Under the Melody
Carol McGill
My hands in yellow gloves
I say
“I like how this song goes low
On ‘coming up roses’.”
And the sister says
“You and your stories”
She says
“I love the way you listen to music,
The way you choose what you like -
It’s always about
what’s under the melody”
And no one
Has ever said that to me before
Made my strange and strangely specific taste
So positive
The sunlight’s making rainbows in the suds
Carol McGill lives in Dublin. Her short stories have been published in Sonder, Crannóg, Number Eleven Magazine, Silver Apples Magazine, and the anthology Words To Tie To Bricks. She has also had work appear in the online magazines Brilliant Flash Fiction, Rookie and Germ. She was the 2019-2020 chairperson of Trinity Literary Society. She tweets at @WordsByCarolx.
When We Listen to Music
-from Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima
Maria Picone
When he pictured himself folded,
nothing at all, he imagined
himself as a posture
as inescapable as the
earth or air
he would become
another form to draw
from Only doing
so would join sin and glory,
atop the breeze rising
reason to enter
there ready-made
to attain the
mind begun to love
Maria S. Picone has an MFA from Goddard College. She’s interested in hybrid and experimental forms as well as free verse. Her hobbies are learning languages, looking at cats on the internet, and painting. Her poetry appears in Mineral Lit Mag, Kissing Dynamite, and Vox Viola. Her Twitter/IG handle is @mspicone, and her website is mariaspicone.com.
The Last Time I Was Out Drinking, Drinking
Sherre Vernon
to be drunk—we were downtown, past Sixth street, two doors
from a hole of a cigar shop, in a hazy bar I couldn’t
name if you asked me—the best me out
& loud and oblivious & my wit
so sharp that even my teeth had to compete for cuts—
I hadn’t yet taken that long look in: asked myself
why I was the only woman there sipping Old
Fashioneds, smoking clove after clove, in a din
so loud that the smoke unpolitely made a point
of squeezing itself between the ruckus and the bodies
of us, my hands on Augustin, rough in the car
& sometimes desperate, because I didn’t know
how many seat belts there were or if I was in one
only that we were eating street tacos, one
after another, the carnitas falling from our mouths
like curses laughing at their own haphazard sway
and swaying under the streetlights, our feet
intertwined like dancing, through an empty street—
I did not check myself, as I switched between
Spanish and English, my tongue fracturing
even this, in my ache that is always other—
and when Tony kissed my cheek and waited
for me to make it inside the gate, I still didn’t realize
that this was a late-night wake, a mourning howl
for a life that was slipping past me. The next drink
I take will be warm whiskey in tea & honey, soothing
& as unfamiliar as the pregnancy hives crawling up my arms
my feet swaddled in sleepy socks & propped up
on the couch of a man who stays in nights, my body not yet
ready to tell me that I will never again be anything other
than this child’s mother. I don’t yet see the close binding
of women’s clothes and the desperate search for pockets—
the weeks upon years of sleeplessness, teatotaled
to an absolute stillness, a softness so unyielding, a new desperation
this need to hear her breath beneath the moonlight—
retreat and return.
Sherre Vernon is a seeker of a mystical grammar and a recipient of the Parent-Writer Fellowship at The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (fiction) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Readers describe Sherre’s work as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. To read more of her work visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications and tag her into conversation @sherrevernon.