September 2024
Flash Fiction
By Amy Allen
Picnic
Everyone romanticizes lying in grass but in reality, it’s itchy, and if you’re not careful fire ants will crawl up into your shorts and through your sleeves into the sticky darkness of your armpits. She understands the reality of this and spreads a blanket out on the hillside under the golden sunshine while her boyfriend walks out into the field carrying a red bucket full of white, plastic Wiffle balls in one hand, and twirling a yellow bat through the fingers of his other hand.
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She lies on her stomach, chin propped in her hands as he sets down the bucket and begins tossing balls into the air, hitting each with a full swing. Smack. Smack. Smack. Her palms smell of onions from the sandwiches she prepared for today’s excursion. After he empties the bucket, he gathers each one and begins the process again. She wonders if he would ever drive somewhere to watch her do something she loves. Probably not, she thinks. And to be honest, she’s not really sure she has a skill to show off. She has straight A’s in her nursing program, but nursing isn’t exactly something other people can watch you do. After gathering the balls one final time he saunters over to her, setting down the bucket and tossing the bat into the grass. His face is red and gleaming with perspiration.
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“Your swing looks perfect, baby.” She compliments him because she’s read in Cosmopolitan that’s what you are supposed to do to keep your man feeling important and interested in you. It works because he eases down on the blanket next to her and motions for her to turn
onto her back.
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“It’ll never be perfect. That’s why practice is so important.” He kneels over her, his knees pushing against each of her hip bones and he smiles, “You’re perfect though. How about some lunch?” She knows he doesn’t mean the sandwiches.
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As he kisses her neck she imagines this trajectory. When June comes and he graduates, a proposal, a wedding, a house and babies will follow in close succession. Nursing will become a hobby, a memory of who she could have been. A sort of sadness moves through her, mixing with and numbing the excitement she feels at being desired by him. She can smell the salty outdoors as he leans over her and begins kissing her chest. She moves her lips toward his neck and licks gently under his ear. His skin tastes like rhubarb against her tongue—tart and acidic. She turns her head toward the grass and watches a line of ants exiting their underground home, making their way toward the edge of the blanket in a steady, relentless progression.
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I am at the beach under an umbrella, pretending to read my book, but really I am watching a toddler holding his mother’s hand, pulling her toward the water, saying, and then yelling, “Mommy…Mommy…MOM-MY!!” over and over and she is talking to a friend, and it’s clear that she really just wants to relax on the beach and watch the ocean while laughing with another adult, but her son’s little hand in hers is making that impossible, and he’s got her arm fully outstretched and she is still talking but he’s winning and her feet begin to move toward the object of desire and she raises her voice now so that the other woman will be able to hear her and the boy carries on repeating his calls and finally she finishes her conversation and picks him up in her arms, his sandy legs wrapped around her tanned, taut waist and she says, “Okay, okay,” and she pushes forward into the shallow and then deeper water and she yells to him to close his eyes and hold his breath and they duck under a wave and when they surface his eyes are wide and he is beaming and he begins to laugh and pats her shoulder with his little hand saying, “Again, Mommy! Again!” and I am sitting there not reading my book and thinking that I would give anything literally anything to be able to do that one more time with my son who is now a young man who shaves his face and calls me mom and really barely calls me at all and doesn’t seem to need me for anything and I have all the time in the world to relax and talk to friends on the beach but really, all I want to do is to be able to pick up my child and show him something magical.
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BIO
Amy Allen has been published in a variety of literary journals including Pine Row Press, West Trade Review, and The Write Launch, and her poetry chapbook, Mountain Offerings, was released in April of 2024. She lives in Shelburne, Vermont, with her husband and children, as well as a fiercely independent husky and a perpetually starving chocolate lab. She owns All of the Write Words, a freelance writing/editing business and serves as her town’s Poet Laureate, a position that includes outreach work with local schools and organizations.​​​​
Perspective
Three Poems
by Chris Dahl
Return of The Sorrow Gondola
Sick, On the Sofa,
Under a Heavy Blanket
Someone brings back my copy of Transtromer’s
diminutive book which I had forgotten I owned.
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“April and Silence,” has been tagged. I recognize
the marking slip with its tip lit red.
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What did I love here, the “velvet-dark ditch . . .
without reflections?” Or the shadow
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that carries us? I, too, want to say things
that gleam out of reach like pawnshop silver.
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There is always sorrow in the world if you look for it.
I steer my way past it every morning.
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Not enough light. Not enough air.
Some sickness in the roots. Fungus
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and rot. But one dot of red still burns,
tucked in a forgotten passage, marking
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those trees that lean toward the smooth page,
lean as if printed light could save them.
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A gondola is a slender boat made for calm,
for poling in waters after the turmoil passes.
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A droplet rolls off a leaf, fog drifts
in hazy banners. I listen to the distant, muted
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calls of waterbirds, the cadence
of wavelets brokering our passage.
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There is a way that everything can stand for something else
if you only look closely. The mountain
may stand for many things: what rises above
the flat and predictable; the heart’s constancy; eternity.
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The blade of grass, wind-dancer,
stands for one small member of the chorus line,
but has ambitions to wave a flag.
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The same blade of grass, whistling, stands
for the edge of summer.
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I know a six-year-old who whistles.
She stands for possibility and the gifts
of what we might call grace.
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Even under the blanket, my hands are cold—
as if they’ve been catching trout in an icy brook.
The brook whistles its own tune
and stands for the swift impermanence of youth.
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What does the dream stand for, trapped
in the smothering blanket cave? You bring me
a deer skull and a bird’s broken egg.
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The skull stands for wilderness or maybe
the remembrance of a past life.
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The broken shell stands
as a reminder that each moment
is fragile, that the next stage begins
with either destruction or emptiness.
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Aware of the Season’s Pivot
We come to the time of year when we wake in the dark.
No shine appears on the water; the surface smothers
any reflection. We have lost our easy ways
of gauging depth.
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Some years I have asked my mother to take my orchids
for the winter, when I head south. They’re a gift—
she could keep them, but she always give them back,
worried they’ll die. So when I return, I take them home
and immediately they bloom. If only she would wait
for the cycle to complete.
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Now, at her house, we talk in whispers.
She’s already organized her files and affairs, insistent
she can take care of things, even after she’s gone.
I’m all worn out with worry, she says. Now
I’m the one afraid of the future.
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Yesterday I took the wilted flowers from my father’s
funeral bouquet and rearranged what was left. Amazing how
certain species go on delighting with their fragile beauty,
alstroemerias, and even some chrysanthemums,
challenging us to find the language that describes
the pull of time, its
relentless gravity.
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These are night thoughts, of course, but then
we have so much more night, now.
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BIO
Chris Dahl hopes to cup a handful of murky pond-water and reveal another world half-hidden in this one Her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, was published after winning Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals—most recently in Cirque and About Place Journal—and she has had poems nominated both for Best of the Internet and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington where she serves on the board of the Olympia Poetry Network and edits their newsletter.