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On the Edge of My Mother Tongue

In Issue 85, July 2024 by Dominique Margolis

There is space on the edge of language where it is quiet but far from empty. It is the space where life is at it should be. I happened upon it by chance one summer between my first and second year of legal existence while scratching at the wall next to my crib on the first floor of the Au Style Modern’ tailoring shop in the village of Tauves in the Auvergne region of France.

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The Merriest Widow

In Issue 85, July 2024 by David Kennedy

A rider was drawing closer, through the light fog rising from the forested hills around Stockton. The ladies had initially considered the pursuer as merely another gallivant taking some exercise, but the man on the horse was taking no leisurely route, rather a direct line toward their carriage.
“Have no fear,” said the coachman. “I am a tolerable shot at a hundred feet.”

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Texting with a Ghost

In Issue 85, July 2024 by Trelaine Ito

“Can we talk?”
He sounds almost too forceful in his delivery, the tone of his voice transforming his question into an attack, so he selects his next set of words deliberately, knowing he’d only have one shot at his opening.

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A Traveling Cloud

In Issue 85, July 2024 by Begonya Plaza-Rosenbluth

After spending a year in Northern Spain with my father’s sister’s family, I reunited with my parents and siblings in Bogotá, Colombia, instead of our home in Los Angeles, California. My parents were starting over again from scratch and setting up shop to establish themselves. Mom, who was a perpetual optimist, had recently hit the jackpot, and with an endless display of excitement she was paying-off debts, shopping for new home furniture, and preparing for my milestone birthday celebration.

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Tai Po

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Priscilla Chan

I lose myself in Taiwan. That’s why I hate going there, feeling like a deer in the headlights; perhaps this time the buzzing crowds, alien sounds of chitter-chatter, and layered characters on never-ending menus will feel more like home. It doesn’t.

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I Don’t Care If I’m Real

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Andrew Park

Sitting in front of the murky Han River, I don’t even see my own reflections. I hear remnants of life here and there: a group of senior joggers, a street saxophonist whose confidence is admirable, and a little girl screaming at something—kids always seem to see another dimension we don’t.

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A Rainbow Day

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Marianne Dalton

I could not sleep at all last night. My mind was in an unending hyper-focus mode. It’s like those songs that have the algorithm that deliberately make it so you can’t get them out of your head. Mind worms. Plus, I kept thinking about the blood.

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Learning to Walk

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Andrew Sarewitz

I have been told that I am visually, and stereotypically gay. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I take it without an angry or even aggravated reaction.

When I was quite a bit younger, I accepted that I was unconsciously flamboyant, which I confess, I didn’t like, being a teen student in a judgmental arena.

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Was That All it Was?

In Issue 83, May 2024 by Andrew Sarewitz

To my parents’ dismay, I took full advantage of New York City’s disco era in the late 1970s till the mid-80s. I did go to NYU undergraduate, but if someone asks, “What was your major?” I answer “Night Life.”

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Prison Palette

In Issue 83, May 2024 by Michael McQuillan

Athletic vitality invites gym walls of vivid colors, players spilling onto courts with crimson tones fitting coming contests yet pale walls circumscribe this setting, matching well-worn olive sweatshirts, khaki pants and lemon tees as men of subdued spirit shuffle in beneath torn net strands, symbols of their fall.

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The Call

In Issue 83, May 2024 by Nancy L. Glass

I was walking the trails through the oak forest on our property, looking for the pair of pileated woodpeckers I could hear furiously pounding their heads against a tree trunk. My phone rang with a similar rhythmic urgency in my pocket, as though in conversation with the woodpeckers.

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Boey’s Love Song

In Issue 82, April 2024 by Michael McQuillan

Solitary star’s light cleaves predawn sky. Morning’s mourning starts. Eyes fill in striking silence. Departed thumping, crunching, sipping, crackling, pouncing, yelping, woofs and wags of canine elder years seem bound within that star.

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Answers to Questions Not Anticipated

In Issue 78, October 2023 by Ricardo José González-Rothi

I slip the CD into the car audio slot and the music begins. As always, Cole tells me he likes riding in my tiny car because we can play CD’s and listen to music and we dance and get silly while driving.

