The Structure of Fiction—a poem by Matthew Kirshman

The problem was as Sal stood by her friend

He was getting robbed by three older boys

In the first scene state the predicament

Such as there was a calamity

She hoped to help him as the world came apart

Then the story became a wild goose chase.

The first attempt to solve this mystery

Which began or had its birth in failure

Depicted our parents in a puppet show

The trick, the illusion, the play of speech

A story so utterly absorbing

Some unknown urge preceded the telling

And wandered through the body of work.


___
Matthew Kirshman lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two daughters. Before settling down to teaching, he had a varied career—telephone repairman, bartender, and cook, to name a few.  Publication credits include: Annapurna Magazine, Apeiron Review, Ascent Aspirations, The Bacon Review, BlazeVOX, Café Irreal, Dirigible, Helix, Indefinite Space, Key Satch(el), Mad Hatters’ Review, Phoebe, The Wayfarer, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Z-Composition.  He is the author of posthumous papers (Nothing New Press). Radio Tales (Red Dashboard) is due out in 2015.

to a cousin—a poem by John Grochalski

my only real memory of you

was from when i was five or six

i’d just been to my first pirates game

and you were at the front door the next day

spying those golden bill madlock wristbands

that my old man had bought me

you asked me if you could have one

and without hesitation i gave it

even when sammy kozub’s cousin

flipped you on your back on the pavement

i never thought of taking it back

because you were defending me

and this is the first thing that i thought about

when my old man called and told me

that you were gone at only forty-one years old

suffocating on your own vomit

like some kind of rock star

i hoped whatever it was that took you wasn’t genetic

because most days i love this life too much to leave it

and i’m scared shitless of doctors and hospitals

i thought about violence and baseball and biology

on the day that you died

instead of how you simply weren’t here anymore

but time has been cruel to us both

family, i mean what can you say?

in some lines blood just doesn’t run thicker than water

it trickles from a rusty pipe

and we never really knew each other

because our dads didn’t get along

so i probably have no business trying to eulogize you

especially in something as cheap as a poem

because you could’ve been any face on the street to me

you virtual stranger

but maybe there would’ve been something in the eyes

that would’ve caught us both

some resemblance or the mention of an old baseball hero

kid stuff to spark some kind of reminiscence

but that chance has passed us by, cousin

we’re distant stars burning out

and now we’ll just have to wait for something else


____
John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), the novel, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and the forthcoming collection of poetry, Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street, 2014).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he constantly worries about the high cost of everything.

Gently Used—non-fiction by Robert Boucheron

Chris Oakley founded her bookstore on little more than a whim. A slender woman with long brown hair and a lively manner, she appears to be about forty. Yet she grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 60s. At the University of Delaware, she helped produce an underground newspaper and poetry readings. In Wilmington, she worked in printing and magazine layout. In 1993, she visited her sister in rural Virginia.

     “I fell in love with the countryside,” she says. “I was certified in prepress and a member of the typographers’ union. A printer hired me.” After a year or so, it was time for a change.

     “I had been in used bookstores that were dark, dusty, poorly laid out, and crammed with books that nobody in their right mind would buy, books that were tattered, stained, and had pages torn out. How about a clean, well-lighted place, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, stocked with recent titles in good condition?”

     There were already two used bookstores in the small town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Both matched her description of what was wrong. The historic center of town was reviving, with a new pedestrian Main Street Mall. And on the Mall, a new mixed-used building was opening—York Place, named for the black slave who went with Lewis and Clark on their 1804 expedition. The African-American owner Chuck Lewis needed tenants for the street-level arcade. With a partner, Krista Farrell, Oakley leased a space. With a few hundred books and no financial backing, they opened for business in November 1995 for the Christmas shopping season.

     Oakley’s Gently Used Books still occupies the same space, plus the one next door. The store doubled in size in 2011, and now has 15,000 books on its shelves. Farrell left after a year to take a job with the public library, and another partner came and went, but Oakley carries on. She is true to her mission.

     “I’m selective in what I buy,” she says. “No textbooks or romance novels.” Oakley keeps up with trends. She reads trade magazines like Goodreads and Shelf Awareness. She has subscribed to the New York Times Book Review since age thirteen. She snaps up hundreds of titles at an annual sale by the public library. More come from people who are weeding their home libraries. The books she accepts are clean, free of underlining, with spines intact. Most the stock looks new. Oakley offers cash or store credit, which keeps them coming back for more. And she asks what they like: “My customers taught me what to buy.”

