The Big Staff Interview | 2024

To celebrate our second winter in print, I wanted to step back and introduce our brilliant DIHP team. Anne, Angela, Grant, & Jody are the people who make this gratifyingly ridiculous dream of a magazine happen. While I ask a lot of their energy for DIHP, they’re also writers on their own literary trajectories and who hold a vast array of magical stories within their fascinating personalities, so I asked them ten burning questions about literature, life, and lessons learned.

To conclude, a small New Year’s gift, a 2025 playlist of our favorite road trip songs for your journeys near and far. – Cami Griep, Editor in Chief

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1. What is your favorite kind of pocket?

Anne Anthony (North Carolina, US): A pita pocket, something I discovered after moving into a tiny roach-infested shared one-bedroom apartment on MacDougal Street in NYC five flights above a falafel shop which is how I stretched my limited grocery funds—daily buying (and devouring) a pita pocket filled with crusty, spicy chickpea nuggets of deliciousness.

Angela Kubinec (South Carolina, US): Secret. I have 2 coats that are over 30 years old because they have secret pockets.

Grant Shimmin (New Zealand): One with a zip in a pair of shorts, so I can go cycling or running and not worry about my phone falling out of my pocket. My phone is where all my poems start life, in physical form.

Jody padumacchita Goch (Germany): The inside chest pocket of my Carhart Storm Rider jacket, nothing ever gets wet there so my bits of poems that are written on torn pieces of feed bags, toilet paper, tiny notepads, they never get soggy, and the ink never becomes abstract art.

2. Tell us three interesting things about yourself that you don't usually include in your bio.

Anne:

· My Hungarian paternal grandmother’s name is chiseled on a statue in Kolontár center square commemorating all the townspeople who left.

· I had a newspaper route as a child at a time when mostly boys delivered papers.

· I won first place in the diocese-wide 8th grade oratory contest reciting a speech entitled, “I am the Cross of Christ.”

Angela:

· I can squash a bug with my bare hand and not flinch or cringe.

· I’ve been able to drive a car since I was in elementary school.

· All my tattoos form a life history totem pole on my spine, and no, you can't see it.

Grant:

·  I love quizzing. I have been on the New Zealand version of the British quiz show Mastermind - I got to the semi-finals;

·  I’m a decent swimmer - I’ve done a couple of ocean swims;

·  I’m a cryer in movies - the most I’ve cried was in Shadowlands, the CS Lewis - Joy Davidman story

Jody:

·  I am terrified of moths. I blame the Moth Man myth and movie.

·  I have a deep and endearing love of tractors.

·  I love to bake but struggle to cook. I love the alchemy of baking: putting a bunch of things together to create goo and then adding heat and getting something completely different.

3. What does your dog like best about being an assistant at Does It Have Pockets?

Anne: She loves snoozing on the sofa in my office nodding off while waiting for me to ask questions or her opinion on a piece. She’s not much into poetry and sternly refuses to read anything that rhymes.

Angela: Having their pictures on the interwebs.

Grant: The fact the Zoom calls are so early for me right here in New Zealand, he gets to sleep right through them.

Jody: The amount of time I spend reading on the couch, where of course she snuggles.

4. What’s the strangest job you’ve ever held?

Anne: I was a hospitality girl (yes, you read right, ‘girl’) at the Hotel Bethlehem during my sophomore year in college. I’d deliver room service, drive guests to the airport, hold the front doors open for guests, engrave matchbooks, and set up hotel ballrooms for large meetings and conferences. After the Bethlehem Steel Corporation purchased the hotel in the late 1960s, the concept of hospitality girls was added to the hotel’s services.

Angela: I was an aerobics instructor. Constantly reflected in a wall sized mirror, with my body always under scrutiny.

Grant: I’m a bit boring on this score, most of my jobs have in some way been related to my career as a journalist. Possibly the weirdest one I did was working as a correspondent for a talk radio station in Johannesburg from the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. Because of the time difference, they would call me about 4.30 in the morning to make sure I was awake to appear on a 7pm sports show in South Africa. It was strange from the unusual circumstances, but I absolutely loved it for the 2 weeks I was doing it.

Jody: Sheep Dipping (fukkin creosote).

5. What are your current favorite literary magazines? What makes you sit up and take notice?

Anne: [Can’t answer this one with the limit of three.]

Angela: The Sun and Carve. They are still in print. I’m someone who likes the feel of a print lit journal in my hands as I read. I’m old school that way.

Grant: It’s hard to get away from mags that have published me. I’d prefer to avoid the ‘dream’ mags I aspire to be in, though obviously I’d change my choice in a heartbeat if one did. Roi Faineant - The Lazy Kings are anything but. I’ll always be grateful that they first published me. So approachable and engaging. They’re a new writer’s dream. The Hooghly Review - I have loved getting to know the staff of this Indian-based journal. They have treated my submissions and me with care and I’m grateful. Blue Bottle Journal - Editor Sean West’s response to my first, unsuccessful, submission was so kind and constructive that his advice on two of my three poems saw me improve them to the point they were accepted by two other journals within months, and his treatment of an accepted poem on my second submission was so great. I’m going to cheat here and say Epistemic Literary and Querencia Press, the journals who accepted the two poems referred to above, are extremely close to my heart too, such kind and engaging editors, and wonderful to deal with.

Jody: Does It Have Pockets...ooops, that’s cheating. The Sun: well shit it’s The Sun. Banshee: I really like a lot of the Irish and Scottish journals, there’s often something fresh about them, and serious and playful. The Chestnut Review: They seem to really want folk to keep trying.

6. If a friend only had time to read one piece published by DIHP, which piece would you assign?

Anne: Tough one. We’ve published so much excellent writing. But if you put a gun to my head (please don’t) I’d say it’d be the quirky flash story “In Praise of Angelica Valentine 1974 – 2024” by Alison Wassell.

Angela: From our first year, “Stigmata Pentaptych” by Spencer Nitkey. It is supremely pocket-y. It lives up to what we say we are.

Grant: It’s a tough choice, and even though I’m a poet first and foremost, my thoughts immediately go to “The Projectionist,” by Will Willoughby.

Jody: Pink Camellias (Longing) by K.M. Baykal or “That Night in the Ghost Town of Ashcroft” by Mary Catherine La Mar.

7. Have any of your perspectives regarding literary magazines/submissions/writers changed over your tenure at DIHP?

Anne: Working on a lit mag gives a writer a more complete perspective of the acceptance/rejection process so that I now take rejections much less personally. I’ve seen quite good stories rejected by our lit mag simply because a similar piece ran or would run in an upcoming issue. Lit Mag teams pay attention to the curation of stories and poems far more than I’d realized.

Angela: I think we organically perform best practices in reading and recommending pieces for posting. We have successfully created a high bar, using instinct and personal skills. I appreciate the effort mag staffs exert, but that was not a total surprise. Cami's personal letters make us unique. Our mix of folks have similar mindsets. I’m sure you can't find all that everywhere. So, the thing is magical.

Grant: I think I’ve realised the importance of kindness and empathy in being part of a lit mag environment. I’ve also realised that it’s not always the writers with the gold-plated bios who produce the writing that really floors me, as much as I appreciate a great track record.

Jody: Yes. I think I am a lot more calm about the whole process. I have a different appreciation of the work that goes into all sides. Sure, I had that before, but now there is a respect for the sheer care people take and the amazing words that float around waiting to be butterfly netted.

8. What do you find most surprising about working at DIHP?

Anne: I’m surprised by how widely the team can disagree on a particular piece. One person might love it while the others think it’s a pass. I’ve come to realize that we each bring our own personal history to the pieces we read and interpret aspects of a story far differently than someone whose lived a different life. What I do love is how the team offers space for discussing the merits of a piece which can sometimes convince the team as a whole to either accept or reject it. I live for those energetic discussions!!

Angela: Weekly Zoom meets. Makes for great morale. Lets us develop a true team. I've never experienced that before. Every working team in my life has had members with agendas.

Grant: How supportive, respectful, empathetic and, I’ll say it, loving the environment is, even stuck down at the a$$ end of the world, thousands of miles from my fellow staffers.

Jody: Oh geez. The Team. What an amazing, warm, kind bunch. It has completely gobsmacked me. My experience before when working in groups was ah, not so positive, but DIHP has really changed things up for me.

9. How about a favorite piece of your own writing? Or someone else’s writing that has special meaning?

Anne: I’d recently had a creative nonfiction essay, Finding the Sweet in the Bitter, published by The Phare, which covers my experience of putting together a collection of flash fiction stories dedicated to my mother shortly after her passing. Getting to know the writers and discovering their own experiences with a parent, spouse, or relative who also experienced memory changes carried me through the grief of losing my mother.

Angela: I was going to say Updike’s Archangel. “My pleasures are as specific as they are everlasting. The sliced edges of a fresh ream of laid paper, cream, stiff, rag-rich. The freckles of the closed eyelids of a woman attentive in the first white blush of morning. The ball diminishing well down the broad green throat of the first at Cape Ann. The good catch, a candy sun slatting the bleachers…”  I think it might be as close to my hope for heaven as I’ve ever read. Of course, in today’s awareness of such things, Updike seems to think all the arms in heaven are white and holy. So, it is a very true problem. Definitely a writer for his time. I always thought he could be funny. Imagine. The piece elicits an intense feeling that makes me gasp, good or bad.

Grant: It has to be the first poem I had published by DIHP, “Would I have taken your picture on my phone if you’d been stillborn in the digital age?” which speaks for itself in terms of being a poem that really gets to the bottom of who I am. It’s since been reprinted, by Midsummer Dream House, and was also the first poem I read at an open mic event.

Jody: “The Castel Hotel.” It’s from the time when AIDS first exploded into our lives. It may never get published, but it never fails to open and soften my heart after I read it.

10. What is a question you wish I had asked and how would you answer it?

Anne: Why do you volunteer hours and hours of your life to this literary magazine? I grew up in a family with six children, born fourth in line with a six-year gap between my older brother and me, and because of that I have the qualities of both oldest child and middle child—leader and mediator. From that, I experienced being a part of something larger than myself. I studied community organization in my Master of Social Work program, finding the idea of bringing people together for the common good something to value. Working on DIHP gives me the chance to give others the opportunity to have their voices heard through their words or artwork. At the end of the day, I find nothing is more satisfying.

Angela: Do you consider writing to be the most important thing you do? I would have to say it’s the most important thing I don’t do - right now. Not forever.

Grant: What is your ultimate writing ambition? To be a really accomplished poet and writer, with multiple collections published, but more importantly to be a writer who cares as much about other writers and their work as I do my own, generous with advice and genuinely, unreservedly thrilled by their success.

Jody: What skill or talent would you like to be gifted? Sing, oh how I wish I could sing and dance. To be able to make music to go with my words, oh my.

 Don’t forget our bonus playlist, below, hand selected for all your upcoming adventures. xoxo

Find this playlist on Spotify!

2024 Pocket Change Creative Nonfiction Contest

Editor’s note: For a bit more on our contest, read a note from EIC, Camille Griep, here.

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Grand Prize - Rebecca Tiger

Strandbeest

I am taken with my friend Bill’s miniature sculptures, metal and string contraptions that look like overgrown spiders with hinges in their legs, makeshift joints that allow for stilted movements. They are scattered in Bill’s, and his wife Peggy’s, garden, surprises as my admiration for their colorful flowers turn to wonder at these peculiar creations.

Teeth stained from red wine, the three of us gather around Bill’s computer to watch a video of the original Strandbeest, Dutch inventor Theo Jansen’s magical creations, which his website describes as a “a kinetic structure that lurches its way on uneven surfaces.” Jansen’s Strandbeests are enormous many-limbed wayward creatures made of PVC pipe and plastic tubing held together with zip ties.  

~

My mother opens the door wearing a flimsy nightgown that has slid down her shoulder exposing her shrunken frame. She smells like shit and piss.

“You look like my daughter, Rebecca,” she says with wonder. Her eyes are watery with a milky film.

“I am Rebecca.”

“Oh! That’s my daughter’s name too!”

My parents’ once immaculate house is filthy - unkempt piles of papers on the floor, dust coating the furniture, blood stains on the carpet, mold in the toilet.

I open the oven; there is a lump of flesh covered in maggots. The refrigerator is stuffed with rotten food, fruit reduced to a fuzz-covered liquid in dozens of plastic containers.

My mother’s car is full of yellow sticky notes written in my father’s shaky scrawl:

NO MORE BLUEBERRIES

Bananas

Vanilla ice cream

She stuffed these grocery lists under the car seat, in the glove box; the backseat is littered with crumpled instructions that she ignored as she drove but forgot where she was going. One time, the sheriff brought her home after she was gone for several hours. My father was angry. Hungry. Why didn’t she come back right away like he told her to?

~

In the video, over a dozen shivering sweater-clad spectators are standing on a windy beach, dense clouds overhead, waiting for Jansen to unveil his updated creation. Like a giant mutant spider, the beest moves its legs on the sand damp from the rain coming down in large heavy drops. As Jansen is coaxing the beest, it turns sharply to the right and, with the wind at its back, scurries into the North Sea. Jansen looks on as his creation is lost to the choppy frigid water. I can’t tell from his expression if he’s surprised, disappointed or resigned. This unruly creature is his creation, after all. Maybe he’s impressed by its rebellious nature?

~

“Is it raining out?” my mother’s lunch companion asks me. The sun is streaming into the dining room of Menorah Village Memory Care Center. My brother and I brought our mother here after my father died.

“No, it’s sunny.”

“Great! We can go outside after lunch then,” my mother says. Her face is crestfallen when I tell her that it’s too cold today.

“What season is it again?”

“Do you work here?” my mother’s companion asks. She is slowly eating from a small plastic cup; the red pills have discolored the vanilla pudding pink. I point to my mother and say, “No, I’m her daughter. I’m here to visit her.”

“Do you work here?” she asks my mother. My mother’s forehead creases, she turns to me and asks, “Do I?”

“No. You both live here. This is your apartment building. But there are a lot of other people who work here.”

“Tell it like it is, Rebecca,” my mother snaps. “It’s a hospital.”

My mother’s lunch companion looks at both of us as if she doesn’t quite believe anything.

“Is it raining out?” she asks. I shake my head and say, “No, it’s sunny. But too cold to go outside.”

~

The larger the creature, the less elegant its movements. Bill’s small Strandbeests need a bit of wind to hobble a few steps, but he expects no more of them. They are pretty to look at and you can marvel at them even when they are still.

The many arms and legs of Jansen’s large Strandbeests often go in unintended and unpredictable directions and because of this, they are prone to wander off, in unsteady loping strides. The movement is what Jansen is after, so this is not entirely a problem, but their self-destruction is a flaw in his design.

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Someone is trying to get in my mother’s room. It’s a newer resident.

“I thought this was my room,” he says. “I must be confused.”

He turns and wobbles down the hall. I watch his legs hold him shakily, as if it’s the ground underneath that can’t be trusted. He lists towards the wall, to steady the limbs that seem to be moving in different directions and at cross-purposes.

 “Who was that?” my mother asks.

“It was someone else who lives here, Mom. He was lost.”

 “Can any of us truly say we aren’t lost?”

~

I marvel at Janssen’s patience. You would think he would give up on these unwieldy creatures, leave them behind to pursue other inventions. But he persists with his quest to design a beest that will move as commanded and be lithe and adaptable. He is trying to tame something whose defiance seems to be built into its very nature.

~

I get a call from Menorah Village. My mother fell trying to get to the bathroom. She forgets that her legs no longer work, that she should use the wheelchair by her hospital bed. She has shit on herself and has her fists up, calling the health aides who get near her “bitch” and “whore.”

“What are you doing there?” I ask my mother.

“Are you crazy too, like these dummies who work here?”

“Whatever I am, I got from you!” I answer.

I pick her up. I walk her to the shower. I clean her. I dry her. I put lotion on her body.

“Don’t forget my diaper!” my mother directs.

“Ah, the cycle of life,” I answer.

We laugh.

My mother and I repeat this ritual many times over 13 months. She will fall, I will help her back into her wheelchair and clean blood and shit off her body and clothes. I will remind her that her legs don’t work. She will forget.

~

Strandbeests have gone through a dozen periods of evolution since 1990: Now, they can fly. But because their legs naturally seek sand, Jansen has designed a device that allows the granular particles to fly under the beest, helping to guide it aloft and away from the unstable surface to which it is drawn.

~

Therapeutic fibbing: telling lies to people with dementia to quell their anxiety. It gives me and my mother the illusion of control, of a future together. My mother asks how her dead husband is doing.

“He’s fine.”

“Will I live with him again?

“Maybe, once you’re stronger.”

“Can I live with you in New York?”

“I would love nothing more, Mom.”

“We’d be partners in crime!”

“We could get in a lot of trouble together.”

“Two single ladies in the city? You bet.” My mother is smiling, stirring her lukewarm coffee with a plastic fork.

I imagine taking my mother out to dinner, something she’s always loved. We walk with ease down busy streets, sit with cappuccinos in the park, watch the elegant ladies dance to Chinese music, the basketball games, the kids playing on the swings.

The next day, my mother falls again. When I come into her room, she points at me and asks a health aide: “Who is she?”

~

Jansen is trying to make his simple creation more complex and will not give up. He has designed a Strandbeest that he hopes will anchor itself to the earth if it senses an approaching storm and retreat to safer ground when threatened.

~

After my mother dies, people tell me how patient I was with her, unlike my father and brothers, who could not tolerate her dementia, who would snap at her repeated questions. I visited her almost daily. I savored her small moments of lucidity, when she could remember my name, or I could talk about the past and she had a peaceful rather than confused or frightened look.

But when I walked into room 105, I never knew what I was going to find. My mother was the most disoriented when she was waking up, prone to fall, hit her head, shit on herself, yell “HELP! POLICE!” when she didn’t recognize me. She told me once that whores had come into the lobby and lured my father away, could I go find him?

I did much of this with her final days in mind. I had heard that in the moments of terminal lucidity, as the organs shut down, people with dementia re-emerge as they were before their minds were ravaged. Dementia is, by its nature, volatile but I persisted with the few moments of clarity as reward.

My mother, heavily sedated with morphine, stares at me with wide eyes and asks what I am doing there. I tell her that we live together and she says, “Wow, wow,” and claws her frail hands at the air. She tries to get up but even small movements exhaust her. She falls back on the bed and closes her eyes for the last time.

~

“Mechanical nerves trigger reflexes that border on thought,” a website devoted to the Strandbeest explains. “Always, survival is the goal.”

Even though my mother is dead, I still puzzle over her transformation. I recently had a dream that she was dying and made her last call, to me, but I didn’t answer it. I heard her clear voice on a recording saying, “Hi Rebecca, this is your mother,” like she used to when she knew who I was, she was, who we were. In my dreams, my mother comes back to me, her mind whole; we laugh about her dementia as if it was a phase like adolescence.

I do not give up on my mother. I twist the wire of memory, hold fragments together with zip ties, re-assemble the parts, all in search of stability, a creature whose lithe and predictable movements remind me that she and I once could lurch on uneven surfaces together, only a little scathed.

~

Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at a college and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. Rebecca’s stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, JMWW, MER, Peatsmoke, Roi Faineant, Tiny Molecules, trampset and elsewhere.

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Slightly Less Grand Prize - Bella Mahaya Carter

Horse Story

In Taos, visiting a friend, I take a solo walk while beating my new handheld drum. Thump-pa-dump. Ambivalence wears a sneaky grin and pokes my side, but an inner voice tells me to ignore the ribbing. Thump-pa-dump. I want to be a woman with many stems and brilliant blooms, like the Scarlet Bugler, prolific and regal under the desert sun. But it’s April—Mom’s birthday month—and cold. My chest is frozen and my ankles wobble. As I walk, I imagine my skinny hollow calves filling with blood and sucking water from the earth—life beneath life—to support each step. Words stuck behind my tongue taste bitter as I try to outpace a mind full of judgments and expectations. What are you waiting for? Your clock is ticking!

Thump-pa-dump, thump-pa-dump, thump-pa-dump. I enter a neighborhood cemetery I’ve never seen before, keep the beat going while wandering among the dead. Roberto Martínez, Padre. Carmela Arcón, Abuelita. María Duende, Hermana, Hija, 1967–1988. Twenty-one. Her resting place is marked with what looks like a sandcastle made of sunbaked mud. Perched on top, the wings of a plastic cardinal on a stick rotate like a pinwheel in the wind. Its whipping sound startles me. I resume beating my drum. Two purple feathers, attached to the cardinal’s wings with black onyx beads, flutter and flail. 

Nearby, behind a chain-link fence, a penned horse meanders my way. I continue drumming and strolling and begin to sing folk songs from my childhood: “Donna, Donna,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “500 Miles Away from Home.”

I stop singing and walking but continue beating my drum gently as I read another tombstone: “Our baby, Esperanza, 1980-1981.” Esperanza. Hope. Expectation. Perished in her crib. The wind kicks up. I zip my jacket.

The horse whinnies me over. I walk toward it, humming Donna, Donna.

We come together at the fence, which is about five feet tall. I peer over it and into the horse’s eyes. Murky brown basins of sadness. I meet them with lyrics about a calf with a melancholy gaze and a swallow careening through the sky.

The horse watches me. Its mouth is open, upper lip curled, revealing large, yellow-brown teeth. Its ears perk up and forward. It lets out a benevolent neigh.

I sing about laughing winds and then riff and rhyme off the last “Don” of my song, crooning about not having to be alone, about speaking on the phone to the ageless, genderless God who appears in my dreams on a throne, encouraging me to roam.

The horse sighs heavily through its nose.

I slow my tempo. Soften my tone. Begin a new song about times of trouble and good old Mother Mary—and mothers everywhere—showing up when you need them most.

Over time—I cannot say how long, nor after how many songs—the horse’s head and neck droop. Its ears relax. It sits. Eventually it sprawls over the ground onto its side. A few minutes later, in the wake of my lullaby, its eyelids close. Soon, its lower lip quivers.

I sang a horse to sleep. How hard could a baby be?

Slumber swells my chest and quiets my mind. Breath dilates my vitals. When I stop drumming and humming, my body feels like the sky. My solar plexus, the sun. My legs, prisms. My guts, polished stones. I feel the earth beneath my feet and imagine how warm it must be underneath the horse’s muscled flank.

I wonder if she dreams.

~

Bella Mahaya Carter, an award-winning author of three books, believes in the power of writing to heal and transform lives. A devoted wordsmith and lifelong student of spiritual psychology, Bella facilitates online writing circles for writers, artists, healers, and seekers. She’s currently working on an intergenerational family memoir in flash.

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Honorable Mention - Ellen Notbohm

The People I Meet as Bookmarks

TO STEPHANIE, WHO DIDN’T FILL HER PROZAC PRESCRIPTION

Stephanie, I found your Prozac prescription in a library book. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A book that dares to make us think about what goes into our mouths.

