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A fool, I contemplate tomorrow’s fate. For future truth, I truly yearn to know. I think, What if? And next, I speculate, What then? Imagining: Why? and How so? By thinking through each possibility, Child’s play thereby extends my youth anew. As in: When I grow up, What will I be? Where shall I live? To Whom shall I be true? Perhaps, it is a foolish errand run As Culture pulls at me in different ways. To be responsible is not so fun. The choice is this: Remain a child who plays. I find the love of self is not mature, Which leaves adulthood more or less unsure. Stephanie Howe Sullivan is an emerging poet in the MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry Program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, where she lives. She is a retired lawyer, seeking the better part of the fine art of living in pursuit of her passions—poetry being chief among them. Follow her at stephaniehowesullivan.com, on IG & Twitter @howeloween, and on FB @Stephanie Howe Sullivan Poetry & Prose.

CW: suicide After the fire, even as the rain comes, a man will most miss what he never had. A service had cleaned his condominium regularly but the place smelled uninhabited. Not musty or moldy, but a smell made of antiseptics and long stretches unbroken by presence. He had been away in a foreign country to work amongst the derricks and drills and the tools that draw oil from sand and water. He had been gone for an eternity of only months, and when he came back to the airless condominium, he had thought to himself that it was true, once you leave home you can never go back. After an absence any place looks like a hotel room. He took a strange satisfaction in this submission to conventional wisdom, in the way that people who do the wrong thing out of a desire to conform to the right idea justify themselves. He deliberately and methodically unpacked his bags, hung up the shirts, pants, and filled the drawers with his other things. He wore the same cowboy boots he had worn when he left, the same boots that he had walked in working at those far-off places. He took the mail he had collected to a coffee shop down the street that had survived his absence. # He met her husband Tom before he had met her. Tom was a consultant to the company he worked for, a nervous man with a nervous laugh. After a team meeting the group went to a local place for pizza and beer and to watch football on TV. The beer was cold and the game ran in the background without sound, the lounge was too noisy for that. They watched and drank and talked and passed the time over red checkered tablecloths. The servers were all young women. Young women do their probationary period in the workforce in service industries. Then they are gone. They go on to better jobs, or to marriage and children, or something else, losing the uniforms and name tags to the past. Tom saw him looking at the servers and without a hint of his usual nervousness told him, “It is true that all women are beautiful, each in her own way. The secret is in feminine proportion. A woman’s soul resides lower in her body than a man’s does. If you place your hand on her belly, below her navel where it rounds a little, you can feel the place. That gentle curve matches the curve of the horizon, and other permanent things. With the cup of your hand or even with both hands you can hold her gently there and feel that curve. This is her center of gravity, and that is why she is beautiful.” It was an odd comment. The others had stopped to listen, and for a moment there was silence. “So where is a man’s center of gravity? He asked Tom. “Same place,” someone said, before Tom could say anything. They all laughed and went back to watching football. # Once at the coffee shop, he ordered the largest black coffee they would sell him and went through his mail. The caffeine eased into him. He liked mail, the speed and convenience of electronic documents were for another generation. The pace of written communication satisfied him. The letters of his own hand were printed now, deliberate lines born of the commercial literacy that comes from filling out forms and templates and logbooks. His cursive was lost to the past like the servers' name-tags. Handwriting, printing especially, is the speed of thought and not the speed of reaction, which is what electronic communication or even the telephone demands. “I heard you were back in town.” He looked up. The man was a friend from his company, an acquaintance. The best kinds of friends have less than real familiarity. They know enough to like you, but not enough to ascribe fault. “Look, we’re having a few friends over. It’s the long weekend and we are going to burn something on the barbecue and have a few beers. You’re invited, and don’t say you’re not coming. Not many people – just company people but only the good ones – no auditors.” They laughed at the shared joke. No auditors. Every tribe has some undesirables. He gave his assurance, “I will be there.” Coming back from the far-away places he had been working was a kind of immigration. He left one life, lived another, and then came back into a new one. Working abroad is a purgatory made bearable by an excess of remuneration. No one who has ever had to work away from their native land disrespects money. You only belong with those who live the same way. His friend left and he finished his coffee. He went back to the condo and into the garage to see to his car. Stored for these many months under canvas like a sculpture, the steel of the door was cool to the touch. He had not driven the car in the months that he was gone but he set about to change the oil. Who changes their own oil these days? Cars have become the province of specialists. His car was vintage, black and chrome, and hand-fitted body panels. Collectors would argue for a car like this with passion and pay a premium to possess one. It was powered by a V8 with the strength that comes from size. Classic muscle-cars are, as a matter of design, built from an esthetic where form follows only the function of power and not of more subtle considerations. Power comes from an anabolic mass of cubic inches. It was made to run hard, not to glide through the air or to save trees; being so, it is sublime. This was the manifest destiny of the oil business; to