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 […]
Category Archives: Issue 12
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, […]
The Space and Slip Between Cup and Lip by J.W. Kash
You meet so many people in life. You hear so many promises and plans. Visions and ideas. Art and dreams. Oh yes yes yes. Words words words. I am guilty of these words and dreams. These grandiose thoughts. These hearty slaps on the back. I remember leaving a birthday party, for Timmy, on a Sunday […]
If the Corner of Your Eye was a Compass by Kristina England
Arrow pointed northeast, New Hampshire forest home, no street sign to direct the post truck, I could use your rounded lips, your sense of puns to guide and steer my car until I was forced to go on foot, give up the city, give up these shoes, give up the cubicle, the talking heads on […]
Forty-Love by Matthew Dube
Brenda liked that her husband Clement felt almost weightless on top of her. She could control him with her pelvis like she was driving her Honda, her progress toward orgasm steady as parking in the garage. A tennis ball hung from the ceiling of the garage on a clothesline, and she knew to stop when […]
Seeing Her on Her Birthday by Jessica Van de Kemp
It’s like using a stereoscopic toy. I load all of the other days of my life and click through until I reach this day. She’s in her forties, this woman who isn’t my mother. She talked me out of changing my name when I was nineteen. Every year, on this day, I call her. Today, […]
Gap Year by Julie Oldham
Alone in Barcelona, having visited the Sagrada Familia, she descended into hell but on the third day rose again. And walks to the window to see a pool of children gathering in grey light. She crawls back to bed. All morning, playground noises, waves of voices, crash on the brick of the hostel walls. Highs […]
Cloud to Ground by Sheldon Lee Compton
Sheets of rain toss the husband’s vehicle. It’s a hard surprise rain trying to beat dents into the earth. Every second that passes, the upper mantle could reverse bloom and open wide to take in the husband and everything else. She gathers hope like wildberries. She gathers hope like fistfuls of gorgeous chicory. She hides […]
Epilogue by C.J. Miles
I Google how to write a poem. It takes me to an essay on how to shoot yourself in the head. The essay informs me that there is no guarantee that shooting yourself in the head, from any angle or into any part of the head, will guarantee death. Shooting yourself in the heart is […]