Participating readers are:

Sarah Lachance, “The Divorce Hotel”
Erin Rooney, “Daredevil”
Guy Capecelatro, “Swedish-born”
Liberty Hardy, “Greedy”
Timothy Fife, “Surprise”
Joi Smith, “Ersatz”
Rebecca Cox, “Wind Warning”

Rebecca Cox was born and raised in Massachusetts, but now lives in California with her husband and their panoply of pets, where she produces a fair amount of copy about art and mid-century furniture. A collection of her short stories was adapted to the stage for the 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival, she’s been published in Extract(s), and is featured on writeplacewritetime. A collection of her flash fiction shorts on love and its misadventures can be found on her blog, launched in 2010.

Farmer and Farmer’s Radio

Farmer isn’t one of those farmers who seems only on the exterior to be simple. Farmer is, though, a farmer, your typical hayseed. Here is his secret: Farmer has lived with women only long enough to know that he cannot live without them. Here is our secret: Farmer needs to forget his stupid secret, he needs his radio. He is only depressed about this one woman anyway, this Sally. Some toe fetish with her. Good riddance to bad rubbish, he should say. We can’t talk to Farmer, though, so we can’t convince him. We can only watch him muck around in the sloppy. We can only hope his radio keeps him alive, serves as a breath support system: poor quality of breath, but breath nonetheless.

We should butt out of this story. Let Farmer be.

But first here’s something we need to remember: Farmer is a dairy farmer. Dairy farmers, like many insects we know, do the same thing every day of their adult lives until they die, or until they sit down to die. Dairy farmers have no hump days, no weekends, and generally not much to holler about.

They do change of course, let’s not be naive. They can become alcoholics, liars, church deacons, bookies, bankers, railroad engineers or any number of engrossing and worthwhile occupations. But it takes them a dreadful long time. We must remember that dairy farmers are patient folk who are willing to live poor and meager lives in order that their grandchildren’s lives aren’t so poor and meager. This selflessness is a religion with dairy farmers. It is also a standard which not all children of dairy farmers can live up to, so many lead guilt-ridden lives. Many also abandon ship; this may be a good thing, for the world’s millions can drink only so much milk.

Our point is that dairy farmers change little. In order to measure some reformation in a dairy farmer you have to watch them for something like a lifetime. (You have to watch close too, for if a dairy farmer does change, it’s bound to be subtle.) Best just to watch one at chores time, when he’s actually doing something. Of course we always hope something implausible will happen, knowing full well that if some change does occur, and we’re watching close enough to notice, we’ll be privy to something most folks only read about in books. Still, our hope is a potato farmer’s hope that his plants will sprout pumpkins. That said, here’s Farmer—your typical hayseed—waking up for morning chores.

Farmer can’t live alone. And yet here he is alive at five and facing the prospects of

another day of farming, alone. Here he is awake upstairs in his farmhouse. The house radio is on: news. Farmer is covered with a thin sheet from his toes to his moustache. It is amazing, he thinks to himself, I am alone, but still alive. I am tired. Hoo boy. He always feels sorry for himself first in the morning. He tells his durable toenails they need a clipping. They do. He tells his hairy toes to wiggle. They do. I am lonely, he thinks, and my toes have hair. So does my back, my inner ears, the tipof my nose. It must grow when I sleep. No one wants to kiss my hairy toes. It is no wonder I’m alone. Hoo boy.

To make it through the 24 long hours in every day, Farmer needs noise. He doesn’t know it, but he does. Farmer socks his feet white. He shivers. He thinks that winter is coming. Farmer hates winter. He hums I’m a little teapot. Lies back down. His life has become a clutter of noises that protect him from unhealthy thoughts, from any thoughts, really, save idle ones. The radio plays all day, all night. Doesn’t matter which station. The noise is simply a string that strings through all things. This keeps Farmer listening just enough to bother breathing. It also keeps him from listening to himself and doing something drastic.

Farmer finally gets his ass out of bed. Comes downstairs. Do I feel like blueberry jam this morning?