provide the raw materials to pour an animated soul – a soul of fire - into something perfectly made to receive it. In his garage with the radio on and some tools in his hands he was finally at home. The radio rock n’ rolled with songs made with six strings and black leather jackets. Rock n’ Roll is America’s gift to itself. The radio sang and the oil was changed and the car was dusted and ready to run. # Someday a man will invent a vehicle that runs on water. When this happens, other men will have to go forth and draw the water upon which it runs. # They had met at the office. She had come in to pick Tom up. Tom had complained all day about his car being in the shop and having to rely on her for transportation. “So, you are Tom’s better half?” He asked her when she came in. “Look, I’ll never remember you by your name, so I’ll call you by your initials. Don’t mind. That’s how I remember people.” He laughed when he said it. She laughed back, “Just call me J.” “J it is.” This was their inside joke. Her name did not start with J. Inside jokes are dangerous. A private joke is a trust born from a particular affection that might precede love. She was wearing a dress, navy blue, with small white dots. Her hair was blond, a blond the color of honey and cinnamon, pulled back away from her face into a short ponytail. She was so beautiful, her eyes so blue. He stood still. He forgot to shake hands with her. She noticed and smiled and took his hand. Sometimes, only sometimes, someone else knows what you are thinking. Guard yourself. Love this person or stay away. They made love only three times. Twice in his truck, his company truck, the first time parked in the rain in the back lot of a church. It was an old church with walls of quarried stone, a copper roof green with age, and stained-glass windows with images of saints. Trees screened the parking lot from most of the street and hid them from passers-by. They were alone. The saints in the windows looked into the church and away from them and for this she had laughed and said that they must be quiet, people might not see but the saints might hear. A man can say anything but shouldn’t, wives and mothers should but can’t. To speak is to confess. He fell in love in her, in complicity with silence. He held her and they kissed, kissed hard, for a long time. They did not speak again. Their breath, heavy and deliberate, fogged up the windows of the truck and they marked this mist with the palms of their hands and the tips of their fingers as they came together, like people underwater, climbing one another to breathe, then sinking beneath the water and beneath each other to embrace again. When they were done, they got out of the truck and he stood behind her and held her. The rain poured over him, as hard as her kisses, and he was her shelter. Her back was towards him and she reached up and cradled him around his neck, reaching up and back with her arms, tilting her head to the side. He breathed in deeply the scent of her hair and held her, one hand high across her collarbone and the other low, below her waist, and he felt her center of gravity in the soft swell of her belly. She broke the embrace first and then walked to her car without looking back. The last time they were together she came to him at the condominium. She did not speak. They made love without urgency, languid, silent even in the absence of the saints. She didn’t stay to sleep. In her absence he missed that. Strange, he thought, how a man misses something he has never had. He imagined her sleeping body next to him, dreaming her into the spring or fall when the outside air is cool and the windows are open to the night. There is a specific time in the morning, before sunrise but after first light, wherein the pale blue glow before dawn you can still see the brightest star. He imagined her in this light. He imagined waking to see her sleeping, sweet and dreamless, sunk into the bedding with the gravity particular to sleep. He wanted to watch forever, but he felt this without understanding, or believing, that a moment is all you get. He imagined this moment and it was his favorite memory of her, an imaginary one, the one he returned to on sleepless nights spent on foreign soil. What did she look like sleeping? He knew because he believed he knew. # He drove to the barbecue in the heat of the late afternoon. It was a hot day but he drove with the air conditioning off. He liked it that way, hot, but with the windows rolled down, only the speed of the vehicle to make a breeze. He set the wine on the passenger seat, the bottle a dark red like death with a formal white label, brilliant in the sun. He rowed through the gears with easy precision. Given a choice he would always drive a standard. Manual transmissions were built for men like him. Now it is possible to have a computer shift a transmission at a perfect moment with accuracy that cannot be matched by any human hand but there are hands that crave the feeling of the shift and there should always be automobiles built for them. When he got to the residence of his friend he parked, gliding easily between cars parked on the opposite side of the street. He took the wine and his keys across the street and up two steps at a time in the same boots he always wore . He let himself in, into an entryway floored in a laminate now popular. Shoes lined the walls of the entryway, but no boots. It was the social convention of his peers – you can wear good cowboy boots anywhere and your good boots are always welcome upon the expensive floors of the homes of your friends. Once through the hallway, he went through the kitchen and into the backyard, where the late afternoon fiesta was held. The barbecue smelled of heat and smoke. The wives of his co-workers were all seated, their children playing around them on the grass. There is a particular self-sufficiency of the wives of men who work abroad, these women who must run a household by themselves. Everything proceeds according to a plan with wives, whereas their men labored far away without plans in the same sense but with strict adherence to process. So here it was that these women sat and talked amongst themselves, interrupted only by their children and by introductions, while the men congregated around the smoke of the fire and talked of their work or of golf