BEFORE I FALL BY ELLI MARI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141 PREVIEW

I rehearsed being incomplete in front of you.

Left drawers open.
Let the cupboard hang by one hinge.
Spoke sentences that collapsed before the verb.
I wanted you to see
how a person can fail quietly,
how nothing terrible happens
when something doesn’t hold.

I placed my flaws carefully—
not scattered, no—
arranged them like objects on a table
you were too young to reach,
but tall enough to notice.

This is what a mistake looks like.
This is where I come apart.
Look—nothing sacred here.

I thought I was lowering the ceiling.

But you—
you began walking as if the air depended on you.
Small hands, suddenly precise.
You stopped slamming doors.
You closed everything I left open
without looking at me.

I remember the way you held a glass—
not drinking, just holding—
as if it were a decision.

You never said
I will be better
but your body did.

It straightened
in rooms I had already tilted.

You learned silence
not like a child hides,
but like someone measuring the space
between breakable things.

And I—
I kept loosening screws,
kept misplacing my weight,
thinking I was giving you freedom.

I didn’t understand
that you were collecting my imbalance
piece by piece,
fitting it somewhere inside yourself
without instructions.

There is a way you look at me now—
not admiration, not quite—
something steadier,
something that feels like being forgiven
for a thing I am still doing.

I wanted you to know
you didn’t have to be perfect.

Instead,
you became careful.

Which is worse.

Because perfection can crack,
it can shatter,
it can be abandoned.

But carefulness—
carefulness stays.
It lingers in the wrist,
in the way you place things down
like they might remember.

And I see it—
when you hand me something,
when you watch me move,
when you stand just slightly closer
than necessary—
as if I am always
on the verge of falling again,
and you—
you have already decided
you will be there
before I do.

—

There is a video somewhere.

I am small enough
to believe my body can become a circle.

You stand behind me,
one hand in mine,
the other hovering
just beneath my back—
not touching,
just waiting
for the exact point
where I might give in.

You guide me backwards
towards my own feet,
slowly,
as if speed could undo me.

Your face—
so serious.
Not afraid.
Just exact.
As if you were learning
the limits of me
in real time.

And when I reach—
when the shape finally holds—
you don’t celebrate.
You stay.

Just long enough
to make sure
I don’t disappear inside it.


We tried again this year.

Different bodies.
Less forgiving.

The same distance
between my spine and your hand.

And your face—
unchanged.
Still measuring.
Still careful.
Still holding me
before I fall.

I didn’t realise

I was teaching you
how to carry me.

You were never supposed to learn that.

ELLI MARI

I think that a poem can change shape while it is being read, and that the most interesting questions are the ones the poem poses afterwards. I am interested in the distance between something and the story about it. Much of my writing begins with an attempt to look at something closely enough that it becomes unfamiliar again. A peach, a lighthouse, a shoreline, a sentence, a person I love—each appears stable until attention unsettles it. Poetry for me is a way of remaining inside that moment of instability and seeing what emerges. I am drawn to questions that do not have neat answers. Memory, inheritance, devotion, identity, and transformation, not because I wish to resolve the questions but because they resist resolution. I am interested in the traces people leave in one another. I think of poetry less as an act of expression than as an act of attention. The poems that matter most to me are those that alter the way I look at the world rather than simply describing it. I was born in Greece and I am studying a BA in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have been awarded a scholarship for an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of East Anglia.

HARD DRIVE BY MARK SMITH 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141 PREVIEW

The hard drive in Harry’s laptop clatters to a stop.

OMG the screenplay’s gone.

He turns the laptop off and on. That worked before. Not this time.

Harry calls Jack.

What? (Jack hates the phone.)

The hard drive died, Harry says.

You backed up?

Always back up.

Harry, I have a meeting, I’ll text you, right?

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BROTHER X BY STEVEN MCBREARTY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 100

Brother X cranked up a portable record player in our religion class and played A World of Our Own by The Seekers. On the chalkboard he wrote: A World of Our Own? Yes?

I sat surprised, curious, mesmerized almost, pondering the ramifications of this tour de force of an introduction to a religion class. I didn’t know what to make of it. Playing a pop song was so far removed from the norm that it was mind-blowing.

When the record had finished, Brother X sat on his desk—that was his signature move—swinging a leg up under his cassock. He waved magisterially in a let-me-have-your-attention kind of wave.

“So-o-o,” he said, pensively stroking his chin. “A world of our own. What do you fine young specimens of American manhood think that’s all about?”

