and we both know
if it wasn’t for the vodka
and that extra shot of rum
you wouldn’t have walked
me home, and you wouldn’t
be here still
if we weren’t both lonely
as hell and boozing again.
If we had real friends
here in Montreal, or loved
ones, or just someone else
to fondle.

We aren’t lovers. Urgency
pressed us into this, pressed
us into each other through some
shared flaw of character
and cheap reasoning, imagined
indifferently. But we
were never lovers. We’re only
naked and guilty
of the practical dreams
and theoretical desires
that dragged us here, lasting
long after the quick sins
and denial.

We were never lovers. There’s relief
when you come
and more relief again
when you leave. We spill
into each other, then
drain away like water
with the first thirst slaked
and forgotten. We were never
really lovers.

"PhotonQ-Femme Feline" (photo by Flickr user PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE)

Search Intensifies for Missing Montreal Woman

It’s the dead of a deadly winter. In that long hour
before dawn, she hotwires the beat-up Pontiac Sunfire
and drives off, hellbent. And suddenly she’s on the run.

All she brings are two pears and the jar of instant café,
a can of tomato soup, and the few creased 20s found
in the pocket of his jeans. Also cigarettes, socks,
and the carving knife. He took the keys last night

and there wasn’t much time, but it doesn’t matter, really,
the shit she left behind. Travel lightly, as they say. Live
simply, and choose your words wisely (those little wounds!).
Joni Mitchell’s on the radio, or the CBC, and she’s heading East.
Right into the sun. She might have family out there,
or a good friend, but probably it’s just nowhere

in particular to here, and that’s the real appeal. All directions
look the same, and she just wants to get away. Yes,
after burning the whole place down, she thinks
she can start all over again. By resurrection

or by deception, this time she’s determined. Deliberate,
keen as the edge of the carving knife she keeps
on the passenger’s seat: this last disappearing act
won’t end in retreat, or returning. Sometimes,
she knows, it just takes not waiting to be found.

–

Born and raised in the ravines of Etobicoke and the wilder areas just north of Toronto, Emily Paskevics is currently a graduate student at McGill University. She divides her time between Toronto and Montréal, and she can’t decide which concrete jungle to settle in. Her most recent publications include Young Voices, Ascent, The Claremont Review, Shorthand (via Toronto’s Diaspora Dialogues); with poetry forthcoming in Voices (through the University of Toronto), McGill’s Read This!, and carte blanche (via the Quebec Writers’ Federation). She has also collaborated with McGill’s “Poetry in Performance” project, and she is a recent fellowship recipient for the Summer Literary Seminars International 2012.

"Pity the poor Moxx of Balhoon" (photo by Flickr user squacco)

Feel like doing some weirdo time warp mash-up? That’s cool. There would be a dial for that. You’d just select some combo like a Charles Dickens and Mary Pickford sandwich, and blammo—you got it. Want a Hulk Hogan golden shower while Betty White spits peach pits at your face? That’s totally sick, but now insanely possible. You dig?

Are you imagining it? Good. Because here’s my theory: we get these magic time machine sex machines out there on the market and price them like whatever gaming console is currently popular. That’s step one. Step two: inundate the market with ads, testimonials, and soft core porn—all declaring the awesomeness of the product. Step one and step two ought to culminate in step three: everyone with half a genital buys one—maybe even two, just so that they have a back-up in case the first one breaks. Step four: everyone is getting laid in extremely satisfying and creative ways, then bragging to all of their friends. (Hey Alex, did you know that I totally did Martha Stewart in one of her weirdo Halloween get-ups that she wears on her magazine covers while Shakespeare and Ross Perot took turns spanking me? Dude, it was awesome.) All of this leads to glorious step five: total world peace.

