya well. He knew she’d be hurt. He knew she’d be angry. So it came as no shock to him, as he double somersaulted towards her, that she adjusted her outstretched hand at the last second in just such a way that it looked to the audience as if he’d messed up and mistimed his jump – the sort of amateur error that could destroy the ego of most showfolk, particularly a proud, preening man like Federico. As he hurtled like a brick towards the safety net, Freya knew Federico would have expected something like this. Indeed, as he vanished into the distance below, she half fancied he winked at her again. Something else that can destroy someone’s ego, showfolk or not, is their partner cheating on them, and that can tip anger over the edge into revenge. Federico knew Freya well, yes, but he didn’t know just how vengeful she could be. He also didn’t know that she’d begun an affair of her own just the night before — with Roy, one of the circus’ safety technicians. Silly, sweet, stupid Roy. He’d been mad about Freya for as long as she could remember, always saying how he’d do anything for her. But Federico didn’t know that either.  And, as Federico slammed straight through the sabotaged net and onto the solid ground below, Freya reflected that now he never would. David Cook’s stories have been published in Ellipsis Zine, Janus Literary, the National Flash Fiction Anthology and many others. He’s a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He lives in Bridgend, Wales, with his wife and daughter. Say hi on Twitter @davidcook100  and Instagram @davidcook1001 .

eternity beacons   a motorcycle cracks the crowd finds silence   the dark lamp sears white through dark days, bright nights   whispering to a world indifferent to its celestial glow, cocooned in their own search for luminosity—   defeated bulbs, a coffin of glass.   Author’s note: This poem was originally published in THE ONCE FAMILIAR WAVES by ANDREW BUCKNER, in July of 2024. Andrew Buckner is a multi award-winning poet, filmmaker, and screenwriter. A noted critic, author, actor, and experimental musician, he runs and writes for the review site AWordofDreams.com .

All roads to Foulpuddle are dead ends. The sooner this dump is swallowed up by the sea, the better. So dull, even migrating birds don’t stop! The six members of Foulpuddle Parish Council listened in silence, shivering, as the contents of the Visitor Comments Box were read out. Council meetings were already salted with envy, for the Great Eel Festival at Marshwick, just up the road, was in its third triumphant year.The Fenland Gazette  had a photo gallery of rippling silvery banners, volunteers in I ♥️ EELS  T-shirts, hundreds of visitors, and a huge foam-rubber eel that shimmied through the crowds in silver-painted waders. Foulpuddle Parish Council were convinced that Jim Platt, grandstanding mayor of Marshwick, was inside the eel suit. They were bitterly aware that few festival-goers followed the road onward and eastward, through the marshes, past mudbanks and tidal inlets, to the village of Foulpuddle and the North Sea beyond. “What makes me simply livid,” said Gloria Shaw, landlady of the Jolly Eel pub, “is that by rights the Festival should be here . It was our idea, and Marshwick stole it. Jim Platt must have bugged the Council Chamber.” The Council Chamber was a one-room hall, used by the knitting group on Mondays and the carpet bowls club on Thursdays. Now in late October, the ancient heating system had failed. The Parish Council hunched over their tea and biscuits, wrapped in winter woollies and dejection. Ray Owen, the local historian, reminded them again that Foulpuddle, not Marshwick, had been home to an eel-canning works. Now ruined and lapped by the spreading salt marshes, its once-imposing structure lay at the extreme end of a silted-up canal. The Victorian entrepreneur who had built the factory and canal, back in the 1860s, had quickly realised his mistake and moved his operations inland.  The Comments Box contained more bile: The so-called ‘pub’ serves the worst food ever. The clue’s in the name. Fall in the mud here, and you’ll never get rid of the stink! Ray was furious at the insult to the village’s name since every reputable historian knew the origin of Foulpuddle  was ‘a watercourse frequented by fowl’. Gloria found the pub comment most hurtful. She said it was probably Jim Platt who wrote those things, it would be just like him. The Parish Council adjourned, agreeing on a single-item agenda for their next meeting: How To Put Foulpuddle Back on the Map. “And teach those buggers in Marshwick a lesson,” Ray said, as they left the building and plunged into the cold fen-mist. One low-tide morning in January 1989, the first clear day after a violent storm surge, Gloria Shaw was walking her dog on the old canal towpath when she noticed a row of blackened spars poking from the mud. She rang the Archaeology Department at Fenland University, who sent a carbon-dating expert to investigate. The rest, say the guidebooks, is history.  Once the remains had been identified as an unusually well-preserved Roman cargo ship, Foulpuddle was swamped with archaeologists, historians, film crews, and sightseers. