Author: Inklette

On the Point

When I saw you

crouching along water’s edge

gazing just over the water

tips of your sight, like pelican wings,

I thought of the deer

swimming across the lake,

perhaps to escape a wolf,

perhaps to enjoy life,

and I resisted

the urge to know

what made you appear

like a small stone

to be skipped,

a number of lives to be counted.

Brad Garber writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. He has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Embodied Effigies, Clementine Poetry Journal, Sugar Mule, Barrow Street, Ray’s Road Review and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. 

Two Poems

Tropical Storm Winds (or How to Alchemize Branches into a Family Dinner)

Goats line their own southern fence,

eat the heads of sunflowers that bend past the rusty barbed-wire.

Water spots form overnight. I am a child, I say Our

house has moon craters!

while sister looks up handymen.

Five trees fall into a pentagram around my treehouse.

Dad yells STAY INSIDE, so I never set my toys on fire,

and mommy sleeps in a separate room like normal.

When the Kitchen Paint Melts into 1980s Flight Paths

I consult a phonebook psychic.

 

After the crystal ball flakes into ash

like cheap hotel soap, after

she instructs me that the house

wants to make love to you, and after

I empty all the drawers of mother’s

old pantsuits,

 

I get naked in the living room.

 

My toes curl inside the VHS player, a breast

bounces against the height markers that Daddy

scrawled onto the doorframe each year,

thighs squeeze the yellow desk lamp mother bought

me in Cincinnati, lips suck the laminate tread

under Daddy’s rocking chair, and my hand claws

the one placemat not worn in by nightly dinners.

Jerrod Schwarz is an MFA student at the University of Tampa and is also the managing poetry editor for Driftwood Press. He has been published in Dirty Chai, Scapegoat, Four Ties Literary Review, and others. The above things are a little mundane. In his day to day life, Jerrod does whatever he can to escape the heat of his Floridian climate, and has been known to take part in staring contests with alligators who would challenge an otherwise refreshing swim.

Chronicles of The Chronically Ill

On March 17, 2015, Hunter and I went to IHOP to celebrate that she didn’t die last year, which I think is a pretty cool thing. We called it the celebration of her Tumorversary, the fateful day a year prior that she had her brain tumor removed. We didn’t cry, we just ate, and ate, and ate, and posted on Instagram a picture of “I love you” spelled out in sweetener packets. This is how we cope. I think about it a lot, the fact that I met her three months after her surgery. I think about how I could not hold her or assure her that I would be there when she woke up. I wonder how scared she was. Sometimes we talk and she tells me the stories, and even in the little anecdotes of her ten days in the hospital, and a month stuck in another state, she sounds brave. I wonder what she saw when she opened her eyes for the first time after surgery, without the tumor eating away at her.

When we first met, we found out the medical anomalies of one another. She asked me about when I was sick, and after four years, I was used to the story: “I was in the hospital for nine days, I could have died, they were watching to see if they needed to amputate my toes, I went to physical therapy for a year and a half, my body still sucks, blah, blah, blah.” She told me her surgery was “months” ago, never with specifications of how long “months” was. It took a while to get it out of her. I didn’t know that when I met her she was newly out of brain surgery, bearing fresh scars, fresh worries, and fresh fears.

And a year to the day she got her rare benign brain tumor removed, the doctors claim she is healed. It does not matter that she can’t stand for long periods of time without feeling like someone cut a string inside of her and tied them back incorrectly, or that she passes out about ten times a day. You are not allowed to take that long to patch up from a surgery. A month is okay, a couple months maybe. A few months, now that is pushing it. You have to heal. Being sick isn’t an option in a world that won’t stop for you, and how dare your body question the healing power of your physician? And there we were, a year later, spelling out “I love you” in packets of artificial sweetener. We ripped open the packets and poured them into our drinks. Bittersweet.

If I measured out our relationship, it would be approximately thirty flares shared between the two of us, three colds, two cases of food-borne illnesses (shigella for me and a nice bout of c-diff for her), six onsets of MRSA, a bit of strep—all in about a year. This really isn’t fair when you’re sick year round and having a “real” sickness makes you feel like you’re ready to dig your own grave. And yet, the “real” sicknesses are the ones that give us pride. Finally our symptoms are proudly displayed on the outside instead of the invisible illnesses we hide inside our skin and bones. Yet, all of those infections make our already hard lives even harder. Hunter and I try to take turns patching each other up. Sometimes I guide her when she blacks out. Sometimes she pets my head when the pain is overwhelming my brain.

