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Essays
“Blue Rain” by Daniel Doen Silberberg
During the day, I taught English to junkie kids at Morris High, deep in the East Bronx. At night, I wrote and played music at a Soho recording studio way downtown in Manhattan. After that I would stay up late drinking cheap Scotch from sea-green bottles and watching old movies. I liked the Marx Brothers’ free-floating insanity and W. C. Fields’s misanthropic grace. It was both entertainment and avoidance.
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“Power Play” by Cynthia Dockrell
Dad is still next to the phone, looking at the place where Mom was just standing. Normally he would follow her into the other room and say something like, “Now wait just a goddamn minute,” but nothing has been normal lately. Instead he turns to me—I have been setting the table with the good silver and linen—and raises his eyebrows. I almost feel sorry for him. . . .
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“Bad Birds” by John Nelson
Some superstitions have persisted into modern times. There are still Amazonian farmers who think that nightjars are messengers of malign spirits, while in my birding travels in Asia and Africa, I have been taken aback by the number of locals passionate in their fear and hatred of owls. To call a belief, or feeling, a superstition is not to say it has no ground in reality.
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Fiction
“The Fourth Wall” by David Tucholski
There is a stick in the ground with a cardboard sign taped to it. A man, who is not an American but wears one of their uniforms, reads the sign aloud for those who are illiterate: “If you cross this line, you will be shot!”
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“One Act” by Micah Nathan
Ben first met Charlie Cahill on the train to New York. Charlie was reading a collection of Hemingway stories; he wore a wrinkled suit that showed too much sock, and he gorged himself on a hot dog, oblivious to the ketchup that dripped down his tie. Behind Charlie sat a young mother with her crying child. After ten minutes of wails and screeches, Charlie turned around, dangled his keys, and grinned.
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“Civil Twilight” by Timothy Hedges
If Augie hadn’t been standing next to the man, he’d have sworn the noises came from a creature covered in fur, a bear, perhaps, or a moose. It was far from the imperial voice he remembered booming throughout his father’s bus, announcing the cross streets at each stop: Van Dyke, John R. In that vision, Augie was the kid sitting by the door, trying to catch his father’s eye, proud that the man in uniform with his hands firmly turning the wheel was his dad.
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Poetry
“Move Along, Nothing to See Here” by Michelle Boisseau
Like a fly from the air, Christina was zapped
from a crosswalk when she was five,
Rosemary from a highway in Ohio,
Rick from a tennis court.
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“All the Way to the Bone” by Vern Rutsala
Words from the East
filter through
the leaves, whispering
news of the dead
you can’t stand to hear, . . .
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“What Comes Next” by Ann Linde
My father did the killing and the cleaning up. In the fairy
tales he put me to sleep with, there were plenty of sweetmeats
and tigers for every journey. He shook them out of his hands,
or so I imagined.
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