Life’s a Timing Thing

Kristian O'Hare


A woman crashed her Tesla into a pool in San Rafael. Cops say she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, cops aren’t sure if the autopilot was engaged or not.  Veered off the road, as if she aimed right for that fence, into the pool, and died.  Life’s a timing thing.  That’s what the woman who owns the house, the pool, says to the reporter.  She had been standing outside with her cup of tea, waiting for the dog to pee, just seconds before the crash.  She complains about the damage done to the landscaping, to the flowering plum, the green sphere manzanita and coville’s lipfern, then she catches herself but a human life was lost.  A black Tesla remains half-submerged.  The white clouds reflect off the cracked windshield, a play of light squiggle snakes across the acrylic blue surface of the pool.  A police officer, in a yellow reflector vest, uses a skimmer net to catch debris, slivers of wood fence and palm tree fronds, while Hummingbirds dodge in and out of a pink currant bush behind her.


Kristian O'Hare's writing has appeared in Third Coast Magazine, San Francisco State University's Fourteen Hills, South 85 Journal, New Orleans Review, The Indianapolis Review, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Hobart, Reservoir Road Literary Journal, Blood Orange Review, and Raleigh Review.
www.kristianohare.com

For You. Again

John Rawski


“Good morning, Joyce,” he says as he comes into the kitchen. 

Morning! Damn him. It’s past noon.

“I lied for you. Again,” I said.    

I am in my bathrobe. Since dawn I have been thinking of changing everything. While he slept, I selected words. While listening to footsteps upstairs, I practiced saying them. While water surged through the pipes as he washed away spilled alcohol and another woman’s perfume and the dried smudges of her makeup and his semen—I was ready. 

But I didn’t say them. 

He is dressed for his work, which demands appearance, poise, and confidence. He has all three. Now. But not before I made him. At the discount store, he was the manager. But it still was a discount store. He wanted more. But was lost. I took his hand. I helped him into graduate school. I supported him. I wrote his papers. I taught him to impress teachers and recruiters. And from the very beginning—I pushed. The more I pushed, the more he slid away. 

“On Fridays you have morning meetings. I called your boss with another excuse.”  

“I make money for him. Money is all he cares about. Just like you.”  

“You promised me that you’d be home early.”

“I only said I’d try.” 

“You were drunk. I don’t know how you made it home.”  

He prepares coffee. “I only had one or two drinks.  

“And women? One or two?”

“Some clients are women. Women who do more than shop for clothes and jewelry.” 

“Like that one you were with last week at midnight when you wrecked your car?”

“I only bumped a guardrail. We had business. She’s an attorney.” 

“A partner in an esquire service.” 

Long sour silence follows. The coffee-maker hisses. Bitterness brews in the silent space. I think of saying my selected words. But he speaks first. 

“Joyce.” He sighs. “Thanks. I’ll try to get home early.” 

I feel the sourness drifting away. I try to hold it, so I can bring myself to say the words I had practiced.  I’ve a feeling of déjà vu.

“You’re good to me, Joyce. Too good.” 

“When I called your boss, I said that you might not come in. Stay.” My hand reaches to touch his. “Please.” 

These two words fill the silent space. 

“Go upstairs, Joyce.” His voice is flat. “I’ll be there.” He kisses my forehead. A peck. 

Upstairs he has left our bed unmade. Only his side has been slept in. I smooth the sheets. I wonder how much time he’ll spend with me. How much time will he spend making love to me as he watches the clock with one eye. 

I remove my bathrobe. I see my reflection in the dresser mirror. I avoid looking into my own eyes. Underneath I had worn a short nightgown of black lace. His favorite. I get into the bed to wait for him. And I pull up the covers to hide me from myself. 


John Rawski is a retired attorney living in Central Ohio. His work has appeared in Riverwind and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. He has attended many workshops over many years, including the Antioch Writer’s Workshop at Yellow Springs, Ohio and Nancy Aronie’s Writing from the Heart. He also enjoys building model trains and cooking with cast iron skillets.

