CONTENTS
# "Untitled Oil on Canvas" by Mario Loprete
# "Rose Parade" by Paul Luikart
# "Bones is Bones" by Jake Bross
# "Dead Announcement" by Marc Brimble
# "Halogen Lights and Last Chances" by Robyn Styles Oliver
# "101 Ways to Flicker" by Rowan Johnsue
# "Hungry Lichen Shall Remain" by Sammy Bellin
# "Frail Sisters" by Megan Denese Mealor
# "Midnight" by Dustin Springer
# "Speckled Romans", "Unfolding" & "Often After Regret Comes the Degradation of Color" by Kim Rossi
# "Positive Mental Attitude" by Lucas Parkinson
# "Talking to Myself While I Stand Behind the Register" by Halle Segal
# "Tristese" by Yash Seyedebagheri
# "Astray" by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
# "I Have Not Done Any Work Since I Got In" by Gabrielle Fullam
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
After the long-held breath of winter the earth shudders with a sudden gasp. Before we have learned to look closely enough to notice, the hard buds of new leaves have emerged miraculous from the gnarled fingers of trees, the stubby limbs of spring bulbs have stretched beyond their sodden beds, the loves of every secret creature have come forth creeping and bounding in multiplication. And before the year has had time to sin against you it has unfurled itself into every corner of your life, whether you were ready for it or not. This year has begun.
In a remarkably similar way, as we have undertaken the composition and construction of a new volume of Spare Parts Literary, the accepted works have inexplicably revealed a correlation. Each rumbles with the peculiar fragility and fortitude of transition, slipping under the microscope and peering with that same incredulity at the heart of all transformtions. This volume bursts with the strange and spectacular ways in which metamorphosis can consume us, in the bizzarre and the benign, in the nightmare and the natural.
At a moment when this magazine also finds itself making equally uncomfortable and necessary transitions, it is uncanny to have inadvertently collected this assembly of voices all treading the uncertain waters of change. The effect, like the slow and sudden erruption of spring is unequivocally mesmirizing.
And so, once again and for the first time this year it is with humility and joy I present for your exploration, Volume 13.
Oak Ayling
Oak Ayling
Vol. 13
UNTITLED OIL ON CANVAS
BY MARIO LOPRETE
Mario Loprete , Catanzaro 1968
Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro (ITALY)
Mario Loprete is an Italian artist who has distinguished himself in the contemporary art scene through innovative use of materials and a unique vision of urban art. His work lies at the crossroads of painting and sculpture, exploring themes of memory, identity, and urban transformation.
Loprete uses raw materials like cement and plaster to create works that evoke urban architectural structures. This choice is not only aesthetic but also conceptual: cement, with its hardness and permanence, becomes a symbol of collective and personal memory, fixing the traces of our urban existence over time. Plaster, on the other hand, with its fragility, represents the vulnerability and transience of human life and experiences.
One of the distinctive features of Loprete's work is his ability to transform everyday and banal objects into meaningful works of art. His pieces often incorporate elements of graffiti, echoing street art and the ephemeral messages that populate cities. However, through the artistic process, these messages are fixed and immortalized, creating a dialogue between the ephemeral and the permanent.
Loprete's works are imbued with a strong sense of nostalgia and reflection on the human condition. Through the use of mixed techniques, the artist creates textured and layered surfaces that invite the observer to reflect on the complexity of memory and identity. His sculptures, often representations of faces or partial bodies, emerge as contemporary archaeological relics, suggesting a personal and collective narrative.
In summary, Mario Loprete is an artist who, through his art, invites us to reflect on our urban existence, memory, and identity. His works, although seemingly simple in their materiality, are profoundly complex and rich in meaning, making him a significant figure in the contemporary art landscape.
ROSE PARADE
BY PAUL LUIKART
Some kid knocked and I opened up. Why? I never do that. He was raising money for the band. The band. They were off to Pasadena, he said, for the Rose Parade. I went into my pocket, handed the kid a wadded single. How long had that been in there? Well, what the hell did I need it for anyway?
“It’s a long way to Pasadena,” the kid said.
I eyeballed him.
“Sir,” he said.
I went into all the reasons I never open my door and barely ever even go out. Chiselers, cheats, grifters, junkies, flunkies, landlords, lost dogs, religious people, and big guys now and then, who’d like to break your knees. The world is a zoo.
“I understand,” the kid said, “I’m sorry to have bothered you, sir.”
This kid, the more I looked at him, reminded me of my own boy. Wiry, buck-toothed, broad-shouldered. My boy was those things. Last time I saw him, he was all those things. Once, he’d wanted to play trombone.
“Hold on, kid.” This time I went into my wallet. Truth be told, I’d just cashed my check. I handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. “That’s for Pasadena.”
“Holy shit.” He pinched it, waved it, held it up to the sun.
“What’s the matter, you don’t believe me?”
“I believe you, sir. I just never saw one.”
“Bang your drums and toot your horns.”
“I surely will. I mean we surely will, mister. Sir.” The kid fairly well danced down my porch steps, out to a Chevy that had just crept out from the shade of my arborvitae.
Come New Year’s, I watched the parade on TV. Plenty of bands, plenty of flowers, plenty of beautiful girls. No bands from around here, though. No bands from anywhere near here. But I didn’t think there would be, not really. I thought about calling the high school. “You’ve got a problem.” But nobody’d be there. It was still vacation. So, I watched those kids step along and step along, blaring and rattling, everything in reds and yellows, everything in flowers.
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
20.
BY GRANTAS ROGOžINSKAS
"У тебя такие глаза, "You've got such eyes
Будто в каждом по два зрачка, That look like they have two pupils in each,
Как у самых новых машин" Like the latest cars have."
