sinkingcity – Page 2 – sinking city

The Enemy

by Alex Rettie

England, 1950

These are the men who set Milan on fire –
mild and pale and rustling their papers as
the train takes us past fields of grazing sheep
and timbered cottages whose thatched roofs an
incendiary attack would burn right down.
They say that Coventry – where I’ve been sent –
was badly hit. The Luftwaffe's bombers
laid the whole city waste in just one night.
I hope it’s true. I hope its young mothers
ran between flames and falling bricks, crying
for children they would never find.

Alex Rettie is a Canadian poet and book reviewer who writes from the top floor of a rented house in Calgary, Alberta, His work has appeared in journals in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Raceme, One Art, the lickety-split, Queer Toronto, ellipsis, and Passengers Journal.

Tell me: where is your sympathetic nervous system

by Heather J. Macpherson

bronchial tubes widen, blood vessels
narrow, the ones pumping and flowing
to your heart—

your heart pumps pumps such rhythmic
unposturing so close to the ground
each chamber a room, a holding cell

suffers the sharp gravel, observes the punc-
tuated arrogance—pump says the right
ventricle from wrong to the right atrium,

an airy portico steeped in ethical doctrines
where oxygen enters the lungs, the unheard
gasp siphoned, the body, your heart—lays still.

Heather J. Macpherson writes from Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Soundings East, Bennington Review, 580 Split, Dr. T J Eckleberg Review, Blueline, and other fine places. She teaches writing at Clark University. You can read more about Heather at heatherjmacpherson.com.

Prayer

by Mozid Mahmud

Mahfuza, your body is my rosary
I observe you and my prayer is done
In any prayer other than yours
My body is not cowed in such attention
I am exhausted in your fire
So that you can be happy
At your closeness arises vigorous God
Then being a shield you check His slanting rays
By getting your touch my pangs come down by seventy times
I every day practice the exact spelling of your name
Somewhere Tasdid Zazam seems to be read
Man listens to my overflowed recitations
With your name is sacrificed my offspring
Keeping head in immolation frame modern-Ismail will not tremble
Mahfuza your body is my rosary
I observe you and my prayer is done.

Mozid Mahmud is a poet, novelist, and essayist based in Bangladesh. Some his notable works include In Praise of Mahfuza (1989), Nazrul – Spokesman of the Third World (1996), and Rabindranath’s Travelogues (2010). His novel Memorial Club is forthcoming from Gaudy Boy LLC in late 2024.

The Train

by Pragjyotish Bhuyan Gogoi

Train no. 12424 passes through the station
At 3:00 in the afternoon,
Making a cut across the heart of the timid town,
Disrupting its machinery for a few minutes,
And waking the clerk up from his hypnosis
In the District Magistrate’s office.
He turns his gaze away from his files
Towards the blank wall,
Which gives way
To him and his father
In the paddy fields of his village
On an early May morning,
And that whistle of 12424,
Drawing his gaze away from the mud
Towards the smoke-blowing machine,
As the crops sway in unison at a distance,
As if bowing in utter awe.

When the train departs
With a sweet parting whistle,
The clerk gets back to his files,
And the child gets back to helping his father.

Pragjyotish hails originally from Golaghat, a small town located in the state of Assam, India. He currently resides in New Delhi, and is pursuing his PhD in Physics from the University of Delhi. He admires deeply the works of T. S. Eliot and William Blake, among others.

Gala

by Gabrielle Griffis

I’m trying to work my way backwards. You take plane flights to untangle yourself. I pull hair from the shower drain.

The dog dies in winter. Your mother vows she will never own another. She shows me a video loop of a murmuration. Birds fly out of the trees.

Sitting on the dock, plastic bags look like jellyfish underwater. There’s a piano buried in sand behind the thrift store. The guys at the candy shop do drugs in a backroom.

In a dark car, you ask about my fantasies. I want to say, “To turn into a flower and be pollinated by bees.”

You ask if I want to come inside. I drive home, down an empty highway dotted with lights across saltmarsh and scrub pine.

There was more rain last year.

We are in the kitchen dancing. Rosa rugosa petals fall in the yard. The dog’s hips are giving out. The in-dent of her body in bed. We walk her favorite path. She’s named after an apple.

I bought a bathing suit on the drive. You stuff your bike in my trunk.

We wade into the ocean. We wade out. You lie on a towel. I cover your body with shells and rocks. Sun heats quartz.

I find prickly pear cactus flowering at the edge of the bay the day we walk the beach looking for you.

Dim lights. Dining room.

Your mother talks about crimes of passion at the dinner table.

You look at her with disgust.

You’ll probably forget this all happened, but I won’t.

At the swap shop, old women squabble over an antique clock. A man barks because you wander into his trash trailer. I find a book about sacred circles full of pictures of wreaths.

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” you say, sighing between racks of moldy clothes.

I show you the circle book.

I want to create meaning out of irrelevant signs because nihilism hasn’t taken over my life yet.

Roads meander through barren trees. We dance where there used to be pews with a woman who’s mad she’s old. You show up.

