Tag: prose

A Monster of Correction by William Doreski

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A Monster of Correction

No one knew how Aunt Alice got into our family. With her starry blue gaze and stilted posture she looked like a refugee from some tiny, impoverished European state. She moved into our apartment with a fat leather bag and an armful of books from Goodwill’s dusty shelves. The first night, when Carole served pigs’ feet and artichokes, Aunt Alice proved to be a monster of correction. Pigs’ feet should be boiled, not roasted. Artichokes go better with beef. Our dining room looks dingy. We should repaint it a delicate shade of yellow. Carole’s apron looks old-fashioned. Your hair sticks up funny. We went to bed early that night, leaving Aunt Alice complaining on the phone to a stranger she had randomly dialed. Days passed. Nights passed. The monster of correction corrected everyone we knew. She told Calvin he talked oddly. She ordered Melinda to wear longer skirts and stop showing her stuff. She told the Unitarian preacher that his God was a wimp and needed elocution lessons. She even tried to correct the sloppy eating habits of our cats, but they ignored her. Carole and I couldn’t ignore her. Aunt Alice had a voice of flint on steel. She sparked when she spoke, and several times almost set the place on fire. Finally we asked her to leave. Her response was to stretch out on the sofa and die. She was clutching a sheet of paper with instructions for the disposal of her carcass. She wanted to be cremated, and the urn with her ashes set on our mantle. Done and done. Now when that metallic voice creaks in the dark we correct her by telling her no one can hear unless she speaks up.

*

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is No Vacancy (2025). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Moving Objects by Marc Frazier

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Moving Objects

How can I be so inappropriate? I think riding the Green Line to my therapist Simon’s office. At a writers’ conference I had unleashed my rage at a staff member. The director of the conference gave me an official warning like I was a three-year-old: if I didn’t behave, I would have to leave. What causes my rudeness? It’s easy to blame chemistry, genetics, or my parents’ upbringing for things. We have pretty much ruled out brain damage and other odd and sundry neurological disorders like Oliver Sacks wrote about. I didn’t mistake my wife for a hat. Simon rarely, if ever, buys my theories. But I guess that’s what I pay him for. I’m just blunt like my parents. Then it hits me: my mother had recently died and my anger could have been at anyone. I missed her. I always leave therapy thinking of what people say at the end of AA meetings: Keep Coming Back. Going home, I take stock of my fellow el passengers. Whenever I do this kind of people scanning, a Joni Mitchell line rattles in my head: A thunderhead of judgment was gathering in my gaze. Sometimes I forget where I’m going. Sometimes I wonder how these trains move so fast considering the weight we carry inside—sufficient to throw off something in the universe.

*

Marc Frazier has published poetry in nearly a hundred fifty journals. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” His four books are available online. Marc has also published memoir pieces, photographs, essays, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association contest. Marc, an LGBTQ author in Fort Lauderdale can be found on his website marcfrazierwrites.com. X @marcfrazier45, Insta mcfj45.

Anticipatory grief by Lyanne Wang

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Anticipatory grief

My chest readies. I no longer know if it’s asthma, or the weather warming, again. I tap my fingers to count the years: the thumb slides back to the index. Five years, almost. Grief measures itself in cycles, and I steady my wishing by feeding the wild, wild spirals. The curl of her hair, rounding the noose. The circle of fireflies in the Minnesotan sky, where I had escaped in June. The way I count time, a winding path to August, and then, a straight line to Boston: 3,110 miles away, away until — April, the fifth since her death. I am waiting, now, in March. The moon is waning, as it always does. The grief, becoming, again.

*

Lyanne Wang is a writer based in the Bay Area and a poetry editor at Pithead Chapel.

