By Rich Hadley
I am my childhood pastor
preaching in the old time way
anointing my stubborn and defiant congregation
on their unwashed, calloused hands and eager foreheads
Dulcie’s Inheritance (You Already Got it, Child)
By Penny Milam
Dulcie sat in her grandparents’ driveway, her head pressed against the steering wheel. Two days after the reading of the will, her aunts decreed that the cousins come and choose some mementos before it was all sold at auction. From her teens until just last year, Dulcie had lived in this house, a one-level brick rancher with a tidy stoop and one-car carport. When Mama died in that car accident, Mamaw and Papaw took her in—her daddy had never been in the picture.
Read More“Broken White Crackers” and More
By Kimberly Vargas
Broken white crackers
Lay my sweater on a wooden pew
upholstery circa-1950
if the AC gets too cold, I’ll button the wool
Across the aisle, my boyfriend pulls his mother’s whispers
into his ears: “Do you really think it’s a good idea to date a girl
from a broken home?”
A Different Morning
By Sunaya Pal
Routines and rituals are a part of our lives. Sometimes we follow them without any questions. Questioning them may lead to a reply one may not be ready for, or give a lesson for life?
The Road Ahead
November 1, 2019 Volume 4: Issue 2
Even though the leaves are falling and the days are darkening. Even though the nights are longer and the days colder. Still this is perhaps my most favorite time of year. It always seems to me so full of potential with the approach of the holidays and the new year.
We now approach the Christmas Season in which we celebrate the the birth of Jesus. Yes, he was probably born in October. Still, there is something special about Christmas during which we remember that Jesus brought Heaven down to Earth for all of us. He is the supreme example of the Sacred in the Ordinary.
With this issue we began accepting submissions through Submittable. If you have something to offer, please submit it there. We also have a new type of submission. We are offering a short play. We hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment.
Blessings.
Hands that Have Always Held Me
by Kristina Heflin
Father, where is the lamb?
The servants say you always bring a lamb
bleating and crying
spotless and pure
following guileless in your wake.
It cannot recognise the blood-stained knife at your hip
sharp enough to slice bone and sinew
with a single touch.
It doesn’t know the sticks
piled on the servant’s back that snap and creak
with every upward step.
They didn’t say this mountain would be so steep, Father.
Did the lambs stumble too?
The ones that have come before?
Father, where is the lamb?
Is it waiting at the top?
The Lord will provide, you say
but now I see no lamb
only the trembling of your hands
strong hands that have always held me.
Did the lambs feel the cold mountain wind
through their tight, curly fleece?
Did they realise their inevitable end?
The kindling, the knife, Father, now I know.
Kristina Heflin is an Arizona State University English major, based in Northern California. She has served on the editorial board of the literary journal Flumes and is Activities Coordinator for the Yuba College Literary Arts Club. She has been published in the literary journals Flumes, Canyon Voices, and Diverse Minds, the websites 2Elizabeths and the write launch, as well as the anthology The Beckoning. Future publications include Canyon Voices and the Same. When she’s not writing or tutoring English at Yuba College, she enjoys horseback riding and Marvel comics.
Hands that Have Always Held Me was first published in Underwood in May, 2019.
A Whale of a Tale
A play by Sylvia Melvin
SETTING: 780 B.C. in a small Jewish home
AT RISE: Levi hears a knock at the door and opens it to find his friend Jonah standing outside.
LEVI
(Levi throws his arms up in the air in surprise and then embraces Jonah.) Shalom, Jonah, my dear friend.
JONAH
Shalom, Levi. It’s so good to see you.
Read MoreNow Let Me Tell You This Story
I was in Peter’s cabin in southern Oregon, in the summer of 1981, Peter had finished at Crosier Seminary in 1965, and having done a stint as a Chaplain in the Navy, or maybe it was the Army, he declined to be ordained, and went to work selling books for New Directions.
