The cup rides in a basket, adrift on the gleaming table. The basket is boat-shaped, with no handle, and no oars by means of which the cup could row to a safe haven, although the basket is safety of a sort, preventing the cup from being easily knocked over and broken. The cup is the […]
Category Archives: Issue 20
Winter Thoughts by Tim Hawkins
Others no longer present have traced fitting inscriptions into the steam of the window and the dust of the bureau: Flat Affect; Bent, Not Broken; White Knuckling It; The Starving Time; A God-Awful Thing to Behold. They could attest to a flash frozen landscape out there—all cold casks of herring in an ice-covered brine. Outside […]
Mandy by Sandy Olson-Hill
It is explained to me there will be six students to participate. Mandy is either new or returned, a lot of the students are. Anagrams and labels abound. ADD and OCD. Cognitive disabilities, Tourettes or on the autism spectrum, like my grandson. Like me. We will be studying art today. Making fun in the academic […]
Daft by Grace Marie Grafton
She believes in prayer. Or, not exactly believes, but prays anyway, daily. Says, “Please spare me ever having to paint my toenails chartreuse or shave my head.” Touches her gold ring (daily), picturing increase not exactly in the form of gold coins but maybe a bank error in her favor. Holds up her arthritic thumb […]
What Time the Clock Won’t Say by Meeah Williams
It’s that rarefied hour of morning when you can hear glass breaking. No one will fully waken to your touch and you can almost see what cats see. The hallway is wired, tense with the potential explosives have. It’s like you’re the only one left alive. You must walk carefully to the kitchen, every hair […]
< > by Mathew Weitman
There are two distinct shapes created by a skein of migratory geese. The first shape is created in the blue it moves towards: it is too big to see the beginning of, but the V of birds forms its end. The second shape is created by all the sky the geese are leaving: it begins […]
Flower-Girls by Rachel Pietrewicz
My sister once told me if you swallow a cherry pit, a tree will grow in your stomach. She said it happens all the time to girls who are too fast and too hungry to stop the pits from sliding over their tongues and down their throats. My sister said sometimes the girls wouldn’t even […]
Back to the Future Haibun by Jennifer Jean
My twelve-year-old taps a sneaker on every tile zigging through the cloistered Monk Gardens at the Gardener palace museum. Worship the dust next time! she says. There is no dust in there, I say, missing my Degas, my Titian, my Singer. My girl slows, puts a finger on a peeling, russet branch—says, This tree reminds […]
Where Love Brought Me by William Braun
To waiting rooms with no windows and chipped tiles, walls with smudge marks like erasers and gashes I could have patched and painted in the time we spent there. To a bed with a rail you erected but couldn’t collapse. Portraits of flowers behind plexiglass cages, a television locked in a case. To the safe […]
Untraveling Haibun by Daryl Scroggins
Bridge words: furthermore…moreover…finally…. Twenty people crossing one bridge, or twenty bridges crossed by one person, as Wallace Stevens has it. At stream’s edge in the park I see part of a late evening sky as if through a stranger’s eye, the sun down behind hills, clouds, just bereft of color, now ash. I imagine it’s […]
The Invasion by Mark Seidl
Our alien abductors took us far from where we’d been, to red mountains, gulches of spiny brush, sun like a ladle crashing on a brass plate. The aliens had no eyes, nothing we could recognize as ocular organs, so eye-contact was out as a way to establish our intentions. We wanted to step into some […]
Bird Dream by Angela Buck
I cannot say for sure what happened. The bird came through the window, and you caught it with both hands, but not before dropping a wink to every man in the room. And the window doesn’t matter much, except that it may be the only thing that saw the scene exactly, which is to say […]
The Last Public Beheading by Mark Seidl
The officer stood next to the device, his task that day to tip the headless body into the pine box. His superiors thought he was ready for this responsibility: he’d done well during previous executions, helping serenely to carry the closed box to the unmarked grave. But when the blade hit and the body of […]
My Tarantula, My Therapist by Tanja Bartel
My sleep-gauzed eyes do not at first see the tarantula on my nightstand. The only place, mother said, she could fit the aquarium. She knows my terror, but with the foster kids, it’s a crowded house. Spiders are all about vibration, so she senses my movements like no one else. When I come home from […]
Gait by Biman Roy
after Danielle Mitchell Sometimes it’s hard to find your gait. Even if you know it, you can’t place a finger on it. Is it straight or crooked, halting or free-flowing, plantar or astral? You are not sure. Sometimes it’s like knowing another body, naked and close, fold by fold, breath by breath, like surveying a […]
Ralph & Alice by Kyle Hemmings
They always did things together. Like fly fishing and trying to conceive. When that failed, they bought a pet. In late middle age, they even stroked out at the same time. Their precocious monkey, Mr. Hobbs, dialed 911. Out of rehab, Alice walked with a tilt, became obsessed with Ralph’s old fish hooks, a tinderbox […]
The Brief Story of Sunday by Daniel Lev Shkolnik
Red saw a different girl each day of the week. Murder brewed between them all. He would take them back into his room and screw the black bulb into the lamp. They opened their chests and let him eat—flinching without a sound. A new Day came along who thought, like all the others, she could […]
New Year Cliché’d by D.R. James
January 1, 2017 That kind of title for one, to mark this particular año nuevo like that for another, to be going on in this vein yet another. Too metta? Meh: it’s all contradictory cringing: ashes outing a vicious victory: archetypal exile among the flood of smudged hours: barbarity, barrels of it: unity like underwater […]
Absences by Stella Pierides
The ossuary, a white-washed, rectangular building, is dark and cool. A musty smell envelops me as I enter. I am searching for the metal box containing my mother’s bones. I’ve been told she is confined to one on the shelves that run the length of the room. I start searching methodically. Each box has a […]
The Unexpected Visitor by David James
You’ll never guess who came over. I didn’t believe it. Not one person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, could guess who came by my house today. In a way, it’s a miracle he came by. There, I gave you a clue: it’s a he. It’s something I’ve always dreamed about and wished for, but […]