As he leans over the ground, digging small holes, he thinks about a news item he’d heard that morning. Anchovies wash up in the millions on La Griega beach near Colunga, Northern Spain. They lay dead, useless detritus, on a sunny beach so far away. His daughter is here, but not here, beside him, but somewhere else.

He sticks his thumbs into the square bottoms of the pansies compact root system and shows his daughter the way to crack and spread the bottoms so that they will take root. The next time she says “Mama,” he’ll slap her quick and tight. Look what I am trying to do here, he tells her. She stares with eyes the color of swamp just like her mother’s. This is life now. The dog was another casualty of their new lifestyle. When its ribcage and spine became prominent he’d given it away to the woman who smiled to his face and cursed him under her breath as she walked away, dragging the dog that’d already lost its will. He just can’t seem to figure out the formula for thriving.

I’m thirsty the girl says. Always some goddamn thing, now and forever. He shoves the water bottle at her. She only turns her nose up at the dirt that clings to its plastic sides. He hands her a soda which she takes without thanks.

They plant slowly. She is thirstier now than she was before. He stands up and kicks at the dirt with his bare feet. From the ground his daughter looks up, shading her eyes with her hand, big ones for such a small girl. Because he is too tired to speak he wiggles and arches his brows. She ignores him, then startles at a car that rounds the corner, passing them by, going somewhere.

Later, on television, they interview a fisherman who laments “It’s a disaster because they’re so rare, and now they’ve killed themselves running from something.”

He holds his girl in his arms, and reaches for her hands which goes limp in his. He sees the dirt crusted under the fingernails, but will not wash it away tonight. In Spain they call them bocartes, and they are precious things. He whispers the name into her ear over and over, and sees a slow smile wrinkle across her pale face. He lets her water the flowers and watches as she holds the hose over each one letting the water beat the delicate petals down. He knows that later they will burn in the sun.

____________________________________________

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her fiction has been published in Word Riot, Rumble, Eyeshot, elimae, Monkeybicycle , JMWW, Blood Orange Review, Apt, Pequin and others. Her fiction chapbook, Natural Habitat, will be published by Burning River in spring of 2010.

Tentatively taste a once sweet word,
a slipped memory out of your past

Love is one example. But you are hesitant
like deciding to scratch your poison oak

when you know you shouldn’t but do
anyway. Or push your tongue against

an aching tooth to make sure it hurts
enough to need remedy. So loss is another

kind of need I’m thinking. As in a tooth
even a root canal can’t save. Reason

recommends extraction to relieve the pain. Or
prevent more dire complications. But by now

the soft tissues of your racing heart have
become too inflamed with invasive memory

from arcane regions of the brain. Those parts
holding onto tenderness, or mostly regret.

The sensitivity rife with remembering. Drifting
there become disease. Lost stillness swelling

to anesthesia you must reach, if you can. Lack
of sensation into lesser pulse-beats again.

__________________________________

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.’s Pocket Field Guide, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, and Bellowing Ark, as well as the online journals Lily, Cross Connect, Word Riot, The Centrifugal Eye, Mannequin Envy, and Red River Review, among others. He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR with a menagerie of animals including a Manx barn cat named Velcro. He teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR., USA.

A father from our daughter’s kindergarten class sent invitations to his art exhibit downtown. The white card was premium stock and edged in gold. The envelope lined with rainbow-colored silk paper, and smooth under my fingers. My wedding was the only occasion I had ever sent such fancy invites. The kind of invite you had a drink with.

We arrived at the gallery. Its walls were white-washed behind the oil paintings and the lights hung low from the white ceiling, stalactites. Waiters dressed in black-and-white, and with dark slicked-back hair, moved through the crowd. They offered white and red wine in stemless glasses. I reached for the red wine. My husband shot me a look and requested water. We made small talk with the other parents: weather, economy, rumors that our school’s principal was about to take early-retirement.

(more…)

Many years ago, in a poor village high in the mountains, a little girl by the name of Guilia Pirolo dreamed of a buried bell. She claimed that if the villagers found this bell the corn would grow tall and sweet, and people would be able to buy everything they’d dreamed of: sewing machines, thick coats, sacks of fine white sugar.

No one believed her. She was only a girl, skinny, with large ears and a thatch of unruly black hair — although she excelled at locating lost objects. When she wasn’t helping her mother with the house or the chickens, she often wandered alone through the village and into the woods. She discovered the priest’s onyx rosary this way, in a patch of moss, where he had dropped it while hunting for truffles with his pig.

(more…)

You see a pile of logs, a bend
in the river, driftwood to collect.
I look for human limbs
in the branches.
You admire the view
from the Second Street bridge.
I calculate how far the drop is,
if it would hurt, and what happens
when, halfway down, a person
changes her mind.
At the beach you collect sea
shells, search for shark teeth,
and I wonder if I swam out
’til I was too tired to swim back,
would it be like going to sleep?

_________________________

Sonja de Vries is a filmmaker and poet living on a farm outside Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Spalding’s MFA program and hopes to teach poetry and creative writing in the near future.