Jessica Thelen

Normal: Addressed to My Sister after her Suicide Attempt

And it will never seem to be

complete, until mid-day or evening

when, shaken from paper 

or dark corner of philosophy, you begin

the next step, you who forgave

the hated one – that you would actually

finish this – speak Septimus Smith’s truths

and your own – and you forget 

that you already spilled them

to the undeserving. He is the victim,

not the solution. You never really grasped

that his death never became

communication, and our propensity

to hurt each other is the norm,

and you think on the label, 

realizing it’s all arbitrary, but you can’t help him, 

emptying the bottle, the doctor of humanity, 

the girl in the hallway

praising herself for jail time.

You speak the truths over and over.

You want to hold him back. You want – 

oh, it’s the same old story – you want

normal misery, not all this. Not all these

open windows where you perch,

waiting to jump. 




 

This Has Happened Before, Right?

Sister, we died in childhood, remember?- Li-Young Lee

baiting your hook, setting the bobber,

casting the line out, avoiding a snag – 

pay attention,  your bobber just went under.

Just a nibble or two. Okay, now set the hook,

make sure it doesn’t swallow it. Now reel

it in, not too fast – make it fight a bit. Now,

bring it to me, closer. You let it swallow the hook.

Don’t worry, I’ll get it out. Grasp the stomach,

avoid the spines on the fins, twist – 

bones crunch under metal. A flash of bright red

gill and a lidless eye. Hook unearthed,

worm missing in action. Blood and fish slime

against my palm. Catch and release. The fish

atop the water, useless in its struggle against

sun and air. We haul it in using a net

made of hair and fingers, digging our heels

into mud, so we don’t fall in. Further up

on the bank, we stroke the stripes

along its sides, to try to find ourselves between

scales and water, only to come up

with tangled line and rusty lures.

Jessica Thelen is a poet from Western Massachusetts, studying English/Literature and Philosophy at Westfield State University. She recently finished her first chapbook, titled "SISTER|RETSIS," and is currently writing new work.

Jennifer MacBain Stephens

magic trick 

If words were just germs to be disinfected, my mouth would be very clean. I am so quiet. 

There isn’t a syllable for miles in my maw. Save that mouth wash.  You on the other hand 

are an auctioneer, a debater. I have never heard anyone talk so fast in my life.  You must be 

a speaking super hero.  Speaking for you must be like a horse race. There is the horn! Go 

words, go! Run free like your ancestors out west! I do some mental checking in. Nothing. 

If you are a debater, you must have a nice suit. Did you actually tell someone you were 

going suit shopping? “I am going suit shopping today.”  Even your mundane is slick. Your 

transitions are a rapid fire attack. Every question is an open and shut case like Criminal 

Minds.  I do some mental checking in. I have marshmallow mouth. Only my hand can 

move fast. Unite brain and hand mixology like the Wonder Twins and dream on in literary 

synchronicity love. Insert rainbow and unicorn explosion here. Five finger salute to word 

page gush. Fireworks.  Back on the sound home front: will my words be pulled out like 

teeth or so many magician’s colored handkerchiefs? Green and purple for the nouns. The

verbs will be Prussian blue of course. The conjunctions, those uncommitted joiners will be

mint green. The adjectives will be white rabbits. My mouth: the hat.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens has poems published in Superstition Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Red Savina Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Burningwood Literary Journal, The Apeiron Review, Dead Flowers: A Poetry Rag, Star 82 Review, and Iowa City’s 2013 Poetry in Public Project. She has poems forthcoming in Rufous City Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, and Eunoia Review.

Kamie Pamulapati

Crunch and Release

       My mom collects dying plants the way some collect stamps and miniature figurines. Our house is scattered with varying degrees of brown and wilted stems that bow down so low to the ground it’s as if they’ve been carrying weight, and finally surrendered to its heavy load. Sometimes I begrudgingly accompany her on plant-gathering excursions. She moves past the lush, green ones swiftly as if they are invisible - only the wounded interest her. If she is lucky, she will find a few that are just close enough to death to keep.

