Tributaries: "I Have a Second Stomach"

By Kate Finegan

for peaches

     eaten     ripe

          over kitchen sinks in summer

berries   plucked     from Northwoods balds

     arsenic

          in     apple seeds

skin cells     I breathe from

     your pillow       at night

spiders that slide

          down my     tongue      

               in sleep

     crowns

from teeth     ground to dust

          particulate matter          from walking

 city streets

          all the times I bit my

     tongue to

blood

     all the times I have told you     I’m awful

and all the times you     have told me

     I’m not            and all the times

          this earth’s

told me it’s awful and     all the ways

it has shown me

it’s not

---

Kate Finegan has a short story chapbook forthcoming with Penrose Press in November 2018. Her work has won contests with Thresholds, Phoebe Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and The Fiddlehead; been runner-up for The Puritan's Thomas Morton Memorial Prize; and been shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize.

Tributaries: "Postgrad"

By Monic Ductan

My apartment complex, Hillside Manor, a generous name for the little row of six apartments in a blonde brick building, sat near the town square. Though Hillside was far from the classiest neighborhood, the rent was cheap, which was a gift to someone like me, a twenty-two-year-old with student loan debt. Plus, I lived less than a mile from work, and I figured that when my old Toyota finally died I’d ride a bike or walk to work.

The apartment building was flanked on two sides by a crumbling, wooden, privacy fence. A vacant apartment sat to my right, but a family, the McClures, lived on my left. The McClures were friendly and waved whenever I saw them, though they sometimes annoyed me, as they had a habit of being boisterous. Some nights I’d hear them banging against our shared wall or yelling at each other. The McClure man, who smoked out on their porch, had a penchant for going shirtless, his saggy white skin drooping around his waist. Once I saw him at the gas station in town, both shirtless and shoeless. When the cashier told him not to come back unless fully clothed, McClure grumbled, “Shit, man, I ain’t never wore a damn shirt in the summertime.”

In the country, the insects are noisy at night. They make a mechanical sound. I loved to hear that sound as I sat out on the porch at night and read a book or flipped through a magazine. But I’d quickly quit the habit, as I grew tired of McClure’s cigarette smoke drifting over the railing and into my nostrils. Worse still, one night I went out there and looked next door to see the McClure woman in her husband’s lap on their porch, her t-shirt riding up so high I could see the crack of her ass and the tattoo above it.

My apartment had a back porch, too, but the view was desolate—a tiny square block of pavement that housed the two dumpsters. Scraggly stray cats usually roamed back there, and I once thought I saw a possum slinking away toward Patty’s Café.

On the evening of a supermoon, I drove home feeling tired and stuck in a going nowhere job. Country twanging my radio. My eyes misty with tears. I saw one of the McClure kids, a barefooted girl whose knees were scabbed and dirty, playing in the grass in front of the apartments. A neighbor had dumped a sofa in the grassy acre we all shared as a front yard. The McClure girl climbed onto the broken armrest of the sofa, which leaked foam stuffing onto the grass.

When I got out of the car, I turned. The yellow moon hung behind the McClure girl like a painting. Her hair shot out in front of it, pointing in all directions. Sun rays.

---

Monic Ductan's work has appeared in Shenandoah, Water~Stone Review, Big Muddy, So to Speak, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She's an assistant professor at Tennessee Technological University, where she teaches fiction writing and literature.

Tributaries: “Peony”

By Sally Nacker

for B.W.

You bring home a peony bush

to plant with your dog’s ashes.

Too late for medicine, or hope,

but not for beauty. Each June,

an effusion of vivid blossoms

will open, blessing air. And all month,

you will bless your beloved friend

in open prayer. July will wander

cruelly in, like death again, each year.

New life will follow, each next spring,

as fresh buds loosen and declare.

Sally Nacker has published poems in Mezzzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women, and Grey Sparrow Journal. Other poems are forthcoming in The Orchards, and The Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine. Her first book, Vireo, was published by Kelsay Books in 2015. She lives in New England with her husband, and their two cats.

