The sunlight explores the walls
of the apartment we share
like a rabid cockroach.
I crack the body
with a firm stomp, one foot—
shoeless. Together, the dog
I call the love of my life,
and I hold a small service.
The dog has a few nice
things to say. I cry for the third
time today. The body lays
in a planter on the fire escape,
three inches down in the dirt,
where a month later grows
a peony, your favorite flower,
clearly in love with the light.
– Kakie Pate…
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When her parents fought, and Melissa had blunted all her colors to stubs, she would crank open the window and take herself off the trailer park, unseen. The oppressive Tennessee summer often baked the inhabitants of her two-bedroomed, ten-by-twenty-eight-foot home; and she understood from a young age that heat, combined with all-day drinking, made both grown-ups so dehydrated they were delirious even in their raving.
The first time she’d thought of this solution, she’d been nine years old and tall for her age; a peculiar child prone to fits of imagination. But who could blame her? For until then she’d known only the closet, candy pink pajamas, and Push-Pops for tea. The very shadows on the wall came alive to keep her company; they danced just for her.…
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Christmas 1990, my dad bought me a Nintendo. My dad, who was freshly divorced from my mom, was down in Florida visiting. We had just moved from Chicago six months before. I was five at the time, so of course I didn’t understand how much my mom disliked that he was there. My theory is that he showed up uninvited but was allowed to stay when my mom saw how excited her children were to see him.
Even though by 1990, the Nintendo had been out in the US for five years, my siblings and I marveled at the video game console like it was a brand-new invention. It was a gift from my dad, a person that we had moved away from, and that I suddenly wasn’t allowed to see any more for reasons I didn’t understand, so I coveted it like it was plated in gold.…
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The air for months
an apocalyptic blanket,
jaundiced shimmer from stones and dirt.
How does your
world end? A pandemic
for real next time,
wet bulb temps settling
along your latitude sooner than expected,
a decade from now or three?
Do you require
global holocaust, or is a burnt town, town
by town
enough? How far away is Talent, Oregon
Paradise, California. How near
is here it is. We walk outside breathing
ash, breathing bone, sucking whatever
we can into lungs, thick greasy air
enshawling our shoulders,
robes we’ll be wearing till
the end.
– Claudia Putnam
Author’s Note: “Raiment” is part of a chapbook MS composed at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in 2021.…
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The leaky ceiling at the restaurant was nicknamed the fountain by the staff, and when the owner overheard them he called it brilliant. He put seats around the bucket and declared it a contemplative experience.
Here’s the thing, he said. Water and air are the simplest elements in our universe. You yourself are 80% water and 10% air. That is why, as you watch the waterfall through the air, you can contemplate yourself and reality at a deeper level than you ever could before.
The entire staff thought he was crazy until people paid double to sit in the contemplation circle. Only one girl piped up and still called it a leak, but he fired her and threatened to sue her into the ground.
It became the contemplation fountain.…
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She visits the playground almost every day. A lone swing stirs, and she knows it for what it is: a sign from her son that he’s still here, maybe not so that she can touch skin-to-skin, maybe not so she can breathe in tuna fish, sweat, and red licorice, but not gone either.
Once the playground was a vibrant place, crammed full of parked strollers and bags of Cheerios. Her son darted from the swing set to the sandbox to the covered green plastic slide that curved into a sudden drop. The other children grew up, started driving, went to college or work. The new crop of parents, calling the playground a death trap, petitioned for a safer area for their children, a place away from the woods, a place with rounded edges and soft landings.…
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Because I am a small person, olive-skinned, female and not old but not young, more senora than senorita, I am accepted in places white men my age are not. Not because I am blessed, mind, but because I do not matter much. I am invisible. I feel reasonably safe and secure here because it is no different from the neighborhoods I grew up in. Also, because I am walking a pit bull with fantastic teeth and lolling tongue, whom no one else knows to be a pussy cat, happy to lick the hand of anyone, good or bad, who holds out treats.
“Good dog,” I tell her, as we pass a gaggle of men and women holding court on the sidewalk. All are wearing masks, I am not.…
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