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. The Jolly Eel, which had been full only once in living memory (a sighting of the rare Western Sandpiper having attracted a horde of twitchers) was booked solid for months. Gloria drafted in two chambermaids and an extra chef. She bought new bedlinen and revamped her menu, which had previously offered a choice of eel pie and chips, sausage-and-mash with onion gravy, and lasagne. Cameras recorded every step of the operation to extract the ship’s carcass from the mud. Also retrieved was its cargo of fifty-three unbroken amphorae, containing traces of fish sauce and olive oil for Caesar’s armies. A TV documentary about the salvage operation, and the ship’s removal to a purpose-built ‘Romans in Fenland’   museum, was fronted by a celebrity historian. Still more visitors were drawn to the village by her aura of suppressed passion and wild flame-red hair, like a pre-Raphaelite Boudicca - the subject, as it happened, of her PhD thesis.  Long before the crowds departed, Foulpuddle Parish Council had begun working on plans for an ‘Ides of June’ summer festival, to feature a fancy dress parade led by the Parish Council in togas, and an Imperial banquet on the village green. One day towards the end of filming, Jim Platt shyly approached the Celebrity Historian, hoping to pitch an idea for a documentary about Marshwick’s medieval past. She brushed him off politely. “I’m so sorry, but we’re on a very  tight schedule. Gloria, I just need a quick word with you please?”  The Mayor of Marshwick retreated, with slumped shoulders. Gloria Shaw thought she had never known a sweeter moment - unless it was on that evening in summer 1957 when she and Jim lay together in mud-scented cordgrass, while he whispered that they were the Romeo and Juliet of the marshlands. Patience Mackarness (she/her) lives and writes in Brittany, France. Her stories and CNF have appeared or are forthcoming in Free Flash Fiction, Citron Review, JMW, Flash Fiction Magazine, Meniscus, and elsewhere. Her published work can be found at http:\\ patiencemackarness.wordpress.com

I visited my Dad in hospital after a throat cancer haemorrhaged requiring a two-litre top-up of blood. He was alive but looked ready for mummification so thin and waxy he was. Due to his Alzheimer’s an orderly sat on watch beside him bed lowered to the floor. I said I’d take over and promptly had the bed raised, after all he was just a sick and confused child inside an 85-year-old six-foot body. If he took off down the corridor the only offence was going to be his adult diaper peeking through his flappy hospital gown. A blood transfusion of that size makes the receiver feel itchy and cold but it perked the old man up no end. Soon we chatted at eye level about my just-released third children’s novel. I told how I’d dedicated it to him and Felicity, my Mum, his first ex, explained it had the sea, a salty old seadog and a shipwreck in it. Dad replied with his usual high-octave naval commander emotion. Well, well, well so there we are ... I didn’t mind, I was happy we were chatting, we’d become close in the years his mind flailed. A man who says you look very smart  when prompted Dad you can tell me I look beautiful it’s my wedding day  – doesn’t change. Most people think Mama Cass choked on a ham sandwich, she didn’t she had a heart attack in bed, at age 32. The sandwich was found untouched on her bedside table. Her minders made up the story about the snack because she’d been performing (and partying) all weekend. Beats me why they didn’t stick to the truth. They opened her up for fat shaming with that preserved pork on buttered bread, made her sound like she lolled around in the pit like Elvis in his sad days of late-night fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Dad’s throat cancer was at the base of his tongue so deemed inoperable. But really it was a better way to go than full circle back to babyhood Alzheimer’s. We sat in silence for a while, then he announced, I’m very tired I think I’ll go now. Of course, I thought fuck a duck he’s dying this is it good bye Papa all over red rover no au revoir just adieu. I held his hand – isn’t that what you do at the bedside of a dying loved one – hold hand between hands - a prayer book sandwich. It’s okay Dad, I assured him looking around the ward for words. Where’s the perfect psalm, the perfect Christina Rossetti death bed poem when you need it. You can go, Dad, I’m here, you must be tired. His eyes shut, I squeezed his hand probably a little too tightly because he shuddered, lay completely still for a bit took a rattly breath then tried to sit up and asked, what time are my mother and father picking me up? That fresh blood was really working. Whoever it belonged to previously, I thanked them for getting along to the blood bank, laying with a catheter in their arm while they waited patiently for a cup of tea and Shrewsbury biscuits. Each donor donates approximately 500 millilitres of blood, this means four bloody good sorts gave my Dad his last week.  The next afternoon, I wheeled him down to the hospital foyer still in his blood-speckled hospital gown and grip socks. The dementia rest home carer who picked Dad up in her battered Suzuki Swift bought him a vanilla ice cream cone on the way home. She showed me a photo of him smiling with his prize, at his wake, a week later. Queenstown, New Zealand based writer, Jane Bloomfield, is the author of the Lily Max children’s novels. Her poetry and CNF are published and forthcoming in Tarot, Turbine |Kapohau, Does It Have Pockets, a fine line - NZ Poetry Society, MEMEZINE, Roi Fainéant Press, The Spinoff, Sunday Magazine and more. Find her at Jane Bloomfield: truth is stranger than fiction - janebloomfield.blogspot.com

