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Oct 29

The Perils of Meditation

by Pearl Johnson

(December 2010 to December 2011)

Reading the description of post traumatic stress disorder on the Veterans Administration website both terrified and comforted me. I was reading my story. I realize I sound like one of those medical students who becomes convinced she has every disease she studies, but I am no medical student (as I am no veteran) and I have no desire to cope with the reality of PTSD. I have no desire to cope with the real world at all. I would prefer to live in the land of glass half full optimism, and deny I have a real problem I must face. I would prefer to keep moving on until I find that place where everyone is kind, and troubles melt like lemon drops. Wait, that is just a song. I live in a world that appears continuously dangerous to me, but is in reality a mixture of good, bad, and neutral as the world has always been, and I want to learn to live peaceably in that real world that will always hold both suffering and joy.

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Oct 27

When We’re Left Behind

by Shaun Fletcher

We always hope for more than a folded flag.
I close my eyes and find Justin blackened on rocks,
days dry and fractioned.

Some nights I find him in brush, a wince
tattooed on his face with one-hundred-fifty grains
filled with uniform blue ink.

I look for a dog tag, a smart mouth, a white bandana
matching the one I carry in my back
pocket, wrapped around shrapnel.

One night I found Justin in a dawn-lit bog.
My youngest sister kept my face from mud,
stitching her legs on my chest to walk me home.

If only he’d walk in with medals all over his chest
with the one arm hand-shake-hug of brothers –
medals with a true “d” and not the Jersey accent “t”.

We meet in his friend’s house, a surprise
visit for his birthday by all his brothers. Blood
accounts only one drop of this ocean.

The times I don’t find him, I brew coffee
percolated in our grandmother’s hands. We eat from her
living room. All of his pictures burst.

Justin and I in matching prom suits on prom night.
The glass spiders and smokes.
Our smiles eaten by sleep.

Fletcher is a North Jersey poet, science teacher, motorcycle tourist, and a proud Air Force brother (cousin by blood, brother by experience). His work often attempts to understand the connections and distance between people using science, the mind, and the road as common mediums.

Oct 22

Radio Chatter

by Timothy Redmond

January 10, 2002

My second year in law school, I dated a classmate, Connie. Connie was sweet and attractive, with beautiful, long, brown hair. At school she was all Ann Taylor, but on the weekends she could rock the Bebe. I used to sing to her rare, old Irish songs:

Her eyes they shone like diamonds
You’d think she was queen of the land
And her hair hung over her shou-ou-der
Tied up with a black velvet band

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Oct 15

My Daddy

by Jeanette Barszewski

My Daddy was a bald, smiling baby in a little lacy dress.

My Daddy was forced to wear old lady shoes to school during the Depression.

My Daddy was a year ahead of Mom at Sacred Heart School and was 6’2” in the
eighth grade.

My mentally-ill Grandma told me that a talent scout wanted Daddy to sign a singing
contract after he overheard him in the bathtub crooning quite beautifully.

My Grandpa left my Grandma alone with five kids when my daddy was sixteen.

My Daddy was expelled from Aquinas Institute for Boys.

My Daddy joined the Coast Guard at seventeen.  He would get plowed on leave and
would run off for miles down dark country roads not knowing why he was running.

My Daddy was a Maryknoll brother for a while.  We have a picture of him in long black
robes like a priest’s.

My Daddy joined the army after that.  He would go to the enlisted men’s canteen on
Friday nights.  Once he woke up in the middle of a cornfield miles from anywhere
not remembering anything after his first beer.

My Daddy was ashamed of not seeing combat in Korea.   He was learning to speak the
language when stationed there.

My Daddy was razzed by the other soldiers for not using prostitutes in Seoul.

Jeanette Barszewski is a writer of poetry, memoir and some fiction when she can find some time out from being a wife and mother in Hamilton, NJ. She is the daughter of SSgt. John L. Coon who was killed in action in Quang Tri, Vietnam in 1968.

Oct 12

ennead: To Lay Down a Prayer in Nine Parts

by Imani Sims

There are times when conversation
gnaws at tissue wrapped acid

It is well.

in an effort to arrest
joy’s soft shimmer magnificence.

It, is well.

no conversation is too large
to grow through like sequoia root to branch.

It is wEll.

She is the soft lens mirror
cradling the stitched together pieces

Itiswell.

in her hands I unfold safely
perfumed blossom of plump brilliance

It is well.

sweet abandon to tender palm–
love adorned eyes.

It is well.

May we find the chuckle
of fourth center deep joy.

We are well.

May liberation spread wings against
our ribs: a pulling toward adventure.

We are well.

May the purist nectar spring from
lips to baptize with cherished intent.

We are well.

Imani Sims is the granddaughter of a United States Army Veteran and a United States Navy Veteran. She has borne witness to their stories and continues to use those stories to influence her work. She is also a performance poet and educator.

Oct 3

Spring Fever in Memory Care (Palm Bay Veterans’ Home)

by T. G. Hardy

The tall Masai princess of a nurse always makes me smile.

That’s the only constant in my life.

Comes from the heart, this smiling, she says, not from the brain. My brain is not reliable, but my heart seems to be.

But my brain has its moments, like right now, when I can at least follow myself.

I’m naked and alone with this juicy woman, and she has me strapped to a plastic seat, which she will lower into this vat full of warm salt water. I forget my beef jerky limbs — I’ve got a trophy hard-on going and D’Arcy is kind enough to take note.

She makes big eyes, “My maman liked to say a man’s brains were in the head of his pickle. Your brain’s acting lively this morning. You should maybe exercise it, give it some physical therapy.”

“Hot damn. Let’s get started.”

“No, you — on your own. Can you?”

“I was in the Navy. Thirteen years.”

“See, you’re making sense already.”

I start touching myself, real self-conscious at first. I close my eyes and after a stroke or two, I’m dancing — as they say — like nobody’s watching.

She whispers, “What are you thinking of, A-B? An image from the past?”

“No. I’m picturing you and me all soaped up in that shower over there.” I switch to baritone. “On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’-fishes play, An’ the dawn comes up like thunder —”

“Lovely, your poem. Took me back to Haiti, the dawn coming that way, like thunder.”

The seat moves down the rail and my ass floats off the seat bottom and I’m weightless, held in suspension by the harness straps. This triggers something.

“I got one — an image from the past,” I say, grateful for the diversion. I was getting too close to thunder, too quickly.

“Take me there,” she says.

“The floating, it makes me think of dogfighting, going zero-g to unweight and accelerate, looking for 350, my ass cheeks floating just off the ejection seat.”

“Must have been exciting, this type of flying.”

“Actually, D’Arcy, the coolest part was just taxiing the F-4.”

“Really now?”

“Oui. From the cockpit, sitting clear out on the beak of the beast, you can’t see the wings behind you and you feel like you’re bareback clear out on the tip of a huge throbbing phallus and, shit, it’s your own . . . actually more like you’re its, rather that it’s yours —”

I lose my place, that taste of rust again in my mouth, and I start to cry.

She bends, this woman, to kiss my forehead.

T.G. Hardy served as a naval aviator with Fighter Squadron 33, flying F-4 Phantoms off the USS Independence. After the service he pursued a career in consumer marketing. Six years ago he quit Manhattan and repotted himself in Colorado, where he began learning the craft of writing at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Boulder Writing Studio. He is working on a short novel, and two of his short stories have recently appeared in SpringGun Press and the Faircloth Review.