Fiction Feature: Touch by Stephen Wunderli

I knew the moment he leapt from the train. Here he was, mid-stride, airborne and about to fall. Of course, he’d been falling for years. He could feel the shame unraveling behind him like the cords of a parachute with no chute, just fibers leaving his body, finally. He wasn’t unattractive, not his fault. And his clothes were not what you would expect a young man jumping from a train to wear. They were clean, no miles of desperation ground into his elbows, his knees, the side of his body he slept on. No. Let’s see if we can read the cords as they unspool and float above him: a woman, standing against him. He touched her on the wrist. She smiled at him, her hazel eyes, his blue, really blue at the moment. Anyway, she understood his shy heart without asking. That’s what he loved. That and her skin. He loved how it responded to his fingertips, rising, electrified, aching as if it was the first time she’d ever been touched. The whole of his body craved touch, fingertips on the inside of his forearm, his own fingers thrumming her rib cage to life. Her hip against his. Touch. Not the way the grown man had touched him when he was a child, groping him hungrily, even drooling, making the then boy hard and ashamed. The boy recoiled, never touched anyone again, until her. Her hair was unashamed; it draped her face, a shade to be drawn back. He traced the vein on her neck leaving a wake of goosebumps. He longed to kiss her ear, to let his tears roll down her cheeks and pool at the base of her neck. She pressed her body against his. It was summer, and the heat made their bodies warm. He felt her shape, so different than the grown man’s that held him down, nearly drowning him in dark stench. She smiled at him, at his reaction to her body. He looked down, ashamed, trembling. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.” The tears came and dropped useless to the ground. Even her feet were perfect, delicate, at ease in the grass. Her fingertips touched the tears from his chin. He quivered. She pulled politely away and they sat in the shade watching shadows and feeling the wind that mocks lovers’ touch, brushes hair away then leaves amid anticipation. He wouldn’t talk. She was patient; she collected her hair and tucked it into the back of her shirt so that he would know he didn’t have to talk, although she must have wanted him to. She must’ve wanted him to touch her again; she took long breaths at the thought of it, his fingers on the side of her face, tracing her shoulder, pausing, not sure which path to take. “I should say something,” he whispered. She leaned into him, just slightly, making it safe. But a stench rolled in from the underbrush, and he pulled away. He didn’t sleep for three nights straight, afraid of himself. He is just one of many stories I could tell you. No one at school saw him leave. No one saw him abandon his hand-me-down car next to the rail-yard. His rapid heartbeat driving the train forward. I saw him standing, the steel doors thrown open, hating even the wind touching him. But hers was different, wasn’t it? I can see it in his eyes as he falls toward me. The stones just below my surface. I am shallow. He scatters me into a million diamonds hurtling upward, each imprisoning the sun. It’s beautiful, the end of penance.  

Stephen Wunderli is a writer living in Salt Lake City. He is a past director of Writers at Work, a writing conference in Park City, Utah. He has published several children’s books, mainly with Henry Holt & Co. He most recently published a short story with The Kalahari Review.

Poetry Feature: The sun shines brighter when I am hungry by Celeste Vandegriff

The sun shines brighter//when I am hungry//and the air tastes pure//like I am taking my first breath//I am so aware//that I am a living//breathing//human//thing//with potential burning white-hot through my flesh//early hunger is a delirious//roaring//high//like the raw electric joy that rises//when my breakfast starts//and ends//with a few swallows of warm coffee//it does hurt//the hunger//but the crawling stomach pain//transforms into//productive pain//workout pain//A-plus pain//first-kiss-nausea pain//proud pain//like my mother telling me my diet is working//like the roller-coaster-adrenaline of scale numbers dropping//dread drowns elation//as the blue-white morning fades//into golden afternoon//here//I must face a deep shame//I dedicated myself to hunger at eleven//I am now twenty-one years old//I have made it past lunch exactly once//it was a sugar-high happiness//yet//today//like every day//of the past ten years//I eat//if hunger is flight//food is burial//food sticks to my throat//chokes me//like hospital-grade nutrient sludge//drying up the caffeine//the purpose//the high//food settles into my stomach//like silt at the bottom of a polluted pond//I have bested much of myself//I have muted my mind//censored my tongue//forced my feet//along paths I did not want to take//yet my stomach//always wins.