Did you too face such a dilemma? Should you put that green and white capsule into your mouth? I wonder if you questioned the good it would do you, weighed against the possible ill it might inflict.

Did you find your answer when you searched “Prozac side effects” and got 17,000 hits in .33 seconds?

Nausea? Take after eating.

Insomnia? Take it in the morning.

Drowsiness. Take it at night.

Sweating? Wear loose clothes.

Headaches? Diarrhea? Drink fluids

Lowered libido? Switch medications.

Panic attacks? See your doctor.

Shaking hands, fast heartbeat. See your doctor right away.

Suicidal thoughts. See your . . .

Did you decide that the cure is worse than the disease? Holding your Rx, I sense defiance. You didn’t accidentally misplace this, did you? And you’re not depressed, are you? I picture your doc, scribbling this out, “if you want to give it a try,” a sidecar to your annual physical, while you’re thinking, Prozac for PMS? Really?

I wonder if you’re the person who put the deep dog-ear on page 23 of the book, like it’s pointing to the line, “So that’s us: processed corn, walking.”

And what made you ditch the Rx at page 148? Did your reading end there? Maybe the part about how “Artificial manures [synthetic fertilizers] lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”

Perhaps you didn’t need to read further. You’d found your answer.  Return the book, refuse the synthetic serotonin, the artificial brain chemicals. Real woman, walking.

I crush your Rx into a tight ball and toss it into the woodstove. Purification through flame.

TO SIMON, WHO IS MISSING A PAY STUB

Simon, this is to let you know that your pay stub from 6-18-2004 ended up 2,784 miles from home, sixteen years after you buried it in a copy of Irvine Welsh’s novel Glue. It made its way from you in Canada to a Thrift Books outlet in Chicago, then to me in Oregon, arriving in June 2020, to take part in my pandemic year commitment to reading foreign authors.

I’d never heard of Queen’s University or Kingston, Ontario. Did they treat you well and fairly? I examine the numbers on your pay stub. It’s not snooping; you left it in a book. Your YTD earnings in June were $4,000. Were you a new employee or should I be concerned? Current pay period, $1,500. Hmmm, not bad in 2004 dollars.

I didn’t get too far into the book. Welsh’s trademark Edinburgh dialect was too much for me. Topsy hud been oan at ays aw week; at school, then at oorwork, aboot ays no gaunt ae the Hearts game. That, and the grating repetition of the filthy-term-for-female-that-starts-with-c. I word search the book’s online preview and find I’ll be meeting up with that word at least 150 times, and that’s a big no-can-do for this kid. Yeah, I know it has a broader meaning in the British world. A fool, a blockhead, an irksome, despicable person of either sex. But here, more than one dictionary defines it as I do, “a contender for most offensive word in English.”

You too, Simon? The Thrift Books description: An apparently unread copy in perfect condition. As New. You didn’t read it either. This makes me smile. Across time and distance, we have something in common. I keep the pay stub and leave Glue in a Little Free Library to await the next reader, perhaps one who loved Trainspotting. Lang may yer lum reek!

TO LITTLE BOY LOST, SOMETIME AFTER SCHOOL PICTURE DAY

Little boy, you startled me, you in your apple red polo shirt, smiling your school-picture smile up at me when I turned the page of the forgettable library book I was reading. I dropped the book. Just a few inches to my lap, but I felt the thump.

Who would do this to a child? was my admittedly melodramatic reaction. Shut him up in a book and give him away?

Look at you, the very definition of a child in transition, your incoming permanent teeth competing with your remaining baby teeth, your ears a little rambunctious, a little large for your face. Your beaver-brown hair sporting tufts that didn’t meet up a comb before you sat down in front of the camera on picture day.  You’re not an attractive child, but you are adorable. You-er than you, as Dr Seuss says.

I try to read your expression, guess at your thoughts as you sat on that stool in front of the camera. Uh-oh, Mom forgot it was picture day. She’s gonna screech when she sees I wore the shirt with the crumpled collar. So you smile big, big enough to eclipse the shirt.

Still, I wonder who would leave such a personal thing in a book, whether they ever realized it was gone, whether it meant anything to them, whether they missed it. Your photo is “trading size,” suggesting there are many of them. Maybe you’re more than one casual bookmark.

And maybe I’m reading this all wrong. Maybe you like the idea of being a trading card, traveling around in a book and startling people like me. You imp. So be it.

I shut the book and send it back to the library, on to the next person who will, I hope, be just as glad to meet you.

~

Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. A thrumbled Does It Have Pockets alumna, her short prose and poetry appears in many literary journals, including Eclectica, Brevity, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Bookends Review, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and in anthologies in the US and abroad.

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Honorable Mention - Donna Cameron

Peace and Desist

“I don’t have the energy to fight with your mother over this baby’s name.”

Those, I imagine, were my mother’s words to my father shortly before my birth. In one hand she holds a Chesterfield cigarette, in the other, a martini, like most sophisticated pregnant ladies in the 1950s.

My father, Walter, had accepted a transfer back to his hometown of San Francisco. He and Connie had met and married in Chicago, and were waiting until their second child was born to make the move. They were hip deep in packing and goodbye parties.

In a letter to Anna, the mother-in-law she’d met only twice—a woman who thoroughly intimidated her—my mother made the chatty mistake of revealing the names they’d selected for their forthcoming child. If a boy, Scott or Brett. If a girl, Dana Lee.

Anna wasted no time writing back that the boy’s names, while not common or preferred family names, were, she supposed, acceptable.[1] But Dana Lee was not. You cannot give another girl child a boy’s name. What will I tell people? You mustn’t!

Since my sister’s birth four years earlier, Anna often reminded my parents that she detested the name they had given her. Kim. Not Kimberly, just Kim.

“It’s a boy’s name,” Grandma bemoaned, “and a foreign one.” The fact that Connie and Walter had tipped their hat to his mother by giving Kim the middle name Ann did not placate Grandma in the slightest. And now she was vehement that another grandchild not be branded with a ghastly, androgynous name.

My father was a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, and he also adored his wife. I imagine that his response to Connie’s quiet exasperation over his mother’s vehemence was, “If you want Dana Lee, we’ll go with Dana Lee. My mother will get over it.”

To which my mother—who adored him equally—likely responded, “It’s not worth angering your mother, let’s find another name we like that she can live with.”

After a moment’s thought, “How about Donna?” 

“Donna Lee?”

“No, your mother says Lee is a boy’s name.” Long and very pregnant pause. “How about Donna Jean?”

Thus, peace reigned, delivered by a name no one especially liked, but everyone was willing to accept. Peace was going to be important. Walter’s parents still resided in San Francisco and the thought of living so close to her in-laws, who wanted her to call them “Mom” and “Dad,” sparked anxiety for Connie. She had never lived anywhere but Chicago, and, growing up in a loveless foster home, had never been blessed or burdened by family.

On top of everything, her in-laws were devout Christian Scientists. Connie was aware—though her husband’s parents had yet to discover—that she already had three strikes against her, being a smoker, a drinker, and an atheist. She had taught Walter to smoke and drink; he already shared her atheism.[2] 

So, they were heading west, debauched by the big city and undoubtedly damned. “Donna Jean” was a small price to pay for harmony.

Connie didn’t entirely surrender. She tucked Dana Lee away in a pocket, to be pulled out occasionally and polished like a treasured trophy. She didn’t call me Dana Lee or misspell my name on birthday cakes, but every time we encountered someone named Dana, Mom would sigh That should have been your name, and recount the story of why it was not.

She knew better than most that names needn’t be permanent. She had shucked her own birth name, Maebelle, while still in single digits, and likely found comfort in telling herself, “Donna Jean is temporary. As soon as she’s old enough, she can change it to whatever she wishes, and I’ll tilt the scales toward Dana Lee.”

I started school aware that my name was a placeholder, a stand-in, like the substitute teachers we sometimes had. Acceptable, serviceable, but not the real deal.

For years, the name seemed off to me, like I was wearing someone else’s shoes. Donna had a breezy, blond frothiness that juddered against my self-perception. Introducing myself—gangly, plain, near-sighted—I felt I should apologize for falling short of expectations.

Despite my name ranking in the top twenty of girls’ names over the last century, I never encountered another Donna until I entered high school. Then suddenly, there were several. A slender, blond Donna played Laura in the school’s production of The Glass Menagerie. Another Donna—tall and nimble—was on the girls’ basketball team. A short, dark Donna sat two rows behind me in Spanish, and I sometimes shared a lab table in Chemistry with a skinny, bespectacled namesake. Did their mothers ever tell them they had the wrong name? The Donnas I met in high school were nothing like me, nor were they like one another. Yet each, I saw, was entirely a Donna. For my part, I was the Donna who joined the yearbook staff and participated in student protests against the Vietnam war.

The name didn’t define me, but perhaps I could define it. I began to see that it was up to me to embrace my name and shape it to who and what I would become. Slowly, I started to like Donna. And Donna started to claim me.

If my name had been my small cross to bear, Mom’s cross was her pious and imperious mother-in-law. My grandfather died within two years of our move back to the Bay Area. We lived about thirty miles from Grandma and saw her often, crossing the water to have dinner with her, or when my father was beckoned to make some home repair. At least one Friday a month, he would swing by her house on his way home from work so she could spend the weekend with us, then be dropped off again Monday morning.

Grandma had long abandoned hope of rescuing the souls of her son and daughter-in-law, but her youngest granddaughter was still ripe for the picking. While we played cards on those weekends she visited, she would talk to me about God as if He was someone she lunched with occasionally, and they both hoped I would join them.

“You do believe in God, don’t you?” she asked.

I didn’t want to disappoint her. I liked playing cards with her and suspected she sometimes let me win. Even at that early age, I understood my role in the family.

“I don’t know,” I answered. It was the best I could do. I'd stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and I likened God to the myths I’d grown too big to believe in.

“Don’t worry,” Grandma said. “One day, you’ll know. On that day, you’ll see that God loves you, and He’ll always be with you. If you love Him and believe in Him, you’ll join Him in heaven when you die.”

Had my parents heard these conversations, my father would have rolled his eyes and my mother would have sputtered and topped off the vodka in her coffee cup. They knew better than to try to dissuade Grandma from proselytizing, but they also rejected her talk of religion.[3]

My father’s death when I was eleven put a stop to these weekends. It also sparked the only vocal disagreement I ever heard between my mother and grandmother. Mom considered funerals and memorial services to be barbaric, having been traumatized, at four years old, by her mother’s open casket funeral. She was determined there be no ritual of that sort for her husband. My grandmother was appalled. Everyone has a funeral. What would people say if we didn’t? She insisted with a mule-like intractability she knew her daughter-in-law could not overcome. As with the naming incident eleven years before, Mom had not the energy to face off with her mother-in-law. Recalling her husband’s abiding efforts to avoid discord, Mom gave in to a memorial service in a non-denominational chapel, and Grandma chalked up another victory.

Did Connie resent her domineering mother-in-law, the woman who overrode two decisions that should have been hers to make? She never said so. She called Anna weekly until Grandma’s death nearly twenty years after her son’s. When she died at age 97, there was no funeral.

Totally unaware of the irony accompanying her displeasure with my name, Mom frequently reminded me that my runner-up moniker need not be permanent. “Changing your name is easy,” she’d offer. She also encouraged me, at age sixteen, to bleach my hair, going so far as to buy for me hair coloring in a light shade that no teenager ever had come by naturally. She hoped I would start my senior year of high school as a slim, popular, silvery blonde—a delusion I didn’t share.

Noses, too, my mother informed, need not be permanent. This came as a surprise—not that people got nose-jobs—but that my particular nose was anything less than perfect.

Mom saw me staring into the mirror one morning, girding myself for another day of high school. “Don’t worry,” she assured, “if your nose gets any bigger, we can have it fixed.”

I liked my nose. It was long and straight, and didn’t curl up on the end as so many cheerleader noses did. It fit me. It was a Donna nose. Evidently, my mother would have preferred a Dana Lee nose.[4]

Perhaps I was obstinate, or just lazy, but more likely, content. I never changed my name, bleached my hair, or resculpted my nose. Would I be the same person I am today if I had, or if my mother had had her way all those years before?

Dana Lee, I think, would have been sprightly and athletic, perhaps a cheerleader. Donna was none of these and never wanted to be. Would we have made the same friends, taken the same career paths, married the same man? There is little value in speculating on the difference a name makes, or a nose. Thanks to my grandmother’s narrow-minded obstinance, my mother’s capitulation and discontent, and my own determination to make my own way, I have stumbled into myself.

I’ve accepted that I am Donna and embraced my Donnaness. Perhaps not perky, nor as fun at parties, I am my father’s legacy. Donna has been my destiny, determined even before my birth: peacekeeper.  

[1] This from a woman who named her firstborn Dudley. My father, as second son, dodged a bullet.

[2] Being denied urgent medical care as a child because of your parents’ religious beliefs can do that to a person.

[3] They were not going to be lunching with God any time soon.

[4] Years later, Mom commented on the amplitude of my nose in front of my boyfriend. He immediately took issue and told her my nose was absolutely perfect and he loved it just as it was. That was the last time Mom disparaged my nose. Reader, I married him. Wouldn’t you?

~

Donna Cameron’s work touches readers worldwide in many languages. She is author of the Nautilus gold medal winner, A Year of Living Kindly, and the popular blog by the same title. Her short prose appears in many literary journals, anthologies, and other publications in the US and abroad, including The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, SugarSugarSalt, and Brevity.

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Honorable Mention - Doug Jacquier

Cooler Than Kerouac

The first car any of my friends had was a third-hand Australian-built Holden Torana. My pal, Greg, inherited that clapped-out shopping buggy from his Mum. However it served our suburban version of teen rebellion well enough, ferrying us to rock concerts and dark basement coffee shops, where it was a toss-up between the coffee and the folk singers for the level of gritty bitterness. On the weekends we would take off somewhere on a whim and leave the practicalities to fall where they may.

At that time, for us everything exotic and wild and dangerous was American or European. We were all fans of Chicago Blues, the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, and foreign movies with subtitles. It was generally thought we were weird but that suited what we imagined was our ineffable destiny.

One Saturday, Greg, Wal and I set off from Melbourne up the Hume Highway, with no plan other than to get back in time for work on Monday. Equipped with a road map and not much else, we were sure legends would follow, so we started taking detours into small towns along the way, based on their exotic names. None were remotely exotic and we spent an uncomfortable night trying to sleep in the car.

On Sunday, our scouring of the map unearthed Dora Dora (we figured that like New York, New York it had to be so good they named it twice). However, there were no Yellow Cabs; just a pub, a general store and a post office. All three were housed in the same building.

We entered the premises and were greeted by a bar of minuscule proportions. Behind the bar, a middle-aged man in a top hat, ensconced in what seemed to be a museum, kept reading his newspaper.

Hungry, I asked if he sold bread and ham for sandwiches. He said he did but he couldn’t sell them in the hotel. He stepped sideways about a yard and asked what we wanted. Having filled our order and it being a hot day and all, we decided to have a beer. ‘Three Carltons’ Greg said and the proprietor said ‘I can’t serve those in the store’. Retracing his steps, he proceeded to pull three beers in the ‘hotel’. Meanwhile, Wal had been examining a rack of dusty and faded postcards and said ‘I might send one of these to my Mum as a joke. Can I buy a stamp?’ The proprietor said ‘Sorry, it’s Sunday. Post office is closed.’

Defeated, we decided to abandon our half-baked Antipodean impersonation of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ and head for the comforts of home.

Driving back to the City in the early hours of Sunday morning we pulled into what we’d learned to call a gas station on the highway. As we were about to get back into the car, we were approached by a couple with small backpacks.

From their accents they were clearly European, around 30, he bearded and she fashionably disheveled. Being the sophisticated, insightful young men we were, we fell for their story about being abandoned by their previous free ride and their need to be in the City as soon as possible to connect with their plane home. After a brief conference, we decided to help them out.

First mistake.

So we three Musketeers (or Mouseketeers in retrospect) bundled into the front and gave them the back seat. Wal drew the short straw of endangering his masculinity astride the handbrake. As we drove through the wee hours, the first inklings of having been duped emerged in my mind. The couple claimed to be French but it was clear that they weren’t far ahead of my lame schoolboy French repertoire.

The final straw came when it became patently obvious that they were engaging in the sort of conjugation that can only be achieved by contortionists in the back seat of a Torana.

Greg had had enough. He veered off the road and ordered them out. They were still fumbling with their clothing and pleading their desperate case when we sped off into the breaking dawn. Wal had back seat privileges as compensation for his discomfort in the front. He said “Hey, they’ve left one of their bags behind.” Greg said “Anything worth going back for?” Wal rummaged through the contents and emerged with a handful of passports, all with pictures of our so-called French hitchhikers, but each with a different name.

Such was our teenage outrage at being duped (and having had to listen to a couple of strangers get their rocks off with no regard for our hormone-fueled sensitivities), we decided to become virtuous citizens and hand over this damning proof of some sort of international conspiracy to the Police.

Second mistake.

In a moment that can only be excused by lack of sleep and having seen too many cop shows, we decided this needed the attention of Police HQ in the City.

Having breasted the counter with a sense of self-importance and what we imagined was urban cool, we told the duty sergeant our tale and showed him the passports. What we had failed to take into account was our own ragged appearance. And, believe me, there is no odour stronger than that generated by three sweaty, flatulent young male smokers in a confined space.

With impressive but terrifying efficiency, a senior detective decided that we were almost certainly accomplices of these villains and, having had some sort of falling out with them over the proceeds from some nefarious activity, we were now exacting our revenge.

I will spare you our pathetic attempts to provide a rational explanation for our odyssey and our fawning pleas of innocence but ultimately it appeared the police had decided we were too dumb to be accomplices and let us go.

We drove home without speaking but I remember thinking ‘This wouldn’t have happened to Kerouac.’

 ~

Doug Jacquier writes from the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. His work has been published in Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and India. He blogs at Six Crooked Highways and is the editor of the humour site, Witcraft.

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A Conversation with Jude Higgins

I’ve followed the Bath Flash Fiction Festival online for years, and it soon became my writer’s fantasy trip. This past summer, I had the pleasure of attending for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Jude Higgins, one of the organizers, was especially welcoming and was fascinated as I learned more about her during this interview. —AA

1. I was delighted to discover your professional background as a Gestalt psychotherapist while preparing for this interview. I’d worked in the mental health field myself and believe there’s an intrinsic connection between writing and counseling. Both fields delve into the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior. Do you find you draw from from your former career as part of your writing process?

It’s a long time ago now since I retired as a therapist. About 15 years. I think I must draw from my former career to some extent, although that part of my life feels quite background now. Often, in Gestalt psychotherapy sessions, therapists devise ‘creative experiments’  with clients to increase awareness. I love the experimental nature of writing short fiction and am always willing to try out new things. Writing for me, is about connecting with others, so if my experimental writing makes that connection and delves deep into relationship issues without being too on the nose, that’s a plus. I also ran dream groups as a therapist and have over the years run ‘Dreams into Fiction’ workshops drawing on the Gestalt approach to dreams.  My fictional pamphlet, The Chemist’s House, was based on dreams about the house where I grew up.  My newly published collection, Clearly Defined Clouds, also contains several stories sparked off by dreams. And there are certainly many stories about the complexities and inconsistencies of human behaviour!

2. In a recent interview with Christopher Allen in SmokeLong Quarterly, you’d mentioned that your “favourite thing about the festival is seeing how happy people are. I love that people have made lasting friendships.”

While attending the festival this year, I definitely felt that vibe and found the experience different from other writing festivals I’ve attended in the past. What do you believe it is about the BFFF that creates this sense of joy and engagement?

I am glad you felt the vibe! There’s a large cohort of  worldwide flash fiction writers who keep contact with each other through social media and in various peer groups. The chance to meet face to face in a setting where no one asks what flash fiction is, is very compelling. I think that brings a lot to the joy and engagement during the weekend. People lead wonderful workshops too and I enjoy devising the packed programme.  My team helps everything run smoothly and I am very grateful for that support.  I do like organising large groups (part of my psychotherapy background too) and I spend quite a lot of time beforehand visualising in great details the event going really well and people having fun. The venue, which I have used since 2018 also helps. It is in such a beautiful setting with all the trees and greenery. We can’t have more than 150 there in total. This year there were 130 and that means it still feels relatively intimate and we can easily welcome newcomers and make them feel at home.

3. As a writer married to poet, John Wheway, what would a typical day look like in your household? Would you mind giving our readers a peek into your lives together?

Here’s a small peek into the writing side. We have spent years sending each other five words as a prompt to write a draft of a story or a poem first thing. Then we spend time writing that draft and share it over a (usually late) breakfast. There are times when we don’t do this but  months and months when we do. I like the way the five random words can prompt odd combinations in stories. We give each other feedback. John is very good at giving me feedback. He was an English teacher once,  is very widely read and is also a psychotherapist. Our house is stuffed with books of all sorts. We have many, many stories and poems in our archives and quite a lot have found their way into publication or have won contests.

4. Do you keep a wish list of dream journals, i.e., those you’d love to call home for your writing, yet elude you?

I would love to be published in SmokeLong. I nearly made publication when I had a story shortlisted in their micro contest in 2023. It would be nice to be published in Wigleaf too. I have had a few stories in the longlist of their yearly selections for the Wigleaf Top 50.  However, in order to be nearer to achieving this goal, I do need to submit to them regularly! I’ve submitted hardly anything to either journal.

5. If I opened a closet in your home and pulled out your favorite coat, what would I find in your pocket that would surprise me?

I have a few favourite coats and was thinking of getting rid of some recently. One which was headed for the charity store is a short fake fur coat I wear when it is really cold. This coat is famous for the time I stood at a bus stop wearing it and a small dog growled and wouldn’t walk by me because I think it thought I was a fierce strange animal. I just found a post office receipt for a book in the pocket from 6th December 2022.  Was that the last time is was really cold here in the Southwest of the UK? I also direct the small press Ad Hoc Fiction and am often down at the small rural office nearby posting books. They call me the book lady down there.

6. When did you first start writing and what do you wish you’d known then that you know now? Do you have any advice for writers just starting out?

I had written before but I began writing fiction with some energy in the1990s when I wrote short stories and won a few contests. Writing fiction was an evolving process. I wouldn’t have known then that my preference was for very short fiction, although I had read Sudden Fiction, the collection edited by James Thomas  and Robert Shapard, which was published in 1983.

When I retired from the psychotherapy work, I did the MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University. For starting out writers, I’d say just keep writing. Get a friend to send you writing prompts. Banish your  inner critic to a remote island. Come to the flash fiction festival!

7. Can you tell us more about your new flash fiction collection Clearly Defined Clouds and how you compiled it?

This collection contains many of the flash fictions I have had published in magazines and anthologies over the last 8-10 years plus some new ones.