Tributaries: “the tenth muse (i drink to you)”

By Sylvan Lebrun

I sit across a table from a mortal bleeding out

as the cruel touch of admiration flays her alive

for to think of a person as more than a person is to kill them

and when they called her a myth

it is like they took the mind from the body

took the roots from a twisting willow tree

took the forces of gravity from the earth and sent the oceans flying

and careening into the air

they ask me to save her, to staunch the flow of scalding force of life

out of her so upright form

but I look in her eyes and see misery

so I refuse.

look what they have done to her. and to me,

handing me the lungs of the afterlife and begging me to sing

they have learned to carve from marble what is only from the air

they took what is rooted in the loving earth

what is rich, what is flourishing, what will never cease to

bloom. they took what is of rivers,

and blackbirds

and mothers

and they stood. letting it spill from their lips that they have taught the cosmos

to shine brighter

but I dissent

and at the site of all decay, I ponder

how they called Sappho

the tenth muse

burned her books and hallowed her name

like it was theirs to hold in reverence

I swipe my finger through the stains

of creation upon the abiotic

and I raise a glass with shaky hands

to the poetess,

to the true

Tributaries: "Ash in a Jar"

By Tara Lindis

 In Portland, in the lull between winter and spring of my first grade year, a series of earthquakes began. They were small tremors that shook our house or my school. So quick and frenetic - my parents’ fighting or my teacher would stop for the tremor, and continue on undisturbed as soon as it ended, and I’d wonder if it hadn’t happened at all, except for the lights swinging from the ceiling. The local news reported the earthquakes, never more than a magnitude of 4.2, stemmed from the north flank of Mt. St. Helens, where magma was moving towards the volcano, after being dormant since the 1840s. By the end of March, a fracture had split the mountain; a column of steam and ash billowed up into the sky. Ash began to fall like rain, except for when it did rain, and mud fell from the sky. By May, we were watching the bulge on Mt. St. Helens grow as if it were a mole on our own cheek, and the steam and ash rose like a dark disease from within.

In school, we learned that volcanoes erupted hot orange thick lava, while at home, my parents erupted and spewed vicious words and insults, slaps to the cheek, yanks to the hair. They threw dishes across the kitchen and jars of peach preserves at the wall. But St. Helens, we discovered on the Sunday morning of the 18th, erupted ash that darkened the sky across the entire state. Mudslides reached the Columbia River, just north of us. Outbursts continued on into the next day, more tremors, more ash, more mud. It clogged the sewers and puddled in the streets.

My dad was supposed to move out that Sunday, but the moving van canceled. No one could see through the cumulous ash. They continued to fight, my mother angry, as if it were somehow my dad’s fault St. Helens had erupted, as if we all hadn’t seen it coming for months. But we all had seen the destruction coming for months.

School was canceled the next day. The city didn’t want children outside; inhalation was dangerous, the local news said. But my father had gone to work, and my mother had gone to the back of the basement, where the stash of canning jars lived in the cellar. I could hear her throwing jar after jar after jar against the concrete foundation wall, each crash followed by the splatter of glass on the floor.

Outside, with a scarf tied around my face, I took a jelly jar and dipped it into the ash. It had a silky feel and slid through my fingers like flour. I tipped the jar up and held it against the still grey sky. A snow globe of my own making, the grey tantrum of the earth leveled in the glass.

“I was born in this place,” I said to no one, knowing even then that in its desolation, it was home.

Tributaries: "yosemite"

By Mia DeFelice

after Daughter, “Switzerland”

forestmaker. two halves making home.
            breathe wanderings onto my wooden spine / my grateful tongue.

curling like chimney gasp / twirling greyscale /
i’m calling you home in a small way. joining sounds yet
unbirthed. hovering somewhere between sentient / soldered.
the air is younger here. your sweater doesn’t do enough.

recall — we two flames lengthwise on single bed,
shotgunning sighs. cabin boy / vapid boy / prayers wreathed round
bed posts, as string lights.

we walking barefoot through holocene / minted mountain passes /
mulch like ice chips under toes — then we amongst pines / shifting scents /
chimney gasp obscuring you from me —

            treading light on parables rooted deep in dawnlight / gentle
            on bare branches — trees you scaled as child / as sketched
            limbs clutching white bark. my heart beating off half-formed
            ribs / you a braver conflagration than i —

                        and you wearing a white soiled shirt / smile seeks
                        relief / red dewdrops and stitches made by your
                        mother’s impatient / disappointed hand / known
                        quantities in smudged stockings / scratched kneecaps —

i would hold you if i could.

i hold your sounds instead. in small iced hands / mittens covered raw /
keep heat in / keep you in. i watch icicles form on your
rosebud lips / spider lashes / aching ears /
we foliage-fragile / fracture-frostbitten / chimney gasp at first white light —

                                                            we two halves. we come home.