I love talking to Hunter. I loved how from the moment we met, we clicked. I tell her every day that we understand each other better than anyone else could, between illness and ideals, politics and opinion, wandering thoughts and life circumstances, we were made for each other.

But lately I can’t understand why I can’t help her. She served her time in the mousetrap of hospitals and pain. I can’t figure out why her body won’t let her be in control, why it refuses to let her do things that other people take for granted, like run or go grocery shopping. And I can’t seem to understand why I can’t understand, since I used to go through the same thing on a daily basis.

We call them flares. The moments, or hours, or days, or weeks, or months, when our already painful and uncooperative bodies decide to be even more rebellious. And I sit in pain a lot, I do. I have migraines almost every day, sometime excruciating, and sometimes bearable enough to tolerate doing daily tasks. Fibromyalgia morphs my body into a tree with gnarled branches. But still, the pain I feel watching the person I care most about hurting so badly shocks me out of my pain. When I met her, I saw strength. I didn’t expect this. Why can’t her body see how strong she is?

There are good days. We went to the Miami Youth Fair during Spring Break 2015. We lasted an entire five hours there, four hours longer than we can usually tolerate standing outside. We didn’t even get tired. I almost felt like I was a kid again.

The Youth Fair is probably the size of Disney. It’s huge. We walked through the entire thing. We took so many pictures and rode the Ferris wheel and the ski lift and surrounded by all of the thrills of the amusement park, she still made me happier than anything in the entire world.

There was a ride I thought we could both go on called Crazy Mouse. It was designed for children, but apparently not designed for someone with neurocardiogenic syncope, the sweet little chronic illness that makes her pass out and become unconscious. Nor was it designed to suit the rather intimidating hole that is a lack of brain in her brain. It wasn’t kind to my vertigo, migraines, or fibromyalgia either. This ride, it spins, it drops, but it doesn’t do anything major. We got on a colorful mouse-shaped seat and gave it a go. We got to the top of the roller coaster, and Hunter just said my name flatly. I saw her face change. The rollercoaster held at the top for a moment of suspense, and then we dropped. We twisted. We turned.

We got off the roller coaster, walked to the little concrete bench to the ride of the ride, sat next to an old couple with their grandchildren, and cried for ten minutes. People passed by over and over again. No one asked us why. Two nineteen year old girls really just shouldn’t be crying in front of a child’s roller coaster. I looked at the tears falling down from her eyes, and how her eyes were vaguely illuminated through her dark tinted sunglasses. Her eyes, at that point in her life, were nearly always cloaked in dark glass, except when alone with just me. This is how we cope.

I look in her eyes a lot, and I’m convinced I can see the entire world in them. Not because she’s some magical being, but because her eyes are so amazing, so unlike any eyes I have ever seen. One is blue and the other brown. The blue one has the slightest brown halo, and the brown eye looks like someone took a piece of chocolate cake and tried to hide it by piling blue frosting where the slice used to be. Her brown eye is like the earth, and the blue like the waters. I see all the wonders in her gaze. And I see hope. I see she’s not going to give up.

I have the fortune of living my life with the pleasure of knowing Hunter Kathryn Tallman. I have watched her grow in the time that I’ve been lucky enough to call her my girlfriend. I was there when she started telling people that she was disabled instead of forcing herself to do things she wasn’t able to, when she faced an old man yelling at her for supposedly using her father’s handicap decal. I was there when she started telling people she had a tumor about a year ago, and that she can’t do everything that everyone else is capable of. I was there when she stopped being embarrassed of who she was and the things she can’t control.

Her dark prescription sunglasses do serve the purpose of protecting her from her intense photophobia and allowing her to see. But they also served the purpose of blocking people out. The first time we skyped, she sat in a dark car with her sunglasses on. She sometimes slept with her eyes covered. Perhaps she didn’t want anyone to see what she could see or the pain in her eyes.

