CutBank 94

2021

Contents

Healthy and Happy
Fiction by Max Gray [Read an excerpt…]

Goliath Frog Soothes My Mother’s Morning Sickness from Her Bedroom Window
Poetry by Emma DePanise

Field Guide
Poetry by Beth Suter

The Man from Montana
Fiction by Dana Liebelson [Read an excerpt…]

Sourdough
Poetry by Erin Block

Elegy for 926F
Poetry by Emily Banks

10 Things Only Single Moms Who Were in my Living Room Will Understand
Nonfiction by Kelly Magee [Read an excerpt…]

Send Nudes
Poetry by Charlotte Hughes

The Pearl Diver
Fiction by Rebecca Moon Ruark [Read an excerpt…]

Unrequited
Poetry by Justin Jannise

Self-Portrait as Mountain of Discarded Limbs
Poetry by Todd Osborne

The Chase
Fiction by Anna Reeser [Read an excerpt…]

The Usual Loneliness
Poetry by Chad Foret

Ghost Dog
Poetry by Serena Solin

Tickling the Dragon’s Tail
Winner: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest by John Blair [Read an excerpt…]

Like Baked Alaska
Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest by Francesca Leader [Read an excerpt…]

Late Summer
Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards [Read an excerpt…]

Max Gray│Fiction

Healthy and Happy

Cory snuck around the side of the house, skirting the gravel path.

“Stay, Randi,” he hissed.

Elephants were useful for a lot of things. Randi could flatten anything or anybody, he could make a trumpet sound, he was a dignified creature, and he could fly. Cory was proud to have the world’s only flying elephant at his side. Often they’d go flying at night, after Cory’s parents went to bed. With the cold wind whipping his ears, Cory leaned on Randi’s leathery neck and snatched stars like fireflies. They circled the house from so high his dad’s pickup truck looked like a tiny red button

The neighbor’s dog, Stephanie, whimpered in Randi’s presence. Elephants were powerful and Cory understood the responsibilities that came with owning a pet, so they tried to avoid the dog whenever possible. Cory’s art teacher, Mrs. Shelly, told him that elephants needed water to stay healthy and happy. So the two of them hung around the fish pond on the far side of the lawn. Their neighbor kept Stephanie tied up to the back porch of her house.

Dana Liebelson│Fiction

The Man from Montana

One fall, I had this boyfriend, the Man from Montana, although he wasn’t from Montana, and he didn’t consider himself my boyfriend. He started calling himself the Man from Montana after he moved to Wyoming for a residency, and I joined him in a shotgun house by the train tracks, where over a hundred years ago, railroad workers had lived. He was from Washington, D.C., but he dressed like a cowpuncher that fall in tight jeans, a fringe jacket, and caiman skin boots. His name was James.

We met that spring at his reading in D.C. He liked my question and came over to talk to me while we ate rosemary crackers. Rosemary for remembrance was his line. I laughed. I’m Ophelia, I said. It was important to him that we take things slow. When I spent the night at his row house, I was careful to leave before the store grilles rattled up unless he wanted me to stay, then I stayed. I was surprised when he asked me to join him in Wyoming. He called me after he’d arrived. Please come, he said on the phone. It’s too quiet here, and I miss fucking you.

Kelly Magee│NonFiction

10 Things Only Single Moms Who Were in my Living Room Will Understand

When you are a single mom, it can be hard to find people who understand you. Harder still when you’re a queer single mom to two kids under ten who has recently filed for divorce and who was in my living room last night when, fed up with feeling misunderstood, you decided to record every bizarre thing you found yourself saying in one three-hour stretch. Fear not, Single Moms Who Were In My Living Room! This list has got you covered.

1. Where did you put the dog? How did the bee get back in?

Having an identity means different things to different people, but we can all agree that it means you are incomprehensible to people who don’t share that identity. Being a single mom can be lonely and isolating. Being in the presence of small creatures who look a little like you but act like nonsensical bizarro humans for 24 hours a day can cause you to do things like make nonsensical pronouncements, blurt out questions for which there are no reasonable answers, and talk to yourself. To lessen these disturbing effects, it’s important to find community, especially with other single moms. That said, like-minded individuals can be hard to come by, and when you’re Kelly Magee 10 Things Only Single Moms Who Were in my Living Room Will Understand 34 • Kelly Magee a single mom in my living room last night, finding someone like you is literally impossible! This list is for you! That bee, am I right? Childless and/or partnered people who were not in my living room last night will definitely not know where the dog is.

Rebecca Moon Ruark│Fiction

The Pearl Diver

Pearl fishing is not a bad summer job. Even the uniform is alright, though the suit is a one-piece that makes me look like a prude. At the Sea Town tryout, my mom had me paste Band-Aids over my nipples, which are always hard, now that I’m finally getting boobs.

Breast buds, my sister Hilary calls them, and she strokes my hair and calls me precious, like I’m her pet, even though I’m almost sixteen and she’s only four years older. But ever since she studied abroad last semester, spring 1993, she thinks she’s mature—and French. Mais oui, she answers everyday questions like, Are you enjoying your summer? She eats brie after dinner. She flaunts her new, French butt in her cut-offs, taunting me, since I’m cursed with my mom’s half-Japanese flat ass. And now she’s too good for the guys who called her Moon Face in high school. Now she wears a scarf, even though it’s summer and the lake makes it so humid it feels like you should be doing the breaststroke to get to the mailbox instead of walking. Next year, it’ll be me waiting at the end of the driveway, for my acceptance letter from Stanford, where I’ll study marine biology and I’ll dive.