Sail Rest

Sean Gallagher


While it's a cliché for me to quote a poet when measuring the importance of the open ocean, E.E. Cummings still put it best, believing that navigating the treacherous waters of the briny deep was more than seeking what lay beyond the horizon: ‘For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always our self we find at sea.’   


Sean is an illustrator and artist living in Charleston, South Carolina. His art is regionally recognized and has won a handful of local awards, and has been featured in Allegory Ride, High Shelf Press, and Ariel’s Dream, to name a few publications. He has also been a journalist and editor, working in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Short stories have been short listed by Retreat West and Sequestrum.

Nepalese Textiles

Amanda Boyanowski-Morin


This new man held his hand up and

his fingers counted ‘four.’

That’s four times on this first date

I have mentioned my new book, 

an unbelievably lucky find, 

just purchased at a used bookstore - 

Nepalese Textiles, clearly not a bestseller,

not easy to bring into the conversation, 

but four times, so far, I have. 

His hand isn’t counting down the chances I have

but counting up, beckoning my excitement

Go on. Tell me more. 

My mind was back in Bhaktapur,

being laughed at by an Auntie who found my

fumbling attempts at crochet hilarious. 

Her speed and precision made me still,

mesmerized by the grace in which she crafted. 

Cotton yarn spinning into details faster than

I could process her hands move, let alone

mimic them. 

I spared him the details of my travels, 

but my skin flushed, nostrils flared,

I found a book on Nepalese Textiles 

Five. An open palm. 

This moment where my interests meet,

an obsession since seven with a country, and as 

I sit in a hand knit shawl, 

my current fixation with textiles. 

I can’t catch up with what I know I should do socially,

I internally call out

      see – watch my joy. 

      Can you hold this moment with me? 

Scared of what he’s seeing, what he’s already seen,

this date so fresh we haven’t even made it to dinner yet

and

I found a book on Nepalese textiles

Six. Two hands now. 

Still, he sits

Leans in


Amanda Boyanowski-Morin is a poet, parent, and partner from Rhode Island. They are most commonly found with field guides, wandering through their neighborhood and various local habitats. You can find Amanda knitting on a stump with her service dog, or reading under the tree canopy. Her work largely focuses on the changing disabled body and an every changing world.

A Good Story To Tell

Danila Botha


We met at a Shakshuka bar on our town’s main street. He was from a small city just north of us, the same place we went to for school supplies and shoes before our town had its own mall. Our town banned heavy industry, and the mall was in an area we called “the industrial zone” though all it had aside from the mall was a bakery, a clothing outlet, and two massive grocery stores. 

 Before that, there were the shops and restaurants on the main street that often changed within two years, and a tiny movie theatre on the other side of town. 

Everyone knew the Shakshuka bar wouldn’t last. It took a classic, takes five minutes to make it at home dish and made it fancy and expensive. There’s nothing people around here hate more than feeling like they’re being ripped off. 

Seriously, you open a can of tinned tomatoes, throw them in a frying pan, add some spices, a tiny bit of honey if the tomatoes are acidic, throw in some eggs, cook on low heat, and there you go. Microwave some pita to eat on the side. Take some hummus out of the fridge. The end. 

This place added greens and kale and feta cheese and olives and shallots and mushrooms and all kind of abominable things, and yet my best friend loved it. She found it sophisticated and interesting, and she offered to pay for me, so here we were. 

Hila was technically my third cousin. To her all food was conceptual. She liked, in her words “li’tom hakol,” to taste everything. I was the opposite. I could easily devour things whole, mindlessly and constantly. I had to remind myself to chew and force myself to stop. 

I was all instinct; I liked to experience first and analyze after. She liked to be deliberate and measured. She took so much pride in self control I thought it was ridiculous, but I still loved her and even grudgingly admired her sometimes. 

When we were kids it was always me who got into trouble. Hila had the best poker face even we were five. Her name meant halo and adults would see her blonde wavy hair and bright yellow dresses and believe anything she said. I felt guilty before we’d even done anything, and I never even tried to lie about it. 

We were both artists. I played violin when we were younger, and she danced ballet and modern. When we were older, I played guitar, and sang and wrote songs, and she painted. 

Neither of us liked anything trendy, so we went to the Shakshuka place as a joke but then she started to love it. 