Celeste Vandegriff is a pre-med biology student in her senior year at Towson. She has shown her dedication to Towson and its surrounding community through years of work as a Writing Center tutor, EMT, and domestic violence hotline volunteer. Vandegriff is in the Honors College and chose to minor in English to find people to talk about books with. She is president of the knitting club, vice president of Original Blend A Cappella, and writes in her free time to relieve stress.

Poetry Feature: TODAY JUST FOR YOU by Jane Costain

      TODAY JUST FOR YOU

                             (a found poem courtesy of email spam)

 

You might find this interesting.

                                      There are bridges only the bravest

        would cross in star-spangled style.

                                                    In the decades since monumental 

          explosions, this is big. Worth the wait. 

                                                               There is still time. But now you better hurry. 

Attractive Russian Women Looking for Love!

                                 You might want to take a closer look.

                                                   We have some recommendations for you.

                       Meet your match today.

                                    (Three-ways are even better.)     

                                                                             Make the most of your summer.

                                                                       Stream in the sun.

Celebrate!

Jane Costain is the author of the chapbook Small Windows (Main Street Rag, 2018) and has privately published A Dozen Centos. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Plainsongs, The MacGuffin, Pinyon Review, and Iris Literary Journal. She has a master’s degree in the creative arts in learning from Lesley College and has taught in public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband, Gary Moore, in Denver.

 

Nonfiction Feature: The Acolytes by Eva Niessner

Close your eyes, and imagine.

You are a 12-year-old girl and real boys do not like you, and you are not sure if you like them. But the ones in movies—the ones in films and TV shows, the ones in fantasy and sci-fi stories, the ones with wings and horns and fangs and elf ears—you like them. You like when they are nice, except you also like when they are mean. They’re hurting, maybe. They need someone to be kind.

Your heart beats faster when you think about being kind in this way, to this kind of person. There is something growing an inch a day inside you like a well-watered sunflower. There is something reaching for the light, and you do not know what it is named.

In real life, you know that boys will laugh at you or ignore you altogether. You have a moon face and a bob that curls up unstylishly. You exist at two ends of the academic spectrum, either raising your hand with feverish desperation to be called on because you know the answer or doodling or reading under the table because you cannot be bothered with long division. You don’t know any of the members of *NSYNC, and you can’t tell any of them apart. None of them can do magic, so you don’t really care. You check out fat books from the library and delight in how hard it is to fit them in your backpack. You are, in short, a hard sell to a boy your own age.

But your girl friends who also like elves and pirates and vampires, they don’t see anything strange about you. They can be just as loud, take up just as much space, when they see you in the hallway. They invite you to the movies and then to sleepovers so you can debrief over the men, men, monstrous men, the stranger the better. 

In real life, they like you for who you are. The stranger the better.

In real life, you start devoting yourself to female friends in a way that other girls do not. 

Do you like the male characters that you have all bonded over, or do you like the bonding with the girls more? Do you like writing longhand in the notebook about how they will fall in love with you all and take you to live in a mansion, or do you like the way they are delighted by your stories? 

Perhaps they are the same plant, a cluster of shared roots, but these feelings sprout separately, and they do not look connected from the surface. 

 

Imagine you are in high school and you can’t decide if you’re gay because you still pine for the men you see in the movies. You play at dating boys. You want them to like you, but when they do, you start to hate them. When they show you attention, you feel smothered. You notice their every flaw with scientific precision. You break up with your first boyfriend at your locker because you don’t even want to look at him anymore, even though he never did anything wrong. When you tell him it’s over, he makes a face that you’ve never seen before.

But you’re boy-crazy, right? Can you still be boy-crazy if you only want boys that can never be attained? You think maybe you’re girl-crazy too, but that is the part you do not say out loud. No one seems directly opposed to it—your parents voted for Obama and spin David Bowie records, and your grandmother speaks fondly of the gay men she worked with at a now-extinct airline. Still, you feel a little dizzy when you think about telling people you’re girl-crazy. It is easier to talk about elf men. It’s a little easier to believe that you will be the queen of his kingdom than that your feelings for someone else might be returned.

You want to believe this isn’t all there is. Boys who tell their sisters they’re fat, boys who share their girlfriends’ nudes. Boys who flirt with you as a joke, the joke being no one ever really would. Boys who follow your friends home until they agree to date them. Boys who do not know their girlfriends’ birthdays or eye colors. This can’t be all there is. Please, God, this can’t be all there is.

