This issue features
photograph by Sigive,
poetry by Jennifer Campbell,
photograph by Bryan Roschetzky,
poetry by Cassandra Jordan,
poetry by Karen Loeb,
poetry by David Murphy,
photograph by Oscar Espinosa,
fiction by Sangita Sultania, and
poetry by Ethan Turner
Sigive
DNA
© by Sigive.
Jennifer Campbell
Upon learning i have russian and ukrainian blood
The bridge lights are out
the horizon filthy gray
but my car is still talking to me
so I know I’m not driving
into the end of the world
That’s some sort of relief
but it only partly explains
why I am angry and sad at once
I know who to root for
but almost nothing about the past
I am a dog displaced by war
a mother distracting her children
in a shelter killing time
no tears to shed for facts
tunneling hope to the other side
Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Campbell.
About the Author
Jennifer Campbell is an English professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has two full-length poetry collections, Supposed to Love and Driving Straight Through, and her chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2021. Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in The Healing Muse, San Pedro River Review, Heirlock, and Paterson Review.
Bryan Roschetzky
Close up Interchange
© by Bryan Roschetzky.
Cassandra Jordan
HWY 3A
The highway
takes and takes:
it asks no
permission, it
demands
no pardon,
shimmering
placid
on the horizon.
Its asphalt
rises and
swells, wave
after wave,
vast
and empty
as grief,
quiet as snow
lapping
pavement,
as the whir
of tires
in icy depths.
Its bone-bleached
lines crest
and fade,
memories
rippling
waterlogged
and wind-bitten.
What this road
swallows it
never
gives back,
depositing only
white crosses
and time-eaten
teddy bears
on its
bitumen
shores.
Copyright © 2023 by Cassandra Jordan.
About the Author
Cassandra Jordan is a writer living in New York City. She is interested in the histories beneath history and the stories within stories.
Karen Loeb
Note from a husband
after William Carlos Williams
I’m sharing the last banana
with you
that you were probably worried
about how much to leave for me.
My half was delicious.
Copyright © 2023 by Karen Loeb.
Abou the Author
Karen Loeb’s poems and stories have appeared recently in Big City Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs, Bramble, Foreign Literary Journal, and Muddy River Poetry Review. Her work has won both the fiction and poetry contests in Wisconsin People and Ideas. She was Eau Claire, Wisconsin writer-in-residence 2018–2020.
David Murphy
On a Snowy Night
What have we here—now, with the last guests gone? Passion. Love, at last, after patient years. A muffled night marbled by scudding clouds. On the floorboards, your pooled dress of chiffon. A couple out beyond an old frontier. Without a whisper, our hearts make a vow. Looks are enough. Moonbeams touch the curtain, band the wooden floor, shine in the mirror. Outside, deep snow frosts this pale Thanksgiving: covering roads, leaving paths uncertain. The present leaves the future no clearer, but tomorrow must await the living.
Copyright © 2023 by David Murphy.
About the Author
David Murphy was born in Oklahoma on Easter Sunday. David earned an MA in English from Kansas State University where he won the Seaton Fellowship in Creative Writing. In 2022, he published poetry in Orchards Poetry Journal, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and Dream Noir. In 2023, he published photographs in CutBank and interviewed with Kelp Journal. His first book of poetry, The Natural World, is forthcoming from North Dakota State University Press. Outside of writing, David worked for two and a half years in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank. He followed that with a year of work in Riyadh. The US State Department then awarded him two English Language Fellowships, both of which he served in Mexico. He returned to the States for four years for work, then he moved to Mexico to be a writer.
Oscar Espinosa
Taxi.Kolkata.India
© Oscar Espinosa.
Sangita Sultania
Blind Cats
Sumit woke up in a clatter. He had been awake for quite some time as the early morning tram started to rattle beneath his window, shaking the panes and the bedside table with its sundry medicine bottles, cups, and jars. But the incessant ringing of the doorbell finally shattered his feeble attempts to catch a few more winks.
