writer – Page 2 – THE CITY KEY

“Moms’ Night Out” by Raya Yarbrough

A study in social discomfort and expensive toast, with explanatory footnotes, to be read at the end

Tonight I went to “Moms’ Night Out” at a pseudo-posh bar in Santa Monica. This was an extra-curricular event through my daughter’s preschool, organized by Sam, a mother who is far more involved and organized than I am. I’m not an un-involved mom, but when I have time to myself, away from the task of keeping another human alive, my first thought is towards my work or a hobby, like running screaming out into the night.² I went to prove to the other moms, and to myself, that I can be a person.

In the Lyft, I ruminated on my discomfort about social events. I just don’t know HOW to people. What do people talk about?³ On stage, life makes sense. I know where and when things are supposed to happen. I guess my point is, after getting past “Hello fellow human female. I see you have spawned as well. Yes, we all drink more now,” what do I talk to a bunch of effectively random women about? But still, I wanted to give it a chance.

My Lyft pulled up to the curb. I got out. I went into the bar.

Inside the bar, it was dim, but not sinister-dim, like sex-den dim. You know. A heavy, dark, toile curtain hung close to the entrance, obscuring half my view. I took two steps toward the toile, then panned left to right: a table with two women I did not recognize, two women and a man at the bar, also foreign to me, some empty couches and low accent tables, and then there was Sam, the classroom rep and event organizer. I see Sam every week when she volunteers to set up lunch for the teachers, and/or to do other devoted tasks. Sam has three children and does all this. Did I mention she’s also skinny and beautiful? I am automatically a disheveled, out-of-shape, one-kid-having wuss in her presence. Not that she projects that—she’s actually lovely—this is all in my head. Loudly. In my head.

Sam hadn’t seen me yet; she was checking her phone. Seemed confused. She was the only one on the couch. I turned on my mental “extrovert app,” and the mask appeared.

“Hi Sam!”

“Oh hiiiiii!”

She had a half-empty glass of sparkling wine. I sat down on a dark blue, velveteen, tufted couchlet. I didn’t see anyone else I recognized.

Fucking hell. I was the first one there.

We both made sounds at each other, reflecting the situation. We recounted the facts, as if we were reminiscing about the events of five minutes ago. Almost nostalgic for a distant past, ten minutes ago, back when it was Schrodinger’s Party in our minds, both alive and dead.⁴

The waiter came by to ask if we’d like to look at the menu. We said yes. We required new activity and stimulation.

Sam said the food at this bar was actually very good, and she put in an order for sliders. I went for the avocado toast. The waiter was patient while we decided how many orders of each we should get. I also ordered an Old Fashioned.

We did mom talk, while the waiter took our orders to the kitchen. Nap strategies, bedtime routines, what do they eat, finding “me time,” and teaching small humans where to poop. My Old Fashioned arrived. I stopped midway to my sip, catching sight of the artisanal-looking orange rind, which set off an overall tangerine effect in the glass. It looked like Dayquil.

Then, Sam asked the introvert’s nuclear question. “How are you?”

It sends me into existential paralysis. How are you physically? Emotionally? How are you finding this incarnation on this plane of existence?¹⁰

I told her about my recording project, my album. That’s a thing.

“Mmmm,” she said, and raised her eyebrows, like the information tasted good. There was full eye contact, without a side-glance, and I know that means a human is engaged. Good so far. I told her my husband had been out of town and would be most of the month.

“Mmmmm,” again, but this time with furrowed brow, indicating recognition of the potential hardship of the situation. That’s an empathic facial response. Even if faked, she took the trouble to make it.

I paused, searching for another “thing.” I got distracted because her eyebrows were impeccable. I started wondering about her skin-care regimen. Side-glance. Shit, I’d waited too long to say a thing, and now my presence had become burdensome. She checked her phone. Oh God, I’m an alien. An alien she’s having to babysit, alone, in a bar.