or of cars. He knew everyone there. “Did you bring the car?” He and his host shook hands again, right hands clasped and left arm holding the other man’s upper arm in the half-hug, half embrace that was the privilege of those who are friends more than colleagues. “You know I did. If I could only drive it one day a year, it would be a day like this”. “Let’s go have a look-see”. The two walked out, back across the street to the car. The friend had brought two cans of beer with him, the cans still hanging in the plastic webbing of the six-pack.. Condensation gleamed on the cans and they sparkled in the sun. They got to the car and he popped open the hood and lifted it up. They drank and talked of chrome and cubic inches and the oil business that sustained them all. Their beer done, so cold and good it tasted only like “more”, he brought the hood down with the hard and sharp sound of steel closing against steel. He could see back down the crescent and across to the front of the house and he could see her car parked. It was the same car that she had driven to the office to pick up Tom on the day that he had first seen her and could not touch her hand, and the same car that she had driven away from him in the rain, away from the church where the Saints had kept their faces turned. He knew it by shape and by form like he knew her by taste and by smell. He had not seen her go in. “Shitty thing, what happened with Tom.” his friend interrupted. He had leaned back on his heels, rocking in the way that men with bad backs do. “Yes.” he said, or thought, he couldn’t really hear himself speak, and he felt the saints turn their gaze upon him. He looked over at his friend and saw that the man was just stating a fact. “No note. No reason. He just did it. You know, he wasn’t part of the company, old Tom, but he helped us get work. You don’t need me to tell you that. The kids are all right I guess, but it’s a helluva thing. The wives are still close with her. They rallied around her, took her in. She and the kids are here today. These women, they have their own rules and while you and I do what we do out in nowhere-land they just kind of stick together.” His friend ran his hand over the car’s sheet metal, up and down each side, the rear quarters and the spoiler, and around the gentle perfection of the fender flares. “Have I told you how much I love your car?” # “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Did you see that?” It was all he could hear. He had been in the corner with the directional drilling supervisor discussing the travel arrangements for the next job. He would be going far away and for the first time in a long time he had not wanted to go. He heard the voice, thin and hoarse, high-pitched with fear and surprise. He had seen accidents on drilling rigs before, and he knew the tone even if he didn’t know who was shouting. He thought that there had been an accident. Slowly, slowly at first he and the supervisor walked out of the office, gingerly, looking up and around as if expecting to be hit by something out of the sky. The release of adrenaline keyed by the voice was simultaneous in the two men, and each grew cold in their shirtsleeves and the flesh of their arms tightened. Out in the office amongst the cubicles there were two groups of people. One, not so much a group but a set of individuals, had taken cover in their cubes, crouching behind chairs and partition walls. The second, the smaller group, crowded against the windows overlooking the parking lot. It was from this group that the shouts came from. “What is it!” the supervisor shouted, moving through the crowd, “What is it?” “Some fucking guy in a black rental car out there pulled up, got out with a double-barreled shotgun, walked up to the door, walked back to the car, and goddamn shot himself!” The voice, the blasphemy, the commentary and the sole witness - he wouldn’t remember who it was. He knew all these people but he would not remember who said that. All he would remember is that even at that moment he had no idea who would do something like that. Who would shoot themselves in the company parking lot, on a warm day at noon in the light of the sun? What he would remember of that second in hindsight was that in that moment he was just stupid, so stupid. He had become a stone, unable to think. He got to the window and looked down at the car with its open door and the legs sticking out. Already there was blood pooling under the car door, human blood the color of which is unique and not red or purple or anything like. Those are adjectives for decoration, not mortality. “It’s Tom,” the supervisor said, surprisingly level and calm, as if he had been confronted with the magical but had deciphered it back into the mundane. “Tom, a contractor. He helped us bid a few foreign jobs. What the hell?” Everyone went down then, everyone except for him. The air soon filled with sirens. The police interviewed everyone in the building, but other than the announcer none had seen it as it happened. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Did you see that?” The man reiterated his own amazement like an echo. When they came in, the supervisorgave a calm and flat description of the aftermath to the detective, as befits a supervisor. When it came his turn, he was not even asked so much as he was told. He listened to the detective repeat the other’s observations to which he merely nodded his assent. The supervisor asked the police what or if they had found anything. “Not so far,” the cop said. Like all cops he sounded like he wasn’t saying anything in his official capacity but by his speech he conceded the definition of the case presented him. “We got a double barrel shotgun, an apparent suicide, and one shell left over. That’s efficiency. No note yet. The family is being advised. We’ll interview them too. No one here seemed to have a beef with him, no one knows anything.” On the day he left for the faraway place he overheard someone say that Tom had billed the rental he drove to the company in his last invoice before he actually killed himself. Someone had raised the issue of declining the invoice but management stepped in and the company paid. # “Let’s go back in,” his friend said. “I’m hot and I’m thirsty.” He could not respond. He looked at the other man for a sign. He tried but could not