It was the newspaperman, there to present his monthly bill. Sumit paid, collected the pack of white slice bread and bottle of milk waiting at the doorstep and went into the kitchen. “Who was it?” his mother called weakly from the adjoining room. “Newspaperman,” answered Sumit, putting some tea to boil on the gas stove. He put on two slices of bread to toast in the toaster, out of which a few cockroaches scurried to corner somewhere else until cooler times. He put the frying pan on the oven to heat, cracking two eggs into it in the last day’s leftover oil, which let out a faint rancid odour as the eggs crackled. He lathered a piece of bread with some butter and another with some red jelly called mixed fruit jam on the bottle. He munched on to his toast while mixing some bread pieces in a bowl of warm milk, which he carried to his mother.
Sumit propped up his mother on her pillow and placed the bowl of milk and bread on a low stool on her bed. He waited until she started to spoon her breakfast and turned to go. “Can I have some eggs today?” she pleaded. “The doctor says no,” replied Sumit, leaving the room.
His tea had gone cold under the ceiling fan whirring in the small dining room. He reheated it and came back to nurse it with his morning papers. The first piece of news he scanned caused him to shoot up in panic. There was a rickshaw strike in the city today, which meant the buses would be extra crowded. He needed to hurry to avoid the squeeze. Sumit breezed through his bath, packed himself a lunchbox, made some porridge for his mother, left it on her bedside table and rushed out.
His heart sank as soon as he stepped onto the grey asphalt. The buses tilted precariously with people bursting out of the doors and windows. Sumit swallowed an inadvertent rush of bile into his mouth. The tube would be the same today. He looked longingly at the trams ambling past in holiday mood and the empty, spacious wooden seats in them, but he didn’t have the time. The boss took extra pride in arriving before anybody else in the office and checking the attendance register was his favourite occupation of the day. Sumit loosened his collar in the stifling, humid heat and wiped the sweat off his face and neck. He had no choice but to take a taxi today.
“Dalhousie?” asked Sumit, hailing one. “Twenty rupees extra,” growled the driver. Sumit knew better than to argue with these chaps, and he didn’t want to exhaust himself before work, there was more competition these days. He got in and slammed the door shut. He rolled up both the windows on the passenger side. It was his ride, and he might as well enjoy it as he liked. He had a choice to shut out the city smog today.
Sumit leaned back and closed his eyes. He had a strong urge to light a cigarette this morning. But he had quit long ago since he was diagnosed with a weak heart. As if on cue, the taxi driver lit one himself. Sumit ran his fingers through his sparse hair and shifted in his seat. “Can I have a cigarette too?” he requested to the driver, leaning forward. “What mister,” teased the driver, “normally people ask for matches, but you ask for a whole cigarette! Here,” he said, handing Sumit one, “pay five rupees extra for this, ok?”
Sumit rolled down a window and let out a few puffs of smoke. The taxi offered a different point of view than a bus. The city appeared more vertical. The incongruous array of crumbling, ornate two hundred years old buildings and modern ones, shorn of any of the frills of cracked stained-glass windows, carved balusters, and grills, seemed to creep up and pass away in a whispering conspiracy. Sumit opened a few more buttons of his shirt as his eyes pleaded a breather to the sky, to be met with a blue-grey alley, crisscrossed with the black amenities that powered his morning toaster.
The taxi stopped at a red light. Sumit threw his butt out and rolled back the window as beggar children and mothers, book, duster, gutka and toy sellers floated from window to window in a ghoulish haze. “Take the flyover,” he ordered the driver when the light turned green.
As he zoomed past the ritzier part of town, with its English medium schools, cultural centres, and aristocratic villas, hedged with lush foliage, the vista appeared insignificant from his bird’s eye vantage point. But the sky had opened up into a wider blue, which will again trickle down to reflect in the open drains as he neared the labyrinths leading up to his workplace. Sumit opened the window and took a deep breath of the higher air, not without a tinge of the smog.
Sumit arrived in the chaos of the business district 10 minutes early. He could surprise the boss but there was no point in impressing him really. Sumit knew he was not one of his favourites and he expected no raise, no promotion in the long term. He just wanted to keep his job and his regular salary. He had kept it for the past 10 years and he saw no reason to change. He was used to his corner, to his worn-out chair, to his ancient computer. But lately there had been a bit of a ruffle caused by a new copywriter, a slip of a girl, finding hands on admiration with the boss due to her ‘spunk’. Sumit despised her intelligence to begin with and wouldn’t have cared except that the boss was beginning to get his copies spruced up by her. It had taken all of Sumit’s reserve of nonchalance to stomach it when he first discovered it. The boss wouldn’t give a hoot if he resigned today, but Sumit hated change.
