SHE TOOK TO LIGHTING FIRES — MARIANNE WORTHINGTON

The fire in the burn barrel was enough to keep her warm while she stood in the bitter air. She dropped old receipts and bank statements into the flames, watching them catch and curl at the edges then dissolve into ashes that danced above the barrel.

We can’t just throw them out, her husband had said. Thirty-three years of marriage meant there were boxes and boxes of old papers stuffed in the shed.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had stood next to a fire.

Her mother had a patch in the back yard that she had used for burning trash. A charred oblong about the size of a car, just at the top of the hill. Her mother tended the fires, transfixed, bewitched, as she did now.

Once, her mother thought the fire was out and went inside the house to make a phone call. Three back yards burned up while her mother sat in the ladder-back chair next to the phone in the hallway, oblivious. She couldn’t run to tell her mother as she stood in the driveway and watched the fire overwhelm the yards. She couldn’t cry out. Or wouldn’t. The skipping flames, the smoke, the thick scorch in her nostrils simultaneously consoled and delighted her.

If she just tipped over this barrel right now, the sugar maples and wild firethorn at the edge of the woods would blaze easily and burn all the way to the creek.

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Marianne Worthington is co-founder and poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing Appalachian literary, visual, and musical artists since 2009. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, and Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance, among other places. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and artist’s grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. She is co-editor of Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and author of a poetry chapbook. She lives, writes, and teaches in southeast Kentucky. 

ROUND ROBIN: A CHEAP POP READING SERIES

We are stoked to announce a new Zoom-based, monthly-ish reading series we’ll be curating called ROUND ROBIN! The series will feature four previously-featured CHEAP POP authors reading around a theme. There may be some laughing and crying, definitely some merriment. Our first reading will be on Wednesday, November 18, 2020 at 7 PM CST and will feature MATT BELL, MYLIYAH HANNA, DINA L. RELLES, and LUCY ZHANG. The theme for this first reading is “CHANGE.”

In the interest of keeping things safe and on the up-and-up, if you’re interested in attending drop us an email (cheappoplit@gmail.com) or DM us on Twitter and we’ll send you the link and password.

So looking forward to sharing this time with y’all, and hope you can make it!

WELCOME, ASSISTANT EDITORS PASCALE & MADDY

We’re thrilled to welcome two new assistant editors the CHEAP POP team: Pascale Potvin and Maddy Rane.

So excited for all the great experience these two are bringing with them, and a hearty welcome to the CHEAP POP family!

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Pascale Potvin (she/her/hers) is currently Prose Editor at Walled Women Magazine and Assistant at One Lit Place, occasionally writing articles/reviews for both publications. She’s also placed work in Eclectica Magazine, Maudlin House, BlazeVOX, Quail Bell Magazine, and many others. She has a BAH from Queen’s University, and she is working on a budding book series. You can read more about her at pascalepotvin.com or @pascalepalaces on Twitter. 

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Maddy Rane (she/her/hers) is a graduate student of literature at the University of Toledo and a Scorpio. A few of her poems can be found in The Mill Literary Magazine, and even more can be found on napkins and the back of receipts. Follow her on Twitter @madison_rane. 

COLLISION — JENNIFER McGAHA

Just past noon on July 20, 1967, Piedmont Airlines Flight 22 took off from the Asheville Regional Airport bound for Roanoke, Virginia. At the same time, a twin-engine Cessna prepared to land. The Cessna veered closer and closer to the jet, and when the planes collided at over 6,000 feet, explosions reverberated through the air. The wreckage covered a swath of fields and highway one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide. Black smoke obliterated I-26. Suitcases, clothes, plane parts, bodies rained from the sky. Still strapped in his seat, a decapitated man lodged in a hemlock. Another body plunged through the roof of a nearby home. A man's wristwatch, found in the wreckage, read 12:17 p.m. A crew of 115 men would sift through the metal for three weeks before they found and identified all the bodies—seventy-nine from the jetliner, three from the Cessna.
           That same afternoon, twenty miles from the crash site, my mother labored in the maternity ward of a one-story brick building that would later become a nursing home. While recovery crews peeled fingers and toes and bits of flesh from the debris, nurses checked her pulse and her blood pressure and whispered to her of the devastation. Two months later, after hurling her body in front of a runaway car, she would return to this same hospital with a broken rib, a ruptured spleen, a punctured lung. But that night, her body wracked with a different kind of pain, she gazed out the window at the full moon illuminating the starry sky, and thought...what? Of the eighty-two people who had woken up that morning and brushed their teeth and showered and drunk their coffee and hurried to catch a plane? About her new baby, not yet a daughter or a son in her mind, just a swirl of images—her husband’s hazel eyes and round cheeks, her olive skin? Or did she simply inhale through her nose and exhale through her mouth over and over again until her baby girl fell screaming into the world, not at all what she had expected, not at all what she had planned?