 

Imagine, now, you are in your twenties. You are openly bisexual. You are in graduate school. You’re doing what you love, right? You’re doing what you love? 

You’re studying creative writing and you’re going to teach and your dreams are coming true and you are so stressed that you have developed a persistent twitch in your left eye. When you look up reasons that might be happening to you, Google says that it may be caused by caffeine intake and anxiety. You have just received word that a family member checked in to an inpatient mental health facility, and you understand that now is not your turn to break down. Maybe next week. Maybe after this paper.

Really. You are doing what you love. Promise.

By now you have decided that you do not want an ordinary man at all, and your youthful attempts to date them look silly and costume-ish, like when you used to wear your mom’s homecoming dress, pretending to be a bride. You talk to women online. You meet people who don’t really fit into any kind of gendered category. You flirt. For the first time in a long time, you are pursued in a way that feels good by people who are your own people. Imagine a dog who keeps turning back to make sure it is being chased, a dog grinning as it runs. You like being chased. 

But it is the imaginary men who have brought you together. They are the reason you have met. They are the ones you’re escaping with, when the reality you’ve always desired is now making it hard to inhale all the way. You all felt the same way about the same men. 

There is a word for this now. Fandom. You aren’t unusual, now, people like you, the acolytes. All of you together, plotting their every move, making them kiss, making them beg, dressing them up like paper dolls in war uniforms and tuxedos and chain mail. Which man, you ask by creating these works, is most like you? Which one can you make most like you? When you write, who are you inhabiting? Who could love you like they love him?

You do not really doubt that you are a girl, but these men are not solid forms, they can be stepped into, they can be worn. You can give him life, in your stories, and he can give you confidence. You can imagine—you can imagine someone might love you with the piercing desire that this man, whichever one you’re thinking of, has been loved. He is not even real but he is so loved, and you are real but he has been exalted by a thousand keyboard clicks in a way that you can’t even get your head around. If he has died in fiction, he has been mourned in real life. If he has killed or maimed or betrayed, he has been forgiven. This, say the acolytes, pointing to a man who has committed atrocities, is my baby.

It is not strange to you that the other fans you talk to were brought to you by these sorts of men. The people you meet might also like baking and houseplants and true crime, things you enjoy independently of this fantasy world, but you would never have found these friends if these men had not been the chapel in which you all gathered. It is not strange to be connected by how you will hurt these men, in the privacy of your fiction and in the public square that is online fandom. It is not strange to bond over stories where they cry, where they lose one another, where they hate one another, where they cry again. These works are offered up to the crowd like a sacrificial lamb, tied and presented before a blade. 

The spectacle can be overwhelming, but it sends your blood rushing. It reminds you of being a girl and thinking about placing the bandage on the monster’s wound, how it might growl and pant and flinch but not run away. It reminds you of studying art history and seeing saints, dazed and sobbing, ecstatic at the sight of what no one else could see. You could be on the shuttle bus or in a common area on campus, but in another universe, waiting for him to appear, him, him, on your phone, in your head. 

 

You meet someone online. You meet a person who sees you like a medium sees ghosts. They see you like you have never quite been seen. At first, you imagine you need to put all this away, for their sake. You’re loved romantically by a real person now, so what do you need with your silly little monsters and villains? But no mad scientist can truly destroy their own creation, and you have spent years, decades, breathing life into these imaginary men. You cannot kill your darlings, not this late in the game.

And maybe you don’t have to. Your beloved is no stranger to this game. Maybe they like the same sorts of monsters and men. Maybe they have more to show you.

They teach you about space programs and about horror films. They’re a writer too. They wax poetic about Stephen King. And they show you Twin Peaks

Smarter people than you have had smarter things to say about the show for years, and you’re so new to it. The coronavirus has been making headlines for months by the time you get around to a show that was airing before Desert Storm. But you are struck by one thing above all others—the way that the unreal can be made real by force in this show.

If everyone believes in the same thing, isn’t that thing real? Maybe the show is a metaphor for abuse, for family secrets, for the way that girls will cry out for help in a thousand ways and never be heard. Maybe the world is simply cruel, and girls will be used, and the harder they try to name their own terms, the harder they will be trampled. Women in Twin Peaks suffer endlessly. Madonna and whore, sinner and saint, they suffer. 