speak again. He thought of the rain running down the windows of his company truck in the parking lot of the church. He thought of the feel of his car’s shifter in his hand and the punch in the back when the four barrels of the carburetor opened up and of the kick of the clutch changing gears on the open road. He thought of the taste of the wine he had brought and he thought of the dress, blue and white, that she had been wearing the day he met her. He could not walk across that pavement, that lake of fire, to the door. “I’m going to go now,” he said, his voice thin and weak. “I’m taking the car for a run out on the freeway.” “The hell you are,” his friend said, not understanding at all in his generous mood, all cold beer on a hot day, good company, and good food. “You’ve been gone too damn long. Put in your time with the wives and with the boys. You can wear your boots in my house; we aren’t real formal around here.” The reflection of the vehicles and the street from the plate glass windows of the house looked like the saints of the old church. Only now he was on the inside and they looked down upon him, their faces strange and their expressions impossible to decipher. His friend, a big man and strong, put an arm around him, a hand on his shoulder and walked him up to the house. Her back was to him now, her hair still the color of honey and cinnamon and still drawn back in that ponytail. She was not wearing shoes and he could see how small she was.. “Hey, look what I found half-dead on the road” his friend shouted, overfull of happiness with the alcohol, the heat, and the company. She turned to see him, her feet and arms bare and so tanned they were nearly the color of her hair. She is still beautiful, her eyes still blue. He keeps his hands at his sides. “J” he said, or rather, he thought, and then “J”, and again “J”. To speak is to confess. # He left the country three days after Tom killed himself. After the interviews with the police, he had not spoken to anyone at the company except the Supervisor, and then only to discuss the job. He got on a plane and he left. He fell asleep on the flight and woke only when they landed. He woke to the sound of thunder and watched the rivulets of water running down the windows of the plane and he thought of her, of the quiet of the church parking lot and of her driving away without looking back, and how if he ever saw her again he would not let her go without looking. How he would hold her and call her J. She will always be beautiful, her eyes always the color of the sky before sunrise. He would not sleep again until she slept beside him and he could watch over her and see the rise and fall of her breath.

'I didn't even want to come,' I moan. I walk up and down the beach, my bikini already dry, stopping to look at the burns covering my arms, my chest, and most of my legs. All this pain seems so out of place in this paradise of rice-flour sand and pristine water. And nobody here. Not a single person. We should have known. Paul is also walking, waving his mobile phone in the air. 'I'm sure there must be a better signal, somewhere,' he insists. 'It's a bay. We're surrounded by rocks. Let's just go back to the village, find a farmacia. It's not like I can't walk.' I look behind me at the staircase carved by water and wind, concealed by the Mediterranean bush. We felt so well-traveled to find this place. 'Perhaps I should pee on you,' Paul says then. Suddenly, I'm reminded of an episode of Sex and the City. Is this what a midlife crisis is about? A seven-year itch? 'Aren't we happy enough?' I ask. 'Is this why we came?' Paul looks at me, frowns. 'It's for the jellyfish burns. Urine contains ammonia.' But my question is already out there, echoing on the bay's walls, even though I say right away that it's just an urban myth – the pee. I sit and stare at the sea. I think of our first holidays, when we would have laughed off any incident. When painful was ok, as long as it wasn't deadly. When we didn't need sudden holiday breaks. When nothing required spicing up. 'I'm happy,' Paul says after a while. He carefully puts a hand on my knee – untouched by the tentacles. 'Well, sad for you, but happy.' He mimes climbing mirrors. I smile. With most Mediterranean jellyfish, the pain will go away after a while. Slawka G. Scarso has published several books on wine and works as a copywriter and translator. Her short fiction has appeared in Mslexia, Ellipsis Zine, Entropy, Firewords and others. She lives between Rome and Milan with her husband and her dog, Tessa. She tweets as @nanopausa. More of her words on www.nanopausa.com

Isolation Street A half-smoked cigarette dangles from idle fingers on a shadowed stoop returned from the empty corner bar where one watered-down drink pushed him away he stands planted a tree in concrete gazing across an asphalt plain not in defiance, just there he wants to soak in an antique, claw-footed bathtub like the ones in photographs for the steam, for the warm embrace but is afraid it may engulf him like the deep end of a swimming pool – He can’t swim. He meanders down an unlit sidewalk five blocks to the silhouetted beach to let curling ocean lips kiss his feet. This Morning’s Playlist I hear the songs that people sing, truth so true it hurts my bones. I’ve felt the dust in their mouths, and wash away that same dirt burying their dead. Truth so true it hurts my bones resonates like heartbeats I no longer hear, one of many echoes waking me in darkness. I’ve felt the dust in their mouths and had no other choice but to choke it all down like so many words I could have said, but couldn’t wash away that same dirt burying their dead with water or water turned to wine. The only miracle: hearing these truths I know I hold. Involuntary Actions Brady Riddle currently resides in Shanghai, China, where he teaches secondary English at Shanghai American School. He is also the literary editor for A Shanghai Poetry Zine. Brady has been a featured poet and presenter at writers' conferences and poetry festivals from Houston, Texas to Muscat, Oman to Beijing, China. Most recently, Brady’s work can be found in A Shanghai Poetry Zine and Alluvium in Shanghai, China; Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine in Hong Kong; Prospectus: A Literary Offering in the US; and Rat’s Ass Review in the US.

