Part II
Photo by Simon Berger (unsplash.com)
Brittany Micka-Foos
Original Sin
The forbidden fruit was, actually, flank steak. Seven months pregnant, I stole away to the grocery store and purchased the first cut I laid eyes on. I was vegan, or had been, before the bite. In fact, I’d gone a decade without so much as a taste of meat or dairy or honey. I did not miss it, I told myself. But there I was in my kitchen, a sheet pan lined with tin foil, range fan on full blast, every door and window open. It was a Tuesday, midday. My steadfast, still-vegan husband was at work. I did not want him to know what I had done, did not want him to behold my capacity for cruelty. I ate quickly and disposed of the evidence in an outdoor trash can, cleaned the kitchen like a crime scene. Next came chicken, then hamburgers, then veal. I could not get enough. There was nothing I wouldn’t consume. My endless appetite against an empty plate. I did it out of spite. Yes, that was part of it. But also, I was so hungry all the time. I wanted to sink my teeth into something substantial. After those aching years of deprivation and self-reproach and wanting, I would not go back. I was stripping down my identity, shedding my skin, one bite at a time. I was becoming mother, meat-eater. I was becoming carnivorous. I did not fully comprehend my transformation, but I bit down into the writhing flesh of it. Took it into my body. Tasted iron as it entered my bloodstream. The heaviness sat in my stomach, nestled beside our unborn baby. A secret, a stone.
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Brittany Micka-Foos is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the short story collection It's No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House Press, 2025) and the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, Epiphany, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. Read more at brittanymickafoos.com.
Lee Doyle
Sharp Things
After the Portland streets thaw comes the black ice, on top of weeks of insomnia. I call the crisis line three nights in a row. I need to write my daughter a letter and tell her I will always be in her heart. I need to get my upstairs neighbor to adopt my dog. The soft-spoken counselors insist I’m not dying. What about the uprooted trees cutting living rooms in half. The people sliding on their asses to get to their front doors. The ER intake nurse determines I’m suicidal. I lay in a room next to unplugged machines waiting for an Ativan. Patients across from my room rage epithets. The social worker arrives. His kind brown eyes collect data on my mental health. I’m my mother. A week in the psych ward shuffling around in teal scrubs. We all make jokes about our breakdowns and the draconian harm-reduction policies. Dental floss is contraband. Upon discharge, my meds backfire. The earnest nurse in the urgent care instructs me on the benefits of exposure therapy and EMDR for PTSD. “I’ve tried all of that.” I pocket the new prescription. In a dream, I circle a pillar in a warehouse, yelling, “Help" over and over. Dad and Stepmom stare blankly from a doorway. No sound comes out of my mouth. After the nightmare, I throw silverware. Pound tabletops. Beat sofa cushions. My hand hurts. I’m a small child shivering in a cave. Someone holds up a lantern. Someone places a sharp pink crystal from Lakota land in my hand.
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Lee Doyle's work has appeared in Calyx, Consequence, Nostos, and other publications. Her first novel, The Love We All Wait For, won Best Novel at the East of Eden Writers Conference. She holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University and shares a lair in San Rafael, CA with a black Lab named Jasper.
Lorna Crozier
Vituperative
Vituperative. Takes up a lot of room in a line of poetry and in a life. If you vituperate, you abandon forgiveness and good cheer. You snarl in your sleep, frighten the cashier as you pay for your bitter fruit, train your dog to dump on the lawn of the nice neighbour who you insist slighted you when you moved in. It’s no coincidence vitriol, venal, vindictive, and vile alliterate. As if small sponges soaked in vinegar sit in the inner pockets of your cheeks, whenever you meet someone who doesn’t know your story, you bring up the great betrayal from thirty years before. And every night as others say their prayers in bed or write a gratitude list, you place yourself at the end of the pier at what was once your summer house and push your ex-husband into the dark each time his head bobs above the water. Help, he calls, help. Sometimes you use a paddle, sometimes your bare hands.
