volume 18.1
Words: Kris Wilcox, Patrick Hueller, Kara Dorris, Anu Khosla, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Sagirah Shahid, Angie Macri, Claire Scott, Rebecca Danelly, Carol Everett Adams, Cathy Allman, Jacqueline Hughes Simon, Julia Rapp, Jeffrey Gray
Images: Lilith Smith, Bryan Price, Mark Yale Harris, Talia Bergman, Adrienne Elyse Meyers, Clair Peckham, Ashley Hoiland, Michael Walrong, Kelley Hudson
FICTION
When the nursing unit director calls to say that his father has died during the night, he is lifted without warning from coffee and newspaper into stinging, new air.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Jay says, “this is humanity’s last chance. Its very redeemability is on the line.”
NON-FICTION
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.
A burly man approximately the size of a yeti in a jacket the color of caution tape made a ski cut across the convex roller. He applied the full weight of himself to his ski edge in order to make a line in the snow, releasing a mini avalanche below us.
POETRY
I’ve dusted the relics for display, careful to curate a collection of the self.
In this returning emergency, in this crisis I give you love poems caught between my teeth.
husband, parent, job, mind, limb, businesses downtown, the lots where sidewalks led to dead ends where nice old houses once had been.
To make a god’s eye totem, the young hippie Sunday School teacher showed me how to glue two popsicle sticks together and weave brightly colored yarn over and under, under and over the cross’s arms.
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.
“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.
Oddly enough, everything looks similar to yesterday—Lilac’s timid blooms in the west; these Dogwoods forced to thrive.
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.
