The Father Cards

  by R. Welch

When I was 26 years old I started to experience migraine headaches on a daily basis. They began with a head cold and a recurring sinus headache that spiraled in severity and completely derailed my life. I did not immediately seek medical attention. I believed the headaches were related to the cold and expected them to resolve along with it, but this did not happen. Instead they became more and more crippling. I would leave work, day after day, and stagger home where I emptied a tray of ice into a towel, secured the towel to my forehead with a belt, and pressed my forehead into the my living room rug until the ice melted away. Nothing helped. I spent so much time with my hand pressed to my brow, the skin on my forehead cracked and began to bleed. After one particularly horrible siege eased, I had to use half a tube of Clearasil to hide the scratches across my forehead where I had apparently tried to claw the headache from my skull. One afternoon, unable to make it to my apartment, I staggered into the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and fell into the arms of an ER nurse who held me as I breathed into a paper bag long enough to stop hyperventilating. I was admitted to the hospital for a week while they ran test after test. They thought I might have a brain tumor or an abscessed sinus, but none of their speculations were supported by the test results. I was on 23 different prescriptions and became mildly addicted to Demerol. Finally, after showing up unannounced once too often to writhe on my doctor's examination table; after 6 weeks of daily headaches that had gone from 2 or 3 hours in duration to 14-16 hour epics of excruciating, blinding pain that felt as though something evil was pounding nails into my skull, my doctor said he thought we needed to get a "psychological perspective" on my problem.

Bruise

by JD DeHart

Light blue reminder

Under my toenail

Not to have a temper.

Mrs. Hughes

 by Michelle Kreiner

 

Greet me morning

Shine on me sun

Take the pain of night

 

Move the memories

Mask the images

Muffle the voices

I need rest

 

When he touches another,

do I become unfamiliar

to those who know me?

 

When he lifts her leg

against the doorframe,

do I cease to exist?

 

When he leaves

like air

this signed paper

means nothing.

 

Sleeping babies

belong to no one.

 

Seal the doors

Shut the windows

Start the gas

I need rest

 

Oh, morning

close my suffering,

Oh, sun

beam no hope

 

Sweet aroma

of my silent soliloquy,

please,

lay me down.

I need rest

EAP

 by JD DeHart

There’s a screaming face

The real killer is an ape

The pendulum swings

The heart beats loudly

The wall is full of secrets

The house is really crazy

It has mad see-through eyes.

how to disappear completely

by Jarrett Fontaine

 A wooden step creaked under the weight of a large man. It sounded like a staggering walk up the stairs, drunken but deliberate. My heart filled with dread.

One step closer.

His alcohol breath was my kryptonite. I lurked away from my bedroom door. Nine years old, but I felt like a weary soldier. Battle fatigued. I'd been waging wars against my alcoholic father for as long as I could remember. He took it out on mom; he took it out on me. I looked at the starry sky through my bedroom window. Last week my dad had thrown a ten-pound weight at me and broken it. My mom scraped together some money to have it replaced, but inside I still felt shattered.

Intimidation

 by JD DeHart

Tall mammoth

Loud voice

Not much to be seen

Pounding out syllables

Blowing off steam

I turn my head to side

Politely exit

I have no time for displays.

The Last Exotic Petting Zoo

by Jessica Tyner

Jessica Tyner is originally from Oregon, USA, a member of the Cherokee Nation, and has been a writer and editor for ten years.Currently, she is a copy writer for Word Jones, a travel writer with Mucha Costa Rica, a writer for TripFab, a copy editor at the London-based Flaneur Arts Journal, and a contributing editor at New York’s Thalo Magazine. She has recently published short fiction in India’s Out of Print Magazine, and poetry in Slow Trains Literary Journal, Straylight Magazine, Solo Press, and Glint Literary Journal.  She lives in San José, Costa Rica.

In the dripping cold of an Oregon January,
miasma of wet dog clung to us like a
discarded lover. You, sick
with a cough and a heavy head tucked
in the pages of a book. I drove
like hell down the coastal
back roads. No one holds tigers
and lions in the winter
but us.
The wanton mud swallowed our shoes,
sucked our feet in searching gulps
while the animals watched.
You held her,
Bristled paws like a kiwano,
as I cradled the bottle of milk
into her frantic mouth knowing you’ll never
think me as magnificent as you
do right now.
I gifted you a tiger cub, her claws etching
delicate scars into your forearms,
while the rain scoured us to the bone.

5 Dreams

by R. Welch

for Judy

ONE:

The storm had been raging for two days. A neighbor had taken Annie and the girls out during a lull in the previous day's deluge and they had returned with tales of fallen trees, flooded roads and boats ripped from their moorings, one of which had been deposited in the middle of Shore Drive, blocking traffic in all directions. "Its like a battle..."Annie said, drifting off mid sentence. "It's a battle...a war..." She faltered again.

"Are you trying to say its like a war zone?" Adam asked, and Annie nodded, visibly relieved as her fingers touched the row of stitches over her left ear.

The remnants of a Nor'easter was battering the north shore of Massachusetts, with hurricane force winds, astronomically high tides and horizontal rain, streaking across the glass as Adam watched from their upstairs bedroom window. Despite the weatherman's assurances that the stalled storm system was finally moving out to sea, the winds appeared to be escalating again, bringing back the torrential rains. Annie and the girls remained huddled in the bed behind him where they'd all watched the non stop storm coverage until the electricity had cut off a few hours before, abandoning them to the roaring dark. The street below was a paved river that gushed against the oak tree at the end of the driveway where its roots had heaved the sidewalk. From the bedroom dormer, it looked like the corner of lawn nearest the oak had washed away. It was hard to tell.

Telling Time

by P.B.

Inch by inch does the minute hand move. 

Tick by tick and tock by tock. 

The sound doing nothing to sooth. 

The anxious fidget in my nerves.

 Clock, dear clock, abide by time or humor my whim.

 But dare not to toy and play what game you do.

 Such frivolous hours should be a sin. 

I fear your father would have your hands. 

If I do not reach them first. 

Adobe

by Kat White

I like the word adobe. It rolls easily in my mouth, sounding full and round. I like that the word itself is over 4,000 years old, it has sustaining power—it lasts. Adobe structures are sensible: they hoard heat in cold New Mexico nights and buffer from 120-degree July days. The cool clay slabs of earthy mud inherently know what to do, and when. The houses appear soft, almost spongy, but they aren’t at all. The façade is just that, a façade; adobe is deceptively strong. The dusty apricot of the sun-baked clay seems velvety to me, easy on the eyes, like the houses sprung up organically from the arid desert sands. Like they just belong there, naturally. Adobe.

`````

I’m a wanderer, but I’m drawn toward that which isn’t and drawn towards those who aren’t. Kasey. The woman who makes me want to stay, anywhere, with her. We talk about moving to New Mexico, Taos mostly, putting down roots in those arid desert sands. Individually, we’ve drifted all over the country, but we’re ready to stay put now—together. We think we’re ready for adobe.