     Charlottesville may be small, but it’s international, with a mayor from India and street vendors from Tibet. The University of Virginia attracts students and faculty from all over the world, and Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello attracts tourists. Accordingly, Oakley’s store has sections for foreign languages and travel. A locked glass case protects a few dozen collectable books.

     “I don’t carry rare books,” Oakley says. “Several dealers in the area have expertise for that. In the glass case are some signed first editions, scarce Virginia history books, and sets like the original Codex Alera series of novels by Jim Butcher. Theft is not an issue, but accidental damage is. I learned the hard way.”

     Apart from the glass case, customers can browse to their heart’s content. Prices are low, half the original retail price or less. “This is a store for readers,” Oakley says, “people with a passion for reading.” A few minutes of talk reveal that reading is Oakley’s passion, too.

     “Authors go in and out of fashion,” she says, “especially when a book inspires a movie. Joyce Carol Oates is up and down. The seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester were best sellers for years, but now they’re in a lull. Earlier writers on the sea like Jan de Hartog and C. Northcote Parkinson are sailing back. I thought I had a handle on mystery writers, then people asked for books by Louise Penny, a Canadian whose mysteries are set in the province of Quebec.”

     The store’s specialty is science fiction and fantasy, to judge by the amount of shelf space they rate. Mystery and crime are not far behind. Customers are aware of this bias. They drop in for specific titles and to chat with like-minded enthusiasts. Oakley knows with uncanny accuracy what she has in stock and what is flying off the shelves. She attends genre conferences like LibertyCon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia. The latter name alludes to the poem “The Raven” by Richmond’s Edgar Allan Poe.

     Oakley has met best-selling authors, and she counts a few as personal friends—Kim Harrison, for example, who wrote The Undead Pool, published in February 2014. Oakley hosted a book signing for her last year, an unusual event for a used bookstore. Harrison was in town for the annual Virginia Festival of the Book, held a block away in March. Oakley has long participated in the festival as the moderator of a discussion panel for science fiction and fantasy.

     She also hosts a Kids’ Book Swap on Saturday afternoon during the festival. The book swap spills into the arcade, with thousands of books to share and trade, and about twenty excited children. Strangely, there are always more books left over than when the event started. Oakley has learned to bring extra boxes. Inside the store is a section for kids and young adults, with books displayed at their height, and a beanbag for them to browse in.

     Oakley tried advertising in the early years. “To be effective, ads need to be well-placed and frequent,” she says. “Shotgun ads that run only once, for example, are a waste. I sent an email newsletter. But it took hours to write and edit, and time is precious. With no employees, all the chores fall on my shoulders. I’m listed in business directories, and book lovers know I’m here. Downtown is a great location. Tourists find their way here, and people come on book buying binges.” Seven bookstores now cluster within a few blocks.

     Success comes from more than location and luck. Oakley logs every book sold in a notebook next to the cash register, she straightens shelves daily, and she checks for books that migrate to the wrong section. “I take inventory once a year,” she says. “I purge damaged books and ones that have been here too long.” She donates the slowpokes to charities like Goodwill and the SPCA.

     An unusual move was to offer display space to John Ruseau, who paints watercolors of architecture and marine subjects. Now retired, Ruseau taught art at the University of Virginia, and for years he had his own gallery. His colorful, detailed paintings of Venice and classical architecture draw people inside. In return, Oakley is glad to help her friend with a sale now and then.

     Other than fine art, Oakley resists adding non-book merchandise. Near the front are two revolving racks filled with miniature books, like postcards. At a few dollars each, they make perfect gifts. As for coffee and snacks, a Cuban café and two Asian restaurants are steps away in the arcade. To placate fans, she sells a T-shirt printed with her slogan “Gently Used.”

     After dabbling in online sales, Oakley saw that she was competing with online retailers that have huge warehouses. “At the moment, I have 450 books listed on Amazon. Online sales are a small percentage of my total.” When asked about e-books, e-readers, and the death of print, she shrugs.

     “Sometimes, I think I’m selling widgets, a product that’s obsolete. But the store has always paid for itself, even during recessions. People keep buying books. Staying open seven days a week, however, is getting old. I’ll close Sunday and Tuesday as an experiment.”

     The main attraction, of course, is Oakley herself. She asks each customer how she can help, and a conversation ensues. On one occasion, the customer was a man visiting from out of town named Jim Beall. An engineer and inspector of nuclear power plants, Beall was attending a four-week training session at the Federal Executive Institute in 1998. A science fiction fan, he canvassed all the bookstores on his first free day, ending at Oakley’s.