Semion Kirsanov
these eyes: two sun-gods themselves in their bony thrones
in your skul: chained pass by the white paths: silver-faced caged glancing:
non-indicative but not indifferent: incomparable
eyes: pass by like a vision of an unexamined life:
such eyes - the whole life itself flashes before you:
you’re looking at a certain death: some of everything: luscious evening blinks
eyelids of the deepest
hue of pink drops on to the final waters of salty horizon
turning its back
upon indignant city or body contemptuously laying on the
sand: your eyes see the final blue your eyes caught
by the sun’s last rays
:a pattern: lost in the arabesque of the sea
you follow the folding waves
you follow the breaking light: at love’s length: but waves
good
night: you follow the pattern: but muddy waters clear out
of brownish-cheek no kissing sight no seeing: and no touching no
touching not to touch the waves trying not to drown:
to drown follow the dead the gone the sleeping burst
after burst into the painting silence of weeping brush of
the anguished clamorous song of the unstressed undead:
their melodious dreams washes out the heart-oysters on the shore:
poignant pilgrims the hooded tourists brakes their shell:
the limitless moment of darkness
and death: they travel all the way from hell from its pernicious
chambers of miserable fiery blue and see do you see this sapphire
glued to what was once her eyes imperial seats of vision directors: once again
back into your sandy muddy mundane sight: i come back to all: blue drunk
and foamy: blood drunk by the fish is not the blue wine but
wine that we drink is the blue blood and the bread that we eat
is stuffed with raw flesh of blind and deaf and more wine we do drink: as the
lids
open
up coffins close in the antique tomb followed by
heavy doors and dusty kind of freaky really freaky gazes
chamomiles gaze out the bars: an offloaded funeral car carries away
the spark of a pair of eyes two big bright headlights racketing
back
glossy black into ubiquity of bleak
and
dreary
mass of
sunless
Sunday
morning
One part of his family originates from the swampland of Latgalian druids and the other from the Caucasian Huns.
Grant Immanuel Mustapha van Rogožinsky; originally from Šiauliai, Lithuania. He studied literature in Budapest to distract himself for some time from doing the actual writing.
He is 26 years of age, and intends to live as long as Gadamer, at the very least. Adores Akutagawa, Gogol, Borges, Cvirka, and Hrabal; Crane, Spicer, Eliot, Radnoti, Mackus, Kharms, and Witkacy.
Lives in Brussels; occupied with some cooking and art curating. takes plenty of pictures and frequently looks at paintings and people. He cycles a lot. Instagram: @grqzu
CLOSE TO HER
BY ED AHERN
The woman I love has transfigured
into a translucent specter of who she was.
An octogenarian’s memories, shared and private,
of challenges and failures and achievements,
of intimacies and friendships and hatreds
that so absorbed her are largely gone.
The congenital challenges she overcame
for decades have risen up in final revolt
and breached all medical protections.
In the beleaguered keep of her being
she still knows and gives love,
still clings to political despisements,
still grumbles at necessary frustrations.
But the open ground is ever shrinking,
the retreats of mind and body constant,
the presence of herself leaking from cracks.
I am become, if somewhat ineptly,
negotiator with the invading world,
chef to a dwindling desire to eat,
putz frau and factotum to recurring messes,
and confessor for a woman who can no longer sin,
sometimes frustrating chores that I will not cede
to anyone else and lose closeness with her.
I have memory enough for two.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over 600 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he squats on the review board, and at Scribes Micro where he is the idle figurehead.
BONES IS BONES
BY JAKE BROSS
Hooves dragged the dirt in a slow clop. Two horses lumbered along in the heat.
They stopped in a clearing of rock faces. Saul stood beside a boulder that gleamed in three colors, just as the map said it would at midday. Black shadow at the bottom, gray in the middle, and white on top.
A bird screamed somewhere above, thin and distant, and Saul took a drink from his canteen.
Across from him, a Cherokee man slumped in the saddle, his hands tied to the pommel, blood running from his ear to the beads at his neck.
“Is this where we dig?”
The Cherokee only nodded.
Saul pulled a short-handled shovel from his saddlebag. He drew another from the bag beneath his prisoner and threw it in the dirt. He untied the man’s hands from the pommel but not from each other.
“Start digging.”
The prisoner, Corn Tassel, tried to dismount and fell. His face and hands turned away from his captor. Saul watched him gather dirt in his palms, then fling it toward him. Saul shifted his horse aside and drew his LeMat, cocking it in one motion.
“Last chance.”
Corn Tassel sighed, shoulders sagging. He picked up the shovel and began to dig slowly with his bound hands. Saul’s horse pawed the earth and huffed as if to echo the order.
The shovel thumped against metal, and Corn Tassel fell back, exhausted. Saul dismounted and stepped forward, his barrel steady. The prisoner crawled aside, red and black rings burned into his wrists.
Saul hesitated, then holstered the gun and cleared the rest of the dirt himself. A buried munitions box emerged from the clay.
Corn Tassel moved suddenly, springing like a coiled snake. The shovel turned in his grip, aimed for Saul’s neck. Saul spun, drew, and fired.
The Cherokee dropped face-down as the shovel clattered away. Saul froze on one knee, pistol smoking. The shot echoed into the canyon below. He sucked at his teeth, spat, and holstered. He took one last look around, then hauled the box out.
He flipped the latch and swung the lid open. His eyes narrowed. Inside lay two long, curved bones that fit together as one. The jaw of a giant creature. He raised them toward his face, measuring the enormity of it, his mouth twisting as though he’d tasted something foul.
He set the bones back into the box, thinking. The box was heavy; the old man only wanted the bones.
He took the blanket from under the Cherokee’s saddle, wrapped the jawbones carefully, and loaded them on his horse. Then he headed east in the afternoon sun, the second horse in tow.
Behind him, the dirt drank the Cherokee’s blood. A lizard’s tail brushed dust across the wound.
Saul slowed his pace so he would reach Randolph at dark. Fewer eyes to notice. The land here was darker still, the moon no help tonight.
He tied off outside the boarding house at the edge of town and paid the man well to see to his horses. On his shoulder, his saddlebags. Under his arm, the blanket.
He lowered the oil lamp’s flame and tossed the bags on the bed. He unwrapped the blanket; the bones rattled softly. The jaw and its teeth caught the light, yellow-white, ridged like old ivory. He wrapped them again and set them in the chair by the window.