Her favourite dish was the Shakshuka Parmigiana, which was full of mozzarella, eggplant, and parmesan, along with the usual things. I once ordered what I thought was normal Shakshuka, but it was full of tiny chili peppers, and I accidentally ate two whole. After crying in the bathroom, not being sure if what I was seeing was chili peppers, tomatoes or blood, she made me promise we didn’t have to go back. 

I was surprised when Omri wanted to go there on our first date. Hila had mentioned it once, so he assumed I loved it too. 

We met two weeks before, at a house party. A few days later he showed up at Hila’s apartment, where we were lounging on the balcony. I figured either they were good friends, or he liked her. Guys always liked Hila, and it wasn’t just because she was pretty, it was because she didn’t give a shit about any of them. She’d ignore them completely, or fix them with a withering stare, her eyes frozen jade, her long, dark blonde eyelashes fluttering prettily as her lips said fuck off, and they’d compete for her attention. I was the opposite. I saw infinite possibilities in all of them, their talent, their humour, their potential sweetness and sensitivity. I could have fallen in love with any of them, on any day, so I tried to hold myself back. 

It turned out, Omri was there for me. He offered to walk me home, and the next thing I knew he was kissing me, his teeth scraping my bottom lip. His parents were out of town the next weekend so he invited me over. I was on birth control, not because I was regularly sexually active but because my skin was a mess without it. I wasn’t scheduled to get my period that day, but I did, and the next thing I knew the sheets on his single bed were stained symmetrically like rose petals but he said he didn’t mind. 

He was gentle until he took off his pants. He told me he’d had other superficial girlfriends who cared about things like size, which was crazy because he could do anything a bigger guy could do, and he was generous and eager to show me when my cycle was over. 

I stared at him, his thick, dark eyebrows knitted into an upward arrow, his brown eyes darting all over the room. “Omri, I like you,” I find myself saying, even though I wasn’t sure how much or why. 

He kept calling and texting after that. 

My cousin told him I was a musician and that I sang and wrote songs, and then he wouldn’t leave me alone. He constantly begged to hear my music. 

I demurred because nothing good ever comes of revealing yourself fully when you somehow know that you shouldn’t trust them. 

He told me that he wrote his own songs and offered to show me his lyrics. We’ll do an even trade, one day, I told him, and then Hila sent him two of my songs. 

One was a song that I’d written for a national contest. I’d won second place. She also sent him a song she said she could imagine on the radio. It was loud and heavy, and sounded amazing with a full band. I recorded them in an expensive studio in Tel Aviv. I worked for two months in a shoe store to pay for three days in the studio, including musicians and production. Still it was the most fun I’d ever had. 

They songs were written in my living room, because it had the best acoustics. I had to find the times when no one else was home, when it was just me, my guitar and my voice filling up the space. 

If you asked me what my dreams were, and I was feeling open right then, I might have said

I wanted to play to crowds. I had a vision of playing at festivals, seeing hundreds or even thousands of people dancing and swaying and singing back my words. My music made me feel connected to all of them, like a place where we all belonged. 

I didn’t want to work in an ordinary job. I didn’t even want to go to college. I wanted to get paid to spend hours every day writing and creating. 

I was always aware of my limitations. I had an emotive voice but not a five octave classically trained one. 

I’d studied guitar for years but my piano skills were very basic. I wrote too many songs in minor keys. I didn’t know how to write about happy things. I preferred McCartney to Lennon. I never, ever felt cool.  

Still, I wanted to be a musician more than anything. 

I felt at home in the studio and on stage. 

We went back to the Shakshuka Café that night. I ordered the Parmigiana again, because it contained no surprises. We got through all of dinner without him mentioning my songs. I didn’t think I cared that much about what he thought, but I found myself asking him in a little girl voice I didn’t recognize if he liked them. 

He looked at me, anger clouding his features. 

At Rotza Lefarsem,” he said, you want to become famous. “I thought you cared about art, and music, but…” 

He didn’t finish the sentence and I sat there quietly, pushing my food around, hoping he’d still pay for it. 

