KALIE JOHNSON

God Seems Smaller than the Sun

GOD SEEMS SMALLER THAN THE SUN

I was alone during the solar eclipse, watched across an empty, unraveling yard as a middle school boy with pimples big as the clouds watched the sun through a box of upside-down Apple Jacks. I held heavy, blacked-out glasses to my face and stared at the sun, dared myself to peek without them; I was always a coward. Quiet rustled in the grass like bird prints in muddy snow or never-finished tree carvings. You knew something was there, but now it was over. The sun was stolen. Lost Sun listing, my rain-soaked flyer with the numbered tabs at the bottom. Take a number if you have any information; I realized no one’s answers were enough.

I watched with toes in desperate grass and found myself missing the almostness of electrocution in my eyes while driving, missing the sun when it filters in through morning's frost-tipped windows, the careless rising of the sun like children’s scraped knees from intentionally breaking their mother’s back. You have to accept pain to cause it; the sun accepted mine with open flames instead of embraces. I never knew I needed the sun until I had to look away, felt my eyes watch the boy and his cereal box, tilting, tilting against the green grass of gravity. I think now would be the best time to swim, to fall into water, lay in a pool of sunless blue--drowning when the world is fragile.

I go inside and cry, know a new kind of betrayal. It is no longer sun-crisped worms on sidewalks, wiggling, edging towards grass, but convulsing into letters that spell out “you could have saved me.” Funny how worms make better use of ABCs. I do not fear ant deaths or burning alive or my father's girlfriend's sun tattoo. I do not fear anything but the sun's disappearance now. When I wake the next day, my only mantra is "I hope the sun will rise today," the only thing I can count on has fallen away, and like broken love, I am left to wonder if it will come back.

My fingers grazed the surface of the sun that day, pried open the fragile wiring that held me from it once before. I let my grandmother tell them it was an accident when I shattered from swinging, hustling, touching with the tips of sticky fingers before I broke silence for gravel kisses and caterpillar tears that clambered across my face, more a reaction to the fear of knowing I reached the sun than from scratching, grey rocks.

I quit rising with the sun after that, backed against the ridges of my knuckles for support as the sun rolling pins over the wet newspaper in the driveway and floods against my dad packing lunch at 6 am, the smell of cigarettes already clinging to his fingers. Another day, another fight with God. Hands are just placeholders like the rising sun, which coffee-drips into the room, rasps its way to every corner, begs the comforter to part again. Why do we leave bed today? I cannot rise with the sun any longer, fear the beginning of morning, my parents waking.

By noon, you realize the sun was not meant for broken families, fought against the sigh of fatherless children, stumbled over missing mothers and empty closets, coat hangers knocking against each other in dusty bitterness, a constant reminder that someone walked out and never came back. We are hanging by them now, a poorly trained trapeze artist falling into unemployment. Daytime is slow, chalk up the cracked sidewalk and my father’s bible across the brim of the toilet. Leave the family alone; let them mourn.

I take warm rain and lightning strikes for morning kisses now, the rasp of my father’s day-old voice is a whistle through the window screen, except it is just the drag of a dying mouse, a gift in the watermelon belly of my youth, the sticking of thighs to wicker chairs. Children draw wiggles of spaghetti suns, and we tell them never look, never stare, never draw attention, shame, power. It is funny they are all the same. Shame at the solar system; shame at my own religion. My craft scissors in my dry hair, I sit beside my brother, run inside from the scrutiny of the sun, and sip tomato juice. I ask my father if anything bleeds blue. He says our blood is blue, but by the time it meets air, it is red. I wonder if the sun is the same way and pull at the skin from my fingernails. The suns of keratin crawl from my flesh and glaze your skin in prisms of downward spirals and gentle ballerina bounces.

I hold up the glass prism that has fallen off the branches of my grandmother's shrinking cactus, watch the sun shatter across the room, hit her fireplace, the chair I napped in on Tuesday, and compose itself across her sunflower paintings. The cat wakes up when the room starts dancing, steno green eyes knowing life is at play. God, can you hear me? I set the prism back in the dirt, let the rainbows slide into the grains of the walls, and realize the sun is always gone when someone dies.

