Issue 18

The God Structure

By CHLOE MARTINEZ

 

“It has a god structure. I think it will resist a long time.”

—Customer review of the Uniqlo Beauty Light bra, $19.99

 

O keep me up, keep me going. Keep it together. Smooth me. Reduce
excess movement. There is a heaviness. There is around me a
God Structure. It helps me organize my thoughts. It has laid out
plans, I think, for various eventualities, and the existence of plans,

The God Structure
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Day-Trip with Missing Binky

By J.J. STARR

I knew I should have told her / we’d been traveling a few hours
she hated the interstates / back routes took us through weird

towns / she liked the fields this way and up close
they come up with tassels swaying gold-beamed wind-socks / in their way

their green so bright you’d think / the whole field a fruit ripe
enough to bite into / and the clouds so perfect and numerous and floating

like a fleet of wish and cool whip / something for the angels to rest on
she would say / and mean it as the towns came upon us like unwrapped

trinkets with a single grocer / and at least one saloon
no matter the dry Sunday / the kind of places men hung

around smoking with one / inevitable woman weathered
as a mailbox / leaning into the side of the building

Day-Trip with Missing Binky
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Saturdays, Like This

By AFUA ANSONG

Praise this Saturday which permits me to wash with my hands (I detest this).
Praise my dirty clothes, the ones I leave for my grandmother who starts the cycle with cold soapy water.

Praise the rinse, the rush upstairs to the open roof. There, the clouds open as I hang and hide my American jeans from my neighbors who don’t even trust the wooden pins to work.

Saturdays, Like This
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Misfits

By BRUCE HOLBERT

Neither pretty nor homely, fat nor thin, Bernice Gardener was a middling girl, all her fenders straight but no chrome or pinstripes. With a few ounces of vinegar, some colored powders or a curling iron, she might have done well with boys. Bernice, though, didn’t alter her pale skin and left her brown hair straight, aside from an occasional colored hairband. She wore jeans and print blouses or modest dresses her mother constructed from dime-store patterns. Though she tripled the outside reading assignment and earned the highest score in her English class, her teachers dismissed her as a mind of no consequence because she read The Thorn Birds, Peyton Place, and Gone with the Wind. She had pondered the term “making love” until she bought Valley of the Dolls in a used bookstore because she wondered why the girl on the cover seemed so pleased to be in a martini glass.

Misfits
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