I grouped them in various ways. For example, there are several stories from a child’s point of view arranged together. There are a few about women without children. I like writing re-visioned fairy tales and there are several of these in the book. The stories often show precarious or flawed relationships as well as the ways people come together again and many include climate change themes. Towards the end of the collection, they become more hopeful. But most are never really without hope or humour.

8. If you could change one thing about the flash fiction community, what would it be?

That all of the flash fiction writers I know on line lived in Bristol and Bath and I could visit them frequently.

9. I’d read in one of your biographical statements that you were “hooked on writing flash fiction after a workshop with Tania Hershman in 2012.” Tell us a bit more about that experience and what sold you on flash fiction.

As I mentioned earlier, I love the experimental form. Tania Hershmann writes wonderful experimental pieces and in the workshop, she showed her well-known story My Mother Was an Upright Piano published in 2009. Soon afterwards, I tried writing a piece that had odd juxtapositions in the writing and entered it in the Fish Flash Fiction Prize where I was thrilled to  receive an honourable mention. This was a great encouragement. I abandoned longer forms and became addicted.

10. Do you believe flash fiction has the same staying power as a short story?

Yes. There are many pieces that have stayed with me for years. Some people have the ability to convey a novel’s worth of emotion and a strong sense of whole lives lived, in less than 500 words. It is worth paying close attention to how they actually do this. Often, it is the  unusual subject matter. But also very strong images and metaphors, sensory details, pacing, sentence structure and finally the way they touch your heart. All the lasting stories have emotional impact.

Thank you for such an amazing interview! Our readers will love your answers which reveal so many aspects of who you are as a person and writer. We also appreciate you sharing a few of your stories from your collection below.

No Rhyme, Or Reason

Mary Bunting from next door has put her baby in the tree again. I tell my husband her man’s gone a-hunting for rabbits and someone needs to go around to get the baby down. In the end, it’s me. Mary pats me on the arm and says the cradle’s quite low down, there’s a proper framework in the tree and it rocks nicely in the breeze. Her baby loves it. I look at the tree and say the bough could break, but she tells me the tree’s sturdy and it will all be okay.

Mary’s done away with flowers in her garden. Silver bells hang from bushes and there are cockle shells all over the place, as if she just tips them out when they’ve finished their meals. While she’s seeing me off down the path, I mention that if she wants anything else to eat apart from seafood, to come around and I’ll make her a nice stew. She says it’s the wrong weather for stew, and she’s got plenty of food in, thank you.

Mary has always been contrary. She used to come around and sit with me for hours after my loss, but since her own baby came, she hardly visits at all. I stand in our garden and look over the fence at baby Bunting tucked up snugly in his cradle and cross my fingers that he won’t fall out. Then I go back inside.

My husband’s at the table, peeling onions for his pickles and his face is streaming with tears. It’s funny to see him crying. I could almost imagine they are real tears and he’s sad for baby Bunting, out in the cold, or that he’s sad for our own baby, but he’s full of Little Bo losing her sheep.

‘She doesn’t know where to find them,’ he says. ‘As if anyone could lose a sheep around here.’

I don’t tell him about the bleating I heard in his allotment yesterday because he’d have a fit if he knew the sheep had got in there and eaten his vegetables.

‘She’s had a thing with the fat guy you call Georgie Porgie,’ I say, ‘So I suppose she’s been distracted.’ I wonder why anyone in their right mind would let Georgie’s slobbery lips wander all over them. Last week, when I saw the way Bo had put on weight, I thought, soon enough, looking after sheep would be the least of her worries. The onions my husband’s peeling make me cry now. ‘Do you really think the Bunting baby’s going to be okay?’ I say.

He wipes his eyes and then mine with one of the posh paper napkins I bought for the street party I was going to organise to cheer everyone up. Such pretty ones, printed with little maids all in a row. I try not to mind that he uses them up like an ordinary kitchen roll. It would have been lovely to have a party for the local children but none of the neighbours seemed very keen.

‘Don’t worry, Goosey,’ he says and strokes my hair. I want to cry properly when he uses his favourite pet name for me. I pick up one of the pretty napkins and press it over my mouth so he won’t see my lips trembling. Soon after our baby died, he kept finding me sleep-walking. Once, I tried to grab his leg and throw him down the stairs. In my sleep, he said I told him it was because he wouldn’t say his prayers that we lost our little boy. He was very upset about that. He reminded me the doctor said it was no one’s fault.

‘We could have the Muffet girl and the Horner boy over today,’ I say. ‘I could make lemon curd sandwiches and something lovely with all our leftover plums.’

But my husband says their parents don’t like them coming over here, they need to be in their own homes. He sits me down and makes me label the pickle jars. Yesterday he made me polish the silverware. The doctor said repetitive tasks would be helpful and would stop everything being mixed up in my head. And it is soothing for a while, sitting down with my husband, us doing things together. But our cupboards are full of what he’s preserved and I wonder why he wants to store everything away.

Outside, the wind is getting up. I hope Mary takes the baby in.

Note: No Rhyme or Reason was originally published in Fictive Dream and nominated for Best Small Fictions includes several nursery rhymes.

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It Comes To Something When You Want To See Roadkill

They’d been talking about hedgehogs, the way they hadn’t seen any for years. And, she said, not even squashed on the road — it comes to something when you want to see roadkill. There were badgers dead on the verges, sometimes a deer, but no hedgehogs. She said she missed the nest of wasps in the wall outside the front door, the way they chased the postman down the path and bothered them at breakfast outside, dug into the apples and ruined them. He said there were fewer woodlice in the wood pile. He used to brush them off the logs so as not to watch them curl up and sizzle in the stove. She said, not too far in the future, people would long to be stung by anything, even a mosquito. They’d deliberately go to Scotland in the insect season to have clouds of midges hanging over their heads. There’d be coach trips to witness the last of this phenomenon. Tourists would show off their bites. At home, instead of Tupperware, there’d be infestation parties. Women would turn up wearing their moth-eaten cashmere like a badge of pride. They’d admire the holes and say, what, you still have moths? Where do you live? They’d long for the tickle of a moth on their necks in bed at night, to see them clustered around a naked lightbulb, long to scrape squashed moth bodies off the car windscreen. Because if they did, at least the air would be alive. They’ll even like bluebottles, he said. Want to hear the drone around the kitchen. Want to see them walking over left-out food, want to see the bluebottle maggots on the rotting animals in the fields. And what about the bees, she said, and they were silent for a while. Once last spring, she said, she rose at dawn to hear the chorus. Still loud, still that blackbird lording it over every other bird. The bumblebees were motionless on the lavender, as if they were dead. But when she put a finger on the furry back of the biggest one, it grumbled like he did if she woke him up too early. Technically, he said, bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly. Physics says their bodies are too big. She remembered the slow buzz of the bees on the comfrey last year, the lazy way they dipped in and out of the blooms. Their wings flex, he said. That’s how they do it. They don’t flap them up and down. Perhaps being flexible might save them and us in the end, she said. Maybe, he said. But they were silent again. And outside even the sparrows had stopped their chatter.

Note: It Comes to Something When You Want to See Roadkill, a climate change type story, was originally published in Ellipsis Zine.

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The Great Conjunction

The mother went out with her spade on the night of the winter solstice, 2020, just after sunset when Jupiter and Saturn were the closest they’d been in the night sky for four hundred years. You might think she had something to bury, but it was nothing like that. She wanted to dig a hole for a new tree. And then in the daytime she would plant an oak in a place where in four hundred more years one of her descendants would stand under its branches and gaze towards the sky to see the two planets in conjunction again.

It was safe in her country garden at night. And she hoped she’d live another year to check the new growth of the tree and that next winter her estranged only son would return from New York and they’d gaze into the sky together, although the planets would not be aligned like this.

The son went out with his smartphone on the night of the winter solstice, 2020, just after sunset, and walked to the middle of Central Park. You might think he was making his usual secret call or that he was waiting for someone to contact him but, today, it was nothing like that. He looked up. Even with his naked eye in midst of the city, Saturn and Jupiter looked bright. He took a picture, which clearly showed Jupiter’s four brightest moons and the faint rings around Saturn. In the daytime, he might send the picture to his mother. And he’d save the photo to show the child he might never have, the child he would tell about Galileo, who, four hundred years previously, used a telescope to look at these planets and kept notes that people could still read now.

It wasn’t safe in the park on dark winter nights and he hoped he’d live another year. Perhaps he’d feel able to visit his mother, even though the planets would not be aligned like this.

For now, the mother and son silently radiate their love across the ocean. Tonight they feel as close as Jupiter and Saturn, which, in the sky, look as if there is only a pinky finger’s distance between them, although they are 600 million kilometres apart.

Note: The Great Conjunction was originally published in Twin Pies magazine.

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 Jude Higgins is a writer, writing tutor, book publisher and event organiser. She has been published widely in magazines and anthologies since 2013. Her collection, Clearly Defined Clouds, was published in July 2024 and is available from Ad Hoc Fiction and Amazon. Jude directs Flash Fiction Festivals UK, and hosts a yearly in-person weekend event in July and three online festival days, which take place in the autumn/winter. She has been running the thrice yearly bathflashfictionaward.com since 2015. You could say she is addicted to flash fiction.

Our Nominations for Best of the Net 2025

When tasked with the effort of reviewing all the pieces we’ve had the privilege to publish between July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, the intrepid DIHP team set to work sprinting down memory lane. The problem with nominating pieces for “Best” lists is that we adore each and every piece we’ve published, and picking favorites can feel unnervingly unfair. But in order to ensure we’re lifting up all the pieces we publish, participating in this annual celebration of literature is important to us, to our readers, and the literary community we serve.

Thus, we carefully worked to carefully select pieces representing the range of work we’ve published over the past year: words that stuck to the bottom of our memories, pieces exchanged in texts/calls/messages from friends and loved ones and strangers, and images that skip off the atmosphere of metaphor into something else entirely. Thanks to each and every DIHP contributor, and special congrats to these thirteen exemplary pieces and their authors.

We’re honored to send these pieces out as ambassadors of “unseamly literature.”

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Fiction

“The Projectionist”

Will Willoughby

Will’s gentle, surreal exploration of our most vulnerable state was a surprise in subject matter, tone, and poignancy.

Published in our February 2024 edition. Read the full story here.

“A Biting Clown”

Dana Hammer

Darkly funny and somberly discomfiting, this cinematic tale of clowns gone wrong found us hopeful for our own rebellious hearts.

Published in our April 2024 edition. Read the full story here.

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Creative Nonfiction

“Bones of the Shelter”

Angela Townsend

Full speed into the deep end, Angela’s love letter to life and love and friendship and animals leaves us gasping for air in the best way.

Published in our April 2024 edition. Read the full story here.

“The Beach”

Susan T. Landry

An autobiographical dichotomy of identity, teeming with imagery, sounds, scents, and lyrical poetics.

Published in our May 2024 edition. Read the full story here.

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Poetry

“Dia de los Muertos”

Amy Raasch

Brimming with the strange, orange energy of Los Angeles, this poem pushes metaphor through the absurd into the delightful, never taking its eye from the riveting center of the comedic tragedy within.

Published in our June 2024 edition. Read Amy’s poetry here.

“Metastases”

Robert Okaji

“What is a cough but an explanation?”A poem about cancer, but about infinitely more than disease. Here, a man, a man’s journey — a moment, an entire lifetime. A transformative lens with which to see.

Published in our March 2024 edition. Read Robert’s poetry here.

“Liver biopsy chronicle”

Laura Damian

A poem about a liver and a pig and a pig’s liver, all wrapped into the strange familiarity of loss, of the din of panic, and the terrible warmth of grief.

Published in our February 2024 edition. Read Laura’s poetry here.

“My Daddy Taught Me to Save Myself”

Kristie L. Williams

A deeply personal, vulnerable elegy to a father, and also a gorgeous paean to those who lovingly teach us how to live without them.

Published in our July 2023 edition. Read Kristie’s poetry here.

“Some of the Reasons”

Hardy Coleman

We were stunned and saddened to learn of Hardy Coleman’s passing in March 2024, the month after we published these poems (the second of Hardy’s DIHP appearances). Hardy had a precise, unique way of inviting the reader to the table to share the pain and joy of being alive.

Published in our February 2024 edition. Read Hardy’s poems here & here.

“An Ode to Lost Girls”

Caitlin Upshall

Holding a mirror to our societal obsession with true crime, this gorgeous, timely poem delicately teases apart the scaffolding of violence against women, past, present, & future.

Published in our June 2024 edition. Read Caitlin’s poetry here.

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Artwork

“Slipping Past the AI”

Karen Faris

Full of color and words, sound and light, this piece by Karen Faris reaches across the boundaries of story, poetry, and visual art. It is urgent and dire, hopeful and bright all at once.

Published in our December 2023 edition. View the full gallery here.

“Story Cloth Nesting”

Suzi Banks Baum

As deftly as words stitch a canvas of story, the Story Cloth project is a fresh look at the ways we record and reflect. This particular perspective takes a peek into the scale of this textured anthology.

Published in our May 2024 edition. View the full gallery here.

“Mr. Pig”

Lorette C. Luzajic

Though it was almost impossible to choose a favorite from this series of animal Tondos, the team adores this dapper, porcine ambassador of “oddities by forgotten surrealists.”

Published in our June 2024 edition. View the full gallery here.

A Conversation Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

Ever since I attended a couple of Shuly’s writing workshops, I’ve been curious about what makes this writer tick. She’s equally equipped to write poetry, memoir, and fiction which I admire greatly. But, when I discovered another Does It Have Pockets staff, Jody Goch also held her in high regard we all agreed we needed to find out more about this talented writer. —AA

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Everyone on the Does It Have Pockets team worships their dogs, it’s definitely a bond which connects us. In a 2022 blog post, you wrote, “Sometimes dogs give you what you don’t yet know you need.” I wonder if you’d expand on that intriguing concept.

I have a belief that life brings us what we need—sometimes it is wonderful, and sometimes it is challenging, and sometimes it is both. It’s only as an adult I have come to really understand the complexity of all things that enter and exit our lives. When I think back on my most difficult times—or even as I am going through them—I try to discern what the lesson is. Often I resist the thing I need because I see how it will be hard, and I don’t give as much weight to the positive parts of what it brings.

What scares you? What would you do differently if you weren’t afraid?

Suffering scares me: other people’s suffering, especially, and also my own suffering, potential suffering. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to avoid potential suffering. I am working on this currently, trying to live more in the moment and not be so focused on what might happen, although, to be fair, my thinking about that has also helped me avoid many negative consequences. If I weren’t afraid, I don’t know that I would do any one thing differently, but I think how I felt would be different. I would just be at peace.

You’ve written several posts about rejections and persevering in the face of rejection. Many of our readers are writers and they’d love to hear five things you do to keep yourself motivated when faced with rejection.

For the most part, I have moved past having much emotion when my writing gets rejected. What keeps me going is:

#1 Understanding that one person’s opinion is only that—one opinion, and not a reflection of my writing as a whole. I’ve edited for magazines before, and I passed up good pieces that just needed more work, or weren’t right for the issue, or or or… There are so many reasons an editor can reject work.

Which leads me to #2: If that publication or press rejects my work, it just means it wasn’t the right one for that piece of writing, and the right one is still out there. I learned this from dating, but it took me many years to really grasp that. Once I got it, breakups became a lot easier.

#3 Long ago, I recognized and got used to rejection being part of a writer’s life—assuming a writer wants to send their work out to publications and presses. Some writers write only for themselves, and I think that is perfectly fine.

#4 I like to aim high. I send my work out to very prestigious lit mags, and so what if I get rejected? If I never try, I will surely never get my work into that place.

#5 I just don’t give up on a piece I love. I’ve had pieces get rejected over and over, and if I love that piece, I trust my gut that it will find a good home—and that has always been true. Trusting one’s gut is essential to being a writer.

At the beginning of every year on my blog, I write a post on the number of rejections and acceptances I received in the prior year. I want for people who aren’t writers to understand what this writing world is like, and my hope is that new writers will see that rejection is just part of it all, and all of it is okay. Here is my post from this year.

What is your favorite sort of pocket?

I've always liked to have pockets in my running shorts, yet I seem to have mostly shorts with teeny tiny pockets or none at all! I have dogs, so I carry poop bags, and then also keys, and sometimes my phone if I am alone. So I have finally resorted to buying a fanny pack so I can haul everything around if I run. It's been the best kind of pocket.

One of DIHP’s published writers, Eric Roe, recently started posting Instagram stories of his early writing endeavors. Here’s a story he wrote at age 11. Did you write a child? At what age did you start? Did you keep any of your early works that you’d care to share?

I started writing at a very young age. My father is a writer, and he is my greatest influence. He encouraged me early on to write if I wanted to, and I did. He used to cut up blank paper and staple the pages into little “books” for me and my sister to write in. I can’t really remember a time I didn’t write in some way because I was drawing pictures of stories before I had a good grasp of sentence structure, etc. My sister was older and more sophisticated than I was, so she wrote about castles and kings and queens while I wrote about Kmart and characters with names like Joe.

In different blog post you write, “…and if a writer can make a person feel deeply, they have accomplished a big thing.”  Are there specific strategies or techniques you use in your writing process to ensure the writing connects deeply with the reader?

I had a professor once say that every good piece of writing has some truth to it. She was a fiction writer, and she was not advocating that we write memoir. She was saying that she thought the best work started with some truth from your life. Almost all of my work has some truth—and I strongly emphasize “some” truth because sometimes it really is just a kernel—for example, some of my stories are set in a place I know, but the characters are all completely fiction, or sometimes a poem will have an emotion that is true, but the rest is all made up. (People always assume all my poems are true, and that just isn’t the case.) I think when you write from a place that has some essence of truth, the work shines brighter and connects more deeply with the reader. Also, I try to never tell the reader what to feel.

I’m a big fan of your doodles and wonder if you’ve always doodled. Is doodling a form of meditation for you? Or maybe, it’s a way to shift your writing brain to your artist brain and back again.

That is so very kind of you to say. For most of my life, I said I could not draw anything more than a stick figure. This goes to show how we can hold ourselves back because of what we think we are not capable of. In 2020 I took a class called “Drawing as Self-Discovery” with Mari Andrews, and for the most part, it was very simple and easy—for example, in one lesson we had to draw a pie chart. Let me assure you: if you can hold a pen, you can draw a pie chart. Her class opened me up to just trying to doodle, and this has opened up a whole new world of art and learning and fun. I LOVE painting and doodling. I make art to de-stress because when I am painting, the whole world falls away and it’s just me and this piece of paper and color. I love seeing what happens on the page (just as I do in writing!) and I also love—when the piece doesn’t turn out well—figuring out how to make it better. It’s tons of experimentation because I have no idea what I am doing. And that’s fine by me.

I also think art has helped loosen up my writing. The more I can let fall onto the page what wants to fall, the better the writing is.

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Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with markers and metallic paint, and is raising two poodles and four orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023); the flash essay collection What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said, winner of the 2022 Iron Horse Literary Review Prose Chapbook Competition; and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She has an MFA from Queens University, and her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Brevity. Learn more at shulycawood.com.

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Poem in Which I Fail to Teach My Dog How to Fetch

after Laura Passin

I throw the tennis ball. She chases it, grabs it in her mouth, sprints as far from me as possible in our fenced-in yard. She plops down beneath a Leyland cypress. The day is filled with opposites: moist mulch and dry grass, broken branch and whole-hearted effort. Here, I call. I am using the sweet voice the vet psychiatrist told me to, not the hell no one I prefer. Here, I call again. I use the hand signal, my right palm facing me, beckoning from air to flat against my chest. In my left hand, a chicken-flavored treat. My dog holds the ball in her mouth, blinks at me. Uh-oh, I say. Uh-oh is our neutralizing word, the word the trainer said to use when the dog ignores your command. You’re not supposed to keep repeating the command or else the dog learns only to respond after the third or fourth of fifth time. Or in my case: never. Here, I say, do the hand signal, offer the treat. Who wants a treat? Already I have resorted to pleading. The day is long in light, short in reply. When my husband first brought her home, when she was fourteen weeks old, I was so overwhelmed by her wildness, whimpers, ignorance of rules that I had a meltdown on our corduroy couch. One day you’ll love her, he said. How do you know, I asked. I know, he said, because I know you. He settled onto the couch beside me, held me in his arms. That saying about love being patient, I suppose it’s true. Here, I say, and the day, like any other, fills with light and shadow, weed and flower. Uh-oh, I say. Here, I say. She stares at me. You don’t always get a choice about what life brings, what it does not. She spots a squirrel, darts after it, leaves behind the ball that now no one will retrieve. There are a hundred lessons she must be trying to teach me, and I have hardly mastered one.

First published in The Sun (August 2023) and then in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems (Press 53, 2023)

Soft-Boiled Eggs on Any Morning

They say a watched pot never boils

but I’ve stood over plenty and they always do

if I wait long enough, which I was raised to do.

To get an egg to turn soft-boiled—as opposed

to hard—so the yolk can still leak

out, not having toughened yet,

you must start with eggs in cold water

and heat them over flame in a pot

gifted to you by the aunt

who never liked you, maybe even

never loved you, yet she gave you this

pot which has endured your bad marriage,

your bout with cancer, the death of your friend

who took your hands in hers and said

it’s time to dye your hair

because she promised to tell you

when the strands were too peppered, and though

you no longer dye anything

now that she is dead, you ache for her hands

and for the smooth and scarless skin

on your chest and for the way you once

believed love was enough. Now you stand

beside the stove and watch the water boil—

it always does, it always will—

and once this bath splashes against

the sides of this silver, sturdy pot,

you set the timer, two and a half minutes long

and wait for it to be over. Anyone

can wait those minutes. The eggs clink

against each other. Steam rises

toward your face and finds it.

First published in Appalachian Places (Spring 2022) and then in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems (Press 53, 2023)

Savior

Your hands pop open the hood of the car,

drain the oil, twist the cap shut, stop the leak.

Your hands pump the colander and wash

shaking leaves clean.

Your hands cut the sunflowers, brown and yellow heads

already drooping from the long drive you must make

to see me through this terrible heat,

the kind that causes rashes, that beats

down on back doors. Your hands

used to know how to take off things

in the late afternoons, when we shoved

our books aside and slept on deadlines,

when I thought the world was made for straps

and sundresses without destinations.

Your hands used to know how to stop me from going.

They used to tell me a story. Now, they break up

a sentence into small pieces. They clear clutter.

They’re strong enough to pull someone from a burning car,

just not your car, just not me.

