'My Father Brings Home the Roots and Bark from a Sassafras Tree' by Debra A Daniel

“We’ll make tea,” he says, “like my grandmother did.” He’s cleaning off the dirt. “Sassafras tea tastes like root beer.”

“Beer makes you drunk,” I say. “Girls aren’t supposed to be drunk. I could get arrested and thrown into the clinker.”

“That won’t happen. The clinker is for hardened criminals,” my grandmother says.

“Ladies don’t call it the clinker,” my mother says. “Ladies call it the correctional facility.”

My grandmother huffs. “The clinker is more refined than hoosegow or slammer.”

“Or joint.” My father’s voice sounds like a movie bad guy.

My grandmother almost laughs. My mother flares her nostrils. 

“We’ll make sassafras tea like fancy English people,” my father says. 

“Sassafras tea will poison you,” my grandmother says. “You’ll die frothing from the mouth, gargling on spit.”

“Ladies don’t spit,” my mother says, “and they only gargle in private. Refined people never die that way.”

My father puts the roots and bark into boiling water. “Now everything simmers,” he says.

The water bubbles. It smells spicy and woody.

“Let it seep,” my father says. I wait to drink danger.

“I won’t witness the imbibing of impolite liquids,” my mother says and leaves. My grandmother wrings her hands.

Finally the tea is ready. He pours two cups, adds honey, stirs. 

My father and I take the tiniest of sips. Then we twinkle-eye each other. We both grab our throats, plunge backwards, crumple to the floor, and lie still like we’re dead from tea.

My grandmother leans over us like a vulture. She wants to be mad with both of us fake-dying right in front of her eyes, but she isn’t. Now we’re laughing, my father and I. Even my grandmother. We forget to finish the tea which didn’t taste that good anyway.

' Truly Lost' by Scott Macleod

Sign posted at apartment gym:

LOST

All sense of sanity and decorum

If found, please return to the guy at the free weights rack who alternately grunts like he is fully dilated without an epidural and sings like Ryan Seacrest is tabulating his score from the treadmill. 

Generous reward to be enjoyed by all. 

Also missing are the heads of numerous gym members who could find them on their own if they look backward into the mirror while doing squats.

' Lattice bridge' by Michael R Evans

is burning down where you guided me one night beneath the canopy of maples and spruces on a study break dare. The popular one and the loner. You remove my glasses to enhance the blackness. All friendship, no faces. We climb over the bridge-closed sign. Holding the oak girder, I clomp surprised onto dilapidated deck planks. We feel our way, scale the crisscross white-painted truss in a spotlight of moonglow.

converse with the September canyon creek below— You interrupt— Have you ever seen a falling star? I laugh at the absurdity. Come on. You lead me through an endless tunnel of thick-barked boughs into what you swear would be a clearing in the daybreak. Thinning tree crowns eclipse the moon. Your hands eclipse my eyes, no peeking. Then you unveil— oh! a myriad sky of placid fireflies at rest

is our Van Gogh viaduct to the infinite, once camouflaged by distant city lights. Under October leaves the colors of flames, all eyes skyward. Still, I weigh this presence against what’s hidden in our well-lit lives: our friends starving students, your research funding ending, spending too much time in the coffee shop where I straighten consignment paintings and wipe counters looking for new customers. Over your shoulder, white-hot, a cinder diving from nowhere into superstition.

reveal the Northern Lights in November that dim the starscape. You say, I love you, but this was never that. I return alone, to confirm the aurora. For a moment, everything is discernible: I was never alone. Not there in the clearing, nor here babbling by the old bridge. Burning, disassembling the latticework. Choking the stars. And you are not here to console me. Through the smoke, I see you through the smoke on the other ledge, flickering incandescent. Tossing down the matches. Walking away.    

'Kapaʻia Swinging Bridge' by PL Harris

I feel her sneakers tread my lumber.

The people of Kauaʻi came together just a few years earlier to renovate me.

Originally built at the turn of the 20th century to help fieldworkers get to and from home and work over the gulch cut into landscape by Kapaʻia stream, I was gray and weakened by the 21st.

How I shuttered and swayed when the old planks were removed.

How I worried that I’d fall, crashing into the river below when civil engineers removed and replaced my cable suspension.

But these good people put me back together. I’m not surprised. With both their Buddhist and Catholic churches nearby, I’d always felt doubly blessed.

And now she is here, this woman I’ve never seen before. Though it is the first time she has walked across my back, her soft features and dark skin are familiar to me.

I think back to all the feet that have crossed this bridge, mostly Japanese and Portuguese feet, the feet of immigrant fieldworkers. Back and forth they went, every day of the week. 

No one had sneakers back then. Work boots, flip flops, sandals, yes. Trainers no. She is a descendant, I conclude, but she sees and walks differently.

She is alone. No co-workers or family. And she is drinking it all in. Her eyes rest on me. Her eyes rest on the river. Her eyes reach out into the distant horizon, where sugar cane once met the sky. 

What is she looking for? An apparition? A voice from the past? Who her people once were? Who she should be?

There’s no way for me to know. I feel her feet leave me on the far side of the bridge. I miss her already. I wish for her return. 

