I return to that house, that night, that instant almost every day. It wasn’t late, not even quite 7:30—this we know from the call records on our cell phones—but it was cold and dark enough to feel much later. I arrived first. I could see that a light was on in the living room, but there was no light through any of the other windows.  The car was in the driveway.

I turned my own car off and waited in the dark, but I had no way of guessing how long Abigail would be. Finally, after what I now know was just a couple of minutes but what seemed at the time like an eternity of indecision, I walked up to the front door and unlocked it.

When her life was shattered by her sister’s suicide, Liz Seymour found unexpected comfort in a big old-fashioned volume of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Every night, she would drop her finger (I Ching-styled) into the book and go wandering through her thoughts with the world’s most quotable companions. Liz lives in Greensboro, NC.

by Darlene Pagán

My query starts with a search on sapling growth, more specifically, how many inches of growth are possible from seed in a five-year period, but a link pops up in red: How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? With two young children of my own, I pull my hands back from the keyboard as if I’ve touched something slimy. Who would write such a thing? Then, I think this must be a joke. It cannot be as gruesome as it sounds: someone sitting in a darkened room who not only considers ways to assault children but devotes time and energy to an entire website that encourages others to consider the same question. More likely, there were a few college friends, bored, half drunk, imagining what might happen on a playground if the entire kindergarten class suddenly turned into zombies after eating a bad school lunch. Despite the creepiness, my curiosity wins out, and I click the bright red link.

Darlene Pagán teaches writing and literature at Pacific University in Oregon. Her books of poems include Setting the Fires (Airlie Press) and Blue Ghosts (Finishing Line Press). Her essays and poems have most recently appeared in journals such as Calyx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Brevity, Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, Literal Latté, and Hawaii Pacific Review. She loves to swim, hike, dig at the beach, play in the rain, and ride roller coasters now that her sons are just tall enough to ride. For more information, visit: www.darlenepagan.com.

by Michael Levan

At eight weeks, she eats / less and less. Food doesn’t sound good to her, / it’s all Too complicated, she says, when he offers / to make her breakfast, lunch, dinner. She stops him / from saying the dishes out loud—veggie patty, plain noodles, a bowl / of oatmeal with sliced strawberries all too much / to taste on her mind’s tongue. 

Michael Levan has work published in recent or forthcoming issues of Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, Radar Poetry, Mid-American Review, and American Literary Review. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saint Francis and writes reviews for American Microreviews and Interviews. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and children, Atticus and Dahlia.

His name was definitely Frank. Hers, I can’t say. But the roses—those, I will never forget. Waxy, fluorescent hybrids so extreme they tipped over from the burden of their outsized heads. Some might have called them garish but not me. I was dumbstruck by their loveliness—perhaps even suspicious. I wanted to touch them, eat their petals, prove their reality. So thick were the roses that they nearly obscured the chain-link fence they lined, which inexplicably cordoned off a small patch of the already small backyard, itself squared in by yet another chain-link fence. In the center of the rose-lined inner fence was a concrete slab on which sat two 1970s-style lawn chairs. Presumably, this is where Frank and his wife relaxed on summer nights—maybe with sweat blooming in the folds of their necks, maybe with pain shining like spurs in their knees and hips—to admire their rose progeny…

Jeannine Ouellette is the author of several nonfiction books and the children’s picture book Mama Moon. Her work has appeared in many journals including Up the Staircase Quarterly, december magazine, Nowhere, The Rake, Utne, and On the Issues, as well as in the anthologies Feminist Parenting and Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. In 2015, her short story “Tumbleweeds” was selected by judge Joyce Carol Oates for a second-place Curt Johnson Prose Award, and her poem “Wingless Bodies” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Jeannine is founder and director of Elephant Rock, a creative writing program based in Minneapolis. She is working on her first novel. 

When I say that studying physics has amazed me with smallness, I don’t mean us, relative to the size of the universe. I mean the cells made from atoms made from protons and electrons and quarks that—guess what—are also waves. Then, as if all this talk about particles acting like the ripples in a pond …

Continue reading “Noticing Uncertainty”