In our subdivision, we’d never break a fresh loaf of bread together. At night, we keep the blinds closed so that our private lights never touch, denying that the light of day exposes us both.
We are more strangers than neighbors, you a property owner in his right mind, I a deed holder on your left.
Could we ever be brothers instead of bothers, each worried about the other’s age, health, hardening of the arteries and of the heart?
One side of a fence seldom feels the other. No, we can’t straddle a wall and mend it, nor can trust return to tear it down.
Perhaps one day our children could play together.
Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014), Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020) His personal website is www.robertsking.info.
the trashcan is full, and the dumpster’s so damned far.
It’s late. The TV is static.
I never paid the cable bill,
so after awhile, all the channels
were snowed in like the Tioga Pass in January.
I prefer the static’s zs to silence’s buzzing.
Similar, but I’ve learned to tell the difference.
Last night I left the Frosted Flakes open
when I passed out off the remnants of
all the ‘almost gone’ bottles in the apartment,
so they’re stale now, too soft to enjoy, yet,
I eat some anyway, dry.
Milk goes bad too fast.
Tomorrow I may have to drink the Vermouth straight.
I’m not looking forward to it.
Maybe I’ll put in some applications,
or beg Sean to let me work at Sears again,
or at least donate some plasma.
The first is only two weeks away.
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day,
but the Great Library of Alexandria burned
in one afternoon.
When I tell people that, they say
I’m avoiding the issue, but I say no, no, listen…
It takes a long time to build something great,
but only moments to reduce it to ruins.
Author Bio: Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review & Texas Review among others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.
hands says my Sunday School teacher, we all have to, she says, but we shouldn’t kill our -selves or be reckless so I asked her why life matters so much–it just gets taken away and God’s in charge of everything so however I die isn’t it His fault, and for my questions I got sent out into the hall, it’s lonely here but still quiet and one day I’ll die and my soul will soar to Heaven but solely to be judged. I can imagine Heaven with this kind of hallway leading to the throne of God and there He’ll sit and when it’s my time check the Book of Life for me. He’ll have to squint.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Cardiff Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Nebo, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.
My snow prints reach a woodland home fenced in by clouds and icicle limbs, a house of brick and window light, an insulated bubble in the darkness.
Surely, warmth glows inside every room. What light leaks out is charity to snowdrift strangers like me.
Would my knock on the door put the lights out, set off the dog alarm? Would I hear feet and voices tangled in a rush to quiet?
To drafts and drifters mothed by window light, most warm homes turn cold backs.
Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014), Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020) His personal website is www.robertsking.info.
The first guy I meet on the app calls himself Stuart. He picks me up at the apartment I share with two other girls, one of them Ellie who told me about the app.
“Guys over forty buy you anything,” she said, showing me her new Coach bag, pink with gold accents. Five hundred dollars. If I got a bag like that, I’d return it, but Ellie holds it close like a pet.
Stuart drives a black Mercedes as sleek as his slicked-back hair. He wears a lavender collared shirt tucked into belted tan slacks. Loafers. Corporate casual.
In the spotless car, he asks, “So, Pammy, what do you do?”
I go by Pam, but Ellie said Pammy sounds more innocent. Cute.
At first I think he’s asking about sex. How far will I go?
I must look confused because he adds, “For work. What do you do for work?”
“I work at a law firm on asbestos cases. Mostly filing and depo indexes.”
“Asbestos cases? I thought that was a mid-nineties thing.”
I shrug. “It pays the rent.”
Actually, I’m proud of my job. I’m twenty-two; it’s my first big-girl job. Everyone, even Steve, a partner with a corner office overlooking Biscayne Bay from floor thirty-one at Biscayne Tower, greets me each morning: “Hello, Pamela,” he says, his voice professorial, exacting.
At The Outback, Stuart orders a Bloomin’ Onion, a surprise given it’s greasy and he seems too fit to truck with junk food. He eats slowly, wiping his fingers on the napkin, not licking them like Roger, my ex would do. I follow Stuart’s lead. I don’t double-dip.
Just as I think of Roger, who did not mind my double-dipping, I get a text from him: How are you? Missing you.
Though we’ve been apart for months, he checks up on me at least once a week. I imagine he can see me here with Stuart. He’d ask what the fuck I’m doing.
I put my phone back in my purse.
While we wait for dinner (I order filet mignon), I lean my elbows on the table and clasp my hands.
Stuart touches my hand, unwraps it with his fingers and clasps it, leans forward as if he’s going to kiss my knuckles.
“Pammy,” he says as if he’s trying to soothe me. “You have beautiful hands.”
My scalp prickles, and I suddenly feel hot beneath my armpits, as if he’s told me I have great tits and ass.
He holds my hand until the food arrives. I eat like I mean business (I skipped lunch); he’s impressed.
In his car, he puts his hand on my leg, leans toward me. We kiss. His tongue slides in my mouth. I can smell his woodsy aftershave or body spray. I put my hand on his smooth cheek, so much softer than Roger’s stubble, and let him move his hand under my skirt. I should have worn jeans, but Ellie insisted upon the skirt.