Our conversation was in syndication now, pure re-runs. She had already told me when her kids went to sleep, but I asked again, as if I needed clarification about the specific meaning of 6:30pm. She asked what I was recording. I told her, “my album.” She repeated her face. She apologized about the confusion and tapped on her phone. We alternated head swivels towards the entrance whenever somebody new came in. We repeated the conversation where we told each other what time it was, and how we thought people would’ve been here 30 minutes ago. We confirmed for each other that it was now five minutes later than the last time we checked.

Then silence.

Sam ordered a margarita.

Sam’s margarita arrived, salted.

The table was an embarrassment of sharp-cut, Himalayan salt-crystalled, conically wrapped French fries. In baskets. We ate the sliders and avocado toast. So there we were: two jilted, awkward, skinny-pants-wearing moms-in-a-bar, drinking and scarfing fries, because what the fuck at this point.

If we had chosen, intentionally, to hang out alone together, it wouldn’t have been as awkward. It was only because we had expected a night of perfunctory chit chat, with many people, that we ended up unprepared for genuine social interaction.

Sam looked with concern towards the kitchen. This is when I found out that she’d told the establishment to expect 20 people, and to reserve seating and staff appropriately. This was the social-let-down motherload—when the people you invited aren’t there, and the people you paid to be there are pissed off and glaring.

8:30pm rolled around, and Sam asked how long I had planned to stay. It was clear that truly, nobody else was showing up. I made words about the babysitter. I suggested we have plans with our husbands sometime, maybe a playdate, something intentional.

“Yeah totally!”

“Yeah we totally should!”¹¹

Because the rules are that you must reverse an unintentionally awkward evening with an intentionally awkward one.

So that was Moms’ Night Out—which seemed like a very specific and reductive title, now that the night had passed in the way it did.

So, did I learn anything about how to be a person? Did I prove to myself that I’m a person?¹³ I learned that sometimes the discomfort goes deeper than me. And sometimes the most prepared, together, responsible folks can still get tapped by the wand of the awkward fairy.¹⁴

Footnotes:

² For the record, “running screaming into the night” is not my hobby. My hobbies are: free-floating anxiety and delusions of grandeur. And watercolor.

³ Aside from Steely Dan, Dark Matter, good/bad use of crash cymbal, Dark Energy, sex, the dishes, more sex, why my software isn’t working, The Singularity, politics, “are changes in emotion metric modulations?”, weird sex, Black people stuff, “where are my earbuds?” Jewish people stuff, Fminor6/9, guys wearing eyeliner, “what are those tiny red spiders called?”, and Star Trek.

I may have digressed.

⁴ “Schrödinger’s cat” is a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition. As the story goes,⁵ there is a cat in a box in the room next to you.⁶ You do not know how long the cat has been in the box, if the box is ventilated, if the cat has been fed, if the cat has been listening to Joe’s Garage⁷ or the Best of Celine Dion.⁸ Any of these variables could render the cat living or dead. Some more than others.⁹ Until you enter the room and open the box, in your mind, the cat is both alive and dead. Like the party. Before I got there. Get it?

⁵ Basically.

⁶ With soundproofing.

⁷ A three-part rock opera recorded by American musician Frank Zappa in 1979.

⁸ Please refer to 9

⁹ Please refer to 8

¹⁰ Fine. Needs salt.

¹¹ Scientists estimate that people who suggest “making plans” in Los Angeles have, statistically, a 10 percent chance of actually seeing those plans become reality. Experts theorize that this behavior is due to several common circumstances, such as:

1) Some shit I’ve got to do.
2) “My girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse is sick/a dick/a bitch/in town/out of town/imaginary”
3) Plans with more professionally important people.
4) “Oh, shit I forgot!”
5) Something to do with kids.
6) Having to drive from West side to East side and vice versa, but usually the prior.
7) Having to drive between the hours of 2pm-7pm.
Recent studies have shown that Los Angeles people making good on “we should hang out” is less likely than the 405 receiving a hovercraft lane, or a frozen daiquiri blizzard naturally occurring over the Grand Canyon. Though there are differing opinions on how to deal with this social epidemic, 95 percent of experts12 agree that the situation is totally bullshit.
12) The other 5 percent of experts were not available for comment because they “Had a thing, but totally want to get together soon.”
13) No.
14) Different from the Absinthe Fairy, which is a story for another time.