     “None of the staff knew much about the subject,” he says. “They couldn’t answer questions, and their shelves were disorganized. I walked in here and hit the jackpot. We got to talking, and I was even more impressed.” Recently divorced, Beall thought he detected a reciprocal interest.

     “Let me see that left hand,” he said. Oakley smiled and held up a ringless hand. By the time his training session ended, they were engaged. They married in 2000. Beall retired and stopped commuting to Washington last year. He helps out in the store, especially in science, mathematics and military history, but he says Oakley makes all decisions. And he loves to tell how they met.

     “I came in looking for science fiction, and I found a fantasy.”


___
Robert Boucheron is an architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His academic degrees are Harvard, B. A. in English, and Yale, M. Arch. His stories, essays and book reviews appear in 2014 in Belle Rêve, Bangalore Review, Coup d’État, Digital Americana, Digital Papercut, Lowestoft Chronicle, Outside In Literary & Travel, Piedmont Virginian, Poydras Review, Ray’s Road Review, Short Fiction, Work Literary Magazine, and The Write Place at the Write Time.

Three Places—a poem by Catherine Simpson

A girl in a white dress walks on the beach.

A barefoot girl in a long white cotton dress

Walks on the beach.

Call: response: yes: no

*

Crabgrass on the lawn.

Ursa Major clawing the

Sky. The smell: walnuts.

                *

Red geraniums in plastic buckets

Hang from plastic awnings.

Fourth of July:  families in heat-wet

Undershirts gather down the street

In plastic lawn chairs, look up, sigh. 

___
Catherine Simpson is a cellist from Santa Barbara. She has been previously featured in over thirty publications, and has work forthcoming in The Aurorean, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Nefarious Ballerina, and Prairie Winds.

Caterpillars—a poem by Christopher Suda

Between Jazz & the Blues

The vein caterpillars up,

sucks it down through a glass

straw, then we vanish. Its bliss,

by the mean of memory can not

be resurrected, only performed.

Perhaps no different from death

since itself, too is unimaginable. Others pick

and choose but I can’t.

Angels visit through the doors, observe

the war, (discuss the next) then move

on by foot—wingless as always. While

leaving, one articulates ‘effort’. Farther

wins out each stretch.  The photograph is said

to depict a sturdy image of time—So will I.

___
The Poet: Christopher Suda's poetry has been published in blazeVOX, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Aura Literary Review, Poetry Super Highway, The Wayfarer, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys, and other literary journals. Christopher is currently a twenty-four year old undergraduate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is a musician involved in three current music projects: Philos Moore (singer-songwriter) In Snow (Instrumental), and Loveislight (Experimental Hip-Hop).

The Artist: Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 400 national and international online and print journals. Some of Dr. Williamson's visual art and/or poetry has been published in journals representing over 40 colleges and universities around the world. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net Award. 

On Beggars—a poem by Pratap Kumar Dash

We are beggars, we are beggars…..

Son to father; daughter to mother; friend goes farther;

Beloved to lover; neighbor to neighbor;

Master to servant and rich to poor!

A chain of beggars—one begs to the other.

A handful begs for handful and handless begs for handful!

Because, everybody is a beggar.

The earth is a beggar; the river is a beggar;

The ocean is a beggar; fire is a beggar!

Give and take; take and take; give and give;

Get and forget; give and forgive.

Buddha was a beggar; Gandhiji was a beggar;

Jesus and Mohammed were beggars.

They begged for alms of brilliance;

Of truth, love, conscience and reliance.

The world is rich in beggars

Having house, horse, cars and creature;

All that called money and honey,

But inside-- a discontented feature.

___

Dr. Pratap Kumar Dash teaches English at Sebha University, Libya. He has published his writings in CLRI, The Taj Mahal Review, RJLCS, Orissa Review etc.

Topographical Masquerade—a poem by Thomas Piekarski

We were stretched out on the esplanade                                                          

                                                                                                 

                Fishing poles limp hot dogs

                The carp didn’t bite there

                So came night came the stars

                That bullied the sky so we left

                Hitching Highway 1 coons

                And possums trailing winds

                Majestic along headlight

                Beams that skimmed bait

                The indolent fish refused

Unquestionably unilateral over the top daredevil

                Window washer repels slings

                So high almost out of sight

                From skyscraper 45^th floor

                Underwear exposed puffs a Camel

                Swings precariously defiant

                With a smile slips loose drops

Relaxed with a bubbly he said she’d always wanted

                An erudite type not some bloke

                With porcupine skin you recognize

                Cucumber nose you’d easily mistake

                For a tsunami any time the waltz hit

                Rodeo Drive made the moment real

                Not overexposed the convivial father

                Call him paladin unfortunately

                Suffered a mild heart attack in

                An orange grove outside Riverside

                Non issue because life is limpid

                Knows elections don’t halt taxes

                Wife weaving a dress from satin thread

                Bakes cookies for the Brownie troop

On a good day he was certain to knock three times   

                                                                                                            

