Julius James DeAngelus

Lancaster Best
Julius James DeAngelus

I read once that more than seeing, hearing, touching or tasting, our sense of smell offers us the most direct route to our past. Therefore, I hope it doesn’t sound so strange to you that whenever the scent of sharp provolone cheese reaches me, with its rich, musty, locked-away-and-forgotten aroma, I am eighteen again and madly in love. more

Lauren Scharhag and Ashley Cowger

West Side Girl
Lauren Scharhag

I wear my skin like some reject from the Tribes of Ham,
Pale and transparent as skim milk. I can never go home.

My father imparted to me like a curse:
“You’re just like your mother. You’ll never
Be able to live more than thirty miles from the West Side.”
And I think, Of course. He’s right.
He’s always right when I don’t want him to be.

And I wonder if it’s this curse, his curse,
Which also gifts him to be able to see into me,
And I to endure the pain of being seen. After all, my skin is his skin.

Ah, Marìa, Marìa, Marìa-- las très,
Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother,
And I am the break in the rosary beads.
I think of the placenta from my grandmother’s birth buried on the hill,
The hill, which I can never go back to.

Instead, I toe the thirty-mile mark.
“¡Bolilla!” They say. “¡Gringa!”
At nine, I saw myself as naked as Eve,
And hurried to cover up my whiteness.

Now I go, bearing my flesh like shame,
And the neighbors ask who the white girl is who comes and visits.

Someday, I will take a grater to my skin.
I shall cast it off. Flayed, I shall anoint myself with cuminos and cilantro.
In blood I shall make my pilgrimage.
On the Boulevard, I shall hail, Marìa.



Peter Never Came
Ashley Cowger

I was sitting on the edge of the counter, my feet dipping recklessly into the dirty sink, and he was sitting on the side of the bathtub, compulsively rubbing the soap grime along the rim with his thumb.
“I used to believe in Peter Pan,” I told him, leaning the side of my head against the bathroom mirror and closing my eyes. more

Jessica Silver and Yvonne Garrett

Bella
Jessica Silver

My sister if I had one
Would dress in red
Would star in porn films and lie about her day job

My sister if I had one
Would start bar fights
With beautiful girls
Walking away with rage in her eyes

My sister if I had one
Would dance alone in the bathroom
While I waited to shower

She would breathe alcohol
Swearing she was an addict

Promise to be there
But forget where there was

Break mirrors
Daring bad luck

She would chain smoke to the edge of dreams
Setting her bed on fire

She would wake from her inferno
Sneaking into my room
Mumble she was there just for the night


Like A River
Yvonne Garrett

Built in 1908 on a hill overlooking the mouth of the Columbia, the house stands huge against the sky with multiple rooflines, projecting bays, balconies, a widow’s walk and a two-story tower. Its dark peaked roof and chimneys are creeper-twined with open overhanging eaves. more

Joanne Lowery and Marie Stern

Muse Weeping
Joanne Lowery

What she provokes could flood Babylon
or rot the foundations of Alexandria.
Here in America, suburbs stay high and dry.
Our poets walk city streets inspired
by soot and taxi horns, the staccato
of fast walkers passing them by.
Anyone waiting at a crosswalk
needs a handkerchief for staunching.
She looks up, remembers the 41st floor
where she pushed a lover out the window.
For the seconds it took him to land
she felt his fear and weightlessness.
Her tears lubricate the description
of that head-over-heels plunge.
On the sidewalk is a puddle of her undoing.


The Dying Sounds
Marie Stern

The light from the TV made Jason’s face look biliously gray, anemic. “I didn’t think you could get through the biological clock anymore. There just aren’t those kind of loopholes. That’s gotta be faked. There’s no way.” more

Allen Peterson and Christine Ecklund

Happening Again
Allen Peterson

I say it again because it is happening again
The clothes that pretend to love me
are out there laughing and dancing on the line
glad to be free of me especially the shirts
whiter than I remember and unconfined

It is like the last line of September
when things are fully preparing for themselves
worm rolling up its leaf and painting the walls
with silk turning inward as if receiving a memo
on the first freeze and paradoxically the squirrels
are carrying leaves back inside the tree
as if reloading for next spring

In the theory of wind the infinitesimal heart
is moved by the least force and the earliest emotions
were observed in the laundry of the Middle East and Asia
whose shirts and tunics revealed that happiness was
lighter than air like the breath of animals rising in cold
I see its repeatable physics joking with the coast
I put my arms into them again. We console each other.




The Old Man In The Bed
Christine Ecklund

The old man in the bed is her father, not quite her dad. Connected to him are a few tubes she can see and a couple she can’t, which is just as well for both of them. She is his youngest and the one who knows him least. Until recently, she has been mostly grateful for that. She’s always been told she had his smile, his Swedishness, a little at the tip of the nose. more

Martha Christina and Shaindel Beers

Associations, Pond Side
Martha Christina

A splash of orange fin above the brackish water. . .
My father and I cross the Third Street Bridge,
careful of the men leaning and casting
their lines into the polluted lake

The maple tree unfurls its leaves. . .
In the emergency room
there weren’t enough blankets
to warm my dying father;
even if he’d been the only patient,
he couldn’t have been warmed.
His hands curled
over the faded bindings

A Monarch butterfly lights on the honeysuckle. . .
I’ve been dreaming again of my father
when he was healthy. Often
he appears in a cloud of butterflies,
his hands opening and closing,
like their wings


Longing on Hwy 10
Shaindel Beers

The Shell station is a horrible ship going nowhere. She feels lucky that it is
not a Mobil station or the irony would be too much. The cars drift along on
their way to Hwy 10—the only road out of this—the only town—she’s
known. more

Marsha Lee Berkman

Orphans
Marsha Lee Berkman


In my memory it is always summer. Winters in the middle of the country where I grew up were freezing, bitter, and dismal, but the summers were usually fiercely hot and humid. Not so good during the day if you had to be out working in it, but wonderful in the evenings after supper, when it had cooled off. more