You stumble into the room (insert time of day, description). Daylight intrudes through a window the length of the back wall, hazy mustard sky and odor of sulfur are barging in. You step back, or pause, or something to do with halted movement (insert place). You’re in the doorway, peering in (reverse angle). Could be […]
Category Archives: Issue 8
Dream, dream, dream Two Prose Poems by Howie Good
Dream, Dream, Dream 1 Ghosts of memory circle my head like nagging black flies. We all go shopping together for a mirror to put above the piano. Attitudes have changed. Authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. A half-grown man in a baseball cap that says Vietnam Vet on the front visits me […]
Message in a Bottle by Eva Roa White
After 30 years, my sister is back into my life. She was looking for a recipe for a dish online, when she came across my essay about our hometown. Her email said: “Hello, I’m your sister and I hope you will answer me.” In the space of a few lines, she reconnects me with the […]
Come Light by Randal Eldon Greene
The acrid smell of her stomach juices hits my nostrils like a belly flop. The guy is yelling, all excited because the sun is coming up, rising from the city skyline. I am kneeling by Mabel, watching her nuzzle the gravel. We’re fifteen stories high. The guy yelling at us to look at the burning […]
Submerged A Collection by Santino Prinzi
Submerged Your memory wanes as I descend towards the seabed. Lingering is your touch on my fingertips. I’m long forgotten on yours. Deeper I dive, searching. You’ve left me in my breathlessness. My lungs bubble. I want to swim towards the sunlight, but how can I resurface without hopeful warmth? The ocean soul envelopes me […]
Autumn A Collection by C.C. Russell
Autumn The clouds moved stealthily across the flat surface of the sky, an invisible high-atmospheric current whisking them along while we, on our backs in the grass near the pond, were left untouched. The geese rattled their tongues in long ululations of grief at a disappearing season. You put your hand on mine for a […]
Abroad by Laurie Kolp
Beside me someone cries as I watch you make your way through customs. The crowd is thin, most of the others are still checking in their luggage. Behind you a young mother and two wiggling toddlers— the ones cried about. In a text I say you should make friends with them. Quick response: they don’t […]
Seven Horns By Scott Thomas Outlar
Neurons frayed from a lack of sleep done purposefully just to reach an altered state so the words will flow from the bowels of a fiery abyss. Add coffee and nicotine to the party and achieve a purge of pacifism which opens the gates for raw rage to saunter through with a rant against the […]
We Can’t Swim in the Dark Two Prose Poems by Kyle Hemmings
We Can’t Swim in the Dark You can’t love me. When you press your ear next to my heart, you’ll hear the swoosh of back history, dumpster mermaids and open hands. I recall the teeth of the night. No hot line for those marked with erroneous incisions. You still recite Marx from last semester and […]
Bring the Wheels of Time to Stop by Daniel M. Shapiro
In prison, his job is to check machines, to make sure nostalgia has been removed. What he had done couldn’t happen again: no more sitting in the last pickup, imagining to be one of the boys walking by. Secrets lived in someone else’s tree house. To think you peaked in youth is to languish in […]
You Will Surely Live Forever Now, Right Two Prose Poems by Matthew Smart
You Will Surely Live Forever Now, Right So I’ve seen God run against the traffic like a cheap thriller car chase villain. God runs like a bitch and I’m not surprised since jokers win way too many contests of chance. All I know is our true love waits for our eyes to drop on them […]
Give a Little A Collection by Annabel Banks
Give a Little Spontaneity is attractive. Will you try? For me? She said yes, although sure she wouldn’t like their sea smell and slipperiness, like drowning in genitals, but doesn’t want to be that girl, the one who says no. Spontaneity is attractive. Took the shell for the hell, tipped it back, smiled and swallowed. […]
Earthquake by Claire Polders
The steel-eyed businesswoman with whom everyone had been flirting all through her twenties, thirties, and forties, much to her dislike, or so she said, was not noticed now as she crossed the hallway on her heels during the symposium on micro-financing in Amsterdam, was even ignored by the trio of eager security men, and she […]
The Gaseous Vertebrate by Jess Mize
Cazart! … A dreary haze of gray falls across the afternoon of the city. The branches of thick-foliaged trees come to life with the motion of the wind. The surf three-hundred miles away breaks and crashes over rocks and piers and sends banana boats swaying. Rain is in the air along with a fresh, cool […]
The Uprising by Voima Oy
All the cats lay curled in sleep, dreaming a new world. On the savannah, caracals leaped like birds and soared into the sky. Human eyes witnessed this murmuration, but it was dismissed as rumor, nothing more. Even video from mobile phones would have been considered suspect, much like the footage of UFOs in the earlier days. […]
The Moth by Banks Miller
Pale green wings dance in the late afternoon, as the western sky grows rich with the gold and carnelian of approaching sunset, and the shadows of pine trees lengthen. A stream murmurs softly as the moth crosses it and disappears into the woods beyond. the flying luna moth – a soft whisper borne on wings […]
How We Loved Baseball A Collection by Charles Hayes
How We Loved Baseball How we loved baseball, Casey At The Bat. Ruth’s point lifted our hearts, Gehrig’s goodbye broke them. Battered like the balls we threw, our pastime, its name a vision gone, a fuzzy memory be. Trinkets, ribbons, a path to heroism penciled in, replaced our gloves and cleats. The luckiest Lou, many […]