       Often I ask her why she collects such plants, though her answer never changes. She responds with, “why not?” She likes anomalies, likes things that exist but go unseen, like fish being born underwater.  

       I then point out the obvious. That these plants are ugly and take up too much room.  Besides, I add, the fresh green ones are so much prettier.
       She has no reply. She simply goes on collecting the fallen, curled leaves from the ground, catching them by the fistful, their crunch echoing across the silence and lingering in my ears even after I am far from home. 

       She will spend weeks, sometimes months, watering them, rotating them between light and dark, and spraying clouds of heavy smelling pesticides, most of which make us sick. But, in the end, not many survive. She cannot save them, much in the same way she couldn’t save my father. So they sit – the dead among the dying and the dying among the dead – filling in nooks and crannies and growing out of walls and into each other, stretching and sweeping across the newly empty spaces.

Kamie Pamulapati is an underemployed English major from Wake Forest University and currently lives in Arizona, though she hates the heat and misses green grass terribly.

C.J. Opperthauser

Fair-weather

Compass, show me which way to part cloudy. The next time marrow stirs sleeping I’ll blame it on the rain, maybe the shower if I feel hollow wrapped in cold towel. The dampness under my eyelids can’t be anything natural, though it’s been sunny enough for condensation, cold enough for backroad spit stones barnside. If I started a losing streak how lonely would my drives become, how quiet, fix with half-empty glass of water left beside the mailbox still frosted and bent. Bend these clouds away with strato-turbulence and churning, turning east-bound till some coast is stormy-ridden and sweet-wet.

C.J. Opperthauser currently lives and teaches in Cincinnati. His poems have recently appeared in dislocate and Midwestern Gothic. He blogs at http://thicketsandthings.tumblr.com.

Tim Kahl

The Considerable

The considerable has taught us the greatest elephant trick was making memory a luxury. The archetypal mind opened obviously like a run in a nylon stocking and all of its people were jumbled in fits of dialect. Fits that spared nothing. All of the details turned to a sharp edge, cutting the synapses in halves, quarters, eighths—portions fed back into the elephant disguised as moments of silence for the aggrieved.

The dead play solitaire in their pajamas and listen to Bartok. They are discs along a necklace of an abacus. They may pair off one by one, lanterns at the stations of a foreign god's nerves and they may believe otherwise sunk in the ground framed by a hole. This and that little thing around our necks. Pharmaceuticals blocking off the future. Are we the deepest dreamer, the sense lock on Sirius? I am waiting to bait these houses for the next of kin.

Blurred Mood

Tonight I will leaf through the dictionary and search for reasons.

There are many words to follow. I trace the path of a fallen star 

that has dropped into the little cluster of houses where I live. 

Nothing in the streets but driven gravel. 

I listen for the sound of water washing into the storm drain. 

I think the leaves are being swept along. They follow. 

I follow the little disturbances in the night: 

the acorn rolling down the roof, the rustle of the highest leaves. 

A tree is a typical kind of exclamation. 

It says I am here to the night. But the stars refuse to listen. 

They have found their own excuses for being here tonight. 

They stand as sentries the same as I do—

my son sleeping in the crib in the next room. 

He dreams of a world moving vaguely out beyond him 

in all directions. All sense, all blurred mood. 

So, what is the reason for dreaming of figures

with clear boundaries, for a constellation of words?

The masterful tule fog slips through my defenses.

Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW books, 2009) and The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He currently houses his father's literary estate—one volume: Robert Gerstmann's book of photos of Chile, 1932).

Desiree Jung

It Happened on the Corner

        She is walking on the street when she sees a very elegant lady sitting on the sidewalk.  The dog stops and starts to sniff her. Normally she pulls the little one, but this time, the woman looks back and smiles. She has white hair, very close to her skull, and wears a scarf around her neck, a checked shirt, and sunglasses. She looks like a French woman. The purse beside her seems to be from an important brand as well. She smiles to the stranger, a bit embarrassed.

