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A Love Supreme: Imagining my father’s madness
by Natasha Williams
photo collection of the author
The kitchen was thick with cigarette smoke and A Love Supreme, his favorite Coltrane. I danced with scarves wrapped around my undersized torso, one tied gypsy-like around my head. Dime-store clip earrings dangled at my neck. I twirled to his lap, where he slumped over his coffee cup at the dining room table, and pulled on his hand to join me. Anchored to his chair by something weightier than our life could contain, he chuckled, looking into his cup, waiting for the “holy” calling only he could hear.
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500 Days and Counting: Memories from Ukraine
by Clare Cannon
photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash
Day 7
“Bomba. Over us,” my friend Anya, who cat-sat for me in Ukraine, typed into Messenger. “Pray. We are in corridor.” I slumped in the wooden chair where I sat at the Spear Physical Therapy clinic in Manhattan as I read, “Rocket was here.” My world exploded. My physical therapist Nada brought me a box of tissues and a cup of cold water. “My friend just got bombed,” I sobbed.
“Clare, I’m so sorry,” she said in her lyrical Egyptian accent.
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Gravity
by Lisa McMaster
photo by Peter Anderson on Unsplash
It’s a dark November evening and the rain slants across the driveway and backyard. My mom and I have just returned from my piano lesson and I am in a good mood. I am singing something silly when I see my dad sitting at the dining room table, his face drawn tight, eyes down. I keep singing because he often doesn’t smile, or say hello, when I walk into the room. When he tells me to stop, his voice is sharp and I assume I have done something wrong.
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BETWEEN THE ACTS
by Elinora Westfall
art "Untitled Portrait" by Elinora Westfall
Act One
Royal Court, London
Front row, middle seat tickets, for The Cane
Red velvet chairs
And I can’t see my feet, in the dark, but I can hear the sound
Of theatre
Of the side stepped shuffle between seats, and sweets and everyone else’s coats on the arms of chairs
Of whispers and hushes and the creak of Victorian floorboards between the clink of wine glasses
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Visible Emergencies
by Hannah Bonner
art: "Estáticos de Bacuta" by Juan José Clemente
On Saturday I celebrate a friend’s birthday which is also, coincidentally, the fourth of July. I arrive during day; I leave at the torque to night. Over cake, I speak with a woman in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. “No one lives with their husband while divorcing,” she tells me. “No one. This pandemic exposes the cracks of what we never worked on.” I say very little. For eight months I have lived alone; therefore, my cracks and her cracks are different kintsugi.
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Shroom Apocalypse
By Richard Schiffman
photo by Mariam Gab
After the deluge, they’re popping up fast,
a pimpled pox of pallid shrooms,puny members swell tumescent
cracking earth-egg’s humus shells,donning post-apocalyptic bonnets,
daisy chains of moonlit domes,gilled as sharks and cute as buttons,
hoisting clods of moldy duff,fungal, Mongol-horded armies,
mountain-moving mycelia,creeping up on sleeping cities,
hoodied toughs on every corner,meek and dapper Mussolinis,
squat Il Duce’s of decaycasting nets in fetid mulch,
