Temple in a City is an online literary journal for creative respite, release and renewal. There's lots of room in these grottos.
Bluesky
@templeinacity.bsky.social
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Micro by Beth Sherman
/in HereAngel
Mother in her coffin, still as a broken doll, her mouth a slash of plum lipstick she never owned.
Can’t walk talk blink eat breathe.
How could she forget how to breathe? I ask them.
In The Place, Mother in a wheelchair. Stationed in the garden or next to her bed. Sometimes they put her in the hall and forget about her.
The Place has big windows. All the nurses wear white uniforms, funny white hats and shoes that never squeak.
There’s one nurse – with seams on her stockings – who whispers maybe she doesn’t recall what she says to you but she knows she loves you.
Everyone’s batty here, Mother tells me. Don’t eat the bananas. They’re poisoned.
Mother screaming at the nurse, stop trying to kill me. You won’t get away with it.
Mother, who never raises her voice because it’s not swan lady.
Where’s Aunt Sue, she asks, when we went to Sue’s funeral, shoveled dirt into her grave.
Mother in the wheelchair with her chin chest-drooped.
Are you sleeping, Mother? No. Her hand reaching for mine, not letting go.
Mother at her wedding in a white lace dress with a train. Why do they call it that when there aren’t any tracks? My father circling her orbit like a planet glued to the sun.
Mother in the Yellow House, making Apple Brown Betty, letting me help. Cinnamon brown sugar butter lemon something sticky.
Mother as a girl. Pigtails. Pogo stick. A blouse that her own mother embroidered. Mother’s name on the collar. I have the picture somewhere.
Sylvia, you’re my angel, she used to say. My good girl. My star.
What was written there?
Sylvia?
That’s not right.
It begins with a G.
I love you, angel and then she’d fold me inside her wings.
Poetry by Jenny Wong
/in HereTrees & Teeth
When I am asked
Why are you so quiet –
even trees hold their memories
hushed, ringed
in their bodies,
each year
layered
in trunks,
humming
in a frequency
unmeasurable in syllables
until someone comes along
– a roaring saw
teeth
demanding
answers.
Flash fiction by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
/in HereEvery Night I Go to Sleep I Dream I’m Standing on a Pier, Staring Out at the Sea
I call my parents at three in the morning. “Why are you calling us at three in the morning?” my dad says.
“I was having bad dreams,” I tell him.
“You’re fifty-seven,” he says. “You’re supposed to be having bad dreams. Go back to sleep.” He hangs up the phone.
So I go back to sleep, and in my dream I’m calling my parents, but they never pick up the phone.
*
I think about what my dad said and I call my parents the next day to apologize profusely, but they don’t remember I’ve called. “Okay,” I say. “But you said something about how I’m supposed to have bad dreams at my age. What is that supposed to mean?”
“What do you think it means?” my dad says. “The older you get, the worse it gets. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“Wait,” I say. “What are your dreams like then?”
“Nothing but screaming,” my dad says. “Sometimes I fall out of the bed. Sometimes it’s your mother.”
“And the tentacles,” my mom says. “Don’t forget about all the tentacles.”
“Tentacles?” I ask, doing my best not to sound alarmed.
“Just you wait for the tentacles,” my mom says. “Are you still going to have lunch with us Sunday at 1:00?”
“Let’s meet at Howard’s on the pier,” my dad says. “I’ll make the reservation.”
*
At Howard’s my parents order octopus. I order the fried squid. “You should take it easy on all the fried food,” my mom says. “You’ll get bad dreams.”
“But if I’m going to get bad dreams anyway,” I say, “why shouldn’t I eat whatever I want?”
“Bad dreams AND high cholesterol,” my dad says, sticking a fork with a chunk of octopus on it at me. Like he knows what he’s talking about.
“You think it’s hard running in your dreams now,” my mom says. “Wait till you find out.”
“Try running anywhere after your first heart attack,” my dad says.
I flag the server and change my order to a salad.
*
In my dreams there is so much cholesterol, and I don’t care. I’m eating the fried chicken of my childhood, the fried clams, the fried everything.
The ocean seethes. I’m sitting on a bench, my greasy fingers reaching into the to-go bag, pulling out a French fry, a clam strip.
Each thing I eat in this dream is only going to make it worse. I know that, nobody has to tell me. But I keep eating, I’m enjoying every morsel I put in my mouth. The crunch. The salt, the chewy bits, everything.