       Someone robbed the car from her driver, and she was warned by her husband, who still doesn’t know if he will pay the ransom. She speaks automatically, as though she was giving a testimony in a police station. “Nobody prepares us to death,” the unknown woman says, scraping her foot against the asphalt, as though the sole of her feet was dirty. “Don’t worry, I’m certain that your husband and the police will find a solution,” she answers, introducing herself, “Maria, nice to meet you.”

       Isabella cries because she’s lost her mother two months ago. She is new, and probably not even forty, a distant gaze. She has no children because she can’t have them. But nothing, she says, “nothing prepared me for the death of my mother.” The emptiness she feels is part of her existence now, for, unknowing, she believed her being was conditioned to that other. 

       In a gap between a deep breath and another, her phone rings and she starts to reply with grunts. “They found the car near here. The driver was dropped off near a slum. They got the wrong one, robbed him by mistake,” she explains. “I got to go. Good luck,” she says, getting up and walking in the opposite direction.

Desirée Jung is a writer and translator. Her background is in film and literature. She has received her M. F. A in Creative Writing and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations and poetry in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antagonish Review, among others. She was born in Brazil and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Patricia George

The Nancys
 

The durable Nancy was beige and sturdy; partners in the 4th grade math book of long column addition. She flashed through her pages with her stubby graphite and left the mirrored pages blank for me to finish. She was poor and smart. I was intimidated by her math prowess.

I saw her house once for a birthday party in her backyard. I went inside to snoop. Her living room was dark and empty and sad.  They had taken all the furniture out on to the backyard for the party. There was only one tiny window on the front by the door. The shade was pulled. I didn’t want to see her bedroom. I might have cried. 

Outside, under the big elm tree she had a tire swing. I was glad she had that. And then I remembered the long columns of numbers and I was all of a sudden so tired just thinking of her big clumsy durable hands that could somehow write numbers to keep up with her quick mind. I finished my part of the math book eventually and spent the summer painting my nails first dark Revlon red and then a pale baby blue. I interspersed that with an attempted paint by numbers picture of a boat.  I liked the smell of the nail polish and the oil paints and never did finish the painting.

Then I read the Nancy Drews; all of them. Someone bought me one I hadn’t read. Nancy was my  hero. I wanted to be this Nancy. I wanted to be a daddy’s girl and solve important mysteries. I painted my nails again and was glad I didn’t have to do any more math. I didn’t have to see  Nancy the durable again until the fall.

Later in life another Nancy had laid claim to the man I loved. She was dark and cute and shady. I was not. I was intimidated.

From the big boned through the sleuths to the cute and shady, all the Nancys intimidated me; all having qualities I admired but didn’t possess. I would never be a Nancy.

Patricia George was born in Kansas and has the wind flowing through her dreams. She was happily transplanted to California where she continued her education from the 7 grade through college. She has taught public school, been a private tutor, worked as a graphic artist and is currently working as a piano accompanist for the high school choirs in the little California valley town where she lives. She reads and writes in every spare moment.

William Doreski

Forgetting How to Dance

Phoebes snicker in tepid dawn.

I understand the nesting urge,

the purge of irrelevant idols

in favor of the household gods.

Fifty years since the senior prom

when dancing wasn’t optional

and the whispered floral offerings

perched on the edge of the abyss.

Last night I dreamed of a chasm

impossible to plumb. A car

parked in its private driveway

threatened to roll into space

deeper than what’s between stars.

I attempted to construct from squares

of plastic a barrier to brace

that car against bottomless doom.

It wasn’t my car but I feared

the depth and the consequent pain

as if something plumbed my innards.

I awoke wholesome enough

to remember the invitation

to the reunion I couldn’t bear.

The phoebes insist on nesting

on the light above my garage.

Their notion of home thus conforms

to mine. Solid and sweating men,

perfumed women, children shaped

to their environment rebuke me;

but enlarging the fable 

will occupy the rest of my life;

and foretelling the failure of nests,

forgetting how to dance, or why,

and bracing objects against their doom

will have to represent me

in those books  too fragrant to read. 

Your Book of Life

You park on a slope that leans

backwards to Memorial Drive

and the river seething with vengeance.

As soon as we exit, the car rolls

and I run for it, leap inside,

slam my foot on the brake pedal.

