October 2023
In this issue
Contents
Blue Tarpaulins On Bombay Chowpatty
How it just happens that we all have someone to make a blue tarpaulin memory with. Even if you find them many years later and many miles away, There is a spot on this Bombay Chowpatty Where the sea is so close to you.
Mother at the Airport
But I like my own bed best, she says, and the quiet in mornings, when I scatter seed for the birds, the quiet in evenings, not at all. That’s when you should call.
Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
Do they make the cut, or are they too inconvenient? What about rain? and never will, dismembering or in many different lights, Something huge and without music has just happened.
Burger’s Daughter
Jars of stunted-self languish there still, in the half light. Stacked fat slices of summer pear. Peeled, cleft and without mouths, they kiss up against the glass.
Kmart is Burning
And my father angry at traffic, always. Still they are driving on the screen past midnight. Sometimes we would arrive in the dark, my grandmother in the kitchen waiting.
How Women Become Poems In Malabar
Death is eternal truth, but death is also resurrection. Death is as old as the sea and as new as the monsoon that births new life.
World Record Holder
I pictured a man with such a long mustache that it curled around his body hundreds of times, making him look like a spool of thread. A week earlier, my father had taken me to the barbershop, where I had seen several long mustaches.
Packed Baggage
The writer notes the bittersweet goodbye and the baggage that comes along with being a spouse to a military man.
Chandelier
“It’s perfectly perfect.” She gives me a hard kiss, her full lips keeping our teeth from scraping, then follows up with a softer one, sneaking in her delicious tongue. Totally worth $1,200.
John Digs a Ditch
They were his wife’s hens, not his, he would tell anyone who listened. She was far too soft, mollycoddling any that became ill, lame, out-of-sorts. It made him jolly angry, if he ever thought about it too deeply or for too long, this attention that she gave them but not him.
Molly’s Positions
With Joel playing Rip Van Winkle, I gave up on him. In the office, I dropped the mail on the desk. As I turned to go for a shower, my cell phone chirped. It was Ron Burkett, Kaufman’s publisher.