Author: Inklette

Three Photographs

In celebration of Diwali, there has been much festivity and happiness in the entire country. India has been rich with colors, fireworks and above all, joy. Aditi Chandra’s recent photographs reflect the minute details behind our smiles and traces them back from oblivion. 

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Aditi Chandra is a sophomore at St. Joseph’s Convent Senior Secondary School, Idgah Hills, Bhopal. Her work has been published in Textploit. She is a member of the National Geographic Your Shot Community and is also working as an Art Editor at Phosphene Literary Journal. 

Mirage

Rustic sprawls

of ancient stars

 

display a trellis

of imagined pathways,

 

ductile creatures

of glacial movement.

 

Lost in the bleakness

of clouds—

 

balloon animals,

bobbing the cosmos,

 

a menagerie,

coloured,

in a spectrum of heat—

 

their hidden smiles

could mean

almost anything.

Richard King Perkins III is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois, with his wife, Vickie, and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar Review, Crannog, The William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State Review and Milkfist among others. He was a recent finalist in The Rash Awards, Sharkpack Alchemy, Writer’s Digest and Bacopa Literary Review poetry contest. 

Dear Persephone

We should have remained in our snowball, me,

half-frozen, ice-blue lips, clinging to you like

water.

 

And you, red-haired, blue-eyed, who thawed (somehow)

as the layers of snow and dirt piled around us all

year.

 

Now you expand towards the sky. When you dance

on the ground, I feel the roots of your feet (like flowers)

below.

 

Remember, darling, it’s only temporary. Soon you’ll see

what I made while you were away, a snow globe, an ice

sculpture.

 

Do not look at me the way you did. You wanted to eat

those pomegranate seeds; you saw that they were red like

love.

 

Do not flinch from my touch the way you did. You grew

to sit on your throne, to caress the souls as they flew

away.

 

Oh, do not shiver as you did. I have built you a castle of ice

so you can dance as you do above, heat wrapping around your

being.

 

I know that you cannot help but see me through the

glaze of your sleep, while the wind mourns its way to

winter.

 

But do not think of that now. Come, love, return to

our snowball, where we’ll find our own warmth in all this

death.

Joanna Cleary is currently attending the University of Waterloo. Her poem, A Coin Toss, is scheduled to appear in the September/October 2015 edition of Cicada Magazine. When she is not writing, she can be found reading, eating various forms of chocolate and, of course, thinking about writing.

Partition

Today, I sat with my grandmother and asked her about the partition. She didn’t say a word and yet her eyes held tears. She did not stop; she sighed and began a story.

A Sardar police officer came home in a hurry, he asked us to pack a few things and leave the house as soon as possible. We were supposed to go to the station, and then leave for Delhi with everyone else. My mother panicked, Papaji (her father) wasn’t at home. I still remember that morning she had boiled some ‘chana’ and cooked some rice. She packed all of it in a big vessel because we weren’t sure how long it would take for us to leave for Delhi. My mother, along with my three sisters and two brothers wore layers and layers of clothes because mother didn’t know if bags of clothes could be kept. And then we left our house in Lahore. That was the last time I saw it. We all rushed to the station and the police  there told us that we would have to stay the night in a tent. Mother wasn’t sure about it but agreed ,seeing we had no other option. On the other side we could hear blood curdling screams, my older sister asked mother what it was, and she hugged us closer and told us that it was the Muslims, they were killing the Indians. Finally Papaji came back, and asked to spend the night in the bus, as it would be safer. We did so. We spent the night there and next day we left for Delhi, leaving behind our house, memories and Lahore.


                When she finished telling me this, she held a strong face and did not cry. She continued.

Once we reached Delhi we stayed at my Aunt’s house, which wasn’t big but we managed. Soon some of our relatives came back, and we shifted to Kanpur. But some of them stayed there. They couldn’t come, even though they wanted to. They were tortured and killed by the Muslims, or they killed themselves because it was better than being tortured. That’s all I remember from those few days.

By the end, I realized that even though it was been years since this happened and we read about it only in our history textbooks,  our grandparents have experienced this. The memories of those who died remain even today. The memories and the pain of the partition remains.

