How easy it is to underestimate the restlessness of scars. So simple to minimize the relationship of reminder and skin. Neither faulty stitches nor careless neglect are to blame for the contradiction of opening up old wounds. But those who say forget about it assume memory is a choice. That’s no more so the case […]
Author Archives: Dale
Compression by Daniel Romo
Once upon a near amputation, a tourniquet fell in love with a limb. Few relationships are tighter than the bond between cloth tightly twisted around skin. Constricting blood flow is the purest form of displaying affection’s depths. Opposites attract, but so do devices wrapping the body as if redirecting life from one part of the […]
Pentacostal Gel by Richard J. Fleming
A watered-down version of physical attraction tears through me like a lack of gravity. I flutter toward the horizon and the pull of the empyrean. I could use a little support here. These wings make my back ache. Heaven’s like a healthcare clinic waiting room. Take a number and wait your turn. Eventually, bespectacled factotums […]
Love on the Rocks by Richard J. Fleming
A bright light goes on in the grotto. Whose idea was that? Not to mention, relentless waves keep pounding the rocks into submission. One of these days, but perhaps not today, I am going to send to the moon for a very special pet rock. It led a quiet life in the Sea of Tranquility. […]
The Giants Open Doors by Ken Poyner
All the doors of the road are open. Someone must have left them unlocked. Or maybe there is a skeleton key. Or someone was willing to pry them open through unleavened force. No matter. You cannot drive on this road: all its doors are open. For now, I will let the baffled, thirsty commuters ponder […]
Jamie’s Dad by Kathryn Fitzpatrick
says the chiropractor’s more useless than a boob on a nun so he fishes the above-ground pool for leeches to attach to his back and suck at the tension. They are drop-stone earrings, the jagged spine of a tired horse. Jamie’s dad drinks Coors Lite after work after he shrugs off his jacket with the […]
Forecast for the House of the Seamstress by Angela Apte
While other babies gummed their fists, the daughter of the seamstress teethed on oracle bones and grew to read anything. Tea leaves, a three-card spread, the Lives of the Saints. The villagers, famous for keeping birds – birds that talked, birds whose tail feathers curved like sabres – would stand outside the window of the […]
Happy Days by Jim Burke
I see bare-assed trees against the skyline, spooky as hell. They are waiting, knowing, something’s coming, rising, and I’m listening to the American actor, Jon Hamm, reciting Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Mayakovsky.” All across the sky there is light. I was five years old in nineteen fifty nine. I had beaten pneumonia. My younger brother Doug, […]
Topiary Gardens by Barbara Westwood Diehl
In the postcard city of Topiary Gardens, the hedges wish to be more than they are. You may have similar longings. Dreams. Being evergreen is not enough for them. Myrtles, laurels, hollies—all wish to be more than mere shrubbery. More than bearers of inedible berries. Flowering in impenetrable forests. A yew yearns to be more […]
Blues Biography by Garrett Phelan
Sometimes I come across as artifact, a found blues, biography of bone washed up into a whisper waiting. A stepping-stone wobbling, a root fastened to a fist, and tongues salvaged trapped in amber sold as prayer beads. Or, a vicious grip of longing stuck to a doorknob. Garrett Phelan is the author of one poetry […]
Ossuary by Garrett Phelan
like bamboo in wind. Wings of cicada. Baseball bats in a bag. Stones. Fingered rosary beads. Marbles in my pocket. All the soreness of crow call or of blood stopping up the wound. My mother’s eyes. All the gray in granite. Shoebox tissues. Pens in a book bag. And a branch scratches the window. Fingernails […]
A Bright Shadow is Cast Over the City by Evan Cozad
All the clowns are jumping off the bridges. All the bulls are stopping in the middle of the streets. The cats have all fallen asleep in back allies, and all the nuns are putting their hands in their pockets. But I’m at home in the tub, blood pooling out of my nose into the water, […]
The Ins and Outs of Topiary Hierarchy by Evan Cozad
The topiary animals come to life at night. Each of them able to uproot themselves without any struggle. The lion, the elephant, and the duck participate in a social club together. It’s a very exclusive thing. They never invite the dog or the rabbit to join. But they eat their baklava and drink their tea […]
Alice in the War Years by Kyle Hemmings
It’s summer, a season of forgotten berries and a neighbor’s neglected hyacinths. Today, the sky is the color of peeled potatoes but the sun manages to make eyes at Alice, here and there. Mitch, a half-blind boy with down-turned eyes and a forearm of beetle-shaped scars, is teaching Alice to do “The Doolittle Drop,” a […]
Class by Tim Love
Badminton players ignore all the floor’s circuitry but for the white lines. No soap operas for them, no quizzes about shop-names, no asking for your star sign. They support the arts, painting you posing with pitchforks like Neptune with his trident. They praise with pastorals your picturesque poverty, eat Ploughmans in solidarity, keep allotments, keep […]
FEATURED: Three poems by Barbara McVeigh
Ken Never Saw It Coming Barbarian. It means. My name was made from universal sounds. The same howl in any tongue. Click. Come closer. Don’t mind the iodine. Barbarians bite and snap and lick the inner ear of any listener. If a tree falls. Body parts. Hunger beating on a drum. I make war with […]
Table of Contents Issue 22