*
My son calls me to tell me about his dreams. It’s always summer, he’s in the car with us on our way to go to the beach, but the car breaks down. We fix it and something else breaks. We fix that but now it’s dark. But we’re nearly there, so we go to the beach in the middle of the night, in the dark. Other people are there too, some families; pairs sneak off. They sound like birds. They don’t return.
The moon is full, we’re busy eating.
We don’t mind it when our kids go swimming in the ocean. We don’t mind when they never come back. We don’t even call.
“What do you think that means?” my son asks.
“Have you ever just sat there,” I say. “Looking out for something nobody can see?”
“Sometimes,” my son admits.
“Keep doing that,” I say. “You’ll see.”
Four poems by Esther Sadoff
/in HereWatchers
When I was younger
I tried to imagine the future.
I saw myself as a watcher.
I watched people passing,
their shapes indiscernible.
My eyes were clear as windows
but that was all I could see.
I could only see my own eyes.
I always thought watching was
something you had to do alone.
Phantom Pain
Though I’ve never been burned by fire,
I can feel its flame the same way
I can feel myself falling
from the top of the swing set,
me falling into the pond by my sister’s barn,
or many years later, a sharp turn
in the road and a large oak tree
like an axe cutting me in half.
Pollinators
I used to think only bees were pollinators,
but now I know that isn’t true.
Moths, hornets, and wasps also
transfer pollen from flower to flower—
small city of magenta, deep purple, blushing pink.
Even flies can pollinate,
the second most important pollinator,
but we are only interested in firsts.
There is so little we want to know.
Talking About the Weather
In a city this hot, the only thing
to talk about is the weather.
We spend our days chasing the wind,
avoiding streets with no air.
A city where breeze becomes benediction.
A weather this merciless will change you.
Heat this extreme requires discipline.
Now that I’m away, what is there left to say?
❤️❤️
/in HereTwo poems by Yuan Changming
/in HereSummer twilight
All the flaring of the day
Dissipates, leaving cracks
For waves of winds
To sweep in a clear-cut night
12 Heart Metaphors: a Chinglish Poem in Collocations
心房: heart house for a soul to dwell in
心扉: heart door always ready to be opened
心鼓: heart drum to be beaten rhythmically
心匣: heart case where to store one’s feelings
心镜: heart mirror to reflect one’s inner self
心田: heart field in which to grow the seeds of hope
心原: heart wildland for the will to roam freely
心谷: heart valley where one can camp for the night
心河: heart river to drift along on a sunny day
心海: heart sea to navigate towards the sun
心空: heart sky under which to fly against light
心坎: heart threshold for a traveller to step over
Flash fiction by Jay Chesters
/in HereTake A Bite Of The Big Apple
A terrible roar shook the Earth to its molten middle. In the skyscraper’s timeless Art Deco facade, the improbably large dinosaur saw its mirrored reflection. An enemy!
Taking a bite out of the Big Apple’s iconic terraced crown, the behemoth sent a deadly rain of glass, steel, and bricks to the avenue below.
People from all walks of life found common ground in running, screaming, for their lives.
Wholly by coincidence, a conspiracy theorist convention was meeting across the street that day. Upon hearing the news, the conference organisers cancelled the informal breakout sessions. Drastic times called for similar measures; they convened an impromptu emergency panel discussion.
Debate raged like civil war between radical factions. Was it all an authoritarian government false flag power grab, or hallucinogenic fluoride in the tap water?
But on something they did agree, and so they flocked outside with one mind, intent on proving there was no danger.
The leviathan lizard’s attention turned to its prey.
“It’s a hologram, a cheap hoax!” said the overpaid keynote speaker to his acolytes.
The beast separated the speaker’s head from his body with one swift bite. The sickening crunch made any further debate redundant.
On the 31st floor, a menace of stone gargoyles roosted peacefully, their wings outstretched. For decades, they had guarded the building’s corners, sightlessly watching life come and go.
Under the unrelenting monstrous assault, their solemn watch ended with an inelegant swan dive to the street.
As an armoured convoy armed with anti-dinosaur bazookas rolled up 42nd Street, the cinema audience cheered in their seats.
“This is fantastic!” the director turned in his VIP recliner to the man slumped next to him. “When does any film ever get this reaction?”
The writer’s story was a hit, but to him the technicolour picture’s was drab grey. His salted buttermilk popcorn? Flavourless cardboard.
He was inconsolable; he should have known the director wouldn’t get it.
The writer had kissed his late wife at the skyscraper’s 71st-floor observatory on their first date. The building represented his love.
The dinosaur? His raging grief.