The Bible Class our parents forced us to attend every Sunday morning was so mind-numbingly boring that Trinity and I spent our time there trying to make each other giggle while Miss Glory rattled on about sin. One day we watched a large spider dangle from her shoulder to the back of her chair then slowly wind its way up again. Despite our hands clamped on our mouths we couldn’t contain our burst of hysteria. Miss Glory glared at us and asked what on earth we thought we were playing at. We told her she had a spider on her back and that it was huge. She swiped at her back, saw the spider drop to the floor, and screamed. Trinity and I fell off our chairs, laughing. After the roasting we got from Miss Glory, we decided our best strategy was to make her like us so that we could more easily steer her away from talking about sin. She knew we were working on local history projects for school and we knew she loved telling stories about the history of our village. She always beamed when anyone asked her questions which signalled their interest in the topic. So we told her we’d been exploring the cemetery and reading the names and ages of families who were buried there. We were so intrigued by the graves, we said, especially the ones with whole families buried there after the plague. Miss Glory nodded and told us how the plague had decimated our village in the 14th century and we could see that by counting those plague-related graves in the cemetery. Now we’d got her off the topic of sin and onto the topic of tragic deaths we told her that our teacher said women accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth century had been buried in the cemetery, but when we’d looked at the gravestones we couldn’t find any that mentioned witches. Miss Glory closed her eyes. When she opened them again she said in a quivery voice it was because those poor women had been buried in the unconsecrated part of the cemetery. She explained the meaning of unconsecrated and told us nobody was allowed to go into that part of the cemetery. On the wall that closed off the unconsecrated part, she said, there was a notice that made it clear that nobody was allowed to enter. We started to ask her why, but she held her hand up and said there were good reasons and that’s all we needed to know. So naturally we kept pushing her to say more, knowing that eventually she’d give in. Sure enough, she gave an exasperated sigh and said those poor women had been drowned, hanged, or burned alive for no good reason and there was an old superstition in the village that before the women had taken their last breath, they had cursed their accusers and all their accusers’ descendants.  She paused, blinked,  swallowed, then said,  ‘One of my own Glory ancestors who lived in that period was involved in the witch trials.’   This last statement intrigued Trinity and me and we asked her where this information came from.  She hesitated then said,  ‘Stories were passed down through the generations. Most people in this village have ancestors that were involved in one way or another.’  Another pause. ‘But it’s best to stay well clear of that subject. There are plenty of other local history projects you can explore. Go to the library and ask the librarian to point you to the right books.’ Trinity and I looked at each other and wore our good-girl faces for the rest of class. Next day after school, we headed straight to the library and asked the librarian where the records of the witch trials were kept. The librarian looked at us suspiciously. ‘It’s for our school local history project,’ we said. ‘Our teacher suggested we research the witch trials.’ The librarian arched her eyebrows. ‘Really? An odd choice.’ But she climbed a ladder to a high shelf and pulled down a book. ‘It’s all in here,’ she said. Two hours later we had the information we needed. We were disappointed to find there were no names recorded for the women who were accused, but Trinity’s ancestor Ben Cartwright, and my ancestor Rupert Halliday were right there on the page as accusers, along with the names of some of our relatives and neighbours.  ‘Does this mean we’re cursed because we’re descendants of those accusers?’ whispered Trinity. I shook my head. ‘Miss Glory said that was just superstition.’ Trinity frowned. ‘She said one of her own ancestors took part in the witch trials, but there’s no Glory on this list.’ We scrutinised the list of accusers again.  ‘So maybe her ancestor wasn’t called Glory,’ I said. ‘Maybe,’ Trinity said slowly. ‘Unless her ancestor was…’ I pushed her. ‘Don’t be stupid!’ ‘Just a thought,’ complained Trinity, rubbing her arm. We left the library and ran over to the cemetery. We walked past neatly mown grass verges and graves covered with flowers until we reached the high wall at the back that separated the well-tended part from the untended part. We found the PRIVATE PROPERTY DO NOT ENTER sign, climbed over, and stumbled our way over tree roots, nettles, tangles of ivy and long grass. No grave markers anywhere. We explored the whole sad, neglected area, making up stories about the women who were buried there, imagining who they were, how they had lived, who had loved them, how they had died. We made up stories about our ancestors, Ben Cartwright and Rupert Halliday, and wondered what part they had played in sending those women to their deaths. We wondered what kind of curses the women had put on them and if those curses had really had any sort of effect on Cartwright and Halliday descendants and how we would find out, given the reluctance of people to talk about that period of history. We decided to write down everything we’d found out at the library, but also to flesh out the known facts with our imagination to make a more gripping narrative. We finally left the cemetery and got to our bus stop just in time to see the bus pulling away.  