Raya Yarbrough is a writer and singer-songwriter best known for singing the opening song of the TV series Outlander. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Frazzled and MUTHA Magazine. Raya is finishing a humorous memoir about being a parent in a multiracial family while also being a working artist.

“The Devastated” by Jennifer Bannan

Once, when we were visiting the Everglades camp, my second husband Brian sent us into fearful conniptions by stumbling off drunk to lie down and look at the stars. We didn’t know where he was and he wasn’t answering our calls.

This isn’t good, my dad said. People get walking in the wrong direction, he said, loading his gun, and they never come back. Somehow, I knew Brian wasn’t far, but Dad shot twelve rounds into the air nonetheless.

I wonder if it irked Dad that it wasn’t the gun that finally woke Brian, but the continued bellows of me and my sister. He emerged from the sawgrass, tripping over cypress stumps. He begged our forgiveness, trying to explain how the Milky Way had lured him. It was so beautiful.

Though he’s been to the Everglades twice before, those trips started with visits to my parents in Central Florida. Brian hasn’t seen Miami yet. He has only heard my stories. And now he’s dying of pancreatic cancer, in his late forties. We’re traveling the world – Thailand, Laos, Tulum, Cuba – and one of our stops will be the place that shaped me.

We drive, sunshine and air conditioning providing that particular mix I’ve never felt like it feels in Miami. There’s the house on Tenth terrace where I grew up. There’s the Denny’s where I worked – the mini mall now much fancier than it was back then, more landscaping, slick specialty shops.

We’re driving West on Tamiami Trail. I tell him what he probably knows, that an hour on this road would bring us to Monroe Station, where my dad kept his swamp buggy parked. The buggy and the camp were sold to an amiable guy who has shown he’s willing to host our visits out there. My parents sold it without even telling me and my sister. Because we live far away with our families. Because we’re girls. I believe a son would have been afforded right of first refusal. When I said as much to my mom, told her to put Dad on the phone, she panicked, she urged reason, We didn’t want to burden you. How would you fix a swamp buggy, how would you fix anything out there? I’ve known the Everglades since my earliest memories, loved it enough to name my youngest, and Brian’s only child, Cypress. They could have told us, could have given us the smallest say.

I turn off the Trail, driving the circuit. I show Brian the simple stucco box that was my first boyfriend’s home. Memories of salsa parties on the back patio, of the grandmother always sweeping the rug. Here: the Westchester mall where we kids would go for bistec and papas fritas.

Brian, stretching his lips weird because the chemo has left his mouth dry, doesn’t say much. I feel selfish spending time on these memories when time is precious. But then, he’s someone who loves big, and he loves me, so what better way to be in the world right now? Place is a part of us, and so this place will also be a part of our son Cypress, growing with him in mysterious ways. It’s important to see.

Next: Pat’s house, where friends blew a hole in the wall with a military-grade firearm. There’s my elementary school. The sidewalk where, as I biked, a teenager grabbed my ass and then showed me his handgun.

“They kept the boot to your neck,” he says of the violence, of the particular way it was directed at girls.

I’m reminded of another time, when he said, “We’re the devastated generation,” about all the toxins and consumerism and depletion of nature that had been normalized for us. And he said that before he knew about the cancer.

It’s true, the female experience of violence is unique, like the gun that forces declarations of love. We’re supposed to say how we like the boot to the neck, how it suits us.

