Color Study

your stomach is american.
one signal for hunger,
another for playing dead.
in the madness you learn to respect
the small edges
regardless
of your body’s body, the late cycle
you race to slow.
you do your time
with a smile, square
in the room with a room.
favor the cast-off parts
of an animal’s eye.
goodbye to adults
nobody can control.
goodbye for-sale-signs.
even blood dulls into kind of peace
before empty space
which feels terrible or else normal-sized.

Source Text: Resch, Elyse and Tribole, Evelyn. (1995). Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Augusta Funk is a queer poet and scholar. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in California.

by Jennifer Whalen

The Beginning

What taught me worry? Who twirled
dark gauze over my eyes?
Who mapped my body, made
these aches a scrawled key?
On the drive home, I pass a forest
crisp & pale & leafless from flame.
My task is to loose myself
from this image, to feel empty distinctly
for the trees. What mantra will leave me,
clean me—what sunset, what water,
what ode? Who taught me worry?
What pattern stitched so sturdy
I can’t unravel? Who will clasp me,
coat me, care me—who will fuck me
threadless? What stick did I pick up
that won’t stuck down? What luck
latched that won’t clash out? Sometimes
I wake & the day is its own introduction:
the gold blades searing the floor are the sun;
if you feel dizzy, drink warm milk;
you’re in your bed, this blank-trauma
is in your head; if your head’s spinning,
here’s some honey; remember
your body weaves miracles,
you could have a baby. If you’re dizzy,
remember the world is spinning.
Who taught you worry? Lay down,
speak steady, start from the beginning.

Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet and educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Glass: A Journal for Poetry, The Boiler, Grist, & elsewhere. In 2015-2016, she served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University’s L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House. She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

by Dan Tremaglio

All Forgotten Great Ideas

This morning he forgot a truly great idea, an idea for a story. The story was speculative and absurd and ambitious and awesome. He thought of it while standing outside his apartment on the concrete steps that led from the alley down to the hidden garden where he often stood cracking peanut shells and staring. He wasn’t cracking peanut shells this particular morning though, only staring, staring at peanut shells previously cracked, recalling how his wife had enthusiastically requested on more than one occasion that he sweep them up. Or down. Either way. All this was entirely relevant and even intrinsic to the truly great story idea. The truly great story would be set in the near future where all truly great speculative stories are set. This story would have to do with great visions for society and how the greater the vision, the more elusive sustainability becomes. Picture some protagonist. Who cares what they sound like. Who cares what they smell like. The point is they would have this great idea, a truly great one, some grandiose vision for the improvement of all things, not just all things with regard to this particular situation but with regard to all situations, everybody’s situation and everything regarding them, and our protagonist would take bold and savvy steps to implement this idea and would meet with some success. People would see this success and would want to identify with it and so would come on board and try to help implement even more aspects of the original vision and it would all work, a little. Here however is when the success rate starts to slow. Here now is where the story truly begins. Here’s page one. Everything up to this moment would get cut in with backstory or dialogue or whatever’s clever. We start with our however-sounding-however-smelling protagonist’s day of reckoning. Today he is compelled to ponder what the problem is, whether it’s minor and local or far flung and systemic, a flaw deep down in the marrow of things. Where did it all go wrong and when will it go right? He gets sad thinking about this and starts to worry that the original idea was not especially great at all. Maybe it was even a bad idea and both he and the world would have been better off if he had just forgotten the whole thing rather than set about the dubious business of implementing it. He gets more and more despondent until he can no longer remember what the original truly great idea even was. Was it about a semiotic cross between bigfoot and Jesus, or did it have something to do with urban development and vegetables? Were startups involved? At this point the original idea is truly and irrevocably gone, so gone that both he and we have to question whether it was ever there in the first place. By the final page, all our protagonist can do, whatever he sounds like, whatever he smells like, is grope about that sterile space his idea formerly occupied, a tall and drafty room upstairs in his mind’s dilapidated mansion, some vapid square of space without a piano or pictures on the walls, just crooked nails and a million cracked peanut shells sprent all across the hardwood floor. Which, sadly, he begins to sweep up.

Dan Tremaglio is the author of Half an Arc & Artifacts & Then the Other Half, a finalist for the 2022 Indie Book Award for the Novella, in which "All Forgotten Great Ideas" and "Saint Patty's Day Parade" appear. His stories have appeared in numerous publications and twice been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He lives in Seattle where he teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College and is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist.

by Dan Tremaglio

Saint Patty's Day Parade

Your scarf on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks on Main. A yellow molted message two minutes too late. The smell of weed still on it and in it. A crossing signal red-handed halfway up its pole. Nobody else around. That was in February before the nor’easter shut out the lights for eight straight days. I didn’t go looking again until the morning of the parade. Crowds promise so much but deliver only numb knees and invisibility. A horse unmounted by the oil lamp at the corner of the commons. Its hammer head bowed over a child’s sneaker. I was pushing through a barrel of shoulders when singing arose and I knew the words this time so why not? I was singing too when the first float floated by. A home-sized cauldron overflowing with coins and waving rainbow ribbons. That was when I thought I heard your voice and spun around to see. I’m sorry for time’s passing. My neck itched, so I unwrapped it. Look at all these drinkers of black ale with their stubble and their greens. Why does no one know where you are and whether it is cooler there than here? I want to tell you things I’d like to think you’d be happy to hear, even though I know they are mostly to make me happy, mostly to make me feel better about me. So what? Here I am dragging around this barely-there impulse to tell you that the tiny something we shared years ago is still here. Still here at a parade in almost-spring while I wear a scarf I found in the street.

by John Minichillo

House Arrest

Annette was sent home early, suspended from school. We asked what she’d done and she said, Nothing. We asked again, but she wasn’t forthcoming, so we called the principal, who explained that, Yes, she was suspended until further notice.

