My father is morbidly obese and diabetic. At 380 pounds, with ruined knees, the ex-athlete has traded cheers and adulation for gawks and whispers. He’s a carnival attraction, given wide berth, even in the most spacious locales. He’s lost two toes on one foot and one on the other. A wound, usually weeping, comes and goes on his lower left calf. Outwardly he’s happy,…
I Confess by Clifton Bates
OK I confess I’m a mess I live alone but I digress. Really I’m a timber cruiser marking old growth. I’m a scout, a surveyor a little bit of both. Nahh, I’m just this guy sailing through the horde with one withered soul temporarily on board. Image by: Ivar Kristleifsson
Missed Cues by Brian Fanelli
She drags her fork across the plate, pokes at peas until he asks, What’s wrong now? He pounds a basketball on blacktop, curses bricked free throws and missed 3s, until she stands on the porch, hands on hips and asks, Coming inside yet? She cranks the oldies station, screams along to “A Hard Day’s Night” after last night’s spat over her in-laws’ visit….
The Summer of Our Fall by Brian Fanelli
We had bands named the Cut-ups, Dead Idols, the Flesh Easters— guitarists named Johnny Smack, Frank Spike, Wailing Steve-O, who all burned up the fretboard as fast as Johnny Ramone. We praised them all in our zine— Terminal Illness, circulation 500, black and white, cut and paste, DIY. Our revolution was so loud that Miss Barker called the cops every $5 show on Saturdays. The…
DEPENDENCE DAY by Michael Meyerhofer
On this, the two hundred forty-third birthday of our nation, I woke from a dream of Nikola Tesla, that immigrant who invented half of everything and probably could have improved the rest had we given him unlimited heart transplants. In the dream, I was insisting that he’d done more for this country than anybody before or after, an odd thing to assert in my grandpa’s…