Exhale
By Joseph Keshishian
you mountain of garbage
All broken bracken
stark and rot
Fetid sludge fen
All must bear you
heavy odor!
Your neighbors
no longer take notice
Shaggy barn peeling
gutted old farmhouse
battleships
still cruising the plains
voiceless
steady sinking
still fighting the good fight
still
you grow ever higher
pungently shouting
at the wind
you testify!
call the congregation!
(you’re just bringing in the riff raff)
birds and beasts
carrion and sundry
insects bore you,
clicks and clacks
and while you sigh
your heavy methane sighs
they make their love tunnels
deeper
The weight
of the line
is heavier in the hand
and mine had a part in your swelling
you, the sum of your parts
warm and thoughtless
eyesore
reckless at my homecoming
House of God
By E.C. Hilty
The lights that illuminated the cross on the front of the building and the headlights of the cars from the street reflected in the plastic of her sneakers. The wind was much stronger on the ridgepole than it had been on the ground.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the cool air. There wasn’t much in her past worth remembering so she thought on the memories she’d made up.
She thought she had been a very pretty baby. Blonde with big green eyes, the belle of the ball as she was the first of the third living generation of her family. Her “very pretty” status changed from certain to dismal somewhere between the ages of four and six. Because there were no pictures of her between these ages, she was never quite sure of the exact onset of her ugliness.
In fact, there was only one picture she had ever seen with her in it after the age of six. She, unaware that a picture was being taken, walked in front of her mother’s lens as it was being aimed toward her youngest child on a swing at the park. By the time Zoë got to kindergarten, she was truly unfortunate looking- too tall for her age, too fat for her height, and her nose would shield Long Island from the rain.
The boys from the “blue table” mercilessly teased her about her mullet haircut, her tragically more than baby fat body, her dresses that were never quite right for the affluent area in which she lived. Thinking back now, she remembered a red haired boy she used to sit next to on the school bus.
She remembered that he was nice to her, but didn’t know if the size of her body and the look of her face had frightened him into submission. Maybe he simply couldn’t get out of the seat.
She always thought her name should have been Gladys or Brunhilda, instead of Zoë. Her mother said that another name might have suited her better, but she’d been baptized Zoë, and Zoë she would stay. Zoë sounded light and playful like a garden gnome and not like the mangled eighteen wheeler she saw herself to be.
The wind threw her hair back behind her, and she remembered the first time someone who wasn’t related to her had hugged her. She had almost pulled away in fear, not sure what to do with this tiny little girl who was holding tight to her monstrous frame. They were the same age, she and Jamie, but Jamie was one of those wispy little girls who would grow up to be shyly beautiful and loved by one and all for her sweet nature and sweeter face. Jamie had invited Zoë to her birthday party. Zoë, even at the tender age of nine, had assumed that the invitation had been extended because Jamie’s mother didn’t want to exclude anyone and risk hurt feelings and angry mothers. Zoë had tried to hide the invitation but her mother was too quick and decided that Zoë should go.
“You never go anywhere. You don’t have any friends. You are going to this party,” Zoë’s mother had said, pointing the finger, cross jumping on her throat. And that was the end of that.
Zoë’s mother picked out a pink drop waist dress with matching pink barrettes to stop the curling of the short hair above Zoë’s ears. She stood in front of the full length mirror in her mother’s bedroom and wondered how fate could have been so cruel and how her mother could think that she would look respectable in that dress with that hair. The fat around her middle made an unsightly roll where a waist in a normal dress would have been. The skirt, pleated below the drop at her hips, was short and showed off the orthopedic-esque shoes she was forced to wear in an effort to correct her out-turning gait. The hair around her face stuck out despite the barrettes and gave a feather fluff effect that might have been attractive had it not been accompanied by much longer hair at the back of her head. She supposed that being quiet and sensitive weren’t enough of a reason for God to have made her good looking. Her mother was so excited about the party that Zoe didn’t have the heart to dampen her spirits and throw herself before the car.
She stepped out onto the curb and immediately wished she could melt into the pavement. Through the big bay window, she could see other girls laughing and talking and drinking from real china teacups. Zoe imagined herself knocking dishes from the table and spilling whatever was in those pretty cups. She fancied herself the bull in the china shop of this party. It was then, after her mother had driven away and she was left standing on that curb wondering where she could hide until her mother came back, that Jamie had come bounding out of the house to embrace her, finally leading her inside.
The girls inside were standoffish at best and cruel at worst, but Jamie was unfailingly kind. Jamie could have been Zoe’s only friend, if not for the fact that she moved across the country very soon after that hug. And Zoe was never invited to another party. She was never sure if she should have been sad about Jamie moving or never going to another party. She never had any particular interest in either of those things, though she thought she should have felt something.
Zoë stepped a little closer to the edge and thought again. Every Sunday, he sat in the park across the street from the liquor store where she worked. She knew that he was taller than he looked; the “Skateboarding Prohibited” sign dwarfed him from her vantage point though she knew him to be at least that tall.
She imagined that the metal of the picnic table was cold even through the aerodynamic biking suit he always wore. He stopped in to see her, she preferred to think. But really his motives were to buy a bottle of chilled French chardonnay, ask for a plastic cup, and walk his bicycle across the street.
Their encounter was Zoe’s favorite part of Sunday, besides the breakfast of grilled cheese and fries from the deli down the block. He was the only man who bothered to find out anything about her. Sometimes she daydreamed that he would ask her to come to the park and share the bottle with him. She would blush and accept, proclaiming that though she worked in a store full of all kinds of interesting bottles of alcohol, she rarely had the opportunity to taste. In this fantasy, it didn’t matter that she left the store unattended even though she was the only employee there. Her overbearing coworker, Hazel, would arrive in the evening to find Zoe still in the park with the tall man and yell at her like a mother does a little girl who doesn’t know her place. Zoe, in retribution for all of the other instances of yelling similar to this one and far less deserved, would take the tall man’s hand and walk away, leaving Hazel fuming alone in the waxing darkness.
As they walk away, the tall man asks, “Are you concerned about her at all?” in a breathtaking Irish brogue.
“How do you mean?” Zoe smiled, painfully aware of her very American speech pattern.
“Does she make your life difficult?”
“Yes,” Zoe imagines that she is mysterious and doesn’t need to say more to communicate more.
“Should yo
u worry that she will make it more so?”
“No,” and that was all that needed to be said as they walked off.
She used this fantasy again, hoping that it would make her feel a little less like jumping from the roof of the church.
No such luck.
She spread her arms and pretended to fly.