Silence is the enemy of Farmer because it breeds in his mind a cacophony of wild thoughts about the one woman who has loved him back. Whenever he thinks about this girl, this Sweet Sally, he decides that the better part of his life is over, that another girl will never love him back, that he isn’t very smart, that his jaw is too Jersey and his head too Holstein, and even that he’s a lousy farmer. Here he is 39. It’s no wonder he needs noise then, to keep these shitty thoughts from his mind at five a.m. lest he decide not to get up at all.

Farmer is up and about. He goes to the porch and sees his farmer clothes hanging on hooks. The crotch is gone in these bibs. Do I have to wear these lousy bibs? The coffee pot is dripping. Gurgling. Farmer puts on a flannel, the crotch-less bibs, his shit-covered boots, his shit-covered seed hat. Pfizer Genetics. This is my handle, this is my spout. I am a lousy teapot, he thinks. I am a lousy farmer.

Chris Fink is a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin where he teaches literature, creative writing, and journalism. He is the editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal.

Farmer’s Almanac (2013, Emergency Press) is available from Amazon.

I’d arrived with only the severance money from a crap job, the notes wrapped in an elastic band. The tour guide from the travel agency told me to guard it well, Crete not being the safest of spots. Frost, The Collected Poems, that’s what I was reading. I’d walk out to a deserted beach every morning and strip down to my trunks, spread the towel on an abandoned wooden deck, and memorize, “The Road Not Traveled.” The black buzz-buzz insects terrified me. The first night, I slept in the back room of my rented apartment, more cell than room, the drone of the lonely mosquito played as background music.

You commented on my book that first morning as I ate breakfast of yogurt and fruit at the small restaurant next to my apartment. You loved Frost, not the “Stopping by Woods,” Frost, but the one who wrote, “Out, Out, the buzz-saw snarled.” Your friend, American, sipped black coffee and read the “International Herald Tribune.” Later, I swam offshore, the sun scorching, and threw my Speedos to the beach in an act of bravado. When the German couple arrived and sat on low chairs on the gravel sand I had to pick my way carefully up the beach to my trunks, my modesty covered by my hands. I needn’t have worried, as the woman shed her swimsuit like a rubber glove and bare-arsed, immersed herself in the warm blue water. She called to her husband to join her, but he tilted his hat over his eyes and grunted. That evening we sat at adjacent tables, moussaka for me, pink calamari for you, the American squeezing lemon and scowling when you invited me to join you on the bus to the Palace of Minos the next morning. When I left you were ordering another jug of retsina and kissed my cheek. I stole a look at the cleft between your breasts and slipped along the cobbled street to my dark apartment.

To Knossos by bus, we sat together by the door, the driver a heavily mustached man with an oil-stained Panama hat jaunty on his head. Of kings and dolphins we talked, and of your small flat in Hampstead Heath, with its oblong windows that opened at street level. I pulled you into the shadows of an amphora as tall as you, and kissed your open mouth. The cheesecloth shirt you wore felt good to the touch, the tied strings of your bikini peeking from the collar. Goat cheese, garlic, and olive oil, your breath a picnic in a field of sunflowers. You couldn’t, mustn’t, you said. He was your sort-of boyfriend, a visiting Rhodes Scholar from Pennsylvania. Retsina overload kept him in bed while we explored the labyrinth of King Minos. I told you how I loved the crooked way you smiled, and your perfect toenails, painted eggshell, like the mosaic tiles of vaulting girls. When your hands pushed me away, a long thread of red cheesecloth had twined about my finger, as if it were the entryway to the hidden chambers of your heart.

Back in the village, I locked the door to the apartment and lay naked on the bed, the fan creaking overhead, the lone mosquito droning like a live current somewhere out of sight. The place had its own smell, peculiar, yet necessary, a scent that lodged in my memory these past thirty years. Oldness, emptiness, olive oil stained wood, whatever it was, it has traveled the years with me, a stowaway from another life. The cracked tile on the floor shifted when I padded barefoot to the shower, flushed the exposed negative of your kiss in cold water and felt the wall vibrate from the tolling of the church bells from the Orthodox church up the street.