He ambled around the district and stopped to help himself to a glass of nimbu pani from a vendor. The taxi ride had put him in an expansive mood and though Sumit seldom ate out, he snacked on a fish fry from another vendor and then on a couple of sweets from another. He started to feel a little bloated and sick at the end of it, with a sudden urge to vomit.
Sumit hurried into his tiny office and headed straight towards the toilet. “Hello mister, where do you think you are going without signing the register first?” the boss called from his room with a direct view of the entrance. “Sorry sir, be there in a minute, I need to vomit first, I am not feeling well,” said Sumit. “First you come late as usual and then you need to do dirty work first! There is no toilet from today, I got it removed last night, it’s not good for vastu. You can go to the next building to use the toilet, I’ve talked to the watchman there,” the boss scowled in distaste.
He will have to concentrate on his surprise another time, at the moment Sumit just had enough will to step out of the tiny office on to the pavement and puke in the putrid gutter. He stared at the black slush contrasted by his white excrement. Overcome by nausea, he vomited some more. Ah, he felt better now. He grabbed a mug of water from a streetside vendor and splashed some water on to his face. He felt good as new. Never again, indulgence and excess were not for him.
Sumit walked up to his desk to find the new girl sitting at it. The boss was with her, pouring over some files together. “Why don’t you take the day off, since you are not feeling well,” said the boss when he saw Sumit and went back to the work at hand without paying him further attention. Sumit looked at his chair a few moments, observing how ill it suited the usurper, then shrugged and walked out of the den he had spent eight hours a day, six days a week, for the past decade of his life. Sumit seldom took vacations and once in a while when his delicate constitution forced him to take a few days off, he had found himself yearning to get out of his dreary home to cocoon in the dark corner of the dingy workplace.
Ok, if today was going to be a day of tumult, so be it. Uncertain what to do with himself, Sumit walked past the humdrum of the area, into quieter boulevards, past the sprawling mansion of the state governor, past the monument dedicated to an erstwhile queen, past a traffic snarl, past some shanties tucked away under a bridge, into a huge green expanse where some boys were practicing soccer. The green folded over Sumit, until he had the urge to roll into it, the slush left behind by last night’s brief shower notwithstanding.
He found a shady patch to sprawl into. The boys dribbled away at the muddy ball, their muscular legs bulging in their colourful socks. Sumit was seized by a crushing sense of loneliness. As he compartmentalized his life between home and workplace, he had steadily shut out all extra curriculars and colours such as those on the boys’ socks. Why had he done that? He didn’t dare ask himself the question. At the moment he just wished the boys would throw the ball in his direction so he could participate for a few minutes. But his nondescript frame safely merged with the shadow of the tree he lounged under. Sumit took out his box of sandwiches and flask of coffee and picnicked by himself. He tried his hand at a siesta after, but he was not very accustomed to the discomforts of nature.
The city had offered him an excursion, a day torn off the calendar that fluttered in his hand like a free ticket. But time hung heavy on its blank page, and Sumit thought filling it up with a movie would be a good idea. He walked towards a cinema he had visited a few times in another era. Did he ever skip classes as a student to catch a matinee? No, he didn’t remember doing that. He had always been a regular guy. Routine and rules wrapped themselves easily around him.
At first Sumit thought he had come to the wrong part of town. Instead of the twin movie houses, which stood next to each other, there was a gigantic shopping mall that advertised a ‘Bumper Sale’ in massive, multi-coloured alphabets. “Er, excuse me, which is the way to New Empire and Lighthouse,” he asked an ice-cream vendor outside the mall. “This is the way, but there is no more New Empire,” he mumbled, before turning his attention back to his swarm of customers. Thinking him to be rather daft, Sumit walked to the counter of another eatery on the premises. “Hey brother, I’m looking for New Empire,” he said, poking his face into the greasy window. “Are you new in town?” scowled a fat face in a grimy vest, “It has shut down ages ago.”
