Five Ducklings Maslen meets a man in a coffee shop in London, but the daydream always stops before he asks her anything. The dream’s allure isn’t about mystery. It’s that no one ever has to make any choices. Maslen tells Sabrina about the dreams she had growing up. In them, she manufactured impossible decisions: save […]
Author Archives: Dale
Peter Anderson
conception We could not conceive of such a thing and yet it came to be. Carrying its own luggage with it, a tray of seedlings from the windowsill of a past life. Flowers of reincarnation blooming but once a century. The desert deep inside us waiting for an opening in the conversation to spread across […]
Brad Rose
Just Like Old Times Tuesday and Wednesday, I experimented on myself. Now, no more cuboid thoughts and I’m sleeping faster than ever. Thanks to the molecule splitters, I just had to replace the blood on the left side of my body, so it only took half the time. Sure, it was expensive, but you can […]
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Chain of Fools It’s a sun-drenched cut-grass balmy-air day and I’m speeding down the street in a borrowed jalopy as Aretha wails One of these mornings on the radio hair tousling elbow out the window feeling strong when I see my boo with his Frank Zappa moustache and winning grin driving the other way and […]
Gordon Taylor
When You Read What He Wrote Just for You This is when nightmares began, the voice counting to infinity and the horses pounding down a gravel road, and there was my own voice too, the pitch I can’t recall, calling for my mother. What do you see? she would ask. Around the same time, my […]
Candice May
Unexplainable You can swim in the cold murky waters of your own existentialism. When you first learned the word, you were ten or thirteen or eighteen. You were on a precipice, crossing over. You can inhale black holes and try to show up eager-eyed for work. You use the backscratcher on your arms, your inner […]
Francine Witte
Home Shopping Late night, all alone. Amethyst twinkling from the TV set. The beautiful “o” of stones. I feel like an “o” myself, a zero, because 3 a.m. is when the world gets so quiet, you hear everything. The host is a piano of teeth and a candle of eyes. She says things like special […]
Richard Baldasty
No Idea You have come to comfort me, I know, while I am beset by Bedouins and their camels in the driveway. Kind of you; all the more because you don’t believe me—no one else sees them and I, old man, am considered fanciful in my distress. Perhaps so: life at length plays fast with […]
Linda Malnack
Balloon Loan I am sitting in my convertible ARM chair with the door to the what-if analysis open. I feel a cold wire transfer from the men’s room where George just smoked a variable rate and left the depreciation open to the basis point. I am on the edge of a potential return. Thank you […]
Phillip Sterling
Memory Play When we visit my family in Detroit on holidays we have to sit through old home movies. My wife sees me as a young boy, and I make a fool out of myself the same way every time. Here I am playing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog” on a Mickey Mouse […]
Meg Pokrass
Cat Proposal This is the night you propose to the cat. She has nothing left to prove to you. She is wild and pale and her eyes are green as pickles. You know there are parts of your heart that you can offer her fluffy light spirit. You have stopped answering the phone, made changes […]
Mike James
E Pluribus Every t-shirt he owned said something in Latin. He owned more than 11 t-shirts, but less than 23. When traveling on a train headed east from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine he tried to count the number of t-shirts. The train maintained a constant speed over mountains, canyons, rivers, and fields. He could […]
Mike James
You & You & You & You If you were a hat you’d be a fedora, brown and sweat-stained, still good for winter weather and rain’s summer surprises. If you were a feather an ostrich would be minus one. If you were a puzzle you’d look nothing like the picture on the box. No summer […]
Mike James
Ingmar Bergman Contemplates Silence on a Beach This is not a swimmer’s beach. The water is cold year-round, as if cursed by a witch. No matter how many years of waves come ashore, the rocks don’t wear to smoothness. Each is a flint knife, water sharpened. Hard shoes are needed. There are summer days when […]
Issue 30 CONTENTS
read issue Mike James Ingmar Bergman Contemplates Silence on a Beach You & You & You & You E Pluribus Meg Pokrass Cat Proposal Phillip Sterling Memory Play Linda Malnack Balloon Loan Richard Baldasty No idea Francine Witte Home Shopping Candice May Unexplainable Gordon Taylor When You Read What He Wrote Just for You Kathryn […]
Implied and Extended by Kristina Moriconi
In the garden closest to the house, I turn over the soil each spring, stir up more glass. There are stories, things that happened here, once upon some other time. And what is broken gets left behind—Wedgwood Blue, hobnail pitcher in jade. Leaded crystal, the smallest shards, champagne flutes raised to toast whatever didn’t last. […]
Stipulations by Robert Fromberg
She told me she would prefer that I walk between her and the curb. She told me she would prefer that I open the car door for her. She told me she would prefer that I open all doors for her. She told me to double-knot my boots. I did. She said, “Tell me what […]