Barbara McVeigh (FEATURED): Three Poems Tim Love: Class Kyle Hemmings: Alice in the War Years Evan Cozad: The Ins and Outs of Topiary Hierarchy Evan Cozad: A Bright Shadow is Cast Over the City Garrett Phelan: Ossuary Garrett Phelan: Blues Biography Barbara Westwood Diehl: Topiary Gardens Jim Burke: Happy Days Angela Apte: Forecast for […]
What Men Talk About When They Talk About Chemo (haibun) by Roberta Beary
treatment room the sun shower on his face Another 15 minutes. Let’s see if I can do this. Anything that comes to mind, right? First there was Gerry, then Billy, after Billy came Nigel, then Billy#2, even though Billy#1 was still around, followed by Andrew whose sister Susan liked me, which was weird, I think […]
Disguise by Brad Rose
I stopped at a Mobile mini-mart, and bought some gas and groceries. You can buy hair dye in a mini-mart, change your hair color in the bathroom, if you need to. Sometimes, I hear the deep blue wire of the sky, hissing. Even at night, when the clouds crawl on their soft knees through the […]
Like a Bird by Sarah James
In a past life, Tina must have been a bird, Jack thought. His girlfriend pecked chocolate chips from a snack bar, then threw away the remnants. She’d scoop a lump of cookie dough from his tub of Ben & Jerry’s like a hungry sparrow attacking the fat-balls his mom strung in the garden. She wouldn’t […]
Appropriate by Karen Marron
When my sister came to visit me in New York, she cried. Everyone dresses so nice here, I’m scared to leave the house in what I have. The same thing had happened to me; I would obsessively look at the clothing of each person I passed to find something resembling what I was wearing, for reassurance […]
Last Night by Jason Heroux
Last night a deep-fried chicken wing dreamt it was still alive, and cried. Life soldiers on. On the bus I overheard someone say, even dead leaves look and sound leaf-like if there’s enough wind. Birds are buckets of song raised from a well. The moon is a bucket of light. Pet speck of dust, where’s […]
K2 by B. S. Dixon
She smokes to chase the devil that burned her. Burned her chin, chest, neck and hands. Waving her cane, she thinks she finally has him cornered. Car horns and screeching tires, the devil trembles before her, frightened—until that bastard cop pulls her to safety. Later she’ll tell me how she doesn’t want to chase anymore. […]
NO. 4 DOWN: WHAT ROSEMARY IS FOR by Lisa Ludden
101 North is packed. You sit in the passenger seat, impatient for the turn to fields and farmland. Herbed goat cheese, lemon and lavender cookies, thyme loaves of bread. You return to your house overlooking the water. Safe. Resume the daily pitter-patter as you move from room to room, fussing here, fussing there, stopping to […]
Collector by Andrea Blancas Beltran
something I wrote is now lost. it was meant to accompany this photo. something about my grandma. fake pockets in a red coat. something she said about my grandfather’s death. blue balloons & how she’s become such a visual person as she grows into her disease. how I wonder in the wander of her face. […]
Transit by Michael Grant Smith
Review your hardware-store shopping list. Arrange the items into two categories: things you must fix before they break something else, and parts for projects you’ll never start. Stop choosing tools based on whether you think they’ll outlast your span of years. Don’t synthesize memories and likely scenarios as you did last time. Gaze into the […]
Sweater Weather by Cherie Hunter Day, photo by John Levy
It’s finally sweater weather so the saints can recline. They remove their heads like we remove our shoes at the end of the day. The weight of the holy is carried high in the body. Deeds have depth and breadth. It’s no wonder that they’re tapped out—what with fostering all those good intentions, compiling records […]
Practicing Faith by Lissa Staples
He confides in me that his sister goes outside every day and whistles for her dog, even though the animal was stolen over twenty years ago, and that passers-by routinely stop to ask what the dog looks like. She’ll describe a brown canine of no discernible bloodline from a time when she fancied herself a […]
They Need Something More Durable Than Longing and Wine by Charles Rafferty
This is why lovers show off their dog bites and appendectomy scars, the tattooed crosses they have come to regret. They keep them hidden until they can’t, until somebody touches with a tongue the place that used to hurt. After all this time, ink remains the standard medium of love letters. It’s how the future […]
Heads or Tails by Gary Duncan
When it’s his time, the old man with the glass eye doesn’t want much, just dancing girls, a pair of new knees and an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. If push comes to shove, if he has to choose only one, he’ll settle for the dancing girls. Big girls, like they used to make them. The eye, […]
A rain is waiting to fall for me by Sahith Shetty
A rain is waiting to fall for me, from the edges of store awnings, from the thin branches of trees, from the tips of black umbrellas. It has been seventy six years, and my rain is yet to arrive. Often, as I turn a corner on a crowded street, I look at the clouds that […]
From the Beginning by Douglas Cole
Those were some good words and a good turn out from what I could see. I was distracted by a flood light at the other end of the field where the road picks up. Sorry I couldn’t stay for the finger sandwiches and all those funny stories you told, but this new vehicle shines, and […]
Untitled (Imagine) by Paul-Victor Winters
Imagine being lost at sea, only it’s not a sea and you aren’t lost, just sort of sad. It’s a small town with a hardware store and an empanada shop. You’re either fourteen or fifty-four, but it doesn’t matter. The litter in the street gutter is much the same. Something’s askew in the cosmos. Hint […]