One or two hands went up. Brother X clapped his hands. “Come on, gentlemen!” he said. “What do you think? You look like some pretty smart guys to me!”

Some more hands shot up. “There, that’s more like it!” He scanned the room with his finger, then pointed: “What do you think? You!”

That first student, and everyone else, thought pretty much the same thing. The song was the ideal, that to be in love and to live with somebody together sheltered from the trials and tribulations of the outside world, was what all of us half-baked 14-year-olds aspired to.

Brother X sat there shaking his head amiably, inscrutably.

“You’re all correct, that’s what the song is saying,” Brother X said. “But that’s not what God wants from you. God doesn’t want you to hole up and hide from the world. He wants you to share yourself with others, share your happiness, share your love.”

This was revolutionary stuff. Hands were going up all over the place. We spent the remainder of that first class in a rousing free-form discussion of our role in creation, our purpose as human beings, our place in the universe.

When the buzzer sounded ending class, I walked out in a kind of trance, navigating through the crowd in the hallway as if entering a new dimension. Being a good person meant being good to others, not blindly following a set of prescribed rules and regulations. Being a good person meant going outside yourself to serve others. Thinking I had any love to share at all was itself a profound deviation from my former mindset.

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STANDARD SHIFT BY MARCIA L HURLOW 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141 PREVIEW

Here’s when my urge to live 
another person’s life began, 
on the drive from after-school
orchestra practice, my cello 
case flat on its back, lodged 
securely behind my seat. 
My friend’s bass viol wobbled 
in the station wagon’s
cargo. Its scrolled head thumped  
against the tailgate window. 

An anxious first-year 
driver, I scanned the fields 
for a deer or hungry fox 
that strayed onto Green Farm Road. 
An angry Angus bull 
could rage through the fence
and right into my dad’s 
black Pontiac. Mark said,

“Pull over and let me drive. 
It’s late. My mom’s car has 
standard shift. I’ve practiced. 
I can drive this baby 
like shifting hand positions 
on my bass. If the cops 
pull us over? Just say
it’s urgent. I’m driving 
you to the hospital. 
Say you broke some foot bone 
when you dropped your cello.”

I watched the gold twilight 
over empty corn stalks, 
the scythe of new moon 
rising through skeletal 
fence row trees. “Listen 
to the engine when I 
downshift. In third now
it’s a tuba. Now, fifty!” 

I fought the sudden
inertia that threw me 
back in my seat. I wanted 
to push my hands ahead,  
clutch the padded dashboard. 
I wanted to match  
Mark’s head tilted above 
the steering wheel. He wasn’t
going home. He squinted  
into another dark 
mile, its long silence.

MARCIA HURLOW

My husband, linguist and artist Greg Stump, and I sit together for two hours every weekday to “create”. I don’t always write poetry but I have the space in those hours, physically and mentally, to do it. I have published two collections of poetry, Dog Physics, and Practice Rapture. I am the co-editor-in-chief of Kansas City Review.

BIRDS BY JOHN T ALTMAYER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSSUE 141 PREVIEW

Tanner called me on my way home from work and asked if I could bring some beer. So I did. He was my friend, so I had to.

Plus it was a sad situation over there. Tanner’s only daughter was dead. Her name was Vivian, five years old. She was drowned by the Missouri River in a boating accident.

Tanner’s wife Jodi was at home when it happened and she would never see it as an accident. She blamed Tanner, reminding him at every chance that it was his carelessness that took her only source of light, the only thing she lived for, from this Earth.

It caused a divide between them so that they slept in rooms on opposite ends of the house. God never intended for them to live separately under one roof, but those were the circumstances.

When I got to Tanner’s place we stood in the kitchen drinking the beer and he talked as I nodded my head, and then he said, “Douglas, man, you know I love Jodi, but I just can’t take it any more. She won’t work, she won’t eat, she won’t talk to me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I sipped at my beer and shrugged.

“You want another one?” Tanner asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

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GOLDFIELDS BY CHRISTINA BAKEWELL, RAIN SETS IN BY PATRICIA WALLESVERD, ALMA’S TREASURE BY DESMA SHEERER, EPIPHANY BY MICHELLE CACHO-NEGRETE, GLUE TRAPS BY DARRYL GRAFF.

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GOLDFIELDS BY CHRISTINA BAKEWELL 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Two months into my sophomore year of high school and every day gets harder to endure. I’m surrounded by children. My 15- and 16-year-old schoolmates have no fucking idea what real life is. Their adolescence radiates innocence and inexperience. I can’t handle it. I’m on a whole other level. The only thing we have in common is I’m still a virgin.