Every Tear A Prayer by Angie Minkin
It never rains in LA, but today it pours. Your daughter knits warmth from fine Peruvian wool — night blues, slate gray, splash of orange. Her fingers can’t stop. She tenderly tucks you in. Your son trims your beard, gently combs your hair, smooths your eyebrows. You always look so sharp. We toast you with […]
Expecting by Luke Wortley
When I open my front door, I see that the porch has turned into a clutch of eggs. All of them dumb and round and nestled tightly, packed in like pebbles on a drive. I’m afraid to step out and see what the temperature actually feels like other than a swipe of my hands, fingers […]
floppy disk (noun) by Domenico Capilongo
floppy disk noun definition of floppy disk : a thin plastic disk coated with magnetic material on which data for a computer can be stored first computers big and stamped with the white letters p.e.t. under monochrome monitors. our teachers wide-eyed and proud as if we had figured out how to land on mars for […]
Maine Rocks by Karen Egee
I will be the rocks down at the shore, where you learn to swim, the glacier formed, sun-warmed, sea salted, seaweed laced rocks slanting into the bay, where your Mom and Dad will stand thigh deep in the water, arms extended, waiting for you to push off me with your feet and splash your way […]
Not a Prose Poem by Matthew Burnside
(Here’s a sentence without words, which you are not currently reading because it isn’t written on a screen or paper, and I am not the author, and you are not the listener because there is no sound in the slither of syllables, no jangle in a quake of consonants, and it is decidedly without punctuation, […]
The Tale of Trees by Owen Bullock
A tree came into our office, sat down and demanded that we give it something useful to do. We got a chainsaw and sawed it into logs. The next day another tree appeared, same request, same response. But it kept happening, and we had nowhere to put the firewood. We told the next tree it […]
The Dresser by Paige Blackburn
Okay, so, say you’re moving out, and you’ve got to leave the furniture behind. You know, because you’re not moving out, you’re being kicked out, and the furniture is not yours, so you’ve got to empty this dresser: a big, ancient thing with dozens of drawers (you wonder what something like it is even doing […]
When the archeologists by Carol Potter
………..dug up the Giant Ape from our back yard I was not surprised. Certainly, something huge had been lurking there. Something with outsized teeth and long hair. Not your ex-husband, not mine, and not a lost dog. Something that could toss you over its back and step on you and there you’d be. I knew […]
Tickled Pink by Carol Potter
I didn’t know it would be problem. Her raising rats in the back yard shed, the chirping sounds they made when they heard her coming through the grass. How they liked to be tickled. How she liked teaching them about the psychological benefits of laughter. From time to time, you could hear her laughing above […]
Incremental Doom by Ian Willey
I was sitting on a bench in the mall watching the fountain when a guy sat next to me and you could just tell he was going to start up a conversation, and he soon did. He held up a small purple ball and said, I have in my hand an Orb of Incremental Doom. […]
Divide and Conquer by Ian Willey
In the days when I had a lawn to mow I’d begin by cutting a path straight down the middle as General MacArthur did in the Inchon Maneuver. The Inchon Maneuver was a bold tactical move which turned the tide of the Korean War and led to the eventual division of the Koreas at the […]
About Ants by Jane Medved
The heat is rolling in, petals unhitched, bursts of curdled dust, and who knows what else, blown from the East, where bad things happen. Even the ants are acting confused, marking tiny circles next to the sink, trying to figure out a plan, with no ears, no lungs, little dinosaurs, looking for slaves, zombie ants, […]
When My Father Had Open Heart Surgery by Jane Medved
They gave him a color brochure. It featured a smiling grey haired couple playing golf, then another photo of them happily fly-fishing, all sorts of promises about what lay on the other side. I remember getting up at four a.m. to drive my mother to the hospital, a huge teaching complex at the South end […]
Winter in June by Lorette C. Luzajic
He is talking about glaciers and the widest skies in the world, about a place called Gondwana that hasn’t existed for two hundred million years. In June, the deep of winter, the moon is eternal and the sun does not rise. You imagine night horses with ice in their manes, galloping across snow-capped mountains. Where […]
The Skeleton Flower by Lorette C. Luzajic
He is telling us about the woman with a thousand umbrellas. How her halls are lined with a garden of brollies, chevron, checkers, damask and chintz. She disappears when the clouds come close, dissipating into vapor, into the thin air. She collects umbrellas to prevent her own vanishing. She is shy to shower in front […]
Study in Luck by Ken Poyner
An old drive-in, with the sound box unclipped from a pole and hung inside the car window by the same clip. Bodies sitting close as on the huge screen massive images move like elephants in love. Bodies sitting close is the important element: the car a mobile motel room with the excuse of a movie. […]