Uber Ride, RDU Edition

Uber Ride, RDU Edition by Carol Everett Adams She’d no front teeth, but said more than any other Uber driver ever, asked me after every story, Does that make sense? Her eyes Ubering off the road as she checked mine in the rearview. We Ubered in the forests of her pitcherisk acres, Ubered on her many riding mowers, Ubered past the years her Pawpaw raised her up to hunt, so she’ll never go hungry, praise Trump, and good God, but our hearts hurt for the woman in the news who Ubered from the Blue Ridge Trail. But you know, her own cancer-passed brother once rented a convertible just so her niece and nephew could have something like a coaster ride. They perched on top of the back seat, arms up, flew and laughed and laughed, and Lord, even I could remember the sun that day,  like I Ubered down someone else’s street, does that make sense? Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Class Reunion, Homecoming

CLASS REUNION, HOMECOMING by Cathy Allman “You sure take a lot of sunrise photos,” the gray-haired woman who used to be drill team captain tells me when I scroll through my iPhone library to show grandchildren photos. No matter how much cake, or punch, or how many balloons, if not for the yearbook senior snapshots on our name tags, I wouldn’t know anyone. Did I even really know them when we graduated together in 1975? Decades of separation reunited. Captain Carry sees my shot of the river iced over, snow frosting the bare trees. “We’re in the winter of our lives,” she proclaims and sips white wine from a plastic cup. “No, this is fall, maybe even Indian summer. Is the phrase ‘Indian summer’ politically incorrect?” Photos flicker almost like a movie until I find the new baby photo. I hold my granddaughter in the chosen frame. Her open baby eyes are locked with mine. I have some knowing glance of adoration that responds to her blank curiosity, almost an unspoken prophecy of love beyond the overlap of mortal time. Yes, the days are getting shorter, but my garden is full—some tomatoes still green, some red and ripe, some rotting on the vine. The boys of summer have finished their pennant race. The World Series is here. Football is robust and populated with Swifties. Anyway, I like winter. I don’t ski. I hate being cold, but when I go back home after this reunion, back north, I will again be transformed into a child when I watch snow fall. Landscapes draped in white-cold sparkle. Leafless, tired vistas brand-new when frozen. She says, “So cute” in response to the grandchild picture and shows me her own shared albums. So goes the evening while the DJ blasts oldies. Tomorrow, I’ll return to retired status. But at this dance I’m suspended in a snow day, some surprise reprieve from the anxiety of exams—the hidden relief from the blizzard of childhood. Poetry Home Art by Ashley Hoiland

Curation

Curation by Sarah Fawn Montgomery I’ve dusted the relics for display, careful to curate a collection of the self. Follow the docent past the great hall: weapons, splattered canvas, coins and ironic urinals, world leaders made of marble before entering an exhibit of my body and best mistakes—scars and sex with strangers, vertebra resisting alignment, spirit claiming indifferent cities. The cabinet of regret outsizes the case of joys but not the shelves of grief carefully catalogued— assault, sexual; disability, invisible; father, deceased; violence, domestic; womb, barren. An intern wipes clean the glass for zero dollars an hour though the gift shop sells my teeth, the brittle fingernails plucked after death for less than a bad cup of coffee. Preservation isn’t easy, so forgive the arbitrary arrangement of my underwear and grudges, resentments next to a broken childhood doll, private matters made public, persona a requirement for audience. I tried to present the story of my survival but museums only display what is already lost, curate what has ceased to exist. Fiction Home Art by Michael Walrond

Once again, a poem about [ ]

Once again, a poem about [    ] by Sagirah Shahid In this returning emergency, in this crisisI give you love poemscaught between my teeth. What’s new about the little liars our lives have become?I need you to taste this day with me,to live it out with gusto, even though we both knowwe’re going to die eventually. You can’t teach a poet new tricks.I lattice my fingers into yoursand let my eyes lap up the moonwith you by my side. We are both shiny and larger than lifeon the inside. We are both cratered and citylesson the inside. No one inhabits usexcept for the lightwhich we reflect backto the people who keepprecise distance. As if to avoidthe growing shadowwhich comes backas much as it leaves us. We are invisible now.We are visible. We are the smallestsliver of universe.We are almost whole. Fiction Home Art by Kelley Hudson