The power brakes don’t work well

with the engine off. Cross-traffic

screams and halts, saving a wreck,

and the car lurches up a snow bank

to stop just short of the river.

I’ve banged my head so badly

a universe whirls in agony.

Stars devour planets, comets

sizzle past the mouths of black holes,

asteroids rasp in packs, fracturing

into smaller asteroids circling

moons that no longer function.

The pain redefines me in angst

that requires an ambulance.

You blame me for letting the car roll,

for failing to warn you to jerk

the parking brake, failing to stop

before crossing the busy drive.

I can’t explain how thick the force

that impels these little disasters,

how bell-shaped the curve of failure.

My headache demands a surgery

that unhinges whatever remains

of my intellect. The surgeon smirks

and with knife and fork feeds deeply

on my brain. When I emerge,

you stand snorting at my bedside

and claim I’m no longer of use.

The world has blurred in pastels

gentle enough to inhabit

without undue grief; but you

in your stocky old-fashioned manner

refuse to grant my heroics

even one page of your book of life.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Atlanta Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Worcester Review, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge

Alejandro Escude

The Rose Bowl Queen and the Garden of Eden
 

In the breakfast night, thinking up new journals,

I inhabit the Germany of my youth, by which I mean

The country of tools where I aspired to be a wealthy man.

Subordinates came bearing roses, and I turned them away.

If you think about, it’s the man in me that loves makeup.

The salmon roast is ready, could you take it out?

I recall my first marriage. Then, I stop to think about my second.

Let’s not bring up the third to the Rose Bowl queen.

Indeed, indeed, indeed. The world-renowned behavior

Researcher wrote me back. I thought he was going to scream, fire!

But instead he told me what I already knew but didn’t want

To believe. I was looking for an easy way out. Aren’t we all?

The Garden of Eden was really just another hideaway.

Then God said, like any good parent, you get the hell out!

And suddenly there was Adam, clutching his balls in the rain.

Eve took better to the pain. To Adam she said, “I’ll carry the load

While you grow up.” She was even more beautiful

In the rain, he thought. The sun was shining on the other side.

Then there was the strange scissoring sound, as when

A tornado approaches and it’s too late to take cover.

The Rose Bowl Queen and the Garden of Eden
In the breakfast night, thinking up new journals,
I inhabit the Germany of my youth, by which I mean
The country of tools where I aspired to be a wealthy man.
Subordinates came bearing roses, and I turned them away.
If you think about, it’s the man in me that loves makeup.
The salmon roast is ready, could you take it out?
I recall my first marriage. Then, I stop to think about my second.
Let’s not bring up the third to the Rose Bowl queen.
Indeed, indeed, indeed. The world-renowned behavior
Researcher wrote me back. I thought he was going to scream, fire!
But instead he told me what I already knew but didn’t want
To believe. I was looking for an easy way out. Aren’t we all?
The Garden of Eden was really just another hideaway.
Then God said, like any good parent, you get the hell out!
And suddenly there was Adam, clutching his balls in the rain.
Eve took better to the pain. To Adam she said, “I’ll carry the load
While you grow up.” She was even more beautiful
In the rain, he thought. The sun was shining on the other side.
Then there was the strange scissoring sound, as when
A tornado approaches and it’s too late to take cover.





Expanse

Once, in Spain, I was walking around the block and two policemen
Followed me in an unmarked car. I was waiting for a bus
To Bilbao. I wanted to see where El Cid was from.
My pulse rose and I tried my best to look normal; that meant
Not walking any faster. I stopped in front of a magazine kiosk
And pretended to read about soccer. The car left, but not before
Slowing down again beside me. The sky was orange.
It was about three or four in the afternoon, and the bus came on time.
The only explanation I can devise is that I was young
And I was wearing a black leather jacket my roommate sold me
Before I left on my pilgrimage to the north.
I don’t live in Spain. I live about six blocks from the biggest airport
On the west coast of the United States. My neighborhood
Is worried that the airport is going to expand, and that the planes
Will grow louder than they already are. I don’t worry about that.
It’s comforting to hear the planes overhead, making
Their final, wide radius over the great expanse of the basin.
You can hear them deploy their flaps and reduce speed.
NO AIRPORT EXPANSION. The north runway they mean.
The one closest to the homes. How does one stop an airport
From expanding? Each bird bigger than the next bird. Filtered out
Over the stone river like geese by the controllers in the tower
That looms at sunset. The broad sky conversions, and the dream
Of flight over your commute. On this point, I am mute,
Because to join a community one needs a country,
And to have a country one needs a war. The testy mockingbird
Haunts the biggest crows; he rides their backsides all the way
To the end of the block and when the crows return
As they inevitably do, he escorts them out again.
He’ll do this until they kill him, and I’ve seen his brethren
— Dead, flat on the sidewalk they spent themselves on.

