 While you consider submitting to CLOCKHOUSE Volume Nine, here's something to read from Volume Seven. Submissions are open until December 15, and the guidelines and submissions upload button are on the website.
from Jill Frances Johnson's Ghats: I’m racing down Kalimati Road heading for the bazaar, what we call downtown back in America. A chicken surprises itself and me by running into my bike’s front tire. A man yells over the chicken’s squawks, but I pump hard and don’t look back. My cycling has improved since moving to Kathmandu. I swerve around a toddler at the road’s edge, swerve again to avoid a porter hunched under his bulging basket. Neck of steel, calves of iron, I write in my head. I’m thinking about my article due tomorrow for the school newspaper. The porter turns his head and spits a streak of betel juice, red flecks sticking to my sneaker. Detouring through Himalaya Heights, the expat community where most families live, I’m on the lookout for one of my friends to go to town. When we first moved into Round House I complained, wanting to be in the American development. Now I like our house, which is circular and white and tall like a three-layer birthday cake. We live in half the cake, our apartment three floors top to bottom. Dad likes to joke how he can never corner my mother.
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 While you consider submitting to CLOCKHOUSE Volume Nine, here's something to read from Volume Six. Submissions are open until December 15, and the guidelines and submissions upload button are on the website.
from Joel Tomfohr's The Inviolable Rule of Love: My dad hunched over the shovel, his back broad, and thrust down and withdrew the fresh, heavy, white snow. He had already moved out, but he came by the house on days after snow had fallen and cleared the sidewalks anyway. Again, and again with the chucking and crunching of the shoveling of the snow and it lulled me into a trance. Throughout that white winter after my older brother Jason had been admitted to the hospital, I sat alone in his bedroom, my younger brother Gabe alone in ours while alone my mom simmered orange peel and clove in a pot of water on the stove in the yellow kitchen, filling the house with the warm scent of citrus and spice, magical because all in winter was scentless. In that cold and white winter I slept beneath the warm winter blankets laid across Jason’s bed for him by my mom. I dreamed that it was spring, the ice and snow thawed, and my family had been reunited, but the lake of my town filled so that it rose above the grassy banks and flooded the town we lived in, the town of my childhood. In that cold and white winter I was tormented by dreams that seemed like memories, and memories that seemed like dreams. Nothing was real. Everything was real. While I slept the snow still fell outside and it was the silence of a dying boy falling and it fell like a pall over our house on Wilson Avenue. |
CLOCKHOUSE
A national literary journal published by the Archives
September 2022
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