She wore a black velvet shirt, the kind that shows you where you’ve been last and is only still cool in places like Nebraska or Chechnya maybe, though it might pass as kitsch today. Almost ten years ago, now, they found her in the woods behind the school as the leaves turned to rust and […]
Category Archives: Issue 11
Formaldehyde by Daniel Bennett
She touched the dead. Muller told me. I would spend my weekends on a chrome BMX, riding the channels of the old river. Orange earth, dust from powdered sandstone. A broken up mill. A red bow and arrow, stolen by a boy who resembled Popeye. The shallow water like bitter tea. Red cranes on the […]
Here we are, sore by Darren C. Demaree
We chased those butterflies for miles, Belle says & I can’t believe I caught one, Belle says quietly & I can’t believe I tore one wing off, Belle whispers & then there is silence for a while. There are a hundred butterflies in the field we are sitting in, but Belle can only look at […]
Concentricity by Shane Vaughan
Says she, what’s the purpose of life if it falls like chestnuts to the fire, to be roasted and devoured by little mouths unaware of their parents’ debts, where the random fall of seed can make or break a tree, with fruit picked by fingers reaching out like tentacles, feeding, until the leaves can’t grow, […]
La Doncella by Derwen Morfayel
Still, we can see her five-hundred-year-old young face. “Your little sister,” I begin, “was touched by lightning. Were you a virgin for the sun? Who was the boy who sits, tied up so tightly, blessed with vomit and with blood?” But the Maiden doesn’t answer. I think of asking whether old Llullaillaco’s water is dark […]
Thorns by Shawn McClure
The Roundleaf Briar has unyielding vines, harder than wood. It has thorns as big as cat claws, and can leave you bleeding. They stand guard over the woods, a dense and complicated barrier between civilization and the wild. They only hurt those who dare enter. Nettles have an invisible sting. You can walk through the […]
By the Third Week Two Prose Poems by C.C. Russell
By the Third Week Coating darkness. Snowflakes corkscrew through the branches of barren trees. Breath nearly the only thing visible before our faces. James was the first of us to go, but none of us had quite been able to see what it was that had dragged him away. Only the tracks of his heels—twin […]
October in Kokomo by Eva Roa White
It’s that time of year when cloud-free skies kiss great blushing trees and mums and roses fight it out. When busy squirrels dig into the newly laid mulch under the jaded eyes of an old Sylvester cat. Stunned bees taste the red fallen apples whose skins have been pierced by the beaks of a murder […]
Hell Is Where You Find It by Howie Good
There’s a moon and the night is clear. A man camping in the woods wakes up from a dream of a bear biting his head to find a bear biting his head. But you know what? Some mystics seek out difficult situations in order to improve their ability to meditate. One even tried to meditate […]
Middle Age by Tom Fugalli
At night the scarecrows come down and walk through the wheat field. I don’t know what they’re up to and am not interested in finding out. Still it bothers me to hear them step into the wheat with their silent feet. I want to leap out of bed and shout, “I live nowhere near a […]
# 40 by Joseph Victor Milford
when i hang my skin up on the hook every night, it hovers over me. i try to hide in others’ hurts. you woke up with a mountain on your face. a pressure. now you hold a volcano in your hand. in December, i hung my October costumes about the palisade to make ghosts look […]
Sinus Pressure by Carrie Conners
is a euphemism for being afraid to fall asleep (even if you could, which you can’t) because you just know that one or both of your eyeballs could shoot out of your head at any second. It’s not necessarily that you’re frightened of this event, you’ve always been fascinated that your eyes are attached to […]
Mass Casualty Drill by Peter Vanderberg
Bodies lined on the flight deck warm in the sun, joke & fake death. Clear skies, light breeze: perfect day for a Mass Casualty Drill. Doc leads his new guy over to practice CPR. The dead man shouts, He’s not gonna kiss me is he? On the bridge they wear helmets & hesitate over laminated […]
Rotten by Kirk Sever
Gristle and pores wet soft aroma, gorgeous, soft, grainy, loud opulent musk. Decaying sack of gladiolas, mushy brown. Sweating. A syrup made for the poor. Browned sugars and weeping rot. The corroded insides, the brown, sweating skin on the outside. The smell of artificial maple syrup, the trees, the dead leaves becoming earth, turning black, […]
Moonscape Two Prose Poems by Jess Mize