Tributaries: "Original Suffering"

William Lychack

In another existence—and, yes, there are many lives within this one life—I become someone who ends up going to Burma to be a Buddhist monk for a spell. It’s like a dream, no need for explanation, but at my ordination I am given a new name, U Sâsana. I go and live for a time in a forest monastery on the southern Shan plateau.

I will teach about this in my classes back home. I will explain how the Buddhists have this idea of original suffering. This is something you carry with you your whole life. It’s not always obvious what the suffering is to you—or sometimes it’s so obvious you don’t count it as anything—but still every choice you make can be traced to this one single thing. It’ll be your giftcurse, everything touching back to this for you.

One afternoon, driving in our jeep from Mandalay to Yangon—I’ve gone to Burma many times now, the complete opposite side of the world in every way, as far from home as I could ever get—and still I feel I must have been a Burman in a previous life. A Burman, or a Brit, just someone with a great affinity for his station here, someone who found he loved the heat and rain, someone who could go as if by memory along certain roads and rivers. This would make about as much sense as anything to my Burmese friends. No need to spell out such yearning to anyone here.

It’d be enough to say you simply felt drawn to a place. In Burma, if you passed unsatisfied from this life, you’d be reborn on the plane of hungry ghosts, your soul coming back again to complete some piece of unfinished business from a previous existence. It took the Buddha many lives to become the Buddha. With this kind of mind, it’d be easy to appreciate—and to have some compassion for—the way a person might feel compelled to keep going back and forth over a particular piece of ground.

On our drive south to Yangon, we stop at a roadside gas station. There’s a small village nearby, and off to the side a very old woman is selling teak chocks, tall stacks of wedges set out in all sizes around her. She’s no bigger than a little boy, woman inviting us to sit with her in the shade. She offers tea and mango, and the breeze is pleasant off the small pond behind the house and palm-leaf shed. She wants to know the story about us—our heads shaved clean, the three of us explaining how we’ve just disrobed, just left the monastery—and she’s pleased and tells how she’s lived on this hill her entire life.

We’re only there for ten minutes—the space of a cup of tea, the engine of our jeep ticking itself cool nearby—and she tells of her children, her grandchildren, her husband’s death, and how she laughed at her younger brother when she was six years old. She didn’t know any better, the boy in his coffin in the front room of the house, but almost ninety years later she’s still known in the village as the little girl who couldn’t stop giggling at the funeral of her brother. It’s right there in her face, the sadness and shame, the acceptance, the odd sense of pride almost, the old woman relighting her cheroot.

Of all the stories she could have told, that was the one she chose to tell about herself. That must mean something. Of all the things she might have wanted us to know about, of all the things to share with complete strangers, it was that single moment from a lifetime away that she chose (or that chose her), this being the detail that let her situation speak, this young girl reacting to the sight of her brother lying there as if asleep.

---

Willaim Lychack’s work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Short Stories, and on public radio's This American Life. He is the author of a novel, The Wasp Eater, a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers, and a forthcoming novel, Cargill Falls. He currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Tributaries: "free women"

By Kathleen Hellen

down the street from where
someone had painted Tear
It Down— as if she were
confederate—from where
the martyred maid still flags the air
for France, a shining reenactment on Decatur
there’s the voodoo museum with
its copy of Rinck’s
"femme de couleur libre"
The veil, the “little roof” she wears
a shelter for the spooks
who want a tip—a cigarette, a dollar
at the altar to the carnal.
They used to think I looked like her
the hostess reminisces
and leaving off the tired histories
says at Congo Square
on Sunday afternoons
she moonlights as the rabbit or
the wolf, the rougarou
potions her desire, prowls the oyster
bayou, her wetlands forested.  The pleasures
men confuse  

with domination. Hair
the contraband, wrapped up in a little tent
where ten to six she sits, contemplating
womanhood. What woman
wouldn’t, if she could
dwell in appetites

---

Kathleen Hellen is the author of the collection Umberto’s Night, winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her collection The Only Country was the Color of my Skin is forthcoming in 2018. Hellen’s poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Seattle Review, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry Daily, her poems have been awarded the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. For more on Kathleen go to https://www.kathleenhellen.com/

Tributaries: “Another Morning”

By Soo Young Yun

The kkachi [1] watches the girl, admiring her ebony tresses as dark as his own tail. She peels off her shoes and lays them daintily behind her, much like every time she enters her home. The kkachi blinks as the streaks of the cold morning sun paint the girl’s silhouette onto the cement. Her shadow is the same colorful grey of the sunlight, her eyes the same hue of everyone else’s in the city. The city is full of pleasantries and scripts, of malleable noses and always lit hagwons, and the kkachi notices the same question hanging by the girl’s head, saying, sadness is the minority, is it not? How can anyone be sad when everyone is wrong in the head?