Four Poems by Leila Abeni Jackson

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IN THE TIME OF GLASS CAPTIVES

Days were measured in indices of refraction. I woke with a fever and, inexplicably, bleeding toes, as though I had been dancing. An ocean of sweat, its tendrils the sheets. I ran a cold shower. Days were measured in millimeters thick. It started with a watchtower, a bottomless brunch, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Around me, people were eating and regurgitating and so I did the same. They spoke of faceless men, palm trees, salt flats. Days were measured in relative efficiency. They piled their plates high and I thought of Kilimanjaro. I excused myself to the bathroom, sweaty and hotcold. When I looked in the mirror, I had a fly’s thousandfold eyes, each surface its own wide and wriggling creature. In the time of glass captives, days were measured in ghosts, in depth of stomach, in eighty-five seconds to midnight. Back at the table, Guantanamo was old news. They were discussing sponsorships and calling for more mimosas. I saw peristalsis thousandfold, villi swaying tirelessly like kelp forests. Like a snake, something in me unhinged its jaw for more.

*

MANY SMALL CRESCENDOS

I was born with my eyes wide open, milky and dark, or so the story goes. In this way, I took the minutes. I bet on black. They shot her in the middle of a busy street, the sun washing its chyme out of her hair, touching her mouth like it intended to climb inside. She spoke charitably about it afterwards: I would tell young girls to follow their dreams, that you can do anything you set your mind to. Magnified and scraping the sky, lips parted. There were clothes, but there weren’t. There were faces, but not really. The next day I went to the body shop. Really, I didn’t know better. I wanted to see it for myself: whose hand, whose cheek, whose swath of knee, which small crescendos went where. They shimmered in the low light. Some of them grew legs. In that moment, it was just somebody’s horrifying basement, some collagist gifting my face to a new naked body. My same forehead. My new hands. It was the same but it was different. Every day the same liver, every night a new vulture. It was a thunderstorm stealing my face, she said, rolling over my body. But it wasn’t real, and anyway, it happens to everyone. You get over it; you move on. This was the radio on a Sunday afternoon, while I was washing the sun’s vomit out of my favorite skin. Supposedly they shot her on a balcony, back to the stars, Venus peeking out from behind her neck like an earring. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. In this way, I took note. I bet on black. The Milky Way beheld us wide open, or so the story goes. I wouldn’t know; I closed my eyes.

*

PULMONARY EMBOLISM

How a bubble in a hose can kill the diver to whom it rushes
To deliver its gifts. How sometimes pain is mistaken
For progress. How I, thinking I would not wake, woke—
Flushed with cold and pressed to a stranger, who said,
With no mouth, you could have died. I chose to take it
As a welcome back, then changed my mind and went with
A simple hello. Until then, I’d had recurring dreams about
This waking up. The curious business of being rearranged
With my eyes closed, like a repeated loser of the shell game,
Never guessing which one hides the stone. It seemed too
Simple to be true—I lived, and so I won—when really,
I’d guessed wrong again and had no idea where the stone
Had hidden itself away. It was too soon to tell, they said,
Whether it was in fact out of my lungs, or whether it was
Giggling somewhere I’d forgotten to check, a hidey-hole
I’d thought was out-of-bounds. I had recurring dreams
About guessing wrong again, though at each moment
You were there to find the right shell, squirreled away.
Oh, love. How I’d laughed with you, felt the air shoot
Up and out, bellies pressed together like rounded drums
When meanwhile, up north, that stray dog in all its
Ravenous beauty scavenged for the most comfortable
Front porch it could find, and my lungs, ever the hosts,
Opened the back door wide.

*

THE TESTAMENT OF ANARCHA

                 I
Shuffled first by my boy—at least I thought
he was a boy, because I once heard
that boys sit higher up—he shuffled me then ran,
giggling, to some light-dark place I knew
I could not follow. After the second day of pushing,
they whispered, she might die, and I thought, good.
I could hold his hand on the way there.
Maybe there would be music.
Shuffled a second time by the doctor,
though he looked more like a grave-robber
to me. Couldn’t imagine what he was possibly doing
except robbing the grave of my grave.
Didn’t stop the blood or the whatever else,
but may have made something entirely new.
Not a child but a monster. He said
you are loathsome, disgusting.
The girls whispered—they said this monster
has thirty faces and all of them are cold
with metal teeth here to chew me up
from the inside. The girls held me down.
I was shuffled twenty-nine more times
and they held my shoulders, my hair,
stuffed a sand-white rag between my teeth
so that I could not speak or scream.
Was it normal? To sweat this much?
Was it normal not to know four years had passed
and yet know I was still loathsome, disgusting?
Littered with debris like some stray animal,
I had long ago accepted that this was hell.
Some days I was a tilled field,
others an axed tree. Often I was the moon,
waiting to be plucked from the sky
by the next steel trap. The girls were all my age.
Sometimes I wondered if their sons ever giggled at them
from behind a light-dark veil every night.
Though we weren’t friends, they wiped my sweat.
Sometimes they cupped my face, like mothers.

