Issue 41
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Learning Human as a Second Language
photo by Yasser Alaa Mobarak
by Meredith Jelbart
I was an only child. I grew up in a place my father called Island Hill. It was not an island, but a house on top of a hill, in semi-rural Australian bush, around twenty kilometres from Melbourne. There were other children in the general area, but the hill was steep enough to discourage kids from wandering up to play with me; and to discourage me from wandering down and up again, to play with them.
I was not entirely alone. I had friends.
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Cachexia
painting by Robert Rogers
by Sydney Lea
A friend from the dawn of our boyhoods is cachectic, a word unknown to me until I heard it from a doctor– a friend of similar longstanding– who’d recently seen him. “It just means he’s withering away,” the doctor told me, adding that our mutual pal had also dropped, as if overnight, into dementia.
I knew that in my own fairly recent talk with the man in question, he had kept repeating himself;
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Mementos of a Dive Bar Maven
art by Catherine McGuire
by Bonnie Darves
I have a thing about dive bars. I like them, not just a little bit but a lot, and one of my sisters, Anna, is similarly afflicted. My mother accused us of frequenting them for less than noble reasons. “I don’t know why you girls insist on ‘slumming it’ in those places—don’t you know that you stick out like sore thumbs or snobs no matter what you wear?” What’s the point? she wanted to know. How could you tell her, in a way that she’d understand,
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down on the Ol’ Brain Ranch
photo by Allison Guan
by John Sullivan
(A new situation comes into focus. The bulbous / florid-faced / fake-smiley guy is talking to an empty suit draped over an empty chair. Talking ardently, even strenuously, occasionally grabbing the suit by its lapels & hoisting it (gently) off the chair to speak to confront the suit (more or less) face to face. You realize he’s talking to his father.)
aka “Doc Benway”
I … I … I always hated how you had to control us.
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Love in the time of distance; Someone to Carry On With; I am most myself when someone is holding my hand
photo by Allison Guan
by Shana Ross
Love in the time of distanceI tell her I have been re-reading Gertrude. She says I would write your autobiography. Referentially. Unironically. Lovingly. Unwilling to trace possibilities to their dead-ends in the maze printed on the paper placemat, one fingertip at a time over and over until the future has been seen. A marble run, a domino track, a Rube. Set off and unwatched. We go about our day but in my ears is the clattering.
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sike.
art by Robert Rogers
by Baraka Noel
I’m sensitive. A smell can send me spinning. I cry for fiction more than life. Today, I saw this cavalcade of blue-black glistening flies vibrating on a dollop of canine feces. So many eyes kaleidoscoping over shit. So much dog shit on the streets. So much information.
I guess they call it empathy. As a child, I wished for synesthesia; now I shower in the dark to deprive my senses of context. I’m pretty sensitive. But, that’s not entirely why I wound up in a psych ward.
