Brendan Stephens

Watching TV with a Busted Antenna

It’s a lot like

when a therapist

wearing a peacock-

colored shawl,

dark azure

and sparkling

green, voiced

what I’d suspected

for so long:

Asperger’s, now autism,

how both expected

and unexpected

the moment felt.

How when I asked

what came next,

how to act normal,

she interrupted

with neurotypical,

which sounded like normal

with bonus syllables.

Either way,

no grounding

technique balms

the skull-deep itch–

all of us, hiding

snow flurries and static.

Waiting

All day we sat on the sofa

in silence, watching the news.

My cousin hadn’t returned

from caving. Two days ago he

called before entering

the Norman side but didn’t call

at the Bone Mountain exit.

My aunt scrolled through cave system

pictures—stalagmites like gnarled fingers,

cavers caked in mud crawling

through “Devil’s Pinch” like a cat

underneath a sofa. My uncle said,

stop torturing yourself.

The rescuers would be thorough, right?

Their son would never wander countless

dead ends, right? He would find a stream,

turn off his flashlight, plunge

into darkness, save

the last gulp of water,

pray, and—for God’s sake—

stay still until they found him, right?

Grandfathers in Wartime

I

No matter how many times

I asked, he never

talked about the war.

Everything I know

is secondhand:

he was a medic with an injury—

his toe blown clean off,

an accidental discharge

inside the barracks.

He hid army trinkets

inside a tattered box tucked away

in an attic crawlspace:

a bullet casing,

a bayonet flecked with rust,

a blank journal with all

but fifty pages torn away.

II

The enlistment board

refused railroad men.

Their battles against

Maryland miles meant

more than another body

in Normandy. Laying ballast

to keep the wooden cross ties

in place, steadying

the ribbons of steel track,

he pretended to pour

cement on German coffins.

---

Brendan Stephens is a writer hailing from western Maryland. His work has appeared in Pinch, Epoch, the Southeast Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, and a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award. Brendan earned his MFA from the University of Central Florida and his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. Currently, he is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University and a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.

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Maureen Sherbondy

The Teens

The teens are stuck with I

inscribed on their tongues.

They believe they woke

as queens and kings.

Sometimes they assume

mother means servant

and father equals groundskeeper

and worker bee.

But then someone says No

and steals chunks from the heart.

At night they become adults,

drunk and lost, debt in their fists.

They wander, wondering why

the castle vanished with the moon.

Mourne

The barista writes Mourne on my coffee cup.

This day invites grieving even though

recently that old coffin slammed shut.

I believe in signs—messages from strangers,

that expected equation of three deaths in a queue.

Once, a friend’s daughter wandered

room to room in a dream. A nest

of mothers nurtured the deceased teen.

I passed the image along to the grief-festering woman.

She hugged me, said others had sent similar scenes.

Swallowing caffeine, I sink in the seat

replete with ghosts. The entire ride home

my fingers try to erase Mourne from my drink.

---

Maureen Sherbondy's forthcoming book is The Body Remembers. Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Calyx, and other journals. She lives in Durham, NC. www.maureensherbondy.com

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Sierra Page

To the fist at the bottom of every bottle

Here’s to the fist at the bottom of every bottle. Every bottle smashed on the side of a brown-brick apartment siding. Every fist smashed into the drywall, smearing it with blood. Every fist gripping every woman in Chicago’s neck as she bends backwards onto the hood of a car. The snow is falling softly, in a beautiful silence on every bloody scene. Freeze-frame on this one precious moment and use it as a blindfold for covering up every bloody scene yet to come for two years. Can’t see it? Can’t remember it. The fist roughly pulling closed the denim jacket with a low-cut top on underneath. Too much cleavage. The bottle that smashes against the cement floor of a warehouse party when its fist for that night slumps. And then the body. Slumps just the same, but with a thud. No one notices. The fist plunged into the throat, coming out bloody. A few coughs into the toilet and the party is back on. The fist gripping the ends of strangers’ toothbrushes to get the vomit to come out. It makes it easier, this way. Wipe any residue from the cheek before opening the door. No one notices. And we’re back to the fist plunging into the drywall at the landing on the staircase of the apartment in Wicker Park, number 257. You can still see the dried blood from the last time, though we suspect it will just be painted over for future viewings. And we’re back to the thud and the February wind whistling through the cracked window that skinny girls stand smoking out of in the corner of the party. Still, no one is noticing. These are our prime years, and we’re just getting started. The fist gripping the greasy pizza to shove it whole in the mouth, swallowed in a grand total of two bites. No matter how little money, there’s always some leftover bottle stashed in the freezer for the desperate times. Each one has a rim coated with old lipstick and grime. Each one screams to a different silent crowd with some indie-rock song from 2009 playing in the background. Each one comes with its own fist at the bottom. Each one with a snowy scene, covered up with a memory of that one moment bent over backwards on the hood of a parked car, in a silent drive, on the only good night, from the best years of our lives. If you press your ear to the freezer door like a salty conch shell retrieved from the ocean, you can still hear it screaming – Notice me, notice me, notice me!

Please.

---

Sierra Page is a writer and PhD student from the Midwest and living abroad in Brighton, England. Her poems have been previously published in Unbroken Journal, Blink-ink Magazine, and Eunoia Review. She spends her free time reading Vonnegut and hanging out with her 3-toothed cat, Bluey.

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