Creative nonfiction by Travis Flatt
/in HereA Box Under the Christmas Tree Looks Suspiciously Like a PlayStation 5
A box wrapped in green and red plaid paper, which looks suspiciously like a PlayStation 5, appears under the Christmas tree. Like, almost three feet tall by ten inches wide, this box, not just a console jankily wrapped in paper—the things have a distinctive look, like a science fiction toaster.
At the moment, a PlayStation 5 is impossible to find at Target, Walmart, etc. You can buy one online for almost twice its official price and you’re likely to get scammed.
For this and other reasons, such as existential guilt that I have better shit to do with my free time (reading, writing, exercising), which is ample after losing my job—our boutique bookstore finally closed last month—I told my wife I didn’t want a PlayStation 5. If I ever get one, I’d wait until they were available in stores and cheaper.
I’m not handy. I don’t own any tools. My wife is, and she’s got a whole, for real toolbox. Today, while she’s at work advising students at the university, I check in her toolbox for measuring tape and don’t find any. I do find a ruler in the drawer of my stepson’s school supplies.
I Google the exact dimensions of the PlayStation 5 box.
The box under the tree is just a little too short, half an inch, but maybe the measurements I found online aren’t up to date. Maybe this is some kind of new packaging. Second-hand and repackaged by eBay scalpers. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she’d buy for me that would come in a rectangular box this size.
I peek through a fold of wrapping paper. I find a loose place where I can just slightly lift and peep in with a flashlight—gently, so as not to rip the paper. The box inside is white. The PlayStation 5 box is white. I accidentally tear the paper, just the tiniest bit, trying to catch a glimpse of the logo or any writing, so I quit.
When my wife comes home from work, she sets immediately to cooking dinner. I’m a miserable cook. She dislikes anything I make and isn’t polite about it. She’s the kind of honest that doesn’t smile and eat shitty food. She wanted to go to cooking school but couldn’t afford it. She can bake difficult things like sticky toffee pudding and did so when my mom asked last Christmas.
I follow her around the kitchen, wanting to ask her about the mystery box, and worry she’ll notice I tampered with it. I can think of nothing but the box and seem distracted until she finally asks me what’s up?
I break down and ask.
(By the way, I’ve already called my mom to tell that I suspect my wife bought me a PlayStation 5. My mom says that sounds like something only my wife would do. She means that as a compliment.)
I confess everything—the measuring, the peeking.
Well, I try to, anyway; she cuts me off at the “tearing the wrapping paper” part and tells me it’s a pasta maker.
I start crying. Feel helpless. Mortified.
Besides books, which I normally buy for myself, I haven’t asked for anything for Christmas in years. We’re poor. Not miserably so, just fine. I don’t enjoy shopping or spending money.
She says it’s okay to want things.
When we go to, say, Target or TJ Maxx, and my wife just goofs around and browses things while I stand silently—like a dick—and think, “junk,” ruining the whole normal American thing for her.
I lie, promise I’m alright, that a pasta maker sounds fun, and we talk about cooking pasta, our mutual love of pasta, the time we’ll spend together, how I’ll learn something (improve my cooking; just improve at something), but I’m half talking and half listening. I’m entirely hoping she’s lying, that it is a PlayStation 5 and this has been subterfuge, that somewhere there’s a PlayStation 5 hiding—in her closet, in the attic, in her office, somewhere.
Poetry by Madison Golding
/in HereThe Bookshop at the End of Wanting
I found you between the cracked spines in the vellichor of a shop where someone else’s marginalia said yes, exactly! in pencil beside the line I needed most.
I looked through paned glass, its glazing chipped.
Every stranger outside the window carried their whole catastrophic life in a canvas tote. All of us, separately, immolated.
Obsession. Infatuation.
These are neighborhoods I keep moving back to. The rent is cheap. Great light. I swear I’ll leave some day.
I never do.
We stayed up past reason. The sky went indigo and misty, ice clouds lit from below. You said you knew what it meant like you always do.
The same wanting returns each morning.
Relentless.
Fiction by Anselm Eme
/in HereTHE SILENCE PROTOCOL
“Names have power. And the ones without names have nothing left to lose.”
When the girl spoke the dead man’s name, Daniel Okorie knew the silence was over.
The name came softly, almost gently, carried on the harmattan wind like dust. But it struck Daniel with the force of a gunshot.
“Ezekiel Nwoye.”
Daniel froze mid-step.
He had not heard that name spoken in seventeen years. Not in public. Not in prayer. Not even in memory. Ezekiel Nwoye was not supposed to exist anymore. The file said so. The order said so. The silence demanded it.
Yet the voice was unmistakable.
