Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

All worlds meet at Happy Nails by Emily K. Bright

Illustration by Sue Babcock

On the flat screen Yul Brenner plays
some sort of Asian king. They are battling
the Mongols, or else they themselves
are Mongols—I missed some salient detail
while debating Apple vs. Hot Flamingo.
Country music plays—there is some mention of
a tractor—and outside it’s begun to snow

again. So many worlds pressed up together here
at Happy Nails. Not unlike Yul-Brenner-land,
where now they drink to victory and cheer a troupe
of belly dancers, dressed to some man’s imagination.
Our hero, white, with 1950s hair, dreams a woman’s
demure face. He still has more to gain.

I want to ask the man who’s filing my toenails
(one eye trained upon the screen) just what
country they’re supposed to be in? Slumped
in this massage chair, I can’t frame this
conversation. The technicians, men, are
Vietnamese. The clients, women: white.

A man washes my feet / a recent immigrant
kneels to work / an entrepreneur with Bluetooth
on earns good money in return for luxury.
I don’t know which lens to use, and when
I ask where the movie’s set, he tells me,
smiling: Portland.

Well, why not? Interchangeable parts.
Insert hero. Insert love. Insert foreign flare.
Yul Brenner’s folks were Russian, quite literally
Caucasian; up next on the marathon he plays a Mayan
king. Is it the lack of hair? “This my kingdom,”
he declares. (Only “white” guys got good grammar.)

My toes are done; my theory ties itself in knots.
The technician doesn’t care if I get up or stay a bit.
He’s turned to watch the grand finale. The battle lines
are clear. We know the good guys win the day. “I love
these films,” he tells me. “I watch them all day long.”

Emily K. Bright’s poetry has been published nationally and internationally in such publications as Other Voices International, Collier’s, America Magazine, and Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota.

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

The Nap Between the Worlds by Vanessa Kittle

narrated by Vanessa Kittle

Illustration by Sue Babcock

In the afternoon, I lie here trying
to recapture a moment which never
occurred—an afternoon by the ocean
with an open window—breeze and sun
flowing over the bed through thin
white drapes. Outside there are
smiling busy people eating sandwiches
on boats, swimming, picking berries,
dripping juice on their fingers.

I am falling asleep, thinking of the cedar
closet in my grandparent’s old
house. It had the smell of trees
in the distance and long fur coats.

I never touched the back wall.

Day after day, I lie here waiting
for the weather to change
for a northern wind
for a sign outside or inside
for gravity
for anything with sufficient weight
to bring motion to inert bodies.

Today there are clouds.
The light fades in this temple.
But beyond the clouds, there is
a wilder sky swarming with red
and golden eagle feathers.
The trees make a tunnel
over the path.
And there will be leaves crunching
under my feet.

One day I will remember
the secret word or find the lost key.

Vanessa Kittle lives out on Long Island with her evil cats, Lama and Sombrero, and her more evil partner, Erin. Vanessa is a former chef and lawyer who now teaches English Composition. She has published two collections of poetry: Apart and Surviving the Days of the Empire, both with The March Street Press. Her work has recently been in The New Renaissance, Contemporary American Voices, Nerve Cowboy, Limestone, Ibbetson Street, and A Generation Defining Itself anthology. Vanessa edits the Abramelin Poetry Journal. Vanessa has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, Elaenorh, has just been published by Double Dragon Publishing. She enjoys cooking, gardening, and Star Trek!

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

Bathsheba Bathing On The Roof by Sue B. Walker

narrated by John C. Mannone

Hallelujah! My breath—that secret chord repeated “C,” then “B.” She was bathing on the roof. In faith, the sight like light madding the distant sky, denied clouds their sure hints of gray. And I, a baffled king sang Hallelujah. In the shrift of love, I eyed the Hittite’s wife. I sinned. She might have turned her back displeased, but I swear she smiled. It made a fool of me. Why else stand in open view? The flowers stood tall on stalks of green. And I have seen her breasts, her thighs, her slender arms. Bathsheba, Bathshua, my queen. You don’t really care for music, do you, but come my sonata, my wife, my Hallelujah!

Sue B. Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama and the Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-1012. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press and the journal’s editor.

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

Nature Like Mother is an Improper Name by Sue B. Walker

(Shilly Shalling Sin)

(A prose sestina*)