What about cruel dictators whose genocidal tendencies threaten the very existence of whole races/ethnicities/etc? Not to worry! There is no way that they will be able to find time to address such grim matters now that they find themselves scampering about in enormous diapers, holding oversized lollipops, and crying to be changed by Cindy Crawford, Julia Roberts, and Julia Child.
What about the moral majority? Please. The morals will go straight out the window once they can actually convince someone to sleep with them. Praise-a-thons will be on permanent hiatus while they drunkenly cavort with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Talk about a “baked Alaska.”

Ok, I don’t know what that last part meant—some sort of Palin sex reference? Whatever. Let’s keep this thing moving.

What I do know is that suicides will most likely also cease. Feel like you’re a big ol’ sack of crap? Probably won’t once all the stars of Twilight reveal that they are warm for your form. “Team Jacob” or “Team Edward?” Bitch, please. Can you say double team? That’s what I’m talking about. Bam! Making this thing happen.

Pretty much the only group that is still going to be annoying is little kids. They will still suck. I know that that is a bummer. We’re working on that. We’re thinking about some kind of aging machine that could just grow them up super fast, something like genetically modifying them the way we do vegetables. Get them big fast. That would minimize the unpleasant years of parenting and the burdens of their endless pointless inquiries about the world. Blah, blah, blah, why is that lady pooping? Whose ugly dog is that? Why am I such a boring kid with no friends? Blah, blah, blah. Something about the moon and a puddle and reasons why you don’t swallow gum. No one really has the patience for that stuff.

Failing all else, we could probably pump them full of tranquilizers, hook them up to feeding bags and just set them aside until they are eighteen and legal. Supermarket tantrums and late night bedwettings? Not likely.

Emily Brontë, sex goddess

When the world is good, I’m going to kick back in my skankiest tube top and order me up some Johnette Napolitano (that’s the chick from Concrete Blonde, for those of you who are not as cool and indie and retro as me), some Rachel Maddow, some fucking Brangelina Jolie Pitt. I’m going to order Marilyn Monroe in a corset, Chloë Sevigny in her big crazy boho 70s sunglasses, and Winona Ryder is going to steal the clothes right off of me. Oh man, and then there is that little minx Judy Holliday, and that tarantula of a woman Joan Jett. God, and Emily Brontë was probably a good time—way better than preppy Miss Austen and her polite little tea set. And hey, let’s throw in the big pervs and see what they’ve got? A little dalliance with Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, or Howard Stern? Howard, I’m going to narrate the way I fuck you on your radio show and you’re going to like it. You will reward my high school listenership with mind-blowing oral and a stunningly tender buttocks massage.

Ok, you get the picture. I know that you are ready for a better world—a world free of bad economies, bad debts, bad cheap food, bad clothes you bought before realizing they were ugly as hell, bad dates with bad losers in which you go to see bad movies starring bad actors behaving badly toward bad others. I know you want the change. I know you want the magic time machine sex machine. I know that you need it. I know you want to finally buy heart-pounding, aneurysm inducing, sextastic sex! Not “ok I’m a hooker and you paid, so go ahead” sex. Not “fine, we’re married so I guess I owe it to you” sex. Not awkward or shy sex. No—liver popping, ovary stomping, kick you in the back of the neck, reckless feckless totally amped up to the max SEX. Glowing, shining, glossy like a prize-winning pony SEX. Say it with me! Preach it to me! Glory be to the sexy! All hail my sweaty lusty sisterhood and brotherhood and transhood!

And don’t forget to pay shipping and handling.

–

Sarah Sorensen’s work has most recently been published online or in print at Identity Theory, Apt, The Battered Suitcase, Knee-Jerk, The Ear Hustler, Metazen, Staccato, and Bastards and Whores. She likes cats, tats, and coffee.

Wet face, tired arms, sore throat.
Look at you carrying on,
carrying the dead weight
that Zora said you would.
Put him down,
he’s too heavy for you
You need melody on the wind

What happened to those days of
thumbing though vinyl until
modernity pulled us by our collars?
Only our bags weighed us down,
full of books and spoon-fed
knowledge we put on hold, put on
the floor, near the doorway of reality
while we spoke in a language of
tracks, tempo and rhythm.