You could say I knew what would happen to me here. Ellie told me at the kitchen table, where we sat across from each other, that you have to put out for these men.
“It’s part of the deal,” she said. “But it’s not so bad. Last night, I had lobster.”
It’s important to add: We barely make rent each month. Meat is a luxury. We box-dye our hair, give each other manicures, eat peanut butter from the jar.
Stuart’s hand goes into my underwear. His fingers are warm. I flinch.
“You okay?” he asks. “Too fast?”
I shake my head, knowing I owe him for the meal, for this escape from the fear I might be homeless someday, like those people crouched like fixtures along the buildings in downtown Miami. I see them during lunch when I take a walk and eat my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. I avoid the staff cafeteria so no one will see me eat.
Stuart moves my hand on his crotch.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I say, surprising myself. “Not here.”
We wind up at a Sheraton downtown, only blocks from where I work.
The room is on the third floor. For some reason, he wants to take the stairs. He holds my hand as if I’m a child who will trip and fall.
In the room that smells as sterile as a hospital, he unbuckles his belt, comes toward me, calling me “girl,” and I realize I think of myself this way: young, as innocent as Ellie told me to be.
“I’m not a whore,” I tell him as he pulls down my skirt.
His brow wrinkles. “Of course you’re not,” he says. “You’re special.”
I should think of Roger, who was always gentle with me—so gentle—for those two years in college. Instead, I think of my mother, who still begs me to move back home (Ohio), where we have a cleaning lady every other week and get take-out three times a week. My second-floor bedroom overlooks our pool with a slide and a deep end.
I won’t tell her that I can’t bear to face my friends, the college grads. I dropped out after two years. Dad expected all A’s and B’s, and I was tired of proving myself.
I feel like I’m proving myself here to this man who could be my father. I’m not a whore, but a lady. Not a child, yet my skin crawls with shame as it did when I stole my mother’s tennis bracelet.
We’re in bed when my phone dings. No doubt it’s Roger, checking on me, missing me, or my mother, urging me back home.
Author Bio- Christine Heuner has been teaching high school English in New Jersey for over two decades. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Flash Fiction Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, and others. It is available to read on her website at christineheuner.com.
I tell my Sunday School teacher after class this morning, she tossed me for chewing gum and blowing bubbles out of it which isn’t easy to do, it’s not bubble gum and the bubbles I blow, I blow small but it was the best I could do and why couldn’t she see that but she said she saw and that my skill was not in question, just my seriousness about religion –there’s a time and place for everything, which I guess is true and I don’t want to die and go to Hell and then have the Devil laugh at me for being stupid and yet talented. God would say the same damn thing.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Cardiff Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Nebo, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.
If I am not seen, I also cannot see myself and all the bright lights, the stars my dark fingers long to reach and might snuff out one by one until everyone is blind.
Invisible, untouchable, I take care not to touch, not to change the world as it has changed me.
Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014), Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020) His personal website is www.robertsking.info.
I want to be somewhere where the ground is green and black and orange and swells and ebbs like an ocean of dirt.
I want to found a retirement village on an island of the black amidst the green and orange so we can sit and watch the sunset be indistinguishable from the ground.
I want us all to take up metalcraft and sit on our porches and make jewelry with the fire in the ground and the fire in the air and the fire in the oven and the fire in our blood.
I want us to forget what we know and only use what we learn anew.
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Stone of Madness, Thirteen Myna Birds, and Caustic Frolic, among others.
is the repetition of sound,
like alarm clock beeps—
depressing, as the day’s crowned
with sounds bound
to meanings that repeat
the repetition of sounds’
redundant mound
of blah-blah-blah-bleep!
Depressing, as the day’s crowned
with less and less profound
combinations, as linguistics seep
from the repetition of sounds
we’ve come to frown
upon as the daily grind, the common, cheap
and depressing as days crowned
with sameness. The villanelle’s fault is it rounds up meanings and sounds, familiar as life’s retreat into the repetition of sounds, depressing as the day’s crown.
Author Bio Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review & Texas Review among others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.
Can a self-love letter be addressed to someone other than the author? I think so! Today, an overcast and snow-filled Thursday in February, I listened to “Feeling Good” as made famous by Nina Simone to recall the sun in the sky, the butterflies having fun, and the scent of the pine. The music resonates with me because of her emotion and expression, but I couldn’t help noting that she is singing about self-love in a way that is addressed to a series of beings other than herself, a series of apostrophes to inspirations from nature.
Whether talking to the Dragonfly out in the Sun, the Birds flying High, or the River Running Free, she speaks to the objects about their freedoms, their abilities, their purposes, before pausing to declare, “you know how I feel.” Her self-appreciation does not diminish when she addresses other items; it grows, blossoms, flourishes.
So, you certainly can write a self-love letter to yourself, but you can also write it anyone or anything that makes you know you are loved! However you choose to write it, we want to hear it! This themed submission closes on February 28, so submit your poems, prose, art, or other media of self-love. General submissions are also open.