Moonscape The moon was once worshiped by our ancestors. Secretly, and with much fuss, but only in certain company. She had a sex, obviously, and was called Salome, Cynthia, Astarte. The lovers sleeping with mouths agape are intertwined upon a cool grass bed at midnight. There are emerald serpents which about weeping willows perform the […]
Intelligence by Ken Poyner
The ants we found to be the size of house cats. They wore ruts in the land, created virtual canyons, at times encouraged river beds. The enriching surprise was that the aardvarks were the size of garden spiders. One ant could feed an entire clan of fidgeting aardvarks for weeks. Everywhere there were decaying ant […]
Facultative Friends by Matt Alexander
Facultative friends will grow inside your intestine like microbiota, as an active culture of rape and pillage and the types of violence we allow our thirteen-year-olds and hookworms to watch on the silver screen, but despite their apparent innocuousness they will eat away all your food as you ingest it, as you atrophy away and […]
Phobia by Karen L. Egee
He dreaded Halloween all year, asking even in the winters of deep snow, while other children were reveling in no school days, making snow forts, rigging up turkey platters as sleds, asking even in summers, at the beach, while other children dared themselves in and out of the freezing water, tugged on each other’s shovels […]
Stopping to Let the Catholics Cross North Street in Salem by Jennifer Martelli
as they spilled out of Saturday Mass, I saw a family raking leaves from their small front yard: mother, father, and a young daughter about nine who sat on the curb with her DS or smartphone. The fallen leaves would call for one, maybe two more rakings before they’d be gone for another year with […]
family friend by Philippe Shils
when after much deliberation we went to my woman’s old family friend about the damage we’d done to his place and he said with a charitable laugh that he wouldn’t keep the deposit all I could think of was the juices we’d left on the chair upon which he sat. as he chuckled about the […]
Thirtyeightmississippi by Evan Anderson
I sometimes imagine that the sky is a giant roll of toilet paper and laugh. Same as I sometimes imagine that the monster slobbering under my train set table is a pile of toys tangled like intestines from those movies where the monster is cut across the belly and its insides spill out like the […]
All the others nights are darker by Chad Musick
If the doors would open, if hands would relinquish sweet baubles of mercy to ward this child against evil, then the hungry ghosts, the wolves dressed up as humans, could be chased back to their lairs by the candy of my breath. For tonight. They know that tasting this sweetness requires less, requires patience: razor […]
Heart-stopping by Richard Baldasty
The nomads departed, quietly as nomads often do, not saying goodbye, leaving us willow baskets they’d filled, some with stones the color of noon, some with stones the color of twilight, and some with the song that rises from fathoms deep of perfect darkness. We packed their gifts away. Put them in the room for […]
Daydream. Believer. by Kenneth Pobo
Keith visited Aunt Viv in Knoxville when, could luck be so good, he found that The Monkees were performing. October 30. Oh hallowed and sacred day. Yes, Mike wouldn’t be on stage, but… Davy… Micky… Peter. Not nostalgia—this was church, the downtown coliseum a cathedral. Christians had Christmas. Keith had one glorious Colgems label single […]
trade you for the collectible marbles by Keith Nunes
shaky footfalls, crisp new face asking me to wipe a mouth that’s been talking nonsense all night, golden syrup drip, dripping up the tie through the right eye spoiling the left-over tongue toppled into a room full of echoing bones, wailing in the ceiling, islands waving with flippers stolen from cut-gut movie pirates you grab […]
Does It Matter by Lee Kaloidis
That on this Friday morning to the soundtrack of the garbage truck, my nosy neighbor’s cheesy greeting and the impossible logic of dharma raveling and unraveling through my head I try to pull a rotting sparrow from the vegetable garden’s net, its red skull smaller than a cherry tomato, a feathery knot so frenzied it […]
Road Kill by Max Hipp
When the Crown Victoria sped through the intersection, we screamed for Kitty to get out of the way, but she just flicked her tail. The chrome bumper knocked her to the curb. She kept clawing the air until the icy wind took her. We waved down the driver, beat on the hood. What was he […]
Sophie’s Story by Robert Nisbet
It was unjust, I was sure, but the gossip was seething, and there’s always innuendo, there’s spite, and obviously something had gone seriously wrong. But I knew the lovely man he was and I knew how much it was hurting him. I said very little to anyone and he and I just met, quietly. For […]