Childhood X

Where does the sob story go, the institution of the bakery
And the hotel bus boy at the end of the day; these people
Are like walking rosary beads, the smile we engender in others
And the focus group meeting under the shade, potato chips provided.
Work is a novel. The only other pressure is the freedom
To read the boardroom and create chaos. I’m not going for it.
The flowers foretell nothing, even back in Guido Cavalcanti’s day
The headman wore the prescribed hood. I read about it.
He wanted to wear the more comfortable one his wife knitted,
But they insisted on the leather hood that made him scarier.
Imagine the paperwork, they told him. You’ll have to suck it up.
I remember the days when I used to wear myself out playing
In the street. The sun blurred my shadow. The palm fronds shook
In the desert wind. Carpet hasn’t changed, and neither has
Childhood, though everyone thinks it has. A pile of broken toys.

The Cat on the Chair

The noble gasses spread
Into the far beyond, the gas
Cloud is the base teenager.
The charge is notwithstanding.
We are rocking
And not everlasting
Past the houses,
The bushes and the fire escapes.
There are residences
East of the city
That give off strange odors.
Dust mites cover the face of the engineer
As he sleeps. Dangerous
Pipes inhabit his house like snakes.
Does he dream of stars
Or lakes? In the early morning hours,
Rocking my baby girl
To sleep, I sense it coming apart
Then returning to wholeness.
Her breath on my breath,
Her little foot in my palm.
We rock like that
Until I know that she will not wake.
That’s when I carry her
Back through darkness
Then come here to the elemental light,
Five a.m., to the words
And to the cat on the chair
If we had a cat.

Alejandro Escudé received a masters degree in creative writing from U.C. Davis, where he won the 2003 University of California Poet Laureate Contest. Currently he teaches high school English. Having won the 2012 Sacramento Poetry Prize, for his manuscript "My Earthbound Eye," which is due out later this year. When not writing, he enjoys spending time with his two kids. He’s also a weekend birder. You can often find him wandering around Bolsa Chica, the Ballona Wetlands, and other beautiful Southern California spots.

Milton Ehrlich

WAITING FOR DR. WILLIAMS

I’m on the kitchen floor 

playing Rudy Vallee’s

“Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries”

on mother’s wind-up Victrola.

Grandma huddles over

Mother’s anguished howls.

Father runs back and forth

to the window, searching for

the Doctor’s Roadmaster

in the densely drifting snow.

The doctor’s wife said he left 

Ridge Road an hour ago.

Despite skid chains, the Doctor 

careens over a white fire of foam 

on our un-plowed roads.

I hear them cheering mother on

like racing fans desperate 

for a winner at the finishing line.

Drenched with sweat,

her face flushed as red 

as the reddest red rose,

she pushes and pushes,

and finally bears down,

but the Doctor’s not yet here 

as the baby’s head begins to appear.

The baby slips though her legs,

as the Doctor comes charging through

the front door.



 

A Daguerrotype

They’re an elderly couple 

in their Sunday best,

side by side on a bench 

in front of the Summerside Laundromat.

Not even the air moves.

Absorbed in reading,

they listen for the rumble 

in the dryer to stop spinning.

They feed each other

peanuts and marzipan.

Few words exchanged.

They sense if each other

has to pee or poop,

is too hot or cold,

hungry or tired,

worried, or in pain,

or quietly at ease.

A silent dialogue

between souls.