He lay down in the dark, but the bones were there too, like another soul in the room.
Sleep came slow.
In the dream, the bones were complete, assembled like the lizard he’d seen as a boy. They stood tall, alive, breathing in silence. The ribs rattled as they drew air.
Three people stood behind him, watching.
The child said, “Will it eat us?”
The middle-aged man said, “I don’t know.”
The old man said, “Bones is bones. Bones is death. And there ain’t no coming back from death.”
He awoke to see the blanket half-unwrapped in the chair, as if the bones had been waiting.
Saul brought the bundle to the old man.
The doctor looked worse than last he saw him. Shrunk into a maroon-and-gold bed that seemed to swallow him whole. The room smelled of liniment and sickness, the only light falling from a window with dark, heavy curtains.
“You found them?” the old man rasped. “And the Indian?”
“We found them. The Cherokee didn’t make it back.”
Saul laid the blanket across his lap. The man’s thin legs made it seem there were four bones instead of two.
The old man unfolded the blanket, lifted the bones, and gasped. “Gigantasaurus! He said, holding the pieces together, eyes lit with a boy’s wonder. “Do you see? The hinge, the sockets? It fits the jaw of something mighty.”
Saul watched in silence.
“We need to know where to dig for the rest,” the doctor said.
“The Cherokee won’t help us. Either they don’t know, or they do and won’t tell us. It’s something sacred to them.”
“You must take them to St. Louis,” the doctor said. “The museum will know what to do.”
Saul shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere else carrying those.”
“You think they’re cursed?”
No answer, at first.
“Are these beasts still around, Doc?”
The old man chuckled weakly. “No. Long gone. Thousands of years, maybe more.”
“What the hell was it?”
“A meat-eater,” the doctor said. “A hunter. From another time.”
Saul studied one of the jawbones, running a thumb over the serrated teeth. The thing would’ve taken a bear like a chicken.
He wondered why the Cherokee would care about something so long dead? His mind couldn’t let it go. The way the man had fought, the way the bones haunted his sleep.
A stubborn pride arose in him, uninvited.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ll take ’em to St. Louis.”
By the river that night, the air was cool by the rushing water. Saul pulled a small Bible from his pack. It had been years since he’d read from it, and his hands felt unworthy.
He turned his back to the fire and let it light the page. He found the passage where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and a strange panic rose in him. Maybe the bones carried a message. But was it from a fallen hunter, or just the dead asking to be left in peace?
The museum in St. Louis smelled of varnish, dust, and ambition. The curator was a man of spectacles and excitement, his hands never still.
They worked by lamplight, assembling what they could on a wooden frame. One bone after another found its place until the shape stood tall: a ribcage, a long spine, the jaw.
When the last piece was lifted into position, the curator stepped back, wiping his brow.
“Magnificent,” he whispered. “A predator older than the flood itself.”
Saul just stared. The light played across the creature’s hollow sockets, the curve of its teeth, the emptiness inside its ribs. It was the thing from his dream, whole again.
For a moment, he thought he saw breath in its chest.
He stepped closer. The floor creaked beneath his boots.
And he wondered if, a thousand years from now, another creature would stand where he stood, studying his bones, wondering what kind of beast he had been.
He left the curator and refused his money. Something he’d never done. He headed back the same way he came.
He’d stopped by the hotel to tell the old man it was finished, but he’d passed in his sleep the night before. He stood by his bedside, hat in hand, looking at the man’s thin legs. Bones is bones.
He rode out into the dark, back to the three-colored rock. He wrapped the Cherokee in the bone blanket and buried him in the sandy mix beneath it. Now a headstone.
He smoothed the dirt with his spade and rode on.
For the first time in a long while, he almost breathed easy.
Jake Bross is a fiction writer whose work explores faith, justice, and the ghosts that follow men across the frontier. His stories have been recognized for their spare language and moral depth and are part of a developing collection set in post-war Texas.
DIP JUICE
BY ELLA KINDT
There is a river. There is a boat on the river & the water is wine dark & laughing. The waves slobber—hundreds of teeth cut cyanide pills. This river lives in the soft ecosystem of your body. It butts up to high rise buildings dripping oil like dip juice. You remember the soft suck then spit, that plink as a droplet got in your eye? You were still in diapers. The waves pick up when his hand unscrews from the hospital bed. When the grease stains on your shirt start to stare like navy blue eyes. You’ll feel it. When the calls on your birthday stop. That river, sweeping up fifty years of Bud Light cans, redecorates the yard. You learned how to breathe the black slick rainbows, now let them build a new house of aluminum. Ride on bareback, sit straight on chestnut withers, down & out of Louisiana. Surf the spill to the Tasty Freeze on the corner. Vomit up the river after a night out, wet sick on green & white linoleum. The shoreline knocks out molars, water sharp on the way back up. Better out than in, you say.
Ella Kindt is a poet and amateur botanist originally from the marshes of Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated from Clemson University and is now pursuing an MFA in poetry at North Carolina State University. Their work appears in Susurrus Magazine, Carolina Muse, and Scaffold Lit, among others. Her hobbies include playing guitar, singing off-key, and tending to an army of houseplants.
DEAD ANNOUNCEMENT
BY MARC BRIMBLE
my neighbour has got metal legs
and her husband
has got bad eyes
he can’t cry
when he looks at you
it looks like he’s looking
at the inside of his own eyeballs
a car goes past
saying something in Spanish
through a loudspeaker
I can’t quite understand
what did they say?
dry eyes tells me that somebody in the village
has died
lucky bastard, I think
got their ticket out of this world
of failed ideas.
if you’ve got life insurance
they’ll do the same for you
when you die, metal legs says.
what’s the point, I say
I’ll be dead.
for your family, she says.
I tell her
I don’t have any family here.
Marc lives in Spain and when he's not drinking tea he teaches English.
HALOGEN LIGHTS AND LAST CHANCES
BY Robyn Styles OLIVER
Rising from the ashes of a phoenix burning, one year,
was the greatest miracle of transcendence known to be
where that’d happened. People gathered from all around
to witness the majesty of its rebirth, but it didn’t happen.
