It’s time for our monthly open mic of poetry, prose, & music. Read a poem, tell a story, play a tune, sing a song or applaud wildly for those who participate. Come out and join us. Tues Feb.7 7:30-10pm Johnnie MacCracken’s Pub 15 Atlanta St Marietta, GA. Sponsored by The Write Room Literary magazine.

by Marsha Temlock

When you died a stranger came
And brushed against the bittersweet
You set out on the kitchen counter.
The petals crunched beneath my feet.
The seeds skittered ‘cross the floor
like dayglo galbugs.

I found the broom and dustpan in the closet.
Swept the floor,
Refilled your vase with lilies,
Brewed the coffee (much too bitter)
Set sweets on bone white china.

Only when each dish is washed,
Your body laid to rest
Dare I stop to weep, dear friend,
with those who’ll come to mourn you.

by Lyn Lifshin

pink leaves
in the gazebo

tangerine flowers,
cats. Japanese

girl in cut offs.
You took photo

graphs of me

never took me

by Lyn Lifshin

the death of one
feeds so many coyotes

the way people seem
starved for a

dead poet’s poems

Amber Rothrock’s most recent publications include Children, Churches, & Daddies; The Poet’s Art; and Left Behind. She is studying Business Management and edits the online journal Illogical Muse.

by Brett Stout

I sit here night after night looking for something. I sit here night after night looking for someone. I sit here night after night looking for anything. I have a disease, a disease of loneliness and isolation. The grasp of winter depression and angst is here again. I procrastinate and make excuses. I feel more human than normal. I have their weakness for now, but hopefully not forever. I’m constantly disillusioned and paranoid. I want something but I don’t know what. Maybe there is light at the end of narrow tunnel, but the light has not been shown to me yet. Destroying myself has brought no answers and cured no illness. The hangovers, random numbers in my phone and empty bank accounts have brought no happiness and only temporary tattooed joy to my life. I don’t have an answers and I don’t know where to go from here or what to do. I will be sitting here night after night burning cigarettes and light bulbs until I do.

by Brett Stout

Superior swarm
Of
Locust like technological
Advances
Pointless
Yet lusted after
Consumed
And
Soon
The norm
Of everyday life,

Blank text messages invade
Phones
Are you on the 5.99 monthly plan?
Bad conversationalists
Make great messagers
Of this
Ebonic text
Pixilated cocks and vaginas
Sent
From phone to computer
Infesting hard drives
Suffer from E.D.?
Euphemistic Facebook crimes
13 hours a day
Madden football
Using hand free remote controls
Infesting brains
Turned bad reality TV,

Instant internet connection
Through 600 dollar phone
No such thing as too much
Jessica Simpson
ESPN
Oprah
Circle K without the slushy
24/7
More wasted life
Hour by hour
Books are so 19th century
Higher intelligence
More freedom
They say
Just more useless crap
Getting in the way,

Making them even more useless
GPS navigation
But still lost
Help me
Tom Tom
Bluetooth
Flat screen ambient TV
Craving
Plying
For the Unabomber
Self made
Euphoria of desolate wood
And nails of Montana spring

by Jan Wiezorek

Ms. Hinchon’s left elbow bothered her again, so she bent her arm twice before maneuvering the wiggly silver canoe toward the shore. Someone was walking along the beach in her direction, south along the lake. She could not tell how far away that someone was.

Floating eastward, she paddled till the bow of the canoe rested on the sand. Ms. Hinchon disembarked into the cold lake and tugged the canoe by rope over the sand and through the fallen leaves. The pulling sent aches up from her lower back and across her shoulders. She heard the canoe scrape along the beach. Her feet caught a rustle of leaves. Ms. Hinchon saw that leaves had fallen into the runoff that rushed across the sand and into Lake Michigan. Some red maple leaves floated into stagnant yellow puddles of tadpoles and water bugs.

Her breathing expanded, and every step seemed like it took a minute to complete. She focused on her sneakers, and the high ground steepened underfoot. After reaching the summit, she had elbowed her way some one-hundred yards from water’s edge to the high woods.

