My granddaughter drags crusty dreams from her eyes, and waddles to the kitchen, diaper squishing in time. She bellows for beans then claps at the plop of the pot on the stove, bounces like a rubber ball as the can opener whirs and beans slosh into the pan. Flames on the stove flash the orange […]
Author Archives: Dale
How Contentment Comes by Deirdre Fagan
In the quiet of a Sunday morning when with covers over my head the children play quietly while I sleep until ten. I wake completely before joining them, making myself a double espresso bedside before journeying to their needs. Upon making breakfast, a poem surprise discovered in yesterday’s pile of mail greets, and reading quietly […]
Birches by Jan Stinchcomb
The bus would never stop moving, that much Klara knew. The birches outside tapped on the rickety windows like passengers trying to get the driver’s attention. Their approach was polite but determined. First they entered in a flurry of twigs and then they pierced branch by branch through the cracks in the windows. The bus […]
What the Hell Is Always the Right Decision by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
She combed the yellow light into her hair and looked out the door into a street full of forties California. I have nothing but words to say these things. No shrugs or silences. No scent of Chanel or musk. My limits are the absence of muscle, the lack of spit, of mucus. She lay down […]
23rd and 8th by Jessica Bonder
Thank God for Fred, who saved my mother in the 23rd and 8th subway station, local stop on the blue line (C-E), train-struck Patricia Elizabeth might as well been, for all the fear in her eyes, looking like a trapped animal, steel-barred, turnstile-stuck, swiping and re-swiping a single fare Metrocard, Fred coaching her from the […]
Hazel by Ricky Garni
Hazel filled the football with helium and the old lawyer kicked it as hard as he could and it went over one house and stuck in the chimney of another. The old couple in that house had a fire going in their fireplace and the smoke soon filled the room. If Hazel had known, she […]
Building Blocks for Pedigree by AJ Urquidi
Our ancestors were groomed in autonomous regions under state command. Franco roughed ‘em up real good from time to time. We pump up, fire water from our knockoffs in the driveway, bare feet stabbed by dead oak barbs. The afternoons marinate in fluoride and bloodgums from jawbutting handlebars. Our ancestors forgot we existed. We rarely […]
The Only Hope of the Jews by Paul Beckman
You’re sitting on your stoop thinking how much you hate the stoop, the building you live in with six side-by-side apartments (now called town houses) and the neighborhood. You hate the neighborhood because all of the stoops in all of the buildings and all of the wire fenced-in tiny yards smaller than a jail cell […]
Anew by Linda Grierson-Irish
Where did you leave it? I asked. She didn’t know, her memory was skittish, kept spinning off sideways, she said. I agreed, reluctantly, to help her search. When did you last see it? I wanted to know. But she was off, gone sideways too. I followed. We walked a long way. In our sitting room, […]
Day One by Mike Jacobson
In the beginning. Of the beginning. From the beginning. Beguine. How to put it, who to put it, created. But how do you know this? And what gender? Or was there a gender? Answers to all your questions will surely be found, but to tell you the truth, there shouldn’t be any need for answers. […]
Haruspex by Eric Williams
They say Schliemann found Troy by studying Homer, mapping the Iliad and dissecting the Odyssey for clues to its location—but this isn’t true. He found Troy by slicing open the belly of a white ram after cracking it on the head with a leaden mallet and cutting its throat. He saw the future in its […]
First & Last Ingrid Bruck
You wouldn’t know we’d had winter except for one late snowfall. The first snow falls a day and a half. Wind carves drifts half way up windows and doors, the top of a ten foot pine plays king on the mountain. Chimes clink, frost closes the windows behind a curtain. A passing flock of hungry […]
Christmas Eve— by Deborah Guzzi
The cobblestone alleys of Aix grasp walking trios like unmarked gravestones teething on the ankles of rowdy past drinkers who imbibe before service. Trees adorned in thongs of cheeky light make the ghost of Magdalene blush. Before the side doors, cross-legged, a Romany beggar woman with anthracite eyes beseeches. Silver palmed Goliaths sidle past, blind […]
Megalomania by Lee Kaloidis
If a deer that the wild has made wary approaches you as noiselessly as a shadow from a small wooded stream and pushes its wet black nose into the back of your hand and licks between your fingers, then takes an apple from your palm and chews not up-and-down but side-to-side as only deer do while […]
If the Fluttering of Butterfly Wings by Cathy Ulrich
If you are on a walk with your brother’s wife and she gets hit by a car. If she turns into a kaleidoscope of butterflies upon impact, whirling into the air. If the driver peels away, spitting gravel from beneath his tires. If you hold still till all the butterflies come to nest on you. […]
When the Dog Gets Ready to Die by Randal Eldon Greene
When the dog gets ready to die she’ll vomit up liquid the color of her kibble. Then she’ll vomit up yellow. Then clear. Then do nothing but dry-heave. When the dog gets ready to die it’ll be a late winter night. There’ll be no veterinary clinics open. No vet will answer their phone. You’ll call […]
Slow Waves and Delta Waves by Merridawn Duckler
