Lost & Found

editor's note

Reclaimed by Stacy Brazalovich

The philosophy driving these evangelical outings was that you had to get someone lost before they could be saved. So we Abercrombie and Fitch clad children played Virgil to the Dantes of urban Ohio.

poetry

Lost & Found by Lisa Plowman Dolensky

I seem to spend my whole life looking for things--
Car keys, purses, notebooks, sunflower seeds, remotes and unmatched socks
I wonder…
Could it be that I really don’t ever want to find them?

Pixelated by Catherine McGuire

We are leading ourselves further and
further into the ether -- our words,
and pictures, vaporized to nano-coughs
enmeshed in circuits as small as a final breath.

Clean-Slate Days by Erik Ta

Everyday
I begin a new day, a virgin and impervious day.
Clean hands. Fresh start.
Square one.

narrow man by Brian Edward Bahr

spidered refractions.
twinned bouquet of white.
ticking trapped in gritted teeth.

Antique Jar by Ken Weene

I know not the substance you once held:
food or drink, poison, balm.

The Random Step by Fariel Shafee

And each possible world
Curled up
With simultaneity;
And histories folded to
A single point.

Forever by Robin Offerdahl

our cat sits with patience each day
at the foot of our French doors

Passé Iconic by Paul Handley

If Plato dropped in would he be dismissed
because he didn’t know the initials J.F.K.?
Become a street person for an inability to relate?

Missing by Carla Martin-Wood

Would you study bleached bones of driftwood,
cast runes of sea glass,
read signs in the inscrutable nightsky?

The Sea Dream Child by Caitlin McGuire

When she wakes, she runs her hands
down her flat stomach, a mixture
of relief, confusion, and almost
disappointment.

Question by Ann Doro

If I drink the blood of a warrior
will it make me brave?

My Mother Takes Inventory In Her Nursing Home Room by Pat Durmon

Somehow
she has not disappeared.
And she declares, “They won’t take me alive.”

We've Never Met by Bob Bradshaw

We share the same veiled moon,
the sleeves of mist, the sad fog horns.

The Second Marriage Rears its Head but Does Not Attack by Mark Jackley

One night in bed, slowly,
in between blackouts
and screaming matches, lamps hurled,
knives and ripped upholstery,
we ate a box of ginger snaps

fiction

The Corners of my Mind by Carrie Bachler

I feel the cold of her ring against my hand, a tiny ruby that I had saved for all last year, and I smile. It makes me happy every time that I see it, because it’s my promise to her. My promise that one day we’ll have a three-tiered cake and brick walls and a pile of bibs stacked up next to the towels. She takes it off and looks at it all of the time, holding it close to her eyes and smiling as the light bounces off the gem in little red sparkles, and when she’s drunk she tells me how she loves the color because it’s just like blood, alive and real.

Crowley's Ridge by CL Bledsoe

She was actually afraid, she didn't know why, but there it was. She didn't know if she was afraid of seeing something, and feeling foolish, or seeing nothing and forever having to face her son knowing that he'd willed himself to hallucinate. Or maybe that would happen to her, too, maybe they'd convince her she'd seen God in a stained glass window. Maybe He was there, and she couldn't see it.

Dottie by Rebecca Burns

And because she needed to convince herself she was doing the Lord’s work, the bedroom door was kept tightly shut and Evie was encouraged to play noisily. Feelings of doubt - horrible, needle-like fingers of worry that plucked at her insides – were cut off at the stump or crushed by the thump and crash of domestic life. Sometimes it worked - on days when her niece was there and the babies were quiet, she was almost certain she was doing what God wanted.

Three Pieces by Kate Maruyama

Martina takes the earthenware platter down from atop the china cabinet. It is chipped at one end, a victim to Aunt Irene's spoon-involved creamed onion outburst five years ago. But it is still serviceable.

Paisan's Pizzeria Lost and Flounder by Sherri Miller

"Look, the longer this fisherwoman casts her line, the deeper she’ll have her hooks into him. I’d like to tell her to go fish somewhere else and spare Gino from being reeled in by the likes of her. We gotta do somethin’ before she dumps his carcass and he drowns in a sea of sorrow."

Gone Fishing by Joan Pedzich

There’s no predicting what’s going to hurt the most. For Jayce, it was the boot that went missing. Our Sammy’s boot, left one of the pair we’d given him for fishing the day he turned ten. They’d come out of a sale bin at the Army Navy, camouflage pattern rubber, of two different sizes. Sammy was so tickled by them.

A Decorous Age by Michael Saad

Emil remembered this news story from a few weeks earlier. The psycho killed an entire family – a husband, wife, their two teenaged sons - apparently over a bad drug deal. The story disturbed Emil, haunted him. The photo they showed of Klodden on the news was that of a monster - a wild-eyed, scruffy-haired drifter whose somber, stone-faced expression kept people on edge, knowing this evil hombre was on the loose.

Boxes by Aliya Whiteley

I left Lily in a box, at a café I once visited in my early twenties. Returning now, after so many years, is not so much an indication that I would like her back, but a sign that I no longer consider her to be something I need to run away from.

nonfiction

My Pretty Fifteen-Inch Dell Laptop, and Its Connection to the Interblag by Francesca Leung

"Bruce has two rules," Shad tells us, on our first week at work. "His first rule is that you should be most comfortable where you're spending most of your time. That's at work, so you should make your cubicle and your computer as comfortable as possible."

reviews

Solo, by Rana Dasgupta. Published by Fourth Estate, 2009. by Alison Stedman

Ulrich is a blind one-hundred-year-old, living in a dingy apartment in Bulgaria. As he sits and listens, he dreams of his life, and he dreams of possible lives. Starting from his childhood, we are led by this one man through a century and a country that have undergone startling changes and startling failures. We are also led through his dream world, where lost realities bear fruit in his dream children – adults in the twenty-first century world who could have been his children.