Issue 43
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Route to Hever Station
art by Gregory Stump
by B. Anne Kalicki
HEAD SOUTH ON HEVER RD TOWARD UCKFIELD LN
0.3 mi
Hever Castle was resplendent – too much of what you expected. The crawling ivy, swans in the moat! The one thing you could have done without was the life-size replica of an adult Anne Boleyn. The castle was her childhood home, and you wanted to imagine her there as a child. Her appearance is your access point into her, after all. Getting there was easy enough,
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The Big Sweep
art by Gregory Stump
by Patrick Browne
My grip slicks the shopping cart’s red plastic handlebar with sweat. Karen and Bob have already disappeared down the aisles with the ten- and fifteen-second headstarts that Dick’s earlier blunders handed them. I should have known not to bring him. In twenty years of marriage, the man can’t have stepped foot inside a supermarket more than a dozen times. He didn’t get a single question right during the Price Guess or the Product Name Scramble. Not one. Might as well have shown up blindfolded and sedated.
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Letter from the Editors, LIT 43
photo by Andrew Velzquez
The word “nostalgia” is derived from two Ancient Greek words: nostos and algos. The former word can be translated to the concept of “homecoming” such as that of Odysseus in the Odyssey, but overall describes the journey of a hero to their home. Around the same time that Homer was writing down his version of The Iliad and The Odyssey, other rhapsodes were writing their versions of the Trojan War down as well, resulting in a full cycle of epics starting with The Cypria and ending with The Telegony though Virgil would later cap off the Trojan Cycle with his Aeneid.
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A Review of Lara Chamoun’s debut chapbook “Bleeding Ghosts”
by Rebecca Endres
Lara Chamoun’s Bleeding Ghosts opens with the image of a scar, and thus begins one of the themes that will haunt the reader for the rest of the book. “It faded to a whisper after your first words squeezed through your throat, slimy and strangled” Chamoun writes.
Slimy and strangled indeed: the collection, written primarily in second person and featuring characters who would feel at home in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, displays again and again the difficulty of voicing things: hurt, elation,
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-5°
art by Trevor Cunnington
by Tashiana Seebeck
Let’s tear open the oil paint
sky in Mariposa where you first knuckled the loam
and said Let’s–
I am afraid to tell God your name lest
he look up at your spruce face and unmake
the tongue tip behind your teeth I’ve come
to know well. December looms and lingers for a lifetime.
The poppies know only hoar frost
and woodsmoke. A man in the shape
of your last lurched out from the doorway lacquered
shut with dust and all the longleaf pines shuttered closed. -
The Sundering
by Stephanie McCarley Dugger
A dove, waiting
in the elm outside the window,
calls. Every day
he searches for her,
listens for her reply. I thought
I would understand love by now.
But, I am featherless,
too careful, too
finely tuned
for touch.
Yesterday,
new buttercups lined the walk.
Today, they droop–