The fourth-period bell rings, jumping me in my seat like an alarm. That’s it, I’m out. I grab my bag and walk out to the parking lot. Kayla rolls up. “Let’s go!” she says.

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ALMA’S TREASURE BY DESMA SHEERER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Alma took a long drag of her imaginary cigarette. She held her breath for a four-count before letting it out between her pursed lips. In the frigid February air the steam from her breath rose like the smoke from the nearby mill stacks.

How long had it been since she’d had a real cigarette? she wondered. Close to 18 years. Ever since her first grandbaby’d been born. She’d watched the baby’s trash mother, her son’s now ex-wife, blow a cloud of smoke over the baby’s bald head, and had thought to herself, no ma’am. Alma hadn’t touched a cigarette since. The pack of cigarettes she’d bought that very morning had gone straight in the trash can. The ex-wife could’ve gone the same route for all she cared.

But sometimes on nights like this, when her nerves were frazzled, she’d find herself standing outside in any weather with one hand jammed in her coat pocket and the other trying to trick her brain into some level of calm with the old smoking habit.

“Alma! Alma, let’s go! Jesus, I’ve been calling you.”

Just like that her placebo calm disappeared into the night air with the breath she pushed out in a heavy sigh. Dan had had that effect on her since he was a little tyke. “I’m coming.”

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RAIN SETS IN BY PATRICIA WALLESVERD 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

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EPIPHANY BY MICHELLE CACHO-NEGRETE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

Chris kissed Bart and whispered, “See you soon.” She made her way back to his room. She sank into an easy chair and watched pigeons strut along the windowsill in the rain.

The banal elements of the hospital reminded her that somebody else had taken charge of her life with Bart, the bleached smell of the linen, the bitter medicinal odour of the air, the endless blood tests, the checking temperatures, the dispensing of pills.

The rain became a noisy torrent rattling the hospital windows and she felt nauseous. A gray veil of dingy light shrank the contours of the room making her feel claustrophobic. The table was piled high with boxes of candy and baskets of fruit, wrapped in cellophane. Bright flowers spewed from vases like vivid graffiti against the walls. Everywhere were cards hand-made by artist friends. The previous night, Bart had joked, “Preserve them, who knows how much they might be worth some day.”

She dozed, then Doc Logan was there, mask pulled down beneath his chin, blood dotting his surgical whites. He smiled, pulled the soft cloth cap off his head and said, “Success.”

She thought he expected her to hug and thank him while in fact she hoped to never see him again, but she was grateful. “Thank you, so very much,” she said, hugging him. He smiled, told her he’d see her in a week, hugged her back, and left.

Then cross-legged in Bart’s bed she ate half a box of chocolates, and called everyone they knew.

Bart was discharged with prescriptions for antibiotics, painkillers, instructions, and warnings that it would take him some months to feel like his old self.

“I’ll never be my old self,” he said in a solemn tone of voice. He said he was flooded with a new psychic energy, a new vision of his work, and a new, profound love and connection for the whole damned world.

The doctor, hand on Bart’s shoulder, said, “It’s often what I hear after cancer surgery. Survival’s euphoric. Enjoy it.”

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GLUE TRAPS BY DARRYL GRAFF 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140

We are checking out a complaint of illegal occupancy at the basement of a building. It’s 8pm, near the end of the day for me and the Fire Department lieutenant and two probies.

The art deco lobby is filled with a warm, lamp-shade yellow light.

I take a picture of the blue and black terrazzo floor.

“What’s he doing, Lou?” Carlos, one of the probies, asks the lieutenant.

“It’s his thing. He’s got a whole collection of Bronx terrazzo floor photos,” Bobby says.

I ring random bells on the intercom until someone buzzes us in. We take the elevator to the basement.

“There we go,” I say at a beat-up grey metal door with a SUPER sign stuck on it. I knock on the door with the edge of my clipboard.

The door is opened by a guy in a white T-shirt. “What’s up?” he asks, leaning against the door frame.

“Department of Buildings. We got a complaint for illegal occupancy at the basement.”

“So?”

“So we have to check it out.”

“You need me?” the super asks, lighting a cigarette.

“You got the keys, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You just answered your own question.”

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THE FLATNESS OF HYPER-REALISM BY ALLISON RICHARDS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 110

Value is a funny thing to measure art by. Talking about conceptual art as if it holds no “value” is wrong in several ways and correct in a couple more. Let me explain.