What did you find?
You pulled his smiling face from the
stack and we admire,
thinking the same thing.
He would lighten the load.
He would make us feel wanted.

"Soul'n'Shoes" (photo by Flickr user Mista.Boos)

Lunch With My Parents

How are you so good at keeping
one hand on my knee,
the other on the wheel
and your mind on my breasts?

He laughs and calls me tactless.
We won’t wreck, he says.
I don’t know that.
I do know that we smell faintly
of rushed unwed sex.
The only kind that will do for now.
I hope my parents are too old
to remember what that smells like.
I don’t want to explain the birds
and the bees to grown-folk.

His fingers dance a jig on my thigh,
nervousness or giddiness causes them
to chorus-line. It tickles and reminds me
of where his head rested hours before.
Red in the face, eyes closed
and chest heaving, he chose my thigh
for a pillow and asked me:
Aren’t we meeting your parents for lunch today?

But he’s incredibly deft.
He works the wheel with
an accuracy that assures me
we won’t wreck.

Maya Angelou reading at Robsham Theater (image via John J. Burns Library)

Should Maya Angelou Go Senile

Try not to be offended when she claims,
“I adore the sound of dandelion fluff
blackness dancing like a dervish
against the backdrop of a rainbow
that is my imagination.”

She will tell you that W.E.B. Dubois
would agree, adding,
“The conglomerate of blackness is
richly dichotomized.” She will repeat
herself often.

Nod and smile when she tells you tales
of her nights with James Baldwin.
How she and “that black queen” threw
Molotov cocktails at Puerto Rican
tiendas.

“Did you know I once danced the can-can?”
Just say yes. Because this might be true.
“When my belly was flat and my arms
strong, I lifted the lid of my own coffin,
climbing right out of the ghetto.”
This might be true too.

Some night she will sit alone
and murmur quietly how she never
knew about caged birds until now.
She’ll shake her head and tear up a bit.
Hold her hand.
Ask her to tell you, again,
what blackness means.

–

Charish Halliburton is a twenty-something poet, living in Toledo, Ohio with her husband and rabbit. When she’s not writing poetry she’s writing for her blog. When she’s not writing at all, she’s chasing the rabbit. You can find Charish’s work at Gloom Cupboard, Tidal Basin Review, South Jersey Underground, and Compass Rose Literary Magazine.

Outside her shared dorm room, down the hallway, a coed screamed playfully. Nkoyo turned away from the blank document toward the shut door. Maybe she would be able to concentrate better if she got away from the dormitory? But she knew that would only be an excuse; she was procrastinating. Another boisterous cry from somewhere in the corridor, however, finally convinced her otherwise.

"Nigerian Student" (photo by Flickr user iEARN-USA)

Closing her notebook, she deposited the device and the three Chinua Achebe novels that her paper was supposed to critique into her Texas Tech backpack. Nkoyo entered the hallway and walked towards the lift.

The elevator carried her to the top floor where she exited. To get to the rooftop though, one had to forego the lift and walk the last flight of unadorned stairs. No students were allowed on the roof, but Nkoyo guessed no one would be out monitoring. No one would fret about a lonely female literature major salting herself away for the afternoon on an unused rooftop.

An autumn zephyr welcomed her immediately as she stepped out onto the barren rooftop of the twelve-story high structure. She unfurled the arms of her red hoodie to block the wind. Nkoyo quickly found her normal writing spot near the building’s industrial-sized air ducts. Comfortable, she removed her books and laptop. Another gust of wind blew westerly, rustling the highlighted pages of the topmost stack of used books.

She picked up her copy of Things Fall Apart and thumbed through the pages listlessly, blankly until she came to last page with Achebe’s black-and-white portrait.

Nkoyo sighed.

