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By Kristin M. Distel

The wood creaked beneath our knees, as I, amid a procession of the faithful, ascended the steps inside St. John of Lateran Church, where the ancient marble staircase—too holy to trod with human feet and tourists’ dirty sneakers—is covered with an exoskeleton of oak, so each penitent can slide their hands in the carefully carved-out slits and touch the steps that once led to Pontius Pilate’s palace, but when I reached the convex glass circle that, a pamphlet I’d picked up at the front door insisted, protected droplets of Christ’s blood, I heard myself wince when I bit my tongue; an old woman next to me, the creases in her skin so deep that her tears formed little rivulets on her face, mumbled prayers and rubbed her knee, groaning quietly with pain—sia fatta la tua Volontà she repeated, saying it twice on the twentieth step, and I wondered whether it was a mistake, whether her pain had distracted her while she slipped her closed fist, full of rosary beads, into the wooden crevice and searched for remnants of Christ, as we all did, and I listened to my coarse and empty hand slide over Pontius Pilate’s marble and realized I’d forgotten to pray, that I’d forgotten the language for speaking to god: “Reciting the pater noster prayer on each of the twenty-eight steps will liberate a soul from purgatory,” my pamphlet claimed, but in 1510, Martin Luther climbed these steps on his knees, and standing at the top of them, counting the souls now loosed from purgatory, asked aloud, “Who knows whether this is true?” and as my tongue throbbed and pulsated, and as I tried to speak the prayer and release a soul from limbo, the not-hell of heaven, I accidentally said “out, Father,” and a bead of blood spilled out of my mouth, staining the wood beneath me.



Kristin M. Distel holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Ohio University; her work has appeared in Glass, The Broken Plate, The Stockholm Review of Literature, The Minetta Review, Juxtaprose, and elsewhere.


Art by Jeff Kallet.

By Claire Elder

A man bent over and expelled his hot breath in my ear, if Johnny Cash was the man in black you must be his woman; his vulgar wink prompted a bile of discomfort and repulsion to climb and burn the back of my throat—if I wore red I would be too seductive, glitter a tramp, gold an ornament for his lap, lace a Victoria’s angel modeling lingerie, pink a Barbie with nice tits and the perfect size four waist, leopard print his feisty prey, leather his submissive to be bound and gagged, purple a jewel bought and kept in a box, white an innocent virgin, but black should be unapproachable because black is the color of mourning—I mourned my eighteenth birthday when it became legal; my mother mourned my adolescence after my first period; I mourned that night in the backseat of my high school boyfriend’s car after he couldn’t help himself; I mourn the moment when the man mistook black for a green light—when I turned away from him, I feared he would whisper in my ear that black means I should smile more; black means I’m easy; black means I'm a slut, and sluts don’t get boundaries.



Claire Elder currently attends Ohio University's Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and interns for New Ohio Review.


By Ryan Drendel

Mom made us chew sugar-free gum during takeoff to release the cabin pressure before it bubbled through our ears ignore the flight attendants’ safety procedures so we can say our prayers up here a perfect farm circle appears oval and all of Missouri is farmed into square-mile pixels and even the Flatirons have been flattened into reminders of my grandmother’s crow’s feet keep pushing their personal items into the backs of my heels kept clapping the first time I flew I flew into Las Vegas to help my mom help her mom get rid of her husband’s old gloves used to squeeze my five-year-old fingers and command that I shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the whole wide world and I remember giggling even though it hurt because I had not yet learned about the premature stress I placed when I tried to pronounce di-abetes my tongue would leap ahead of itself to keep pace with my thoughts and the speech therapists would call this lazy passenger refuses to cover his nose with his mask while the shadow of our contrail stretches into the meadows like another powerline I wonder whether we change time-zones in the air or after the voice on the PA tells us it’s okay to turn off airplane mode and often I forget I’m allowed to wear a watch on each wrist but I remember tapping my grandmother’s during our final descent into the overcast I asked her whether we were where Grandpa had gone and I remember she told me to close my eyes and keep chewing until the plane landed like a moth who was exhausted of flying into the moon.



Ryan Drendel is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, where he edits Thin Air Magazine and co-hosts Cinder Skies: a High Desert Reading Series.


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