'Letting Go' by Pam Makin

 “Fifteen is almost an adult,” she mutters, slipping out of the window to disappear forever.

'Mayberry' by Willow Woo

Alastair the crocodile spits up five dogs as Ines the walking yarn zebra meanders, noticeably lasting burps. He putters, tiptoes home, and shoots oopsie whoopsie rounds just to keep quiet egos in vexing X.

'Exposed' by Allison Renner

We were happy once, not when we first met, both outcasts with no one to square dance with in gym, but we partnered up and became inseparable. Our friendship developed after the bell rang, when we could go to my house where no one was home and be ourselves. There, it felt safe to talk about how we felt, to share more than words until you felt stifled.

Suddenly, it was too much, too wrong, and then you shared my secrets with the world.

I walked home alone, sat in the house alone, wondered what you were doing. Made a plan so I wouldn't have to go to school tomorrow.

' The Unfortunate Meeting of Echo and Narcissus' by Beth Sherman

Thousands of years ago in Greece, a boy meandered by the river’s edge. Olive trees swayed in the springtime breeze. Wild anemones tipped white petals to the sun. A water nymph splashed, playing hide and seek with eels. But the boy noticed none of that, so transfixed was he by his own image reflected back to him as he knelt on the muddy bank. This liquid gaze? That aquiline nose? Curls soft and pale as baby’s breath? Surely, his face deserved to be etched on a vase in the royal palace.

The nymph agreed. When she caught sight of the lad she was stunned by his beauty. She stared and stared at the human God, who only had eyes for himself. Her longing filled the river, tickling catfish, scaring her eel playmates. She forgot she was beautiful, too. Her flowing hair a ripple, her skin blue as sprigs of poisonous larkspur. She forgot she was cursed, with only an echo for a voice. She forgot she had wings. 

When he spoke aloud – what matter what he said? – all she could do was repeat his words until he was sure there were two of them. Him and the beautiful boy in the river, cloaked in a mist of clouds. Seasons shifted: sultry to crisp to snow that kissed the river with a thin sheen of ice and still the boy stayed, eating grass, drinking rainwater, craving the unattainable River Boy. The nymph pined and withered, her arms becoming circles that skipped stones traced on the surface, visible only for a moment before fading away. Her voice, rusty from disuse, was stolen by a raven one day. You can still here it near the river some nights. Harsh. Forlorn. Waiting for an answering mating call.   

'The World’s Longest Suspension Glass Bridge in Huangchuan, China' by Elisa Dominique Rivera

It’s not easy being an introvert with the job that’s been bestowed upon me by the gods. Every time the Sun is out, throngs of them turn up to cross me which always make me shiver inside. I’ve watched every single one of them present with a smile before they step on my belly. Instead of marvelling at my structure, the strength of my red arms holding on to the sides of the Lengjia Gorge, and my transparency (a gift to them from the gods), they gather for a talk about “safety”.

Safety from what? Here I am giving them a corridor to witness the ancient Lianjiang River and they are too busy putting on harnesses and funny foot coverings which tickle my glass skin.

These miniscule souls, they don't marvel at me or the Lianjiang River, they are too busy looking at their devices, using me as a crutch instead of a window into the natural world. They laugh at my belly, as if there’s anything amusing about carrying their fear of mortality in the middle of me. Why do they cross me, then cry as if it’s not the best experience to be up in the air above the ancient Lianjiang who has seen a millenia of history pass by, but never saw humans over it with a structure like me?

I wish the criers, or the gaggling young ones preoccupied by their reflection on their devices, or the ones who find gratification in seeing others suffer are not allowed to even set foot at my side. I wish I could sway to the breeze to nudge these annoying tourists, so I could worship the mighty Lianjiang River in peace.

'Redundant/laid off' by PL Harris

 I’m the happiest redundant/laid-off-person anyone has ever seen.

It all starts inauspiciously.

I’m late to work, again.

Shoving my bike into an empty stall, I felt a buzz in my back pocket.

Text message.

My boss’s boss.

Am I coming to the meeting?

What meeting?

Where’s the meeting? I text back.

He describes the room. I recognize it. No windows. Three chairs. Enough for him, the Human

Resources lady and me.

He comes out to meet me and I have the biggest smile on my face.

“Please tell me I’m getting laid off today!”

Caught him off guard.

I’m grinning like a fool.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my job, my colleagues, my office.

Could not ask for better, anywhere in the whole world.

It’s just after being cooped up in an office for decades, I want to be free.

They have the severance agreement.

I ask for a pen.

Slow down, the HR lady says, go home, read it over.

But I’m ready to sign the severance agreement, pronto.

Severance from this life, on to the next, is all I can think about.

After we meet, I hop back onto my bike and cycle to my best friend’s house. And then I cycle

on, the long way home, trying a new route, on a new bridge up and over an interstate, down to

the San Francisco Bay Trail, past egrets and herons, past glassy inlets and ponds mirroring

mountains in the distance, past sailboats and golfers, past a reconstituted mastodon skeleton

found in a nearby river bank, back home.

No. Not back.

Forward! Forward to whatever my new life might bring.