narrated by Sue B. Walker

nature-like-mother-is-an-improper-name Her body, thick and craving, a house, white bone house on the red-rutted road she never dreamed she would walk down, down past loblolly pines where, waiting, she would sometimes braid a bracelet of pinestraw flowers, flowers that would never bloom, those little curly nodes she’d wear on her wrist, her body housing a baby, yet unborn, there in the piney woods, backwoods hiding whiskey stills, where that drunkard, that married debt-stud daddy rode her like his mare when she walked into the woods, woods with flowering dogwood and yaupon to meet him, and if the child to be is a girl, she would name her Cassina, Ilex Cassine, or maybe Holly, and they would walk the red-rutted road together, mother and child, go deep, deep into the forest and play house like she used to do when she was a child living on the country road near Tuscaloosa and together they would name the trees, say longleaf, shortleaf, say pond pines, pines whose names were familiar friends: sand pines, pitch pines, slash pines, slash, slash, slashslashslash – and her wrist, she gentled it, but would she slash it, for it wouldn’t matter then, that red-rutted road in front of the run-down house where her own papa lived, where nothing could flower along any spite-filled house, house she’d leave, and walk, walk away, farther and farther away. Why is it she pines for the father of this child, when he says she has to give the babe away, and her mother had raised Billy Jean already, her babe named after his son by his wife, so she’d gone then to the House of Unwed Mothers, and birthed, and now she’s pregnant again, but would she slash her wrist and end this flowering, get off this road, road straight to hell, ‘cause the preacher said “sins find you out if you don’t walk the straight and narrow,” that lily-flowered path where pines look up to the heavens as she would do, look to the heavenly house, to the god-house, its wide doors wide open, house beside the gold-paved road where she would surely find Jesus, if only she would turn to Him, turn then, and walk with Him and talk with Him among palisadial pines and corn-stalk flowers and be delivered of sin.

*(The six sestina words: house, road, wood, walk, pines, flowers)

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

Awaiting Another War in D Minor by Marge Simon

narrated by John C. Mannone

Illustration by Sue Babcock

Jennifer arranges a set of Edwardian chairs
side by side on the beach, one red, one brown.
I smile, for she wears her best bombazine blouse,
giving me a hint of the night’s festivities ahead.
Licorice gives her a headache, but she enjoys the taste,
and the color compliments her attire, even to the point
of turning her lips and tongue and teeth black.

We bleed ourselves under the moon’s horn.
Jenny’s fluted silver dipper shines with our fluids,
and smiling, she ladles our offerings into the tureen.
Once a communal bowl, it is again just so.
Later, when the moon lowers in the southern skies,
she’ll summon the drinkers to partake of the bowl,
followed by a group read of The Wasteland.

We do enjoy those moments,
waiting for another war to manifest itself,
if not in the worlds beyond our door,
then here tonight on this silver beach,
where a beautiful woman cellist plays
Bach’s Suite Number Two in D Minor
and the soldiers dance around her, mad with lust.

Marge Simon is a past president of the SFPA and editor of Star*Line. A former 1995 Best Long Poem Rhysling winner, she won the Bram Stoker Award™ for Superior achievement in poetry, 2008, the Strange Horizons Readers Award, 2010, and the SFPA Dwarf Stars Award for short poetry, 2012. Her flash fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Vestal Review, more. www.margesimon.com

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

Everything and I by Adele Gardner

narrated by Adele Gardner

Illustration by Sue Babcock

My everything and I, on inline skates, glided black tarmac in our quest for frogs, deep bellows in the night, counterpoint to the zapping hum of power towers, derricks strung with lines like cables for suspended bridges. These monoliths perched like robots from another world where insect life held sway, marching in precision through the clear-cut behind the housing tract, immense in the swath plowed through lush wilderness, their height rising above the treetops to speak volumes into space.

We stopped there, past the last dark road, beyond the wood, the gingerbread cottages, the tall white mansions whose lanterns burned all night. As we passed, the last frogs trumpeted their gruff farewell, reminding us that fairy tales often don’t end well.

My everything and I had found the key, we thought, to life beyond the gap, a breathing space beyond the simple fact that low-wage jobs scarce covered our existence even without the alcohol that fueled his poet’s soul and turned me into something from the sky. I never felt at home when he, so starry-eyed, proclaimed me so high above him I knew it was not me he saw, but some magic mirror reflecting his own desires.

Blocked out, I hid behind the dark back of that mirror while he hovered above me, my angel, his radiant face blurred by the nimbus, that ghost-light, of all he saw and heard that I could not. The mirror hid his soul from me while he moaned my praises. My gaze reflected inward painfully to find only dirt and the little worms that had consumed me all along.

But afterward, gliding hand in hand on skates, the black night turned velvet ribbon beneath our feet, our words bounced back from porch-light to streetlamp, zooming as we rounded curves or whispering as we coasted, listening for frogs, attending the hush, our minds keen for secrets we could share.

We’d end up there eventually, no matter which road we took–the clear-cut where the towers marched, titanium thrumming with codes that regulated human life, these mighty multiple arms stretched cruciform above spider’s legs, humming to join the universe just beyond–those stars we couldn’t see, blocked by the reflective shield of light the city made, that dome of brightness powered by these lines of force, the pillars of our community.

We held hands, yearning for the stars we were blind to, feeling their dim pulse in the blood that beat through the fragile skin around the fingers we clasped near—held back by the delicate membrane that kept us from getting any closer, knowing only that someone else was there. Yet as the wind lifted our hair, we felt it through our bones, that hum that fueled the towers that linked us to the stars; and everything was close, so close, so near.

AUTHOR BIO: Adele Gardner is an active member of SFWA and a Clarion West graduate with stories published in Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra, Legends of the Pendragon, and Scheherazade’s Façade, among others, mostly under her previous byline, Lyn C. A. Gardner. She’s had poetry published in Silver Blade, Liquid Imagination, Strange Horizons, New Myths, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Dreams and Nightmares, and forthcoming in Ad Astra. Two stories and a poem earned honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, St. Martin’s Press), and two of poems, one long and one short, won third place in the Rhysling Awards.