On social media an artist–very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of painting–posts a time-lapse film of their work from start to finish. We, the viewers, are stunned by how true to life the figure in the painting looks, how the eyes look so wet or the cheeks look so soft. It’s just like a photo, we think as we watch, impressed by this artist’s ability to represent life exactly as it is.

We’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning over them forever. But now the artist films the process and speeds it up to less than a minute, and shares it with millions of viewers on an app designed algorithmically to show us things we will react to.

The glorification of hyper-realism we’re seeing right now is fascinating to me, not because I am a fan of the kind of exact replication of form that seems to stun viewers, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art makes perfect sense in the context of our waveringly democratic reality.

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. Endlessly striving for some fucked-up idea of perfection is a pillar of white supremacy, and a barrier to entry into a world outside the joyless one most of us inhabit in good old late-stage capitalism.

We viewers cannot paint perfect figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time, so we don’t make art. We watch a video on TikTok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection in the mirror, and so we don’t make art.

So some people think abstract artist Rothko is full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. We can have specific tastes in art without being fascist, obviously. But what isn’t fine is the flatness of hyper-realism and the way it exists in our attention right now.

When the art we make doesn’t contribute to its own commodification, it is seen as having no value economically. When what is most commonly commodified is hyper-realism, our less exact, less time-consuming, or more wildly imagined art is seen as less valuable. So, in this way, yeah. Conceptual art can be economically valueless.

When we cannot commit one hundred per cent of ourselves to our art because we have to go to work and we have to take care of our families, or we don’t want to make art that way, we aren’t going to become pros at hyper-realistic art. We aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like TikTok virals or whatever.

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my economically valueless art still has value. Not only is it a rebellious act to spend my time making something “valueless”, it is also a practice in fighting idealized perfection.

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that artists have been making provocative, ugly, confusing, weird, seemingly unimpressive, or seemingly disturbed art in response to global hardship since the First World War. Surrealism, right?

So while hyper-realism is having its day, what’s brewing is (hopefully) something really fucking weird. Make fucked-up art. Even if it pays you nothing back.

ALLISON RICHARDS

I’m a 20-something writer and artist living in East Nashville. Before this I was in Boulder studying writing and literature at Naropa University–which explains why I have no money and too much time to write. I write essays and poetry about walking home, my struggle and ultimate recovery from anorexia, what it’s like moving through the world as a woman, chess, sucking dick, being afraid, being in love. girlseekingpeanutbutter.blog

SMALL WONDERS BY DAVID P LANGLINAIS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 64

Jim’s father dies in Denver. Jim manages to book a flight that leaves around midnight, but he wants to stand by in case an earlier flight opens up.

Jim’s wife Gina is at her father-in-law’s bedside when he dies. After calling Jim with the news, she calls Cathy at her office, two floors below Jim’s office. They work at the same advertising agency.

Cathy offers to drive Jim to the airport. As she pulls into the driveway, Jim comes out of the house with a suitcase as if he’s been sitting by the window waiting for her. He walks to the car before she has a chance to kill the engine. She pops the trunk. Jim gets in the car and sinks into the seat like a deflating balloon.

“How you holding out?” Cathy says.

Jim shakes his head. It’s obvious he’s been crying. She puts her hand on his knee.

“Look, there’s no sense in you sitting at the airport for five hours,” Cathy says. “Let’s grab a bite to eat on the way, okay?”

“Alright,” Jim says.

“Taverna sound good?” she asks, referring to the Italian restaurant they like. Cathy, Jim, and Gina eat there together all the time.

It takes a moment for Jim to nod and Cathy knows his mind is in Denver.

“C’mon, Jim, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Cathy says. “Your dad was in good shape when you left him. There’s no way you could’ve known things would take a turn the way they did.”

“I talked to the doctor,” Jim says. “I said is he out of the woods? and she said yeah, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of the woods.”

“I know,” Cathy says.

“Those were her exact words,” Jim says. “I mean she made it sound like he’d be going home in a couple of days.”

Cathy doesn’t say anything. What can she say?

“No way I would’ve come back to Dallas for that meeting otherwise,” Jim says.

“Of course you wouldn’t have,” Cathy says. She resists telling Jim it was God’s will. Or that it was meant to be. Or that his father is now in a better place. She hated it when people told her things like that after her mother died. They said it so often, at times she’d wanted to scream at the top of her lungs for everyone to just shut the fuck up about it.