First published in Prime Number Magazine (Spring 2022) and then in Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021)

Katy Perry Is Crooning and Won’t Stop Just Because I Did

Because this is a small village and people tell other people’s news, I already know when I walk past your mother’s house, and the garage door is flung open wide as if it got stopped mid-scream, and you are lining up the contents on the lawn (an artificial Christmas tree, boards that once belonged to shelves) that your brother died fifteen hours ago in the early hours of morning, that he had trouble breathing because of the flu or because of some other condition the coroner will discover—I will learn about that, too, surely, when the news comes, because this is how a village runs: on private information, on what really happened, on what maybe happened, and especially if it’s bad news, we pass it along like hot potatoes so it won’t burn our knowing hands, and in this way perhaps it might not happen to us, not in the same way, or not so badly.

I pause at the edge of your lawn and pull out my earbuds—Katy Perry is crooning and won’t stop just because I did—and tell you I heard about what happened and I’m sorry, and you are startled because we have never talked to one another but as happens in a small town, I know who you are and you know who I am, by name anyway, and you have forgotten for a moment the way a village runs: on recognition and proximity. We must look each other in the eye if we are to ever look at ourselves. You don’t know what crises I have lived through, for I moved away and am only back now, and it isn’t really fair that I know about your brother today, and it isn’t fair that we are both alive and that his silver Grand Marquis sits with a cold engine on the side of the street and it isn’t fair that after I have expressed my sorrow for your loss I can step back on the sidewalk and off your lawn. I can slip the earbuds back in, and there will be Katy Perry, still singing, and if I want her to start up again all I have to do is push rewind which I won’t—but I could—while you are left with the contents of the garage laid out on the lawn and you won’t be able to put any of it back but you can’t leave it out either in the rain that is coming down already.

This version first published in Brevity (September 2018)

A Conversation with Brittney Corrigan

Ellen Notbohm talks with Brittney Corrigan about Daughters, Solastalgia and how poetry can reach readers in new ways.

In hindsight, I’m astounded I did it. The set-up was as far out of my comfort zone as Pluto. But I applied for, and won, a writing residency at a cabin in the coastal mountains where the only other person in residence, and for some distance around, would be a complete stranger. But it was fast-friendship-at-first-sight. I had just begun writing my historical novel, The River by Starlight, and Brittney Corrigan was working on what would be her second published poetry collection, 40 Weeks, a progression of short poems using the imagery of the natural world to follow a developing pregnancy. When our week together ended, we continued to meet every other Sunday morning to critique each other’s works-in-progress. At first, I balked at critiquing her work, as I knew nothing about poetry. Her indelible reply was that she didn’t want to only appeal to other poets, she wanted to touch a wide range of readers. That one remark made poetry seem suddenly accessible to me. In the seventeen years since, it’s been a joy to walk beside Brittney through what is now five poetry collections. The last two, Daughters and Solastalgia, are the work of a mature poet who is indeed reaching to deepest corners of contemporary life.

Daughters is a collection of persona poems that reimagine characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters, while Solastalgia faces down the Anthropocene age with shattering yet hopeful perspective on climate change, extinction, survival, and love. — Ellen Notbohm, Guest Interviewer

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EN: Daughters is one of the most widely relatable poetry collections I’ve ever read. Every woman who ever walked this planet is a daughter, right? I watched Daughters evolve from your original idea, writing from the perspective of mythological or fictional characters to including perspectives from startlingly contemporary daughters: an active shooter’s daughter, a storm chaser’s daughter. Many of the poems are unexpectedly jarring commentaries on social issues that have always plagued the human condition: the Pied Piper as a pedophile, Goldilocks as a desperate homeless mother, Dorothy Gale deep in dementia. How did you conceive Daughters? What has been the response to it, and is it what you expected?

BC: I fell into this project by accident. I had been interested in persona poetry in college, and after a couple of decades of writing poems about myself and my family, I was interested in returning to persona poems as a way of trying something different with my work. I wrote “Scarecrow’s Daughter” on a lark and enjoyed it, so I moved on to Bigfoot. But I was struggling with the poem from the perspective of Bigfoot himself, so I decided to switch it up and write in his daughter’s voice, instead. “Bigfoot’s Daughter” just happened to end up with the same number of lines and stanzas as “Scarecrow’s Daughter,” and that gave me the idea creating a larger project. I decided I would write 50 daughters’ poems and began making a list of ideas. I had no idea at the time how much these poems would end up resonating with readers, but I love that the daughters really speak to people, and I’m always interested in hearing from folks about who their favorite daughters are from the book.

EN: Even readers who enjoy a range of prose will tell me they don’t “get” poetry and therefore never read it. What creates this mindset and how can we talk about it in a way that encourages hesitant readers to give poetry a chance?

BC: This is certainly a common response to poetry, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because the only poetry some folks have had contact with was in school, and perhaps they were asked to dissect or explain a poem before they’d had a chance to just read it for pleasure. Or perhaps they’ve only read poetry by dead white men (not to say there isn’t value in those poems, too) and haven’t been exposed to other poetic voices, including ones to whom they can better relate. Contemporary poets are doing exciting work with subject matter, form, and performance. I urge folks to come to poetry with an open mind. If we approach something with a mindset that we can’t understand it, then surely we won’t understand it. But if we approach a poem with willingness to listen as well as curiosity, we’re set up to be pleasantly surprised by what we might find, and then we can enter into a deeper conversation with the work.

EN: About that dead-white-men observation. In She’ll Be the Sky: Poems by Women and Girls, curator Ella Risbridger calls out the fact that only one of twenty-one Poet Laureates in the UK has been female, and in the US, only 14 of 53 Poet Laureate/Consultants in Poetry (title of the position before 1985) have been female. Yet when I think of contemporary poets, the first who come to mind are Amanda Gorman, Maya Angelou, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ada Limón. Why such disparity in the upper levels of the art? Do you see that changing?

BC: I think the disparity is there for the same reason it is in other arenas: a long history of misogyny and sexism. But I absolutely see it changing. There are many strong female (as well as trans and nonbinary) voices in contemporary poetry, and our three most recent U.S. Poets Laureate have been women of color (Ada Limón, Joy Harjo, and Tracy K. Smith). These poets, and so many others, are changing how people—especially those who aren’t immersed in poetry on a daily basis—think about who poets are: what they look like, what they write about, and how they can start conversation or affect change in the world.

EN: The word solastalgia was new to me. It’s a 21st-century combination word that describes our distress about environmental change and a kind of homesickness for the home you’re still in. Tell us why you chose it as the title of this latest collection.

BC: Yes, solastalgia is a neologism coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005, combining the Latin word sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief). The poems in my collection explore topics of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age and how we as humans, and myself specifically, are dealing with these challenges. It seemed the perfect word to describe the complexity of emotions associated with living on a planet that is in peril because of the actions of our species.

EN: Please define “the Anthropocene age” for readers who are unfamiliar with the term. It’s a little discomfiting, isn’t it? Do you find some potential readers have trouble confronting or accepting the concept?

BC: The Anthropocene is our current geological age (folks might be familiar with the Mesozoic, which is the geological age in which the dinosaurs existed). The Anthropocene age began about 2.6 million years ago and is characterized as the period in which human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment. Most of my readers seem well aware of how humans have impacted our planet, though I’m not sure everyone wants to accept how negative that impact has been and continues to be. One of the ideas my poems wrestle with is that the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants may well be better off without us, and that is certainly a concept that makes people uncomfortable, or sad, or some combination of the two.

EN: Some of the poems in Daughters have climate or meteorological perspectives. How did Daughters lead to Solastalgia?

Daughters was definitely a project book, and it took me five years to write, wedged in between work and raising children. As I was coming to the end of that collection, I was feeling like what I wanted to write about next were issues of climate change and extinction. I’ve always had an affinity for the natural world and animals, and the state of our planet was calling me back to those loves in the form of my artistic expression. The very last poem in Daughters is “Yeti’s Daughter,” which is about the human impact on the planet and the beings who live here with us. It was my “gateway poem” into the writing of Solastalgia.

EN: Who are you looking to reach with Solastalgia?

BC: The poems in Solastalgia are not just for other poets or lovers of poetry. I hope that these poems will speak to anyone who is concerned about the state of our planet and the more-than-human beings with whom we share it. I hope readers can see themselves within these poems—be it a wonder for the natural world or a fear of its demise—and are inspired to take action in whatever way they can to help undo as much of the damage we’ve done as we possibly can before it’s too late and to be better stewards of the Earth moving forward.

EN: Which poems in Solastalgia might be good introductions to readers new to poetry? I gotta go with “The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind,” in which we end up oddly rooting for those abandoned storefronts. And “Elegy for One Billion Animals,” a soul-wringing requiem for the unspeakable losses wrought by wildfires. “No telling smoke from ghosts” is a line that will haunt me forever.

BC: The “Anthropocene Blessings” in Solastalgia evoke a variety of endangered species, which may be familiar and of concern to new readers. Folks might also enjoy the poems with a bit of a pop culture feel, such as “The Ghost of Marlin Perkins Visits Me Wearing a Copperhead” or “Tweet.” I also hope readers can identify with poems in which I, the writer, relate my own personal experiences, such as “Fossil Record: Smilodon” or “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.”

EN: And Daughters?

BC: I invite readers to meet the daughters through the table of contents and sample poems below, and start with those they find most relatable. Many of the Daughters poems are available in literary journals online, as well. To name a few: “Lepidopterist’s Daughter,” “Surrealist’s Daughter,” “Minotaur’s Daughter,” “Active Shooter’s Daughter.”

EN: The poems in both Daughters and Solastalgia range from bleak to hope-filled, a few even defiantly exuberant. Why and how did you craft such a balance? How do you decide the order in which poems appear in a collection?

BC: In putting these poems out into the world, two things were important to me. First, I think we need to sit with the darkness for a while. We need to meditate on the damage we as humans have caused, and we need to take responsibility for that damage. We need to feel sorrow, maybe even a bit of despair. But then we need to do something with those feelings. And so the collection is also threaded with wonder and hope. Because I have to believe that, while we can’t fix everything, we are fully capable of doing something to make things better, or at least not make them worse. The poems are arranged in sections that mirror the spheres of the planet: biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere/cryosphere, and there are several types of poems within each section. The final two poems in the collection are intentionally hopeful. I want folks to come away from Solastalgia feeling, and thinking: What’s next? However small, what am I personally going to do to create change?

EN: What would you like readers to know that I haven’t asked?

BC: Many of the poems in Solastalgia fall into categories. In “world without us” poems like “The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind,” I see images of nature thriving without human influence. In “parallel life” poems such as “Triolet for the Marine Biologist I Didn’t Become,” I explore other possible career paths I might have taken that are rooted in the natural world. I’m especially fond of the “unloved animal” poems, in which I celebrate (and hopefully change readers’ minds about) creatures such as opossums and coyotes, with whom we often share our urban environment. The “Fossil Record” poems examine my own life experiences in the context of the issues I’m writing about. The “Anthropocene Blessings” highlight both the beauty and plight of some of our most threatened species. My goal in creating this variety of poems is that any reader can find themselves in the collection, find something that resonates with them. Something, as my editor Simone Muench at JackLeg Press says, that make readers “…want to be better, do better.”

Brittney Corrigan, Nina Johnson Photography.

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The following poems appear courtesy of Brittney Corrigan and are excerpted from Daughters, published by Airlie Press, 2021.

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Goldilocks’ Daughter

Trespass: the very word sounds

like the combing of hair. The tines

separating the locks, wrestling each

strand into its own. Curls parting,

disentangling, to let the wooden

fingers drag themselves through.

Consider: that’s not how

we saw it. The cold, it set even

our toes to trembling, knocking

together in their blue chatter

of flesh. Our hands, our ears,

our noses fared no better.

Understand: we did queue up

at the shelter. Mother and I,

our coats held around us

like weary pelts, skins crackling.

There were never any beds

when the dark came stinging.

Notice: the door was open,

the house unattended. Who

leaves three meals a-steam

on the table top? Yes, we tried

on the chairs for size: the novelty

of a custom seat, a bowl just so.

Imagine: the beds! Oh, the beds

were nothing like the ground,

were nothing like a box, or

a doorway, or a troll-worn bridge.

Even the least downy among

them was cause to sing.

Listen: Mother and I, we thought

to stay only long enough to warm.

But oh, how they always find us.

How they always turn us out. How

it goes like this: an open hand,

then the roaring of the bears.

~

Siren’s Daughter

Our songs are not for you.

My mother didn’t teach me

to lilt a lyric from my throat,

to crest a note from my

tongue, in order to enthrall

or summon a man.

Such conceit, to think

a goddess would sing

of men’s deeds. We sing

for the same reason cranes sing,

or the deepening whales,

or a whole fierce chorus of wolves.

I wish all of you would bind

your rough and yearning

bodies to the masts

of your figureheaded ships,

sails a-beat in the salty

wind, breaking the waves.

Because truth be told,

I’ve had enough of your

maddening inability

to keep your hearts and hands

to yourselves. Your excuses

puddle ‘round your boots.

But still you come. My mother

says men cannot leave a thing

of beauty to unfurl of its own

accord. You must always lean

in and pluck it, roots and all,

no matter the withering.

So we have to make our homes

among the sharpest rocks.

We have to pick the roughest

whorl of seas. And if we draw

your ships to smithereens, well,

that will not keep us from singing.

~

Alien Abductee’s Daughter

My mother isn’t a sci-fi-movie-

1960s-housewife-drying-her-hands-

on-her-apron-as-she-half-sleepwalks-

into-the-yard-where-there-is-a-bright-

beam-waiting-to-levitate-her-through-

the-whipping-wind kind of gal.

She makes grilled cheese sandwiches

sensibly, with butter on both sides,

and pickles, and tomato soup. She

reads novels of literary merit, maybe

a little magical realism thrown in,

but not enough to make her moony.

She believes in ghosts, it’s true, the same

way she believes in mathematics.

The beauty of theories and formulations,

the attempt to enumerate all things:

black holes, gravity, planetary orbits

and tides, weather, dark matter, energy.

What I’m saying is, I believe her.

If she lost time, it likely was because

of the UFO. I mean, she’s not

an invents-bedtime-stories kind of mom.

There’s nothing impossible about it.

It all comes down to simple math.

Listen, my father’s not really my father.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When

he’s gone, we know exactly where

he goes. You can smell it on his clothes,

sour and sloppy. My mother was returned

only slightly disheveled, and carrying me.

See? My skin has a shimmery gray undertone.

Just look at my whopping green eyes. We don’t

need my father anymore. They’re coming back

for us, I can feel it. That’s why my mother stands

in the yard every night, crying, holding my hand.

We’re certain. We know the lights will come.

~

---

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, Daughters, and Solastalgia. Her poetry has appeared in more than 130 journals and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has served in editorial roles for Airlie Press, Timberline Review, and other publications, and served in administrative and advisory roles with Pacific Northwest writer residency programs. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction and is forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing in 2024. https://brittneycorrigan.com

~

Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose has most recently appeared in Brevity, Eunoia, Does It Have Pockets, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and several anthologies in the US and abroad. https://ellennotbohm.com

A Conversation with Brendan Constantine

I met Brendan Constantine at an event in Los Angeles back in 2013. He greeted me as if we were long lost friends, and I found myself desperately wishing we were. That’s the dynamic joy of spending time with Brendan’s spirit -- as welcoming a space as that which he leaves for us in his work, places we can sit down next to him and luxuriate in metaphor and recognition. Thankfully, we did become friends, and it’s been a great joy to learn from him, to read each new word of poetry, and to celebrate the variety of good he brings to the world. Here, we talk about pockets, poets to discover, teaching, and more, followed by the gift of four brand new pieces. -- CMG

Hello, Brendan!

I’m currently sitting at a beautiful desk at the Carolyn Moore Writers House in Tigard, Oregon. The folks at Portland Community College have been kind enough to offer me a residency here for a month! So, while I endeavor to answer these questions, I must pause now and then to wonder at the curious number of robins that have gathered outside. Just now (2:30 PST), I can see at least ten in one window, standing apart in a meadow, facing the same direction. Something appears to be ‘up’ in robinland.

1.     Please tell me about your biggest kitchen failure.

Well, the one that stands out is from about 1977. I was ten years old, and my dad had just bought a microwave oven. It’s fair to say, back then, safety standards weren’t quite what they are now: this thing kept cooking with the door open! Anyway, my stepbrother and had been left alone in the house (again, it was the 70’s) and we were hungry. So, we took a frozen dinner from the fridge, wrapped it in several layers of foil, as one did with a toaster oven, and likewise set the timer for 45 minutes.  In over forty years of attending rock concerts, what my brother and I witnessed stands out as one of the best lightshows I’ve ever experienced. Incidentally, we did try to eat the frozen dinner (a Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie, I believe) but it resisted us, and we gave up after bending a knife.

2.     What is your favorite sort of pocket?

Interior breast pocket of a sport coat. Still feels sneaky.

3.     Who are three writers who you wish more people knew about?

The top of my list has to be my girlfriend Julia Ingalls, an artist and essayist here in Los Angeles. She has spent so much of her time promoting other writers – in addition to a good deal of critical writing, she was the curator of the now legendary cross-genre series It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere – that I think her own work hasn’t received any of the attention it deserves. She’s written for Salon, Slate, Guernica, Crime Reads, and the LA Times. Here most recent project is an audio quartet which can be sampled here, starting with part one ‘Blind Spots’: https://soundcloud.com/user-427725026/blind-spots_part-1-julia-ingalls-audio-quartet

Next is LA-based poet Tom Laichas, whose work knocks me out. If it was one wit less, I’d merely be resentful. As it is I can only admire him. Here’s an excerpt of a larger work which appears in the current (and final) issue of Lammergeier:  https://www.lammergeier.org/post/excerpts-from-the-star-catalogue-tom-laichas. His newest collection is Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (2023 Futurecycle Press).

The third is Oakland poet Valentina Gnup. I am so excited to be shouting about this poet. I’ve known and admired her for over twenty years, and we are finally getting her first collection! Her book Ruined Music (2024 Grayson Books) was released in March! Here’s a recent piece from Two Hawks Quarterly: https://twohawksquarterly.com/poetry/2022/05/06/the-work-of-flying-by-valentina-gnup/

4.     Strangest/favorite place you’ve given a reading?

Where do I start? The pizzeria? The observatory? The bus stations or cemeteries? No, it has to be the time I was asked to read at an apiary-supply shop, outside San Francisco -- ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper.’ The event was part of Litquake and local businesses had agreed to host poetry readings for an afternoon in 2012. This particular venue was small, and guests stood or sat on the floor. But I was made very comfortable, even given a big pair of bee wings to wear by emcee Nichelle Davis.

What I didn’t realize, until I was halfway through my first poem, was that there was a live chicken behind me, in a decorative cage. For the next ten minutes, this little guy offered commentary, making clucks and half-caws with incredible sensitivity to the mood of each piece. I would say something about astonishment or loneliness, and as I tried to ‘hold’ the moment, the rooster would utter an inquisitive “Ohhh?”

It is, by far, one of my favorite gigs ever. I even toyed (very briefly) with the idea of getting my own chicken to accompany me at future readings.

5.     Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what?

I do! And it’s a pretty eclectic mix. Because I have a tiny brain, it’s hard for me to listen to lyrics while writing, so I favor electronic music, symphonic, or jazz. Perhaps the most evocative for me, or rather, the music which has proven the most conducive, has been the work of Swedish composer and ‘sound artist’ Marcus Fjellström. In 2018 I watched the first season of a series called ‘The Terror’ which was set in the arctic and which featured an incredible soundtrack. On viewing the last episode, I saw a dedication to Fjellström in the credits. Apparently, his score for the series was one of his last efforts before his sudden death in 2017 at the age of 38.

I’ve since found tons of his work online and play mixes of it at my desk. I’ve also acknowledged him in my next book. He helped inspire a lot of those poems!

6.     Tell me about teaching. What has teaching taught you about artistry? (Related: Was Letters to Guns a real class exercise?)

I’ve been teaching for over twenty years now, at pretty much all levels. I work with adults, college students, the elderly, people living with brain trauma, and since 2004, I’ve taught Creative Writing at the Windward School, a college-prep in West Los Angeles.  

What have I learned? Good Lord, there just isn’t enough time or space to answer. But let me see if I can offer some highlights! Teaching has kept me teach-able. It’s one of the scariest things I know how to do; I’m just as terrified as I was the first day, but my students, especially my kids at the high school, are constantly making poetry new for me, they let me ‘see’ it in a thousand unexpected ways. They remind me that while the first poems may have appeared over 6,000 years ago, this art form is still quite young, and will stay perpetually adolescent so long as speech itself continues to evolve.

When it comes to workshops (as opposed to teaching the mechanics of poetry) my latest kick is to create classes where the participants acknowledge and accept that I expect them to lead their own classes. My motto is “If you can take two workshops, you can give back one.”

As to the latter part of your question, I think you’re asking if ‘The Opposites Game’ came from a real exercise. And yes, it did. The scenes described in that poem actually happened. There are a few embellishments, a few extra colors, but I really did have a class (more than one, actually) where a debate over the antonym for 'gun' raged for days and divided students.

Wanna try it? Take a poem by someone else and rewrite it, saying the exact opposite of everything it describes or asserts. If the first poem starts, “Once upon a time...” then you might begin with “Twice under never...” It shouldn’t take long before you encounter terms without an obvious antonym. Go with your instincts, go with what feels emotionally true. Where possible, structure your poem identically, line-breaks and all.

TIP – Your first draft may look like a train wreck. Expect to do a second or third. Your poem is in there, just a little buried.

Brendan Constantine, photo by Taylor Mali.

---

Brendan Constantine just completed his fifth collection of poems, “The Opposites Game.” He teaches at the Windward School in Los Angeles.

---

Study of Three Paintings Eaten by Dogs

1

A woman in a straw hat, ribbon

trailing, eyes lost in shadow.

She waves from a beach to where

a whole sky should be, but isn’t.

There is half a cloud.

There is one wing.

2  

A man with white hair, a blue

suit and necktie. He looks at us,

ready to answer any question

not found in the books behind him.

Don’t be alarmed by his missing

chest, his pulverized desk; these

are his credentials.

3

A mountain pass, late winter,

pine trees loaded with snow, gone

pink at evening, they lean away

from an awesome hole in everything.

It’s so big you can see the skeleton

of the world; wet, wooden, thrown

together in a rush.

We might have known.

~

Juice Box

I saw a cartoon where a wolf got sent

to the electric chair. He had stalked a trio

of pigs before killing two of them.

The judge and jury were cats and crows.

The wolf’s lawyer was a worm with big

glasses. He didn’t seem prepared.

Justice was swift, the wolf howled as he died,

long and loud, and the sound hung on the air

in letters made of lightning.

I remember, vividly, asking my mother

about it, trying to lead her to a hopeful

answer,

“There’s not really a ‘lectric chair, right?”