But also, everything I loved. What the boot couldn’t take from me. The banyans of Coral Way. The beach at night like a black and white movie. The teacher assigning me The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, allowing me to see myself in a grand, artistic way. The deep, pure yearning, emboldened by the crisp blue sky.

And, oh Brian, of the devastated generation. Your dying is proof enough that the boot hurts everyone, that the boot is on everyone’s neck. Every generation and all of us in it. All of us, again and again, bearing the devastation. Repeating the very cycle we’d hoped to disrupt.

Jennifer Bannan’s (jenniferbannan.com) second short story collection, Tamiami Trail, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press Fall 2025. She has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology, Keeping the Wolves at Bay, the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review and more.

“Chiang Mai” by Neal Donahue

Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for the poem.

The Muslim call to prayer
awakens us at quarter to six
in the morning, the pulsing
voice otherworldly and insistent.

We find ourselves in Chiang Mai,
a market city, prosperous and
alive, a religious mecca with
golden temples and Buddhist monks.

The air is cool and fresh,
a welcome change from Bangkok,
and we are uplifted by flowers and
the majesty of surrounding mountains.

As we make our way upward
on the winding mountain road,
the city falls away below, a busy hub
in the shadow of Suthep Doi.

At the temple, we ring the bells,
their throbbing tones rising up
toward heaven, the benevolent
spirits welcoming our prayers.

Neal

Neal Donahue majored in English at the University of Oklahoma, then served 5 years as a submarine officer. After his stint in the Navy, he taught elementary school in Massachusetts and Vermont, incorporating poetry into his curriculum. Neal has had a number of poems published in small journals.

Two Poems by Sarah Zietlow

Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for the poem.

The View from My Balcony

The corner of Animas and Campanario
Centro Habana, Cuba

Three boys shoot marbles on the sidewalk below
the laundry their mothers strung from one crumbling balcony
to the next. Each glass orb, glistening, bounces into the street
and underneath the ‘55 Buick Special, painted Tiffany Blue
over Bondo, and parked beside mounds of trash on the corner
where old men pick through the rubbish, seeking useful things

hidden in a sea of plastic bottles and rancid food. Things
like one aluminum can, just peeking out from below
soiled diapers and molded, rotten fruit—one crushed corner
of the can gleaming in the sunlight, just visible from my balcony
above. Two blocks up the road, the Malecón heralds the blue
Atlantic beyond, where a north wind blows down the street,

bringing with it dreams of Florida and another sun-drenched street
somewhere in the south of Miami. Alicia upstairs says that things
are better there. In Florida, the sky and the water are impossibly blue—
Madres, padres, and their familias, can escape out from below
the crumbling facades here that threaten to crush them. One balcony
fell last week and took the whole building with it, just around the corner

from here. Four cubanos muertos, Alicia tells me, on that corner,
but you wouldn’t know it after the rubble was swept from the street.
¿De donde eres? the cubanos, one after another, call up to my balcony,
and after my response, shout, ¡Americana! America, after all, a thing
they’ve imagined in a daydream more than once upon a time. Below,
a woman walks past to empty her trash into the pile beside this blue

building on this blue street in this blue town, under a sky of blue
that makes everything still somehow seem gray. I wonder if this corner
is the same as any other, but then remember Miramar, just west. Below
each building there, the view is not like this. On each manicured street,
freshly-pressed suits stroll from one embassy to the next. Everything
is planted and pruned and contorted into lies that echo off each balcony

here in no-man’s land, where Yessie sells cigarillos from her balcón
for thirty-five cents a pack, and cold cervezas in cans of green and blue
for only forty more. But these little luxuries are the bigger things
that most cubanos in Centro cannot afford. On every corner
up and down Campanario, the buildings close in on the calle,
and an invisible gray fog settles more each day on everyone below.Perched high on a Habana balcony, I miss the little things:
The boy in blue shoots pebbles of plaster into the street
from the corner of the curb, and there are no marbles below.