But why? What did she do?

His response was as unsatisfying as hers: Nothing.

There had to be something.

School’s short on desks, he said. Short on books.

Then Crystal was sent home from work. Was she laid off? No. Would she work from home? If she was so inclined, but she didn’t have to. Would she be paid? Yes, but not as much.

Then I got arrested. For what? Was I speeding? Had I broken the law?

I was told to take it up with the judge.

I said, I will.

Meanwhile, I got a letter in the mail that my license was suspended, so I stayed home too. Crystal worked on her laptop, and with no one to drive Timothy to his preschool, our family stayed home all day every day, made to stay home by no fault of our own. Annette hadn’t done anything wrong. Crystal hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t done anything wrong. And Timothy certainly hadn’t done anything wrong. But I had a suspended license just the same.

Each morning I percolated coffee: for me, for Crystal, for Annette, and even Tim. He liked his black. The rest of us preferred a dash of cream, which we had run out of, so our mornings began steeped in bitterness. I would have gone to the store except I was forbidden to drive. Crystal moved numbers from one column to another column on her laptop. The coders at her company had written a program that was supposed to do this automatically, to much ballyhoo, except their solution was imperfect, and Crystal had to double-check the columns anyway. Despite thirty thousand lines of code, she usually wound up moving the numbers herself. We should be glad, I suppose. This flawed computer program kept her getting paychecks, even if they were smaller.

Luckily, Crystal had seen this coming. Her favorite film was about a giant rock that smashed into the Earth. That was at the end of the film. Most of the movie that led up to this dramatized our mortal worries in spectacular fashion. The film let everyone know that while we might anticipate the arrival of the catastrophic rock for several seasons, things could fall apart quickly. Crystal took the hint and she kept us stocked with vacuum-sealed bags of coffee beans, and other kinds of beans, from chili beans to burrito beans, from navy beans to lentils. We had water filters and bags of flour, canned tomatoes and jars of peanut butter, jars of yeast and tiny paper packages of yeast in case those ran out. We had jugs of kimchi and boxes of noodles, gallons of bleach and gallons of olive oil, with rows of metal shelving to store it all. We owed a lot to that movie. We drank our coffee without cream and went about our daily tasks separately in the same house.

My job was to make coffee and to try to reverse the trajectory of the court. I would call to see if my appeal had been received or if a court date had been set. I would call to ask the nature of my crime, if there had been witnesses, and if maybe there had been a mistake. I did look like other people and yes, I could have been mistaken for someone else and accused of their crimes. My interactions with the court were unproductive. I spent most of my time waiting on hold while a static-y blues riff played too loudly in my ear over and over. Generally, I’d put the phone on speaker and mute it so I didn’t disturb Crystal, who was working, or Annette, who was trying to keep up with her schoolwork (even if they didn’t have books for her or a place for her to sit), or Timothy, who could recite his ABCs like the best of them and had moved on to long division. We had our coffee, and we had our quiet house, which was how we preferred it, so I was self-conscious when a court official finally answered the line and I had to unmute the phone and rattle off my date of birth and social security number, my case number and court date, which I didn’t have, so that this sometimes sent me back into a loop where I might be on hold for days, until I eventually reached someone who was kind and who also knew the quirks of the system.

I should have gotten a letter, but I had no letter.

I should have hired a lawyer, but I didn’t want to bankrupt us.

Eventually, this court official would ask if I wanted to remain on hold or if they should call me back, which was a trick. I’d learned to always stay on the line, because they never called back. Why would they? The case would progress without a court date. It didn’t matter if I was the wrong guy. Justice had momentum.

I finally got through to a woman on the phone who was extremely knowledgeable and exceptionally kind. She told me I was on house arrest and someone would come over to fit me with a monitor.

A what?

An ankle monitor. An electronic device.

How could I be on house arrest if I hadn’t had a trial?

They do that sometimes.

What had I done?

She didn’t know but she said, I’m sure someone knows.

Each morning we drank our black coffee. Each morning I spent the day on the phone. I wanted to believe none of this was happening and that I could will it away. That I could walk out the front door and drive to the store for a carton of cream, maybe even pick up some donuts, and we’d all be fine. No one at the store would know I was supposed to stay home. I would be the hero for risking everything to bring home cream. Hell, maybe Tim would start taking cream in his coffee too.

But I stared out the screen door and stayed inside. I couldn’t cross the threshold.

I had the keys to the Hyundai in my hand and I clicked the fob to unlock the doors, so the horn beeped and the lights flashed like the maroon crossover was reporting for duty, or it was a toddler's sneaker with LEDs that lit up when Tim ran, and my car was ready to run, an old friend so happy to see me.

Except I couldn’t leave. I just couldn’t.

I clicked the fob and the car doors locked.

I clicked the fob to beep the horn and flash the lights.

This was better than waiting on the phone as blues music played.

This was better than moving numbers from column to column.

We didn’t need school. We didn’t need long division.

They couldn’t do anything to us if we just stayed right here.

John Minichillo is the author of five novels, including The Message in the Sky, forthcoming from Spaceboy Books. He lives in Nashville.