Maybe that’s the way of the world, the real world.  

But maybe this show is also a warning and an invitation. We can create our own reality—at our own risk. 

You are loved by a person who encourages you. They are excited to hear about how your day went. They let you cry about the trivial and the terrible and hold you tight. This isn’t all there is, you want to tell yourself as a girl. There is more than a life being flirted with as a joke and a death wrapped in plastic. There is love, and it is real. 

 

You were imagining someone, all this time. If you are a certain kind of person. You were imagining a character that you loved in a way that felt like staring at the sun. And you still love them, even if it’s been years, decades, even. You may have a mortgage and a cubicle and a spouse and a Labradoodle and children and a Honda and a membership to a gym you never go to, but you also have him, living inside you like a dormant gene. You may never show symptoms again of your girlhood obsession, but he will be there, caught like popcorn in your teeth. 

Will you let him live inside you peacefully, or will you evict him by force?

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes, and maybe, just for a second, he will be standing in front of you.

 

Eva Niessner is a graduate of the Towson University’s Professional Writing program and specializes in creative nonfiction. Her work has previously appeared in Grub Street, and she has also been published in Baltimore Magazine.  She lives in the Baltimore area with her partner and cats. She enjoys ghost tours and caring for plants. 

 

Poetry Feature: Lonely Asteroid’s Ode to a Rover by Chloe Ziegler

Follows: Curiosity Rover Sings Happy Birthday to Itself

 

I’ll kiss you like the autumn
sun to a horizon, just
at seven. 
And I’ll miss you like lost
stars in smog, just  
past heaven. 

Curiosity does best me when
I hear you sing alone oh

My Dear, I won’t be long. Just   
hold your galactic gates till
dawn, and remember how 
I love you.

 

Chloe Ziegler is a senior attending Towson University who has had works published in Towson High School’s Colophon. She has gained several years of editing experience while working on both schools’ literary magazines. This is in pursuit of a lifelong passion for literary journals and writing that began in a second-grade after-school poetry workshop. As shown in her poem, she is an outspoken feminist and activist via her literary works and also on social media.  Chloe is also featured in Volume 72. 

Poetry Feature: #buryyourgays

She sees my neck
choker wrapped
dares to graze
the skin beneath
the disbelief 
my head is not yet
rolling

In every dream
I hold her hand
and feel her gaze 
as the sun
the earth cracks
my lover must fall
to the flaming tomb
the fate of every sinner’s 
choices

I open up
on date night
the series finale 
we cannot wait to see
the tension build
before the kiss
we start to believe
in happy endings 

The lover is shot
thrown off the cliff
sacrificed 
the moral of the story
set

She has to go
she doesn’t text
I crawl back in 
my sleeping bag
my closet closed
and cozy

 

Ashley Robles is a queer, Hispanic artist currently residing in San Antonio. She studied English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin and is working to normalize chronic illness in her corporate and creative life. Her work has been published in The South Carolina Review, Messy Misfits Club, Grim & Gilded, and Unstamatic, among others. She is a recipient of The Bermuda Triangle Prize and is part of Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s 2022-2023 Poetry Collective cohort, where she is currently working on her first poetry collection. Robles can be found online everywhere @mzashleypie

Fiction Feature: The Scrubber by Blake Kilgore

Mr. Low was bent, sweaty, and his back ached. Nevertheless, he continued steady, erasing the phallic symbol scribbled on the third bathroom stall door in the eighth grade boys bathroom; there was no hurry. This was already the tenth one this year. Big and small, short and long, heavy on the balls or thick on the bat, last year he’d scrubbed away more than 25. You’d think these boys would get creative, at least experiment with the notion of a woman’s body. Nope, just poorly drawn and vastly exaggerated representations of their own sprouting organs.

Walker Low washed his hands, head bowed, and avoided his reflection. He pulled a paper towel from the third dispenser he’d replaced this year. The kids had a strange desire to destroy any aid to hygiene. Several of the sink handles had also been torn off, sometimes while running, so they sprayed in all directions, flooding the bathrooms. Stuffing sinks or toilets with massive wads of paper was a favorite pastime that also induced a wretched overflow. Soap dispensers were mostly made of plastic, so they had to be replaced a few times a week. And it was truly incredible how many times kids decided it was a good idea to just crap in the middle of the floor. 