This Side of Negril

Down here at the West End
on Hylton Avenue is where
Wen fries snapper at his roadside stand
on Sundays. Red sauce too,
poured over rice and peas
with a side of slaw on top. I’ll
wait across the way at Whoopie’s and I’ll
save you a seat at the westernmost end
of the bar. Together, we’ll share each piece
while the sun sinks (the sky wears
his Sunday best) down, journeying on to
the Caymans, Belize, then Guatemala. Stands
of palms hold hammocks, and you’ll stand
at the edge of the cliff—the edge of this isle,
while I’ll snap just a picture or two
before the green flash that comes at the end
of the day. The Canadian ex-pat, Brian, wears
another Hawaiian shirt and breaks off a piece
of his gizzada—and another piece
for the goat that stands
nudging her nose at the pocket where
the bag used to be. I’ll
call Ardie over from the other end
of the bar, and order two
more. Red Stripe for you, and a white rum too,
with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a piece
of hand-chipped ice.

Back at East End
women in shanty-town stands
sell tchotchkes arranged in tightly-packed aisles
to American tourists come to ogle there,
just steps, but a world away from their
all-inclusive hells (women that wear too
much makeup and too much money).

I’ll
take my rice and peas and the peace
of the doctor birds that flit through stands
of ackee trees down here at the West End.
Before she closes tonight, you stop for a few pieces
of bacon, two potatoes, and four eggs from Dora’s stand.
We’ll fry it all in the morning for breakfast—at the West End.

Sarah Zietlow is from a small town in northeast Ohio where she currently teaches language arts to 7th-grade students. She holds a BA in Education from the University of Akron, an MA in English from Bowling Green State University, and is currently working on an MFA in Creative writing in the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. Sarah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna and Merion West. In her free time, Sarah enjoys sitting by campfires with her husband while simultaneously staring at the stars and contemplating how best to sell off all she owns in an effort to find herself in some place other than Cleveland.

Zietlow

Two Poems by Susan Scutti

During the reign of restlessness
The only open seat
is beside a questionable
person. Wilting
you ease into the
space beside him.
He asks if you have a habit.
“A habit
isn’t a bad thing,” he says. “Some people live their whole lives with a habit.”
The train you ride causes a strong wind as
it arrives in the next station.
On the platform, a woman’s hair
rises and falls like an empire.
The phone you clutch carries a message
you’re unable to delete.
Other things you cannot discard are mistaken ideas about the rich and the casual slights by so-called friends.
Camera-ready smiles appear genuine
despite the vacant eyes tucked within
layers of makeup.
“We are troubled by behavior
that does not align with our own:
Your assignment for today is surrender.”
A slender shriek escapes your lips
while you doze among the beginnings and endings
of things discovered within
the night’s fragrant pulp.

Hudson Chapel
Maneuvering like
atomic particles, seafarers
ready their
kayaks as a
bird pirouetting on
the branch above my
head begins its
strange call: a drilling
sound as persistent as
examined conscience. Forlorn
industrial structures
squat on
a pier to my left while
a lone
seagull, impervious as
false confidence, floats toward
me along the tide.
It is assumed small
birds possess
no malice, no charity, no philosophy…
but how do we know?
Someday scientists
will view the
unconscious mind with special
instruments just as today they
inspect someone’s internal
organ — a liver, say, or
a heart — with contemporary
machines. The kayakers
in dayglo life vests grow smaller
as they glide into the distance.
Overhead
the motor of an airplane
drones and a fly, its
transparent wings twitching, lands within
the shadow
of my foot.