                 II
I woke engulfed in tongues of sand, swathed
carefully like a newborn. There was music.

A hundred hands touching me—not to stuff rags between
my lips, but to gently carry away the sobs and spit

born there. An old woman lay on my left, a stranger
whose name I somehow knew, her brown skin sagging

and flaking from its home like paper. She held my hand.
The women whisper-chatted amongst themselves,

breasts all bared like new mothers who had forgotten
their shame. They helped me to my feet, bathed

me in the surf until I stopped saying loathsome, disgusting,
until I forgot the shape of the words in my mouth.

There was music. There were hands in my hair,
teasing it into shapes. I thought there would be fire, I said.

The women laughed, as a bird laughs when staring down a rifle:
as though carrying the knowledge that only a chosen few are blessed

with flight. I had no pain, and whether or not I had scars
didn’t seem to matter. My dead skin snowed off in sheets

below the buttery and unplucked moon. I did not tell them
that I had met the Devil, the endless hollowings,

the deaths of all I’d never owned. I didn’t have to.
They already knew. When I held still, there was music.

*

~ Author’s Notes ~

“In the Time of Glass Captives” is after Evan Antonakes’ “Crack”.

“Many Small Crescendoes” is dedicated to the increasing number of women who, due to advances in artificial intelligence, have had their face and likeness used without their consent. AI pornography is a deeply violating reality. Like other concerns addressed in this collection, it robs people of ownership over their bodies.

“The Testament of Anarcha” pays homage to Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who underwent over thirty gynecological surgeries without anaesthesia to treat her vaginal fistula and to serve as a test subject for research in the field. Her tormentor, J. Marion Sims, is still honored today as the “father of gynecology”. In his autobiography, he repeatedly describes her body as “loathsome” and “disgusting”.

*

Leila Abeni Jackson is a proud DC native and a Pushcart-nominated Harvard undergraduate studying English and History of Science. Her work appears in the Harvard Advocate, Rattle, Sixteen Rivers Press, and elsewhere. She is the former poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate and her most recent work includes her senior thesis, Uncharted Song, a poetry collection which explores Blackness and the medical body through time.

Two Poems by Rebecca Aronson

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On Working in My Son’s Room After He Has Moved Out

What does it mean that the only art you’d allow in your room is a tiny painting that blends with the blue walls, a portal through which to see two silver-haloed planets and a droplet of a moon in a star-splattered, velvety sky? They are not like earth, nor unlike earth exactly, just as the blue of this room is nothing like and very like a certain kind of sky. It’s not, I don’t think, that you dislike art in general, but you don’t like to be pinned to a single idea. There’s a book of logic puzzles on the shelf we always used to wonder at. Planets are to identity as paint is to fish. No. Space is to color as the roses blooming outside your window are to the tiny eye of a praying mantis. No? I always use wrapping paper printed with stars for your gifts. I’ve given you cards that unfold to reveal a three-dimensional paper ship, a bedspread that looks like an unmown field. That is to say, I have wanted to give you the world, but since it has never been mine to give I bought you a small portrait of imaginary planets someone else’s child painted, and hung it on your blue walls, which were not the neon green you said you wanted, but this other color, different than either of us would have chosen, but beautiful, it turns out, in all the kinds of light we have here in this little room on earth.