The terrible truth is that it wasn’t meant to be witnessed.
The phoenix died and never resurrected. When they at
last understood this crime, they moved to protect that
vulnerable species. Films were produced of them falling
from the sky at high rates of speed and we still watch
this on our favorites. Stakes risen dramatically haven’t
dissuaded us from a learning opportunity, yet. Nobody
talks about how that went for the ashes’ interests, though.
Phoenix ashes are unique and glamorous in particular
ways that we aren’t privy to in our realizations of wonder.
When they perish and don’t return, this renders the ashes
especially radiant. They can’t be resisted by the poacher,
who arrested himself at once and went to the hills where
they come from to understand why he’d missed this chance.
Providing what’s needed for a social movement to take
off hasn’t been interesting to this social class or its friend.
Proven of our ignorance needs finally its best man at the
wedding for a speech of so interesting a kind—this would
be how they get back at us, however. They aren’t reborn
at so great a wind as once blew across those glorious hills
and those photographers know every angle of a face alive.
Robin Styles Oliver is the Chicago prophet of his wiser meaning for kindness and war. His work explores thematically the modern condition of the human spirit and its purpose. Check out his chapbook, ‘First I Was Wise,’ with Bottlecap Press.
101 WAYS TO FLICKER
BY ROWAN JOHNSUE
Aileen keeps trying to meld with me.
It started slow. There was this pair of bonded cats that she loved, Ginger and Greg. Their orange and grey-brown tabby coats made one calico with a constantly shifting pattern. Cooing at her phone meant it was a Ginger day. Aileen always thought I was like Ginger and she was Greg. I wondered where Greg went on Ginger days. Did they have to take turns? Do they miss each other? The shifting never seemed to affect the eyes, bright yellow with a ring of green. This did not comfort me.
The first humans melded by accident. Joyce Singer and April Sun had been best friends since first grade, at least that’s what they said on the late night talk shows. They spoke like a chorus. At certain angles you could see Joyce’s sleeve of patchwork tattoos, and close family friends say April’s asthma had cleared up. The cats were long forgotten. Aileen watched them undulate the way a child keeps touching a hot stove.
Work was a refuge until it wasn't. First it was Janet from graphic design. She came in every other day for about a month, each time looking different from the last. Once, I asked her about a project we were working on, a big billboard opportunity in the center of midtown. As she answered, her hair began to shrink to her husband’s crew cut. This was strange because the latest office gossip was that they were considering a divorce. In the break room, she told people about it in honest detail, the pain of bones breaking into new forms so rapidly and the best ways to calm it (sucking the meat off olive pits, something about antioxidants). The intimacy of it all. I watched as people shifted in their seats, skin flushed. We all wanted to ask but didn’t. It wasn’t our place.
Aileen eats dinner to punish me, a dripping sink the only sound between our wet mouths and forks. She looks at me longer than she has in weeks.
“Tell me about Dallas?” She asks.
“He’s an abstract now, just some blue and a mouth. You can only see Nick from the side.”
She sighs. “He must be beautiful.”
“Leena-”
“What about Sophie?”
I know I should be uncomfortable, cautious at least, with the way she’s looking at me, but I can’t find her anything but familiar.
“I’m not sure, I’ve only seen Lin lately. She looks alright, though.”
“I hear it’s like being at the bottom of a swimming pool, looking up and seeing the rippling sky above you.”
“What?”
“Flickering.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
I try to talk to her some more, ask her about the pomegranates from the farmer’s market and the hummingbirds we haven’t seen in our hibiscus bush since June, but she’s made her point. The garlic butter on the bread between us has congealed into the top layer of the dough. Everything is a reference.
When I can’t take the silence of the house, I go on night walks around the block. Our apartment is right across a park with a little garden. It’s tomato season, plump yellow and red hanging from the stems. I watch as a crow hops around one that has fallen, overripe, into the soft soil. His beak comes away slick and full of seeds. I feel like a voyeur.
On the walk back, a man on the street screams as something begins to bubble under his skin. He looks at me and I’m not sure if he wants my help. He glitches, folding in on himself with each stutter. The screaming stops and he’s nowhere to be found. I walk up to the place he was just standing, the smell of gasoline and magnolia lingers. It’s okay, the air seems to say, nothing but growing pains. I don’t know what to do with the grief in my lungs.
The entry way is humid when I return. It reminds me of when we first started dating, how certain corners radiated heat despite Aileen’s insistence the room was set to a comfortable 67. We would open all the windows in the house together. It became one of our games, both of us breathless and laughing as we brushed past each other along the walls.
Walking further into the house, I realize something is wrong. It’s muggy in the living room, a heavy and consuming kind of heat. Sweat pricks to the surface at my temples. The photographs on the TV stand are blurred by a thin layer of condensation. One of them, a childhood photo of Aileen with cha siu bao cheeks, is almost completely static. It looks like she’s pressed against the northern lights and not aquarium glass.
As I go to open a window, I hear her cry out from the bathroom. The door is closed but not locked. I knock softly and then a little harder when she doesn’t respond. With my ear pressed to the wood, faint and ragged breaths echo out. The door is surprisingly cool, but when I go to turn the doorknob my hand snaps back before I can process the sting.
“Are you alright?” Her voice is shaky and distant.
“Are you?”
She laughs, airy then flinching like she’s in pain.
“Aileen-”
There’s a soft click before the door pops from the frame, the small crack letting out smoldering air. I can barely look inside. The whole room is a mirage, white and blue tile shifting like waves under the fluorescent overhead light. She’s slumped against the edge of the bathtub. I can’t tell if she’s fresh from a shower or if it’s sweat, but she’s shimmering along with the room. She looks up at me with stars in her eyes.
“Hi.”
I crouch down next to her, blinking away sweat as I reach out. The air around her vibrates like a thunderstorm. Right as I’m about to cup her cheek, I notice something flash on her forehead. She pixelates before me, hard lines replacing soft edges and eyes, so many eyes, look at me, each one a planet. Her hands grab mine. I look into Jupiter and Saturn as her mouth turns into a flurry of fangs. She squeezes three times before she jerks back, arm melting into something thin and black.