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Lorna Crozier's poetry has received most of Canada's national awards, including the Governor-General's Award. She has read her work on every continent except Antarctica. Her latest book is After That (McClelland & Stewart, 2023).
Howie Good
Mice in a Fish Tank
Very few people seem to “get” me. One of them keeps mice in a fish tank. It’s my vocabulary. Gulls squawk. Sirens whoop. I sound like a professor. It comes naturally to me. But others just think I’m full of myself, a showoff. My wife’s friend’s husband said he should’ve brought a dictionary along to dinner. He laughed as he said it, but everyone at the table knew. I felt I was back in high school. The adults were thugs in suits and dresses, and the girls covered their mouths when they giggled. There are tumors no magic mix of chemicals can shrink.
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Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections THE DARK (2024) and AKIMBO (2025) from Sacred Parasite.
Amy Wise Rothschild
Bake Sale on Ittoqqortoormiit
Photo by Annie Spratt (unsplash.com)
The rock would fit in your hand, snug, pleasing, except it is wrapped in stiff, rasping cellophane surely not endemic to Eastern Greenland. Igneous (granite), it is black and gray and the pale pink of an unripe strawberry. Peppered with white quartz like coarse salt. Someone in this town invented by the Danish government and made real by real people — inhabitants — owns a label maker and has printed a minuscule banner in bold italics. It waves like a flag on the rock’s quiet white twine. “Stone collected in the Ittoqqortoormiit area.” Of course they sell rocks on Ittoqqortoormiit, and if you are among the trio of American school teachers brought on this ship to see this place at this time through a friendly alliance of corporations, if you, in your whistling windproof pants and branded lanyard are a walking tax write-off for a distant lord, if you gripped a horizontal rope — hold steady — that stretched across a formal dining room as the ship sawed its way back and forth through ice for hours, hellbent on getting here because people on the east coast of Greenland don’t have visitors very often, if you gasp at the sapphire water, the white ice, the colorful roofs, the pink tricycle, if someday you might teach your students about rocks and minerals, if you want to quicken the flow of lava and compress geologic time into an instant, a lesson plan, if you have lost a sock and so have room in your suitcase, if you get paid twice a month via direct deposit, eat green grapes from Chile all winter, if you wonder, like Elizabeth Bishop, if it would have been better to have stayed home and thought of here, it is only polite to buy a rock. It is only right to buy a rock. 20 Danish kroner. Somehow, you have some.
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Amy Wise Rothschild’s writing has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kate Fawcett
Three male skeletons found in a mass burial, Lindisfarne, 750-800 A.D.
Bam! goes the hand against the glass and we shiver in our case. Another greedy fist making its demands. If only our bones were still joined in all the right ways we would scuttle and hide in an unlit corner. Not that such a thing is likely, a gap of dark being now near impossible to find. Almost each sharp edge of this world illuminated by a stubborn sun which refuses to set, simply blinks off at the same time every day and drops us into night. Ah, we are old bones now. We are the sum of our parts. Strictly speaking we are: femur, femur, rib, rib, rib, leg bone. Two and a half skulls. All that remains of poor Eadric is the soft curve of skull that God whispered into, which blistered berry-red in summer. Forgive us! We forget ourselves. The line between Cuthbert and Eadric and Peter so thin that if one wished it could be brushed away like a spider’s web. Time and fortune has bled us into one. Lumped together in one unholy mass, without ceremony or conscience, destined to be dug up after a millennia and displayed as a jumble of bones in this glass-case purgatory. There – another insistent tap vying for our attention. A girl, her face a moon against the glass. She dares hold our gaze. For while there is naught left of us but cartilage and memory and the secrets that a body holds, while we are blurred into one and damned to confinement, while we yearn for the days when God bestowed mercies, we can and will still look back.
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Kate Fawcett lives in the south-west of England. She works in a museum and has an MA in Heritage Studies from the University of Manchester.