Next morning when I picked the newspaper off the floor in the hall I saw a photo on the front page. It was the bus Trinity and I should have taken home. There was a short piece below the photo describing how a truck had crashed into the bus, overturning it, after which it burst into flames killing everyone on board. I stuffed the newspaper into my schoolbag so I could show Trinity on the way to school.  I pulled the newspaper out of my bag and thrust it into Trinity’s hands. Her eyes widened when she saw the photo. Just as we stepped off the pavement she stopped walking and talking and started reading the article aloud. Len and Matt, two boys from the class above ours, elbowed us out of the way and charged across the road, whooping and yahooing. We stared in disbelief as a car barreled into them. Someone phoned an ambulance and a crowd gathered around the boys. Police arrived and ushered us on our way.  ‘Len and Matt’s ancestors were on that list,’ gasped Trinity. ‘Coincidence,’ I told her. ‘It could easily have been us lying there, if they hadn’t pushed us.’  ‘No such thing as curses. That’s what Miss Glory said.’ ‘She didn’t say it like that.’ ‘That’s what she meant.’ Every evening after school we met at Trinity’s house to work on our project. She was a talented artist so she drew pictures to illustrate our booklet. The pictures included women burning at the stake, being ducked in the village pond, and hanging from a scaffold. The final sketches were of the unconsecrated part of the cemetery with its overgrown memories of forgotten women.  When all the local history projects were handed in they were judged by three teachers and to our amazement they announced in assembly that Trinity and I had won Best Project. All the projects were displayed in the school hall and the local newspaper sent a reporter to take photographs. Our project made the front page with pictures of our illustrations. Some people in the village congratulated us on ‘exposing a tragic part of our history’, but some said we shouldn’t have ‘stirred things up’.  When we went to Bible Class the following Sunday, we saw Miss Glory sitting in her chair as usual, her head bent over her Bible. She looked up as Trinity and I walked through the door. Her face was white and her eyes red and puffy as if she’d been crying. ‘Oh girls,’ she whispered. ‘You have no idea what you have done.’ Sandra Arnold’s work includes eight books, including her most recent, Below Ground, The Bones of the Story  and Where the wind blows . Her short fiction has  received nominations for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University, Australia. www.sandraarnold.co.nz

…for I have sinned. My last confession was over a year ago. Since then I’ve committed a myriad of sins. When I drink I tend to gossip, that’s two sins right there that I blame on being Irish. A poor excuse, there’s thousands of hardworking Irishmen here in Dakota Territory who don’t gossip nor drink. I also covet other men’s wives, and frankly for no real reason at all since the local whores like my handsome face and throw me a free one every time I am down to my last cents. I also failed to read scripture regularly. Since I been locked up here I understand what a great loss that was. All I done here is read scripture. And the worst of my bad sins, when I am pushed in the corner I lie like a cat. Other times I lie even when it’s no benefit to me. Just a bad habit I can’t shake.” “Well, Mr. McCall,” said the priest, “those are venial sins, so called because they are forgivable. However, let me remind you the one at hand. Last August you shot Mr. Hickok in the back at the Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon. It is a cardinal sin, also called mortal sin; murder.” “Yes, padre, but that doesn’t count,” said McCall. “Killing in self-defense is not  a sin at all.” “How was that self defense? Hickok never threatened your life. I understand the day before he’d offered you to buy you breakfast after you lost all your money at the poker table. Then you borrowed more and you lost that too. That’s when Hickok came to you and gave you a couple of dollars.” “That part is true, but it was not about money. The reason I shot Wild Bill was because he’d murdered my brother Lew in Abilene, Kansas. I never denied killing Bill. But shooting him was revenge killing, delayed self defense. The victim cannot do it so somebody close to him, friend or family member, pulls the trigger instead. Avenging Lew’s death was delayed self defense.” Whatever, thought the priest who was annoyed he’d been summoned to the jailhouse that icy Dakota morning.  At the gallows, the clergyman, his teeth chattering and lips turning blue, asked all present to plead for mercy on the condemned man’s soul. Surveying them, McCall saw their unforgiving stoned faces but at least the hangman’s prayer seemed sincere. J. S. O’Keefe is a scientist, trilingual translator and writer. His short stories and poems have been published in AntipodeanSF, Friday Flash Fiction, Everyday Fiction, Roi Faineant, 101 Words, Spillwords, ScribesMICRO, 50WS, Medium, Paragraph Planet, Spirit Fire Review, Satire, WENSUM, Virginian-Pilot, MMM, 6S,  etc.