“It’s hard to explain,” he said when we walked out of the restaurant. “When you look at Hila, and her paintings, it’s art for art’s sake.” 

I wanted to scream. His assumption that I wasn’t a real artist, that I didn’t put thought and ideas and emotion into every word, that he didn’t know me or see me hurt the most. 

I thought about all the songs that changed my life, the way my hands and knees shook when I got to meet my favourite musicians and singers. I dreamed that one day someone would feel like that about something I wrote and I’d know that I was here for a reason. 

“You’re right,” I said to him slowly. “I do want people to hear my songs. I do want people to like them. I want people see me.” 

I started to cry, and he reached an arm out but I pushed him away. 

I cried all the way to Hila’s house, thinking how unfair it was that our friends who worked hard to develop apps or small businesses, or who went to university were considered ambitious, but if you worked hard in the arts, people thought you were naïve. 

“It’ll be a good story to tell,” she said quietly, when I got there, my face pink and tear streaked, and she pulled me into a tight hug. “When you’re famous, and you’re doing interviews, and they ask you about your early days, you can talk about this guy who was stupid enough not to support you. And the interviewer will look at you and laugh and shake his head and say what a fucking idiot. I bet he regrets it now. And you’ll look at him, all generous and loving, like you always do, and you’ll say something like we just weren’t right for each other, and you won’t expect it to feel good. because it was so long ago, but you will feel better, just hearing that reaction.”

Later that night, I found myself sitting outside my apartment building so I wouldn’t wake up my family, plucking at my guitar strings, as angry lyrics poured out of me. I called it Mr Index Finger, and it had a chorus that went “accusing me/pointing it in my face/ treating my ambition like some kind of disgrace.” I imagined it playing on rock and even pop music stations, girls sharing stories with me backstage. I imagined myself feeling confident, maybe finding someone who would understand, and even support me in wanting to be myself. I imagined the interview Hila talked about. As I walked inside, I started to feel a little bit better. 


Danila Botha (She/Her/Hers) is a fiction writer based in Toronto, Canada. She’s had two collections of short stories published, Got No Secrets, and For All the Men...which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, the Vine Award and the ReLit Award. Her new collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is out in 2024.

I Made Wings Out of My Blood

Josh Megson


I made wings out of my blood.

Iron feathers that flap to a hangman’s tune.

Tasseled veins pulsate the marrow,

with each pump my heart shrivels like a wet toe.

The Mars feathers wisp away in the stratosphere,

with a breeze that tickles a predator’s hunger. 

It closes the eyes of a serpent leaking my venom

from its fangs. Diamond teeth tarred and contaminated.

The sky fades to mucus as I learn I possess the poison.

Cropdusting Chernobyl’s vices over an alien world Earth.

Desolate in the open air, not a red-eyed crow 

to show its beak, 

I am as lonely as I was…

when I kicked the ground and the grass stood still.

Expunged, left to saunter in thick marshes

like the three-eyed fiends who spit stardust and sing the blues,

or the foil-antennaed paratrooper watchful of government smell.

I made wings out of my blood,

hurled the scarred cirrus clouds.

I wanted you to see my eyes from afar.

See they are not dead any longer.

I wanted you to see the pupils that now are my face,

a dark closet that locks from the outside.

I might’ve banged for your spirit in the past,

but I have wings now– 


Josh Megson is a short fiction and poetry writer from Albemarle, NC.

Plankton

Tommy Gault


The tumor was a surprise,

a fat sack in the back of my brain.

If I start going blind, give the doctor a call.

I’m not a rideshare.

I just have a very quiet passenger.

They find my friend in dead people,

cereal box prizes from the yet MRI’d.

I am far ahead of the curve.

My new friend is named Plankton,

a cartoon steering my occipital lobe.

Biopsies,

the on-deck circle of medical tests.

Enter Plankton-

a fistful of clumsy sutures,

a future on the head of a pin.

I only want to meet him in a jar.

He will reside in my living room,

and be featured heavily at every birthday.

Every year, another fuck-you to Plankton.

I will never shake his hand,

my quiet friend in the deafening tube.

As he lounges, I can’t sleep.