Mediums can only half sleep, plugged into the constant dead, who never rest but complain and petition, want favors and reassurances, want even love, of a limited kind, before the disaster of forgetting descends. Next to me in bed, wrapping the sheets tighter, you are a breathing wall of great shoulders; cried of hounding, making […]
Swimming with Angels by Anna Geary-Meyer
Can you swim with angels? I asked my mother once when I was eight, while she was busy washing dishes, and she said no, not usually, but down the canal there are some swans, I think. I don’t know what I was looking for besides that mid-air diving board feeling, that feeling of life without […]
Paved with Good Intentions by Sophie van Llewyn
You promised me the sea for our vacation, but after driving under stone arches, you took me to a hotel with a pool. It was there that I bathed with all the other endangered species. When I rustled the mud resting at the bottom I felt that I was disturbing someone’s ashes. I asked you […]
The Way Back Up by Louis Rakovich
A thud. Quiet, like a knock on a distant door. Danny shifted in bed, turned to his side. Maybe someone finally came. He’d been anticipating them for the past three days—Tzachi’s parents in their somber dark frocks, perhaps Tzachi, too. He must have found his way back. Danny thought of the way down. Oren and […]
Something About Bursting by Lauren Suchenski
And maybe tonight the sky will just sink through the telephone wires and finally reach me. Maybe the porch will swing on its axis and the platform of our loves will all dangle like strings and shoelaces from the blades of grass holding our heads together. Tonight as the sky glows whiteblue and bluedarkblue for […]
Unearthly by David Mohan
I used to go walking back then, when I still lived with my folks. I did the Meadowlane walk, five minutes from my front porch. First, you crossed a road, and then you were on the farm drive. It was like a bit of country tucked away in the suburbs. I walked up a bit […]
Why We Went to Florida by Glen Sorestad
We went to Florida to find out what all the fuss was about. For most of our lives we’ve heard that in winter Canadians are there everywhere, spread across the beaches, lolling like white manatees on the glistening sands. We’re told they pack all the little bars and watering holes with large flat screen TVs, […]
Fetching Fossils by Heath Brougher
Wildly digging for the wild wildebeest necklace. The last fur on Earth. What will the final atom of the final creature to inhabit this Earth be? Wild flames of wildflowers of thought rise like a risen Phoenix ready to wander and inspect. To wander barefoot around the womb in deepest rumination. Fallopian hallways to travel […]
Futuristic Farm by Linda Imbler
A little house on thirty-six acres of refuge, outside a small Texas town, accessible only by one narrow, perilous, rutted dirt road. My father’s farm, weekend retreat, brought him back to his small-town upbringing. Reminded him that the actual beauty of the world, woods and streams, “The Bottoms” and birds, could still exist even this […]
Apple by Chance Dibben
I have an image of an apple in my head. The apple is my head, the image static and frozen like a photograph of a sneeze in a blizzard. The apple can be shaken, yet it does not move. The head can be reattached with relatively minor memory loss. The apple can drive the bones, […]
Velleity by Sarah Kathryn Moore
A little called anything shows shudders. —Gertrude Stein, from A Little Called Pauline Street lamp light through a glass pane and secondarily a held-up sheet of heavy paper from Buenos Aires. Dually framed on the leaf’s a line drawing, fox corpse flossy with flies: the body is, thusly, lousy with love. Zinging through the sieved […]
Munch III by Kyle Hemmings
A war of stray bullets is raging. Toxic rats sneak into our homes, draw blood from the deepest well of our sleep. Avenue D is being overtaken by radioactive clowns. Avenue C can go either way. Ghosts are driven under the streets. In dumpsters, weeds grow out of crumpled Starbucks cups. In a loft, in […]
Thursday Lunch by Sandra Anfang
I take my fifteen minutes of naked sun in the patio, hidden by tall fences. The cats play tag in shady spots beneath my chair. Jasmine scatters scent like feather boas. A breeze winds through the red maples who hold their breath as if to conserve water against the heat. Where silence reigns, the throb […]
Small Town Drug Dealer by Meagan Masterman
It comes in little bags. Little Ziploc bags, like the ones they package jewelry in down at the junk shop. You know what I mean. The bracelets with bright plastic beads? There’s only a smidge of it in each bag, but it’s worth a lot. Like diamonds. You’ve got to seal up the bags carefully […]
Dear (Deadbeat) Daddy by Anna Keeler
I am writing to a man who doesn’t exist with words that were pulled from between my teeth before I was old enough to feel them. There is a cavity in the middle of my chest where a hole should have been carved, but for some reason, what I feel festers more than it hurts. […]
Jackson Pollock Paints Pammy T’s Daddy by Tammy Robacker
There is no plan just subject here I am the drip the smear the nanny that circles the room chasing after tiny Pammy T it is a canvas it is a kitchen I am a chicken I walk the perimeter so wide so white so wolfen with Mr T peckish at center table but I […]
Considerations by Laurinda Lind
Maidens in the ice convinced me that electrocution was never going to work as an inducement to safe crackers and sociopaths. Where would they go during a deluge? Not to nude operas. No one likes a ruthless chimera either, unless on the tundra awkwardness counts as a crossroad. Other comrades could gather under the layers, […]