Holding the Ball no one has died around me today, I’m lucky, in this corner of a V-shaped valley aside a mountain death comes by accident or lost cause, rarely by intent, we are moving in the kitchen as though no-one is dying anywhere, she is baking a cake and I’m playing absentmindedly with the […]
Author Archives: Dale
Thinking of a Monk by Jefferson Navicky
at the decline of the Ottoman Empire, in some far flung border province, alone, with dogs and images, and who would have recorded testimony of rumors, of theosophy, rivers, moving pictures, women, violins and oddly strung instruments, of enormous open ears and hands, and the whispers of white animals disappearing into the hills. Wondering if, […]
God the Sun by Rachel L. McMullen
The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” – Carl Sagan There he is, the solar deity. He tips his hat to the evening, and later lets loose a slight, knowing grin when the night can no longer stand its ground. He sits in the morning garden, praising […]
Indie-Pop by Jess Mize
Genuine smiles are like indie songs on the radio. Few and far between. Songs on the radio are like reflected suns. Mirrored discs and metrics bouncing back to the beam. The drums. The drums. The drums. Swelling vibrations that flow along with staccato heartbeats. One can do without anything else excepting music. Music is the […]
A Couple of Fools by Mike Jacobson
Stupor. An exaggeration. Lengthwise it could not be determined, but likewise it was promising. Lightness of touch when appropriate. Half-stoned, he turned to her. As it speeded up, he caught sight of everything out of the corner of his eye. Everything, the totality of what mattered. Matters, to this day. His eye encompasses elephantine figures, […]
Taps by Charles Hayes
Romantic and sympathetic in its genre, a perfect stand in for the cold and the dead that someone, somewhere, must have loved. Some smidgen of peace it may bring and peace it must keep with them that mourn, their hands clasp away from the necks of those who pipe its tune. But the dead are […]
Instagram Poem #10 by Rebecca Gaffron
Another surge. Selfie. Nothing’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Today try coffee cups and kids. Kids and puppies, attention grabbers every time. So this is your life. Another surge. Selfie. Look bone-cut and sexy all at once. Fuck lingering doubt and second thoughts. True love ended. Separation, divorce. So it goes. Another surge. When […]
Say Goodbye ‘Cause I Can’t by Daniel M. Shapiro
Since the smog stole their light, her dog has had no use for eyes. She had sneaked her tools in his chew toy, wrenches rolled on drivers. She told them the urns were Mom and Dad’s ashes. They didn’t check, didn’t see the inner frameworks. In the last days of alliteration and rhyme, she had […]
A Confession (what I want to tell my friends when they ask me why I don’t want to be involved with him romantically)
by Myrtle Yvonne
Spare me the romantic gestures, spare me the cliché love note on a tissue paper, the lame confession on the bathroom wall, the tree trunk with our flamboyant initials carved on it. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to be involved with him romantically. All I want is our constant enthusiastic exchange […]
Parallel Speed by Sarah A. O'Brien
You taught me to drive with a beat-up Honda Civic and a shit-ton of patience in high school and mall lots. Parallel parking was your favorite; you had me learn the language of the steering wheel, flirting with faultless turns. The whiskey breath barely bothered me, and we’d laugh over the occasional carcass on a […]
I Saw a Little Boy Today by James Santore
I saw a little boy today. Tiny chunks of alabaster and big brown eyes. He was chasing a pigeon on Haverford Avenue. I saw a woman too. Candlelight spirit that shone for that boy alone. She looked at me as if to say, “Do you see this? How cute is this?” I moved on—and passed […]
Boothwyn by Catherine Zickgraf
Sears sent boxes of her grandparents’ new home up the tracks from Dover, Delaware. Men dug a hole, cemented its sides against bugs and dirt. New wood bored in the wall made cellar steps—still stable now as three generations later she surfaces into the living room, warm basket in arms, lasagna in oven, their first […]
Imports by Julianne Neely
1 There are imports right now in your living room. The television has seen things your eyes would melt from. The couches were beaten, dragged, held prisoner of free enterprise. They finally found a home and now you sit on them. Walls move and paint cackles. Watching it is like watching a girl walk up […]
A Good Eye, Kid by Dorian Rolston
Each night before tucking himself into bed and feeling for the shudder and push- off of dreaming, he stood tall as he could, puffed out and barefoot, in front of the mirror, and looked: looked at the wet-glass surface over his eyes, looked at the water-color white and blue and yellow and orange spread together […]
The Ghost of Jesse James or Jack Johnson? by David Spicer
I hear noise from the attic. This happens at night when I’m in a dreamlike state. I credit the sounds to mice, squirrels, or raccoons. I hope there aren’t any, but the noises grow louder. Two dark mornings ago my wife and I awoke when the windows in our bedroom shook. Somebody was banging against […]
The Things I Know about Sex A prose poem for my daughter
by Tina Francis
My daughter, lithe and teenage with her finger on the pulse, has begun trying to fathom what I know about sex. Her expectations are low. But I jump into the waters of advice where they seem most clear: it’s better if you like the person, I say. Which is good advice, unquestionably, in a general […]
Satsuma Oranges by Glen Sorestad