A woman and her
husband in early old age are
speaking in Russian as
they approach. The
woman passes
three empty
benches, then sits right beside
me… crowding me.
She turns and
says “Gud mohrnink” with a smile. In a
gentle voice her
husband scolds
her for her
sweet moxie which, glancing at
me, he understands I
forgive-respect-admire. On
the breeze, I smell
her, her
scent is not unpleasant just
dissimilar to my own. I suspect
she eats more meat than I do. Pickled or
otherwise prepared parts, perhaps
livers or maybe
hearts, the discarded
organs of the same
animals I
consume on occasion.
Exhaling, I watch the narrow houses
perched on a cliff across the river.
They stand isolated yet together,
whispering confidential secrets into
strong winds. Meanwhile
peace, random
yet always certain, arrives to bathe
the island, a scene of
colluding energies, as we three
sit side by side
observing.
Melville,
how right you were
to send Ishmael
to the sea, the sea
the sea:
strange mirror
of self-
discovery, a
bewildering pulse of
eternity.

scutti 8 sept 2024

Susan Scutti grew up in Woodbridge, NJ and has lived in New Haven, CT, Anchorage, AK, Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, Washington, D.C. and her current home city, New York. She loves to walk along the Hudson, listening to audiobooks and watching those passing in the opposite direction.

Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.

Three Poems by Amy Barone

Rio-The Way I See It

Hot pink is the color of Brazil,
but green is the color of Rio,
a tropical urban jungle pulsing with life.

Yellow is for flickering lights from the favelas
that hug lush mountains
offering prime city views,

where poverty, drugs and samba mingle
and young children bounce on a trampoline in Cantagala
immune to foreign visitors’ downcast glances.

Blue is for swank homes in artsy Santa Teresa district
echoing France’s Montmartre,
but where few workers speak other languages,
preferring to communicate in smiles and laughter.

White is for Cristo Redentor
with arms outstretched and oversized heart
who protects cariocas alongside city patron Sao Sebastiao.

black is the color of rosary beads that dangle from taxi mirrors
promising safety on and off the road,
the only jewelry we wear in this dangerously fun town.

City on a River

What Chester made no longer makes Chester.
Scott Paper, Ford Motor Company left for sunnier climes.
Blight replaced a factory town flanked by a shipyard
and ethnic neighborhoods that glowed.

Before communities dismantled and racial clamor tolled,
mapping out his peace plan, Martin Luther King chose the city
for divinity studies at Crozer Seminary.

Landmarks of learning endure, like Pennsylvania Military College,
now Widener University, and Chester High School.
I pore over my mother’s yellowed letters.

Chester High students credit their old English teacher
for love of reading, guidance, success.
I feel a flicker of her hometown allure.
Change rains lightly.

A national soccer team built a stadium in the city’s largest park.
Games sell out.
Freighters glide by.
The glistening Delaware River reflects the stars.

Art En Plein Air

No need to enter museums or galleries
to experience Buenos Aires art and politics.

Just wander the streets of the Palermo barrio
where mothers and sisters
whose sons and brothers went missing
send messages through vibrant murals.

Or read the walls flanking chichi restaurant Tegui
to learn how fiercely Argentines revere the islas Malvinas.

No need for rich patrons to be an Argentine artist.
Make city walls and private homes your canvas.

Theatre designer Jazz commemorates two murdered boys
with a charcoal of raging bulls.
Pum Pum channels fun with her pink and blue cats
and a big banged little girl in high heel boots.

A Cuban artist splashes a wall
with the expressive eyes of his father-in-law
whose sole dream was to have his ashes
returned to Buenos Aires.

Amy Barone (5)

Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, Defying Extinction, was published by Broadstone Books in 2022. New York Quarterly Books released her collection, We Became Summer, in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing). Barone’s poetry has appeared in Martello Journal (Ireland), Muddy River Poetry Review, New Verse News, The Ocotillo Review and Paterson Literary Review, among other publications. She belongs to the brevitas online poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City and Haverford, PA. X: @AmyBBarone

Three Poems by Eóin Flannery

City of the future

The branches of the trees are a squall of applause,
choiring out ragged notes on the park fence.

