{by Gailt Breen of These Little Waves}

photo credit: Sean Hubbard/@seanhubbard

I look at him through red rimmed eyes. He wipes my cheek dry with one thumb and asks, Are you happy?

Yes. No. Sometimes.

Yes, when I’m focused.

No, when I falter.

Sometimes.

We sit in the center of our bed like our three children often do. Our room is large but this space in it is small. Our toes touch. Our voices conspire.

He is loving mixed with worry. I am anxious laced with anger.

Anger because he dared scratch beneath the surface of what I want seen. I am faltering.

When I’m focused, I see a straight path to my treasure. The obstacles along the way are simply tasks to complete.

But inevitably, I falter. I falter. It is my own undoing every single time. I steal my own confidence. My own vision. My own focus.

I hide these treasures somewhere deep inside until they are no longer visible. And I replace them with ugliness. Fear. Insecurity. Jealousy.

{by Nish, The Outdoor Wife}

All I have is the unsung in me.
The unwritten, empty pages blank,
Words piled up thick behind the whites of eyes
and the skin of my teeth.
The tiny voice speaks bold and
claws out from fingernails,
Unspoken.

I have a heart of superglued glass.
I have the ink on skin
that bleeds out onto paper.

All I have is hellfire passion
burning slow and set aflame by only
one man’s touch. His.
He unearths me with gentle hands to
untamed skin and I am left
undone.

{by Jonniker}

She picked up the glass, twirling the crystal stem in her fingers, holding the paper-thin bowl up to the light. They were the perfect glasses–Baccarat, not Waterford, as everyone knew Waterford was too fussy. All those facets, she thought bitterly. I don’t want to drink out of the Chrysler building.

She remembered the day they picked them out–well, the day she did, anyway, whirling around Neiman’s with the glowing red gun. He resisted initially, insisting that they were too expensive.

“Babe, I don’t want my grandmother forking over $300 for a single water glass,” he said. “Can’t we get these instead?”

He’d pointed to a display of Lenox glasses. Goddamn LENOX. She rolled her eyes at the memory. As if I’d be caught dead entertaining with a $36 glass. She won him over by insisting that the glasses were an investment.

“An investment in a lifetime of memories,” she cooed.

Stupid. I’m so stupid.

She turned the Baccarat upside down again, watching the light bounce off the rounded stem. She put it back on the table and twisted her hands for a moment before letting them fall into her lap. They rustled in the folds of her tulle slip, and she realized with horror that she was still wearing her wedding dress.

Her hands smoothed the fabric as she glanced down at herself admiringly.

{by Jo of Mylestones}

Sometimes I feel like the pit of my stomach is an airtight word container, precariously latched, desperately shoving against my heart to spill onto the open page. Sometimes my soul must labor to breathe because of thoughts lodged in my lungs, freed only in the coughing compulsion of tippity-tapping on the keys.

I don’t always feel it, but when I do, it nags at me until I can’t think of anything else but letting it out. And most of the time, I don’t even know what it is I’m unleashing, until it is there in front of me in words I can finally read.

But that’s nothing new, right? Just a common ailment of a writer? (Or in this case, of a girl who is still reluctant to call herself a writer or even admit that she wants to be one.)

What troubles me is how this feeling gets in the way of my daily life, how it diseases the moment I’m in. And what troubles me more is how in my melancholy, I savor these symptoms as if it is soothing to be sick.

I despise how easily I can disappear into my head and miss the rich flavor of the moment. I know I won’t be offered another taste of those sixty seconds, yet I persist in fasting from the present.

It strikes me at the library, surrounded by foam puzzles and board books. It strikes me at a party, surrounded by friends and frivolity. It strikes me on a run, in the car, in the middle of a conversation. It strikes me, and I think, “I must start writing, or I will explode.” (I am wrong about this. I will not explode. All that ever happens is that I grow weary of feeling on the verge of explosion.)

And here is the bottom line, if I’m really confessing, if I’m really naming the fear. I’m afraid that if I don’t let the container spring wide open and write, then I will never know what the deep-down me is trying to say. And if I don’t find out, if I (the daily I) do not listen to her, then no one will. She will never be heard.

{Originally posted on Adam P Knave}

I leaned heavily against a wall. Trying to catch my breath was a mistake but I couldn’t keep running. I just couldn’t. “BIG RABBIT IS, WE SAY IS, SON ARE YOU LISTENING, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” was painted along the wall. How they found space for the lettering I don’t know.

I found the strength to keep moving.

The thing of it was, I didn’t have the heat on me. No one was after me and I could’ve just gone back home. But after what I saw that night, after that, I just couldn’t. I found what they did to Porky. Poor bastard.

Technically they took him to ask a few questions. Technically he had decided to move to another city. Technically… a lot of things. This night someone had left me a key to a door I didn’t know existed, and it was there I found him. Well, films of him, anyway.

Stripped naked in a cage of rats, he squirmed and squealed like, well, to be fair, a pig. I’m not sure why I was given the key, the directions, shown what I was shown but I had a feeling…

For weeks now I kept a journal. A journal of my thoughts and dreams. Stuff that I wasn’t supposed to have, much less think. It must have been found. So I ran. I ran though no one actively seemed to pursue me. I ran to find my love. Marvin. Oh, how his helmet shined in the light. He wasn’t from around here, as it turned out. Despite what we were told. He said the wars were fake. He said he loved me. He said we’d be safe.

Damn it, I couldn’t break down in tears. Not yet. Not until…

{By Laurie of Laurie Writes}

I’m sitting in the bookstore trying to grab ahold of the words before they leave me. The game club of Maryland is gathered here, and the bookish men and women at the table next to me are playing a card name whose name I can’t remember, even though I recognize it on sight. I once sat across the table from someone and learned to play it myself, wondering why I was there when it made no sense to be, beyond the fact that I have a tendency to put myself in risky places when I stubbornly and often stupidly feel it’s worth it.

