#170: Excerpts from "Sonnets to E——" by Dan Brady

15

~This poem originally appeared in a chapbook print to accompany the Call & Response Exhibit at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC (2009)

You accused me of consuming too much

with my calm, sad face. I couldn’t stop,

so I didn’t feel remorse. I began to rot

from the inside. I understand what happened.

To save yourself you came to view me

without care or doubt, another bug

closed in on the porch, dead against the window.

To go back, even one step, is impossible

and imperfect. Beyond love is mercy,

and beyond mercy, oblivion.

You look at me now as a project

turned unrecognizable to you,

just as God cringes at the bitter taste

of the rivers and the seas.

*****

Redux Open to Submissions July 5 – July 31 (2015)

NOTE: THIS IS A PRIOR CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS IN 2015. REDUX IS NOT OPEN FOR UNSOLICITED SUBMISSIONS AT THIS TIME.

Redux is accepting submissions of fiction/poetry/essays during an open reading period: July 5 to July 31.  We’re looking for literary work of high quality that has been previously published in a print journal but that is not available elsewhere on the internet.  Our mission is to bring deserving work to a new, online audience.  Preference will be given to older pieces (i.e. published before 2012).

No novel excerpts, poems that appear in chapbooks, or pieces published in anthologies…even if these books are presently out-of-print.

Please read our guidelines for important submission information.  If your work is accepted, you will also be asked to write a short “story behind the piece” essay a la the Best American series. Pieces must be available in a Microsoft Word file.

Authors we’ve published include Margot Livesey, Sandra Beasley, Robin Black, R.T. Smith, Michelle Boisseau, Kelle Groom, Erica Dawson, Catherine Chung, Walter Cummins, Lee Martin, Dave Housley, and Terese Svoboda.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Submission guidelines: http://www.reduxlitjournal.com/p/submission-guidelines-for-redux.html

Questions: reduxlj AT gmail DOT com

#169: "Deja New" by Lee Martin

~This story was previously published in Ms. Magazine (2005).

           

            You’ve seen me. I know you have. Maybe at the Piggly Wiggly, maybe at the Speedway Auction House, Braum’s Ice Cream, or someone’s estate sale. I waltz in, wearing a wide-brimmed hat adorned with silk flowers and feathers, or a Carmen Miranda number stacked high with bananas, pineapples, grapes. Remember me now? Maybe I step right out of the fifties, demure in saddle oxfords, bobby sox, a poodle skirt, and a cashmere sweater, or better yet, you look up and there I am in a fringed flapper dress with thin shoulder straps and beads around my neck, strands that hang down to my knees. Please excuse me; I’m working on reclaiming joy. 

            Tonight, at the young widows’ support group the leader, Candace, tells my friend Nadine that it’s all right to be angry with her husband because he killed himself. We all have a right to anger and guilt, Candace says; pain lets us know we’re alive. If we verbalize, we can accept. We can love, and love can save us.

            “I’m pissed off,” Nadine says. “I plan on staying that way.”

We’re sitting in a circle, the five of us, around a table in a room off the Interfaith Chapel at St. Anne’s Hospital. The room is bright with fluorescent lighting so we can all try to feel hopeful and work on developing strength and tranquility through continual exposure to emotional intensity. Candace uses language like that; she’s a young widow herself. She tells us that grief relies on memory, so our stories are sacred.

Here’s one I’ve never told.

#168" Two Poems by Michael Gushue

The Iraqi Hilton

~This poem was previously published in the Indiana Review (2003).

 
                        i
 
All this reconstruction is hopeless.
We will never lawn over our failures.
 
Failures are a lens to fry ants as they
travel on their invisible monorails of scent.
 
The smell of ants attracts
the bunko squad. Although disbanded,
 
each member of the bunko squad yips
like a Barbary ape caught between bars.
 
Sitting in bars, we watch the Nature Show and
the Food Show. But the Cop Show watches us.
 
In this episode, because he owns me,
the chief can put his arm around my shoulders
 
and say: "There's enough here to re-elect
the mayor without a single vote. A man
 
never knows how handsome he is until
his face has been irredeemably scarred."
 
                        ii
 
 
During the night crows fell from the trees
and shattered onto the pavement below.
 
Each morning I had to sweep the shards
of black glass that littered the sidewalk.
 
Confession: I ditched the bags at a work site
for a monument whose very idea I detested.
 
One day while sweeping I took off my gloves
and picked up a bit of wing. Clean sharp edges.
 
 
The next morning my hand was brittle as praline.
 
                        iii
 
We crawled downstairs to lobby head first.
In the middle of every room,
 
            pools of mercury.

During the War of the Mini-fridges our emblem was:
The Frozen Exploded Coke Bottle.
 
Electricity rationed in tiny vials
and measured in sporks.
 
Famous Battles: Water Retention. Water
Retaliation. Meat Disposal. Attrition.
 
On Tuesday, an angel arrived
and committed atrocities on us.
Her left buttock was tattooed
with a skull and broomhandles,
saying:

“There is so much garbage in the world.”
 