The kkachi admires the grace in how the girl’s shadow leaps and soars from the ledge. He flaps to the glittery studs on her sneakers, cawing in pleasure to see another lovely pair of ivory shoelaces. Another pair for his collection.

[1] Korean magpie

Selections: “Interlude on Darkness”

by Gary L. McDowell

Nighttime as elegy. Nighttime as constraint. Being in the state of. Nighttime’s alter-ego: the Jazz Man. Croon, baby. Croon. Darkness after light is universal. Or before. We recognize the world, the jaws, the mandibular arc of daybreak.

*

Imagine living in a city before electricity. Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, writes that, “…in 1830 what lights did exist [in New York] were intended only as beacons or guides rather than to illuminate the night.” Imagination hadn’t yet shortened the night. “The New York street lanterns burning whale oil were in 1761 merely ‘yellow specks engulfed by darkness,’ and even more than a hundred years later its gas lamps were still ‘faint as a row of invalid glow-worms.’

*

I’ve never been afraid of the dark. Things that go bump. I have fears, no doubt. Just not what’s-in-the-closet, what’s-that-shadow-on-the-wall, that sound! what is that noise? Maybe failure. Or silence. But darkness and silence are two different sides of a very similar coin. Darkness: the lack of visual acuity, the distinct absence of optical cues. For which to maneuver. Silence: hypersensitive visual acuity, but with calmness, without clatter—precision, depth perception. You can hear what you see.

*

the mandibular arc of daybreak…

And its opposite: the sun bowing, dissolving into silhouettes. Sloping. We call this time twilight. The gradual gathering of darkness has three stages. Civil: cars need headlights. Nautical: one can navigate via the stars. Astronomical: the faintest stars available in the sector of sky one sees are visible. In other words, that long blue moment.

*

I’ve only been to New York City twice, but one of those times happened to be in the summer of 2010. The Flatiron district. Jim Campbell’s installation titled, “Scattered Light.” From two A-posts in Madison Square Park, Campbell hung a net of 2,000 LEDs that turned on or off when visitors walked by. The result was a set of ghostly, moving silhouettes capable of being seen from hundreds of feet away. I remember walking just closely enough to turn the lights on, then backing off until they switched dark again. Over and over. Really, I just wanted to get to the bookstore, but the scatter, the secret on-and-off, the way I felt, momentarily, crepuscular: my pupils expanded, my irises relaxed. The light flooded in.

*

The same gene that makes your iris makes your frontal lobe, which controls personality.

*

But we expect darkness. We crave it, have for millennia fought our fear of it, waited for its end to hunt, gather. Though in it, through it, we navigated, procreated, birthed. Our ancient core, our collective, or genetic memories from before we were even human, needs view of the night sky. We are connected to the nuances of our surroundings through their occasional absences; in other words, nocturnalization.

*

As the retina ages, its proteins thicken, become, like an old windshield, flaky and cloudy, an accumulation of minuscule chips and dings—a veiling luminance. According to Bogard, these proteins “reduce the eye’s transparency as they scatter the light coming into the eye.” Basically, contrast. Surely you’ve driven at night, on a lonely road, stars visible above the horizon, maybe even the moon’s shadow cambered overhead, its playful half-circle etched into the empty passenger seat. Maybe a deer on the roadside. Oh, its eyes: pearly, translucent. Driving at night slows down time, or speeds up time. It depends on how many deer, how many marble-eyes. What I’m really trying to say: a shadow marks arrival and departure, the simultaneity of progression, a slowing down—of time and light and bend: gravity or the unknown arc of space-time. Something of a continuum. And then the speeding up at some burst of light—a flashlight, stroke of lightning, daybreak (even the slow burst of morning is still a burst), headlights—and we’re back to seeing shapes unhinged, less shapes, really, and more the things themselves.

---

Gary McDowell is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Mysteries in a World that Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Press Book Award. His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Gulf Coast.