GOD SEEMS SMALLER THAN THE MOON

Beneath freckle constellations and baby powder snow, I realize moon clippings cannot survive on their own. I know now that I can dry-swallow the moon in doctor office gulps, drink in stubborn grace that tastes like grape cough syrup, and chuckle at how silly we were back then. It is a nighttime swim you cannot take with me.

Yet, I fear I will never be unaffected by night. Night fooled me, told me the boy who sang me love songs while cradled side by side in the thickening of his comforter did not want real intimacy. Tricked into pinpricks of starry-eyed romance, I felt along the ribbons of his throat when I laid down to hear him sing--deepen, darken nighttime with the soft soaking that told me this moment was everlasting. Atonement never felt so easy. When the night ended, I skipped beneath the moon, opened the window to sleep aside thunder that shook my pillow with possession. It ended, cycled into the baby tones of emptying night into day, where neither one of us claimed we know the other any longer.

But I used to claim the night with hot-watered conviction. My grandmother ripped me from my bed after every storm. 2 am, 3 am, the draining of nighttime could not stop her. She rattled a strobing flashlight from her rough hands into my own sleeping fingers. Are you leaving? Please shut off the lights. I stumbled in rain boots across sliding grass and searched the top of the mud for worms. I felt invasive, stealing light that did not belong to anyone but the moon to reveal scrawling expanses I’d never wanted to disrupt. Scooping stolen nightcrawlers into buckets wasn’t my only nighttime church service. Grandma taught me to kneel in silence and give God my mind. But she could speak in tongues, and I couldn’t pronounce my W's. I feared her, begged her to stop. Do not deny God. I removed the window screen and knelt until the church service I had rambled at the half moon was met with wet mosquito bites or the taillights of my neighbor’s car heating up on the waffle crunch snow. I never left the house without a flashlight again.

The first time I saw the moon was in my father’s fingernails, the soft crescent hills of calico calcium reflecting the moon I later threw rocks at. I found my guilt in his fingertips; feared it all in the midst of waves of geodes cracking into a nighttime heartbeat. My grandma spoke in tongues again; rhythm matches the crickets. God is talking back and dripping from the base of Van Gogh’s moon. He painted that crumbling cookie moon in spiraling yellow that thickened above a sleeping city. We were both made for the night shift. The nocturnal only know the power of religion in waxes and wanes.

They all know the moon. Bukowski wrote of deadbeat winters and turned every icy forgotten father into a gospel. And I, I am battling dusty Mondays, finding the meaning of life in curling L's and $20 books. Dusty Mondays that dance under nailbeds of satellite suns, dew drops drip from rusting gutters. The moon is careless tonight. I am riding a journey of night upon day and day upon night; I trust that love is the meaning of life. The car kisses the garage doors, ducks beneath hail like lemon cough drops. I wonder if God cowers beneath the Sun and Moon too.

Kalie Johnson is a 25-year-old living near Chicago. She's published in BW's The Mill, California State's Watershed Review, Fatal Flaws Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, Coffin Bell Journal, and The Quillkeeper's Press. She is looking forward to being published with THAT Literary Review and Jet Fuel Review. When she’s not writing, she enjoys seeing the world, hiking, roller skating, and camping. You can find her writing Instagram at @thingsfeelwrite.

ADRIAN KENNEDY

Jaguar, but Pronounce the “U”

I became the one thing I sought to destroy
A child?
No!
A velociraptor
It eats people raw
Bones wet with blood and flesh
Like a Big Mac
Blood being the sauce
How gross.
In Catholic Church we drink gods blood
And we eat his body
So
How could we be so different than a velociraptor
If not even worse
Eating our savior
Stop
Don't think of it that way.
A wasp
It stings people
And it’ll never tell you why because it’s a wasp and it can’t speak
Yet
They can grow, just like anything.
You’re doing it again, you know you need to stop.
It’s a human
Who does very bad things
Who can’t be forgiven and doesn’t want forgiveness
That’s what they say
Constantly.
But I am also human
The apple must not fall far.

This hasn’t been helpful. I’m sorry.

Adrian Kennedy is a writer whom chooses to remain nondescript. Their work, "To Face the Sun," has previously been featured in In Parenthesis online blog.