A child’s voice.
Daniel turned slowly.
She stood at the edge of the red-earth clearing, barefoot, thin, no more than twelve. Her dress was grey with dust. Her eyes were steady. Too steady for a child who had just spoken the name of a man officially erased from history.
“You shouldn’t say that,” Daniel said.
The girl tilted her head. “Why?”
His heart thudded. “Because he’s dead.”
She shook her head. “No. He was deleted.”
The word cut deeper than any knife.
“DeLeTeD”.
Daniel felt the weight of years press down on his chest. He had written that word himself. Signed it. Authorized it. Lived by it.
He took a careful step closer. “What is your name?”
She hesitated. Just for a second. Then, quietly, “I don’t use it anymore.”
The forest behind her stirred. Not with wind. With memory.
Daniel knew then that the Protocol had failed.
Seventeen years earlier, Daniel Okorie had been a rising intelligence officer in Abuja, young, efficient, and trusted. When the government discovered the existence of “The Silence Protocol” they needed someone who could obey without asking why.
The Protocol was simple.
When knowledge threatened stability, erase the knower.
Not by killing.
By removing the name.
No records. No photographs. No mentions. No graves. Families were told the person never existed. Entire lives wiped clean, not violently, but completely.
People forget faster than they admit.
Daniel was good at it.
Too good.
Ezekiel Nwoye had been the last deletion. A civil archivist who discovered a pattern, whole communities altered, elections quietly influenced, histories rewritten. Ezekiel had asked the wrong question.
So Daniel erased him.
Or thought he did.
Now a child stood before him, speaking the forbidden.
“Who taught you that name?” Daniel asked.
The girl looked past him, into the forest. “He did.”
Cold spread through Daniel’s veins. “That’s impossible.”
“He talks when the forest is quiet,” she said. “He says names get lonely when no one remembers them.”
Daniel swallowed.
“What else did he say?”
She met his eyes. “He said you would come.”
They walked in silence.
Daniel led. The girl followed. She moved like someone who knew the path long before she stepped on it. That disturbed him more than her words.
“You live near here?” he asked.
“Yes. But not with people who use names.”
He glanced back. “Why not?”
“Names make it easier to be found.”
Daniel stopped.
That was something Ezekiel used to say.
They reached the abandoned research station just before dusk. The building was supposed to be sealed, burned, and buried under paperwork. Instead, it stood intact, swallowed by vines, waiting.
Daniel keyed the rusted door open. Inside, dust lay thick, undisturbed.
Except for footprints.
Small ones.
“You’ve been here before,” Daniel said.
The girl nodded.
“Why?”
She pointed to the back room. “Because this is where you started lying.”
The words struck harder than accusation. They were statement. Fact.
Daniel moved slowly into the room.
The terminal flickered to life.
On the screen was a list.
Names.
Hundreds of them.
Redacted. Restored. Reappearing.
His work, undone.
“This shouldn’t be possible,” Daniel whispered.
“You taught the system how to forget,” the girl said. “But you never taught it how to forgive.”
The terminal beeped.
A new name appeared.
OKORIE, DANIEL
Daniel staggered back.
“No,” he breathed.
The girl watched him. “The silence eats everyone eventually.”
He tried to shut the system down.
It resisted.
Files opened on their own. Audio logs played. Faces long erased stared back at him from the screen. Not angry. Not vengeful.
“PrEsEnT”.
“This isn’t revenge,” the girl said, as if reading his thoughts. “It’s balance.”
Daniel laughed bitterly. “You’re just a child.”
She stepped closer. “I was born the night the Protocol reached full capacity. When the last name disappeared, something needed to remember.”
Understanding dawned, slow and terrible.
“You’re not a messenger,” Daniel said.
“No,” she replied. “I’m ThE ArChIvE.”
Outside, the forest began to hum.
Not loudly. Gently. Like voices testing their throats after years of silence.
Daniel’s hands shook. “If these names return, everything breaks. Governments fall. People panic.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“I understand exactly,” she said. “You thought silence was safer than truth.”
Daniel slumped into a chair. “It was.”
“For you,” she corrected.
The terminal chimed again.
Another name restored.
Then another.
Daniel felt tears sting his eyes. He hadn’t cried since his first deletion.
“Why me?” he asked.
The girl’s voice softened. “Because you still remember.”
He looked at her, really looked.
“And you?” he asked. “What happens to you?”
She smiled, small and tired. “I get to rest.”
The humming grew louder.
Daniel stood.
“Then let me help.”
She searched his face. “You would give up your name?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I already lost it.”