You Could Have Gone West, Acknowledgements

You Could Have Gone West, Acknowledgements by Kara Dorris Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ nounplural noun: acknowledgements    1. acceptance of the truth or existence of something.“there was no acknowledgment of the family’s trauma” 1979 was the year. The U.S. established diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal, Three Mile Island melted down, and you began attempting to conceive me, a baby girl, in the back of a ‘67 Camaro. You know, you sought balance, a future sister for a brother, one of each and all of that. The two of the 2.5 kids. Add in Lassie and all set.   At the same time in California, did Brenda Ann Spencer gather ammunition and orange juice, think all set, as she sat in her living room and opened fire on the elementary school across the street. Was she thinking to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream? You know, the movie came out that week. And, somehow, that thought was translated into, god, I hate Mondays. Reporters. They never see subtext. She surrendered. So, what? I want to know if she longed for death. Could she not face, even at 16, the mile markers ahead? I don’t see how anyone can face the enormity, a mayfly life stretched into double infinity sign. The infinitely looping Route 66.    Don’t you ever wonder what could have been? What if Voyager I never revealed Jupiter’s rings? If the Iran Hostage Crisis never ended? What if you had gone west? If you never went to see Star Trek, climbed into that backseat, took down your pants?     ∞   Acknowledgements You could have gone west, just drove, let the road fill you up even as meth stripped you down, not that you hit the hard stuff then, just the pot and whiskey of a shotgun wedding.  You could have left your son. You hadn’t saved him from anything except oblivion of not being born.  You could have lost your shirt in Vegas. Watched Michael Jackson living off the wall. You looked like the lead singer in an ‘80s hair band, your long lank strands, your tall, lean frame.  Could have protested the canceled Mardi Gras with your mere presence.  Could have been more than a jack-in-the-box, said your name was Joe when you took that Wyoming waitress home. Could have fathered another daughter. Remember your first? You named her Eve, called her Molly. You dream of her still, how sweet and unknowable she was at the beginning, before she became known and knowing. Before she showed you in between places addicts must go.    ∞  Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ noun    2. the action of expressing or displaying gratitude or appreciation for something.“she received an award in acknowledgment of her work” 1979 seemed to stretch into 1980. A year of attempting to conceive. The Iran Hostage Crisis lasted 444 days. It was enough time to create new families. Was there an after? In An American in Paris, Jerry renames Lise, allows her to forget her occupation past; she pronounces his name with a French accent and suddenly his wartime is forgotten. Can there be an after disaster? Yes. Look at the trench coat, that belt you tie against rain, against time, was meant to hold grenades. And even though your hands blow shit up, you can’t pass yourself off as heavy artillery.    If Dirty Dancing had aired five years earlier, you wouldn’t have settled for him, another not-the-one. You could have carried a watermelon, not a grenade, not a kid, not the rain. Could have not lived in the trenches. But divorce shellshock lingers. What if you had headed west, been on American Airlines Flight 191 out of Chicago? Can death be a kind of life? Even as you slid into that ‘67 Camaro, as you lifted your peasant blouse, unbuckled your bra and leaned into his hands.     ∞  Acknowledgements You could have gone west, been a Vegas showgirl, a Midwest Rockette kicking thighs over chest on stage rather than over the backseat of a muscle car. It was supposed to be the time of your life. You could have scooped out the Grand Canyon with your hands, rode a donkey all the way down, bleached your hair blond, widened that streak of light and rebellion.  You could have become stewardess, flown Paris, London, Minneapolis, learned the sign language of leaving, of always assessing survival tools and nearest exits.  You could have left your son, a lesson you learned from his father. From your father’s father too. And I’m told that leaving one kid is easier than leaving two.  You could have fallen in love with shadows, the way light weaves and narrows, cul-de-sacs of shadows, shadows within shadows, of stones, in drawers.  You would have walked past me never knowing I was never born. You would have loved my shadow. You would have loved your own.    ∞   Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ noun    3. a letter confirming receipt of something.“I received an acknowledgment of my application”  Somewhere inside these bones, this brain, this heart, I know I wouldn’t rewind, just watch as addiction and depression climb into the backseat of a young man’s sick ride, a ‘67 Camaro. As a young woman’s shoulder pads and legwarmers sink into the floorboard, past, into the pavement, into roots of the overarching trees, ambivalent cover dripping sap against humid windows, no cover at all against the Texas heat, no Bruce Springsteen’s Cover Me, just that song, Do It To Me One More Time playing over and over again in the cassette player, until the ribbon gives out, tangles up, and rips, as all things rip, when you try to untangle.     Nonfiction Home Art by Claire Peckham

On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced

On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced. by Julia Rapp That we threw our rings in the Hudson River a moment ago.To celebrate, let’s drink alcohol that is the color of indoor pools.Tell me your last words. I will share the ways I have pierced myself.Let’s touch each other in a corner booth. Smash our bottles in the back alley.Enter a street where the people are fleas and the city is a wounded deer.It could have been our two-year anniversary, but I have been dead for years.We could start here, on a building that looks like a glass hive, and leap.No? Okay, let’s eat disappointing sushi on the hotel floor and keep talking.You want to live in a shade of purple that rolls along like a story without a plot.I want to live in a house made entirely of citrus, but San Francisco will do.Do I seem careless and radiant to you? I am trying to be a plot device.You tell me to stop kissing you like we’re married and I have just learnedthat you are dying. But darling, we are dying. So I must tell youthat I have lied— I do believe in that which endures. I (almost) do. Poetry Home Art by Mark Yale Harris

As to Wonder

Igneous lump.

If something is missing, don’t mention it,

If something is missing, don’t mention it, by Angie Macri husband, parent, job, mind, limb, businesses downtown, the lots where sidewalks led to deadends where nice old houses once had been. One hot night, two girls walked down one, then turned to look at the street as it must have been seen from the porch back then. Oh we shouldn’t do this, the older said, it feels strange, and so they didn’t again. Streetlights, headlights caught in the pebbles in the concrete like lights in animals’ eyes, in their eyes as they walked home. Permissible: to speak of rain so long gone fields burned where they stood around the town. Because all knew, rain would return, for sure, sooner or later. Poetry Home Art by Bryan Prince

Anorexia

Anorexia by Claire Scott Bear with meI have been given muchbut received little steeped in refusalwhere blades of hungerkeep despair at bay concealing ringsof whorled memoriesmidnight hands insisting no mercy in my morning teanot noticing the warm rain floatingover fallow land not noticingthe piles of pineapples, of pearsof cheeses and chocolateson an empty plate Poetry Home Art by Lilith Smith

Palouse Hills, Near Pullman

Palouse Hills, Near Pullman by Jeffrey Gray Riding west on the bus from the dry land east of the mountains I knew I wouldn’t see you again for a year or more and out the window lay those hills two thousand years of silt blown down from the glaciers eroding pale buff but wintry I was seeing them for the first time and never would again never will with your death now so many years behind and no reason to go back to the cropped wheat or to your wish to be a meadow with that return cut off in your life’s own evening in those rooms in that town in that car and the death that you took— (though we say she took her life —) never leaves me not in the cells formed this morning nor those in the infant night where they foliate unsensed unseen. Poetry Home Art by Lilith Smith