Thick With Conviction

A Dream with My Great-Grandmothers These women, stories finally made flesh, sit across from me on an upholstered couch. Helen folds her hands upon her prayer’s knees. Margaret offers me a piece of heaven-scraping cake. Sitting across from me on an upholstered couch, they ask about me, how my grandparents are doing. Margaret offers another piece of heaven-scraping cake. I’m careful to mind my language and hemline. They ask about my mother, how my grandparents are doing. I ask Margaret if she threw sheet ropes out the window, was careful to mind her language and hemline, and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men. I ask Margaret if she really threw sheet ropes out the window, if she wore three gold rings during WWI and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. She wore three gold rings during WWI because she couldn’t say no to soldiers who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. Helen attended politicians’ wakes on Sunday afternoons because she couldn’t s...

on the nickel block where we go to see about my best friend’s medicine and she explains how the city has been extraordinarily slow in filling the holes on this street for months and months again she tells me how much safer she feels there than in the fast neighborhoods how tall beautiful and immature her son is for his age and i notice lately that construction cones have become as thin as apricot stalagmites marking time as nothing but brave young titian colored brachium punching out and up like any part of a bird’s mouth rootstock reaching for a breath of finished air all they want alive we turn around in an abandoned parking lot behind the next pile of broken orange teeth i wait for you to reseal your blunt with mother’s spit Some things are better free Nothing happens in America until someone sells a ware and a truck or train delivers it unlike all my favorite songs that start squarely in the middle of the end. Our first Winter toge...

3 AM Insomnia Perhaps, my darling, The most intimate thing we can do Is give another our sorrow, To be open, split, and vulnerable, Even while knowing The wound might not be sealed, But left open, and crying, The way a child does, Without shame, or reprimand, But merely To have the hurt held As though it were just another Part of us. Ache You beat until you bruised my heart, You don't get to ask Why it's gone black.  Jonathan Douglas Dowdle was born in Nashua, NH and has traveled throughout the US, he currently resides in South Carolina. Previous works have appeared or are appearing in: Hobo Camp Review, 322 Review, The Write Place At The Write Time, Blue Hour Review, and After The Pause.

Child in the Distance I want to remember the days of being young. Of being the same height as my mother’s knees. Of carrying a tub of fruit inside from the orchard while the sunlight drown the fallen leaves in gold and everyone I loved waiting at the kitchen table; my father in his fiddleback chair, holding a gin and tonic and a lit cigarette. But those aren’t memories anymore, they’re tiny pages scribbled in an old diary, after the war, tucked beside the rules of etiquette like treasured bibelots. Still, if I try hard enough to recall the feeling of being a child, it was for an instant, a flicker of whimsy; a barrel of uneaten fruit, the tenderness of handpicked apple blossoms pressed against my chest. The Boyfriend? I’m the guy who looks prettier than you who wears Zegna suits and cufflinks with my initials in gold. I’ve been told I’m great in bed and that’s an understatement unless you underline great in red, then you’d be on the mark. Here’...