I hunt through Goodwill stores and garage sales, always looking for “hidden jewels,” preserved covers and discs without scratches on the tracks. Cole is very specific about his likes. He doesn’t much care for little kid tales. He likes The Four Tops, Jimmy Buffett, The Beatles and Raffi. This day I slip in Jimmy Buffet’s “Greatest Hits” into the slot. Track 7.

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The Voodoo Shell

In Issue 78, October 2023 by Marianne Dalton

I hold the tarot card in my hand and stroke the silky surface, studying the illustration. It’s a colorful drawing of a woman seated on a throne. She’s beautifully dressed in a red billowy gown with a crown of moons on her head. I rub my fingers over the image as if using a paintbrush, imagining I’m the artist creating it. Mom’s voice interrupts my dream drawing. She directs me with her sweet sing-song upbeat tone. Put the card here on the table, face up, and then take another from the stack and flip it over next to it. Mom smiles and looks me straight in the eyes. Her cobalt blue eyes glisten and sparkle. I’m mesmerized.

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Choosing Gratitude

In Issue 77, September 2023 by Nancy L. Glass

Amanda, our hospice nurse, answered the door when I rang the doorbell, showed me where to leave my shoes and escorted me into the den, where I found Faiz’s mother, Haima, sitting on the floor. Haima apologized that the air conditioner was out again, for the second time in a week. Within minutes, my slacks and blouse stuck to my skin, and the air in the den felt heavy despite a frantic fan and the open window in the breakfast room.

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Fear in America

In Issue 77, September 2023 by Kathleen Tighe

My students are working their way through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when the superintendent’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker. “Excuse me teachers and students. We will now conduct a hard lockdown drill. Hard lockdown.” My class responds immediately, leaving their desks and joining me in the corner furthest from the room’s single entrance. Cody flicks the light switch off, and all sink to the floor.

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A Kitten Before the Fire

In Issue 77, September 2023 by David Kennedy

This was not how Senator William Sharon had intended to spend his retirement. Having amassed his fortune, failed to obtain re-election, and outlived his wife, Sharon had dreamed of living off the interest, tossing aside the newspapers once he tired of politics, and paying for discreet liaisons who could be trusted to dispose of themselves once they were no longer needed. It had come as an unpleasant surprise that the tides of business were ever-changing and unpredictable…

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A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning

In Issue 76, August 2023 by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—

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Pop Goes the Weasel

In Issue 76, August 2023 by Paul Benkendorfer

I stood with my father on the BART platform of San Francisco, our luggage in hand and three plane tickets tucked tightly away in my pocket. We had spent the previous week with my older brother and his girlfriend to celebrate my nephew’s second birthday. The walkway was damp and covered with puddles that had formed during the rainy night. The day was humid, carrying with it the soft heat of a Bay Area July. A weird aroma of cinnamon mixed with the sewer steam of the city wafted through the breeze. Little light crept in the sunny afternoon day from above the stairwell.

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Love and Patience on Mount Pico

In Issue 75, July 2023 by Scott Edward Anderson

“Are you sure this is a road?” Samantha asked as the black basalt paving gave way to dark, red dirt, and the deep-green grass seemed to grow closer and closer to our rental car.
“It’s supposed to be the fastest way,” I answered. “According to Google Maps…”
Then I realized I’d lost the cell signal and my iPhone was navigating blind.

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Meditation’s Coda

In Issue 75, July 2023 by Michael McQuillan

The window’s tree is a friend. Its limbs pulse with rain as Sabbath meditation sifts preoccupation.
The living room corner, home within home, contents me. The sill’s cup of French Roast stimulates my molding words as poem and essay phrases on what seem urgent social concerns.

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Some People Say the Holocaust Never Happened

In Issue 75, July 2023 by DJ Grant

An exhibit about the life of Anne Frank has been traveling the world for decades.1 Anne Frank was a Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis in The Netherlands during the Holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Jewish people of Europe during WWII. The diary she kept while in hiding from 1942 to 1944 is an exemplar testimonial of the Jewish experience of persecution.