“Will you be back?” I ask her. I wish my voice wasn’t so weak.
“Gotta come up for air at some point.” Her mouth twitches like it’s trying to smile as her torso curls into a singular point.
I pull her in by the back of the neck, the curve still smooth and a little damp, and kiss right above Venus. She wraps her now many arms around me, her forehead sticking to mine. A promise. I hear her bones shift and crack but she doesn’t flinch.
Soon the room is no longer blistering, and I am alone. The tile under my knees is cold. I don’t know when I get up, but I know pins shoot into my feet as I brace against the sink. Condensation still clings to the mirror, the only evidence of anything from before. I swipe through the water, and on my forehead, right where Aileen’s was, is a small spider. It doesn’t move as I peel it off with my pointer finger. Its little legs hug around the first knuckle. I don’t know if Aileen is still there, floating on her back and staring up at me, and I don’t know if I want her to be. I move her to the freckled orchid in the shower windowsill and watch. Neither of us move, and this makes me angry. It feels ridiculous.
She, or the spider, begins moving to the petal’s edge. My breath stops as she jumps. The light from the streetlamp catches on the silk holding her up, legs scrambling to find their footing on the next flower. The connective strings are only visible from the right angle. My eyes hurt from how much I’m straining to see her but I don’t move closer. Sometimes, she moves into places I can’t follow, shadows in the leaves and window. But then I see movement against the soft pink and white petals. By the time she’s done, it doesn’t feel like I’m waiting for her to come back. She curls up in the heart of her web, watching. I leave the light on and the door open as I go.
The cool air from the fridge clings to the remaining sweat on my neck. I reach back, past Aileen’s half-drunk, orange-ginger tea and a bottle of fish sauce I hide chocolates behind because I know she’ll never move it. The thought feels like helium behind my eyes. Instead of a nicely wrapped Ghiradelli, I find a small ceramic dish. The olives in them are still young and green. I place them at her spot at the table and let myself cry.
Rowan Johnsue is a writer, poet, and bug enthusiast from Southern Maidu and Nisenan lands. His work can be found in TRANSliterate and Blue Marble Review, and is forthcoming in Apus.
HUNGRY LICHEN SHALL REMAIN
by sammy bellin
This world can come to destruction.
I’ve seen the settlers settled stone
and imperious structures split and struck dumb
by heaping vines cleaving to their spine.
The hardy weed fills a fragment of crack and forces fracture
enough to break pavement and shift gauges
hammered into rust-licked railheads stretching
their well-spiked fingers for endless miles.
This world can come to destruction,
there will be nuclear waste and fat patches of plush moss
clinging to eerie luminescence. Humans of course
will erode, and quickly at our pace.
We will bring our end in a selfish way, and then
decompose, feeding the Earth, and then
she will reclaim. Hungry lichen shall remain.
Sammy Bellin is an Archives Technician from Pittsburgh living in Lewisburg, PA. His poetry is forthcoming in Rust and Moth. In his free time, he enjoys reading poetry, hanging out with cats, and wandering.
FRAIL SISTERS
BY MEGAN DENESE MEALOR
this greasy silk coquette
a nuanced chocolate daisy
unfolds her Kabuki fan with pit viper polish
simulating snowflakes and wind-torn birthday cocktails
painted cats prowling hand-billed parlors
air-tight paste stone buckle garnishes
used prettily in stomping Rotten Row
caged crinoline riding rantipole
three-pennies-upright
against feral blonde bricks
when the pin cherry trees boiled with flammable patina
a dirty puzzle solved with melting moments
bone-weary in Dark Cully tallywag tallow-light
upholstered claret ill repute
clinging to the colored sugar walls
no bonnet for those walnut hull ringlets
foot posed like a tiger orchid at dayspring
fingerless smoking-gloves aflight
academicians both angel and arch rogue
biting our names in as blind harpers
eras of dawn chorus wood-pigeons ago
now a wife only in watercolors
carrying impolite bone box baggage to the window
this mourning dove who drapes on kung fu mascara
to subtract stars at the obscure ceramic gym
headlining baby tee banners for barking irons
Megan Denese Mealor lives in her homeland of Jacksonville, Florida with her husband, 12-year-old son, and three mollycoddled rescue cats. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and candidate for 2023 Best of the Net, Megan’s writing has appeared in hundreds of literary journals worldwide, most recently Nova Arts Literary Magazine, The GroundUp, and Wingless Dreamer Publisher. She has also authored four poetry collections: Bipolar Lexicon (Unsolicited Press, 2018); Blatherskite (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019); A Mourning Dove’s Wishbone (Cyberwit.net, 2022); and A Cat May Look Like a King, which will be available from Dancing Girl Press in Summer 2026.
MIDNIGHT
BY DUTIN SPRINGER
June comes in through the window on a bed of leaves that crack and snap under her feet as she slowly approaches the bed. In the dark, a mass lies snoring.
“Momma,” June says.
The mass stirs, turns, an arm raises and comes back down. Deeper shadows move through the dark.
“Mom.”
“Mh?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“It’s… just a dream.”
“I was lost and I couldn’t find you.”
An arm raises. “Come here.”
June crawls into bed, her mother wrapping her arm around her.
“I was grown up and I couldn’t find you,” June says, delta waves flowing free from August’s closed third eye. “I didn’t know who you were anymore.”
“Mhm.” August mumbles. “Just go to sleep.”
Dustin Springer is a graduate student working on his MFA in fiction at Oklahoma State University. While he has many things in the works, this is his first publication. He lives in Tulsa, OK with his wife and daughters.