It was not only painful but also unforgettable.

Deepti Chadha is an aspiring journalist from India. She is currently a student in the 12th grade, studying commerce. She is an avid reader who loves all kinds of books. Deepti wants to travel the world, meet new people and learn about different cultures. Writing is a part of who she is today, and writing is what keeps her content. 

 

Jackyo

They said he came out of the wide, open sky like an eagle, and they said he screamed low and flat and fast over the scrubby hills of Wyoming. Before he crashed and became all rubble and smoke and faint fire, etched against a tall mountain of dark clouds. Like mourning at dusk.

The coyotes found him first.

Then the ranchers in their Ford Broncos and their four wheelers.

The Air Force shipped him home across the great land-locked spaces of prairie, of Kansas and Iowa. In Air Force regulation issue, eight feet by  three feet of burnished, ornamental gray metal.  His lips stapled into a half smile. At the jokes the train men told the honor guard named Delbert who sat in the corner reading HUSTLER.

No one present knew about the thin blue scar on his upper lip. Where I hit him with a piece of brick in an old summer, over an old girl, named Linda Sue or Julianna..

*                                                   *                                           *

            We stood in the station, three A.M.  Sunday morning.

No Savior in sight.

They brought down the box, and his mother said, “My boy is home.” And I said, “Wild Man.” And my brother said, “Jackyo.”  And the train man said, “Watch them sharp corners. You’ll lose a finger.”

We took him to Cates Funeral Emporium where “Dignity Is Our Business.”

Luther Cates said, “That make up job is a botch.”

I said , “Maybe he don’t care.”

We put him in the Oriental Room where never an Oriental had walked , spoken or lain .  The Air Force bars were on fire, reflecting the candles set in sixes.

*                                                   *                                                            *

            The next day the town came. The cloying smell of toilet water and sweet talcum. Women in print dresses from Penney’s,  the men stiff and pinch- faced in twice a year suits, collars tight around red necks.

They watched him being dead, and they mostly talked about the tobacco firing yellow in the late summer fields.  How them new Buicks  were death traps, how Jimmy Loney got no visitors at the La Grange Reformatory after he stole that Catholic poor box.

Old lady Pritchett and her mother Ladonna went to the baskets of flowers and read the cards, oohing and aahing in soft exclamations.

“This one is from Freida and Eddie. I thought they was dead,” said Ladonna, pulling at a raveling on her mother’s green dress.

*                                                   *                                                            *

            I smiled at my brother. He shook his head.

The people sitting there in rows  were not there the night we got drunk at the Star Light Drive In on Sterling long necks.  When Jacky barfed on the windshield of a Methodist boy named Marvin,  who locked his doors and told his date he did not like to hurt drunks.  Or the next day when we played touch football in the park with brain rot hangovers, where we jumped and screamed and danced like fools on the edge of a vast abyss.  For we were young and golden, and we thought the signs which said, “JESUS WILL COME, LET’S BE READY!” meant somebody else.

Now the organist tested the pedals.  Then played sappy and dreadful.   “Going Down the Valley” and “Where the Roses Never Fade.”

Brother Hurt  Murphy , his jowls hanging fat and heavy , moving in a cloud of Aqua Velva,  said, “Let us bury our brother in Christ.”

And my brother smiled again , as we remembered the careless girls and  wild hearts, fleeing before any moon, peeing  off bridges, daring the gods that be to fish or cut bait.

We knew everything and suspected nothing, Mr. Dylan Thomas’ “young princes of the apple towns.”

*                                                          *                                                           *

            Then out into the dense, humid air, we carried him to the hearse.  Eight slow miles toward the cemetery and that grave like a muddy mouth. My brother chewed Juicy Fruit  and popped his knuckles.  I watched two nine-year-olds seining for crawdads where the creek breaks under the County Line Bridge.  I saw the stripper pits where we

jumped off cliffs into the green cold water and yelled “Don’t let a turtles bite your dick.”

The road slipped by which led to Wimpy Carson’s river cabin, where we fried frog legs at midnight.  Where we watched two water moccasins , coiled in a ball, bite themselves to death. Where we dreamed wild, extravagant dreams, sweet like peaches on the tongue.