LILLIAN LIPPOLD

Oxnard

- A hybrid-genre contemplation about returning to one's hometown

I’m sitting on an abandoned play structure in Oxnard. Nothing is difficult when we are together, so here, things look strange. We haven’t been like this in a while. I’m obsessed with taking pictures on disposable film. You’ve got a new cell phone. There’s a car in the parking lot, fifteen feet from me, but I’m not expecting trouble because that isn’t you, Oxnard, is it? The view from here is astounding. I’ve got chills. The Ventura city lights on the mountain are pretty gorgeous now that I look at them.

I swear I’m with you though, Oxnard, my vantage point, growing up, falling down, metaphor. It has been difficult getting by without your emptiness to companion me.

This is the set for enough horror movies, me and the car and the undeveloped camera to protect me, so I face the parking lot, never avoiding the fact that I could be killed if someone tried. I’m hoping the New Year will be kind enough for me to survive it, but then again, I haven’t been sleeping, so how good has it been really? You tell me I look for omens far too often, and I do.

The car has a headlight out, and I’m raising my eyes to check on it every few seconds while listening to the same song again about a river I’ve never seen. No US state looks the same as the next of them. Would someone know to look for me if I left right now for Alabama, told no one, just caught a Greyhound with the 200 dollars I’ve got and no phone charger? There’s a couple, emerging from the car watching me, who’s had some deep conversation. Obviously, it’s not the first because during that, their right headlight went out.

My coffee’s getting colder, and my dad only eats meat and blueberries these days. Oxnard. Sour blueberries, a taste like the lake water from the little pond in the house where I grew up second. I’m getting better at fueling my body, not good enough, but this city-town is beautiful, beautiful and distracting. I’m trying to be more in the where that I am in. No one knows truly how much I love being in associated place, my body in my body in my shoes.

Anyway, Ventura is beautiful, and Oxnard is probably much more than a metaphor if I ever took the time to know it correctly or learn to drive. The drought-resistant trees are still green despite the desert, and I find myself surprised that so many people own raincoats here. It is uncharacteristically cold for the season.

My hands are freezing. The people in the car have climbed together into the backseat. I just felt a patch of warm in the air, drifting through me, but I’m not sure where it’s come from. They’re having sex, that couple in their car with the missing headlight. I know what car sex looks like. The last time someone fucked me in a car, she parked outside the fire-station-turned-speakeasy across two streets from my too-crowded, wealth-infested college dorm, and I fingered her below me until 3 in the morning. I’m nearly positive she faked it. She must’ve been at least a foot too tall for the backseat. Then, when we found ourselves watching Rent in her New Jersey basement bedroom weeks later, she didn’t want it anymore.

Oxnard, the queers have a problem accepting lovers when they’re easy, when you’re not ducking down below the cop-lit windows, pressed together, cheeks and sweat, blending into each other like this, this, this is what our elders fought for, our bad behavior and worse sex in the back of a car and then our silence when we finally find ourselves alone, in bed together with a safely locked door.

I’ve lost the story here. I tend to when sex is involved. There aren’t swings on this playset, which child-me would’ve thought stupid. I write with a wrecking ball and a wide lens nowadays, in three different notebooks for two stupid hours because I can’t say what I mean. I write the way my elders taught me, deathful without absence, opening beyond and beyond still, a wit that crackles into the Pacific.

The car is pulling away now, rocking up and over the speed bump, and I am wishing I gave a little witnessing wave for the sake of good neighborship, a proof that sex doesn’t just tumble off into the abyss once you’ve finished him off. The writer keeps the score. My bluntness is no mistake. It’s been bred into me like a racehorse who’s always willing to say a bit more than that which should be properly allowed.

Attention is difficult for me because I see well and without a quiet enough place to pick the important things and live with them. I miss my own warm body next to yours, you who holds my hips gentle like the violin bows they’ve become. The drought-resistant tree next to me looks like an angel if I glance up too quickly. The car is gone, thank god, because a mother and a son have just walked by me, and I already didn’t know what to say to them.

Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer obsessed with Place and queer utopia. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in many university pubs and other mags. They definitely love you, too.