From the bench, shedding its paint in burnt petals,
I notice a trunk like a chipped dark vase, unpolished,

leaning off-balance, steadying itself with a thin elbow
on the iron perimeter gate that keeps the children
from the traffic.

Twisted with age, its face is curved with wisdom,
and I half expect it to curl
a twig in my direction.

Milky light breaks the cover of the upper branches,
daubing the lawns with a cage of brightness and shadow,

warming my skin with unsteady jets of heat,
heat that disperses unevenly out from the lawned
park,

heat that reaches beyond the traffic blockages, carried on
the same currents as the purest pollutants

speckling the arteries of circular motion,
the city’s cluttered corridors through which
we will walk.

The unstirred air is padded out with warmth,
worn as baggage, time’s stained clouds.

Unshadow – Wurzburg

A yellow tram folds itself around
the corner,
slippage and spark
are cobbled together at high pitch.

My shadow drains through the streets,
it seizes and strains,
brown eyes look
from behind the chains of rain
mingling
on the weathering shopfronts.

Steps lead to the bridge astride
an overwhelm of Spring river,
from where a sound that clouds out
the footfall of the passing and the past.
Where its white and grey mess
trespasses on disquiet.

High above the city,
your hand presses
on castellated walls.
Knuckles of stone, worn with story.
But there are gaps,
imagined looks and bursts of smile.

And there is that heartbeat
that recoils
from expressing too much, too late.

I try to unshadow it,
through the looks of others.

Aussteigen – Stuttgart

The doors of the train
snap shut like two bare
hands clapping against
a bitter cold, sending a shiver
through the bodies of those
that cluster on its plastic
seats.

Mice thread their way through
the brackets of steel below
on the tracks as

we race the escalators to
the bottom,
hit the platform –
too late,
but take
consolation in the
underground heat that
pads out
the tunnels.

We wait.

According to the colour-coded
map, we need the S3 to
Stadtmitte,
where we change to the S6,
it will take us all the way to
Weil der Stadt –
a mythic place,
the end of the line.

On the undercard of city life,
we wait for the gathering
vibrations of the next train,
the prickling tickle of its
tongue
beneath our feet –
the shared feeling that
something is coming.

download

Eóin Flannery is a writer based in Limerick, Ireland, where he is Associate Professor of English Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He has published 12 books of cultural criticism. His poetry has appeared in ‘The Galway Review’ and ‘Vita and the Woolf’, it is forthcoming in the ‘Hog River Press’ and in ‘Inkfish Magazine’. He is working on a collection of poems entitled, ‘Unshadow’.

“The Only Girl’s Awakening” by Dorothy Venditto

This summer night began like so many before. Supper was over, and my mother said it was time for all of us to move to the living room so she could finish washing the dishes. I wanted to stay behind to help clean the kitchen and to be with my mom, but I was just 5 years old and wouldn’t have been much help. So, I followed my five older brothers and father into the living room as expected. I can’t remember what we were watching that night but imagine it was one of my father’s favorite cop shows. The younger kids got a seat on the hardwood floors, the older boys fought over a space on the couch, and my father collapsed into his chair in a way that signaled he was not getting up again.

On my favorite nights in our apartment, which this one was not, I could gaze through the open window from my seat on the floor and see the setting moon competing for attention with the Empire State Building. I could not seriously consider which would win such a competition because I felt their magic equally. I’d often find myself listening to the conversations of people walking on Third Avenue as their words and laughter made it through the thick summer air to our second-floor apartment. Groups of men loudly talking about the game they just watched at the corner bar and women considering where to go while hailing taxis – these types of conversations kept me listening for what might come next. I saw myself wearing shimmering high heels and a long, dramatic black coat and wondered where I would go when I was old enough to hail taxis on my own. Listening in on real people’s lives and creating imaginary ones for myself always won over TV storylines.