“Now’s the time it would have been helpful to have a man around,” she said out loud to herself. She snickered, dropped the rope, and massaged her elbow again. Eventually, she took the red scarf off her mousy-brown hair and stuck it in her quilted vest pocket.

Elbowed in the woods was Ms. Hinchon’s cottage, a dark gray with dormers. After her brief rest, she dragged the canoe into the metal utility shed and walked toward the house. When she looked up, she saw Harry the gardener at eye level with a rake in his hand.

“Why didn’t you tell me you needed so much raking done?” he asked. He twisted his red baseball cap off his head and rubbed his wet forehead.

“I’m too busy, I guess,” she said, glancing down to avoid his steely blue gaze.

He hacked and spit in her direction, but she avoided the unpleasantness and headed past the stinky gingko on the side of the cottage where Harry parked his old, blue Chevy pickup.

Opening his unlocked door, she sat in his bucket seats until her back and shoulder pain had eased. Her elbow tightened again, so she shook her entire arm the way a handwriting student does when a cramp comes on. The pain continued. The left elbow throbbed as her right hand reached into the glove box and then under the bucket seats. She found three quarters and put them in the right pocket of her vest. Nothing of any interest drew her to linger, except Harry’s road atlas. It was tucked away in the holder. She slipped it under her arm and slammed the door.

Harry heard the slam and shuffled back as Ms. Hinchon walked away, with a weather-worn smile on her face, glancing down and attempting to move her left arm and shoulder in small circles.

“Looking for something?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Want me to move the truck?”

“No, it’s fine right there.”

“Thought I heard you slam the door,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, no matter.”

“You were in my truck?”

“No, my car.”

“What’s that?”

“Just my road atlas,” she said. “From the car.”

She saw Harry give her the queerest look, but she paid little attention and walked up the steps to the cottage, smelling the gingko fruit again.

“Harry,” she said, “when you’re done, pick up that rotten yellow fruit and throw it away—unless you want it for tea.”

“No, I do not,” he said, as his foot wobbled and his gait slumped. She noticed his eyes were overlarge, the sides of his nose flamed outward, and his face hadn’t recovered from a hint of distrust.

“Why don’t you buy a leaf-blower—something useful for a change?” he asked, demanding.

“Check the storage shed.”

On the porch she sidestepped a trail of pine needles. “Oh, and when you’re finished with the gingko, there are needles here that need to be swept,” she called out.

“At your service, ma’am,” he said. She heard him spit.

Inside, she put the atlas on the coffee counter and pulled out a black journal from behind the sugar bowl. She wrote the date and added the words “canoe, paddle, atlas, .75—a.m.” She closed the notebook, thought back on the week’s escapades, and heard the leaf-blower at work. It must have been that noise that prevented her at first from knowing there was someone pounding on the porch door. When she turned from the counter to the door, she saw a silhouette of a man, tall and big, and she couldn’t imagine for the life of her who would be up pestering on a Saturday morning.

“Yes,” she said, opening the door to the porch. He was big alright, she thought, and very official looking, with some sort of a gun, badge, and dark uniform.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said.

“Good heavens,” she said. “You’re a tall one,” looking upward into his square jaw and black eyes.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m Officer Wentworth.”

“Yes, do come in,” she said, running her right hand like a comb through her hair.

The officer stood inside the door until she directed him away from the kitchen counter and into the sitting room that overlooked the pines and the lake.

“How can I help you?” she said, standing at first and then deciding to sit across from him near the mahogany coffee table.

“We’ve been looking into a string of thefts along the lake here, and I noticed someone pulling a canoe—could that have been you?”

“Canoe?” she asked. “Not with this sore elbow,” she said. She massaged the left arm where it bent. She heard her voice giggle.

“Well, it could have been someone else,” he said.

“I imagine.”

“Have you found anything missing lately—recreational gear, gardening equipment, or the like?”

She thought for a while before answering. “It seems to me that someone took my planting pots, but I may have asked the gardener to put them in storage for me.”

