Natural and Un.

by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

Brush a hand along aged
rough trunk and gnarled roots.
Do they cease to feel the breaking away?
Leaf from branch, limb from core.

What can anyone really know
of the roots of another’s suffering?
I hold on to the feeling of being left behind,
a speck, a mote. Should it matter

that what lives must expire?
Body refuses to release its hold,
has a memory all its own.
And memory only pretends

to forget pieces of the story.
Grief is an oak.

Pity the leaves
all shiver and crumble.

by Laura Roman. “Fly me to the moon, Let me play among the stars… ” Andrea died early in the New Year. On New Year’s Eve I was with Jennifer, toasting their soon-to-be life together in Milan. “Amore mio, see you soon” he wrote at midnight. Jennifer had waited a long time for this love. […]

by Kelsey Liu. To Eric Park.  In April, the goddess on the moon hit her rabbit for the third time. “Why?” she cried, tears crumpling her exquisite face. “Why?” The first time, the rabbit had crawled in circles, weeping. Eventually, it had convinced itself that centuries of companionship were, in fact, lucky to mar themselves […]

by Patrick Roesle. In many ways Amar’s case was familiar, if not typical. When he was eighteen years old he left his father’s home in Flagstaff, Arizona to study at a small, well-regarded liberal arts college in the Midwest. He graduated with honors and returned to Flagstaff when he was twenty-two. At eighteen, Amar had […]

by Kate Tallman. On September 13, 2013, I woke up in the middle of the pet supply aisle at a local big-box store. There was no call for alarm. I was standing upright, leaning against a shopping cart, staring down at a long list of items: Cat Food- I guess we ran out this morning… […]

by James Sallis. The worst thing about new books, French philosopher Joseph Joubert wrote, is that they keep us from reading the old ones. Which is precisely how a truly great novel like George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides gets, if not lost, then seriously mislaid. Published in 1949, the same year as Orwell’s 1984 andtwo […]

by Mark Tallman. “Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”-Henry Miller It was unseasonably warm in Boston at half past noon on January 15, 1919. On the North End, just east of where the Charles River Dam stands today, at the current site of a junior athletic field and playground, residents and passersby […]

by Kate Tallman and Mark Tallman. Hi everybody. We were both very pleased when Tod told us we could guest edit the Spring 2014 issue, Disasters: Natural and Un. We chose a topic that figures prominently in our minds, as one of us is a professional security and emergency management consultant, the other an academic […]

by Brian Griffith. Among the many heroic movies I watched as a youth, some of the worst concerned combat with deadly insects. In the film Them (1954), ants exposed to radiation in New Mexico grew into murdering giants that had to be exterminated by Air Force bombings with poison gas. Then there was The Naked […]

by Bishop and Fuller. A group of innocents have been targeted by the Feds as terrorists. Through a stroke of lunatic physics, they have escaped a fiery death and find themselves on a ramshackle Blue Terrapin (Green Tortoise) tour bus heading West. The old driver, Smokey, is a trickster. An all-points bulletin has been issued, […]