Fragments 1 The Lone Ranger approached the low makeshift stage of the automobile dealership as his audience waited for him to begin to speak--- Uncle Fud and Uncle Dud lolled together in the mud--- Stay far away from Danbury, Connecticut--- Out of control on a downward grassy slope---face first onto a hard concrete driveway--- Cow bells on the mountain--- The fresh eastern hilly countryside of Quebec---- Not a cento--- Run the bases, fill the vases full of flowers--- Slug a lug a ding dong, a pocket full of high--- Pioneers and Sons of the Pioneers--- Sons of the desert--- Aunt Louise and Sister Smith polished off a potent fifth--- The farmer lost his right arm at the elbow to an enraged boar--- Green can be an odious color--- All babies cry in the same language--- Near Venice, Florida mostly black prehistoric sharks’ teeth of various shapes and sizes wash up toward the beach in the relentlessly frothy surf--- The Alamo, from the vantage point of this height, looks quite small indeed— Run The Bases Run the bases. Fill the vases. Full of flowers. Watch the hours. Tic away. Say heh heh. Note the surplus. Turning purple. And the gurgle. Of the water. Nothing soft. Comes this way. Say heh. Single mothers. W/ their children. Want to cross here. Very grimly. They advance now. Granite faces. Of the players. Fill the bases. And the mayors. Cheat and steal. Never miss. A single meal. (The Texas “swing” song. Piano and violin. At the surprising end. Of “Places In The Heart”.) Mind your daddy. And your mama. Don’t abuse them. Or confuse them. Or misuse them. Give them honor. And amuse them. Joseph Buehler has published over one hundred poems in over 40 literary magazines in the UK, "Sentinel literary QuarterlY', Ireland, "H.C.E. Review", Australia, "Otoliths" and widely in the USA, "ArLiJo", "North Dakota Quarterly", and "The Tower Journal" among others. He lives with his wife Trish in Georgia; they are originally from the Mid-west USA.

Every day, in the window of the house with the red door, there are flowers. Flowers sitting in pride of place. Flowers spilling their petals, their colour and leaves. Falling piece by piece, day by day, onto the deep wooden sill. Every day there are flowers in that window. Flowers that call and sing to the rest of the narrow grey street outside. And each week the arrangement changes. Samantha has noticed that no two bunches are ever the same. Sometimes a round red vase holds simple daffodils; proud and golden, standing alone. Next time there is a crystal vase, crammed with the exotic; vivid orchids, crashing and clashing with blousy roses. Or a blue jug, swirling with bright pink lilies, star-shaped chrysanthemum or indigo irises waving like flags. As she walks past each Monday, making her way from two doors down, Samantha turns to the window, ready to gaze upon this week’s offering. And she wonders how the woman who lives there chooses. Does someone buy the flowers for her? Or does she select them herself to reflect her life or alter her mood? Are they delivered by the armful in a sleek white van? Or brought home from the supermarket, jammed between toilet rolls and food? Does this woman choose these blooms for love, for laughter, for sorrow? In remembrance, in celebration, in defiance or in joy? Occasionally Samantha catches sight of the woman moving within. She is tall, statuesque, with long dark hair, flowing like water past her shoulders, onto her back. As she strides from room to room her clothes move loosely around her; swatches and swathes of emerald, bronze, cerise and gold. Striking colours. Sometimes there is music, escaping from the open window. Music that is high and urgent, that pushes through the drab English air, sending something foreign and forbidden up to the grey clouds and northerly winds. And in the evenings other women come to the house. Samantha sees them park their cars and walk, laughing, up the path to the red door. Like the woman of the flowers they too are shrouded in colour. In their hands are bottles of wine and covered dishes from which spice and heat escape, pooling in the road. Then one weekend Samantha hears shouting. Shouting that turns to screaming in the black heart of the night. And the music is drowned out, by the sounds of glass smashing, the squeal of tyres and slamming doors. Followed by the thin wail of sirens and blinking blue lights that wriggle under Samantha’s thin curtains and dance on her bed. In the morning she asks her mother what happened. But her mother shrugs and clutching a mug turns away. And the silence in their kitchen is a little tighter and the air is a little more grey. On Monday the red door has gone. Nailed over and hidden under a sheet of splintered plywood. And in the window there are no flowers. Just a single cactus instead. Rachel Canwell is a writer and teacher living in Cumbria. She is currently working on a flash collection and her first novel which was shortlisted for the Retreat West Pitch to Win 2021. Her short fiction has been published in Sledgehammer Lit, Pigeon Review and The Birdseed amongst others. Website - https://bookbound.blog/writing/ Twitter - @bookbound2019