*

Halloween snowstorm, Minneapolis, 1991

I remember that I didn’t know my neighbors
except the man across the hall with a kitten
he let wander our hallway. On the morning D called
at dawn muttering nonsense about angels and windows
I saw the city buried in snow, white sky, white mounds,
the streets whited out and everything as still
as a held breath. The kitten man and I went from floor
to floor and at every door asked what was needed
then took a wagon that someone had and struggled
into the new white-out world where everyone lived
now to help another. We worked in pairs and coteries
to dig out cars from beneath snowbanks, to carve paths
wide enough for one person to pass
between piles which were already starting to lose their brilliant shine,
we sculpted streets where memory said streets should be,
took turns following the shovelers with bags of sand
and cannisters of coarse salt. We took turns shoveling,
throwing the heavy stuff into mounds
that fattened and grew and sweated and froze slick again.
We dragged the wagon a few blocks that took all morning
to a store that was somehow open and bought whatever we could find
that was anything like what our neighbors wanted
and heaved the wagon back another hour along our own furrows
and up the mountain where the front steps used to be
and knocked again at all the doors on all the floors
to hand out all the not-quite-what-was-asked-for sundries
and went to our own doors exhausted, as happy
as I had ever been.

*

Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com

Ghosts of the American East by Jerry Wemple

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Ghosts of the American East

Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.

Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.

Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.

Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.

*

Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.

Three Poems by Howie Good

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A Dog’s Life

What I remember happening probably didn’t happen quite as I remember it. I was only 4, maybe 5, playing with toy cars and trucks on the sidewalk. A stray dog – a big, brutish German shepherd mix – appeared out of nowhere. They say dogs can sense fear. That frightening dog sensed mine. It snarled from deep within its Nazi guard dog heritage and then snapped at my face. Everything went black. The next thing I remember is mom, a kid herself, scooping me up in her arms and staggering down the street covered in my blood. Time is a funny thing. Seventy years later, in the dark gray of a winter twilight, I pull against my collar, a dog on a chain.

*

Wedding Song

The most popular wedding song in the spring of 1973 was “We’ve Only Just Begun (White Lace and Promises)” by the brother-sister duo, The Carpenters. Its sentimental lyrics set to a simple melody appealed to both the soft of heart and the soft in the head. Our wedding song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Although we were young – just 21 – we were old enough to realize white lace can yellow and fray and promises be broken. Call it cosmic pessimism if you want; philosophers do. So much that exists exists in contradiction. The moon shines despite being barren rock, and in Alabama frozen embryos are considered children.

*

New World Order

It’s the belated end of the American Century. You can hear the slow, monotonous ticking of the cooling engine. A self-proclaimed king and his coterie of sociopaths have recast the culture in their own distorted image without so much as a “pardon me.” The lamp beside the golden door has been extinguished. Human bones are used in soups. Breathing is frequently a struggle. A fine black thread of anxiety runs through everything. I cope, but just barely, and only by exceeding the maximum daily recommended dosage. My face, with its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a signed confession. Some things are crimes even if the cops don’t have to be called.

*

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author. His latest poetry collection, True Crime, is due out in March from Sacred Parasite.

some taverns use shotguns for door handles by Kimberly Sailor

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some taverns use shotguns for door handles
For Jessica

you’re a vegetarian, and that’s where things got complicated at the Americana Holiday Spectacular. three dive bars in a tucked-in mining town, shafts sealed up after Nixon, lampposts still burning gas. avant-garde menus with two types of burger: cow or hog, pickles or none. sometimes fried food is just processed cheddar, but it comes from the same spitting oil vat as the animals, and you wouldn’t mix and match. i still don’t know how a bite-sized town budgets fireworks in December, or how the volunteer fire department times the lighting of the tree perfectly with the last big smoky bang, but fragile miracles happen everywhere. like how you married a hunter who makes his own jerky. like the way you lean into me when I say something funny.

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Kimberly Sailor, from Mount Horeb, WI, is the editor-in-chief of the Recorded A Cappella Review Board and author of the 2024 poetry chapbook “Holy Week in Cave Country” (Finishing Line Press). She has been a finalist for the Wisconsin People & Ideas poetry contest and the Hal Prize for poetry. Sailor serves her community as a volunteer firefighter/EMT. www.kimberlysailor.com