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 […]
Category Archives: Issue 7
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 […]
Spinning in Imaginary Circles by Tara Isabel Zambrano
I am vacant and cold as an empty nest. No breath, only a threadbare sniffle. Air up the lungs, stuck in the throat, finally out the mouth with no human odor. My flesh is pushed inside an iron trunk two sizes too small. My hands, a pair of mismatched socks. There are missing buttons on […]
Russian 117 by Linda Wojtowick
How it ended up set on a dusty brown television in the electric trailer park is strange. But maybe not stranger, say, than an amphibian rain. A bend in wind. The father crushes his cans in a homemade machine and tends the dirt-filled pails. Under his constant hat his head is downy and small. The […]
From Horseshoe Beach by Kelly DuMar
I. From Horseshoe Beach, The View You ride the motorbike, a rental, to this good luck named beach. Your wife, a happy passenger, is craving solitude and sun and no children to mind. She lays her towel on pinkish sand and kneels. Her back against the limestone cliffs, her view is of the sea. One other […]