At the Mount Hopewell cemetery, we stood under the brooding shadow of an old water oak.  Stood over the gaudy, fake grass.  We looked into the deep darkness of the grave, where your jump shot does you no good and the worms eat you up like Christmas.

The honor guard fired into the air.

His mother fainted, and two women caught her and they used smelling salts.  They talked in hushed whispers and told her, “that she would understand it better by and by.”

*                                                   *                                                            *

The coffin went away, and we compressed ourselves forward momentarily, as though the last view of a cheap coffin might make something very clear.

From another part of the cemetery, a sixteen year old rode a Toro, and the music from his radio drifted on the air in wind swept tinklets.

“Wi-i-l-l-d  Hor-r-r-s-ses couldn-n-t drag-g me-e aw-a-ay,” Mick Jagger told us all. All of the doubters, all of the weepers, all the lost losers.

The mourners swarmed among each other like large, whispering insects, consoling and declaring.

“Now we see through a glass darkly.”

“It is a part of God’s plan.”

“He’s gone from this veil of tears.”

Then they went off down the hill. Back to the line of cars.

His mother went back to her house, where the tables were loaded with fried chicken and meat loaf, pickled beets and potato salad,  to a cabinet covered with jam cakes and apple pies. Went home to his picture there on the mantle with his sideways smile: Captain Jack Barrett, U.S. Air Force.

The sun declined toward the west. My brother and I walked in empty circles, gave each other half grunts and sighs.  We watched Willie Bumpus, the cemetery custodian, who drank from an unsecretive bottle , as he  pressed the last shovelful of dark loam into the symmetrical mound.  Then he crawled onto his old red belly Ford tractor and took the backhoe to the utility shed in the woods over the hill.

I sat on a tombstone addressed to DARCY YATES, OUR LITTLE LAMB, HOME IN THE FOLD.

*                                                   *                                                            *

My brother threw walnuts at a ground squirrel.

It was almost dark. I decided to tell him.

“Jackyo’s dead.”

He shook his head once, and then , “Yeah. Jesus. Sweet Jesus”

We walked back to the car in the shadow of a newly risen moon.

Jim Gish has been a Greyhound bus driver, a farm hand, a law student, a college instructor and a counselor in his strange life. His oldest daughter has a PhD from Harvard, and his youngest is finishing her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. Jim began writing when he was twelve years old and found out that little girls would sit with him on the bus. Gish lives in Arcanum, Ohio, and he is married to a retired computer programmer. He has won national awards from Phoebe, The Whiskey Review  and Lunchtime Stories. 

In the event we get stranded

My mouth is an anchor that never learned

to save the ship, a slow descent into a darkness

I never loved, but always knew how to flirt with.

I’ve left more poetry strewn on inner thighs than

have made it on paper, some of my best lines

will always rub against jeans I’ve never seen

strewn on my bedroom floor.

 

I hope you taste my name every time you bite your lip.

 

One day we’ll get drunk, and reminisce about the way

our bodies fell apart against cold blankets, the sting

of heaving chests, familiar, just to keep us warm.

Kristen Kane is a Pittsburgh native whose poetry has been featured in Backroads, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown’s literary magazine. 

Varicose Veins

My thoughts, they bulge

from the surface of my

skin, swelling and twisting,

oblong blue branches stemming

across gaping valleys of hushed pores.

Suits with crescent scowls

point knives at me, threatening to

slice me open and let the dense

air swallow me whole.

 

I hide in a music box that plays

off-key carnival tunes, letting my blood

thicken to a viscous concentrate.

With a gentle touch, I squeeze blood

onto page, after page, soaking them

until they drip, saturated. Once

 

I emerge

 

from the box, I wring out

the pages over the suits—

their bodies wither

into an ashy heap, and I hear

that same off-key carnival music

on the radio for the first time.

Evan Goetz is an enigma wrapped in chocolate filigree. He is a graduate of the University of South Florida with a B.A. in creative writing. His work can be found in Damfino Press and Digital Papercut among other journals. When he is not writing, he spends his time performing with an improv troupe making a fool of himself.