In Maurice Berger’s classic White Lies , part memoir, part cultural analysis, he writes about “disrupting our complacent fantasy that our racial and ethnic identities will always be manifest, simple, pure. Whiteness, like blackness is not an immaculate, concrete truth but a social construction designed to mark the boundaries of race.” (206) Berger is gone now, he died of Covid in 2020. I believe he would’ve appreciated Ben Drevlow’s Honky .  In Drevlow’s Honky  stories, creative nonfiction with a dollop of fiction, he tells of growing up in a small Wisconsin town on Lake Superior, a White, Lutheran boy in a dysfunctional family and a self-described loser, as a fan of Tupac and Tyra Banks, as someone who played basketball and revered Black college and professional players. Someone who dreamed of playing college ball himself but didn’t have the talent and wound up as a glorified ball boy for the team.  Drevlow is nothing if not self-deprecating, cloaking real sadness—especially about his older brother killing himself, and also about his unloving father—with self-derision, so that the reader wavers between sympathy and impatience. But while in Drevlow’s novel The Book of Rusty , where Rusty seems to be a stand-in for the author, the pathetic-ness of Rusty is a thick smoke for his limited and choking life, in Honky , there’s something more nuanced and rounded going on, something that demands an identification from the reader. And what a wonderfully messy identification it is. In Honky , Drevlow apologetically explores his early friendships with Black people. Well, at first, only one Black person, Boykin, because Boykin’s family is the only Black family with kids in the 150-student rural school Drevlow goes to, and the two are not really friends but sometimes friendly acquaintances. The reader switches from a relief that Drevlow found a fr-acquaintance from a family that’s different—in any way—from Drevlow’s own to a familiar horror at realizing how impossibly tough Boykin’s life was. “The whole school already knows Boykin because he’s the only black kid in the school besides his two sisters and they know how much he hates most teachers because—small town or out in the boonies—in Northernass Wisconsin they’re all racist.” (32)  In college, Drevlow’s roommate is Q, a Black basketball player, and theirs is an unequal friendship where Drevlow, unskilled with women, helps Q juggle his many girlfriends. Drevlow never stops apologizing in one way or another—directly or subtly—to the reader for exploring racial stereotypes in his writing and in his life. Some of the stories are heavy handed—Q’s condoms are too big for Drevlow’s penis—some more subtle as when he’s let off the hook for drunk driving by a White policeman in a way he knows he wouldn’t be if he were Black. Drevlow is embarrassed the contrasts are such a steady drumbeat, and unfair, and the reader feels strangely grateful to him for owning and articulating them.  As I was reading, I was reminded of watching Season 1 of Mad Men  when it first came out and feeling an intense relief that the show made mention, a lot of mention, of racism and antisemitism. I knew growing up these daily signs were constants, and know they still are—what we now call micro-aggressions, but somewhere along the way in mainstream culture they too often got painted over, yes, whitewashed. Drevlow unearths them, and his younger self even yearns for “different” friends (one of his early crushes was on a girl who was half-Native American and half-Jewish). He’s accused regularly of being a w-igger—white person aspiring to be Black. But none of it works, he’s still stuck with his White self and his awareness that he’s bad at surmounting cultural and racial differences. If anything, Drevlow’s lack of the social skills needed to cross racial lines seems to get worse when he’s an adult living in a small town in Georgia with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The second half of the book is called Southernass Georgia, and the well-crafted stories in it are a catalogue of gaffes, some of them so wince-inducing, like when Drevlow tries to give a Black man, hanging out in a park, a man he wrongly identifies as homeless, a twenty. And then later he does it again—to the same man, who again gives the twenty back. Other stories are more relatable, about white guilt, about trying for cross-racial friendship. I read this book at a gallop, grateful for its honest, deftly written stories about the daily grain of racism, and attempts to go against that grain—and even more for its articulation, especially in the Midwestern first half, of hunger in wanting to relate, to connect through different differences, partly succeeding, partly failing. Available now! HONKY - COWBOY JAMBOREE MAGAZINE & PRESS A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Maud Lavin writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She has published in BULL, Cowboy Jamboree, Reckon Review, Copihue Poetry, BRIDGE, Heimat Review, Harpy Hybrid, and Roi Fainéant, the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, Slate, and other venues. One of her books, CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE (Yale UP), was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include CLEAN NEW WORLD and PUSH COMES TO SHOVE, both MIT Press, and three anthologies. Her writing has appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Spanish as well as English. This fall Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish her chapbook SILENCES, OHIO, and, in May, From Beyond Press will publish her eco-novella MERMAIDS AND LAZY ACTIVISTS: A LAKE MICHIGAN TALE (a portion of the proceeds will go to the nonprofit FLOW: For Love of Water). She is a 4-H alumna and a Guggenheim Fellow.