Sumit disentangled himself from the press of an impatient humanity, salivating at the door of the eatery. He sat down at the edge of the pavement, feeling like an out of towner in the city he grew up in. A woman with a bulging bag and a child matching the girth stumbled upon him in her rush. The child started to bawl as he dropped a purple ice-cream on to Sumit’s leather shoes. “Is this a place to sit?” growled the woman. Sumit took out his soot-caked kerchief and wiped his shoes clean. He longed for the sanctuary of his room, for the quiet company of his ceiling fan whirring in a monotone.
The strike was over by this time, as was the evening hour rush. Sumit’s day was capped by a surprisingly empty bus ride, with a window seat to boot. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he scanned the faces around him. Tired he thought, many unshaven, mirroring a melancholia, he imagined was his own. His ruminations were broken by a blind beggar singer, who boarded the bus with a harmonium, singing a song of piety. “One day I will be dust o’ Lord, so why shall I build a home, for whom and for what o’ Lord, for whom and for what o’ Lord…,” he wailed. The singer was surprisingly good, and Sumit tossed him a coin before the fellow stumbled off the bus at the next stop.
Sumit arrived home and headed straight towards the bathroom. “There is no water,” his mother announced from her room, “The community tank burst this afternoon, it will take 24 hours to repair.” Damn! Sumit went to his room, peeled off his sweat drenched clothes and lay down under the fan. His legs ached from all the unaccustomed walking and his eyes shut from exhaustion, despite the rumblings in his stomach.
Sumit wandered from floor to floor in a huge shopping mall, desperately looking for something to eat, he was ravenous. He went to a pastry shop, where they were dipping the cakes into colourful jars of plastic paint, before displaying them at the window. A girl lovingly licked some green paint off her fingers that dripped from her pastry. Sumit flitted to the next shop where they were frying chicken wings in a chemical vapour. Unable to hold on any longer, Sumit grabbed one and ate greedily. His throat burned and his head swam from the chemical attack. He grabbed a ‘drink me’ bottle from the next shelf and spat out some kerosene. Other customers laughed hysterically as they chomped on to the fare effortlessly.
Sumit ran up to the terrace for a breath of fresh air. He leaned over the rails panting and struggled to catch his breath as he breathed some more of the vaporous air. As his eyes adjusted to the haze, he saw two battle-scarred, blind old cats sitting by the roadside, mewing in confused stupor, as the night traffic zipped past them in a tearing hurry to conquer the next destination.
Copyright © 2023 by Sangita Sultania.
About the Author
Born with a love for the written word, Sangita Sultania grew up in bustling Calcutta, India. She sold her flair as a journalist to numerous publications of repute in the country like The Telegraph and The Times of India (including a stint for a newspaper in Dubai) for a number of years, before deciding to branch out on her own. She has written three books in all – a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry, and a novella – for which she is seeking publishers. She has also written a movie script and a screenplay in the past, which is yet to see the light of the day. She currently lives in France and continues her explorations with different forms of writing, while constantly hoping for a wider readership.
Ethan Turner
lullaby
the rains come
hard and fast
during the hour of black
when spirits routinely dwell this island.
i am liminal in this bed,
hearing the downpours yet unaware
of what i am and where i am from
and who i’m sharing this studio with.
droplets fall on the concrete roof and
splatter on the windows but i feel
them coursing through my veins
and i’m awash with a calm
only felt by the dead.
it might be midnight or two or three
but i guess it doesn’t matter if
the trade winds still carry me
from sleep to daylight
where i’ll wake in the same bed
once more.
the mattress is thin and the pillows are hollow
and it’s blowing a gale outside.
i’m certain the hour is 6:58,
moments before my watch will beep
to signal that i should
put on underwear and a pot of coffee.
i’ll stand in the kitchen,
staring out the window onto the patio
which is without a trace of the monsoon
from last night.
my friends will wake and tell me they don’t recall
those rain spirits which wrapped me in a soft amnesia.
later out on the beach the palms will tell me
it is better to bend to these elements and
accept their gifts than to question their intentions.
i prayed to them five more times
and each of those five nights they answered
with their archaic whispers.
Copyright © 2023 by Ethan Turner.