Mantilla-covered ladies stepped up the uneven stones to the chapel. I followed them inside, the space lit by gilded chandeliers, walls hung with time-worn frescoes. Kneeling in prayer, I felt like an intruder, among all these dark-skinned old people, faces nut-brown, like a swarm of humans halfway through the process of morphing into squirrels. In Greek they prayed, the words echoing in the old walls, as I made my own silent prayer to my own personal God, to remove the American from the island and allow you to fall in love with me. Empty vessel, empty prayer, the feeling of outsider sent me away from the solemnity of the mass. Instead of prayer, I hiked the narrow path uphill to the kafenion and sat with my book of Frost poems open on the table. On the blue water a small vessel puttered toward the leper island, sunburned tourists leaning over the gunwales, seeking the balm of the spumed wake. I pictured you with the American, a lanky young man with black-framed glasses, and a tuft of hair over his forehead., arm-in-arm, the taste of my mouth still on your lips.

Back in the apartment I rested on the bed, the jingle of the mattress the only music in the humid Cretan evening. The bouzouki players wouldn’t play until later, when the tourists were sitting around the tables of the tavernas dotting the seafront. The scent of the Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil from where my fingers rubbed your neck was still on my fingers as I dropped my Speedos to the floor. In time to the humming mosquito, my eyes squeezed tight, I touched myself while the shadows swallowed the last of the day’s sunlight.

The oyster-catcher spun towards the ocean, its eye a salt jewel, its beak slicing air, and the sky a riot of white clouds filled with the next day’s rain. I wore the scarf I’d bought in Plaka, from a stranger, a woman beneath an olive tree, smoking a pipe, the fine wisps drifting into the orchard. I went to give it to you, but another couple was in your place, nothing left of you save the faint scent of garlic and tanning oil.

Writer James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA. His short fiction collection, Blood a Cold Blue, will be published this fall by Press 53.

Busted Silo, Anthony Santulli

busted silo
nowyouseeitnowyoudon’t
never forget.

Caught as if it were original
A sharp edged fork spiked
Holes for their supposed need
For air they died in morning
As she grew older and sat
On different sofas and chairs
Paying 20% deductibles
One therapist discovered the fire

Flies living inside her
Air slipping through her belly
Button, her eyes blinked wildly
With their tickling air,
Her mouth her throat
It always felt like something stuck
Like the tail end of a green

Pepper but it was the flies
They liked her brain best
They became people
Inside the cerebellum
That lit up at night
They had the time of her life

Barbara Benoit is the author of a chapbook, Waiting for the Thoroughness of Winter (2013, Finishing Line Press). She is a 2009 graduate of New England College’s MFA in Poetry program and is studying for a second MFA at Ashland University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, 5 AM, Slipstream, Blueline, Babel Fruit International Journal, Tygerburning Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, The Write Action Anthology, Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other (Write Bloody Publishing), Poetry Alive! Montpelier, and Smoky Quartz Quarterly. She served as poetry judge for New Hampshire’s 2012 national competition and received a Vermont Council Artist in Residence grant.

from “Considering Magritte”

1. (with a grain of Sel)f-Portrait

A gaping hole
where face should
be an unripe apple

a void at the caged gut
disguised by a bird. If I
were to open

my eyes you’d see
only sky. What a body
wants:

a good hat
to keep it all in,
some wooden wings

to weather storms from
sea, some clouds to stuff
in holes like bread

so the darkness doesn’t
show through. My brain-
’s aflame,

my heart a paper
doily. That’s
gonna burn. Burn.

Write Me a Letter

I try to mop up a spot on the tile only to find
the sun had spilled itself there momentarily and again
I’ve come to the place where words

fail me. Dante through all the circles found
something to say, as did the dead, when in life on Earth we’re
stunned so frequently, mouth

agape, a stutter: light flaming bare trees, the kindness of a fellow,
inexplicable flicker of what seems like fate, and that
thing that atoms do when split

apart in time and space, wherever
they are: this instant
correspondence.