Right now the bathroom was pristine, and it felt like an accomplishment to eradicate the grime, but Mr. Low knew there was always something more to clean.

“Custodian to the auditorium, ASAP!”

Drying his hands and shaking his head, Mr. Low smirked, then frowned as he shuffled down the hallway toward the Jack Dee Wright Performing Arts Center. Who would believe he’d seen good Mr. Wright—wealthy businessman, philanthropist, and school board president—in a most untoward predicament just a few years before? All Mr. Wright had been wearing were purple and black argyle socks and a matching bow tie, and his gaunt frame was pulsating against Jenny Watkins, lovely young wife to Johnny Watkins, the superintendent of schools. Mr. Low was invisible. Neither of the two cheaters knew they’d been caught, and he decided to let the community keep their false icons.

Here came Ms. Hartshorne, the aged vice principal, who was suffering from an illness she tried to hide. She always smiled, and her gait was proud, her voice strong and clear. But Walker saw the pills, heard her vomiting late at night, and cleaned up the blood she’d failed to completely rinse away.

“I’m sorry, Walker. I don’t know why they can’t call you ‘Mr. Low’.”

Walker smiled.

“Well, anyway, come on, and let’s take a look. Bob’s freaking out because ol’ Jack Dee is coming tonight for the fall symphony and some kids took it upon themselves to welcome him with some adolescent art sculptures.”

“Let me guess?”

Ms. Hartshorne led Mr. Low down the aisle to the front row, where the backs of several chairs had new and unfriendly juvenile inscriptions below the plaques marked “reserved for the school board”.  There were chairs enough for eight school board members and their families. So, a whole row of slurs and epithets, and each chair was covered with Saran wrap and a gloss of varied human excrement. The air teemed with rancid odor.

“Well, there are no poorly drawn male organs here. That’s a first.”

“Sorry, Walker.”

Ms. Hartshorne left Mr. Low to the work. He gathered his supplies: a screwdriver, trash can, gloves, a mop, disinfectant spray, and several disposable wiping cloths. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the auditorium and wondered what other mischief all the dear children were up to while he was so thoroughly occupied.

That night, Mr. Jack Dee Wright and his sweet and unknowing wife sat in clean chairs in the front row with their two youngest daughters. Their oldest, Veronica, played the flute in the front row of the woodwind section. She had lovely purple bows in her hair and wore a matching skirt that showed off her long, slender legs. Mr. Low sat in the back, unseen and ignored, but he enjoyed the music too. Afterwards, when all of the families had gone, he’d sweep through each row, thoroughly removing the debris carelessly left behind. If each person would just carry out what they’d brought in, it would save him an hour he could spend with his own children, but he didn’t complain. 

When Walker Low got home well after dark, his wife, Leticia, was up. She met him at the door, kissed him gently on the cheek, and squeezed him around his waist. Then she led him to their kitchen table, sat him down, and pulled off his boots. She’d kept a kettle simmering while she waited, and hearing its shrill whisper, she poured a steaming cup of tea and stirred in some honey. Then she placed the warm mug snuggly between Walker’s worn hands.

Walker cupped his fingers over hers and leaned in, drew deep the aroma of mint, then smiled. He clasped one of her hands to his face, and closed his eyes, kissed it gently, then laid it back down. After a minute, he spoke.

“Well, what is it?”

“So—Bobbie’s team got new sweat suits. They got stripes down the side and their name on it and all. Coach Willis says Bobbie don’t have to get one, but he’ll sorta stick out if he doesn’t.”

Walker couldn’t remember his boyhood teams having anything special. Sometimes they didn’t even have matching jerseys, and he always had to wear hand-me-down high-tops. Kids these days always needed new this or that, but and to his mind, all that extra gear hadn’t improved little Bobbie’s jump shot in the slightest. 

He also remembered having to borrow some younger kid’s brother’s glove whenever they played baseball and how deeply embarrassed he’d felt.

“What else?”

Leticia tried and failed to smile.

“Ellie’s struggling with her numbers again. Her teacher says she’s falling too far behind. She passed on a list of tutors.”

She sighed and sat back.

Walker leaned in.  “So?”

“We’re over budget again this month, Walker.”

Walker Low bent over the tea, letting the steam moisten his face. He took a long, slow drink, sat back, and closed his eyes. 