She was wearing her black cardigan

with the purple blouse and smoking so,

when she exhaled on “Yes,” I could

see the shape of the word,

could see myself breathe it in.

“There are lots of those chairs,” she said,

“we’ve had them for a while now.” Of course,

she told me not to worry, that I was good

and always would be,

but I had more questions. For instance,

what other electric furniture was there?

Couches? Beds? My God, bunkbeds?

And what crimes were thus punished?

I didn’t ask any of this. If that seems odd,

perhaps you’ve forgotten the essence

of childhood, which is shock. To be new

is to be dumb to the world’s mad example,

to see words sizzle as we grope for them.

It’s many years since they led the wolf away

and I peer into my electric window,

for any surviving footage. I find it.

The archives are pretty good for this

sort of thing. The whole cartoon

can be seen anytime. I watch it over

and over for the one image I somehow

missed as a child: the wolf redeemed

with wings and his own cloud in Heaven. 

He plays a small harp there, the music

falling to earth in jagged notes of silver.

~

Tinnitus

According to Christian tradition, the Virgin Mary was impregnated

through her ear. In most depictions, the Spirit is delivered by some

robed figure – an angel or the unborn Christ himself – who blows

a golden trumpet, bright tracers of sound entering not her body

but her halo, Conceptio per aurem. She hardly seems to notice

looking instead at whomever is talking to her. It’s always someone,

always male, Joseph or another saint. Likewise, her palm is always

raised, as if to tell them, No, please finish, I can wait.

~

Civil Twilight

Just after sundown, when most accidents happen,

when small things lose their shadows and curtains soak

with television, when the cricket gets lonely enough

to sing for its killer, that’s the true witching hour; not

the middle of the night — there isn’t one — not the dark

of the dark but the darkening. It’s before and not during,

it’s What are you trying to say and I already told you.

This is when purple was invented and both the apology

and the suicide note, when the dead make their best

predictions. And this is when we, you and I, tend to enter

our own poems, walk around in them, make a point

of breathing. No matter the season, I listen for birds,

smell for sweet alyssum. I don’t know what you confirm,

but I bet it’s always the same thing first, like touching

a key in your pocket. We both wonder if we’ll finally confess

our part in the great crime or find a way to describe hesitation,

rain sounds, the breath of animals, without comparing them

to anything. Which means this is when we fail, as music fails

and everyone’s picture. Even this hour falls short of an hour.

It’s the time it takes to lose sight of a balloon, one we let go

on purpose, because it’s dying to get away.

---

Susan Emshwiller

I caught up with Susan shortly before the release of her latest novel, All My Ancestors Had Sex, to learn more about this quirky and riveting novel which exploits genealogy as a springboard for a wild, funny, fast-paced tale of redemption and to find out more about her writing process, her inspirations, and ask her questions I’d always wanted to ask. —AMA

You’re someone who has worn many hats— print maker, actor, screenwriter, director, novelist. If you were forced to choose only one hat for the rest of your life which would you choose and why?

I would really hate to make that choice, but since you are forcing me to choose, I’d pick novelist. The thing about it is you can do it on your own. Acting is pretty much done within the realms of film or theater and both of those generally involve productions that require collaboration. Screenwriting isn’t the finished product and also involves getting money/people/equipment… and so, many don’t get produced. I’ve had great fun directing plays and films but it does require a lot of finagling to get something off the ground. I didn’t do any short story/poetry/novel writing until about ten years ago. Previously it was all stage plays and screenplays. When I wrote my first short story I was ecstatic to be able to be “in someone’s head” because it isn’t allowed in writing for film or theater. With novels I can write when I want to and how I want to and not be constrained by anything but my own imagination and will.

Certainly, your mother, Carol Emshwiller, writer, and your father, Ed Emshwiller, visual artist and filmmaker, influenced you and your writing career, but who else in your life directly contributed to you developing into the person, the writer you are today?

 As a person, going to therapy and finally getting comfortable talking was a big deal. My husband, Chris Coulson, a writer and actor, helped me learn who I was by listening and loving and giving me encouragement. And let me give a shout-out to writing groups! I’ve been in several— in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Durham NC, and Santa Fe —and all of these interactions have vastly helped me as a writer. 

Your brother, Stoney Emshwiller, filmed himself at the age of 18 as if interviewing his older self. He spliced that footage with later footage of himself at 56 to create a sizzle reel, Later That Same Life, of his older self talking to that younger self. If you had this chance, what would you like to say to your younger self—let’s say you at 35—and how would you convince your younger self to listen?

 I really would want to say, “Chill out. Don’t be afraid. You’re doin’ great.”

This ties in with the your next question. I didn’t speak except with family when I was younger. In kindergarten they were going to kick me out because they thought I was mentally impaired, but my parents showed the school my drawings, and those convinced them to let me stay. I had one kid I would whisper to if I needed something— “Mrs. Left, Susan says she needs to go to the bathroom.”

At one point I thought my life was characterized by Fear. Then a few years ago I realized this was wrong. My life was characterized by Courage. The thing about my younger self is— I was quite scared of people and situations but I never let that stop me from doing things. I have a lot of respect for that kid—whether age 10 or 35. She was tenaciously courageous.

As to how could I convince my younger self to listen? I couldn’t. I still fight some of those internal battles today.

You have a finished novel, as yet unpublished, in which the main character speaks only when with family. Talk a bit about the inspiration for that novel.

When I first started that novel Exclamation Point it was just for the joy of writing these people and a strange gothic mystery. Of course, the subconscious has its own agenda and pretty soon I was writing about a young teen girl who seemed remarkably like myself. In having her face her own inability to speak with non-family, I healed a part of my past self.

Speaking of inspiration, what are the origins of your recently released novel, All My Ancestors Had Sex. Are there parts of your novel that you appropriated from your own life? 

I never know what a novel is going to be when I start it— or even if it will be a novel. I really love to work in a place of discovery via the subconscious. One of the reasons I love art-making is to find out about myself. So, I started this novel with a young woman living a “paint-by-numbers life” that was all mapped out. A while later, I had a dream of a German soldier in WWII who wakes up in a ditch and his leg is no longer attached. I wrote out that dream and for some strange reason, I thought, “I’ll just throw this into that other story.” It didn’t fit at all, but I continued. At the same time, in a prompt-writing group, I wrote a short piece about a thrift store find I have—a silver cup trophy engraved with “Log Race. 2nd Place. 1962. Dragon Lady.” I added that to the mix and little by little this strange tale emerged.

I think we always appropriate elements of our own lives as we write. Most all of the locations in the novel are places I know well. I’ve experienced incidents similar to some in the story. I’ve thought similar thoughts.

If I flew out to visit, walked into your kitchen, and opened the refrigerator door, what would I find that would surprise me?

Maybe the scions (twigs) of apricot, peach, apple trees in a plastic bag waiting for me to graft them onto our trees. I like playing the mad scientist and creating a tree full of multiple varieties of fruit.

Do you plan your novels with a theme in mind? If you had to describe the theme for both your novels, Thar She Blows, and All My Ancestors Had Sex, what would they be?

 I never know what the themes will be when I’m writing. I don’t plan at all. I love that I write the first draft and then read it and go, “Wow, look at that! I was writing about what was happening in my life and didn’t know it!”

Thar She Blows was written after my husband and I moved from Los Angeles. I’d lived there for 34 years and it was a shock to no longer have California as home. I felt like I didn’t have a home. I feel like one of the themes of the novel is Home. Brian, living in a whale, names his whale Home. Anne gives up her home to search for her son. And they both find home in themselves.

In All My Ancestors Had Sex I was going through a difficult period of my mother dying in our home, then being executor of her estate, facilitating a retrospective of my father’s art and films, and I was sick of having the past be my present. I wanted to rid myself of the past. That’s the feeling that came out as a theme in the novel.

I’m curious about the cover for your novel, All My Ancestors Had Sex, which I’m told you’d created yourself. Mind telling us more about it?

Having been a visual artist before I was a filmmaker or writer, I feel comfortable in creating the covers. I tried compiling various ancestor pictures into one young woman’s face, but wasn’t happy with it. Finally, I got the idea of buying old ceramic figures and breaking them and using pieces to create one amalgam creature. It’s visually weird and putting it against an artificial background, which I borrowed from another assemblage I’d made, made for a provocative and mysterious image. The title-text is trying to be pulp-sensationalist which I hope makes it seem a bit funny. Which the novel is.

What do you do when you’re not writing? Share a bit about a typical non-writing day.

I really love being outside and creating an oasis. I’ve done this in all the yards we’ve had. Since moving to Santa Fe two years ago, I’ve planted many, many fruit trees and berry bushes and perennials and done more grafting. I love to watch the slow miraculous changes that take place every day.

If a writing genie magically appeared and offered you a wish to select any phase of writing — Inspiration | Drafting | Revising — which would you choose and why that one?

I love all the phases, but the genie is getting impatient so —I like revising the best because the whole massive pile of mud and rusted metal and bits of bone and bird nests and lost marbles is there on the table and now comes the real work of shaping it, pulling out this, shoving in that, discarding, adding… learning what it’s trying to say to me and striving to augment that.

Of all the characters you’ve created, which one would you invite to your house to spend the weekend? Why that character?

Right now, I think it would be Dragon Lady from All My Ancestors Had Sex. She’s really quite an asshole, but for a weekend, she might be the most lively, unpredictable, and —we could listen to Dean Martin, curse, and drink dirty martinis together.

Thank you, Susan, for your straightforward answers. I even learned a few things I hadn’t known about you. I hope our readers enjoy the opening chapter of your novel, All My Ancestors Had Sex, as much as I enjoyed the reading the entire novel.

---

Susan Emshwiller is a produced screenwriter (including co-writer of the film Pollock), a filmmaker, a published playwright, novelist, teacher, artist, and short story writer. Her novel Thar She Blows debuted in 2023. Other writing can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, Independent Ink Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, Gone Lawn, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Ms. Emshwiller was a set decorator for many years in Hollywood and a featured actress in Robert Altman's The Player. Her feature film, In the Land of Milk and Money, a wild social satire, garnered awards and rave reviews at festivals in the US and internationally. Susan has taught screenwriting at North Carolina State University, OLLI at Duke, the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, and in conferences and festivals around the country. She lives with her husband and dogs in Santa Fe, NM where she enjoys inventing stories and backyard contraptions.

---

Novel Except

Vegetable Plan

As I vomit my meds on the sprouting vegetables, I wonder if this plan will work. So far, the plants seem happy. Little leaves reach toward the glass roof in a prayerful gesture as I hydrate them. No matter that the hydration is via stomach acid tinged with a cocktail of drugs I can’t name except for Lithium.

I’m told, “Working in the greenhouse is a privilege liable to be rescinded at any time for behavioral infractions.” I intend to keep this privilege by acting pliant and pleasing, thus getting good marks on my daily evaluation.

Early on, I learned that it’s impossible to hide four pills tucked in the gums or under the tongue. My keepers are used to that subterfuge. Nurse Blinky repeats the song for each of us. “Lift tongue, to the side, other side, thank you.”

Swallowing is the best option.

That day I was strong-armed up the wide steps and into the Institution was the day I succumbed to the effects of my meds—a squirt of bile in my brain that led to confusion, lethargy, dizziness, and dull contentment. I’m not sure how many months I was in this state but as I floundered, part of me, many parts, swarmed to my rescue. My right hand had its finger down my throat when I finally came to. Now I pretend to be confused, lethargic, dizzy, and dully content—all the while keeping this garden fertilized with meds. I intend to stay awake and aware. Mine is a serious sentence and it’s up to me to extricate us from this situation. Up to Me. Us. Me/Us. You’ll get it.

But I’m charging ahead of myself. You want the low-down on how I came to be in this nuthouse. Reckon I’ll start at the beginning.

Paint by Numbers - Born

I’m not cognizant of what went on before I was born or immediately after, so you’ll have to give me license to speculate. Although much of what I’ll recount is fact, other moments are informed extrapolation.

I do know mine was to be a paint-by-numbers life. My course was set and the outcome expected to be magnificent.

When I was not even a twinkle in Evelyn and Philip’s eyes, they made plans. Perhaps you’ve heard of Vision Boards where people paste images and words on a surface, creating a collage of what they want to manifest in their lives. My parents didn’t do that. My parents made Vision Books. They (Mother) cut pictures from periodicals: Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Prestige, Town and Country. From clippings of beaming babies in bassinets to well-dressed young professionals in well-appointed homes.

My parents planned each milestone of my projected journey and created thirty-one leather-bound Vision Books. One volume for each anticipated year of my life. Babyhood onward to thirty.

Being members of the super-rich and used to outsourcing everything, they opted to forgo the muss and fuss of pregnancy and implanted their fertilized egg into a surrogate womb. Yasmina was already known as a reliable and hardworking housekeeper and was amenable to the incubation payout.

In a Petri dish, Father’s sperm was injected into Mother’s egg and presto-chango I was created. The parental chromosomes mingled, set about sorting which parts of the Deoxyribonucleic acid to keep or discard, and I was concocted of these randomly selected strands. Millions of bits of countless generations. I was made entirely of the past. But whoever did the fertilization procedure got a text or notification on their phone and didn’t give me a stir. At least, that’s my theory. I wasn’t stirred and all that DNA didn’t get homogenized.

After five days in an incubator, I graduated from a multi-celled embryo to a blastocyst. A syringe sucked me up and squirted me into my new home—Yasmina’s insides.

In our Central Park West building, Yasmina was moved from her housekeeper quarters off the kitchen to the suite of rooms that was to become the nursery. She was fed nutritious meals, our chauffeur Alberto took her to weekly checkups and ultrasounds, and Mother brought her to the Upper West Side Yoga Center as a guest member to keep the blood and amniotic fluid moving—and to show off. My parents did not ask to know the sex of this growing fetus, yet they had the baby clothes, silver spoon, and silk sheets monogrammed with E.G.G. in anticipation of Edward Gregor Gaston. As I grew, Philip and Evelyn counted the days and set aside Tuesday the 4th of April in their schedules. They pre-enrolled me in pre-school at Sebastian’s and, with a generous gift, secured me a place in Rothschild’s Academy for my high school years. My life was in place.

My first crime:

On April Fool’s Day, during downward-facing-dog, Yasmina groaned and I popped my head out, my features stretching the crotch of her yoga pants. I hollered, Yasmina screamed, and Mother yelled, “Shove it back in!”

Yasmina didn’t. She lowered her pants and I slid out, landing face-first on the yoga mat. Yasmina gently turned me over, and Mother gasped.

My second crime:

I was female.

Unaware of the horror of this infraction, all the ladies in the yoga session curdled around me, cooing.

They say all babies come out a red-faced, scrunched, wrinkly mess that fairly quickly evolves into the cutest button you ever saw.

I didn’t.

My third crime:

I was ugly.

Junious ‘Jay’ Ward

In Conversation

While attending the 2023 North Carolina Writers’ Network Fall Conference, I had the good fortune to participate in a poetry workshop, Into The Deep: Writing the Poem That Leaves Us Breathless, led by Junious ‘Jay’ Ward in which he guided his students to discover the heart of what they wished express. It proved to be an incredible experience. Recently, I caught up with Jay to discuss his poetry as well his journey as a poet. —AMA

You’ve been a busy poet of late especially in your role as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Charlotte, NC. What was that like carving out that role? Were you excited by the prospect of creating something from nothing? Or did you find it overwhelming at times?

Being the first poet laureate for my city has been very exciting and I’ve learned so much along the way. I wouldn’t necessarily say I was overwhelmed by the prospect of shaping the guidelines of what the role would look like because I always assumed that each successive laureate would likewise re-shape the role in their own image. I think what I found overwhelming was that without that framework in place there was no one to kindly tell me to take a break, to assure me that I didn’t have to be in constant motion. In most cases it takes a while for a project to get going, especially when you have to secure funding, so early in my tenure I found myself starting several projects in a mad rush just to show progress after my appointment, only to be in the whirlwind of all those projects being funded, beginning, and ending in close proximity to each other. So I learned a little more about grace, delegation, and reasonable expectations for myself. But back to the excitement. We’ve needed a laureate in our city for some time, and I would argue that we had various poets who filled that role before it was official. When I applied for the role, I listed out my objectives, I listed out projects, I described how these things would make Charlotte’s literary (and performance) landscape better. I told myself I could do those things if I were the poet laureate. What I realized after I became laureate was that although the implied authority from having a title helps, these are things I (we) can do even without the title. Sometimes we seek validation and power from others, but in truth we can empower ourselves to make our communities better.

I came across a Charlotte Observer article published shortly after your appointment in which you stated, “As artists, as poets, we are translating the world and handing it back to people, so what we write about is influenced by what’s happening around us,” Ward said. “If we’re writing about the beauty of a bird, even in that, we can’t help but be influenced by what’s happening in Ukraine… “We can’t help but be influenced by what’s happening in our neighborhoods. All that is somehow in the poem, even if it’s not perceptible, it is somehow influencing the way that you’re writing or the way that you’re creating art.”[1]

What influences shape your work today?

For certain, my work is still shaped by Ukraine. It’s shaped by Palestine, Israel, Black Lives Matter. It’s shaped by the Super Bowl and funny dog videos on IG. It’s still shaped by the pandemic and its myriad societal after-effects. I’ve been reading a book dedicated to the genius of Coltrane’s signature album, A Love Supreme, and that is shaping the way I hear and translate the world around me. Which is not to say that I necessarily feel compelled to write about those things (though I might). Art, in many ways, is about our connection to humanity. When we really listen to what’s happening around us, it can inspire us to anger or joy, it can move us to compassion and empathy, it unveils things in us that are far less binary than those examples. At the very least, and maybe in the very smallest sense, it can tell us who we are. I mean to say that there are unconscious choices that we make in our art that reflect the tear-jerking break-up story recounted from our co-worker, or the inside joke shared in public by our partner that makes us smile uncontrollably—it shows up as the use of an em dash in a poem, or an almost imperceptibly light brush stroke in a painting. There are also conscious decisions in bold revolt or acceptance of the humanity that surrounds us in its deluge of halos and pitchforks and all that lies in between. The theme of resilience has echoed through a majority of my recent work. That is a bold and conscious reaction to everything I’m hearing on a daily basis.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention your work as a spoken word poet. I watched your performance during the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam in San Diego CA. [Note: See YouTube link below[2].]

It’s a powerful performance exploring layers of feelings related to your father. Tell us about your experience with spoken word versus printed word — is one better than the other? Do you choose one over the other to achieve different emotional effects?

I appreciate this question on many levels, so thank you! One thing that performance poetry has taught me is the roles that urgency and accessibility play when it comes to poetry. With a performance piece, the audience cannot re-read and study parts of the poem, they have to get it the first time. And for the poem to be effective the audience has to be moved, they need to receive the poem in both a cognitive and emotional sense. Contrary to what I assume would be popular belief, this is achieved more so through the writing than the performance, though intonation, choreography, and the energy of being with a live audience also helps. In my mind, this (the added layers you get in seeing a performance that can’t always be duplicated on page) is similar to the extra resonance you get from line breaks, punctuation, and form on the page, in that each medium (performance vs printed word) allows something extra that the other cannot, but can also inform the other. I don’t view either the oral tradition of spoken word poetry or poetry in the printed word as being better than the other, or even at odds with each other. I see them both as valid mediums through which poetry can reach and impact audiences. I think for me, and this may sound a little esoteric, when a poem of mine becomes a performance poem or a “page” poem, it has to do with serving the interests of the poem. I imagine that I am listening to the poem tell me what it wants to be. Certainly I could fail in that interpretation, but that is my hope.

One line (actually, so many lines) from that reading resonated for me. “So, you learned doing something for yourself always ends badly?” In the poem, you indicate that this question was asked by your therapist. Is that something you believe to be true for yourself? If it is, let me ask you this: what was the last gift you gave yourself?

You are coming with the hard questions now! So, I don’t think that question is as true today as it was then, but still true to some extent. And it’s not that I believe it of course, consciously I know that it’s ok for a person to do things for themself from time to time. However, actually doing something exclusively for myself still feels objectively selfish in the moment, y’know? The gifts I give to myself are probably not intentionally given as gifts and more so take the form of relenting to temptation in the checkout line, allowing myself a pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups, or finally committing to purchase something that’s been sitting in my Amazon cart for a while. I will say that I am fortunate enough to have friends around me that will call or text and remind me to take time to celebrate achievements instead of just moving on to the next thing. My wife is really good about insisting that I splurge on something when a project comes to a close or a recognition comes my way; a dinner, a new outfit, a movie. Something like that.

As I’d mentioned, you’ve had a busy 2023 which included the release of your first full length collection, Composition, which “interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens.”[3]

I’ve read your poems several times, trying to select one to discuss for this interview, and honestly, it was not an easy task, however, one poem which I found especially telling, is EVERYTHING COULD BE A PRAYER, which speaks to your biracial identity. Why did you choose to shape that poem as you did? (Note: See poem below.)

Thank you so much for looking through the book so diligently! I do think a lot about form and shape when I’m revising. For this poem I was thinking about Psalms as they appear in the bible visually, a kind of stacking effect. I wanted the alternating lines to be shorter so that the reader gets an immediate sense of symmetry but not necessarily balance. I am, after all, juxtaposing several things in the poem; my life and Martín de Porres’ life, my choices and my father’s choices, belief and non-belief. Even though the poem is stichic it also feels like couplets, which felt like a nice way to call back to the two parts of my identity without relying solely on the text. The poem is also centered, which I don’t do a lot. Here, centering made it feel like the embodiment of prayer, the lines, like two hands, reaching toward common ground.

“Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his readers an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.”[4] I’m curious about how you used form in this poetry collection as well. You include blackout or erasure poetry for many of your pieces. Why this poetic form? What was your thinking in using it?

The first iteration of this manuscript was a chapbook that only lightly explored my biracial identity. As I did more self-interrogation and as I wrote more poems, I noticed that the manuscript wanted to explore history, documentation, family interactions. Form became a huge part of the manuscript because I wanted to break form, I wanted to combine form, I wanted to create form. My thinking was that every poem would then become a metaphor for the collection as a whole. So I spent a year studying particular forms, determining how form could impact certain thematic choices in the poems, adapting the rules, and etc. Many of the poems were actually written in a different form (or in broken form) and if the result didn’t work, I’d rewrite it in yet another form (or combined form) until I felt that the poem lived the way it wanted to live. In the collection I’m playing with the contrapuntal, ghazal, sonnet, rispetto, sestina, villanelle, and others. Even when I’m “breaking” a form, I’m also committing to rules, so I’m breaking rules by way of creating new ones. This kind of experimentation led to many surprises. For example, the blackout and erasure poetry you mention became a way to manipulate black and white space on the page, a further allusion to my own identity and a dominant theme in the book. It also allowed me, in the words of Tyehimba Jess, to “create supertext” in addition to subtext. But perhaps the main reason I chose to use blackout and erasure poems is because I am working with documents that were a profound part of the conversation about mixed race marriages when my parents were courting; Senate Bill 219 (anti-miscegenation law), Virginia Health Bulletin, a letter from Mildred Loving to the Attorney General, etc. By interacting with those documents, it gave me the opportunity to “talk back”, to be part of the conversation, to change what must have felt unchangeable at the time.