I stuff the happy yellow silken blooms into my pocket, my bunny rabbit’s favorite treat. I let them grow wild in my yard and harvest them in big batches. The sun heats my back as I collect the yellow bursts for Bunnylla Bean. He is not a young rabbit anymore. He is slow and cantankerous, picks fights with the cats all day, and I know that he is in pain, that he is dying. The dandelions bring a new bounce to his tired bounce as he rushes over to gobble them all down. He eats them all stem to blossom in one slurp, his little jaw churning the flower into mush. I wonder how it tastes for him, the bloom giving off only a slightly sweet scent. I imagine it tastes green and rich on his soft little bunny tongue. And so I gather more for him, my offering to the companion who will soon be saying goodbye. Levi Faulk has been obsessed with reading and writing for as long as he could read and write. He still believes in the power of the written word to change lives.

Christmas Eve night And the pub is not very full, Although there is a hundred percent more People than last year, When it was closed, And we were locked down Like pampered prisoners. The DJ plays the same songs As he does every weekend. And when he plays ‘Love really hurts without you,’ I feel like crying, Because it is true. There is a man in here Who looks like a garden gnome, Woolly hat pulled down, Squashing his ears, A carefully constructed beard. He grabs a kiss from a woman with large breasts, Who then staggers to the bar top heavy, Ready for more shots, That she spills down her chest. My friend Karl has walked in And it appears he has been drinking All day again. He sits alone with his eyes shut tight, Occasionally clapping along to the song, And jerks his denim clad body, Awkwardly. I don’t know if Karl and I Will see another Christmas, If we don’t quit This drinking tradition. S.Bennett is a new poet from Rotherham, England. He has poems appearing in the Spring issues of boatsagainstthecurrent and Delicate Emissions.

I let it creep up the sage-throated walls and roost While the body crawls out of the room. The kitchen walls whisper about spoiled milk and trying again. Cry about it! The body snaps, seizing a fistful of honey-nuts. Meanwhile i’m somewhere on the ceiling, picking the whites out of my eyes. Passing the thin pearlescent membrane over the acne prone face of the moon. Metalcore hums about yellowjackets and i’m fading out in a red flannel. Are people sixty percent freshwater or saltwater? Do they ebb and flow? Is the moon tugging at the seas we carry, begging for company? The body takes to the cold wave of a canvas. I quickly learn that drowning doesn’t feel like anything. Alana is a writer from South Florida. Her work has previously appeared in Little Death Lit and Hecate Magazine, notably their Winter 2021 anthology DECAY and inaugural zine FRANKENZINE. Track her down on Twitter @alanaseenah

CW: violence I spent a year wanting to kill a preacher. Inside the mother’s body, a child began to grow. I imagined medieval contraptions. Sharpened metal designed to pierce, cut, and stretch. His fingernails extracted one by one, my laughter at his screams. The baby grew quick, the mother exhausted and nauseous in those early months. I moved on to the more practical. I had no gun but my dad had a shotgun and more. A bullet in the leg would fell him. The second would keep him down. I’d stand over him. The barrel of the rifle would split open his forehead. I’d spit into the stream of blood. A sonogram surprised with the reveal of a tiny penis. The mother regained energy as her belly gained heft. There was an arrest but he was out on bail. No lawyer nearby would touch him once the name of the victimized family had been leaked. No secrets in small towns. I plotted violence. The mother was put on bed rest. Monitored. Everything was monitored. Family emotions raw. Rumors had him at Wegman’s, sitting in the minivan while his wife shopped for groceries. Murderous thoughts became attainable. He’d get out for a stretch. I’d mow him down with my car. The bumper shattering his knees, the asphalt cracking his head, my wheels crushing his sternum. Trolling the parking lot, I visualized the carnage. The last months were long but less anxious for the mother. The boy was healthy and big. I didn’t attend the trial. I was afraid. Afraid of my hands reaching for his neck, squeezing him lifeless before other hands could reach me. Waiting. Waiting for the boy, waiting for the verdict. Guilty. He was going to jail. Guilty. I imagined the sick things that might happen to a man such as him on the inside, not sure if those thoughts rendered me guilty too. The child was born. My son. Almost 10 pounds and with much less trouble coming out than hatching. A beginning. Joy. The second child was my niece. She was 12 when it started. 12. The preacher told her he loved her. Told her those things were okay. Okay in the sanctity of the church. Her childhood ended as my son’s began. My son is grown and taller than me. I have two more children at home. I watch over them and hope never to want to kill again.