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SHARED OCCUPANCY BY RK PATEL 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 139

Daniel could keep up a conversation for about 45 minutes. He’d ask the right questions, nod at the right time, laugh close enough to real that most people banked it and moved on.

But around the three-quarter mark he’d respond to something funny with “wow” instead of laughing, or ask a follow-up about your sister when you’d been talking about your boss, and if you were watching closely you could see his face rearrange between expressions, like a screen buffering.

Beth had been living with this for two-and-a-half years. She told her friend Megan that dating Daniel was like dating a hotel concierge: attentive, responsive, and off the clock the second you left the lobby.

They had a place on East 36th, a one-bedroom with a second room you couldn’t fit a queen mattress into without blocking the closet, rent-stabilized at $2175, a number Daniel dropped into conversation the way other men mentioned their marathon times.

Beth did accessibility audits on city websites. Daniel did something at Deloitte involving databases and dashboards that Beth’d asked about early on and never asked about again because Daniel’s explanation sounded like a terms of service agreement.

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DREAMSCRAPES BY STEVE BREYMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 139

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ANYTHING HELPS BY TOM KNIFFIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 139

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SHARED OCCUPANCY BY RK PATEL, DREAMSCRAPES BY STEVE BREYMAN, A BLESSED DAY BY STEPHANIE SWARTZ, ANYTHING HELPS BY TOM KNIFFIN.

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A BLESSED DAY BY STEPHANIE SWARTZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 139

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WHEN GOD FOUND MATH BY AIDA BODE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 75

Cracked and burst

into a shot of chaos—

light, confused

without direction,

G O D—bewildered

at his own words.

the sky, a mistress of

white

stars, the suitors of

darkness

I see them

wait for a deity’s

mind,

to find the beginning

sand is a prisoner of

a shore where

he’s started to count

knowing that

Pi begins

at T H R E E

AIDA BODE

I grew up in a communist country where faith in God was not only prohibited but also punished. When God Found Math may be skeptic, or even ironic and doubtful, but it is out of longing and thirst for what’s beyond human, and what’s certain in an uncertain world. I hope that as one reads my poems, one finds that no matter how harsh reality may be, we do have faith, imagination, and humanity to pull us through. Let’s dream together and make the world a better place!

STEALING HOME BY KAY BONTEMPO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 78

Two bell peppers, Muenster cheese. Cauliflower, a pack of Newports, Tampax. Martinelli’s apple juice. Paper towels two-ply. English Breakfast tea. Boil-in-a-bag rice, paper clips, ramen noodles. Maybe some ice cream if there was money left over. America’s Choice vanilla, eaten straight from the carton. It wouldn’t be bad.

With an uncomfortable pop, he pulled out of her and lay beside her, breathing hard. It was 11.52pm. She wondered if the Shop’n’Save would even be open.

Lucas was 23, like her, and also graduated from the local college. He had a calm assurance that things would be the way they were forever. In his apartment he had hung the same basketball posters and St Pauli Girl beer sign that had adorned his dorm room. In the corner, a Yeti cooler-fridge hummed, relentlessly content.

She liked him, she thought, in the way that she liked cereal—enjoyed on occasion. Some things changed from week to week, from moment to moment, but raisin bran was perpetual, and so it seemed was Lucas.

She rose and dressed, and slid out of the apartment with a noncommittal goodbye. He didn’t see her swipe the mini cactus from the corner of his dresser.

Back at home she fiddled with the hundreds of assembled trinkets on her bedside table and wondered what she would tell the next boyfriend about him. Maybe about his impressive collection of polo shirts. Or that his favorite TV show was The Mindy Show. The Mindy Show Guy she would call him to the next boy and they would laugh without shame but also without malice.

She had carved Lucas’s cactus into the exact shape of the State of Texas.

Her office cubicle had three walls the color of unpolished pewter and a divider she shared with Marcia, a heavyset woman who typed with two fingers and gave off the ever-so-faint scent of mothballs.

Her desk was mostly bare, save for a too-smiley photo of her and Lucas that he had put there himself. In it, he was wearing a turquoise polo shirt and giving a thumbs-up; her eyes were half closed, something she had pointed out to him and he had ignored.

The desk drawer housed hundreds upon hundreds of cap erasers, stolen one by one from the supply closet when no one was looking. Matte and pink, they pointed upwards like small animals begging for direction. She had arranged them painstakingly into a map of the world, Africa looming large in the center and Japan hanging like a question mark.

She wondered what it was like in Japan. She pictured bamboo reaching toward the sky, TV-inspired images of temples built like layer cakes.

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