Lucinda Kempe
The Animals Don’t Have to Apologize
I never apologized to my father Godfrey for the one brief paragraph I allotted him in my diary after his suicide. Nor to my mother, Maud Ellen, for having to accompany me to the dentists, gynecologists, the abortionist, and the Mandeville asylum. Or to my grandmother, Mamoo, for knocking her on her ass in the back hall during one of my furies. Or to Marjory nee Miller Oppenheim Kirkpatrick Jerome, my dad’s mother, for taking her last twenty to buy face powder. Godfrey never apologized for hanging himself and leaving me with my mother. Neither Mamoo nor Maud Ellen apologized for sending fifteen-year-old me to his funeral alone. Marjory never apologized for not putting her son’s name on Vault No. 67 in the St. Roch Cemetery and leaving it for me to do. Maud Ellen never apologized for using me as bait when trolling for sailors in the Decatur Street Greek bars. I never apologized to Skouria, Maud Ellen’s Saigonese Street dog, for punching him after she ran off to Greece leaving me to adolescent-the-station and take care of him and Mamoo. Nor to Billy Pouchoir, my one-eyed Lab rescue, for deserting him when I moved to New York. Nor to Conner, the Blue Heeler pup, I had put down because I was afraid of his fear. Nor to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Maud Ellen’s last rescued red tabby with feline AIDS so named because she said, “I always wanted to sleep with the President,” for killing him on her birthday.
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Lucinda Kempe’s work is forthcoming in Salvage (China Miéville editor), The Summerset Review, SoFloPoJo, Bull, Does It Have Pockets, Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, and Centaur, among places. An excerpt of her memoir was short-listed for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. She lives on Long Island where she exorcises with words. You can find her here: lucindakempe.substack.com. Nominated for Best of the Net in 2024 by Boudin Magazine (The McNeese Review).
Angela Townsend
Resolved in Time
Photo by Rod Long (unsplash.com)
We want it to be the same and we want it to be different, so we use our grandmothers’ recipes but add Funfetti. It cuts the licorice kick and soaks the anisette sponges in our own time. We lay a single biscotti across the generation gap and all the confettis make it across safely. Our ancestors left Ulm and Amsterdam and Orleans, which they loved one teaspoon less than the scent of a kitchen unseen. The birds in the window sang a new song, but the people could be pungent. They named their places New Ulm and New Amsterdam and New Orleans so not everything would be new at the same time. We want it to be the same and we want it to be different, so we buy last year’s blank book in a different print. We are the only ones who will know why we are leopards instead of succulents this time. We list five blessings before our coffee like before, even on mornings when we can only think of two. People keep vigil under a glitter ball in a city that boasts, because they want to see and not just believe that it is a New Year. They speak in many tongues but could not tell you why they cry at midnight. They press their lips together after everyone yells “one.” We want it to be the same and we want it to be different, so we get mammograms and touch up our roots. If we stay ahead of the countdown, we all get to stay in the kitchen together. If we can stay awake, we will remain astonished, so we ask the stylist to add a stripe of magenta as broad as a child’s thumb. Our grandmothers did not make resolutions, which are pastimes for smooth hands. Some of their bellies billowed and some of their shoulders were sharp as swallowtails. They learned to play our video games and bequeathed us their aprons. We are still not sure how we know their hymnals by heart.
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Angela Townsend is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and seven-time Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and West Trade Review, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and writes for a cat sanctuary.
Jean Biegun
Grease Gun
Aunt Valerie wrote poems in our toolshed, her only private place. A notebook she would stow behind a barrel of rusted parts where pencils nested, too. The sharp edges of metal implements ordered there could never inspire, I thought. Thick ropes and oiled chains hung from beams, and rows of ready hammers and wrenches braced on a peg wall. The setting, however, served up dandy metaphors for the whittled life, she told me, like scenes of a heroine in celluloid lying on a cutting room floor swept off by the night custodian, like rubbed-off bits from an eraser, or medium-grit sanded-down patches of memory, still puzzling why Carlotta, gowned in maroon, cries in the third stanza.
