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Morgan Cross

THE BABY'S COMING

The baby's always coming. The baby's coming when we wheel Grandpa into hospice. The baby's coming when we push onto a sweltering Friday street after work. The baby's coming on a parched Sunday morning, on a drizzly Monday afternoon, on Wednesday night just as the taco seasoning hits the beef. The baby's coming and she's gorgeous, nomadic, everything we dreamed we'd be someday. The baby's coming and he's hideous, it'd be better if he did not come. Still, the baby's coming. The baby's coming on the Matterhorn at Disneyland. The baby's coming on the toilet just as a chickadee collides with the bathroom window. The baby's coming in winter and summer, spring and fall, last week and this week and next week too. The baby's coming the moment we finish pouring the bath water. The baby's coming and we're not allowed to eat lunch. The baby's coming while we weep in the hydrangea bush, in the parking lot, in the ditch, down the river, on the swings of our elementary school playground. The baby's coming from a far distance but we will see him on the horizon soon. The baby's coming chubby, ruddy, with slicked-back hair and a sales pitch. The baby's coming laughing out loud. The baby's coming to serve us legal papers. The baby's coming and she will take everything from us with a toothless smile, she will leave no house, no hope, no pennies to skip town. The baby's coming ruthless. The baby's coming with brass knuckles, scoliosis, smoker's lungs. The baby's coming on death row. The baby's coming and she can't be stopped. The baby's coming now, with not a moment to waste. See her scrunched between the train and the platform, urging the doors open with her wet little hands. The baby can't wait any longer. The baby's coming.

Tiff M. Z. Lee

To the Bone

We strike gold the third time we spelunk Great-Grandmother's spinal cord: a great, lumpy nugget, half-buried in a web of dead nerves and almost glowing in the shadows of her towering C7 vertebra. They made 'em bigger back then, in the old country. Before we crossed the ocean and learned to make ourselves smaller, generation by generation, a horde of near-invisible cousins squeezed into society's hidden cracks. But here—here we have space to roam. We revel in the miles of sinew. We savor the sight of rivers overflowing with the blood of our forebears. Content at last, we wipe drops of marrow from our found treasure and march onward into the unexplored landscape.

Paul Green

NOW HERE ARE THE FACTOIDS

Now here are the factoids: a black table, a glowering screen used as a distraction machine. The sky is strips of grey, the leaves of the trees float down like charity shop dresses. The room is square, window is rectangular. Birds and small animals flicker in and out of sight. Various electronic signals tell us about ghostly collectives of huge bloody events which will be coming very soon to a town near you. All sorts of people are on display and we're all expected to celebrate. History has piled up and is stacked against us. I used to be at the controls steering myself into a future skyscape, a floaty palace of the light but that's been cancelled. I've pulled the wrong levers. Back to the big world. It operates through the distribution of disturbances. I'm crossing out the world now. I was controlled by an electromagnetic mist. Words fly in and out of my gob, it's a red cave, a cavern to die for.

Lia Mastropolo

Gravity

The word I'm looking for is not celestial but something like it. In preschool my daughter is learning, my body, your body, me here and you here. All of us live in different houses though she carries you in her body like I do, not just memory but your actual cells leftover in her ovaries that might one day make her a mother too. Where the glass is shattered, where the door was left wide open, footprints on the floor and lipstick hearts drawn on the mirrors isn't always from lack of care. Gravity needs weight, it needs a body. Seen from space the things we touch are nothing, even the hard things: cement walls, bridges. Walnut shells. Bone. Maybe the word I want is soft, I have heard middle age brings softness. Our mother's hair was soft as a baby's. We accepted when the man at the funeral home told us what to do next.

Bill Rector

The Scenic Route

I pull over. I've got a flat. This is why I never go anywhere. I can't figure out how to assemble the jack. What's a crank shaft? Where does it fit? Saguaros charge the road. This is our territory, Bud. I put up my hands. It's a standoff. Elf owls nest in my ears. Tourists on their way to the Grand Canyon stop and take my picture. Politicians promise to make me a national monument. Kids with .22s use me for target practice. Oil is discovered. Forget the monument. Fame. The wire rack of postcards. The owl nestlings make their first flights. Tumbleweeds grab my legs. Ask to borrow the car. They want to drive faster than the wind

Emily Kingery

Beer Liquor Grocery

You die at a gas station in the green chenille that used to be expensive. It is an effort to spot the potholes, but you pull in and run the pump anyway. You savor the rush in your grip. The marquee is your only light, your star above a manger. A man with one good leg says, Nice car you got there. The seat is still warm from travel. You scoop coins from your pocket, an accidental gum wrapper, and pour silver into his glove. He is familiar and unfamiliar as an ex: the baseball player who spit sunflower seeds and swore until his mouth was raw; the rail-thin drummer in XXL shirts, thrashing with poor, earnest rhythm; the consultant, whatever that means, who overfed you sugars of Donettes and Gatorade and youth. They were liars, all. They were short-lived Bics, the tricks of King Size, Natural, New. The trick of Nice car you got there two weeks before Christmas, not one but two legs at full gallop through the dark. You trip on the hose, soak your coat in fuel. He collapses you like an exhausted star. ♦