                        iv
 
In the Iraqi Hilton
there is something beige about
all the colors in the room.
 
The line dead. Two days,
and my body odor is a foreigner.
 
Outside, loudspeakers ululate.
 
In the TV snow, coming at me—
is that Godzilla, or the Dear Leader,
or the Parliament of Wolves?
 
Patella, femur, scapula, ulna.
I can hear the racket outside
my door, out in the dim hallway:
 
 
two skeletons, coupling.

*****

#167: "The One That Got Away" by Mary Kay Zuravleff

~This story was previously published in Gargoyle (1988).

                   

Jeanine’s gills were becoming more pronounced, she noticed on Saturday. Ralph pretended they were just lines on her neck, but Jeanine could feel them flap when she coughed or sneezed. They both read the paper. A woman in Miami, a man in Portland, sisters in New Orleans. A baby had been born with them in Houston. Gradually, Jeanine expected, she would need water for her air.

            Ralph blamed Jeanine’s yoga teacher, though none of the other cases mentioned seaweed supplements or chlorophyll drinks. What was she trying to show him? Other wives were having breast implants, dying their hair, or letting themselves spread into elastic waist pants and baggy sweaters. Ralph could not understand Jeanine’s attitude toward the transformation of her shapely, freckled body.

            At breakfast, Jeanine watched Ralph through the chlorophyll water in her glass, remembering when his unhandsomeness had been endearing. Ralph’s small brown eyes were sunk into his doughy cheeks like raisins, and his thick arms and legs stuck straight out from his torso. But he was not made of gingerbread; he was pasty white with clumps of black hair randomly tufted over his body. He smelled unshowered this morning, and Jeanine could not remember why she married a man with hair on his back.

            So far, the longest they had gone without mentioning her scales or thinning bones was a full day. As a scientist, Jeannine was intrigued by these changes. In a notebook she recorded the progress of the slits along her neck as well as her ideas about their cause. I should tell him about the water supply, she thought. I’m going to say it’s a worry I have.

            “What?” Ralph asked, expectant and annoyed.

            “I’m going swimming,” she said and left to gather her gear.

            In the water, Jeanine tried to be firm with herself. This is only for half an hour, forty minutes at most. You wouldn’t want to live in the water. You wouldn’t. Want to live. Her words floated away from her, and she swam without stroke or kick. From the bottom of the pool, she watched the executives take their oval laps while she freely moved from lane to lane. She listed reasons to stay on dry land. Ralph. Yoga class, the smell of wood smoke. More compelling was that if she were caught meandering in the Bay, they would probably scale and gut her on a university dissecting table.

            The young, goose-bumply lifeguard glared at Jeanine the few times she came up for air. When she heard him blow the whistle that announced the end of adult laps, she thought only twenty minutes had passed. She flopped out of the pool, unexpectedly struck by how upright everyone was. Chlorine stung her neck, and her fine hair looked green under the bathroom lights. By the time she got home, Ralph had been to the hardware store and back.

            “For Cripe’s sake,” he said. “Did you swim for two hours?”

#166: Three Poems by Kim Roberts

  

~This poem was originally published in Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue (2008).

THE SHIPWRECK 

Painted in 1805, part of a retrospective of the works of J.M.W. Turner

 exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

In Turner's painting The Shipwreck
everything leans and moans,

even the glowering clouds.
Three small wooden craft

are flung from the drowning ship.
The striped cap of the sailor at the tiller

looks like exposed ribs,
while in the other life boats

men drape agonized atop one another
and waves hoist

their hummocks of foam.
The young genius, the painter,

lingers lovingly, reaching
over each violent wrench of water.

The Shipwreck is his first large-scale oil,
his palettes and knives and brushes reaching,

desperate, through a vortex of small men
centered on their unfolding disaster,

two dozen hopeless figures
hemmed in by a dense black sky.

*****

#165: "Anything You Want It to Be" by Jamie Holland

        

~This story was previously published in Antietam Review (2001).

              Two days after her father’s funeral, Maggie found herself on a Washington, D.C. tour bus next to a man who wore a leather jacket, combat boots, and a black beret.

              “How’s it goin’,” he said, zipping open his knapsack.

              She looked away. “Fine.”

              “Where’re you headed?”

              “It’s a tour bus,” she said to the window. “I’m just headed around the city.”

              “You live here?”

She turned to him. He’d taken off his hat. Perfectly bald. No hair whatsoever. And very pale with dark blue eyes. He looked like a grown baby. His eyes were that blue.

              “My parents do. Did, I mean. My mother still does.” She had to concentrate to focus only on his face and not let her eyes explore the globe that was his head.               

He stared at her, waiting for something, it seemed.

“My father just died.” It was the first time she’d actually said it.

              “Oh.” He took out a paperback book and began to read. She watched his eyes go from left to right, left to right, reading the lines.

              “He killed himself,” she said.

              He looked up. “Who?”

              “My dad.”

              “Oh. Was he sick?”

              A wave of relief washed over her. “Sort of. He’d been depressed.”

              He raised his eyebrows. “I guess so.”

              She felt her face curl into a snarl. What was wrong with people?