When I complain about peri-menopause—weight gain, hot flashes, dark spots on my face—the doctor insists on a pregnancy test, and I laugh because I’m 46, soon to be 47, but when it comes back positive, I say, “I’ve already raised my kids.” And then I remember this same sentence came out of my mouth when Eunice returned from her freshman year of college in tears because she was pregnant and had waited too long and needed our help. And I said, “I’ve already raised my kids,” and now Eunice waits tables and Parker is two and I’m a grandmother, a grandmother with a baby on the way, and I wonder if now is payback for then. And sometimes I hear talk about girls taking emergency camping trips to Maryland or Illinois or Michigan, and I consider the possibility of an emergency vacation, but I’ve waited too long too, never imagined menopause could turn out to be a baby. And I remember how Jim and I got down on all fours with our kids, gave them horsey rides through the house, slid down the slides at the park, rode all the rollercoasters at Six Flags, and I wonder how we will do that now that our knees pop when we move and Jim groans when he pushes himself up from a chair—his back bad from years of manual labor—and we’ve been talking about moving into a townhouse now that the kids are grown so we don’t have to do yardwork. And I picture us standing at this new kid’s graduation, both of us old and gray and tired and someone will ask us if we’re here to see our grandchild, and we’ll hesitate before we say no no no. Laura Leigh Morris is the author of The Stone Catchers: A Novel (2024) and Jaws of Life: Stories (2018). She's previously published short fiction in STORY Magazine, North American Review, Redivider, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Furman University in Greenville, SC. To learn more, visit www.lauraleighmorris.com .

Mark Twain on growing old: Beats not. James B. Nicola is a returning contributor to RF.   The latest three of his eight full-length poetry collections are Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists,  and Natural Tendencies .   His poetry has appeared internationally in erbacce, Cannon’s Mouth, Recusant, Snakeskin, The South, Orbis, and Poetry Wales (UK); Innisfree and Interpreter’s House  (Ireland); Poetry Salzburg  (Austria), mgversion2>datura  (France); Gradiva  (Italy); the Istanbul Review  (Turkey); Sand and The Transnational  (Germany), in the latter of which his work appears in German translation; Harvests of the New Millennium  (India); Kathmandu Tribune  (Nepal); and Samjoko  (Korea). His eight full-length collections (2014-2023) include most recently Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists,  and Natural Tendencies . His nonfiction book Playing the Audience  won a Choice  magazine award.

Sonnet for a Real Slag One day, she’s gonna be obese, that slag. Salt and vinegar McCoy’s for breakfast — pulls at your bedsheets like she’s hoisting masts; tugging pleasures, snatching at this ragbag assortment of whatever she can blag. Telling you half-truths no matter what you ask. Exposing cream cake thighs, she walks past your office window. You joke, call her a hag . . . It’s her youth what you want of her, really, in that desperate, total way that you do. And it’s her fault, feelings you’re frightened of . . . Strength of a mother, her anger nearly bursts through the lust. Maybe you’re ready to fill up her, whole, with the shape of your love. Classy Birds Our screen name was ClassyBirds and we roosted in chatrooms. Crude wit flying out our fingertips: sleek and shocking — rude, like a plume of blue-tipped feathers. Blowjobs/wankstain/illsitonyourface. High on the power of the giggle. Teehee! Quod we. We soared on the winds of our swelling sexiness. The thick screen was a thick armour. We perched on an office chair my dad had nicked from work; told old men about our dirty knickers. They kissed our virtual arses, while our real bums — warm and pressed together — shared the heat of an intense intimacy. Fledgling flights for later, our real wings shorn, in nests we made with men false as cuckoo’s eggs. Thin screens now, in our pockets, like terrible flat runes we carry always. Unanswered text messages vibrate; our flesh, hungover soft, ripples rejection. Worms hang from our beaks, limp and wet — heavy with the weight of wanting. Eating In Today, I read a poem about eating peaches after sex. The poet luxuriated in sticky sweetness; warm, fragrant juices, on her mouth and the sheets. I’ve never eaten peaches after sex, but once I sat naked at the foot of my boyfriend’s bed, still fizzy from orgasm, and ate cold leftover curry with a spoon, straight from the takeaway tin. The container sent its metallic hum across my teeth. I upended the last of the yellow sauce into my throat as my boyfriend looked on, his face a grimace of horror and arousal. I licked my oily, spiced fingers and stepped into dirty knickers, laughing and sated. Subchorionic Hematoma There, inside my steep walled womb, an egg of blood. The nurse moved the wand with precise turns. I had lost dark clots, and concrete-coloured strings of meat — held them in a wad of tissue and tried to identify human parts: an arm the length of a fingernail; some dot of foot. My