You’ve worked with several organizations over the years —BOOM, The Watering Hole, Breathink.org, among a few. Do you consider literary citizenship an essential role for every writer? Tell us more about your work with the Charlotte community, beyond your responsibilities as its poet laureate.

Great question. I think literary citizenship is absolutely an essential part of every writer's journey, even if they choose not to embrace having a particular role in it. By that I mean, many writers are introverts like me, some are socially awkward like me, a small percentage may even be averse to playing nice with others (I’m trying to skate around calling anyone a jerk…but some of us are!), but even still we were probably helped by someone along the way. We probably helped someone along the way even if only by example. The next logical step is to make connections with other writers and organizations, not to save the world but to do what we can to make this solitary process a little less lonely, to help others on a journey we personally know is tough to make without assistance.

I’m on the board for BOOM and also a curating artist for the BOOM fringe festival in Charlotte, which brings high quality experimental work to the city. I’m a frequent collaborator with CharlotteLit and Goodyear Arts, two organizations that are doing so much for the literary, performance, and multi-disciplinary landscapes in the city. I’m also on the board for Guerilla Poets which, among other things, does amazing work with at-risk youth. I’m also on the board for BreatheInk, an organization that works specifically with teen poets in the school system and abroad. In fact, I was a teaching artist with them for many years before becoming a board member. I’m involved in a lot of things, but there are so many folks out here really working and making a difference. I’m happy to contribute what I can.

You dedicate one of your poems, Southern Cross, Thirty Feet High, to Bree Newsome who on her website states the following: “I think Nina Simone said it best; ‘an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.’”[5]

How do you build social activism into your poetry and into your life as a poet?

Funny story that I love to tell about Bree Newsome and that poem. The week before she took that flag down, I was part of a wonderful recurring event in Charlotte that brought musicians, singers, and poets in-the-round to perform together. At the end of that event I’m doing a freestyle poem with the musicians, including a young lady on the keyboard who had been rocking out all night. Fast forward to me sitting in my home office overhearing a news reporter talking about the flag coming down at the South Carolina state house. As I’m rushing around the corner to the television (because this was historic and it certainly felt historic in the moment) they called the name Bree Newsome and I said, no way! Then they showed her face and I said, no way! It was the same Bree Newsome I had just met and collaborated with. I say that to say, Bree’s music may be influenced by social activism, but her practice is social activism and I think that’s a difference that’s important to recognize. My poems are influenced by social activism and can maybe be used to help with social activism in some way in terms of giving people reasons to change their mind about something or encouraging them to stay on task. And my poems, certainly true to Nina’s words, “reflect the times.” But I think real social activism happens out in the streets, the rallies, the courts, the flagpoles. I’m not distancing myself from social activism at all, I just want to ensure that while I acknowledge that the arts have a great impact by reflecting the times, there are people out there on the frontline, literally risking their lives to make a better tomorrow for all of us.

“To pinpoint my answer to your question, I don’t know that I intentionally build social activism into my poetry, I think it manifests because it has to, because I have to reflect the times, because as a father I’m seeing the future through the eyes of my children, because as a global citizen I know that I must contribute my voice against atrocities and toward justice.”

What’s next for you now that your responsibilities as Charlotte’s poet laureate are nearing an end?

As you can imagine, balancing laureateship, work life, and family life can be a bit much and have, frankly, left me with little time to devote to my own craft. I’ve written drafts here and there and I’ve thought about personal projects, but mostly those things have been relegated to the back of my mind for now as my focus has been creating spaces and platforms for others. My creative life post-laureateship is going to be wonderful—I’m tingling just thinking about it (I’m kidding, but also serious)! First up, I have drafts that I haven’t revisited yet and the editing and revision process is easily my favorite part of writing. I’m looking forward to getting back out into the plethora of rejections that hang out on the submission trail. Second, one of my drafts is exploring a fringe connection between lyric essay and speculative fiction and I’m very excited to spend more time figuring out what it is or what it could be. Third, I’m going to continue to provide programming in Charlotte and to visit schools and libraries, but perhaps at what would feel like a less fevered pace.

Thank you, Jay, for taking time to share more about your writing and your life.

Thank you so much Anne, for these thoughtful questions! Wishing much success to you and Does it Have Pockets!

[1] https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/artsculture/article263175593.html#storylink=cpy

[2] https://youtu.be/zYotT_zOZ04

[3] https://buttonpoetry.com/product/composition/

[4] https://buttonpoetry.com/product/composition/

[5] https://www.breenewsome.com/activism/

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Junious 'Jay' Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte's inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Discover more about Jay: https://jwardpoetry.com/home

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Everything Could Be A Prayer

Marin de Porres is recognized as the patron saint of mixed-race

people & public health workers & all who seek racial harmony.

Credited with many miracles, Martin died of fever in 1639.

I won’t pray to you, Martin, but if I did how would that even work,

me to you, you for me, or jettison all hope

of intercession and just kick it dorm-room-style? Pink and fevered

as a baby, my body may have passed

your bronze statue on the way home from Vassar Brothers Hospital.

Mulatto dog. Slave-son. Rebel of soft heart.

We’ve been called many names, but I’d never seek my own sale to save

A convent (unless you’re thinking of convents as a way

we house faith or the myriad of small faiths we call home—a name

versus what will truly follow a person).

The early whisper of morning’s mouth in the green ragtop’s

backseat hid mason jars for Tyrone and me

to pee in. After we moved to dad’s hometown in Carolina

we’d visit New York each summer, stopping

at a trusted truckstop with a heat-lamp halo perched over day-shift

burgers. I wouldn’t know this for decades

but as a teen my father had been taken by the Ku Klux Klan

or by the police or by some white men or all

of the above, and was miraculously released on the third day,

Grandpa Bud serving as mediator.

It makes me question whether surging out of the South the way we did

whenever we traveled north, each precaution,

was a ritual or prayer, a lasting standard by which a father delivers, watches

over. Are all such choices so clearly black

and white (I’m asking if salvation is without consequence)?

I feel obligated to say here, talking to you

like this does not constitute supplication. I speak to many selves,

especially in light traffic, who are dead or holy

or exist only as a voice in my thirteen-year-old Camry, a fervent recycle

of breath, disembodied but not ghost. To say I revere you—

as opposed to saying we cohabit our skin—is to say you prompted a white

dietician from Mass a Black Army cook from Rich

Square to the same city of winding mazes, cleared a hand over them, said

In the blessing of this union I shall be reborn,

and kept safe so that I’d be in position to move my own three children

across Mason-Dixon borders, across darkness,

to what we hoped was a better life. No, I can’t believe in us. Father,

Risk taker. Saint to those whose eyes

are tinted with need. We are many names if we choose

not to believe in coincidence.

I’m not what you would call a believer of all miracles, but I give you this:

bilocation. You could appear beyond a locked door

to minister to ill, they say, while also kneeling in the darkness

of your dormitory across the courtyard.

I assume these accounts owe much to the ebbing cognition of the sick, the time-

lapsed dispersion linked with intermittent

consciousness. Still. This might be the miracle I fall unto like revelatory light:

residing in two truths at once,

place & time subjective, alone in a crib of night sweat.

a cool, damp towel pressed, somehow, to my face.

 

Kodak 4200 Slide Projector Asks if I Ever Held Hands with My Father

I.

In the first picture                  

my father’s hands 

ain’t holding nothing

but a cooking spoon               

                                                I hold

the wired remote, clicking

to the next slide                       a lifetime

flashing against yellowed plaster

*

In this one his hands are         empty

near a hollow steel pot

first day as a cook at

Hudson River

State Hospital                         where

he and Mom met                     I imagine

there is a photo                       his hand

focused on her belly

my hand walled within

reaching impossibly

toward

*

Here a custodian                     his hands

covered in grease

& callus—hot water

heater memento He                 really could

fix/love

whatever

needed to be

loved/fixed                              if I’d let him

instead I’d pretend

not to see him in school

head down timid

waving as he passed

II.

Memory merges                     

light & dust

an odd hum

with the present—

hospital room                         

a blink of                                tethered                                  

machines oscillating

like                                         

past lives against

a transfigured wall

his thin fingers

resting in mine

Previously published by Columbia Journal in March 2022 and winner of the 2021 Spring Poetry Prize selected by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Makers

White folks hear the blues come out,

 but they don’t know how it got there – Ma Rainey

I. Ma Rainey speaks to Elvis

What a strange sound to mimic and call creation.

My rent been making a sound the same color as these keys.

I sang a song that broke my own heart more than once—

mind you, that’s even when I didn’t hit the right notes.

Can’t take that. Hard as you try you can’t.

Can’t thank the grass for rain while a cloud is watching.

II. The Ghost of Elvis Apologizes. Kinda.

I’ve only died once / so I wouldn’t

say I was good at it / or anything

but I did make a tune / didn’t I

could sing a song so blue / and black

you would swear / I colored / the chords

I been thinking / about how thrifters

pop / tags and sell something inferior

to the original / for more than it’s

worth / and I know my work was not

in vain / I know I’ll live on / there will never

be another me / how could there be

my soul wasn’t even mine

III. The Music Speaks for Itself

The smoke

cleared, exposed

your dissipatin

wisdom. I been

waitin to burn

red-faced and neck

bent back, waitin

for the curtains—

storm clouds breakin

like records—

to be pulled back,

to shake n shimmy

n sweat, to grunt

n falsetto n coo,

to slide one leg

like a pastor

slick cross

the floor,

finger extended,

to say now that

there, son,

that’s how

it’s done.

Previously published by Crab Fat Magazine in August 2019

Epithalamium from Dad to Mom

after my parents’ wedding photo

Skip to the end—you have to know I’d still die

for it, to hold it all. You: Caregiver, Master of Loss,

Weary Hands. The boys: shades of us. Of course I

would risk the law, Town Hall, even the courthouse.

In fact, break open these doors—I’d meet you anywhere.

You: A-line dress, angled angel, halo of white-headband,

look at me and say promise. I whisper into your nape:

we both shall live. Just outside our blessing

is called blasphemy, forbidden, hanging, strange,

a tree that was, and is not, and yet will be. In your belly,

a branch—fruit, wing—yes—a way. Steal away

south. part. Reunite like doves midheaven. We’ll fly

and dance & light, sunlit as any new beginning.

have & hold. We don’t have much but everything.

First published in Composition, then published in July 2023 print issue of WALTER Magazine

(One Hand in My) Pocket-Sized Fiction Winners 2023

Editor’s note: For a bit more on our contest, read a note from EIC, Camille Griep, here.

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1st Prize - Kik Lodge

On the off-beat

Drummer Boy’s gone missing, and Ms Mutch has gone feral.

      She’s a tangle of red hair, stomping her heels on the skanky brown carpet of the music room.

      When you’ve been missing this long, the probabilities, well.

      We pour into class and stick our bags in a pile in the corner. I head to the back, sit behind the music stands. Others sit crossed legged by the window, whispering things.

      Everything has been about Drummer Boy at school today. Where and how and why. Why.

      It’s the last lesson of the day and everyone’s done in.

      Ms Mutch doesn’t say a word. She’s stomping so hard her jewellery is jangling and the cymbals in the corner are making a tinny sound.

      No wonder Ms Mutch checks herself into the psych unit most holidays. Too much discordance sometimes, she told Drummer Boy, who told me.

      Two girls are on their feet now, looks like Lisa and Ame, the nice ones who have all the empathy, and they’ve started stomping in sync with Ms Mutch. Even the panes have started rattling.

      Ms Mutch’s eyes, shot with blood, flash in my direction, and I look at my shoes, my arms hugging my knees. Now she’s brought her fist to her chest and is thumping it, on the off-beat.

      Drummer Boy tried to teach me the off-beat on his snare drum once, but the off-beat’s hard. It’s about holding the weak beat, not keeping to the common pulse.

      So lame to throw yourself in a river, if that’s what he’s gone and done.

      So lame to not say a word.

      A few more pupils are on their feet trying to mirror Ms Mutch’s syncopation.

      Ms Mutch is thumping her heart because her love for Drummer Boy is a simple love.

      Not like my love for him which is on and off, on and off.

      A masterclass in confusion.

      I kick the music stand over and Ms Mutch sees me and says, Right, Matthew, out!

      Apparently I am the only one to find this harsh.

      She stomps over to the door and opens it, sweeps her hand and fingers to motion me out, but I don’t want to be in the corridor with all my thoughts, I want to stay put and fill the silence with something, so I don’t move, I say no and I say fuck you Miss, and Ms Mutch stomps over to me, banging her heart off-beat, fever-eyed she bangs, fever-eyed she looks at me, right into my core, maybe she sees my love for Drummer Boy is uncut, she grabs my hand and takes it to my chest, motions my feet to stomp in sync with hers, and in my mind’s eye Drummer Boy is in the hollow of a bass drum, the one he places at an angle when he’s sitting on his swivel stool, and he’s saying don’t you just love the fucking boom of it, Matt?

~ 

Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and rats. Her work has featured in The Moth, Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, Tiny Molecules, trampset, Maudlin House, Milk Candy Review, Splonk, Bending Genres, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and other very fine journals. Her flash collection Scream If You Want To is out with Alien Buddha Press. Erratic tweets @KikLodge

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2nd Prize - Gabe Sherman

Apple Seeds

I am out walking the dog again. Early morning and the sun croaks, feeble but awake. The birds move about and chatter; the road is desolate and still. A rabbit stands on someone’s neatly manicured front lawn and watches us walk past like a dare. The rabbits are too complacent around here; they chew clover and go about their business as if there isn’t a dog — salivating, leaping in violent circles, fantasizing about first kill — right there. Grass carries dew heavy like a backpack, while the fog lifts as if pulled like a curtain on a string. Sammy shits on the sidewalk, tail pointed sharply up to the heavens — I always imagine dogs as nervous poopers. I am not walking this dog. I realize sometime after, with a poop bag in my hand, that my movement through the world feels automatic and stilted, like a person trying to remember how to be a person for the first time. I am stuck in last night, before I got high and watched Michael Laudrup highlights and went to bed, before I threw the dishes in the sink and thought I’ll deal with these tomorrow. I am in the living room, Uncle Leon across from me, lentils and chicken still scattered on our finished plates, stagnant in the other room. I am back at the first thought I had after he told me how great-grandmother died, after he told me how great-grandfather died: Having chosen to go out of this world together, did they hold hands?

~

Gabe Sherman is a writer based in New York. He loves words, scallops, and unfortunately, the Celtics.

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Honorable Mention - Marc Sheehan

On Liminality

Each year the town raised funds for the public good by placing a junker car out on the lake ice before the thaw began. A betting pool was then organized about when the car would sink. In a rare example of the town’s early ecological awareness, the engine and gas tank were removed to prevent fluid leakage. That also reduced substantially the car’s weight, which extended how long the thinning ice would support it. Which, in turn, extended the betting pool’s window, increasing ticket sales. Once the weather warmed, volunteers took shifts as spotters to record the precise moment the car sank. One spring the ice got thinner and thinner until it disappeared, and yet the car remained. A television crew from the city arrived – which, had it not been for the unsinkable car, would have been its own miracle; no one remembered the station ever covering a village event before. Crowds gathered. Someone, apparently angry at the invasion of city people, stole a rowboat and set fire to the car, which stubbornly remained atop the water. Despite the crowds and the car now being an eyesore, the town council deadlocked on whether to remove it or not. An attorney advised that since the boosters who put the car on the ice formed a private organization, they had a right to do as they saw fit. And so, one morning it was gone. Despite reports of the car being towed and crushed, people preferred to believe it had been taken up in a kind of automotive rapture. Boosters reimbursed members of the betting pool who requested a refund. The story passed into folklore. With the advent of the Internet, sites published snapshots of the car, but they were grainy and blurred. Most people dismissed them as fakes. No car was ever placed on the ice again, only the usual fishing shanties, at least one of which each year fell through the spring ice when its owner failed to retrieve it soon enough. They were fishermen, after all, and only human.

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Marc J. Sheehan is the author of two full-length poetry collections and two poetry chapbooks. His flash fiction has been featured on NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction series and Selected Shorts. His hybrid/flash fiction chapbook, The Civil War War, was recently published (2021) by Paper Nautilus. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan. www.marcsheehan.com

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Honorable Mention - Kathryn Kulpa

Switch

You meet a woman on the train and decide to switch lives.

Criss cross. Prince and the Pauper. The Parent Trap. You’ll be her and she’ll be you.

When you were twelve you wrote a story like that, about people switching lives for one week. One was a new mother. You never wrote about how she felt leaving her twin babies behind. You never wrote how anybody felt. You wrote about “mishaps.”

Switch! Was the name of that story. Your teacher gave you a B. Cute! She wrote. But far-fetched, no?

Switch is what you do with the woman on the train. The woman doesn’t look like you, but she doesn’t not look like you. Two women riding the train. Under the tunnel, over the bridge.

You think about twins. Lookalikes. Lives you can step into and drop out of. You exchange bare facts. Will that be enough?

The train seat is covered in a rough-fibered fabric, concentric circles and squares. Rust-colored, cranberry-colored, mustard-colored. They all fit into each other and so will you.

The woman you switched with left you notes on a 3 x 5” index card. The son will only eat sandwiches cut on the diagonal, not the square. He won’t eat tomatoes unless they’re peeled. The husband likes Tater Tots but not French fries. He likes nooners, sex under bright midday sun.

You throw the card away, because what kind of monster doesn’t like French fries?

You didn’t give her any instructions. You don’t care what becomes of your life. Let your work nemesis take your job. It might make her happy, for a moment, the way Gargamel would be happy if he destroyed all the Smurfs.

You imagine the morning staff meeting. The guilty few sneaking in late, reeking of cigarettes. LED lights that make everyone look hung over. Will the new you make it there on time? Will anyone think she looks different? Will anyone care?

Nobody looks at you as much as you look at you, your mother used to hiss, when she saw you studying your face in the magnifying mirror.

In your new life, you slice, but do not peel, tomatoes. You cube melons into chunks, humming a song your mother used to hum while she swept the floors, made the beds. Did she know the name of that song? Did your grandmother hum it?

Circles of squares. You peel potatoes, chop them into finger-sized sticks, tip them into a yellow ceramic bowl of water to blanch. You slide potato peels and melon rind into the garbage disposal, run the water, flip the switch.

The house you grew up in had a garbage disposal. Had a dishwasher that shook the floors like an invading army, but never died. Had a stove and refrigerator older than you, harvest gold. They never died either. You imagine them still in your childhood house, though people you don’t know live there now. You imagine them still breathing.

That night at dinner you serve grilled cheese and tomatoes, cut on the square. You serve French fries. You serve melon drizzled with balsamic glaze. Everyone eats the food you serve. Everyone says it’s good. The husband dips a French fry through a brooklet of balsamic. Licks his lips, eyes wide.

You look at the photos the woman on the train gave you. This is Gary, she said. Or was it Larry? This is Zachary. The man is tall with wire glasses, thinning brown hair. The son is stocky, with the kind of almost-white hair that will turn dark later. You look at the man and the boy. Are they the same husband? The same son? You can’t tell.

How many people are out there, living lives not their own?

There’s a bottle of wine, tasting of plum and pomegranate. Gary pours two glasses. Or Larry does.

Softly, softly, you hum a song your mother used to hum. You have never known the words. You follow Gary or Larry into the bedroom, dim the lights. Shut the door.

The next morning, you ride the train again. Over the bridge, under the tunnel. You see a woman who looks vaguely like you.

Criss cross, you say.

~

Kathryn Kulpa has work published recently in Dribble Drabble Review, Fictive Dream, and Ghost Parachute and forthcoming in Fractured Lit. Her flash chapbook, Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, won the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest, and her stories have been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist. She is an editor and workshop leader at Cleaver magazine.

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Honorable Mention - Sam Crain

Tacit

Susan had an understanding of sorts with the older woman who lived upstairs. It was a big house; they both rented rooms. In wet-erase marker gleamed the schedule that allowed each tenant a turn for the kitchen and the washer-dryer. The different boarders did not comingle, the spaces common in name only. But Marjorie lived upstairs because she had come later than the rest. The extra flight of stairs hurt her hip, but she didn’t complain. Susan had learned so much by watching Marjorie shuffle, leaning hard on the railing with one hand.

Their understanding was never formalized with words. Marjorie could come into Susan’s room, anytime. She usually didn’t, but she was allowed. She had dark eyes, like a doe’s. For most people, that would be an insult, but not for her. Her hair was ash-grey and she wore it in a bun that always tumbled down by the end of the day—her hair was too fine for styling.

One particularly bad night, Marjorie had slipped over Susan’s threshold between rumblings of thunder, still wearing her work clothes, the only time she had come straight to Susan, with no intervening steps, recalling morbidly curious Susan from a magazine article about a haunted theme park. When she was furtive, Marjorie looked more like a doe than ever. Her tongue, a healthy pink, darted out to catch a drip of rain down her face.

If it were a tear, it’d be salty, Susan thought, but she was already out of her chair, fetching the towel from its hook by her sink. “We can’t have that,” she said, allowing Marjorie to dry off while she took the terrycloth robe from her closet. “Here.”

Majorie’s mute look of gratitude gave her eyes an unprecedented luster. Her hair came all the way down as she dried it, and she looked questioningly at Susan as she undid her shabby blazer. Susan brought a hanger. The blouse beneath was old-fashioned—cream rather than white, with buttons hidden under a flaring of ancient silk. It suited Marjorie exactly, even crumpled with wet.

“How was your day?” Susan asked as Marjorie undid those concealed buttons. There were eight of them.

Marjorie was a secretary. She’d worked longer at her company than anyone and knew more than she could ever say. Words came hard. “Good. And yours?”

The shirt was on its own hanger now, hung from the curtain rod, the drapes already closed against the lashing rain.

“Mine was fine, Marjorie.” Susan had never liked that name in the abstract, not til she’d met someone so suited to it that her very forehead, furrows and all, sounded it out. Marjorie had a flatter stomach than her shapeless serge skirt suggested. It was freckled. Susan wanted to believe—with a sudden, passionate intensity—that she had got those freckles sunbathing on a postcard-ready beach, devil-may-care and graceful, stretched out just above a tide-line the color of her hair. A small mole, almost flush with her skin, winked darkly from just north of her navel. Modestly, Marjorie donned the robe over bare arms and torso before shedding her bra and skirt from beneath it.

