The ocean dries up when I touch it. Fish and algae disintegrate; every drop of salt water seeps into sand. Emoto says it’s my negative energy, that the waves would rather go bare than be exposed to me. I don’t know the ocean’s feelings. And it doesn’t care to know mine: I’ve given up looking for my notice of its departure. All I know is the little girl inside me, and the apologies I keep giving her. I write sorries in handwriting she doesn’t know as her own. I’m a stranger to her now. Her tiered dresses hang dusty in my closet, gray around the seams. The mole on my forehead mirrors hers, and, to her disappointment, the scar on her fingertip still hasn’t faded. I try to tell her about the science of nostalgia, about sensory stimuli and chronological remoteness.…
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The woman did not survive but the child did; her fall was cushioned by the body of her godmother, who hit the ground first. The young godmother, frozen in flight, knows exactly what is happening—her arms are extended as if they could possibly break her fall—the baby, upright but looking down in disbelief as the disassembling fire escape cascades alongside them, a collage of iron fragments racing them to earth, potted plants in accompaniment. Smoke can be seen creeping and curling like fog over the edge of the rooftop.
I had first seen the photograph—really a series of photographs: the photographer was using his motor drive—while in college, in a class called “Media and Memory” or something very like it. It fulfilled my second history requirement.…
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I didn’t hear the thunder. I may have felt it, swelling in air and buffeting close to me. Saw skies, shades of grey and purple, colors of bruises healing. I lay on my back, seagrass wisping dryly over me. Waves broke behind where I lay, spray hazing over skin, numbing me with cold. I couldn’t pinpoint the pain. It seemed centred on a hip as if I’d dislocated a bone. Scents of brine floated across me as if someone held smelling salts under my nose. I couldn’t move.
“Are you okay?” she said next to me. “Thought you were dead. My boyfriend’s calling an ambulance.” She bent down, gusting wind layering hair like bandages over her face.
I’d noticed it coming. The freshly turned earth smells, odor of downpours on steaming ground, rain angling, swishing through leaves and across bitumen roads radiating the day’s heat.…
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Harry was tall and thin, elegant looking, silver-white hair; an older man, maybe 55 but what did I know? I was 13, maybe 14. It was hard to tell how old adults were. My father’s name was Harry so maybe that was why I felt safe with him. He started talking to me on the subway and I immediately responded, telling him how I wanted to be an actor, how I was coming home from rehearsal. Then it turned out we lived on the same block on the lower east side of Manhattan. Made sense. That’s why we were on the same train.
My father was fat and ugly, a mean man and it showed on his face. He hated me, hated that I was an actor.…
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Look, her almost bare stems bows away from glass,
casting charms and spells so you’ll face the glass.
Leaning towards light, this one expects you to play
like some little girl who’s not encased in glass.
Green, sharp and strict, still hoping. A soft sway
lights the words she needs to explain the glass.
Crossed as a sword, daring, calling today
shyly—come closer to her. She’ll tame the glass.
Commanding light to kiss her, calling May
out of April, she flies to perfectly shade the glass.
Almost straight as a delicate mast, gay
as a face card, reflecting the spray of glass.
Gather them all and mark their place—
Softly, gentle, careful not to break the glass.
– Mark J. Mitchell…
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This morning it poured my glass of Wild Turkey bourbon on A Farewell to Arms, made a paper airplane from an Appalachian Power bill, subscribed to Glamour magazine against my will. Sometimes it squirts toothpaste across my mustache and draws smiley faces on the mirror. It pinches baby cheeks on city buses, fixes tags on strangers’ t-shirts, texts my ex in the middle of the night.
It’s been three months since Moira packed her bags and moved out. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said. The fighting, the infertility, my drinking—it was more than she could bear. But the affair was what finished us. I’d betrayed her body by giving mine to another. She wanted to forgive me, to move on, and she tried, but something had died between us that we couldn’t get back.…
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I referred to my stepfather as the Peanut Man for the majority of my kindergarten year. He hadn’t married in at that point, but his basketball shorts were in my mother’s closet and his mixed nuts in our cupboard. Nobody ate nuts but him. Thus, Peanut Man.
I still call him Jeff, but his name is on the mortgage and he came to my senior night for soccer. He moved me into college. He is my grade-school caricature, acclimated. We say “I love you” if I say it first.
Remarriage complicates love. Jeff’s introduction to me wasn’t watching his wife tear top-to-bottom to push out a product of them, but rinsing my blueberry-dyed vomit from Dora bedsheet while my mom scraped my crusted body with a washrag in a home that wasn’t yet his.…
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