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Jean Biegun’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has received two Pushcart nominations and written two poetry collections, Hitchhikers to Eden (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Edge Effects (Kelsay Books, 2024). Recent work is in Third Wednesday, Unbroken, and Thin Places and Sacred Spaces: A Poetry Anthology (Amethyst Press).
Ron Riekki
At the V.A., they come out and slaughter your name, just to make sure
you understand that the slaughtering of your body wasn’t enough, and twenty-five percent of those who join the military end up disabled, and the second half of that word is bled, and the first half is diseased, and I’m thirty percent disabled, which means that three of my fingers are disabled and three of my toes are disabled and fifteen-percent of each lung is disabled, and seventy percent of my penis is fully operational, and they called it Operations, what we did — Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause and Operation Legless Piss and Operation Drunk Porcupines and Operation Plinth Headbanger and I was involved in Operation Impotent Christians and I lost thirty percent of my right eyeball in Operation Hot Loose, but I’m a good pet and I know how to freeze-and-fawn and the PTSD counselor at the V.A. says to me, in session, You really need counseling badly and the rooms there are just the perfect size for claustrophobia and it’s a place where you avoid eye contact, just like the prisons and the homeless shelters and the warzones and the minimum-wage matchstick factories.
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Ron Riekki's latest book is The Many Lives of The Purge: Essays on the Horror Franchise. Right now, he’s watching Paul Giamatti’s Closet Picks for The Criterion Collection.
Matthew Anderson
United States
Photo by D. C. O'Brien (pexels.com)
American Ruins
The vestibule strewn with the shatterings of stained glass. Pews upturned & thrown against doors with the rage & chaos of improvised barricades in the street, made to wait for the police to come drumming their shields, marching closer. The wooden pulpit jagged from bullets, a Bible left in pieces. The steeple on the ground outside, riven from its tower, broken & burning like some great angel fallen, embracing mortality with a groan. But the corpses, in festering, leaking piles — we laugh. Rows & droves of us, our bodies destroyed & gurgling with bloody laughter. It’s what we always wanted, always dreamt of — Conclusion. Final & sublime.
* * *
No Place Like Home
As I walk past the mall in downtown Portland, I’m asked for a dollar and I look and I have none to give. They turn silently from me and walk past and I think of my father’s silver harmonica. I hear his blown metallic blues, his harp to his lips, his sweating brow furrowed in concentration. His feathered cowboy hat upside down on the sidewalk as a bowl for cash. He winds his way across and through America, drifting like embers in waning smoke, only to land again in my hometown across the country from me. Back on the sidewalks of where I grew up, you can hear him and his creening harmonica. People pass and he nods his head as he plays wailing songs by Little Walter. All the lonesome Bluesmen, my father’s tragic heroes, his dead idols. The men who could transfigure sorrow into music. A kind of sorcery really, a kind of healing — a way to proclaim: “And yet, I live.”
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Matthew Anderson is a prose poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon with his fiancé and two Sphynx cats, Iggy and Ursula. His work has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
Jason Heroux
First Things Last
The first time anyone saw the Loch Ness monster was August 1933. The last sighting was less than a year ago. The first and last thing I look at each day is the luminous digital clock radio that brightens the bedroom. The first rule of war is to prevent the enemy’s ability to fight. The first sign of acute mountain sickness is dizziness. The first anonymous passenger pigeons flew across the sky 5.3 million years ago. The last one, named Martha, passed away alone in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The first tie I wore belonged to my father. The last tie my father wore belonged to me. The First Law of Geography states, “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” The last ingredient on the list is the one that weighs the least.
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Jason Heroux was the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston, Ontario from 2019 to 2022, where he lives. He is the author of the prose poem collection Like a Trophy from the Sun (Guernica Editions, 2024).