“Have you seen anyone suspicious along the shore?”

“No, I can’t say I have,” she said. “It’s all so peaceful here.”

“Right.” He rose and walked toward the porch door. “Well, if you notice anything unusual, please let us know.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And thank you for your visit, officer.”

“Welcome,” he said. “Goodbye, ma’am.”

“It’s Rose,” she said. “Rose Hinchon.”

“Goodbye, Ms. Hinchon.”

She walked out onto the porch and studied his sturdy gait as he paced across the lawn and back down toward the beach again.

“Where’s his car?” she wondered out loud. Then she thought he may have parked it up by Blueberry Beach, maybe a half-mile walk or so. She wondered whether he was the walker she saw south along the beach.

“Harry,” she hollered, waving. The leaf-blowing stopped.

The gardener sauntered over to her, having missing the officer altogether.

“Harry,” she said, “I just had a visit from the police, and he said there have been some thefts along the lakeshore. Have you seen or heard anything?”

“No, I haven’t seen, and I can’t much hear.”

“You see anyone rummage around here or along the beach?”

“No.”

“Good. Let me know if you do.” He stared at her again before he went back to leaf-blowing, and she saw how his right foot shifted in the lawn, pulling him downward from his hip, like he was all out of joint. She caught her right hand massaging her elbow as she walked past the side of the house.

She had a notion to call the officer back. Ms. Hinchon cupped her hand and shouted with all her lung power down the hill toward the beach. Her yell was loud enough to be heard. The officer came sprinting up the grade, past the yellowing pools, and though the rustle until he met Ms. Hinchon near the shed.

She thought about it all the while the officer was running toward her. She thought, and she figured she’d know how to explain it. “Officer—,” she said. She stopped and turned back to see whether Harry was far enough away and busy with the leaves. “I’m not accusing, but on second thought I’ve been worried about my gardener, Harry.”

“Why?” the officer asked.

“You look in that gardener’s shed, and you tell me what you see.”

She thought it was her civic duty to speak up. Long after her husband had left her for a truck-stop floozy, she had taken pride in making a go of it. She was the one who kept up the house, wrote her children’s stories, supported herself, and called the shots. She made certain others were held accountable. And the way Harry treated her. Rejection, spit, and all. Well, he had it coming, she thought.

The officer unlatched the door and swung it wide open. What he saw matched the descriptions on the reports—canoe, lawn mower, golf clubs, assorted toolboxes, and gardeners’ implements—most everything brand new.

“Are these items yours?” the officer asked.

“Never saw them in my life,” she replied. “He came by during summer asking for a job. I needed help, and I said he could store whatever he wanted.”

“The canoe’s still wet,” Officer Wentworth noted. “Did he carry it here?”

“Must have,” she said. “Officer, I’m only doing my duty, and I don’t want to cause trouble, but what will come of him?”

“We’ll take him in and see what we can find out.”

“I only ask because he had mentioned something about a tussle with the law years ago—as a young man—but I just didn’t imagine he’d still be a thief. That’s what you get for helping someone out.”

“We’ll take him to the station at Four Oaks.”

“I appreciate it, officer,” she said.

“We’ll take care of it—and him.”

“Thank you so much.” Then she said, “I hope I did the right thing.” She raised her face and looked into the officer’s black eyes. She felt safe—now—looking into them.

The leaf-blower stopped and Harry wobbled his way to the shed. “Morning,” he said to the officer, and he spat in Ms. Hinchon’s direction.

Ms. Hinchon left the two men to sort things out. She walked back around to Harry’s blue Chevy on the other side of the cottage. In the back seat, she felt for the warm hand-woven alpaca blanket that looked so nice in the truck. She rolled it and carried it out, sensing a damp chill coming from the northwest. “Here’s my warmth,” she said out loud.

Step by step she winced and wound the blanket around her elbow and over her shoulders. It gave her what she needed right then, and she sat on the porch swing.