Sometimes, bad weather obstructed my view and street conversations leaned more toward conflict than celebration. Still, there was comfort in the routine hum. Ambulances often raced by, rousing me from daydreaming. One brother would mention, probably for the hundredth time, that it’s an emergency block for Bellevue Hospital, so you have to put up with the noise. But my oldest brother, who didn’t much like the high pitch sounds, almost always got up to close the window and shut out the sirens.

“The Moon in Palermo” by Jane Rankin-Reid

In the early mornings, the sound of horse’s clip-clopping on the cobbled Billiemi marble of Palermo’s streets feels timeless. My experience of these echoic memories from across the ages is as strong as the sensory reflections certain aromas evoke. Later in the day, horses harnessed to ornate open carriages stand as their drivers idle, smoking and gossiping on Via Vittorio Emanuele, waiting for tourist fares. The odor of horses is ever present in Palermo’s ancient inner-city streets. It sometimes feels as if nothing has changed in the last one hundred years. Horses feel as if they’re part of the city’s sense of overlaying loss. Their contemporary presence lends an air of surreality to Palermo’s undercurrent of historic madness.

Last year while visiting on an extended sojourn, I often spent a part of my mornings lying beneath the Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis’ Untitled series of nineteen old-fashioned wardrobes and cupboards. These unexpected objects are hung by steel wires from the ceiling on the first floor of the Palazzo Riso, home to Palermo’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Kounellis’ menacing flotilla of gravity defying objects loom overhead like a flock of heavy wooden birds. My experience of lying on the cool polished terrazzo floor beneath these airborne old cupboards, some with doors open dangling carelessly, is an intimate ‘suspension of disbelief’. This momentary flight of logic and rationality is an experience created by sheer daring, both mine and the artist’s. It is an artwork that invariably sent me out on my day’s journey exploring Palermo in a state of boundless wonderment. The installation opened my sensory pores to the potencies of the many myths and superstitions I frequently came across in the City of Happiness. It became one of my most favourite rituals, an inventive reverence of the flight of human creative imagination.

I kept running into the moon during those hot early July days. That morning, it was the fourth time we’d met in the last week. First, on Monday when it was being assembled on the pavement outside Giardino dei Giusta (Garden of the Righteous). There was something essentially convincing about its arced, white-painted slatted timber form rearing upwards in its rawest state. Workers crawled over its emerging shape with nails held between pursed lips, hammers dangling from worn leather tool belts. The next day though, it had not moved, the moon seemed to have become more secure in its identity. An indigo blue ‘sky’ of felt had been attached to its base. A day later, in a park closer to my home, the moon’s incarnation as a float for the upcoming Santa Rosalia festival parade was almost complete. White fluffy cotton ‘cloud’ pads were being stapled onto its nether regions. Santa Rosalia, dressed in pastel green robes, her long blonde hair rippling in pasty curls, had been erected to look as if she was astride it.

Two Poems by James Conroy

EVERY CITY IS MY HOME

Someone says my name
in another place as if they know me.
Every bus, every train is a homecoming.
I see my father in a stranger’s eyes
and my mother on a billboard.

Every city is my home,
mountains and prairies in the yard.
I tend to things the way this river
spreads itself in high-water season.
My clothes fit every occasion.

Every city is my home
though I am always going;
horns and sirens late at night
and a newspaper in the morning.

NO ONE SAYS…

“Correct me if I’m wrong,”
and means it.

‘L train rumbles by;
rumbling because it never
wants answers
to questions it hasn’t asked.

If I cross another bridge
will the river feel diminished?
The river heeds my concern
so we remain friends.
It will still freeze next month.

I pass an old building in demolition
and think it was a school, once.
Might have been.
I taste the chalk.

J. Conroy. heashot.3

James Conroy is a writer and editor living in Chicago. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in BLUE UNICORN, THE CAFÉ REVIEW, XANADU, THE ICONOCLAST, FREEFALL, SPEAKEASY, and the THE GROVE REVIEW among numerous other distinguished journals. He has also published a collection and eight novels.