This issue, we’re excited to include a special musical playlist and visual art from guest arts editor, Tierney Malone. For each of five feature pieces, Tierney has curated a unique visual and musical pairing to accompany the literary work. We were fortunate to have Tierney participate in this project, especially as our June issue coincides with Juneteenth—the celebration of which the artist is deeply engaged with this month, both through music and a special art exhibition. Our arts section features an in-depth interview with Tierney, who discusses his work, the complicated history of Juneteenth, and his selections for this issue.
We are also delighted to introduce our new fiction editor, Julie Wilkerson, including the debut of her new story, Magnolia Lane. We welcome Julie and her wide-ranging literary interests, from mystery and historical fiction, to YA and speculative.
On a sad note, this will be poetry editor Amy Lemmon’s final issue. Amy has been with us for a decade, and in that time, she has cultivated a rich, diverse tradition of poetry at the magazine. She will be greatly missed, but has already found an outstanding replacement, with Precious Okoyomon, who will debut as poetry editor in our next issue.
Of course, we hope you’ll enjoy all the original essays, fiction, humor, memoir, and poetry in this issue. And if you’re in the NYC area, please join us for the issue launch reading, which will take place on July 15, 2017.
Finally, we thank the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp), for their support of this issue in the form of a 2017 New York Technical Assistance Program regrant provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Masthead
Mary Cool
Editor in Chief
Voichita Nachescu
Essays Editor
Julie Wilkerson
Fiction Editor
Tierney Malone
Guest Arts Editor
Lisa Kirchner
Memoir Editor
Amy Lemmon
Poetry Editor
Table of Contents
Greg and Marcia run against each other for class president and Marcia accuses Greg of spreading fake news.
With this interview, Ducts welcomes Tierney Malone, guest arts editor. For 5 pieces in this issue, Tierney curated selections from his own visual art as well as a "playlist" of jazz music.
Studies show: memory is OJ from a can. Reconstituted from concentrate, to be exact.
The subject line of my sister’s email to me on the anniversary of our father’s death contained his initials, followed by a question mark: RDB?
I say yes without thinking about the words.
Sorry to mention the chorus of cicadas / and the constellations of fireflies
Sweltering heat. nearly empty car. red laces on blue Nikes lean against a pole.
Ducts summer issue launch! Sat, July 15, 2017, 7-9 pm at KGB Bar
Trumpet Fiction thanks all of the people who made the July issue launch of Ducts possible.
Ducts is honored to be one of this September's "Literary Bookmarks," as featured by the Woven Tale Press . . .
Saturday, October 14, 2017, 7-9 p.m.
Kirsten Major, Roberta Allen & Sophie Jaff kick off 19th season
Saturday, November 11, 7-9 pm
Hosted by Lisa Kirchner. Sat, Dec 9, 7-9 pm
Marina Tsvetaeva was an exile all her life. She coined a famous phrase: All poets are Yids, which means that all poets are Jews, exiles, foreign. A real poet cannot be comfortably placed in any context.
We Carnies didn’t see ourselves as being in the restaurant business. We were in the social-change business.
It was as if we had been looking at our living room through bleach-colored glasses that hid the scuff marks on the walls, bumps from moving furniture around, a space behind the couch where I had etched my initials with the grime from my boots on a day I had been binge watching American Top 40 upside-down.
The magazines kept coming every week or every month, so it was one or another of them every day, and you didn’t have what we both knew it was going to take to make them stop.
The voices were faint, indistinct, like a quiet murmur that played inside her head. Once, when Marilyn told her father what she heard, he told her not to worry. The ancestors were watching over her, he said. She was the fortunate one.
I was dealing with the misery of PMS at the time: bloating, spotting, cramps, and an insatiable appetite wit
Strictly speaking, I’d seen a girl with chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail exit the bus. Yet she looked, from behind at least, so strikingly similar to my big sister Joan, that it didn’t occur to me that it might not be her.
This is a story of my son’s conception. I hope he likes it.
Nebraska has a bakery for early souls.
Youth, greedy for beauty, / Squanders it carelessly.
You shark-circle me, I know,
But I am in my own ocean,
Lying in hushed dark blue and looking up
To the curve of the tail of my blue whale.