boyfriend clasped my hand — he was already crying. The nurse rotated the wand inside me and said: There’s your baby . She was no baby — she was a pulsing pearl, wedged into a far nook of me. And as the egg bled its bleed, she pulsed her pearly pulse and became my daughter. After Swimming We stand by the river eating chips; wet hair whips our faces. Knickerless. In the wind, under the plastic flume — twisting tubes of yellow/green where just now we whizzed outside ourselves. Salt burns paper cuts on our water-wrinkled fingers. Vinegar and chlorine on our tongues and the air. Cars speed by, flashing headlights in the glow of street-lamps; orange on orange. We suck vinegar off our fingers. Suck the ends of our chlorinated hair that just now underwater floated around us like soaking clouds while the hands of all these boys ran over our wet bodies. Up our legs. Their lips our lips/For once I am not only watching. Author’s Note: These are coming of age poems taken from my chapbook Plumstead Pram Pushers, which explores the intersections of class, sex, desire,  motherhood and popular culture. Katie Beswick is a writer from south east London. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a range of publications including Ink Sweat & Tears; English: Journal of the English Association; Harpy Hybrid Review, The Citron Review, Dust Poetry Magazine and Ballast among others.

When sixty thousand people from the North-West of England marched and danced to brass bands in their Sunday best on the sixteenth of August, 1819, some carrying children, others with banners bearing words like ‘Reform,’ ‘Universal suffrage,’ or ‘Equal representation,’ they had no idea. W hen someone started singing and the entire crowd joined in, out of time and out of tune, yet united in one harmonious purpose, they didn’t foresee what was to come. When they listened enraptured to John Knight of Oldham, protesting about the Corn Laws that robbed the people standing peaceably before him of the money to buy flour with which to make bread, how could they foresee amidst their disciplined roars of appreciation that terror was about to rain down on them? Picture this. You’re watching from a window near St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, England. You crane your neck. You’ve never seen so many people in one place. The women have picnic baskets and many wear white, but the men are muscular workers shod in shoes too small, with soles hanging off – those that aren’t barefoot. You, whose belly has always been full, wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night. It befalls you to read the Riot Act. You open the window as wide as you can. You do your best, but your voice doesn’t carry above the speeches, chatter, and cheers. You can almost smell the acidic alarm growing amongst the magistrates behind you, polluting the smell of homemade, hard-won bread being lovingly placed in the mouths of children in the streets below. Someone suggests calling in the Salford Yeomanry, led by Captain Hugh Birley and Major Thomas Trafford. If they arrest Henry Hunt and a few others, the crowd will likely disperse. You wait nervously, hoping the plan pays off. But the men of the Yeomanry have to be hauled from taverns. Their beer belligerence is palpable. Your hand, resting on the windowsill, begins to shake. The crowd links arms, despite hot, tired, thirsty bodies, to resist their comrades’ arrest. That’s when the Yeomanry charge, swords ready to slash and kill. Some have old scores to settle. You can hear them calling men by name as they strike. A few people storm the Quaker Meeting House. Some get in. Others flail, pinned against its walls. Then six hundred of the fifteenth Hussars arrive on horseback, brandishing clubs and sabres, led by Colonel Guy L’Estrange. As white dresses turn to red, a child falls like your discarded smock at the end of a hard day. You turn and walk from the room in deathly silence. If such a heinous crime were to be committed today, would I be as brave as the cavalry officer who tried to strike up the swords of the Yeomanry, crying ‘For shame, gentlemen: what are you about? The people cannot get away!’ Would I risk my liberty and publish the names of the dead and injured? Would I raise money for their families? Would I speak truth to power, as some brave souls did? I’m humbled when I read that John Edward Taylor set up the Manchester Guardian in response to what he had witnessed on the sixteenth of August, 1819. I am in awe of Shelley, who wrote ‘The Masque of Anarchy,’ calling on reformers to ‘Rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number.’ I applaud William Hone’s book ‘The Political House that Jack Built’, illustrated by Cruikshank. Using a nursery rhyme to get its message across, it became devilishly popular, daring its critics to make a fuss in the face of such mockery. What would I do when the government responds to ordinary folk’s desperate demonstration by passing a law like the Six Acts, severely curtailing the public’s freedom to meet and protest? My body trembles as I contemplate echoes in the UK Conservative government’s determination to clamp down on peaceful protest through the Policing Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act of 2023. We can, and must, learn from the past. There must never be another Peterloo. As I age, I’m less able to march and stand for hours listening to speeches, and still less to contemplate a night in a police cell. But as Butler remarked in 1839, the pen is mightier than the sword. And so, I write. Bonnie is a British writer whose short fictions have appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, including those by Roi Fainéant, MsLexia, Tiny Molecules, Flash Boulevard, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Press, Ad Hoc Fiction, Briefly Zine, and The Dribble Drabble Review. She shares a house in Greater Manchester, UK with an unpredictable number of family members, grows disobedient vegetables and finds inspiration when walking in the hills. She sometimes travels alarming distances to see loved ones in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Website: https://bonniemeekums.weebly.com/

I have a terrible time picking my favorite anything. What’s your favorite movie? Favorite band/singer? I have no clue. I could never pick a favorite genre of fiction or favorite type of poetry, never mind a favorite author or poet. So, Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh was a gift from the universe that fell right in my lap. This collection contains poems that range from Sapphic stanzas to a cento sourced from Virginia Woolf to abstract poems and free verse to a poem written after William Wordsworth. No need to pick a favorite. While there are so many different poetry formats in Pigeons , they all share a unique voice and use of language. It’s not flowery like the wallpaper in an old stuffy manor, but it is flowery like a hillside in the sun, covered with wildflowers, attracting bees and hummingbirds. Walsh’s language is as iridescent as the pigeons in the title.   From ‘Not Fell but Fall’:          Childhood summers I would stand waist-deep within the gentled sea as if it were my vast and rippling skirt and sunlight my chemise.   Below my feet a ballroom floor of glossy stones.   From ‘Visiting My Son, Foreign Student’: I could carry you the last time we were here. My hips still know your weight notched in my waist, your fingers at my neck light as love, your nodding head’s dense rest. Snail tracks of your saliva on my chest.          Walsh’s brilliant language imparts a natural beauty to the everyday events in these poems and heightens them to something extraordinary, a subject worthy of poetry. And what is more poem-worthy than love? Familial love, romantic love, the love of and for a loyal pet, and even the loss of a loved one.   From ‘Innocence and Mercy’: I had done so many things to make my mother cry but this was accidental. Mercy came in the form of my grandmother’s bemusement, her calm amid my mother’s mascara-flowing storm.   From “I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds.”:           I want to touch you in the mottled dawnlight mist of larkspur shadow pressed thin   Another engaging aspect of Walsh’s poetry for me is her genius wordplay. It feels like another expression of love. This time it’s a love and appreciation of language itself. From ‘If the Wound Is How the Light Enters You, How Do You Heal?’:              Remember how mar  means flaw and also the sea How ding  means dent and also a peal How rupture  is the godmother of rapture How pain  is also bread.   From ‘Things I Broke’: First marriage, on purpose. Wine glasses, canaries of a certain coal mine.   The sugar bowl my mother made in arts & crafts to get a break from me. Walsh ends the book with ‘Love Poem for Laura #4, 2009”. This tender love poem seems a perfect closing to a collection that explores and portrays so many aspects and versions of love in so many various forms of poetry. As the blurb from Margaret Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground  says, “Come for the influence of Virginia Woolf, stay for the ‘Dogs and Their Lesbians’!” She is not wrong. I’m so happy to have come, and so glad I stayed.  Candace Walsh's poetry chapbook, Iridescent Pigeons is available from Yellow Arrow Publishing: https://www.yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/iridescent-pigeons-paperback Candace Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing (fiction) from Ohio University and an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Her poetry chapbook, Iridescent Pigeons , was released by Yellow Arrow Publishing in July 2024. She will be the visiting professor of English (creative writing and literature) at Ohio University during the 2024-2025 academic year. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include Trampset, California Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD (poetry). March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages (creative nonfiction); and The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review (fiction). Her craft and pedagogical essays and book reviews have appeared in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies,Brevity, Craft Literary, descant, and Fiction Writers Review. At Ohio University, she co-edited Quarter After Eight literary journal for three years, founded and produced the QAE Reading Series, and coordinated the English department’s Visiting Writers program.