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Jennifer McGaha is the author of the memoir, Flat Broke with Two Goats. Her work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, The Good Men Project, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Baltimore Fishbowl, BackHome Magazine, and many other publications. An experienced teacher and workshop facilitator, Jennifer earned her MA from Western Carolina University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently teach at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

FOCUS — TJ FULLER

He hoped his first would be Crystal, who wiped her hand on his belly afterward, but she had planted her True Love Waits flag in the hill outside her megachurch, and Rachel and him only pretended to know each other in the darkroom, finding corners, turning off the light, searching out seams and skin, and even though Brianna was a bragger, all they ever got was handsy, which was better than Anita, who talked him into wearing lipstick, a brighter shade than hers, the taste of their breaths the same, but wouldn’t slip out of her pencil skirt, or Martin, who talked him into a fair trade, each of them avoiding eye contact, claiming each other was their first man, but he had traded with Ari and let Alex watch; in fact, after Martin, he told Eva that shame was flash paper, but he still burnt at some memories, like lying about Jessica and Erin—it was just he had gone so long without what everyone else already had, or seemingly had, because Tina told him all she’d ever done was dry and Kristin said she was waiting for something real—then what am I? he had asked and she had laughed, even though he wasn’t joking, couldn’t kid about the way loneliness found him buying microwave meals and thrift dishes, felt more like homesickness, each cell floating back to Sandra’s bedroom or the high school darkroom, even as he tongued between Kristin’s legs, he felt shot through with that homesick air, and when Angela wanted a massage, he missed Kristin, always too early to whatever he might miss, which is why he keeps turning the prism of your body, soft hairs, red mole, noticing to stay present, you, his second love, fourth dinner with the parents, seventh online official, first time figuring out the goddamn fucking angle, lower lower, tip your hips, bend back back, higher, almost twenty years of dreaming, undressing, planning, pretending—angling—of chocolate roses and embarrassing mixtapes and useless words, of missing the arc for the moment or the moment for the arc, just to get this close and—here here here here.

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TJ Fuller writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online @fullertj.

COUP DE FOUDRE — KATHERINE GLEASON

At the Virginia Woolf conference I sat with Jess and doodled and during a break you appeared all smiles and hugs and yet we hadn’t met before, no not yet but I had seen you, seen you on stage, dancing in a torn black dress and at that moment everything stopped and at the same time rushed ahead. A wooshing in my ears, the flight of many tiny wings. What season was it? At the conference you were sleeveless your milkmaid arms glowing in the overhead lights. Could it have been November? In the spring at the bar I admired your new haircut and flinched when women dropped at our table to say hello but the whole time your eyes were on me, wrapping warm, and when you kissed me, I was sealed swaddled branded forever in your orbit a happy moon. We finally went back to your place—what time was it?—and stayed sunrise to sunset and sunrise again. Those days were cappuccino foam bouncing along the street together we shopped we ate we snapped photos on the back of someone else’s motorcycle. You moved to the big city, gravity shifted months of gnawing and chats on the phone and your voice faded your spirit off seeking. What year was it? I returned home to a letter from you, your loopy handwriting warm in my grasp. Dear K., Know that I love you but I cannot love your sin. You are not a lesbian; you are merely someone who chooses to practice that lifestyle. Sin you ask yes sin it is all around us and we must fight it, fight it off and grow toward the light.

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Katherine Gleason’s short stories have appeared in journals such as Alimentum, River Styx, Southeast Review, Derelict Lit, Gone Lawn, Juked, Jellyfish Review, Mississippi Review, and Monkeybicyle. She won first prize in the 2007 River Styx/Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest, garnered an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and has published a number of nonfiction books, including Anatomy of Steampunk: The Fashion of Victorian Futurism. 

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR — MELISSA BOWERS

Overheard at the mommy and me group: I left him alone for two minutes—two minutes, swear to God—and suddenly there was Sharpie all over the walls and also on his face. Oh yeah? Well last week I ran upstairs to change clothes and my youngest ripped the stuffing out of our pillows like a fucking puppy. Okay, once, I went to the bathroom and by the time I flushed she’d cut her brother’s hair off. We’re literally not allowed to pee, you know? You can’t ever turn your back. They are wild and unpredictable. Most accidents happen in sixty seconds or less.