Recently, Hunter bought a second pair of prescription glasses. This time, they aren’t sunglasses. I think perhaps she sees the world differently, and she’s ready for the world to see her differently, too.

Haley Zilberberg is a student at the University of Central Florida where she studies Creative Writing and Social Work. 

Unwritten

 Meenakshi Rauthan’s piece Unwritten explores the dimensions of things that are better left unsaid, of words and worlds that intersect with one another. Unwritten focuses on what forms the interior and what regenerates it. Inside what is unwritten, a world revolves within itself. VA_Unwritten

Unwritten by Meenakshi Rauthan

Meenakshi Rauthan is an eighteen-year old student, majoring in Psychology at Sophia College, University of Mumbai. Her love for art and music grew after she majored in Visual Arts at HVB Global Academy. 

In Training

While   you   are away

(somewhere)                                                                training—

7 killed                        an accident                  mechanical failure

over water    then into                         the water                     an accident

debris              and                              remains

washed onto the beach       not identified

where are you?

 

4 killed                        an accident

live ammunition                    mortars                        grenades

4 sweep the field                               1 undetonated mortar                 found

undetonated until                                found

where are you?

 

tanks on the beach                        stumble upon

by accident                         when running                          an accident

where

                                                                                    are

                                                                                                you?

Lisa Stice is a military wife who recently completed her thesis year in the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program. Some of her work is forthcoming or appeared in Emerge Literary Journal, 300 Days of Sun and On the Rusk. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. You can visit her Facebook page here and her website here.

When Spring,

i.

He turned off the lights.

The tangerine sky, the downward

t r a j e c t o r y

of the

e a g l e,

and the silent scraping of nails.

My body – holy, ocean-like,

and the world: walls, blood, hands.

The single eye twitching in the corner,

and my bones coming loose at odd angles.

                       

ii.

I touch myself where he touched me.

The soft, the brazen, the fleeting touch of a leaf,

the breaking and un-breaking

of tea cups, coasters and dry concrete.

I find no salt in my wounds, no clot. Rather, a clawing

longing to fill the air with sand, to sew up my skin with

thread–

a longing to make maps with blunt knives,

and surrender my body to water.

                       

iii.

When we were fourteen, we declared that we could fly.

Yet, as the years went by, we grounded ourselves to our homes,

yet rootless where ever we went.

    But I rooted myself

                        to the wet walls and

                        the soft earth, my limbs

                        fossilized in the moment,

                        and my arms-

                        dissolved under whispers.

                       

iv.

When in spring,

when the weeds we grew in our gardens uprooted themselves and left,

when the birds came, regardless of hate, when the water rippled again,

when I turned to a crusade, my body – no longer a place where he touched me,

but

a war memorial

a souvenir

a museum exhibit

a book of fire

when in spring,

when we left our attics to take to the streets,

our clothes torn, our faces scarred, our bodies peeled of skin,

and these, these footprints of an earlier life,

that dream of doves, vanishing into a deafening cry-

then,

perhaps, the stars will reign again,

weighed against a golden sky.

Smriti Verma’s poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Word Riot, Open Road Review, DoveTales Literary Journal, Alexandria Quarterly, Inklette, Cleaver Magazine, Textploit and Yellow Chair Review. She is the recipient of the Save The Earth Poetry Prize 2015. She will be joining Inklette as a Poetry Reader and currently serves as an Editorial Intern at The Blueshift Journal.

Winter Romance

“You are like the winter wind. I don’t like you very much, you arrive in November, I celebrate my birthday in your presence. You wish me Happy Birthday by hugging me, sending chills through my entire being. Then we celebrate Christmas, running around covered from head to toe in mufflers and socks and gloves.

And just when I start getting used to you being around, you turn your back onto me and abscond, bringing flowers and greenery back that you had scared away.

I miss you a lot. I miss the hot chocolate that we used to have when we got too clingy, and the sweaters tucked away deep into the closet.

You’re gone for months, and our memories shared in the driveway are all that I have. The long months make me forget you, all too soon.

Little did I know my stoned-cold heart had been too warm. For you come back after eight long months, introducing yourself again.”

Vaishnavi Sanap is a fifteen-year old from Mumbai, India. She runs a blog of her own. This is her first publication.