Intimate moments,

are well practiced.

Nary a word is said

when a body 

needs to be touched.

With effortless effort,

a life force flows

from one to the other,

as it should

Milton P. Ehrlich has published poems in the "Wisconsin Review,"Antigonish Review," "Toronto Quarterly Review," "Seventh Quarry: The Swansea Quarterly Review," "Shofar Literary Journal," "Slipstream Magazine," "Huffington Post," and the "New York Times."

Gary Blankenburg

LOST AND FOUND BOYS

1953 Danville Illinois
 

One summer at Lake Vermilion Beach

a boy went missing.  He was the younger

brother of a teen aged girl who worked

the candy counter at my father’s theatre—

one that smiled at me so that I shook

on the insides.  The lifeguard had us all

join hands in the shallow water and walk

out toward the horizon.  When I was

chest deep, my foot stepped on something

foreign, and I called out to the lifeguard 

who was three links down from me.  He

did a surface dive and pushed the boy up

so that his blue body floated face up

in front of me, a corpse, a lost boy.

1946 Cerro Gordo, Illinois

My cousins and I were playing hide-and-seek

in the expanse of cornfields when the supper

bell rang.  Even after olly-olly-oxen-free was 

called several times, little David was missing.

Quickly my mother and father, my aunt and uncle,

and a scattering of neighbors who had been called

gathered.  We formed a line, three rows of corn each, 

and began to walk deeper and deeper into the fields

calling his name.  After about two hours, as dusk 

was approaching, his mother found him surrendered,

stretched out asleep between two rows of tall, dusty, 

tasseled corn.  She stammered between anger and relief, 

lifted him up into her arms as his sleepy eyes opened,

and said, Oh David, my little lost boy, we found you.

Septuagenarian Gary Blankenburg is a retired English teacher whose doctoral dissertation 

treated the “confessional” poets. Blankenburg is the author of eight books of poetry and

fiction and was a founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review and Electric Press. 

His new manuscript, The Times Theatre, depicts the spiritual angst of an aging persona. 

Nowadays he reads Victorian novels and paints while gathering himself up for eternity.

 

Johnathan Campball

Under the Bridge

Hearing the rain appear and disappear

makes me feel like this house 

is shifting location ever so slightly

we all have known this shock when driving under a bridge in the pouring

rain.

When just for a moment

almost short enough

not to hear

there is silence.

I have often been told

that there is no such thing as silence

in our modern world.

That is because 

none of us are listening

driving under bridges

in the pouring rain.

More Than One Body

Just one kiss will tell me that I am more than
one body.  
Slit me open with your pointed lips and kiss
me from the inside.

Johnathan Campbell is a poet living in Salisbury, North Carolina. He has been featured on the poetry blog "Untitled, With Passengers." When not writing poetry, Johnathan listens to Frank Sinatra and meticulously combs his hair."

Introduction

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling

away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.

And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn is a time of death and dying while also a time reaping.  Two diametrically 

opposed forces working at the same time.   Rilke’s poem has always been a favorite of 

mine as it explains this season so well.  Fall, falling, falling…harvesting the cache of 

fruits and vegetables at their finest in order to keep everyone and everything plentiful 

through the harsh winter months. Warding off death and starvation.  Keeping the winter 

months at bay for as long as possible.

Scapegoat Review Fall 2013

Introduction by Erika Lutzner...
Johnathan Campball • Under the Bridge • More Than One Body Gary Blankenburg • Lost and Found Boys Milton Ehrlich • Waiting For Dr. Williams • A Daguerrotype Alejandro Escude • Rose Bowl Queen and the Garden of Eden • Expanse • Childhood X • The Cat on the Chair William Doreski • Forgetting How To Dance • Your Book of Life		Tim Kahl • The Considerable • Blurred Mood C.J. Opperthauser • Fair-weather Kamie Pamulapati • Crunch and Release Jennifer MacBain Stephens • Magic Trick Jessica Thelen • Normal: Addressed to My Sister after her Suicide Attempt • This Has Happened Before Right?
Desiree Jung • It Happened on the Corner		Patricia George • The Nancys