She swaddled, swung, and daydreamed. She had a fragment of a new story in mind, a sad tale about a red maple leaf and a tadpole .…

The tadpole wanted out of the yellow pond, Ms. Hinchon thought to herself, for it was turning cold as winter neared. A beautiful leaf fell from the heights into the water by the tadpole.

“Miss Leaf,” the tadpole asked, “won’t you allow me to lie on your back?”

“What on earth for?” Miss Leaf replied.

“Because the wind will carry you and me from this pool, across the beach, and over to the lake, where I will be safe, and you will float on water forever—as free as you please.”

“Oh, well, I certainly will try,” Miss Leaf said.

So, the tadpole lay on Miss Leaf’s back, and the wind blew, carrying them out and over the beach. But the wind came up short and died away. Miss Leaf and the tadpole found themselves cut off from the lake and falling onto the sand.

It was there that the tadpole died owing to lack of water, and Miss Leaf dried and curled, a victim of the cruel cold.

Even if they both had made it to the lake, Ms. Hinchon thought, the tadpole would have frozen eventually. As for Miss Leaf, wasn’t she really dying the moment she fell from the tree? “What was that tadpole thinking?” Ms. Hinchon asked herself. But then she thought out loud and asked, “Is there anything wrong with dreaming otherwise?”

The question lingered in her mind. So, Ms. Hinchon sat on the porch swing and swung in thought until she noticed the officer had Harry in custody.

“Ms. Hinchon, I asked a squad car to come by and pick us up,” the officer said.

“Oh,” she said. “You men think of everything. Here I thought you’d walk back to the beach.” She giggled on the swing, but it was painful, so she stopped.

Harry’s gaze looked disconnected, as though his sight made no impression on his brain. All he could do now was spit and plead. “I’m telling ya,” he said, “I don’t know anything about any thefts. I saw nothing—and I can’t hear well.” He hacked and let it fly.

“Goodbye, officer,” she said. Rising from the swing, she twirled around and grabbed the chain on the swing with her right hand. She leaned on it like a girl coaxing a visit from the boy next door.

He waved and the car left. “What a shame Officer Wentworth couldn’t have stayed longer,” she said to herself.

“But then, perhaps he’ll drive over next time, and I’ll have a chance to see his car. She stifled a giggle and directed her chin toward the needles on the porch. “I’ll need another gardener,” she said.

Ms. Hinchon wrapped her elbow tight in the alpaca and swung for an hour to ease the pain. When the telephone rang inside the cottage, she got off her swing and walked inside with the blanket.

“Hello,” she said. “Oh, yes, Officer Wentworth—. I’d be delighted to have you stop by.” Her eyes came alive and her elbow pain seemed to subside. “Yes, well, I’m certain I can explain everything. That’s right. Yes,” she said. “Oh, that soon? Well, yes, I’ll expect you then. Goodbye.”

Ms. Hinchon worked quickly. She pulled out a wood party tray from the cupboard, opened the refrigerator, and took out some cold ham. She sliced the ham and added gold cheese slices and rye bread to the tray. She found a good Bordeaux by the bar and opened it to let it breathe. Looking up, she caught her own image in the mirror, and she felt her face, puffy and flushed. She thought a little makeup would help even out all the rough edges.

“And when he arrives, we’ll have a little wine to relax,” she said out loud.

Her faded gray eyes brightened at the thought. “He’ll want to search a little more, so I’ll invite him upstairs.”

Looking at her face again, she believed an eyebrow pencil would help. “We’ll chase each other around the bed and then he’ll have a lie down. I’ll wear him out.” She enjoyed her giggle through the pain. “Whatever you say, Officer Wentworth.”

Would the officer like her makeup? she wondered, tucking the alpaca around her shoulders. “Winter’s coming,” she said, smiling and then wincing. “At last, a man to keep me warm.”

by Timothy L. Smith

When he was two, his mother started the blanket. She used the heavy needles her mother handed down to her when she was a young girl, the same needles her grandmother and her grandmother’s mother had used for their children’s blankets. She gathered the yarn from various places and markets, but always in the colors of rust and mustard-yellow. She followed no pattern or design except for what her mother had taught her and what her own heart felt to be right.