I am holding this huge ring and using what feels like every bit of my brain to try and remember what roman numeral XLVII stands for, but light is bouncing off the marble mantle, off my old, framed jersey and everything is messing with my thinking and I can’t get my thoughts straight. I know that X is supposed to be ten and V is five and I is one, but L is that fift?. So ten fifty five- I came in here looking for something, and I got distracted by my Super Bowl ring. Now I’m trying to remember what I was looking for, putting myself in the frame of mind that took me from the breakfast nook to this room, but I am blanking hard. Our long snapper that year was a classics major from Davidson and he explained how roman numerals work to all of us after the celebration champagne had turned sticky and everyone told any camera that would point their way they were going to Disney World! “Evan,” my wife calls. Shit. She told me to grab something in here. It's coming back, but not quick enough. Go get the… and then the thought evaporates. “Baby?” she calls. “I’m in here,” I say. “Are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” In our house “Are You Okay?” isn’t a polite question from a wife to her husband. It’s a wellness check. Sometimes I am not fine and she has to come to my rescue. She can tell something is wrong this time, even if it is as minor as forgetting what I came in here for or not remembering how roman numerals are ordered. She is actively trying to figure out what I’m thinking about. “Did you grab your notebook?” she asks. “Not yet,” I say. I hold my ring up to her. “I got a little distracted.” She asks if I blacked out, and I tell her I just had to straighten something out. We reach an unspoken agreement to play along that everything is still okay and she walks back to the kitchen. Tori and I met in college. Even then she was my rock, helping me study for high school-level math or checking my conjugation tables when I had no idea when to use conocer. She kept me hopeful and picked me up when I wanted to quit the team. I proposed on Senior night and she cried as I picked her up and kissed her, smearing eyeblack and sweat from my face to hers. My memories of her are the things my brain fights to remember. They are put on a higher shelf than most thoughts, safe from the rising flood that has started rotting other parts of my life. I see a little green notebook on the chair next to me. I pick it up and remind myself I came to look for this. Of course! I didn’t blackout; I was just distracted. Now I hold the ring in one hand and the notebook in the other. I feel the heaviness of the ring, solid gold outweighing the small notebook. I set the ring back in its case. The overhead light is pointed to make all the little gems sparkle my name back at me like I am a king. The notebook is full of writing, mostly mine but some of Tori’s. “Love you, Ev” reads one, and “You can do anything!” is underlined on another page. A few bulleted lists: * Get up at 8 * Shower, brush teeth, shave * Go downstairs for breakfast Monday: Bacon (4) and eggs (3) Tuesday: Granola (3/4 cup) in yogurt Wednesday: Sausage biscuit Thursday: Bacon and Eggs … Sunday: No breakfast. Brunch with Tori and Abigail after Church. Abigail is a friend of Tori’s, but she sometimes comes with us to church. She comes every week if I remember right. On the other side of the page are large, capital letters written by a man who must have tried to be as convincing as possible without giving away how scared he really was: TAKE MEDS. TRUST THE DR. “Mommy,” Abigail calls down the stairs. Tori had a sorority sister named Abigail. My notebook was talking about our daughter Abigail, of course. She calls again and again, louder and tinnier each time because she is a child and that’s just what children do when they want something. I feel like I must make her stop yelling because I am developing a headache. I can’t concentrate on flipping through this little green notebook in my hands because my eyes are blurring because my head is feeling each pulse of blood my heart is sending through it, so I get angry. There is a forest fire in my brain and the acorns are pop pop popping. Now I am yelling back at my little daughter. She’s at the top of the stairs and looking down at me as I take the stairs two, maybe three, at a time. I slam my fist against the wall as I go up. Long whole notes of yells with quarter note thumps against the wall. She screams and runs to her room. My knees force me to stop moving, but they can’t stop me from trying to let the headache out through my mouth by way of screaming. Why am I so angry? It feels like everything would have been fine as long as she said “Mommy” one fewer time. I remind myself that I am a good father, a kind father, but I have to yell so she understands that I am serious about whatever I am saying. I can almost hear the picture frames rattle on the wall as I turn and let one last roar go through the whole upstairs. What am I saying? The back of my throat hurts now. “Evan, what’s going on?” Tori yells. She sees me standing at the top of the stairs and Abigail’s shut door. “What the