“Well, I bet they still need help for the tournament this weekend. I could ask Ms. Hartshorne to add me on for Saturday.”

“Walker, you need a break, too, and we’ve all been looking forward to being together this weekend for the show.”

Walker put his elbows on the table, rubbed his eyes.

“Didn’t you say Ellie’s main dance is in the second act? If I hurried, I might not miss the whole thing.”

Leticia covered her face.

A few minutes passed, then Walker stood and leaned over his wife, kissed her on the top of her head.

“It’ll be alright. You’ll explain it to Ellie for me, okay?”

Leticia stood, and the couple walked hand in hand down the hall of their small apartment and shuffled quietly inside their children’s bedroom. They knelt between the small beds. Lifting hearts in prayer, they silently asked for protection and for a beautiful and prosperous future. Deep in his heart, Walker asked the good Lord for more time at home with his family.

***

The next morning, Mr. Low was up early and back at school before anyone else. He liked the silence of dawn. No matter what destruction was done to his building each day, it always started out new, with fresh hopes for learning and growth among the children. Even though they increased his workload immensely, he still loved them. He also cared for the teachers, even though some of them were unkind.

One snappy teacher barked at him almost every day about erasing the chicken scratch notes he’d wanted to be left untouched. Mr. Low asked if he could leave a note on the board, but that seemed like a bridge too far, and so the young fellow continued to berate him like a child whenever they met.

“When are you gonna shampoo these damn floors?” another teacher demanded. Mr. Low wanted to tell her that he’d put in a request to do just that, five times, but Mr. Jack Dee and his friends at the school board did not feel that was a necessary expense. He’d also asked for funding to repair the roof leak over the basketball center court, but the board couldn’t find those funds either, and so Mr. Low had to endure the ire of coaches who thought it was his fault their games and practices were postponed or canceled whenever poor weather settled in.

Even Jack Dee had complaints, but they were of a different sort. He didn’t think it was a risk to share his true feelings with the likes of a no-name janitor. 

“Can’t wait to get out of this town. Being overrun, if you know what I mean? I can barely understand what half of these new parents are saying in their broken-down English, and what the hell kind of religion do they practice over in that temple? Purple people with their many-armed goddesses. Dammit, when I moved here this was farm country. Quiet, and everybody looked like me. No offense.”

Apparently, ol’ Jack Dee only noticed late that Walker Low was black. He wondered what the president of the board and local hero said about him when he wasn’t around. But of course he knew Mr. Wright only thought about him now because he was in front of his face, listening to him whine. He wouldn’t think about him again until he turned down another budget request, and then he’d probably be grumbling and calling him “uppity”.

The weight of the job could get him down. Devoted, Walker had to focus on his love for the children, and despite separation of church and state, he prayed silently as he swept the halls and scrubbed the stalls and mopped the floors and helped kids into lockers that were jammed again and again each day.

He knew, perhaps as well as anyone in the building, how much suffering was here. He’d stooped to read forsaken notes that contained unspeakable sorrows. Failed marriages and dysfunctional homes, dying siblings, addict fathers and mothers. Sometimes, the scribbles spoke of cutting and killing, of self-inflicted pain. He’d bring these to the counselors or administration, but they mostly had no names, and so the heartbreak went untreated.

How many times he’d stumbled upon a weeping child hiding backstage in Jack Dee’s auditorium. Or in a locked stall in the boys bathroom. There was not a thing Walker did not observe, and some things grieved him more than others.

Most of the adults in the building loved the children as Mr. Low did, and offered up their lives to see them grow. But there were some who struggled with their own selfish desires. Some were mean to children because it made them feel strong when they’d only felt weak among adults. Some of these worshiped rules and an illusory order and sacrificed children daily at its altar. Others were poor lonely souls who wanted their students as friends, and so they could not be their mentors.

Mr. Harriet was a strange fellow, and Mr. Low saw that his eyes were always wandering below the waist. Walker once asked him if he needed help with anything, and he’d stared the teacher down and firmly gripped his hand. Mr. Harriet pulled back, turned away, and bellowed his curt response.

“You’re the janitor, right? Yeah, I’ll let you know when I need some help, buddy.”

But Mr. Low kept checking in on him, especially when Mr. Harriet became an advisor for the debate club, which met after school. Mr. Low wanted to say something to Ms. Hartshorne. There was nothing more than intuition, though, and he didn’t think it right to ruin a man’s life on a hunch. Still, he cleaned the adjoining classrooms during those debate meetings and happened to be sweeping in the hallways just outside Mr. Harriet’s room as the club let out, and what he witnessed unnerved him.