“Come here,” said Susan, indicating her bed, made up so tightly you could bounce a quarter off it, like in army barracks. At its foot was a chest with a pillow across it, so that it doubled as a bench. Scooching it out, Susan could perch on the bed with Marjorie in front of her, the drying hair lank against her terrycloth-ed back. Susan snagged a hairbrush from her nightstand and began at the crown of Marjorie’s head. Marjorie sighed but no words escaped her as the boar-bristles passed through her hair, tugging small knots free until each tendril lay in its proper place. Even knowing it was futile, Susan gathered the hair into three parts, plaiting them for the sheer pleasure of its sensation against her hand. Marjorie sighed again, and Susan tied off the braid with a thin ribbon of deep blue, knowing it couldn’t stay in.

None of them were allowed hotplates, but Susan knew Marjorie would never tell on her. She heated water and added packets of cocoa, stirring quietly in case the next-door boarder heard through the shared wall. She brought Marjorie a mug that still steamed, watching the blue ribbon fall away as Marjorie tilted her head to sip. The chocolate kept them silently together. The digital clock on Susan’s nightstand said it was past ten already. Without her needing to say anything, Marjorie rose to set her mug by the sink. A smile lit her face.

Susan did not want her to leave but could not ask her to stay, for the single bed was too narrow for them both. But she could make herself return the smile. Marjorie took her clothes from their hangers and Susan inwardly cursed herself for not laying them over the radiator that had fogged the window behind its curtain. She must remember, next time.

Still smiling, Marjorie nodded to Susan, hand on the doorknob.

It was a nameless desolation Susan felt as the door clicked closed behind Marjorie. Setting her own mug by the sink, she went to take down the bedclothes. Doing so, she saw there was no glint of blue against the off-beige of the boarding-house carpet. She searched carefully, but it was definitely gone. Inordinately cheered by this, Susan got under her top sheet, curling shrimp-fashion among her pillows. For a moment, she could believe Marjorie was still there, her back against Susan’s chest. No, Susan thought. That’s Marjorie’s bad hip. She turned over. There. That was right. Bless you, Marjorie.

 ~

Sam Crain lives in Fremont, CA. Now that she's finished her PhD in English, she's free to return to her first love, writing stories, which she does whenever she can steal her pens back from her cats. Her stories "Debts Discharged" and "Eyes Full of Promise" can both be found on Mythic Beast Studios, where the latter was a first-prize winner.

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Honorable Mention - Zachariah Claypole-White

Obsessive-Compulsive

You have a Thought. And It will never let you go.

You wake up and the Thought is crouching on your chest. It’s a pathetic thing—all soggy-limbs and jealous eyes, pushing you down into the sheets. Every time you breathe the Thought rams into you, driving the air back out.

But.

You could stay like this.

(Couldn’t you?)

You need to piss, and the alarm will go off soon, followed by the second alarm (the one you always leave out of arm’s reach), but you won’t move. No. You’ll lie here, with your aching bladder and sweat-tight t-shirt, the Thought’s weight holding you still and close.

You walk to your commute and the Thought stays with you. It is in your throat. It scuttles across your teeth and waits—with arachnid-patience—for your lips to open, for any careless word to spill out.

On the train you wonder if other passengers can see the Thought. Surely, they can. Him! The man who caught your eye when you boarded. Or her—the woman who switched seats just a minute ago. (Did she move because of you?) She saw It. How could she not? The Thought is larger now; can almost take Its own seat. Soon It might.

You have a Thought. It is with you, in the office, at your desk. Your coworkers make coffee, argue over the good mug, and who’s up for cleaning the fridge (you volunteer). They do not have thoughts like this.

The Thought watches them. Oh yes, It always watches. It grows new eyes to peer into their successes. Catalogues them. Whispers each back to you: those you should have achieved and those you will never deserve. It is meticulous, spiteful. You chew your nails low and wince at the blood. The Thought giggles.

In the elevator, the new hire is coughing. She pushes the button for your floor and smiles. You have a Thought. It skulks towards you through the closing doors, wedges you into the metal box. The Thought breathes through hospital tubes, reeks of bile and industrial bleach. The elevator stops. Doors open. No one speaks.

The Thought is in your stomach, sitting like rancid meat. It guides you to the bathroom, to the medicine you keep nearby. It scuttles through your gut, doubling you over. You imagine skin distending, tearing, and all your small cruelties pouring out over the tiled floor.

You have a Thought. But you push It down, unacknowledged, buried beneath irrelevancies and distractions. You fill spreadsheets. Drink more coffee (despite the current therapist’s advice). You arrange papers on your desk from left to right, right to left. Try to make plans for the evening, cancel them before anyone can respond. You will not admit the truth: the Thought wants to be alone with you. And you want to be alone with It.

In an Uber home, the Thought takes front seat. You hear It in the snow-hiss between stations, in the radio’s promise of warming summers, a new strain of virus, the rising likelihood of drought.

You have a Thought. It leads you from the car and unlocks your door. Tucks your shoes neatly into the corner. Its footsteps fill the house like flocking birds. Do you notice how—as the days pass—the Thought has begun to walk like a man?

You no longer sleep. You close your eyes and listen as the Thought paces your room.  Some evenings It stands over you like a concerned lover. Some evenings It slips into bed besides you. Slides Its fingers between your teeth.

The Thought looks like you, with unkempt hair and scratched glasses. When you stare into the mirror you can no longer tell who stares back—you or the Thought.

You miss work again this week, or maybe you didn’t. Maybe the Thought went in your place, and no one could tell the difference.

And perhaps you notice when I begin to move your hands, or when I first speak with your lips. Maybe, by now, you have simply stopped caring, not that it matters.

You have a Thought. And I will never let you go.

 ~

Zachariah Claypole White is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator, originally from North Carolina. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His poetry and prose have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, such publications as Bourbon Penn, The Maine Review, and The Hong Kong Review. His awards include Flying South's 2021 Best in Category for poetry as well as nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Zachariah teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Honorable Mention - C.A. Coffing

Heat

I paint Katie’s nails red, the color of blood on sand. She rolls on her back, holds her hands up to the sun. “Look at that. These nails are electric, like us.” She turns her head to me and smiles, “Let’s swim.”

We swim in the lake; bits of algae tickling our legs. Our faces emerge again and again, fresh with drops of lake water. We climb on the dock to dry our wet bikinis, our legs stretch long, our feet pointing to the horizon. I tip my head back, let my dark hair fall between my shoulder blades. Katie piles her blonde hair on her head, loose strands fall across her face.

We play Frisbee in our bare feet, our tracks in the grass giving testimony to our youth as our bodies soak in the fresh smell of soil and stray leaves. We flirt with the boys we like and taunt the boys we don’t like. We bask in the gazes of men staring from picnic tables, as their wives gesture and talk beside them. Men glancing over their shoulders as they walk to the lake’s edge. Men turning their heads in our direction as they push their toddlers on swings at the playground. We drink with Jonathan — Rainier Beer poured into empty pop cans — and smoke one cigarette shared between the three of us. Our laughter rises above the motorboats and floats to the treetops, to the cloudless sky.

"The summer of eternity," Katie says. She holds up her hand. We touch palms, our fingers entwine. Jonathan snorts, tilting his head back. Our heels press into the soft earth, our bodies absorbing the heat and falling whispers. We stay until the sun grazes the top of the lake.

We pile in the pickup. Jonathan’s driving; Marlin rides up front. We sit in the truck’s bed with Samantha and Dustin. The wind whips our hair about our faces. We laugh as our bodies toss about, searching for handholds as the truck makes abrupt turns. Jonathan and Marlin have the radio up loud. Songs drift out the open windows. I hear their voices singing along.

My mom’s cooking pot roast when I get home, the oven contributing to the hot July kitchen. "You've been at the lake?" she asks over her shoulder.

"Yea. Why?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s returned to the pot roast, pushing a thermometer into its sizzle.

The television drones in the living room with the evening news. I grab the remote and scan the channels, falling back on the couch and putting my dirty feet on the coffee table. The telephone rings.

“It’s you,” mom says.

I pick up the phone beside the couch. “You see the news?” Katie asks.

“Not really. Why?”

Her voice drops. “Turn it to Channel 5. Now.”

“Why?”

“He took her today. From the lake. The lake. Shit. We were there. We were right there.”

 “Took who?”

“A girl,” she says. “A girl like us.” I wrap the phone cord around my fingers. “Abducted. By a guy. A normal-looking guy. Older, you know, but normal looking. I mean, what the hell? She helped him put something in his car and he… he took her and now… well, she’s missing…” She pauses. “That could have been us. We can’t go to the lake anymore.”

“Did we see her?” I ask. “I mean… what did she look like?”

“Shit. She looked like you. Turn it on.”

I turn to Channel 5. The word Abduction rolls across the screen. “I see it. I think this is it,” I say. A female face fills the screen. She’s young with dark eyes, her long brunette hair parted in the middle. She looks like me. I look like her. I stand and cross to the television, stretching the phone cord. I touch the screen, put my hand against the picture of the girl, feeling the chill of the glass, my feet still on the orange shag carpet, sand between my toes, my skin smelling of lake water and tanning oil. The heat falls away. I picture Katie’s blood red fingernails wrapped about the phone. “Are you there?’ she asks.

~

C.A. Coffing holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. A self-published novelist and playwright, she was a 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Finalist, third prize recipient in Flash Fiction Magazine’s 2021 contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee. Living in a small river town, she spends her time waiting tables, dancing, writing and dreaming. She is an earnest eavesdropper who loves to write about the nonsensical.

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Kathryn Kulpa: A Conversation

I first met Kathryn Kulpa in 2021 when I enrolled in her workshop AFTERBURN: The Art of Flash Revision through Cleaver Magazine and found her critiques encouraging, instructive, and thorough. I subsequently enrolled in four more workshops the following year. Kathryn’s approach to writing workshops is very hands on, giving advice on how to sharpen the story and turn it into a publishable piece. Dozens of writers give her and her workshops credit for the inspiration and fine-tuning of stories now published in literary journals.  

This month, I caught up with her during her book tour for her recent flash fiction collection, Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, the winner of the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest. — AMA

1.     Your first publication was a short story in Seventeen Magazine almost 30 years ago. I was surprised to learn that Sylvia Plath submitted nearly 50 pieces before her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again," was accepted and published in the August 1950 issue. Tell us a bit about your publication experience with that magazine.

Well, now I feel old! I still think of the 90s as ‘about ten years ago,’ in my personal chronology. I was also surprised to hear that Sylvia Plath had that many stories rejected—I’ve always thought of her as the golden girl, at least on the outside. My Seventeen story was my first submission there, and really the first story I was serious about sending out. I’d sent it to other places, including the Atlantic, and, of all places, Playgirl (!), where it was often “too young” or “not right for our readers.” It was held for a really long time at Sassy magazine, which felt like the perfect fit. They kept saying it was still under consideration, but I got tired of waiting (good thing, because they folded soon after!) and sent it to Seventeen and they accepted it right away.

2.     If you could give guidance to your younger writer self, what would it be?

Be patient! I kept setting these artificial goals for myself—I have to have something published before I graduate high school, or I’m not a writer—I have to have something published before I graduate college, or I’m not a writer. Age-based, and all about getting external recognition. And it’s so hard not to want that, because that is what society tells you makes you a “real” writer. And then I would get so discouraged because I didn’t meet some arbitrary goal, rather than trusting the inner voice that knew when I’d written something good.

3.     Someone only needs to follow your Instagram account to recognize your love for felines which makes me wonder, if you were a cat, what would you likely write about?

Ha! An evil empire of mice, foiled by a cat commando, maybe? My cat Smudge, who is normally indoor only, got outside recently and was missing for over a week. I spotted him slinking across the yard, watched over by a deer. I wish he could tell me what he was up to during that time and what made him leave the tribe of Cervidae and return home—that’s a story I’d love to write.

4.     Your fiction has been published in numerous top tier literary journals, Smokelong Quarterly, Milk Candy Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, to name a few. Is there a specific journal which you’ve attempted but find is still out of your reach?

Yes, a few! When I wrote longer-form fiction, I used to batter myself against the Atlantic and New Yorker. I kept getting these “this is brilliant, BUT” notes from C. Michael Curtis at the Atlantic, and they made me gnash my teeth in frustration yet kept me going, in a weird way, when I wasn’t getting any other kind of notice. More recently, with flash, my “impossible dream” journals are The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, and Fractured Lit.

5.     You earned a Masters in Library Science and currently work as a librarian in two Rhode Island libraries. As a writer, does the thought—Holy cow, hundreds and hundreds of books! How could I think I could add mine to these shelves?—ever creep into your head?

Knowing the realities of how libraries work—it’s not so much getting on the shelf as staying on the shelf that’s the real accomplishment. The shelves of used bookstores and library book sale tables are sagging in the middle with yesterday’s bestsellers no one wants. Not to mention all the weird niche titles, like “Here’s a cozy mystery about a team of crime-solving sister wives!” I’d love to write one classic book, or even a single story, like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” that stands the test of time and gets republished in new editions and anthologies to be discovered by future generations.

6.     Your stories are truly compelling (examples follow this interview). What dark corner of your mind creates these twisted tales?

I’m not sure, but I do know my 10-year-old self is squee-ing at being asked about dark corners and twisted tales! As a kid, I used to read collections of ghost and horror stories and save them to tell at slumber parties. I once put together a collection of adapted scary stories called “CAUTION! DO NOT READ AFTER DARK!,” which of course was exactly designed to be read after dark. As a young teen, I read everything I could find by Poe, Lovecraft, and Stephen King. I didn’t really think those influences crept into my own writing, though, at least in an overt way, but when I was putting Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted together I realized how much darkness is in my stories. So much so that I had to reject things: “Well, this werewolf story is spooky, but it’s not really ‘haunted.’ I’ll have to save it for a ‘monster’ collection.”

7.     What would I find in your fridge right now that would surprise me?

I’m afraid to look! I don’t want it to jump out and surprise me.

8.     Describe your first memory of truly owning the feeling of being a writer.

Well, getting that Seventeen story accepted was definitely one of those moments, but I’m going to go back even farther than that. I was about 13 or 14 years old, and my parents were away so I was spending the night at my aunt’s house. I had my notebook with me, but no pen, and in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, I became possessed by an idea: I had to write this story! I looked all over for a pen and couldn’t find one. I finally found a pencil—but it was all worn down, and I couldn’t find a pencil sharpener, so I actually took some scissors and whittled the pencil to a point and wrote the story with this dull old pencil, and I remember it being three or four in the morning and having such a feeling of triumph—I had DONE it!

9.     During the months of September and October, Does It Have Pockets is hosting a Flash Fiction Contest. You’ve worked as an editor for Newport Review, Merlyn’s Pen, and now for Cleaver Magazine, tell me, what elements do you consider necessary for compelling flash fiction?

A voice—as distinct from story, or plot, or even characters—that holds you and won’t let go. And I know voice is such a hard-to-define element, but it’s absolutely essential. It’s when you start reading and immediately trust the writer to take you wherever they’re going to take you.

10.  Is there a question I should have asked you but didn’t? Anything about yourself, your life, something about your writing or writing journey that you'd like to share with our readers?

Just that finding a writing community can be such a lifeline, and it’s one of the best reasons to take a writing workshop—finding people who get you, who understand that artistic obsession and help inspire you to keep going and make good work even better. My first writing group grew out of a class I took with Jincy Willett, and now when I teach workshops and my students say they’re going to keep exchanging work on their own, I feel so happy at the thought of all these overlapping circles, these incredible writers supporting each other.

11. We so appreciate sharing your thoughts and experiences with our readers. Where can we find more of your work?

Thank you so much for asking! I have links to a lot of them that were published online on my website, which is kathrynkulpa.com, and links to buy print collections and anthologies are also there.

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Cooking Tips for the Demon Haunted

(after “Self-Portrait” by Rosa Rolanda)

Keep those demons at bay, is what Mama always said, for they will try and try to find a way in, and they are many and they are everywhere. Even now, standing in the kitchen as I am, a demon is beside me. If a bird flies into your window and leaves a trail of feathers and blood, it is a demon bringing bad luck; if white roses grow where you planted azaleas, a demon sowed the seed; if the paint separates and the color will not fix, a demon dipped his brush; if the beans sour in the soup, a demon stirred the pot; if the rice burns in the pan, a demon fanned the flame; if a young woman twists and turns on a high wire, rope of braid hanging down, she is a demon in pleasing form and that rope is the noose she holds for your husband, or for you. Too many demons crowd my head; they snap and fly like hot grease on a cast iron frying pan, spanging through the sky, leaping and multiplying, they are all busy going somewhere and here I stand as the water boils away, leaving a smell of brimstone. Are you feeling well, child? Mama asks, her fingers cool against my forehead. Surely this is Mama’s hand, the hand I’ve always known, so white and dry and cold.

Originally published in Ekphrastic Review, May 13, 2022.

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The Last Thing She Ever Wore

If you thought the clothes you put on in the morning would be the last ones you’d ever wear, you’d choose them more carefully. I would have.

Last seen in a purple t-shirt, jeans, and black Chuck Taylors. May or may not have been wearing a rainbow loom friendship bracelet.

Not, for the record. I took it off weeks ago. And the shirt was more violet than purple. Violet like twilight, which it was, and the end of April, but already summer-warm, and I was zinging, vibrating, every raw nerve brimming with want: to go somewhere, to do something, and my cousin’s confirmation party was not that thing, and Hannah had said we could meet at the skate park later and I was asking my mother, one more time, when we could leave and she said Get lost!

So I did. Slammed my glass of off-brand orange soda on the table and walked out the back door, past the adults talking their boring talk, past the little kids and their dumb party games. I walked to the end of my cousin’s street and kept walking, wondering when they’d miss me, when my mother would be sorry she’d pushed me away. Get lost! I walked until I no longer knew the names of streets, cut through backyards like a spy, seeing the blue lights of TVs through picture windows, hearing lawn sprinklers, thinking how people were carrying on with their ordinary lives, barely awake, barely alive, and this was not the life I wanted. I wanted to ride dragons; I wanted to find lost cities; I wanted to climb a mountain peak in the sharp, red outback, under a sky of a billion stars. I wanted something more, something I couldn’t name.

I pulled a pink flower from a hedge with thick, waxy leaves and breathed in its strange, spicy smell. I tucked the flower behind my ear like a dark-haired girl in a painting I’d seen in a book in the school library. The girl was topless, or would have been, but someone had inked in a bikini top and written Woo! Woo!, and I swayed down the road like I was that girl, crowds of people saying Woo! Woo! in my head; I wanted to be a bad girl, a wild girl; no one had any idea of who I was or what I could become—so of course I got into that car. Got in with my own two feet. The path forked and I took the path that was all wrong, the path the lost girls take, but what other path could I have taken? In that warm violet twilight, with new grass bending under my feet, the music from that car pulsing past me, slowing down, that man leaning out and saying how hot I was, and I was on fire, I was so alive in that moment, every cell in my body tingling, waiting for something, finally, to happen: so alive, so alive.

Originally published in Monkeybicycle, April 29, 2016.

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Lights Out : Zelda at Highland Hospital

It’s almost nine o’clock. Time for the night nurse to come and tuck me into bed, and I’ll make a show of yawning, of being dull and slow as most of us are, as they want us all to be. A placid vessel on a tranquilized sea. If I’m quiet, and wait until she’s nodded off over her nurse-romance novel, dreaming of the handsome doctor-lover never to come for her, the old goat, I can slip out, and walk in the night air, and smell the jacaranda blossoms that almost smell like home—like home and the wide back porch where we drank sloe gin on long summer nights, after my parents had gone to bed, and kept our voices hushed, or tried to. My laugh that you loved, and the little green notebook where you’d write down things I’d say.

Was I your muse? Did I amuse? My feet were never still; my toes still tapped out the rhythms of dirty jazz, all those barracks dances and the juke joints we’d stop at, later and drunker. Mama never minded how late I came home; she’d been a belle in her youth, and liked to know that somewhere young men fought their sheets in uneasy dreams and called my name, as they’d once called hers. One night, on a dare, you sipped champagne from my pale-pearl silk slipper, and it always smelled faintly winy after that, a smell that reminded me of moonlight, and sin, and you.

But I’m barefoot now, and slip lightly over the cold tile floors. If I’m caught out after hours one more time they’ll tie me to the bed at night, and I’ll be like poor old Elsie, with her red-chafed wrists and rubber continence panties, howling through the long nights, like the lunatic that she of course is, that we all, of course, are.

I never wanted to be saved. I never wanted to be safe. I still don’t. I let them take my days. The nights are still mine. Only in these dangerous moments of solitude can I remember myself. “One of those fast, dangerous girls”—a murmur of talk, overheard at the nurses’ station. And for a moment I let myself imagine they were talking about me.

This, now, is my life. I rise early in the morning, so they won’t suspect. Lying in bed past eight, wishing to be alone, refusing to eat: all these things are suspect.

I lob tennis balls back and forth to a tired attendant. My head throbs from relentless sunshine. I force a smile and pray for rain.

I long to lie in the shaded grass, barefoot, a tall glass of sweet tea beside me and a book to read, all in a lazy afternoon. But sloth is a sign of—something. I sit in a straight-backed chair. I pretend to listen to a lecture on home economics and the virtues of Victory Gardening, and dream of the French dancer, Emma Livry, turned into a torch by the footlights. Still she turned, layers of tulle, magnificent in flame, to finish her grand jeté.

She never regretted beauty.

Emma Livry. It took me two days to remember her name. I’m not allowed my dance books. Dancing is dangerous; it might “trigger an obsessive episode.” I’m not allowed to practice at the barre. I wear supportive cotton stockings. Me!

I’m sure my knees must weep.

I write Emma’s name in a matchbook, so I won’t forget her again. Matches are contraband, of course. Writing is discouraged, except for therapeutic exercises. A sign of neurosis, grandiosity.

I can’t be you, Scott, no matter how often I let you be me.

I slip past the tennis courts, past the neat rows of seedlings ready to carry us the last mile to victory. Tomatoes and broad beans can well, our lecturer told us.

But I am not content with a vegetable love. I will not plant my feet and root. I will not rot. I will not die on the vine.

I am not your ego, not your twin, not the girl you could have been.

I am tinder. I am tulle.

I am spark. I will fly.

Originally published in the anthology, Up, Do: Flash Fiction by Women Writers (Spider Road Press), February 15, 2014.

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A Conversation with Zachariah Claypole White

In 2018, while editing an anthology, I recall reading Zach’s flash story, “Books from Keida,” and feeling swept away by its powerful imagery but it wasn’t until I listened to him perform the story that I felt the raw emotion in his narrative. It didn’t surprise me when I learned he was both poet and songwriter. This month, we caught up to talk about his recent projects and his life as a poet and are featuring four of his published poems including “The Coup” which had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the 2021 Flying South’s Best in Category award.  — AMA

+++

Let’s start with you sharing details of your writing process. Tell us what you do. For example, what time of day or night makes you most productive as a writer? Where do you write? Pen or Pencil or straight to the keyboard? How many drafts do you generally go through before you consider a piece to be complete?