Names dance across my screen – words and facts and possibilities that I’m trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid to do it. Sometimes I don’t think I can, that I’ll just let the waves of the next thing wash over me until I’m that half mile down the beach that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and didn’t emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can’t imagine that no one saw, but maybe that’s just because someone has usually been watching me – not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I’ve never been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you’d believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers where it’s warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset. When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China – a concept we’d been taught as children digging holes for sand castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I’d never do it, knowing as sure as I sat there that later that day I’d be getting in a car and heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it, I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible shift in the air around the people close to them when people did things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when they succeeded? There had to be, I thought – at least a palpitation or a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

{Originally Published on BHJ}

I’m in no hurry. You know that guy on the highway? You can’t get into the left lane because it’s a swarm of caffeinated speedsters and you’re trapped behind some fool going 5 under. That’s me. Good morning.

I had a friend. Skip. Every time we parted, without fail, he’d say “Take it slow”.

My path to work winds through a cluster of yawning mountains. Just before the sun rises, the top, just the bare tip, of the jagged horizon’s all lit with the glow of a faint orange hum that aches to be something – looks like the mountains are about to have a big idea, like something’s about to happen. You know what I mean? You know that weird feeling you get when something’s about to go down? Your kid is walking with a glass of juice. A man stares too long at a woman’s purse. You take the first drink. Something’s about to happen.

There’s a subtle negotiation between the black sky of last night and the sleepy orange morning waiting for its time. A deep staggering blue, stumbling, confused. Sometimes it’s blood purple. In some vague space between words, it doesn’t know what it is. But it’s not bothered by this. It’s in no hurry.

I may have missed my calling as a cab driver. Can you imagine? I would look in my rear view, check out my passengers, write little stories about their pasts and futures. That guy. He keeps checking his watch and calling someone who doesn’t answer. I’m taking him to a part of town where only a couple things happen. The crying lady. Going to the airport. And those two, kissing, groping, wearing wedding rings that don’t match. Everyone’s going somewhere. They start out here. I take them there. But me? I spend my days in between. Lingering between what just went down and what’s waiting to happen.

{Originally posted on Slouching Past 40.}

Carol was prissy.

Years of living alone had cemented the fact. Without Charlie around to raise his eyebrows, a bit mockingly but largely affectionately, she’d begun to give in to some of her more obsessive tendencies — like taking Charlie’s shirts to the dry cleaners every so often so that they wouldn’t smell dusty. She could not abide that smell of disuse. Or washing the car once a week, even if she’d used it only once, when she’d had to take Penfield to the vet for his shots.

Charlie had brought levity to her table, that’s why she had married him, and without him, she’d grown rigid. A prankster, Charlie had been, and though now and then his immaturity had caused her to throw up her hands, secretly she adored it. He’d always made her feel young, and light.

Until that evening in September when he’d groaned at the dinner table. Thinking he was joking — he always was! — Carol rolled her eyes and issued her standard, “Oh, Charlie.” But for once he wasn’t fooling around. He died right there, still in the middle of eating his pie, and only fifty-six years old. When Carol flashed on the scene, she didn’t see Charlie. She saw his pie, and the forlorn way Mrs. Smith’s apples sat on the plate never failed to make her weep, even now, almost a decade after Charlie’s passing.

She was in the supermarket inspecting eggs for cracks when Charlie’s unfinished pie came to mind. The image, unbidden, unwelcome, still so vivid, flustered her. With trembling hands she picked up egg carton after egg carton but couldn’t find one that had twelve perfect eggs, eggs without fissures or breaks, eggs that didn’t look half-eaten like Charlie’s pie — damn him, couldn’t he have just finished that pie? She was breathless and red in the face when she felt someone behind her. She turned to find a seventy-something man, his beard and hair salt-and-pepper, his eyes bright and mischievous, his physique not trim, exactly, but no worse than her own.

{Originally posted on Schmutzie.com}

Over one year later, I am still discovering the shape of my grief over the loss of my uterus.

I miss a thing I could never see. I have no documentation of its existence. It does not show up in family photo albums. My clothing fits as it did before the surgery. I never touched it with my hands. I cannot trace its outlines in pictures or where it is no longer on my body.

The only evidence that it was ever here is a pregnancy test that I keep pushing to the back of the bathroom cupboard behind the cleaning supplies.

I do not like that it was cut up into tiny pieces and vacuumed out of me. I do not like that it became medical waste. No part of any body should be made into medical waste. Our bodies hold far too much power, far too much meaning, to be so degraded.

I am angry that I could not take it with me, that I could not find my own place to put to it to rest. I hate not knowing where its pieces are. I imagine it having its own sapling beneath which it could rest and feed its growth. I need to imagine it being less alone.

The shape of this grief is little more than a chronological line between two points, from there to here. It has yet find its flesh.

The chocolate-smudged face of Blog Nosh Magazine is in the process of changing. For the better. We are loosening our belt to make room for more delectable goodness, and eyeing some snazzy new pants with an elastic waistband.

In other words, the response to our call for new channels and new Channel Editors has been overwhelming and we are moving forward with a move to WordPress, complete with a new layout and easier navigation.

Look for the relaunch of Blog Nosh Magazine the second week of September. In the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to one of the new editors we brought in before the open call and are eager to see what she will bring to the table:

Deb on the Rocks!

Okay, it sure seems like we keep bringing women in and still no men, but they are coming. Speaking of coming, let’s talk more about Deb. wink wink

(click title for more)