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.