When he was four she put him in the blanket; just for a short time, to let him grow used to its weight and feel. The blanket was heavy and scratchy, pulling his young body down and making angry rashes on his skin. He tried to push it away at first, but his mother only smiled and wrapped it tighter.

Later, he grew accustomed to the weight, and the irritation became an odd comfort. He took to wearing his blanket everywhere.

When he was older, he sought his first job. The manager of the town’s largest industry took an immediate liking to him. “That is a wonderful blanket,” he said, admiring the stitches and the weight of the hem as he held it in his hands. The manager told his assistant, “I think he will do just fine; perhaps a place in Human Resources.” The assistant wrote a note and the young man had a job.

Later, when he was older, he looked for a wife. The girl next door took an immediate liking to him. Her parents had always approved of him, particularly in light of his blanket. “If he should continue to wear that blanket, you should marry him,” they told their daughter. He did, so they were.

The years went by; the man and his wife had a child. His wife inherited the needles from the man’s mother and she began to make a blanket for their little girl.

Later, when he was an old man, he looked for understanding. The blanket was now old and frayed, its red and yellow colors faded to a dull gray. He would sometimes take the blanket off and look at it, hold its weight in his hands, brush his hoary hands along its worn remains. He was often heard to sigh at such times and look to his daughter, her blanket tucked neatly under her chin, irritating and pulling her young body down with its weight.

“Don’t bury me in this,” he told his wife near the end. But this was foolish, he thought a moment later. What did it matter if he were buried in the blanket or not?

And then the cold wind rendered his core…and he pulled his blanket close without thinking.

by Kent Monroe

My father piloted B52s for the Strategic Air Command during the height of the Cold War, and it’s a damn fine thing my mother wasn’t beside him in the cockpit, because if she was our journey to the stars would have been placed on pause for a century or three. Trust me. She would have eventually said something that crossed the crooked line, and my crazy bastard of a father would have snapped. He did it all the time at home, so I see no reason to believe he wouldn’t do it up there, closer to the stars, to creation. That reminds me: one of the more savage beatings we witnessed came as soon as we arrived home from church. It was autumn of 1965, K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, Upper Michigan, and the sound of the front door shutting had not made it to the end of the hall before he punched her in the stomach so viciously she vomited her communion. Then he dragged her by the neck into their bedroom, slamming the door shut. Bullwhip slaps, screams and choking sounds split the air like lightning. My two little sisters and brother held each other tightly, bouncing up and down like pogo sticks. I stood at the door and reached for the knob. I knew he kept a pistol in the top draw of his dresser, and for a second I thought about it. I’d dash to the dresser, pull the drawer out, reach inside and grab the pistol and…what? Shoot him? Kill him? Kill the man who flew hydrogen bombs around in the sky, the man who split the air like lightning on the ground? I was ten. He was my father. If he’d turned his head my way, I’d have pissed myself. I ran for my siblings. We cried as we jumped in place.

My poor mother–most times the harder she got it the crazier she became. Her words, toxic and profane, were her fists, and she threw them at him with a palpable violence meant to hurt. She’d have been right in his face mask, shrieking, cursing like a syphilitic sailor, spraying the cockpit with bloody spit. Her face mask would, of course, have been beaten off her head. There would be zero oxygen at that altitude, but she wouldn’t have needed it. Her rage would have been her air, her blood bright red with hatred. “That’s right!” she’d have screamed. “You can beat the shit out of a woman, you dick-less motherfucker, but you don’t have the balls to blow up the world! You pussy!”

And you know what my father would have done? Captain Monroe? He’d have done it, sister. He’d have dumped those bombs like he was taking a dump in her shoes, just to spite her. He’d have ridden one of those bombs down like Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove, punching and strangling my bleeding, screaming mother until the blinding, white-hot and furious end of everything.