SPECKLED ROMANS
by Kim Rossi
elongated palettes of green-streaked gold,
ripening to red with rivuleting stripes
all shades of orange,
the colors of the buildings in Trastevere,
by the turn of the Tiber,
the colors of the tangled eyes of the man
washing his hypodermic
with water curving from a nasone fountain,
or my mind’s fire,
from Aperol and sun, ribboning me
through the graffiti and vine variegated
maze of ochre and vermillion stucco
to Via della Gensola,
to lie down behind amber walls,
to dream the Roman afternoon
like the tabbies sleeping in the dapples
of broken pillars, holding up nothing,
at Largo di Torre Argentina
where Julius Caesar was stabbed,
blood sinuating down his toga,
the lava-flow of empire coming
and gone, veins of poppies
bleeding through its ruins
a tomato-less empire
Marcus Antonius never presented
a pomme d’amour to Cleopatra,
she never held it in cupped hands—
how it matches her hennaed hair—
she never tasted the sun
mottled like my translations
of Virgil and Catullus,
tomatos virumque cano,
or Michelangelo’s paint-dribbled face
as he curved like a cat at the Vatican
where I went to see Raphael’s
The School of Athens
but the crowd devoured me,
a green seed
spit out
into the gift shop
sent
tendriling
back to Trastevere,
where everything remains in cadmiums,
past bar cases full of Caprese sandwiches,
past blonde Tiberius, shaking his head,
river rilling from his beard;
past mopeds striating between bistro chairs and
crates of plums and pomodori;
past Bacchus in his tiger-drawn chariot
god of everything
vining
and nectarous
UNFOLDING
1
The wardrobe enfolds the household
ephemera (collapsed paper lanterns, infinity scarves,
vacuum cleaner bags, extension cords)
behind an outer dimension of wood veneer panels,
a keyhole, a scrolling
resembling leaves or vines, abstractly.
2
In the garden the leaves of post-snow
strawberries fold over their faceted tower,
only a few leaves remain distinct, the flat green of
construction paper. The others, brown and crumpled,
form corrugated chambers for overwintering insects,
like the earwig magnified on the television,
it’s wings iridescent double-folded fans,
replicated in origami by the scientist studying them.
3
In a mountain fold, three students find a shrew.
This is the first time this species has been photographed
alive. The shrew lifts its nose upward, whiskers matching
the delicate starburst seeds scattered around it,
the red stalk of a thin-leafed plant extending
toward the moon. Needing to be sure, one
student gently folds hands into a canoe, the shrew
small as three earwigs inside,
paper-light.
4
In a parallel fold, my son studies a piece of
art until its composition leaves the canvas, collapsing
into lines and shapes he copies onto a small square of paper.
He bends the paper,
trying to match the model to his mind.
The paper resists.
The pattern resists.
He unfolds.
Paper and pattern know their own geometries,
know the shapes they want to become together.
Fold here, they say, cut there.
He listens, following the nuances,
the obsessional chains—
feeling, folding into dancing volumes,
mostly convex, mostly closed.
Scaleless spaces.
OFTEN AFTER REGRET COMES THE DEGRADATION OF COLOR
On good days I see
through the cold brown
small gold discs
unfurling, violent
into vibrant
underground shadows,
the whispers of flowers,
bounded between
green, vibrating.
Kim Rossi is a poet and speech language pathologist living in Decatur, Georgia. Her poems have appeared in isotrope.
POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE
BY LUCAS PARKINSON
Against the weight of the drugs, my eyes peel open and I’m awake. The chill of night numbs my right foot, which has thrashed free from the thin sheet and the heavy, unwashed blanket. My face is pressed against the plastic bedframe. With a bruise-mottled arm I check my phone. It’s half-past midnight, an hour or so since I drifted to sleep. Another five-and-a-half hours until my observations. Another six-and-a-half until breakfast.
The room is dark, but not dark like a bedroom should be—not encompassing, comforting darkness that insulates you while you sleep. It’s dark like an empty office, tense and temporary and ready, without notice, to be flooded with fluorescence. I lie, staring at the ceiling, blinking away sleep until the blur becomes a grid of tiles. It reminds me of school. My mind churns into dull activity, and the thoughts begin to cascade back. They, more than the physical pain, are the reason for my ineffective sleeping tablets. The sad thoughts, the bad thoughts, the dark thoughts.
My breathing quickens. The grey walls are closing in. I claw back the sheets and swing my legs from the bed, and the moment they touch the ground I’m staggering towards the bathroom door. I fall before the toilet and the braille-like bumps of the plastic floor dig into my knees. I lean forward over the bowl, resting my forehead on my arms crossed at its back. While I stare into the water, the sickening smell of cleanliness layers my nostrils. I close my stinging eyes. At least now, I don’t have to worry about my hair getting in the bowl, my long, dark, thick, naturally-curly hair. An ache begins to massage its way into my neck, then a long trail of saliva breaks from my lips, descending like a spider on a thread before plopping into the water, sending it rippling. I need air.
I quickly dress and prepare to go outside. It isn’t forbidden, but at this time the nurses don’t like it. I listen at my door and hear the regular chirrups of machinery and, distantly, plimsole-on-plastic footsteps. I step into the hallway, squinting at the brightness, then move towards the Teenage & Young Adult rec room, which provides the closest route into the garden.
The first door I pass is ‘three’—Chloe’s room. Instantly recognisable. It’s marked by a cutesy pink ‘C’ stuck to the door, and pretty little polaroids, and sparkling silver tassels on the walls to either side. She’s friends with all the nurses and speaks to all the staff and just won’t stop pretending this place is like her university dorm. She doesn’t treat her situation with the gravity it warrants. She doesn’t acknowledge that this is a prison.
I arrive at the rec room, which isn’t a ‘room’ per se, but a large alcove bulging from the main thoroughfare, with a pool table, TV, and some lurid furniture. Down the hallway I hear the overlapping whispers of the night shift, along with the low, halting rumble of a trolley. From a nearby room comes a cough, then a wail. I push open the heavy glass door and the hiss of the broken seal sounds faintly as I step into the cutting night.
While trudging over the wet grass I think again about Chloe, who, despite her sickeningly positive attitude, is prone to crying. She often leaves her door open when she has visitors, which is most days, like she’s inviting the staff to join them. It’s then that she cries the most. Really, those were the times she has a duty not to, a duty to be strong for those around her.