In 1967, he’d been chatting up bookstores for James Laughlin, and he stopped in San Francisco—took LSD, and tried briefly to become King of the hippies. Shortly realizing there were too many pretenders to the throne, he then retreated to southern Oregon, where he bought a very small cabin in the woods and went on forays for Amanita Muscaria mushrooms every fall and for Amanita Pantherina’s every spring on the Oregon coast, or in the mountains. He’d dry hundreds of them and step into an altered reality most every day, then run ten miles and then in his mid-forties he looked like an athlete in his twenties.
Read MoreHonor Your Father and Your Mother
by Karen Lynn Woo
Almost anyone who knows the Bible will recognize the words, “Honor your father and your mother,” as part of what is known as “The Ten Commandments,” but just what does it mean to honor your father and your mother in today’s world?
Read MoreJustified
by Gale Acuff
In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said
that everybody must die, sooner or
later, which scared me because I’m only
ten years old to her twenty-five and I
love her and want to marry her one day
and that scares me, too, love I mean, almost
as much as death, I mean almost as much
as death scares me. On the other hand, does
love scare death, too? I might pray about that
tonight, before I go to sleep, after
I say the Lord’s Prayer and the others
for my dog and my folks and for the test
I have in English tomorrow, that I
might pass it. I don’t want to die but if
I’ll Always Know Who You Are
by Katie Bockino
Three things happened next. I learned by chance or fate, I still can’t decide which, that I had my daughter’s time of death wrong. My husband left me–not in the dark of night but after lunch. I watched him pack his socks and old college basketball trophies into his Honda Pilot as I picked greasy dandelions out of my toes. And, I learned all at once and yet not soon enough that there is life after death. Just not in the way my Judeo-Christian faith had wanted me to believe.
I was, in fact, going to see Willa again.
Read More
The Least Among Them
by Joseph Leverette
When I was in college, I had a job driving for the President of a large University. My duties were essentially to drive the prominent President on his business trips out of town, and to escort him to the airport for his flights as needed. The justification of the position was that I was providing security for the highly esteemed academic grand poohbah, but it was really just a convenient job perk for the El Presidente.
Read MoreOn Easter Sunday
by Maggie Babb
we bomb
them Monday
after Monday
fledglings stagger
bodies flounder
laser guided
hawks dive
we bomb them Friday
into Friday tiny
red bursting maple
buds obscure bobbing
tiny rafts rise
and fall drowning
sanctified we bomb
them Wednesday to
Wednesday
precision guided
honeybees cover
golden dandelions
fleeing bloodshed
with their thrumming
easy prey small
circular error probable
satellite guided smart
seeds breach erupt
swell corpses pile
we bomb
them Thursday
intoThursday sensitive
urban zones open mouthed
exclusive robins seek
munition worms
we bomb them
skunk cabbage unfurls
inverse cube law
reveals tender tendrils
purple green
coils
of despair
Maggie Babb is a working poet and prose writer with an interest in Investigative and Documentary Poetics. She is a member of the Hollowdeck Writers Guild in Maryland, USA. She lives with her African Grey parrot and German Shepherd.
Hydrology. Hydrophilia.
by Logan Garner
Of the moisture in the earth,
and the dark, musty soil,
ripe and rich with the film and girth
of one million earthworms:
Of the peat and muck, wet
and dripping brown water by the ounce
from a single squeezed handful:
Mixed Praise
by James Nicola
If God makes deluges and droughts,
I don’t think I can fathom God.
Is He unbalanced, is He unwell,
cursing with plenty, blessing with less
than enough? How can I, starving, bless
the feast? Alas, I’m stolider than
that, or smarter, or stupider,
to pretend that Nothing is a feast.
And in your absence I cannot pretend.
If God’s The One Who makes you absent,
what the h— is He, that I
should glorify? Pray? I would, sure,
except I don’t dare make a sound
for fear of cursing, for which I’d
be damned, and apart from you forever.
But then you return, and I’m insane
with joy. And no hunger, drought,
or deluge can make me not praise God.
James B. Nicola’s full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), and Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award.