I’m a rising sophomore. Sophomore year is when I must prove myself, says my mom. Excel or be lost with the tide. “Focus,” she says, and then she repeats it in Japanese—“shouten”—and nods her head solemnly, like I’m supposed to feel blessed she directed at me one of the five words she remembers of her dead dad’s language.

Anna Reeser│Fiction

The Chase

On the rug was a shallow wooden box, four feet wide, divided into sections, each full of tiny metal blocks. She lifted one. A stamp, a letter e, ridges crusted with ink. She pressed it against the skin of her thumb—it left a mark. The whole section was full of es.

Adam knelt, and Helen handed him the e, which he considered, rolling it in his hand.

“It’s a complete font.” The man walked over. “My father had a printing business in the fifties.”

“This has every letter?” Helen said.

“It should. You want it? Five bucks.”

Adam stood, said it wasn’t possible, they were on their way somewhere. Helen grazed her fingers along the letters. An alphabet laid out in solid shapes, each with weight. She pictured them left overnight, tipped into a garbage can, hitting the plastic like hail. All those years.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

“Really?” Adam said. “We’re going to walk into Dan’s house with that thing?”

The type case filled her arms. She often slouched, but this made her straighten up, spreading the weight across her body. “It’s an icebreaker.”

Adam’s face relaxed. “Fine. It’ll kill that awkward fifteen minutes before everyone gets drunk.”

They walked on, Helen carrying the type case, Adam carrying the beer. A crackling in her chest, anticipation of alcohol, that pink-cheeked feeling. Above, trees were leafing out. Adam was saying something about Texas, how there was so much space, how you could see farther. She recognized a feeling she’d had in each place they’d been before, just when they began to talk about moving—nostalgia for what they’d leave, shot through with the desire to leave immediately. By the fall, she’d be thirty, he’d be twenty-nine. But today the neighborhood smelled like cut grass and ancient ink, and by now she knew that last summers in cities were beautiful, especially at dusk

Jon Blair│Winner: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

I.

Start with the core. With how they made three bombs but only dropped two, Little Boy first, then three days later like an ecstasy of dominion the Fat Man, and the third, stoic in its sundered parts, lingered in Los Alamos waiting for a reason, for the righteous shriek of supercritical mass that never came because surrender came first (Hirohito’s divine capitulation, The Jewel Voice Broadcast, August 15th 1945, the god-emperor of the Shōwa, the Era of Enlightened Peace, “pondering deeply the general trends of the world”) and among its pieces: the demon core, hot-pressed oni of ever-so-close but no closer, about the size of a man’s closed fist (6.2-kilogram subcritical mass of plutonium-239 in two dull gray hemispheres electroplated with a nickel’s worth of nickel), left-over but not left out, a toy for boys to play with, “tickling the dragon’s tail” ever so gently, to see just how close anyone could possibly come to tragedy’s raw edge, to a river risen and ravaging a levee’s soft and failing shoulder, to the toothed serpent that hovers like chaos inside rain and snow and the sunless raptures of drowning.

Francesca Leader │Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

Like Baked Alaska

“At last!” Uncle Fi grins.

“Yes!” I say.

Our room at the Renaissance Philadelphia has just one queen-sized bed.

We take turns changing in the bathroom, and climb in, side-by-side, naturally as an old married couple. Uncle Fi puts the ice bucket on the floor near him, just in case the combination of Percocet and alcohol and an immense Morimoto meal erupts like a fifth grader’s science experiment. The meal he drove all the way from the Bronx to eat. Not a last supper, maybe. But one of the last.

People in our family aren’t photogenic, so I distrust the old pictures of him. Bet he was really something with that dark, curly head of hair (now just fringe) all teased out for the disco. Bet he had a tight ass and a warm, sly mouth that drove the boys wild. I was just a baby then. Looking up at a bug-eyed man who cooed and rolled his tongue at me, vying to be the first to make me laugh.

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards│Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

Late Summer

I turn on the oven, perhaps for the last time until fall. Soon these California nights will cease to deliver a reprieve from the heat of days. Even in the wee hours of morning, no cooling will come, and our skins will seem like too much clothing; we’ll dream of peeling them off as we stand naked before the box fans. Already the neighbor’s yard is browning in the sun. That was the way you preferred your favorite vegetable, cauliflower: oil-drizzled, roasted till golden brown.

As a child growing up in Massachusetts, I both cursed and relished the bright, stifling days of summer. Relished exploring the thirteen acres of woods behind our house, cursed the humidity. Relished the samaras of the maples I split and sap-glued to my nose, but cursed the mosquitoes. I relished the peonies, the coconut scent of your suntan oil, the cool relief of your homemade popsicles.

And how I loved watching you in the garden, where, crouched down or bent over, you worked, your long, tanned legs tattooed with dirt, a bandana wreathing your head.