STEVE GERSON

Alone Together

Act 1 Some Guy

The Hole, Greenwich Village coffee house, folk music venue, underground, private, personal, pure escape. I'd go there, 1964, my pre-hippie days, maybe before I even knew what a hippie was, but I was sure on the path to hippiedom, trying to be cool, or at least out there, somewhere, remote, aloof, odd. I'd walk to The Hole and smell the java, as deep dark as an orc's home in a primeval forest, the underbrush dense with my caffeinated dreams. I’d hear the music drifting from the door like a mystic’s incantation, enticing me to solace.

"How many?" The hostess at the door asked, her hair plaited and dangling over her left shoulder, her right cheek decorated with a hand-painted sunflower, she standing there in her mini dress, all legs and allure. I was in love.

"One, just me," of course, alone, again. "Unless you'd like to spend the rest of your life with me," I said with what I hoped was a cool, new, never-heard-before come on.

Act 2 Shirl

I hate this place. Dreary music, too much smoke in the air, coffee fumes, yuck. And loner losers. That's all we ever get in The Hole, dud dudes who listen to downer music, folk songs about depression, though I do dig Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and, man, to hear Townes Van Zandt singing "Marie," well God damn. When he croons with that Marlboro voice all soaked in bourbon, saying, "maybe me and Marie could find a burned out van and do a little settlin' down," that hits you man. You can feel his pain. I’d get it on with him, but he's always in some kind of world all to himself up there on the stage, the smoke from his ciggie swirling around his head like a curtain, him alone in a fog, part smoke, part dope, part isolato. Still, one kickin’ dude. I hope he makes it big in the business. Still, I can’t believe I left South Carolina for this, standing in the cold, warming my hands of lukewarm wishes.

Act 3 Townes

"Hey, Bob, you got a D string? I damn busted mine, and I'm 'bout to go on in 5 minutes."

"Sure 'nough, Townes," he said, reaching into his guitar case. "Take this," so I did, spooled the string through the 4 hole, tightened it a few twists, and asked Bob to give me a low E to tune.

"Alrighty Dighty. I'm set. Thanks, my man," and I shined my Nocona boots on the back of my jeans, tilted my Stetson down low on my head, and hit the stage, looking left to see if Shirl was still at the door.

Applause

“Howdy, brothers and sisters. Great seeing you tonight. I brought my best friend,” I said, patting my guitar on its pickguard, “‘cuz I sure as hell got no one else.”

Polite laughter

“Any requests,” I asked, hoping no one would suggest a song.

“Can you play your Shrimp song, dude?”

Oh no, not him again. The same lame guy who comes here every week, sitting by himself over by the dying Ficus tree. Always asks me to sing the dumbest song I ever wrote.

“You got it, my man,” and I set off, strumming my chords, hearing myself sing, “Goodbye mama shrimp, papa shake my hand. Here comes the shrimper for to take me to Louisian.’” And the crowd howls, no telling why, ‘cuz, come on, it’s a song about some poor baby shrimp getting caught and heading for the shrimp boil. Damn, poor little sucker, all alone in the turgid surf of the Gulf of Mexico.

Epilogue The Hole

It sagged a bit. That’s what you get when a roof leaks and pipes burst from time to time, streaming green gunk down the walls like lichen on the dark sides of dying trees.

The Hole was north of Houston, south of Bleeker, brownstones lined like tombstones, like shark’s teeth, like druid’s talons stained in blood. Pitiful trees fought for life in cobbled streets, each tree getting at least 2 feet of dirt to struggle in.

To the left of The Hole was an empty lot, strangling weeds growing next to broken bottles and used syringes. To the right was a dilapidated flop house for hobos and has-beens, most of the second-floor windows broken out, a few light bulbs flickering dimly, dots and dashes for hope.

To enter The Hole, you had to walk/trip down one and a half flights of broken cement, each step darkening, one of the lightbulbs burned out, one light bulb flickering semaphores, dots/dashes.

People lined up outside The Hole, individuals, no twosome lovers, no groups of groupies, loners seeking music to steal their souls.

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Vermilion, In Parentheses, and more, plus his chapbooks, Once Planed Straight; Viral; and the soon to be published, The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety from Spartan Press.