Channeling

By Adam Gianforcaro

Your mother cursed the town you moved to and the man you moved in with, and that’s how I found out about your death, four years after the fact, when I searched your name online and came across your mother’s posts, hundreds of them, one after the other, as if Facebook was the only way to your spirit, as if this was the only logical way to mourn, post after post, which has somehow shifted my memories of you, because your mother is there now, in the woods where we used to smoke, in your bedroom, wanting more than anything to yell at you about the laundry or the movies from the library you put god-knows-where, but instead, communicating in a language of clairvoyant key stokes, posting to tell you that your cousin had her baby or that the dog learned to give paw, that she did it twice today, and it made her think of you, those brown eyes, that solemn stare after being praised.

Adam Gianforcaro is a writer from Wilmington, Delaware, with stories and poems in The Cincinnati Review (miCRo series), Poet Lore, Maudlin House, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere.

Photo by Adam Gianforcaro.

The Green Pata

By Sarah Marie Kosch

Three years alive and the little girl has begun to demand stories from our heads, devouring them like a beautiful little beast, too hungry to pause for plot or craft she wants them when she wants them “with a mommy horsie and two babies and a green pata” a bribe in exchange for learning how to human: she sits on her tiny pink toilet and I sit on the other spinning sugar fluff and stealing whatever’s handy, wondering how much darkness to let in and when and what’s not mine to tell even disguised in some uncanny form to warn and filter out the worst poisons with my tongue as fast as she picks up words like stones from the ground and tucks them in her cheeks, twice as many as I have ever swallowed; I scratch for old learning my lazy skin has let evaporate (only the easiest and most delicious shards remain: hola, delicioso, rascacielos—pebbles in a whole other way to call things) stumbling with a child’s mouth trying out shapes, I give her a mommy horsie and two babies eating berries and napping in a sun-warmed bed of hay hoping I can distract her from what I don’t know, but only three years alive she already knows stories are better with loss—she claws out the bottom as fast as I build: “… dreaming on their beds of hay… (“They don’t have beds!” she laughs with delight at her theft)…they curled up on the fresh green grass… (“No grass!”)…on the rich brown dirt” (“No dirt!”) and our animal feet keep stamping down through crust and mantle to find the center of the earth.

Sarah Marie Kosch lives in Omaha, edits Random Sample Review and occasionally tweets from @smkosch.

Art by the author's niece.

One Boob

By Denise Mills

That time my mother was dying from breast cancer and had booked in for a mastectomy, my father told her, “I’ll still love you with only one boob," while smiling to himself over what a great catch he was as a husband (his head tilted to the side and there was a look on his face that reminded me of a good puppy, waiting for a pat), that was the first time I saw a flicker of rage in my mother’s pale blue eyes (instead of the sadness), but her mouth replied: “I know you will”.

Denise Mills is a reader, writer and reformed accountant living in Central West NSW, Australia.

Image by Nick Botka, an artist living in Oregon; find his visuals here and his music here.