I settle in my spot, which is just over the wooden fence, a little way down from the gate. It’s a clearing, a patch of flattened grass between the gnarled mass of a hedge to my left and the wooded reserve to my right. Ahead, just beyond a nettle-filled ditch, is the country road connecting two villages. With a shiver, I lower myself to sit against the trunk of an enormous oak.
Despite the damp earth, the chilly air, the pain in my ankles from hobbling over uneven ground, I like it out here. It’s the one place that, even temporarily, I get some privacy. The nurses don’t burst in for observations, or blood-tests, or those awful anti-coagulant injections, and it’s the one place I can cry without bothering anyone.
Or that’s the idea. In reality, it’s like that first time you’re in bed with a guy, when you desperately need to piss but you hold it in out of embarrassment, then when finally you get a chance to go you just… can’t. I go over the last few weeks: the look on dad’s face when I told him, the pain of the biopsy, the sniffling from mum when she shaved away my hair. Nothing. I squeeze my eyes shut and ball my fists, letting my long nails dig into my palms. I clench them so hard they shake, and open my eyes to the night air, then start rapidly blinking to urge the tears out. Still nothing.
I let my fingers bloom outwards and my hands drop to the cool earth. My head falls backwards to knock lightly against the trunk of the tree. Then, I loll forward and throw it back harder. The sharp pain ripples across my skull and leaves a persistent throb. Nausea burgeons in my stomach. I stuff a hand in each side pocket of my black puffer-jacket and from one pull a lighter and the other a pack of cigarettes. I pinch a cig between thumb and forefinger and place it at my lips, then, blocking the light breeze with a cupped hand, light it and take a deep drag. No tears, but I have my privacy. I rest my head against the trunk and look to the sky, where the stars are like thousands of pinpricks. There’s so many out here in the country, more than I’m used to. Something about the hospital being all the way out here feels so palliative—I’m on that ‘farm’ where sick dogs go.
The quiet of the night is broken by the roar of an engine, growing louder as it approaches. It’s almost deafening as it shoots past my gap in the foliage. A shitty starter car; a teenager out enjoying freedom. The flash of headlights sears a ghostly blob into my vision, which stays when I close my eyes. I continue to smoke my cigarette and wonder where they’re going at this time of night. Buying weed or getting laid, I imagine.
The cig has burnt down almost to my fingers and I’m shuffling into a position I can stand from, when I hear the distant gurgle of another engine. I get to my feet, expecting it to rocket by like the last one did. Instead, the noise begins to fade. As the headlights approach, I realise it’s slowing and duck behind the tree. The car, a modernish black saloon, pulls over on the opposite side of the road, idles for a moment, then the headlights flick off. With a hollow click, the driver’s door opens and a man, shrouded in darkness, steps out.
The figure makes his way to the passenger side and leans against the door. He fumbles in his pocket, gets out his own pack of cigarettes and begins to smoke. Briefly, the lighter illuminates his face and I see he’s middle-aged. He gazes past me, towards the hospital. Carrying on the light breeze, I hear him begin to sniff, then sob, gasping for air between the drags of his cig. Why is he here, at this time? Was he a patient once? Did he love someone in here? A parent? A child?
As the two of us raise our cigs to our lips, I realise that his being here, like my being here, is a practiced habit. Maybe in twenty years, my own tears will come. When my body has stopped fighting and I can finally relax, when survival is no longer my first priority. Perhaps then, I’ll stand where he stands and remember Manor Vale for what it gave to me, rather than what it took away.
He finishes his cigarette and drops it to the ground, then snuffs it with a twist of his foot. He wipes his cheeks with the palms of his hands, then gets into his car and pulls slowly away. In my spot lurking behind the tree, I pull my jacket tighter around me—but I’m glad for the cold that nips at my face, because without it I wouldn’t feel the tear rolling down my cheek.
Lucas Parkinson (He/Him) grew up in East Yorkshire, his youth interrupted and consequently shaped by a battle with leukaemia. A recent alum of the Creative Writing MA at Nottingham Trent University, his passion lies in writing personal short fiction, intimately following characters through short flashes of their lives.
TALKING TO MYSELF
WHILE I STAND BEHIND THE REGISTER
BY HALLE SEGAL
And I’m lucky that my legs still work although life has grown intolerable in other ways, the man
with face tattoos is an electrician. He’s sober and he bought me this hot dog.
There’s a sober electrician under the tent
There’s a sober electrician in the floorboards
There’s a man stuck in the wall I think I love him he sang me this song that I forgot about
There’s a dead man in the wall
There’s a dead man in the wall who plays the guitar so well that I think I love him although he
forgot to put sugar in my coffee
He forgot the sugar for my coffee.
He spit the ketchup from his hot dog into my mouth, he kisses with tongue, I think I love him I
think I love the dead man in the wall.
Halle t. Segal grew up outside of Philadelphia and moved to New York City from Vermont where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English writing. Halle has been published in three zines: The Gist, The Living Room Zine, and Phase Zero Zine. She has also been published in Literary Veganism: An Online Journal. Halle writes poetry and mini-prose pieces celebrating small moments, and is deeply fascinated with the mundane expressing itself as surreal. Halle enjoys road trips, film photography, wild animals, and the color purple.
TRISTESSE
BY YASH SEYEDBAGHERI
Another day almost half-gone. 10:47. But I can still get something done.
I have fifty-four submissions to read for the Midnight Marauders fiction contest, for which I’m a judge, due in a week and a half. I also have twenty-six manuscripts to edit for Trident Publishing, four days to go, with a rate of $20 per submission—enough to actually eat something besides sodium-saturated TV dinners and Ramen noodles.
I can clean my room, blue jeans, Big Lebowski and Debussy T-shirts strewn across a bed, sheets flung away. I can spray air freshener to chase out the scent of armpits and stale feet.
But I can’t. I try to read submissions, but it’s back, a force between me and the screen, the world, a deep fog from which I can’t emerge. A fog that presses down on my once vibrant smile. A fog that makes me feel half-asleep, a body moving on occasion, but not really thinking. A fog that seems heightened by the sun peeking in; I fling the curtains closed.
