#107: "Makeup" by Hadley Moore

~This piece was originally published in slightly different form in Midwestern Gothic (2012).

So this was what it was. Champagne gold read the label on the box. Anne Marie looked at the silver-colored pot in her hand, its contents like a dessert, a blondish mousse in a miniature ramekin. Against the lip of the pot’s smooth white insides the champagne gold seemed dark, but impossibly pale for its intent.

Was her face champagne gold? Champagne gold where it wasn’t port wine?

            Fifteen minutes ago her mother had returned from shopping in Traverse City. Among the bags she brought home was a tiny unmarked vellum one in which was nestled a tinier box (in which, Anne Marie knew now, had been nestled the still tinier pot of this mousse-like makeup).

"I found it at Macy’s," her mother told her.

Anne Marie had smiled and said thank you and asked if she should wait until tomorrow to open it.

"No. It’s not a birthday present. But listen, Anne Marie, don’t be mad."

And Anne Marie had wondered what she meant. The package looked like it could hold a pair of earrings, or a lip balm, maybe.

"Don’t be mad," her mother said again. "It’s just…I saw it, okay? I ran across it. And I thought of you. You’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow, honey. I mean, thirty-nine. That’s almost middle-aged."

Maybe not a lip balm, but earrings, perhaps, or a brooch.

"It’s not a birthday present. It’s just that it seemed…it seemed time. All right? Now I’m going out again for a bit."

When her mother gathered up her things to leave, Anne Marie had the sense she was being given privacy. She’d need the whole house to herself, apparently, to open the tiny package—and then she’d wondered, panic traveling up from the middle of her chest, what kind of sex thing could be so small. Was her mother giving her a filthy toy? Or birth control? Oh Lord, it made sense: "Don’t be mad," "You’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow," "It seemed time."

"No, Mom!" Anne Marie had shouted.

"Don’t be mad. I’ll be back in a couple of hours," her mother said, and shut the door behind her.

#106: "Chelsea Hotel, Room 101" by Allie Marini Batts

~This poem previously appeared in New CollAge Magazine (2001).

Chelsea Hotel, Room 101

is where they bring the gurney.

Between sodden lingerie, the knife’s rough part

grins like teeth in a tissueless tract where babies can’t grow.

Closed tight or half-open still, you think of your fingers

and count the times I didn’t call.

It’s like a hunger, this ache in my belly.

There’s a wet suck as it leaves my belly,

divesting me of Cupid’s arrow before raising the gurney.

If I had air left in my lungs, I’d call

for you, but I don’t. That’s the hard part.

I can feel your fingers,

even as the chills grow.

It is New York, cat-calls and traffic and sirens grow

loud too early in the day, and my belly

was full and tight now two hours ago, your fingers

did not trail behind the gurney

looking for one last touch through a cloth part.

You start to wonder if I did call.

Perhaps you slept through my call,

deaf to my voice in your opiate dreams; this can grow

tedious, the way television and smack is the part

of our day that never stops. You touch my belly

in your dream, and I turn into grey flesh on the gurney,

then straight back to ash, slipping through your bruised fingers.

Under the sink, my fingers

spread open wide from wanting. I grew sticky, my call

was too quiet for you to hear. I can see the gurney

for a split second, before the lights in the room grow

blurred. I have an echo in my belly,

spilling onto the tiles, my secret inside part.

In that desperate, strung-out part

of sliding away from you, at last I could feel. My fingers

found steel, mumbling inside my belly.

I am bleeding beneath the leaking sink. I don’t want to call

out to you, because you won’t let me grow

cold on the tiles, waiting for the gurney.

This is the part where I call goodbye to you.

I grow backwards, born again bloodless, a screaming baby again with closed fingers.

I can’t see you anymore from the gurney; I am curled up inside my own dead belly.

*****

#105: "Calling Up Billie" by Susan Starr Richards

~This story first appeared in Brilliant Corners, A Journal of Jazz & Literature (2004).

            That carefully breathy voice speaking out of my phone in the middle of the night, conjuring up my whole lost world—the late-night city world I left behind.

            “Are you sitting down?” the voice asks me.

            I’m lying down, in the bed. It’s 3 a.m. I live in the country now.

            But I’m wide awake, suddenly. “Why? What’s happened, Jo?” I ask.

            A pause. “This isn’t Jo. This is her sister,” the voice says.

            But it’s still Jo’s voice I hear. A voice that knows just how to let itself drop at the end of a phrase—the end of a moment—the end of a set. That music has a dying fall. So does the voice.

            And now that same voice—it says it is her sister—is telling me Jo had a dying fall, herself. Out the window of her apartment, fourteen stories down. What’s wrong with this conversation? Everything. How can someone who killed herself be telling me so on the phone?

            “I thought you’d want to know,” the voice says, before it drops back into the dark. “Since you were such good friends.”

#104: "Bounty and Burden" by Kelly Martineau

~This essay originally appeared in Quiddity (2012).

