If they could speak what stories would they tell? How you crawled through fire to save Fred Noonan? How you were cast away like Robinson Crusoe? Was Fred your man Friday?
About the sun, sharp and relentless, how it burned your skin, already charred? About the rain that drenched your shelter, hastily built in the shade of a ren tree?
They say you lived for sixty-one days. Did you live or just survive? Were you sad or secretly relieved to be free of photographers’ flashing bulbs and Lucky Strike?…
It rained all day and then the next day and then it rained for the next one hundred years. Sometimes it came down hard and other times, just a light mist. People got used to it. It was expected and normal, like the fact that, in the morning, there’d be air to breathe.
People sunned in the rain. They swam and had parties, played ball, rode bikes, cooked out, drank wine and beer. People made love in the rain, divorced in a downpour, washed their cars in a drizzle.
In dreams, people often imagined clear, sunny days. They imagined dry fields and lawns, trees swaying in warm sunshine, lakes and ponds as smooth as a sheet of glass.
There were always a few in each town who couldn’t take it, who let the constant tapping on the roof and windows drive them nearly insane. …
I refused to cut my hair until I was seven. My mother probably hated having to sit down every day until then to untangle the nests in my hair- and my relentless whining every time the brush pulled my head back a bit too far, but she misses it every time it’s short. I liked going to bed with my hair spread out along the pillow, the ritual of my aunt stroking my hair until I fell asleep whenever she visited.
Every weekend I’d go to my dad’s apartment building- on this particular day, my mother thought it was nice enough to walk there, so that’s what we did. The three-block walk wasn’t too taxing- the only complaint I had was how sweaty her hand had gotten while it was locked with mine.…
Michael Montlack’s poetry collection Daddy (NYQ Books, September 7, 2020, 88 pages) is a sweeping vista of allegories and witticisms, and a benevolent contemplation on being a son, a brother, a poet, and a gay man in America.
The book cover is Christopher Shields’ pencil drawing of a man’s muscular arm sporting a tattoo of a seahorse; arresting and intriguing, it’s a warning of the nuanced play on femininity and masculinity that is to come. Appropriately enough, the book opens with a poem, “How to Mother Like a Man,” that talks about a male seahorse giving birth to help the female exhausted from egg production. This sets the tone for the entire collection—a compassionate memoir that transcends defined gender roles and is a celebration of grace, forgiveness, acceptance, and family.…
the room in which they’ve put her hospice bed brims with whispered talk of Christ a cross adorned with gaudy plastic beads glitters above the fireplace her husbands reads the Bible and tugs my arm to say she loves this verse his eyes are red and bulge with cowboy gospel songs she doesn’t budge except to mutter water to scratch her eye
i know this is her last transfiguration i know the harp that is her collapsing mouth is tuned to keys the living cannot fathom her song is no longer mother but something else
in life she never asked me once to pray in death i blink and don’t know what to say
The ring, held between white satin lips in the black velvet box, was shoved deep into the left-side of his hiking pants pocket. He repeatedly reached inside to touch it, making sure it was still there, even when on level ground where it was unlikely to fall out. Mal did not have much feeling in his left hand because burns had eradicated his finger tips. People still stared at his leathery facial scars, now twelve years old, but they no longer stopped while staring.
Still, it was a wonder to him that a woman as attractive as Becca would date him. They had been exclusive for several months, from the time they met at the university in Indiana, where Mal had enrolled as an MFA student in Poetry and Becca worked as the English Department administrative assistant.…
The first time I remember seeing you was at Awana in the Bible church in Three Rivers. I was in fifth grade. You were born a couple month before me, but were in third grade because, as you later explained, you broke your leg in first grade and didn’t go to school for most of the year. The other year you got held back? I’m not sure what you said happened with that, whether you were just behind or a teacher didn’t like you. It wasn’t anything you took responsibility for.
But you loved the Christian metal I had you listen to. You loved horror movies and so did I. The next three years of my high school you were at my house nearly every weekend.…