There’s time enough to read. I can still succeed with this round of submissions; this round won’t be late.
So I watch clips from dark movies instead. American Beauty. Falling Down. For a few moments, I laugh at Michael Douglas launching bazookas into construction zones and storming burger joints and Kevin Spacey cheerfully blackmailing his superiors. But the time slips by. The numbers on my cell phone glare. 11:00. 11:05.
I mourn the fallen morning. I imagine yet another tranche of TV dinners. I have to get to work.
I tell myself I can’t let it beat me. I have a decent life, here in the hills, where I’ve come to save money. I have a home. I work remotely. I like my work, even though I’ve flubbed up so many times. I actually know my neighbors. I walk every evening under an explosion of peach, silver, and lavender, Ponderosas swaying while psithurisms wail, and stalks of grass dance across verdant fields full of daffodils and dandelions.
But I need something more. Or so I think. Maybe that’s the reason for it. For the times I want to hole up in bed. Or weep. Or just stare at the ceiling fan, whirling round and round, the blades thinking they’re going somewhere, when they really aren’t.
I need to not be reminded of open spaces, where it follows me on dirt roads full of potholes, or the town with no stoplight, and a tiny market that opens out onto a giant meadow whose girth scares me somehow.
I need the clatter of cart wheels, the exhaust of cars rushing up and down long stretches of road between strip malls packed with McDonalds’ and Applebees and sushi and Thai joints. Where there’s no space between cars in parking lots, and the only islands are small concrete ones. I need the glow of butter-colored streetlamps, people flocking to the cool lime green and pink lights of bars where the bass thumps from jukeboxes and bodies crowd into spaces.
I need coffee shops that bustle, where disembodied speakers blast artists I hate, but people fill the seats around me, soothing me with the thrum of cell phone conversations and laughter and communion. I need more than a rustic shop with three seats that shuts down before five.
I return to the computer. Stare into the expanse of screen. Remember that it was there before I even came up here. It was there as I tried to vanquish credit card debts, seek out invitations to Friday night parties in an apartment complex with turd-colored dumpsters.
Remember that I thought leaving would kill it.
But I try to brush those thoughts away.
I imagine a sea of towers and office buildings. Switch on some classical. Classical’s helped get me going before. Some Tchaikovsky? Not this time. Chopin’s Tristesse. The sorrowful, graceful notes rise, while I struggle to judge a story, to form a sentence of which I can be proud. Platitudes spill out instead. But it’s something. I imagine a new apartment complex, as the morning turns into afternoon, as clouds build outside, huge and impenetrable, and I scream out for answers, for clarity, and the evening swoops in, while I drown in fires of orange and lavender.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA fiction program. His work has been published in Flow Magazine, Prosetrics The Literary Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.
ASTRAY
BY KAREN GREENBAUM-MAYA
Neglected children are often drawn to animal rescue, observes a social worker. To strays needing reliable food, and a home, a place to sleep safely. Abandoned cats, betrayed, waiting for their owners who have walked out on them, never to return. Hungry, and hungrier. No way to fend for themselves, and how could they? Even the adult ones live two, tops three years on their own at best. And the kittens die of cold, so easily. Those bodies, conceived and borne but too small to withstand the world’s cold nights. They look like dark pink rats, so bare, so hairless. Huddling in a stucco corner. Residual heat of an engine, turned off only for the night. No one asked them to be born but here they are. If they survive the night they learn how to ask. Bodies so small they are only barely cats, tiny spike tails, cries like birds, ears that flutter in wordless pleasure and relief when the cats finally suckle. Somehow they learn how to ask or they cannot survive. (Neglected children often speak early too.) Eating the wrong food because wrong is better than none, any is better than none. Unless someone saves them, they are mothers at six months, vessels sucked dry, bundles scraped out, the kittens quickly as big as their mother, nursing her to death when there is no more food. Some of us cannot let be done to cats what was done to us. That stab in the belly, that griping guilt nearly shame, that recognition of cruelty and selfishness in the place of love, bringing that faint sob if you can dare to accuse, that sob before words that says, Quick, make this right, before, because, it is happening to you.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, former German major and restaurant reviewer, and three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work in fairy tales and dream interpretation, and her obsession with Kafka and flirtation with Buber have led her inevitably to prose poems. Her work has appeared widely since 2008, Her collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and, Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and their Untying (Kelsay Books), and The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor i(Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California. Her first complete sentence was, “Look at the moon!”
I HAVE NOT DONE ANY WORK SINCE I GOT IN.
BY Gabrielle Fullam
I can see myself in the water, this time,
It is calm enough.
That when I fold myself over from chill,
Readying myself for worship
The water commemorates my profile,
And I can picture the sea dripping from my nose,
Sniffing in overcast bottled glory.
When we have screamed enough, I get out of the water and
Stretch myself up like a minaret.
We shake from the cold.
Our frames echo a season not reflected in the wind,
I think: the sun is running from us,
But then she comes out for a moment
While the others walk ahead,
I turn back and
I can see myself in the water, this time.
She blinks at me, says:
Do you think things are going to come together for you?
Or will it just be lighting and laughing and trying
Not to bleed yourself dry.
(it is a trick question)
I look at myself; and the sun, and the sea
They make an ugly face,
But it slips together well.
And she cannot trick me this time, because-
I can see myself in the water.
Gabrielle Fullam is an Irish-Punjabi writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Icarus, Fruit!, Litro, Bending Genres, Lesbian Art Circle, Channel Magazine, Sanxtuary Magazine, The Liminal: Notes on Life, Race, and Direct Provision in Ireland, among others. She was awarded the Whitechapel Gallery Young Writer in Residence 2024. She is a previous editor of Icarus Magazine, previous Deputy Editor of Trinity Women and Gender Minorities Review, and editor of Holding the Archive produced in collaboration with the National HIV Stories Trust. She studied philosophy and sociology at Trinity College Dublin, where she served as Student Union president, and she is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University.
