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I Saw the Sunshine, Melting

I Saw the Sunshine, Melting

Beneath the old sarcophagus and inside the core of Reactor 4, there remains a black, molten mass. The mass has a name, though I’m not sure who named it. (Only a few people have seen it in person, and it’s unclear if any of them are still alive.) They call this black, molten mass the Elephant’s Foot, and if you look at it for more than five minutes, it may be the last thing you see. The blackened lava has solidified in parts and formed rings, loops like the bark of a tree. At its center, the Elephant’s Foot continues to burn. Thirty years later the wolves and deer and wild boars have returned, the sun is scorching, the mushrooms are scraping their fresh caps against the sky, oh my, oh my! And the core is still melting.

Sonya BilocerkowyczScott TSR SullivanMay 29, 2019NONFICTION, TSR Classics

Origins

This daily shrinking of a 28-letter alphabet
Trading غين حاء عين ضادfor the Fourteenth Amendment
Dragging inshallah by the vowels from right to left.
English no longer my second language
Nor Arabic my first.

Hajer AlmoslehScott TSR SullivanMay 22, 2019POETRY

The Return of Skinny Arno

The Return of Skinny Arno

Morgen EljotScott TSR SullivanMay 15, 2019GRAPHIC

Ode to the Quick Brown Fox

We knew dog. We knew to love
lop ears and slow bounding after
tennis balls in the park. Wasn’t a fox
trying to trick the Three Little Pigs?

Kimberly KemlerScott TSR SullivanMay 8, 2019POETRY

Faux Pas

Faux Pas

I remember every second: the shock of how very hot things feel very cold, the way my finger stuck to the plate, the skin tugging as I pulled it off, screaming as my grandmother ran the cold water. “Bet you won't do that again,” she told me. “Don’t just do things because people tell you to.'”

B.A. Van SiseScott TSR SullivanMay 1, 2019NONFICTION

SOME PEOPLE YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT

I’m not here to have opinions

I keep thinking, Rib-eye steaks, and what do you know? Lil’ Spanky actually comes by. “Just Billy now,” he tells us, shaking Thomas’s hand. “But look at this! Big boss right here!” he says.

Thomas shrugs. He’s in a rayon shirt and cuffed slacks he ordered from a back-alley tailor in Little Saigon.

Billy’s still holding Thomas’s hand as he says to me, “Back in the day this fool was at a Motel 6! Running fingers through the carpet for rocks!”

“Yeah,” I say. “That probably explains a lot.”

Steve ChangScott TSR SullivanApril 24, 2019FICTION

Equivalent

Every couple of months, the seller arrived unannounced to pick up something he had left behind: a wall phone in the den, canoe mounts in the shed. The buyer allowed him to take what he wanted, then asked him for help with a difficult chore.

Amy HempelScott TSR SullivanApril 17, 2019FICTION, TSR Classics

Dog: Gone

A man told me once that there’s more nuclear waste roaming the highways than there is in underground storage. He said they can’t keep it in one spot for too long. (I did not ask who “they” were.) I merely nodded at this possible lie. I found the story too romantic to want to challenge it.

Nick BertelsonScott TSR SullivanApril 10, 2019FICTION

The Naïfs

I asked her death angel, whom I could barely see that day, why. Why the savagery. She had been, on balance, a good person. Selfish at times, deceptive even. But on balance, I mean. The indistinct angel might have shrugged, I couldn’t be sure.

José SotolongoScott TSR SullivanApril 3, 2019FICTION

memorandum on plans for a city

first we must arrange the burial of the dead,
what some say are arrangements for life. the body seen through police eyes
we call it mourning. the ceremony. others call it an inconvenient bus ride.

Clifton GachaguaScott TSR SullivanMarch 27, 2019POETRY

The Great Plains

The fence won’t be a deterrent for Liam; even with his skateboard, he’s a climber, and he’s not one to fear consequence or retribution. He has grown up in a trailer with his dad and his sister, the trailer park a tiny communal netherworld separated from the Kansas college town’s outer ring of student housing by a block of untapped woods that will soon be purchased and plowed and built on. For now, big fighting dogs roam unchallenged.

Amy StuberScott TSR SullivanMarch 20, 2019FICTION

Take Back the Dark

Do you man or woman? Are they afraid of the dark?
Not monsters under bed or hall closet noir, but walking
home talking loud on the phone to no one. That dark.

Geneviève PaiementScott TSR SullivanMarch 13, 2019POETRY

Coffee Table

HEMNES, named after the Norwegian word for “home,” left with your husband when you asked him to move out. All through the days and weeks that followed, you pushed remnant furniture across hardwood floors, liberated desks and armchairs from parallels, and right angles, arranged rooms for friends who didn’t yet exist.

Catharina CoenenScott TSR SullivanMarch 6, 2019NONFICTION

Casual America

She’s started refusing furs. She turns up her nose at mink. She will not wear weasel. She won’t allow me the coonskin cap, either. It’s all about collegiate dress, she tells me, and one doesn’t wear furs to lecture.

Charlie SterchiScott TSR SullivanFebruary 20, 2019FICTION

december 13th, 2016

I pictured
the 3 who had vanished from the data
as if they had risen from the ruins
and swept from their legs and chests
the cracked stone that had been chewed
by inhuman teeth.

Xiao Yue ShanScott TSR SullivanFebruary 13, 2019POETRY

Sherry Takes a Cherry Pie to Her Father’s 58th Birthday Celebration

It’s February, one of those thaws you get in the Midwest,
so she’s driving a T-top Firebird, top off and in the trunk.
The 8-track is cranked because we’re young. In our 20s.

Roy BentleyScott TSR SullivanFebruary 6, 2019POETRY

“La chair est triste hélas et j’ai lu tous les livres”

At first I thought it meant there is no escape from the spiral of life’s endless quest for entertainment, and I recited it, in my youngest adulthood, so young it could barely be called that, in a town called Villedieu—it means God’s town—of which, in France, there are too many to keep track

Sarah Van BonnScott TSR SullivanJanuary 16, 2019FICTION

Tenderness

I have a friend who is nagged by this memory of a very indecent Garfield comic strip. He says it is actually quite sexy, but incredibly perverse, and not just because it involves an anthropomorphic cat and meatloaf.

Shane KowalskiScott TSR SullivanJanuary 2, 2019FICTION

Incision

There is a museum of feathers
in that wisdom tooth: this is the real
reason your dentist is taking it out.
The insects of his anxious fingers
pry apart sprays of raw tissue,
bare pink stalactites of your mouth.

Christina Beasleyvanessa cutiDecember 26, 2018POETRY

Gloria

Gloria watches him intently, her perfect first child.

More swimmers arrive and go to the raft. Her son swims away from them and joins her on the shore.

“I knew you would come in when other people arrived. I know how you are,” she says. “You have always been a loner.”

Ana DanielScott TSR SullivanDecember 19, 2018FICTION