Admitting that she thought Achebe’s prose not worth analyzing in depth had surprised her professor. The frail lecturer could not understand why Nkoyo would not want to write on this world-renown author of her own nation. Was there any better known African writer? the lecturer had questioned. But Nkoyo was used to such silent admonishments: when her father had carried their family to London to work with the oil giants, her college professors had also not understood why such a bright girl like Nkoyo could not seem to embrace such a cultural treasure. Surely all Nigerians loved Achebe. Not this one, she would think to herself. Nkoyo was going through a fin-de-siècle phase, where if the writer was not a realist and not dead by at least a century, then she was not interested. She would have taken a lesser work by de Maupassant, Galdós, or even Fontane over any of Achebe’s supposed bests.

Now that her father had been relocated to Irving, Texas, she had followed the family again dutifully and ended up in some place called Lubbock for her masters’ degree. Here, the water was not safe to drink, and the air smelt of burnt tires in the summer. Lagos had a similar smell, she would occasionally remind herself.

Nkoyo had attempted to be conciliatory to her new professor. If they insisted that she critique someone from her native continent, how about Tayeb Salih, or even better, Coetzee? she had suggested. Neither of those had esteemed her to Nkoyo’s instructor: one was too Arabic, and as for Coetzee—did he even count, an Afrikaner?

Also, Nkoyo’s ethnic group was Yoruba and Achebe’s Igbo, but that actually mattered little to her, cosmopolitanized girl that she was, half raised in London, half in Lagos. She had even met Achebe once. Her father’s wealth had allowed them to move through the type of social class that inevitably draws in national literati from time to time.

—Our daughter aspires to be a writer, Nkoyo’s father had said after dragging her away from her peers.

The family was celebrating their last evening in Lagos before the big move to London. The city’s socialites had gathered at their downtown loft. Achebe had been dragged along by one of these affected souls, unwillingly. But the bookish man was experienced enough to know not to fight his public role:

—A youthful woman author, strong and confident, that would surely mix up the old club of writers here in Nigeria, Achebe responded, shaking hands with the fifteen-year-old Nkoyo.

Achebe knew immediately when he was in the midst of an unforgiving critic. The precocious glint off Nkoyo’s eyes told him so.

—And who is your favorite author then? Achebe continued.

Nkoyo did not answer immediately, so her father, standing behind her, squeezed her shoulder, indicating that she stop playing the boarding school brat and respond to this living national icon in front of her.

Deviously, Nkoyo smiled:

—I love Conrad.

Before Achebe could answer, Nkoyo wriggled away from her father and hid amongst her friends.

Nkoyo’s father laughed magnanimously. The oil man had never heard of Conrad before.

—You have to forgive her. You understand how teenagers are. But she sure does think your writing’s swell, Mr. Achebe. She was just telling me the other day she hopes to emulate your style, Nkoyo’s father said to the Nigerian hero.

As Nkoyo was recounting these memories, still staring at an empty word processer document, she heard the sound of the stairwell’s steel-hard door open and close quickly. From behind the air duct she could not see who had entered onto the roof.

A man appeared and walked indolently to the building’s precipice. He did not espy the exchange student. With his back to Nkoyo, the man removed a cigarette from his uniform windbreaker.

Nkoyo recognized him as the complex’s security guard. He was a Nigerian, an Igbo like Achebe, and had conversed with Nkoyo a few times, but only enough to establish that he was a poorer immigrant—probably with refugee status, she guessed—and that he was much too diffident for a Nigerian male.

—Ikenna! You can’t smoke up here, Nkoyo shouted at his back coltishly.

The security guard appeared startled, as if someone had just ran a feather against the back of his neck, and immediately dropped his fugitive cigarette. Turning to face his accuser, Ikenna relaxed when he saw Nkoyo’s friendly, smiling countenance. Embarrassingly, Ikenna walked towards his impish compatriot.

—Little sister, what are you doing on the roof here?

Ikenna smiled when he spoke. His eyes seemed to hold a thousand starry stories. All the men of Lagos seem to have eyes like this, she thought as he neared her—eyes that were always shiny, both somehow religious and lecherous at the same time.

—I’m not your sister. And smoking is like a sin in America, so maybe they should fire you, she rejoined.