I used to write almost exclusively at night. Now, given my work schedule, I tend to do it in the mornings or on my lunch breaks. I do still find myself writing in the evenings on occasion. Oftentimes if I start a longer piece during the day, I’ll return to it at night. (Otherwise I can feel it scratching away at the back of my brain, wanting to be written.) In terms of where I write, I’m honestly not that picky. I do love writing outside, but since moving to New York for my MFA, I’ve found myself writing on trains as well.

For poetry I always write the first draft by hand, and always with pen. For prose I go straight to the computer. In terms of drafts, most of my poems realize themselves in the revision process. In fact, I’d guess about 80-90% of my writing happens during revisions. So, as you can imagine, I have a lot of drafts. In the rare case of a poem arriving more or less fully formed (RA Villanueva once called these “Athena poems”), it will still go through at least three drafts. I never even consider the first handwritten version a true draft; I think of it more as a blueprint or schematic--an attempt to familiarize myself with the topography of the poem. I just checked the manuscript I’m working on and most of the poems in it have had anywhere from seven to ten drafts; a few come closer to fifteen.

You recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence College. How did that experience shape your development as a writer?

Before the MFA, I was starting to feel stuck as a writer. Not in terms of writer’s block but rather, I knew my poems wanted to grow and move in new directions; I just didn’t know how to follow them. The MFA taught me to trust my poems, to surrender control to language. Several writers I admire have spoken about letting your poems be smarter than you. The MFA let me do just that and helped me learn to trust my instincts as a writer (even if I don’t always know why they are pulling me in a certain direction). The program was also a profound and delightful reminder that you cannot write without a community.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote that “The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where one stands in times of challenge and controversy.” I think it’s fair to say you’re tuned into issues of social justice. Does this sensitivity to the world’s challenges and controversies shape your poetry? If so, how?

Of course! Every writer brings their obsessions, worries, and hopes to the page. Even if you’re not “tuning in” to politics, the world will still bleed into your work. When I sit down to write a poem, I never do so with the intention of examining a specific social issue, but inevitably those issues assert themselves in my writing, because they’re a part of my life. I will say, I always try to write towards hope. Even in my darkest pieces. That’s become a part of my voice. I’d like to think that despite, and perhaps because of, the challenges of our world, I’ve leaned more into a poetics that finds delight in resilience and resistance.

Many of my poems also engage with, and draw inspiration from, my struggles with mental illness. I’ve dealt with anxiety and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) for most of my life. Writing helps me come to terms with my illness; but just as importantly,  my poems seek to provide a space where other people with invisible disabilities can do the same, especially when so much of the world demands that we approach such differences with shame and guilt.

In the recent years, you’ve been longlisted in several notable poetry contests. What is your best piece of advice on how to persist as a writer through these rejections?

“Be bloody, bold, and resolute!” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Ah, MacBeth quote. That works. 

Writing is a career of incredible highs and many (much more frequent) lows. You might have no sense of “progress” (I use that term with some hesitance) for months or even years. Find your writing community: those people who will force you to keep going when you want to quit, who will commiserate when the rejection letters arrive, and who will celebrate your success. People who will push you to do even better. Celebrate your writing successes! However large or small. Do not compare yourself to other writers. That is a great way to make sure you never pick up a pen again. Focus on your own journey. So, in the immortal words of Churchill, “KBO” (keep buggering on).

You’ve mentioned a writing community a few times now but how does someone interested in building a community who isn’t pursuing an advanced degree find their kindred spirits?

It can be tough, and that was certainly something I struggled with between undergrad and the MFA. There are a lot of incredible workshops and residencies (some online and some in person) which you can always explore. Independent bookstores are also great centers of community; they’ll host readings, open mics, book clubs, and even classes.

Remember if you can’t find an existing community, you can always create one. Start a reading series or open mic and invite some writers you admire to perform. Perhaps your community is a group of high school friends you zoom with twice a month to exchange drafts. Maybe your community isn’t made up of other writers at all, but visual artists, or musicians, or just friends whose judgment you trust. There’s no right or wrong way of “doing” community, as long as it works for everyone involved.
The other advice I’d give is, once you find your people, don’t let them go. Stay in touch!

These are excellent suggestions, especially staying in touch with your writing community. It’s essential. I’d like to change topics or maybe shift focus is a better way to describe it since your songwriting is tightly coupled with writing poetry. Up until 2018, you’d played guitar in two bands, The Arcadian Project and Eden Falling. Why did you pause your musical career at that time? I’m guessing music is still very integral to your creative process, what music do you listen to when you’re writing (song, band, genre?)

I absolutely love the spontaneity of performing, especially my own songs. It was my therapy for a while. I could jump around a stage with a guitar or microphone all day, but I was not particularly fond of the business side of music. I also fell into the trap of trying to make every show absolutely perfect (which is never truly possible). The more I pursued it, the less therapeutic it became. Once I realized that music was causing me more stress than happiness, I decided to step back from it (at least in the career-sense). I realized I didn’t love the craft of songwriting as much as I love the craft of writing poetry. I can spend hours pondering over the smallest details of a poem, and delight in that, but the same isn’t true for a song. I still love playing and performing. I practice my instruments every day, but music has gone back to just being a personal escape. I would like to play in a band again someday.

In terms of my writing process, I always listen to music. I prefer recordings of concerts over studio albums when I write. I’m honestly not sure why. I think it has something to do with the joys and imperfections of live music. I switch up my writing music quite a bit, but I tend towards metal, punk, and folk. Recently I’ve been listening to Sleep Token, Coheed and Cambria, the Airborne Toxic Event, Slipknot, Queens of the Stone Age and some Rihanna. For specific songs, I’ve been stuck on “Alkaline” and “Take Me Back to Eden” by Sleep Token.

Who would play you in the film about your life?

Oh, that’s a great question. I would love Viggo Mortensen to do it. Not necessarily because I think there’s a huge overlap between us but because I love Lord of the Rings, and Return of the King is my favorite movie.

Another choice would be Tom Holland. I think he could play a good Zachariah.

Are there people in your life who have influenced your writing? Teachers? Family? Friends? Public figures?

Of course! As I said, despite the stereotypes, writing is not a solitary craft. You need a community. My parents have been hugely influential. In fact, most of the advice I gave on persisting as a writer was stolen from my mom.

That would be novelist, Barbara Claypole White?

Yes. She and my dad have always been incredibly supportive of my poetry. All of my professors in the MFA have guided me, but I’m especially indebted to my thesis advisor, Sally Wen Mao, and my first workshop professor, Marie Howe. The incredible writers in my MFA cohort have also influenced my writing and my approach to craft. Finally, I was lucky enough to be accepted into one of the “Kenyon Review’s” residential workshops last summer to study with Victoria Chang. She really helped shape how I think about my writing process.

What question didn’t I ask but you’d hoped I would?

Nothing specific comes to mind! As I said, OCD and mental illness are key focal points for my writing. It’s worth mentioning that as a Southern (and half-Jewish) writer, coming to terms with what that means and what responsibilities (to home, to history) that entails, has greatly helped to define my poetics.

You’ve worked as a bookseller in recent years. First at Flyleaf Books in North Carolina and now at Womrath Bookshop in New York. Both are independent bookstores. Some say brick and mortar stores are a thing of the past. From your experience, talk a bit about the future of bookshops in this country especially with the recent movement to ban certain books.

As long as there are books to sell, independent bookstores will exist. We lost a lot of them to Covid, but before that I believe the number of independent stores in the US was actually increasing. I’m not sure what it’s doing at the moment, but I do think people are very aware of indies and eager to support them. So many incredible books don’t get the attention they deserve, and the indies are a key part of making sure those books find the people they need to. In fact, one of my favorite parts of being a bookseller is introducing readers to the small press titles they might have otherwise missed.

In terms of book bans: independent bookstores cannot replace libraries and they can’t fully mitigate the damage of removing books from library shelves. That said, they can (and should) make sure those books are celebrated. They can also shine a spot light on marginalized authors and make sure that kids find the books that speak to them. Even without book bans, so many voices are excluded from “literary” discussions. You want to find incredible horror books by queer, POC, or femme authors? Go to an indie and ask for recommendations. Need more trans poets in your life? (Duh, of course you do.) Go to an indie!

I’d like to end our interview with two related questions stolen from the late James Lipton: What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? What profession would you not like to do?

This might sound a bit ridiculous, but I’d love to do voice acting, especially for cartoons. I think I’d be a great Squidward. My other option would be an actor at a haunted house. I’d get paid to dress up in a Halloween costume and jump out at people. What else could I ask for?

For professions I would like to avoid: anything involving finance. My brain is just not wired to find any joy in it. I would also hate working in an airport. As soon as I step into one, my anxiety skyrockets (no pun intended).

Aside from reading your poems from the May Issue of Does It Have Pockets, how else can readers find and support your work?

Right now, the best way is to follow me on Instagram, or check my Linktree. I keep both updated. I’m also on Twitter but don’t use it as regularly. I do hope to have a personal website set up soon.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zachariahcw/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/zachariahclaypolewhite
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Zachariah_CW

Poet Zachariah Claypole White. Photo courtesy of the author.

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The Coup (Language is a Violence to Rise with the Sea)

November 10th, 1898
Alex Manly’s press will burn

in flame-kissed photos
white supremacists pose
an orchestra awaiting its curtain fall

men stand beneath the dangling sky
grind heels into half-printed headlines
hold nooses like cello strings

state militia are dispatched
only black citizens are arrested

local newspapers
led by the Raleigh-based
News and Observer
help instigate the overthrow
swallow the ash of darker words
    
each day the News and Observer
arrives under my window

I skim pages
tear them into cardinal wings
taste another’s blood in the ink

reach for violence
the smoke under my fingertips

my brother says
    muzzled words
    are feral things
    clawing at our lips

i say yes

we understand

+++

November 1898
Wilmington executes
sixty or more black citizens
hands like mine
do not record
the exact number

sometimes i leave the word history in my coat pocket
hand it to a gas station attendant
neither of us sure
how many gallons
it is worth
 
protests continue
i try to speak with the ghost
sharing my seat
but our tongues have fallen
between the pews

officials note
the neighborhood
declined

 decline
    which might be a synonym
    for overthrow
    for no whites arrested
    for lynch

i believe a nation
is a bird with no feet

This poem quotes from: “Wilmington, North Carolina’s Taylor Estates Redevelopment Project.”  n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2017.

First published in Flying South, Number 8, 2021

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Odes to Insanity

its voice is my voice
nothing like my father’s lullabies
honey-dark smiling
roadkill teeth
fluent in love poems
and declarations of war
my voice is its voice
too much like the emptying
of my grandmother’s ash trays
more akin to a bird
than a fish or prayer
stalking rabid
across my chest
its voice is our voice
too much like God
to be holy
well versed in archaeology
oncology and grief
an architect of failures
hauling Babel
from ruined fingers
our voice is its voice
nothing like a brother or hurricane
copywritten
hereditary
often mistaken
for a sunflower
lover or priest

its voice is my voice
too much like my father’s lullabies

how easily
he called sleep down
from the mountain

gathered its silence
in the warmth of rooms
unbuilt

First published in The Hong Kong Review, Volume 3, Number 1.

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A Catalogue of Moments as Told to My Bedroom Window

I.
Today, my father is a hummingbird against the screen,
and we are candles crossing the distance.

He is twenty-one: a prophecy of laughter
counting pigeon feathers, and I—the sand,
waiting his touch.

Today, the surgery. Fingers swell ripe as harvest moons.
His wedding ring will not fit past the knuckle.

II.
I am trying to describe the failures of gravity
and my grandmother is dead,
buried in a church with no roof.

But today she is a child, pulling away blackout curtains,
watching the dogfights: strange blossoms
in the garden of our violence.

My mother is born in this house,
once a soldier’s hospital.
My father flees a different war.And I am a riot horse,
still kissing his blood.

III.
Today, the same cemetery
where—twenty years ago—we are remembered
as prayers pebble-smooth.

And I am sitting in this room—five hours now—
hoping to touch a dead boy through the window;
again and again, my mother writes one sentence.
There is no metaphor in this.

IV.
All these todays ago
I pull ferns from my wrist.

With hands ration-strong,
my grandmother holds the river’s slope,
drinks the tree-dented light
till hawks flower from her grave.

Today, the funeral;
today the stones are named
Teacher and Priest.

Today, my father laughs like wind
fresh-born from the mountains.
There is a city in his throat;
it too is dancing.

First published in Pedestal Magazine, Issue 90

A Conversation with Logen Cure

Welcome to Midland. Cover design by Justin Childress. Cover art by Ashley Shea Henderson.

I met poet Logen Cure at a reading in her home state of Texas several years ago, and I’ve been closely following her writing ever since. A queer poet and educator, Logen curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly podcast reading series for The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She's an editor for Voicemail Poems. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

This month, we feature a conversation with Logen and feature five poems from her debut full-length poetry collection, Welcome to Midland (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021) which was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards. — CMG

1. Thanks so much for joining us for a chat here at Does It Have Pockets. First question: dogs, cats, or ?
Both! I have a gorgeous cat, a cattle dog mutt, and a corgi. They bring me so much joy! I love animals generally, though, as evidenced by all the creatures in my book.

2. Strangest/favorite place you’ve given a reading?
Years ago, I gave a reading at an art festival in Fort Worth—the sort of event where they close several blocks of street for booths. I was asked to read in the middle of the afternoon, standing just outside the booth for a local literary organization. There was no stage or microphone. It was very bizarre to just start loudly reading poems as people teemed by. But then people stopped. An audience formed and foot traffic diverted around all the folks listening to me. It was quite an experience.

3. What are you reading or watching or listening to these days?
The most recent book I read is Black Chameleon by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. It’s a memoir written by a poet, so it contains stories from life, but it’s also mythic and fantastical. I love books that challenge definitions of genre. I had the privilege of hosting a conversation with Mouton at the Deep Vellum bookstore when she came through Dallas on her book tour. Our conversation was super inspiring and I’m so glad I got that opportunity.

4. Welcome to Midland came out smack in the middle of the pandemic.
    A. How did that affect the book?
Yes, so the book was acquired by Deep Vellum in February 2020, and released in July 2021. Deep Vellum threw me an in-person book launch at the Wild Detectives, a bookstore/bar venue in Dallas with a beautiful outdoor space that makes celebrating safer. That was fortunate, definitely. But I had ambitions to do a tour of readings all over Texas, and I will admit I’m sad that couldn’t happen. It was harder, generally, to connect with people and raise awareness than it might have been otherwise. I had to reimagine what it meant to have a debut book. I’ve been really lucky, though, and I’ve found my way.

    B. How did it affect your writing?
Honestly, I haven’t done much poetry writing since the book was acquired. The book was a long time coming (like a decade) and I am still resetting after its release. My creative energy also goes toward my monthly poetry reading series, Inner Moonlight. We recently celebrated the 5th anniversary of the show! For two years before the pandemic, it was an in-person reading at the Wild Detectives. When the pandemic started, the show was on hiatus for several months, then I brought it back as an interview-style podcast. Inner Moonlight was solely a podcast for about a year, then we returned to the Wild Detectives, this time outdoors. Now I record the live readings and release them as podcast episodes, so it’s the best of both formats. Sometimes I write book reviews for authors I feature in the series, and that’s been lovely. It’s been positive for me to turn my creative energy toward community endeavors, especially during a very isolating time.

   C. What coping strategies were most helpful?
Honestly, making a podcast is the best thing I could have done. It gave me the chance to connect with writers and readers all over the world. The podcast got a shoutout from Texas Monthly, which was very cool. I think the buzz from the show helped the book, too, because it led people to discover my other work.

5. We’ve talked before about the power of confessional poetry when done correctly. Part of what I love about your writing is that you make space for the reader even though these scenes are intensely, sometimes brutally, personal. Still, Welcome to Midland has an almost novel-ish sort of plot that winds through these poems. Was that intentional or organizational or something else entirely?
Thank you for the kind words! Yes, it’s accurate to describe the book as a novel in verse. I didn’t set out with that intention from the first poems I wrote for the project. I noticed the potential for a plot arc fairly early on, however, and became intentional about it. The poems are also about storytelling in a lot of ways—gossip, myth, history—so it made sense for the book itself to tell a story. I didn’t anticipate the nature and history threads at the outset either, but while reading everything I could find about Midland, I was inspired to try a few poems in that vein. They turned out alright so I wrote more. For me, it’s always some intention and some exploration.

6. The illustrations are a big part of the magic of the book. How was the process of working with the illustrator? Did you pick certain subjects together or did she read and draw what kindled her imagination?
Thank you! I’m so happy that illustrations add magic for you. The idea of illustrations didn’t occur to me until around the time the book was acquired. I’d admired countless illustrations throughout my research for the book–scientific drawings, historical photographs, guidebook images–and I asked Deep Vellum if they were open to including art. I was stoked they were on board! I requested the subjects plus grayscale realism with hand lettered labels. They’re all India ink paintings. The illustrator is a fellow West Texan. She read the poems and we worked together to figure out what each piece should look like. West Texas is a weird place, and I think a lot of folks have probably never seen some of the subjects depicted, like the tarantula hawk wasp or the horned lizard. The art captures that bizarre beauty so well and I am pleased with the result.

7. Your relationship with Texas is a big character in the book. So many of us have complicated feelings about our hometowns (hello, Billings, Montana). How is that relationship evolving in today’s garbage political climate? What makes you hopeful?
I’m glad you asked me this. One of the things writing the book taught me is that I am not obligated to speak to a broad “universal” audience—my work can speak specifically to queer folks with hometowns like mine. Giving myself that permission was vital. Just this past April (National Poetry Month), I was invited to visit Midland/Odessa by the University of Texas at Permian Basin and Pride Center West Texas. I taught a workshop at the university and gave a reading for the Pride Center. Growing up in Midland, I couldn’t have imagined a Pride Center could exist there. It was profoundly heartening to talk with queer folks living there now. I was touched to hear that people connected with my work and encouraged to hear their commitment to fighting the good fight. You’re right that the political climate is garbage, but frankly, the political climate is always garbage for queer people. It’s also true that time and again, we find hope in each other, and I’m so glad the book led me to make that trip and meet those beautiful people.


8. What question do you wish someone would ask about your work?
Thank you for asking this! I ask writers this question in interviews, too, and it can be tough to answer. No one ever asks me how I named the characters in the book, so I’m going to tell you. I’m a poet and had very little experience naming characters. Once I leaned into creating a novel-like arc, I decided character names would help build the narrative across poems. The book contains some pretty scathing critique of a certain kind of Christianity, so I took the names from biblical characters. I narrowed down a list of names that would sound natural enough for people in my generation, then contacted a former undergrad mentor (who’d become a priest) for consultation in matching them to the characters in the book. The character name Lily is a diminutive of Lilith, who may or may not be mentioned in the Bible, but is certainly prevalent across other kinds of storytelling.

9. How can readers find out more & support your work?
My author website is www.logencure.com and you can find Inner Moonlight on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and most podcast platforms!

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Illustration by Ashley Shea Henderson.

Five poems from Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure

Lucifer at the Tea Party

My mother will tell you about reading the invitation to me—

Hannah Miller’s 4th birthday, a dress-up party—

the way I said, Oh good, I’ll wear my devil costume,

how she explained that’s not at all what they meant.

Think tea party. Think fancy.

Oh, I said. Then I’m not going.

When Hannah’s mother asked me at preschool pickup

if I was planning to attend,

my mother explained the misunderstanding

after I said, Nope.

Oh, Hannah’s mother said,

just bring her in whatever she wants to wear.

I don’t believe I remember this.

Isn’t it strange? The way story blurs

with memory, the sweet mythology

we make of ourselves.

Ask my mother and she will show you the photo:

little girls clad in lace, sashes, tiny gloves,

sitting in a circle, heads bent

as Hannah opens a gift,

and me, kneeling in the background,

dark eyes looking square at the camera,

my horns crooked, the hellfire on my red, red cape

just visible at the edge of the frame.

---

Elementary

My fourth grade teacher told me

she dreamt I belonged to her:

together we traveled by boat.

I imagined the unending sea,

my young teacher squinting in sunlight,

a life with another mother.

The day I had to explain

why I chased Rebekah Jones across the blacktop,

punched her in the back so hard she fell

and bloodied her skinny knees,

I really thought I was in trouble.

You know that thing boys have

that girls don’t? I said.

My teacher nodded.

She said I have one of those.

Before I could say sorry,

my teacher hugged me;

her sea-green eyes brimmed with tears.

I stood stunned through Rebekah’s stiff apology.

Back at our desks,

she picked at the bandages on her knees;

I drew a series of boats.

---

Misdirection

The first time I broke

a disposable razor, I accidentally

slashed my thumb.

I did not cry out.

I freed the single, flimsy blade.

My intentional work

came out neater, bled less.

I was twelve and knew my body

was haunted. I slid the blade

between dictionary pages,

returned the volume to my bookshelf.

This is how I learned to hide in the open.

My inner thighs were so

easily unseen,

even in the locker room,

in department store fitting rooms with my mother.

I learned to create distractions,

to stand at the perfect angle.

I knew people cannot see

what they are not looking for.

---

Warbirds

Ninth grade field trip, Commemorative Air Force:

we filed through the collection of WWII nose art,

massive painted pinup girls on jagged-edge metal,

like torn pages of a dirty magazine.

Boys behind me shoved and snickered,

called each other fag.

I squinted up at cartoonish women,

the perfect Os of their mouths,

heart-shaped bottoms, bare breasts.

They were more bizarre than alluring,

accompanied by slogans for sex or death like

Target for Tonight or

Just Once More.

In the next room, we saw

replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy suspended,

mid-drop, surrounded by photos of mushroom clouds.

How strange, I thought, to go into battle this way,

such sweet phrases for devastation.

---

Laws

1. A body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
 
My sigh steamed in the frigid morning;
the sky was the same color as the parking lot
and I had a physics test to study for.
 
I liked school better this early.
The quiet gave way to my footfalls,
the equations I murmured like psalms.
The library waited for me.
 
2. Acceleration is proportional to the magnitude of the imposed force.
 
I saw the truck take the corner,
rattle down the street as I stepped
onto the crosswalk. It slowed as it approached.
 
I regarded the driver, a blond boy
I’d known since middle school.
I was square in front of his hood ornament
when his eyes narrowed
and I knew—
 
Dyke! he yelled over the engine’s sudden roar
as the truck surged forward—
 
I dodged, barely—
 
my physics book slapped pavement,
fluttered open.
 
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
 
His rumbling laughter receded.
I picked up my book.
I found the library empty.

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