Mr. Jack Dee Wright’s daughter Veronica was in the club, and Mr. Low had learned she was a real whippersnapper. But she was soft around Mr. Harriet, and while this was not completely abnormal, it bothered Mr. Low, who could not ignore the keen look in the debate club advisor’s eye when he gazed a little too long.

One day, during winter, Mr. Low noticed a group of eighth grade boys in the lunchroom. They were giggling and pointing, and then he saw the object of their teasing was Veronica Wright. She was glancing back and forth from one friend to another and then back to the boys’ table. Suddenly, she stood and flew to the girls restroom covering her belly.

Mr. Low asked one of the lunch aides if they wouldn’t mind checking on her, but when he did, the aide abruptly walked past him to chastise a table of kids for trash left under their table. When she returned, Mr. Low tried again, but she blurted out that she was “really busy” and rushed past him, ignoring his plea. Mr. Low stared at the door to the girls bathroom and waited.

Several other girls eventually went in after Veronica, but came out again pinching their noses and looking miserable. Mr. Low kept his eye on the door, but when he saw Ms. Hartshorne walking by, he asked if she’d check on the girl. Moments later, she was leading young Veronica to the nurse and asking Walker if he’d clean the mess she’d left behind.

Closing the bathroom, Mr. Low went about cleaning up the vomit in and around the sink. He glanced up and saw the look of sadness in his own eyes and then lurched away, back out into the hall, and strode to the main office and Ms. Hartshorne. She said the girl was going to be okay, but there was something dishonest in her tone. Mr. Low nodded and wandered away to clean yet another beckoning disaster. This time some of the seventh grade boys had decided to urinate in the sinks.

The next time he cleaned up puddles of urine was two weeks later, when he was sent to clean the mess beneath Mr. Harriet’s desk. The debate club advisor had been arrested that morning. Mr. Low was near the front doors when they took Mr. Harriet away, his pants stained and his head bowed.

Earlier that morning, Mr. Low had gone into the girls restroom to empty the garbage, and when he pulled out the bag, it tore, and some of the trash fell on the floor. As he bent to sweep those stray pieces, one worn and many-folded note caught his attention. On the outside, written in purple, was the name ‘Mr. Harriet.’ 

Mr. Low leaned over the sink, gripping the sides. His intuition was clanging the alarm, so he slowly picked up and unfolded the note.

I really don’t want to “get rid of it” like you said, but if I did, would you give me a second chance? -V

Mr. Low never saw Veronica Wright again. She’d had an abortion, he heard, her father urging her to do what was best for the family. But he didn’t know for sure and wasn’t one to pry. 

At the end of the year Ms. Hartshorne took an extended leave of absence, and Mr. Low turned to his summer duties, when he’d clean everything top to bottom and make the school new again. He would baptize the floors and walls and lockers and shelves, scrubbing them with antiseptic. All the while, he prayed for the brokenhearted ones he knew were still suffering. He could see their faces, hear their voices. And he spoke their names, wondering if everyone would make it back or if, like Veronica, they would drift out of his life forever. For those he offered a prayer like the one he said for his own children, begging for a beautiful future. He would have to let them go; come fall, there would be another thousand tender souls arriving.

 

Blake Kilgore is the author of Leviathan (2021), a collection of poems. A wanderer, he’s from the South and Midwest and now, the Northeast. Blake used to be a preacher but walked away to find his faith. He’s been winding his way back now, and love of his wife and four sons is a balm. A junior-high basketball coach and teacher, Blake is also refreshed by the idealism of his young students. His writing has appeared in Frost Meadow Review, Flint Hills Review, Lunch Ticket, and other fine journals.

Poetry Feature: Down at the Club by Barry Peters

mid-winter
my annual descent
into the dark place

dirty immersion
in the muck & mud
& funk-smelling

junk of soul jazz
a gaslit basement
pink-jacketed quintet

rotund bass
walking the dog
saxes & drums

the gummy organ
a rumbling subway
beneath my feet

undersea
melodies adrift
in overcoat pockets

filthy & killer
sugar & spice
in plush booths

& at the heavy bar
another brown drink
in thick glass

a line of draft taps
steeples pointing
up & outta here.