Plankton tips drivers at fifteen percent.


Tommy Gault is a writer by trade. They live in L.A. with their husband and two enormous black cats.

Ballad IV

Nicholas Ritter



Nicholas Ritter (he/him) is a poet in the MFA program at George Mason University. He is a fellow with Poetry Alive!, a program that teaches creative writing at juvenile detention centers in Northern Virginia. You can find his work on The Shore Poetry.

Fever

Jeff Burt


My mother was not tender in her care. The Vaporub went on my chest not with idling fingers in curls of swans but the rapid beating of hawk’s wings trying to lift talons with the skin of my chest. A spoon was a utensil of malice to force the penicillin down, that chalky half-liquid, half-mud, through the narrowed gap of my lips.

It was not my illness, my mother said, but ours, as if it spread my rheumatic fever to her, night sweats, chills as if the furnace had quit, my lonely hours plastered to the window-watching neighbor kids playing in the snow.

I grew half-formed and half-grafted, arms thin as a rake’s handle, back legs of a fox that ran as much sideways as forward, the convulsing scales of a snake before the lightning strike of a kill, the half of me in motion through the house, the half of me who could not leave the bed, the chair, could not shovel snow, make a snowball in one quick pat, begin a day outside with whitened cheeks turning into reddened flares.

There was no mystery, even though the doctors could not find a source for my illness, like an artesian spring that begins a creek from no known source below, where wells are dug but no pump can draw. I had a condition, a rheum, a flowing of pain, of an ache that lasts and lasts.

My mother tickled hard, and in the angry poke of her fingers I felt the hostility of caring for a son who never seemed to heal. It can affect your heart, she said, but I won’t let it, as if her intention could hold back bacteria.

You’re sick, she said, we’ll stay home. We’ll beat this thing together.


Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in electronics and mental health administration, and contributed to Brazos River Review, Gold Man Review, Per Contra, and previously at Fauxmoir.

Pink Rue

Roger Camp


Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, Witness and the New York Quarterly. Represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NYC, more of his work may be seen on Luminous-Lint.com.

My Brain Goes South

Deborah K. Shepherd


 ¹Knoxville: Summer of 1915, by James Agee


Deborah K. Shepherd is a former newspaper reporter and retired social worker. Her first novel, So Happy Together, was published in 2021 by She Writes Press. Her essays have appeared in Motherwell, Herstry, and Persimmon Tree, among others. Mother of two and grandmother of two, Deborah lives in Maine with one husband and two dogs and is currently working on a memoir. @dkshdw74 FB--Deborah K. Shepherd, Author Website: deborahshepherdwrites.com

A Letter to End Things

Kalyani Bindu



Kalyani Bindu is an Indian writer and researcher. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Kali Project (Indie Blu(e) anthology), 45th Parallel, Better than Starbucks, Half Empty Magazine, the Indian Express, New Asian Writing, Guftugu, and others. Check out www.kalyani-bindu.com to read her works.



The Celestial Map of Dream Sequences

Ryota Matsumoto

My work reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus, which could be attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by social, economic, and cultural assemblages. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures, and ecosystems in the transient nature of constantly shifting topography and geology. 

There is a common thread with regard to visual abstraction in my artworks: the multiplicity of hybrid objects that unfold within their own spatiotemporal coordinates of phase space and are transcribed to an image plane. In that regard, the creative process of drawing can be defined as the swirls of virtual intensities that are reconfigured as the cartography of spatiotemporal transduction.

Furthermore, the varying scale, the juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections, and visual metamorphoses are employed as the multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, emerging realities of the digital hegemony, and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration. The application of these techniques allows the work to transcend the boundaries between two- and multi-dimensional domains. 

The process-oriented compositional techniques henceforth conjure up the synthetic possibilities of spatial semiotics that emerge as the potential products of metastable procedures. They imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our socio-cultural environments beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities.


Ryota Matsumoto is an artist, media theorist, and architect based in New York, and Tokyo. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at the Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, the Glasgow School of Art. He has taught architecture, art, and interdisciplinary design as a lecturer and visiting critic in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

https://www.ryotamatsumotostudio.com