I do laundry.

You’re in a beach house on the edge of a marsh. Sun sets over cordgrass. Harsh gusts. Winding through forest. Dust covered knicknacks. Peeling floral wallpaper, a bad collage appreciated only by the beach bum you adopted like a stray cat. In an upstairs room reading on a floor mattress, the wind howls. Maple in the front yard. Snow falling, snow melting. Hellebore emerging, wilting. Rose mallow. The summer waning, the summer dying.

You think I like your long hair, but I don’t.

At the film festival, you make friends with everyone. In the car you talk about cultures absent of judgment-based language. In the vestibule you wear a dirty red coat.

I say that’s my job

You say that’s sweet of you.

I tell you what I am going to do.

You tell me what you want to do.

I answer the phone.

You call.

Gabrielle Griffis is a musician, writer and multimedia artist. She works as a librarian. Her fiction has been published in Wigleaf, Split Lip, Matchbook, Monkeybicycle, CHEAP POP, XRAY, The Rumpus, Okay Donkey and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2022 and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Read more at http://gabriellegriffis.com or follow at @ggriffiss.

Herd Everything Seen Everything

Ronald Walker is an artist living in the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style he calls Suburban Primitive. This style combines his interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. He holds both an MA as well as an MFA degree in painting and his work has been shown in more than 50 solo exhibits over the years.

Men to Boys

by Joseph Hardy

An old marine, my seventh-grade PE teacher, made us march on the playground in the Four
Winds; we, who wanted initiation, who knew only World War II in movies on black and white
TVs.

I can still see his salt and pepper crew cut, his face, the swollen red of a committed drinker. Hear his bark at our mistakes.

But when we got it: the turning step that marched us apart, one column becoming four, striding out in faith of his cadence, then turning again, four columns becoming one in perfect step, he whooped and would have thrown his hat into the air if he’d had one.

Joseph Hardy, a reformed human resource consultant, lives with his wife in Nashville, Tennessee. His work has been published in: Appalachian Review, Cold Mountain Review, Inlandia, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore among others. He is the author of two books of poetry, “The Only Light Coming In” and “Becoming Sky,” through Bambaz Press Los Angeles, and a picture book, “At the Reading of the Will—And a Boy’s Life Thereafter,” IngramSpark.

memory ubique

by Angela Ramos

I sleep better

because Nate is in the Northwoods, holding vigil
where I used to shed mortal fluid
to mark territory; where I
dripped saltwater and dejected tissue
in sync with lake tide.
my heart lives in the reedy marshes
that are tucked

secretly there among the bones
of old birch, rotting evergreens,
and dead people.
sometimes, though, my mouth

fills with the desert, with
pinons and roadside honey and
I feel the rope of moon and stars
I left behind there, in the
motel parking lot, tugging at my throat. once,

a raven approached me
and a quick, green lizard
perched on my shoulder. petrified
wood scattered the vista. this was

before your time. I wore
my dead grandfather’s shirts,
striped powder blue and butter yellow. I wore
wry expressions and a sunburn
from falling asleep in the back of the car, where
I later sold amethyst cathedrals
and Tarot cards that told the story
of how landscapes collide.

Angela Ramos

Visitors

by GR Collins

The father and son enter and everything
is ruined. Paint starts peeling from the walls

cracks appear in the glass, the circus
gate is breached and the city falls.

The father and son do not stare at the damage
and think my God we did this as they ride

their bone carriage through the crowds.
Instead, they think see how they love us

as they smile and wave, as they flay
all the unscarred arms and bless

each tender head with a cudgel.
Soon, they have staked their claim

and wrapped each face in foil to show
their movies on. But in the end they grow bored.

Nothing is left for them to take. No fields
remain unscorched. Then one day they are gone.

Crows gather in the willowshade of their passing.
The holy ghost hides its shadow in the marsh.

GR Collins is a writer from Milwaukee who has held jobs as brick mason, farmhand, middle school teacher, prep cook, and currently works in biotech. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Whitefish Review, Waterstone Review, Red Flag, Hive Avenue, Red Rock Review, Flint Hills, and others. He lives with his family in the heart of dairy country, where there's always great cheese.

sun drunk

by Carter Rekoske

contrails arc across the canyon
as four crows croon around a cave.
the sun sets, yet the clouds are deep
with rain so i fear i will see no stars tonight.

my sunburns are still hot to the touch,
but i’ve come to understand what’s insignificant.
here, i’ve found that if i put enough mirrors on the ground,
i could walk across the sun drunk canopy of clouds.

when i search for omens, i’m shown only beauty.
nature remains unchanging in that way.
each new dawn, each new desire,
each new song of another that i make my own

i sing only to return to myself. the sun
like a heart thumping through the body of the world.

Carter Rekoske is a poetry enjoyer. He is excitedly waiting to begin his candidacy in an MFA program this Fall. He won the poetry award in Bryan College’s 2022 and 2023 annual literary contests, the 2023 Dan Veach prize in the Atlanta Review, and is published in Black Fox, Common Ground, and the ever so infamous elsewhere.