She nodded.
The terminal asked one final question.
CONFIRM RELEASE?
Daniel pressed ENTER.
The lights died.
The forest went silent.
Then the wind moved again.
By morning, the research station was gone.
In its place stood young trees.
Villagers would later speak of a strange calm that settled over the land. Of old photographs reappearing in drawers. Of names remembered without pain.
As for Daniel Okorie, no record of him exists.
But sometimes, when the forest is quiet, a voice can be heard, steady, regretful, at peace.
Telling names.
So they are never lonely again.
Word
/in HereFiction by N.H. Van Der Haar
/in HereAfter Steel Magnolias
With a deep and queer passion, I live in delusion. If I were to die before her, heaven forbid, knock on wood, my mother will perform a tremendous impersonation of Sally Field from Steel Magnolias. A sublime performance in that greatest of films. She would buy a dress for the occasion, a stylish black number snatched off the rack from David Jones. She would match it as best she could to the shoes she had. She will clutch at the soil on my grave and scream. She will rip and tear at her hair and jewellery. My father would passively tell her to calm down and to get a hold of herself. She will swipe him away with a large hand.
“I wanna know why, I wanna know! Why my son’s life is over!”
My sister will heave my mother up from the fresh grave. Both women will struggle to compose themselves, dabbing their cheeks, eyes, and nose. My sister will dust my mother’s knees and gently scold her for getting dirt on the bottom of a brand-new dress. Our mother will look stoic for a moment only to lift her head to the sky and howl. Like a wild animal. My beloved husband will have already driven off to the wake, to sip an icy old fashioned and fan themselves with the funerary program.
“I’m fine… I’m fine… I’m fine!”
Mother takes a manicured fist and smacks it into the palm of her other hand and swears viciously. Like her mother did and her mother before her. My father would again tell her to calm down with his shaky, emotional voice. Repetition would not enhance the phrase’s effectiveness. My mother ignores her blubbering husband and rants with vitriol rising in her voice, eyeliner moving to stain her tired face.
“I don’t think I can take this… I… I don’t think I can take this! I just wanna hit something! I just wanna hit somebody… till they feel as bad as I do! I just wanna hit something! I wanna hit it hard!”
Again she stumbles. My sister will back away as she drives her hand deep into the soil and squeeze a handful of it in her fist.
“I’m supposed to go first!”
She struggles to hold herself upright. Her ankle will bend at an awkward angle. She has sprained it painfully but will only become aware of this tomorrow morning as the alcohol leaves her system.
“I’ve always been ready to go first!”
She will weep thick tears and stain the words on my small tombstone. At the wake, she will get so emotional she will try to blow her nose with the funerary program and get a paper cut just beneath her nose. My cousins will grin and snicker at the red mark and say Mother got it shaving her beard off.
In his own very particular kind of mourning, weeks from now, my father will plant over my grave a magnolia tree. All day my father will slave over a hole in the ground. Dressed in a stained white skivvies and tradie’s shorts. He will dig it alone with nothing more than a shovel, despite the gravedigger turning up as the sun begins to set, with a post hole digger that gets it done in a quarter of the time and with no sweat.
The magnolia tree will grow tall and straight, unassisted by unnatural fertiliser, to close to its full height of 5 metres tall. Children with their parents, on visits to the graves of grandparents and great uncles they cannot remember, will pluck the creamy flowers to leave as gifts on stranger’s tombstones. A lonely woman, whose parents are all dead now and her girlfriend will sit under it and weep. Years later, cemetery garden maintenance will be instructed to trim it back in the winter. But they will be pruned too far and the following year later it will die. All that will be left of my crumbling grave is a rather small tombstone and a dead magnolia tree. My mother will another hole in this cemetery. My father will be quietly cremated and his ashes scattered on the property his second wife owned with him. My sister will tear at the soil and earth holding my crumbling body until she can hold me aloft. From my rotting mouth, I sing to her.
“Behold the Ship of Theseus”.
On the way to the wake, Father plays ‘Past Carin’ by the Bushwackers Band on the radio. The thrum of the guitar and heavy lyrics fill everyone’s hearts. My sister whispers, almost to herself, that the song reminds her of that Australian film, Acute Misfortune. The artist Adam Cullen dying alone on his stripped mattress. Mother is moisturising her dirty and red hands with the creams she keeps in the glovebox.
“That is awful, just awful”
Slowly, the tears will dry and the sniffling will stop. The group’s individual gazes move out to stare at the landscape, the vanishing road beneath the car and the slow-moving cattle stomping through the passing fields.