As a child, I would sometimes lie in my bed, humming, pillows pressed hard to my ears. You never knew. It was mostly quiet in our house, but never peaceful. If you expressed the karma of my family sonically, it would sound like a wasp trapped between a window and its screen. It was the background radiation of our reality. You never knew when the violence was coming, only that it would come. You anticipated it. If it didn’t come tonight, that only meant it was more likely to come tomorrow. After a few days, you’d flinch at any sound—the furnace kicking in, the cat jumping, the neighbor cranking his lawn mower….

I carry a particular memory like a bomb in my heart, a memory so bittersweet the sweet is like matter and the bitter antimatter. It plays back automatically from time to time, year to year, decade to decade, always fresh and detailed and heavy with feeling, and always exploding into nothingness at the end.

I was twelve. It was the summer of ‘68, Dayton, Ohio, a week before my father left for Vietnam. I had spent the previous six days at this gathering of the entire state’s Boy Scout troops. It was like the Boy Scout Olympics, and both my parents came the last night for the closing ceremony, which was held about a huge bonfire. The firelight rippled like magic water on their loving faces. They kissed and caressed and gazed into one-another’s eyes with a tenderness I had never witnessed, and I felt this joy I cannot express. I remember thinking: it’s going to be okay now. The streaking lights from the universe’s burning stars intersected at that bonfire into a single point of amazing grace and kindness and love, and my family—life itself– was instantly transformed. Rainbows arced from my parents’ faces, melted into the verdant earth, poured up from the ground in a healing mist that permeated existence. The violent, menacing buzz of wasp wings drifted away, replaced by the bright, clear resonance of love and possibility. I could bring friends to my house. I could float into sleep in a cocoon of peace and security. I could anticipate happiness. Boom….

My father soon went off to war in Vietnam, returned home to war a year later. The domestic violence resumed, escalated; our home buzzed with menace, and our remaining years together grew progressively darker. The family karma eventually followed me out the door to school and beyond. My world buzzed. One sunny April morning, 1975, Fairfax, Virginia, the man who split the air like lightening left our home for good, quietly walking past my mother, who lay on a sofa with a broken tailbone, on to his career and his new life disconnected from his secret failure. Soon I left, and before long, we all were gone, moved on, blown apart like debris from a tornado, never to reunite.

My parents are dead now. I mostly remember them as they were that one beautiful night when their love seemed to shimmer like sunshine on the first snow. It always goes back to that memory. It just does. As I drove her to the hospital in 2002, my mother, dying of cancer, suddenly looked at me and remarked, “We missed it, didn’t we?” I didn’t reply, but not because the question was rhetorical. Interned within my silence, acrid and swirling like smoke from ruins, was the awareness that not once, ever, not as children nor adults, had any of us ever mentioned, much less discussed, that which had defined and destroyed us as a family. We endured it as if it didn’t exist, then faded apart without protest, our existence diminished. For a minute or two, I struggled with how such a thing was possible, how he, she, we, I could have allowed it — how merciless and meaningless this fucking world can be…and then, empowered by some unsummoned existential grace, I reached over and held my mother’s hand in mine.

I am a gardener. My life’s nebula has coalesced into beautiful tools: trowel and twine, weeder and trusty pruners. My gardens are my safe houses along my line of space and time. Seeds swell, flowers unfold, leaves orient towards our star… and sometimes I drift into the craziest, impossibly golden notions, like I would have made a good father, like I would have helped my son have peace of mind and a loving heart, like love can be communion for the lonely. Sometimes I create a door in the distance, today between the redbud and the gooseberries, tomorrow beneath the arbor covered with honeysuckle. I tell myself: This is my destination. I walk my bones up to my door, with everything I am—all my feelings and thoughts and memories—locked inside the smooth stone rubbed between my fingers, turn the knob and fall through a white hole to a new universe, where all that was lost hangs as fruit from the Tree of Love. Six pieces of fruit, luminous and sweet, hang for me. As I pick them, one by one my family appears, and as we eat our fruit–our sacrament– rainbows arc from our faces, melt through the verdant ground into the roots of the tree I have made from my heart for us, and we become whole and loving and inextricably, eternally connected –all those lovely things that might have been but never were.