Editor’s Note: We welcome Channie Greenberg back to the Cafe today with new poetry and fiction. Channie never fails to surprise us with the interesting directions her art takes – nor to delight us. My Etsy Site My Etsy site’s full of objects made from century eggs, sannakji, and puffin hearts, But not fugu, or hákarl, especially not shark meat served alongside surströmming. See, I couldn’t, hereafter, entirely disconnect all of my offerings of fins and tails, Give up completely trucking with evil, especially lads revealed to be key criminals. No lack of midwifery of unhealthy scions insures my partners keep their beds clean; Outlandish creatures show up in my life, regularly, despite my doughty efforts. What’s more, since I’m temporarily ineligible for base jumping, given my gestation, I dusted off my teacup collection. I like porcelain, locally sourced,…
“Typhoon Season,” A Short Story by Michael Colbert
Logan followed Natsumi to Japan and he was beginning to wonder why. Yesterday he wondered why when he drank bad coffee from 7-Eleven but was desperate for an iced latte. Today he wondered why when he tried to buy stamps at the post office to send his seventeen-year-old sister a birthday card. “Kitty,” he said. “America made kitty.” Natsumi had told him what to say as she ran out the door of her mother’s house to buy more medicine. Her mother was sick. Badly sick. With what, Logan didn’t know. “Logan, I need to go home to Japan,” she’d said. In bed, her back was to him. He stroked her smooth shoulders, outlining the Astoria house he saw through the window. “My mom is sick.” They were coming up on the end of their lease. Their first apartment together. They met in college, Wesleyan. He was studying…
“Out of Time,” Powerful Flash Fiction by Lucy Zhang
A ticking time bomb. Every tick a precious second lost–not preserved in Snapchat or Instagram–the memory of it cached in a few brain cells before a new memory purged space for itself. Ellen, twenty-nine years old and ticking, kept a bright pink box, the First Response Rapid Results pregnancy test, in a cabinet behind the bathroom mirror. She already wasted one test on a false-alarm missed period. After peeing on the tip, feeling the warmth of a droplet of urine on her finger, she had stood watching the test for ten minutes while her husband, Wes, stood outside the locked door to the bathroom. No pink. Safe. Or not safe, she supposed. She and Wes had been trying for children for a few months now. You’re in the prime of fertility in your twenties, Ellen’s mother had…
Introducing the Poetry of Jessica Lovett
STRING OF LIGHTS Our hands go like this they go up I’m so proud of us all of this us, and the things that kept falling out, the sharp hooks of twisted girls’ mouths are lights on a string they’re just lights on a string. I guess it’s probably spring but I’d find that out at your house look at you, with all your time SEEING THINGS FOR WHAT THEY ARE On the edge of a bench the sun mutters a breeze look at the trees; look at guy in red hat and capris my body’s a cylinder placed on top of a moving submarine, this you’re better to believe performative pigeons and their soliloquies you could have me, here, in a lot more ways than one …
“Thistled Spring,” by David Norwood
Robin perched in her tree and frantically counted the eggs in her nest. She feared she had taken too long hunting for worms which in turn gave other creatures ample time to steal her eggs. But, it was just too damn hard to find any food. The ground was as hard as a brick and the grass as thick as a jungle. Why couldn’t it rain just a little to help loosen the soil, or why couldn’t someone cut the grass and drive those worms out of the ground for her, she thought. Was a little help too much to ask for? But, all four eggs were still nestled together just as she had left them, and her worry began to ease. She then scanned her immediate surroundings for any signs of intrusion. Claw marks? Chipped bark? Broken limbs? Mangled nest? Had some miscreant been lurking while she was away, it would most likely return later that night. But,…