The Orion Nebula

Whirling gases
catch Sun’s light,
shimmying, turning,
pulsating like strobe.
And we too are vast
humming spaces of
tapdancing molecules and
pulse.  What color
are we at the cellular level?
Does light penetrate our layers,
catch the edges of our atoms – do we
glow? When we die, burn out, do we
float away, fly skyward to join the astral hum?

Is my father up there somewhere,
the tobacco smell of him faint
on the edge of the Orion nebula?
Is Lila still on Earth in her kitchen,
twirling among the dust motes,
shining in the sun’s slant?
Is there a great cloud of us rising now
with the steam from Sun burning
the sea-cold water off sodden
roofs, the glowing tar?  Clearer
than smoke we rise.
How far will we go in the endless space,
or will we lie like sweat on the living,
beading on skin and shining?

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Chosen by judge Gray Jacobik to be part of the Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection, Marilyn McCabe’s book of poetry Perpetual Motion was published in January 2012. Her chapbook Rugged Means of Grace was published by Finishing Line Press, 2011. Three chapbooks produced in collaboration with poets Mary Sanders Shartle and Elaine Handley were awarded best poetry book prizes in 2006, 2007 and 2010 by the Adirondack Center for Writing. She has been published in a variety of literary magazines, including Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Rhino. Her book reviews can be found regularly on connotationpress.com. She earned an MFA in poetry at New England College. More of her work, plus recordings of her renditions and translations of French art song, can be found at www.marilynmccabe.net.

Perpetual Motion is available at The Word Works and through Small Press Distribution or direct from Marilyn.

Jill and I were unloading the car, schlepping our backpacks and bags of groceries into the cabin, when John stopped his pick-up to check us out. He lived in the woods full-time, owned an incongruous brick ranch house at the very end of the two-track that meandered like a river of sand past working-class vacation shacks and hunting camps.

I hadn’t been at my family’s place in a while, and he didn’t recognize me at first– me with my long hair and beard – who was getting away from the city for a weekend with my girlfriend.

“Sorry,” he said, still sitting in the cab of the idling truck. “We’ve had a bunch of B&Es around here. I just wanted to make sure you belong.”

I was lying in bed that night, feeling the length of Jill’s skin and listening languidly to the silence when she asked me if all the people around here were that racist.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The Biennese. That guy said he wanted to make sure we weren’t Biennese,” she said.

I explained that he was talking about Breaking and Entering.

“Oh,” Jill said, rolling onto me. “And how do you know so much about crime? Who are you, anyway?”

Her long brown hair rained down as she lowered herself to kiss me.

“I’m your little Biennese, baby,” I whispered in her ear.

If your guess is that I managed to screw things up, you’re right. Sometimes I go online and visit the website Jill launched to sell her art. I look at photos of her at various gallery openings and wish I had been there over the years to witness the arrival of each wrinkle and gray hair. It’s sort of like being a Peeping Tom, which is exactly what you’d expect of a Biennese.

Recently I dreamed I was in an automat, but instead of sandwiches and soft drinks displayed behind little windows, the machines vended other lives. I could see them there behind the glass – or maybe they were video screens. In each tiny diorama Jill was next to me, no larger than a figure atop a wedding cake. I reached into my pocket for some coins, but they were from another country.

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of two poetry collections — Greatest Hits from Ashland Poetry Press, and Vengeful Hymns from New Issues Poetry & Prose. His flash fiction story “Objet du Desir” won the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Contest sponsored by the public radio program Selected Shorts and was read on stage in New York by David Rakoff. His flash fiction story “The Dauphin” was broadcast on Weekend All Things Considered as part of its Three-Minute Fiction series. Other pieces of his short fiction have recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Museum of Americana and others. He is Communications Officer at Ferris State University.

Join some of our favorite authors as they sit down over a glass of fine wine and fresh, seasonal appetizers to discuss a book that moves them. This is not a lecture–guests are strongly encouraged to engage in the discussion. The goal is to have fun in a thoughtful way.

The series kicks off Sunday, May 26 with EPLH and Extract(s) founders Jenn Monroe and Christopher J. Anderson leading a discussion of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Seating is limited. All the details can be found on the Events page at the Eastern Point Lit House website.

Simon Perchik’s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.