                Stovepipe hot and she would respond                              

                By beating a tin kettle the cat

               Texts cousin Sue sweet in Madagascar

                Ducting clear of pesky dust mites

                Thank god the glass slipper glistens

                In the sink we show great stealth

                Ascend dozens and dozens of steep

                Iron steps inside the capitol dome

                Wind way up to where pure

                Gold plated ball kisses nascent clouds

                Gaze way down the mall where

                River and Tower Bridge merge if only

                You could stop traffic on a dime now

                Arrest distance with nuclear theory

                Maybe Vanderbilt or Bach could

                Backstage Mata Hari lurks squats

                Senator you should do something

                Do something before the ice cube

                In my martini melts like a man

Stan and Ollie trailed team Chevy Chase three

                To nothing in the bottom of the ninth

                When it began to drizzle pin pricks

                We packed bananas and Pepsi cans

                Hightailed out of Frisco on the next

                Bus and buzzed into chilly Berkeley

                Like a pair of slightly juiced dolphins

                We both stomped jovially

                Up Shattock toward the Civic Center

                To find a Miloz selected someplace

                Anyplace remaindered so crazed

                At last fruition bubbled to the rim

And that was a photo to be relished while eating

                A Po Boy at the Amtrack terminal

                Jawdropping buns and jugs sat

                No man’s land across from me

                Distanced yet here a daisy showed

                There a unicorn stunning immense

                Glissandos left on the hothouse steps

                Along with nine empty milk bottles

                I swear Ted sure did cry when they

                Took his toy monkey away from him                     

                Easter was early or anyhow it seemed                                  

                With so much snow all around                                            

                But difficult to catch a flake on your

                Tongue to salvage sanity or soul

We absolutely did not want to be discovered curled

                Like a couple of snails copulating

                At the foot of Mount Ranier given

                Beautiful as Aspen is Owens Valley

                Some circumstances I would avoid

                Outright if possible not patronize

                The fashionable politics of bullets

                Kids favor these days over the pen

                Isolated from good poems perfect

                Eliot masterful Gauguin

                Messianic howl over the moon

                Turned sienna before my eyes

                In a symphony the ages descry

Ear muffs ipods cell phones phonograph afoot

                We watched Roy Rogers kick up spurs

                 Hop onto Trigger and head out for

                 Wonderland so that it would become

                 Essentially unnecessary to ask why

                 The chicken steadfastly refused to set

                 Foot on the road and why it elected

                 Not to lift its shirt and expose its navel

____

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry and interviews have appeared in Nimrod, Portland Review, Kestrel, Cream City Review, Poetry Salzburg, Boston Poetry Magazine, Gertrude, The Bacon Review, and many others.  He has published a travel guide, Best Choices In Northern California, and Time Lines, a book of poems. He lives in Marina, California.

Song (To my sister, Mariela)— a poem by Diego López

Something has COVERED its mouth

Voice is familiar
though
when its song
             
             All light quivers to no more

                                                        colors are no longer colors
                                                                                                 

The moon, star, ocean and the idle sun are now ears

A splash                                                 A shot goes off
is a click of the tongue                 a petal has ripped



A cry is heard                                       Cement crumbles
A circle is completed                          an instrument is dragged



___
Diego F. López is a working writer from Lima, Peru, raised in New Jersey, living in New York City.

 

Cloud white slather—a poem by Wayne Burke

Cloud white slather 

above brown brick block;

     a telephone talker,

     a chick

     running into bank

     for last minute withdrawal,

     businessman with attaché

wine-salesman or maybe heroin-seller,

     hillside houses scattered

     like dice among

bare trees, brush, brown-green;

     office workers going home

     to grub

or to Irish pub on noir-ish side street

     by jewelers' sparkling windows

     on corner...

Chubby high school girl

     wearing green Celtics' jersey, walks past;

I hear screams of punks on Brooklyn Street

     (where shooting was last week)

church steeple an up thrust dagger into

     cloud slather

purr of cars from Prospect Street;

     my back to pine tree

     my prospects few

     (could be worse)

pine needles at my feet

twigs, cones, chewing gum

wrapper, butt...

I should do something to get out

     of here,

     but what?

___

Wayne Burke's work has appeared in FORGE, miller's pond, and Northeast Corridor. He was poet-of-the-month in Bareback, 7-13.