Enroute from Houma to New Orleans we spot a roadside stand selling Satsuma oranges, so I pull over, stop the vehicle, get out to stretch my legs and have a look. I say to the woman vendor, I didn’t know you grew Satsumas here. Her eyebrows shoot skyward; her expression says: Did you drop in […]
When by Nooks Krannie
When he lightly touched the wool under her jaw, she froze. She knew what this meant, so she traced his hand carefully along her jaw line. ‘I can’t hide anything from you, nothing, just like a jellyfish that holds a garden of every known lick, in perfect harmony, inside it’s stomach, trussed to corals in […]
A New White Shirt by John Grabski
Emanuel released the breath from his lungs, pressed his back against the flat wall, the brass button of his denim jacket scraping the polished granite behind him. He turned his neck, flattened his stubbled cheek to the cool, gray stone and inhaled smoothly as he sidled along the tower’s ledge. A pigeon, baffled to see […]
Brightness Falls by F.J. Bergmann
after Liviu Georgescu You, rising through parted waters, grow like pain in the beautiful light. Illumination is the instrument that fractures on your arms and legs, scorches your feet, burnt, burning. The prism of silence gives birth to the celestial spectrum of music. Across the continuum, a field of oleander and thistles the color of […]
When I Die by Prerna Bakshi
Will my body be buried or burnt on a pyre? I ask this in a hushed voice. As I lay there dead, lifeless, will kalma be recited or mantras be chanted? I ask this in a hushed voice. Will the mourners be arriving dressed in all black or will they mourn me dressed in all […]
Midnight Messsage by Ivars Balkits
I get a midnight message—I get it. A newspaper in a thrift store, yellowed, “The Last News.” A pile of those newspapers on the glass counter by the register. Articles about panic, disaster, storms. I thought the tract was new and that it was on beige paper. Instead, it’s old and yellowing. Teen gangs carrying […]
Liquid Two Prose Poems by Shane Vaughan
Liquid We stood at the cliff-face with nothing but air between us and the Atlantic and I told you that here the sea etches itself onto our faces, like we don’t wrinkle we ripple, as an ocean puddle sketched onto skin, and you said the same but different, said where you’re from the Adriatic drifts […]
Adjust by Matthew Schmidt
I caress the calcified knob of your knee. Solitude reigns in the sparseness of the room. A wooden stool abuts your bed. I read quietly, the words abscond in my throat, unsure where they will sequester themselves. It is in these moments that darkness hides under the turned page. Once when tablets were etched with […]
Queens, New York, 3:37 AM, January 23rd, 1981 by Miles Varana
A bum asleep on a bus or huddled by her shopping carts beneath the nearest overpass. An insomniac slumped over an ashtray in the brightly lit window of an all night diner. 2 men drunk in the parking lot of a Wendy’s, just off work from the medium-late shift at a plastics factory and about […]
Minneapolis Vignettes by Zebulon Huset
The Bar The last sliver of ice struggles vailiantly to remain in existence in an abaondoned glass, chasin the little red straw. On the bar by toothpicks, limes and olives, there are coasters with the 1980’s Budweiser logo. Counting Crows on the jukebox, cracked red vinyl barstools and dim lighting to hide the dust that’s […]
At the Non-Telluric Bedside by Heath Brougher
An alien whose lungs are opened and exposed and unfurl when he takes in a breath then roll back up until the next breath is needed. He is dying. His hands are held down to let him suffer off to an eternal sleep or transformation of energy. Noisy protest. Noisy grotesque. There are no chains […]
Three Seasonal Haibun by Charles D. Tarlton
1 A lifetime of changing seasons are stored in my head as if simultaneous one with the others. Red leaves show up on the winter trees, snow falls in the flowerbeds though it is July, and now that one special day dividing summer and spring, and afterwards everyone complaining. watching the river wondering why there’s […]
Hay-Man by Daniel Finkel
Jack woke in spring, head poking through phlox and trillium among the wreaths of cabbage and of squash, coiled towers above the fragrant loam, when the air was still cool and mist lay on the land and rains brought the heavy scent of many types of sage. He grew, his broad face crisped by a […]
How the War was Won by Kathryn Ross
The old city was completely unrecognizable. But, then, so was everything after the bomb. Neither side knew who had dropped it, neither wanting to claim it, neither wanting to say it wasn’t theirs. “Who would drop a bomb on a city in the dead of night?” the world asked itself. Who would take so many […]
Family is a Habit by Alina Stefanescu
Family is a habit we wear inside the house in which a history hops from head to head like lice. We don’t see the lice. If we could see the lice, we could wear our hair tucked under hats as a form of modest protection. The hats would serve as a final frontier against hopping. […]
One Day I’ll Take You There by Kathy Gee
Behind the Market Hall the roads are narrower. Department stores decline downhill through tattoo artists, betting shops and spray-tag hoardings. Office blocks stand empty—‘let with onsite parking’—overlook no entry signs. Old iron railings fence the traffic island where a tramp lay dead in his small snug camp beneath the shrubs where nobody went. Ring road […]
Take, Take, Take by Adam Giles
The dad picks the daughter up from school and the daughter pulls a donation form from her backpack. They’re collecting to restock the library after some grade eights broke in one weekend, set the sprinklers off, and flooded the place. “Can I get you on the weekend?” says the dad, thinking this is actually a […]