—Fire me? But fire me how? I am a star employee of the university. And if I have to go, then who would watch over you, little sister?

Ikenna’s voice carried the weight of his forefathers. His accent was terribly Sub-Saharan, rusted by a not-so-distant colonization, limned with unforgiving experience, yet veneered, coated anew with something hopeful and forward-looking all the same.

Ikenna crouched down in front of the coed. If someone had walked upon the two, they may have thought the uniformed man was leaning over to kiss Nkoyo. Ikenna picked up one of her paperbacks.

—Uncle Chinua! He is like me; he is Igbo, Ikenna said when he saw the cover.

Nkoyo watched him turn the book over. She wondered why the way one cradles a book in is his hands is always a giveaway; Nkoyo wondered if the security guard had ever read a novel.

Ikenna suddenly appeared tired:

—I cannot be a university student. You see me, little sister, how I am already old. So I cannot be a student. But I know this story.

—The writing’s just okay, Nkoyo replied, a hint of honest London listlessness highlighting her accent.

Ikenna turned over the paperback again.

—This story is about my mother’s mother’s village. Or, no, maybe my grandmother’s mother’s village. But, it is about a village in the east of the country.

Ikenna placed the book atop the other two carefully.

—Little sister, do you miss Nigeria?

"Nigerian students power up their OLPC laptops" (photo by Flickr user Kevin Lim)

Another gust of wind blew, this time from the north. The wisps of cooler air flipped open and closed the cover of the topmost book.

Nkoyo did not respond. She did not want to answer Ikenna’s question.

The security guard’s radio beeped. Someone’s voice crinkled through the walkie-talkie unintelligibly. Ikenna stood and retrieved the plastic-cased device from his belt. He spoke into the receiver once, quickly, before returning the radio to its holster.

Ikenna smiled down at Nkoyo.

—That is okay. I do not miss Nigeria anymore either, little sister.

The security guard hurried away, leaving Nkoyo alone on the roof. She closed her laptop, placing it aside, and walked to the edge of the roof. Once to the cement precipice, atop the twelve-story building, she peered over the edge into the afternoon horizon, her back to the wind, her dark-brown eyes forward, gazing upon the flat interminable plains of the Texas panhandle.

Nkoyo returned to her special writing nook and began her essay, not the one on Achebe, but the one she wanted to compose on de Maupassant.
–
An American, T. F. Rhoden is an avid traveler. He enjoys good lit, cold beer, and learning new languages. Rhoden is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Poli-Sci. Past books include the travel guide Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand, the language-learning books Making Out in Burmese and Outrageous Thai, the literary fiction piece The Village, and the epistolary account Burmese Refugees: Letters from the Thai-Burma Border. Visit him online at tfrhoden.com or tfrhoden.blogspot.com.

"The Holy Grail of the Mini Wheats world" (photo by grammardog)

A Mini-Wheat eyes me warily from the bathroom floor.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I won’t throw you away today.”
Droopy red marker beards on the mirror
Ask me who I’m going to be.
The mirror tilts its head, questioning.
I brush the crusties from my eyes.
It doesn’t wipe away the tiredness.
I take one look at the toilet and decide I’ll hold it.
Stepping into the shower, I watch the mold fester on the curtain
Smatterings of darkness on a once white pleat
Ancient screws emerge from the metal rung
As if they always meant to be that way.
The shower is always too short. There’s never time.
My green towel is bunched up next to the hand towels,
Slightly left of where I put it, used.
I smile at the beards again,
Aligning my face with one that suits me.
Good morning.

–

At 21 years old, Ryan Nelson is an adventure addict. Born, raised, and stuck in the Pacific Northwest, he is an English Literature major at Western Washington University. Ryan has spent the last couple of years coaching middle school sports and leading Young Life, but each summer he transforms into a man that will do just about anything to pay his way through school. Whether he’s working on boats in Alaska, driving buses as a tour guide, or rooting around in a junk yard, Ryan hopes someday he will finally be able to just sit behind a desk and write about it all.