hell did you do to her?” she asks as she blows past me and starts knocking on her door. “Abigail, baby, are you okay?” I’m not even close to the door, but I hear sobbing on the other side. “I don’t know what I-“ I am told to go downstairs and wait. I am a child again, in trouble with mom. She’s taking me out of church for being disruptive, not sitting still, or stealing from the collection basket. She goes into Abigail’s room as I take the steps one at a time now. My knees force me to be more careful and remind me that I don’t have the explosiveness once listed on my scouting report. I want to look back and see if she is okay, but I don’t. Tori comes down, and I can’t look at her. I trace the pattern in the kitchen counter with my finger to not have to look up and see her staring at me, waiting for me to start the conversation. I don’t want to see her disappointment. She doesn’t give up her silence and waits on the other side of the island, and I feel my face get hot. I was the one that threw a tantrum, not the child. “It really scares her,” Tori finally says. “When you let everything get to you.” The pendulum I was tied to now swings the other way. I burned my forest to the ground and now a river has come to sweep away all the ash. I slap my face, and it hurts like I want it to. I want the hurt to be outside instead of inside. “I don’t know what to do, baby,” I say into my hands as I feel tears in between my fingers. Tori takes a step closer, but I pick up a glass and smash it on the ground. She jumps back and puts a hand on her chest. Oh no. I’ve scared her too. I sit down, and she slowly walks over and puts two hands on my shoulders. I am a spiraling combination of angry, really angry, and soft. She puts her head on top of mine and her hair tickles my face. “Please take your pills,” she pleads. “I think they’ll help.” I hate my pills, but at that moment I don’t remember why. “I can’t take it anymore,” I say, and I’m not sure what I am talking about. The river inside me starts rising and everything is off balance. I want to lay on the floor and curl into a tight ball, but Tori is holding me up. It takes her only a moment to grab the pills from the cabinet, come back, and set them in my hand. The bottle feels full, and I try to remember how many I have taken and if they’ve ever helped. I tell her I need to go lay down, and she almost lifts me off the ground on her own. She would walk me all the way to the bed if I’d let her, but I say I can make it. I am quiet as I walk past Abigail’s room. She has a picture from a family trip to the beach taped to her door. We all look happy and sandy. It was in the downtime between Draft Day and the start of preseason camp. I was almost a different parent then-- I was too busy to get annoyed and lose my train of thought. Almost every day was mapped out where I should be and how I should do my job. I take two pills and hope they make me feel more like that parent. A word from the author: A former professional American football player fights to keep what he’s feeling under control as it gets worse.

1. “Good girl,” I say to the little dog when she pees beneath the palm tree outside my apartment building. That’s what the training video for Chihuahuas said you’re supposed to say. Good girl. And she seems pleased with herself. Good girl. And she is. A good girl. So far. 2. “Yet something doesn’t feel right about this,” I say to myself. “I feel like I’m the one being trained. Why is that?” 3. “No, wait,” I say to myself. “Don’t answer that. Stop. Just stop.” This. This makes me crazy. Thinking about this. It reminds me of what I did. How I adopted a dog. When I never planned to. When I’m not a dog person. When I never have been. Never wanted to be. I’m a cat person. And happy about it. Very. Happy. But last Saturday. It happened then. I was eating lunch in the park. And there she was. This tiny Chihuahua. Abandoned. In the park. Thin. Too thin. And tiny, tiny. I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t. I saw those people drive up, toss her out the window. I saw them drive away. But what could I do? What? So I rescued her. Adopted her. And look what happened. My life changed. Drastically. In just a week. Changed. In ways I never planned. Never wanted. Change. It’s not my friend. No. I’m not good with it. No, not at all. 4. “But, but, but,” I say to myself. “Stop. Just stop. Don’t say another word to me. Thank you.” 5. The little Chihuahua rolls over on my shoe to show me her fat belly. Good girl. And she is. And sweet. That too. I gently tug her new leash (just like the video said). She jumps to her feet. Potty break over. Time to go home. Laura Stamps loves to play with words and create experimental forms for her fiction. Author of 30 novels, novellas, and short story collections, including IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RIDE: CAT MANIA and THE WAY OUT (Alien Buddha Press). Winner of the Muses Prize. Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize nomination and 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. You’ll find her every day on Twitter (@LauraStamps16) and Facebook (Laura Stamps).