 

Barry Peters and his wife, the writer Maureen Sherbondy, live in Durham, N.C. He has been published in Best New Poets, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry East, and The Southern Review, among others.

 

Poetry Feature: BETTY CROCKER HAS LEFT THE KITCHEN by Jane Costain

She’s had it! Enough! She is done
with all that mixing, stirring,
measuring, those dirty pans

to scrub! Away with the apron,
the glued-on smile!
Leave all those books for others
who know no better.

She takes her meals now
in style at restaurants.
A bottle of fine wine 
served in a crystal goblet.
No more sipping the cooking sherry.

In her little black dress with its
slightly scandalous neckline,
her fingers bejeweled (no need
anymore to knead the dough),
her hair now blond, cascading
(no net) about her deliciously
made-up face, she clicks around 
in dangerously high heels.

In fact, she is no longer “Betty”
but “Liz”—and for her,
the words “house” and “wife”
can never be spoken as one.

 

Jane Costain is the author of the chapbook Small Windows (Main Street Rag, 2018) and has privately published A Dozen Centos. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Plainsongs, The MacGuffin, Pinyon Review, and Iris Literary Journal. She has a master’s degree in the creative arts in learning from Lesley College and has taught in public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband, Gary Moore, in Denver.

Poetry Highlight: “Summer Night” and “August Wind” by Marcin Oświęcimka

By: Michael Downs

As I try to write these words, a little more than a month has passed since Marcin Oświęcimka drowned while swimming off one of the Canary Islands. Marcin, a writer and graduate student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, had begun a semester abroad at Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife, working to complete his degree in English philology with an emphasis on American language and culture.

Though I am a writer and professor in the United States, for a brief time in Spring 2022 I taught in Kraków, which is how I met Marcin. Quickly, I came to admire his writing and to feel grateful for his spirit. Smart and witty, Marcin connected to others through tenderness and empathy. He organized events for the campus’s English language and literature club. He could talk about skateboard wheels as well as he could discuss poems by Charles Bukowski.

For an assignment in my class, he wrote a poem based on a painting by Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Some 75 years after Hopper finished his “Summer Evening,” Marcin looked closely at the image of a man and woman standing in garish porch light, and he called them “a couple like any other.” Such a bold statement! Literature usually explores what differentiates the individual from others. So, Marcin’s description challenged my expectations and raised questions. What would the poem reveal about couples that make them all alike? At the end of his “Summer Night,” published here for the first time, Marcin offers a paradoxical answer that leaves the reader to wonder about the distances between people in love.

As seen in “Summer Night” and a second poem, “August Wind,” Marcin was a writer and poet of great potential. In an email before he was to leave for Tenerife, we talked about the possibility of him studying in the United States. I knew of a scholarship, and he hoped to conduct research into attitudes toward different foreign accents in English. “No other country can provide so many opportunities to research that field,” he wrote.

As for his creative writing, Marcin told me that he’d been traveling back and forth between composing in Polish and in English. It turns out, he wrote, “that I’m a completely different poet in my mother tongue, and I’m currently having adventures exploring this side.”

Summer Night
after Edward Hopper’s Summer Evening

the guests returned to their homes
it was an enjoyable evening
(for them)
or at least it looked as if it was
firewood and charcoals are crackling still
in the barbecue

they are a couple like any other

the night has come and
moths are headed to the lamp
sizzling on the bulb
and grasshoppers and
an occasional owl
are looming
from the meadows
and from the woods

this corner of the world
is where time flows how
it was meant to
with the idle wind strolling along
and perhaps too many chances
to think about what we all
think we think about, but we don’t

a neighbourhood like this is too small
for having secrets
so that’s how I know
they are a couple like any other

I see their undraped curtains
and the door blind undrawn
And it doesn’t mean much
nor does it bare a soul

I see them in the spotlight
sitting on the ledge of the veranda
quite close to one another
but they are a couple like any other
here
infinity spans between them

august wind

august wind
sometimes carries
notes of autumn
to itself
although it’s still
summer around

and silver moon
shows up
now and then
in the middle of a golden day

so I find a single dry straw
among lush blades of grass
and a lonely white cloud
in a patch of clear blue sky

old age reminds us that
it not only reads our memoirs
but also
writes us back

– Marcin Oświęcimka