Avoir du Chien By Zebulon Huset
They found her, corset strapped so tight it was cut off, feet bound into balls, vomit crusting her lips. No foul play was the ruling. Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and editor in San Diego. He is obsessed with the netherland between flash fiction and prose poetry, as well as the haiku’s ‘murican brother […]
Humite by Linda Wojtowick
Things are changing perhaps. His dreams are that he is a dog, running. He runs all over. He covers the land from the gulf to the larger sea. Though his feet register the spiky roots of bog trees and spines of desert rocks, they are numb, unaffected sensations. He tries panting, just to see. When […]
Flags of Defiance by F.J. Bergmann
After the grape jelly ran out, there was an ascendancy of marmalade, the sultan of the breakfast table, absolute monarch of the buttered bread. Chunks and globs periodically fell from grace on the way to the mouth and crushed into the carpet, snuggling up to dust mice and stray pubic hairs, until sucked into a […]
For Want Of by Kevin Mulligan
Flying jabberwocky monkey pickles blew past the stop sign of endgame. Silent grief dropped from the sky, gluing itself to the parade. Garbage bag floaters shone like bricks melting on a grilled cheese cabbage. Alice drank her milk, thinking Kool Aid posters of dice on a blackboard. Meanwhile, Sherlock sluiced the kielbasa as Murdock fired […]
Making of Time Two Prose Poems by Chaitali Gawade
Making of Time You have to have ribbons of steel flowing in your blood to perfect this craft. You have to gather eons in your mouth, let it sit, marinate a while. The taste should be enough to make you weep, little pinpoints of ecstasy all over your tongue. The stars sieved through, nights and […]
A Letter from Auguste Rodin to T.S. Eliot by Ophelia Leong
You, whose words pepper the bland landscape of society with ruminations under streetlamps and languid women who peel back your skin with their judging eyes, is there any color your words can’t paint? I slide my pen along paper hoping to catch the world on fire. I see women glide through the streets, hands clasped […]
Public Displays of Thinking by Betsy Schaffer
I’ve seen it before. Maybe a frown or a chin scratch. Something telling the world that someone is thinking. This time it was someone I knew. I saw him at lunch walking alone. His hands were preacher-like at a pulpit, moving together, then up and down. They were trying to tell the church something important. […]
//A bread roll, 3 grapes Two Prose Poems by T.L. Krawec
//A bread roll, 3 grapes She dreams of writing, dreams of those who spite her being other characters who love her in spite of her. So, she hasn’t written since teach threw that book report in the trash but she knows the word protagonist and wants to be it, to be the most important and […]
Cliff Diving into the Underworld by Genevieve Mills
I jumped. You would have done the same thing if you spent your entire life surrounded by beautifully useless flowers and your mom was the goddess of fucking wheat. If you ran through fields of roses hoping you would step on a bee or a thorn just to feel something besides the gentle tickle of […]
Auto Autonomy by Mori Glaser
Flying headlit through night terrors, instruments wink at me as I blink through exhaust smoke at wing mirrors and I’m transported into a parallel parking universe with transparent privacy to curse–gossip–cry–sing off key or phone a friend. Dreary toil for years–months–days–hours buys a metal combustion nest mounted on wheels of air with soft-sell interior and […]
Looking for This? Two Prose Poems by James A.H. White
Looking for This? A dog cries through the night because his owner has set a hedgehog constructed from manicured folds of cardboard on the living room bookshelf with a body reminiscent of the fat neighbor cat that brushes against the back patio ferns while curving her notables back and up. The dog believes the new […]
Treadmill by Sandra Anfang
The treadmills at the gym look out on Main Street. I’m long past squeamishness at being Exhibit A, a Macy’s window poster child. A couple pushes a stroller past the brick facade. I wait for their child to plant his palms upon the glass. Sometimes I wave to them. When the mother stops, bends over […]
Lunch Break A Collection by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy
Lunch Break I am writing this note to apologize for eating your lunch. Only after I returned to my desk did I realize it was not the House Special (tuna and tomato on white roll) I have every day, but the Siesta Fiesta (salsa omelet on whole wheat) that you must have ordered. There was […]
The Dick Van Dyke Show by Kenneth Pobo
Laura Petrie wore Capri pants, which Sally would never wear. Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat held no appeal for her. She joked with the guys, played piano, sang, and went home each night to Mr. Henderson, her cat, waiting for a man to call, a sadness that she reversed into laughter the next day in a […]
Mea Maxima Culpa Two Prose Poems by Cathy Shea
Mea Maxima Culpa First, before I do anything, I want to say I am deeply sorry for postponing everything from sympathy cards to tax returns. Sticky note to myself: Do what I must do before the last God damned minute! And stop swearing when I’m late. Given every chance and all the warnings, I don’t […]
Poetry at Sea Two Prose Poems by Michael McInnis
Poetry at Sea Asked the recruiter would I be able to write poetry on a ship, stifled by discipline and regimentation and salt encrusted rails and salt encrusted slabs of lukewarm meat and beige chicken with a dollop of rice and water that always taste gritty with everything on the ship painted three shades of […]