Bounty and Burden

Hunger

In those days, when my parents were still married and we lived in the white colonial on a tree-lined street, I began curling my shoulders forward, wrapping my body so that my chest sagged and became a hollow.  Once, when I was four, I wore a candy necklace—an elastic round punctuated by pastel beads that I could crack with my baby teeth.  My father’s best friend bought the necklace at the grocery when he and my father escaped from their wives long enough to buy more beer on a muggy Saturday afternoon.  Long after the candy was gone, the adults still emptied the cans.

Balloon

            In yoga, much work is done to open the chest.  Note the breath as it enters the lungs.  Lift the chest to the sky during sun salutations, in standing poses.  I breathe space into my upper body and feel my breastbone rise as my shoulders ratchet open, tugging against the years of internal rotation.

# 103: Two Poems by Mary Zeppa

~This poem previous appeared in Another Chicago Magazine (1981).

Sweet Dreams

1

I speak to my sister

of orgasm

I speak to my father

of Proust

while Marlon Brando (as Stanley Kowalski)

is sitting beside me, his hand on my thigh.

2

These nights, I meet you

inside my dreams

dream lover of the long thighs.

Your wife doesn't notice

when you leave your body.

It still does the things that she likes.

All night, you bruise

the inside of my skull.

All night,

she fucks her blond doll.

3

Yellow begins.

My thighs are its flames.

Its light

fills those hollows,

my bones.  My skull

has been keeping

a secret:  this dark

is purple and warms.

*****

# 102: "Slow Fire Pistol" by Sherrie Flick

~This story was previously published in Puerto del Sol (2003).

  

            When I met Robert he was crazy, going five million directions at the same time. I followed him down each and every path, trudging right along behind him all the way, stomping all the way back.  The whole thing was super-fast—like one of those Matchbox car snap together loop-de-loop tracks.   

            By the end of the first month, he was moving in.  Into I don't know where because there sure as hell wasn't any space in my one-bedroom.  He seeped into nooks and crannies, into cracks, poured himself into the divots in the linoleum floor, reaching down and throwing some roots into the thin gaps between my floorboards.  He took hold.  And it worked, you know?

            It was saturation point, mind you, month one.  But I just keep taking and taking.  That's how I learn.  My friend Vivette tells me, she says, ‘Susan, you're like a motherfucking sponge.’  She says I'm one of those big ones you use to clean the tub with or the hood of your car.  I'm a sponge waiting to soak it in.  All of it.  Whatever it is.  Vivette says it's her job to come along and wring me out. 

            So there's Robert seeping into that, and reaching into this.  And there I am sitting on the couch with my legs wrapped up underneath me, watching him.  I'm sipping my coffee with two hands, holding the mug like I'm cold.  I'm watching him watch the football game he always has time for even though it always seems like he never has time for anything.

            I'm staring him down, watching him go five hundred million ways, and that's just sitting still.  He's eating pretzels and opening a beer.  He's shuffling some papers from work.  Robert sells life insurance.  He's good.  He says it's because he understands people.  He's alternately reaching out and squeezing the back of my neck.  I sip my coffee again.  I've been staring at him for five minutes straight and he hasn't once made eye contact with me.  He has the phone beside him.  He's trying to get through to his brother in California, but the line's busy which means that Danny's on the internet.  So Robert is going every which way, then he yells--jumping up--"Touchdown!  Yes."

            He flips to the Discovery Channel, because he's also watching this thing on frogs, then to MTV, the Food Network, then he looks right at me looking right at him like I'm the only person in the world.  There's some woman frying little chunks of ham in a skillet on TV.  The woman is smiling and saying, "Believe me.  It works," as she stirs the naked chunks with a big wooden spoon.

            Robert says, "Babe.  Let's talk.  Remember when we would sit up listening to the trains?  Remember that?  Let's talk like we did back then."  He looks at me for what seems like a long while but is probably just a second or so.  We don't say anything.  Just stare, smiling.

# 101: Two Poems by Meredith Pond

~This poem previously appeared in Georgetown Review (2008).

Peeling Psyche Off the Wall

So we make the same mistakes and so does she: losing faith

in her lover, listening to jealous siblings, holding the candle

too close, spilling the wax. We can’t stop ourselves, neither

can she. But no ants come to sort our grains, no birds

to pluck the fleece from the thorns by the riverbank, no song

of Persephone’s to hum us home from the hell we’ve created

all on our own. Betrayal is a dusty toad, sitting in its lumpy truth.

Let her be, you say, setting her down in the gritty sand

to kiss the toad, to seal her fate. We knew this would happen.

We knew it all along. But now the ants are back, birds aloft,

the road to Hades darkening with Lethe’s sleep. Look,

she stands and loosens her garments against the heat

of his mother’s rage. Beauty suffers, but beauty lives. 

The soul reaches for the lost one, but where? For us

here in this empty room, we hold her threads,

we see her colors, we feel the weight of stones

moving where once our hearts lived, once we loved.

Over and over, we peel Psyche off the wall, help her

stand, begin again. We are the ants, the birds, the fleece,

the thorns. Our redemption is her immortality.

*****