They told you it would be innate, a roaring primal thing that shakes you alive by the neck as soon as you’re split apart and stitched back together. You would lift vehicles to save them, they said. You would throw yourself in front of a train.

But one morning you go to put away the cooking oil and your toddler spins a knob on the stove and the pan catches fire, and you duck and run first, remember her second. She stands alone in the kitchen for only a blink, not long enough to scream a full scream, and then you are back, reaching for her, shielding her body from flames that lick at the ceiling. A hero—you, and your damp dish towel flung over top.

Later, your friends’ eyes will widen and one of them will flutter a hand above her heart. They will take turns saying things like So lucky you were right there with her and Imagine what might have—. They will point to the blisters bubbling up along your pinkie finger and shake their heads with relief. It’s your job, you’ll tell yourself, To absorb the oxygen if it becomes a hazard, to suffocate dangers even if you are afraid.

When your toddler grows into a big kid, she will bring home intermittent facts from friends and books: Polar bear moms are prepared to battle the largest, scariest males. A gazelle draws attention to herself so predators won’t notice her young. Orca whales never leave their calves longer than a few hours, not for the rest of their lives.

Every once in a while, your child will talk about the time she accidentally cornered a hissing mother raccoon in your backyard, or the geese that chased her away from a nest by the lake. If she asks, you will pull her close and list the ways you’ve rescued her—bloody scrapes bandaged and kissed, feverish cheeks cooled, tantrums tamed, lice and nits picked carefully from a tender scalp—but all the while you will think of your split-second failure in a moment that truly mattered, the shame and the smoke, and wonder about your instincts.

Even a cold-blooded crocodile carries her babies gently between her teeth and deposits them in the water, where most fires will not survive.

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Melissa Bowers currently writes from California, though she will always consider herself a true Midwesterner. She is the first-place winner of The Writer magazine’s personal essay contest, a multi-prize winner of Pithead Chapel’s 2019 Short Story Award, and a finalist for the 2020 Lamar York Short Fiction Prize as well as the 2020 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. She was shortlisted for Barren Magazine’s inaugural Flash Fiction Prize this year, and Susanna Kaysen recently awarded her the 2020 Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Melissa’s work has also appeared in Writer’s Digest, HuffPost, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among others.

GLENDALE — GEGHAM MUGHNETSYAN

Our first trip was to the Social Security Office. We wore what we had brought in our suitcases earlier in the week, still dressed for a snowstorm instead of tropical winter. America had not yet clothed us with the hoodies, graphic tees and khaki pants from Mervyn’s Department Store on Brand Boulevard which croaked during the recession that landed two years after our arrival.

A single orange tree in front of our green-colored house, really a two-bedroom backhouse with a single bathroom and parking space for five people, testified true to the address of our new residence on Orange Grove Avenue and although I didn’t yet know what “grove” meant, oranges in January sounded outlandish to me. 

I had seen oranges in January before, but the context had been radically different. 

Oranges were a staple on New Year’s Eve holiday tables and in gift bags given to children and this tradition had survived when everything else was in a perpetual collapse. 

Oranges don’t grow in Armenia. If people managed to buy a few imported Georgian or Turkish ones, they would be wrapped carefully in old newspapers, placed in a box and stored somewhere in the closet to later decorate the fruit basket that included golden delicious apples, persimmon and a solitary banana, then to be sliced in circles and unrolled to be eaten one sweet, tangy triangle at a time.   

In abundance, those orange orbs that possessed globe-sized value transformed into fruit grabbable with a stretched hand, at times fallen and rotting on the ground, unnoticed. 

My first abundance was the Jons Marketplace on Colorado Street, our second trip. And as we picked the biggest size of Lays potato chips, a 12-pack of 7 Up and ketchup because salsa was yet a thing to be discovered, the mid-sized market appeared movie-like with a truly gargantuan amount of food. During the following years it has never again matched the grandiosity of that initial impression. 

The storefronts with “fresh bread”, “cold water” and “meat” in Armenian lettering along Broadway were billboards confirming that the wave that brought us here had been to this shore before. 

You are newcomers here, we heard as the initial gasp mellowed in the weeks and the months that in sum will soon amount to fifteen years. The neighboring house with a pool has yet to be a dream fulfilled in this hilly, evergreen semi-desert.

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Gegham Mughnetsyan is an archivist, translator, and an occasional writer. He lives in Glendale, California. His writing has appeared in the Armenian Weekly and can be found at www.districtofgegham.com.