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.