April 2011
3 posts
10 tags
Sundays on the Tennessee by Jonathan Kosik
Nothing good comes out of this river. Heavy steel killed this bend in the Tennessee. My father pours two bags of ice into the fish hold in the middle of the boat. He sinks a case of Coors Light into the ice, two cans at a time. We don’t keep the fish; my father throws his catch back. It’s just time in a boat, floating, pulling fish from the river next to the sagging frames of steel mills where...
11 tags
The Hummingbird by Robert Hill Long
How the hummingbird got into the attic he didn’t know. All day at the desk rewriting a single foolish page, he’d mistaken that vibrato for something within—onset of tinnitus, a Cassandra vein in his temple forewarning a stroke. In the ashes of afternoon, he pictured an angel of perfection, tiny as a needle injecting the word No through the top of his skull.
The ocean outside was mantled in fog...
11 tags
Quee by John E. Branscum
We all loved dogs. After all, a kid without a dog is like a kid without a heart. Beagles and Labradors and Cocker Spaniels, and the mutts of course — the unlikely couplings of Chihuahuas and Rottweilers, Poodles and Dobermans. Then one morning, a few days after the last day of school, we find she who belongs to no one — sleeping on the porch of the abandoned house at the end of...
March 2011
5 posts
11 tags
Chocolate Milk for Miles! by Andrew Battershill
Derek was with his friend Annabel, drinking by a river. Annabel was about knee-deep in the water. She tripped slightly and as she righted herself an expanding swirl of silt rose to the surface. Derek was sitting higher up on the hill. He had an umbrella suspended in a tree branch above him. Rain fell heavily into the river but only the occasional drop made it through the canopy of the trees.
...
11 tags
The End of a Season by Kim Connington
It’s late September, past cottage season. No whining buzz of boats on the lake, no shrieking children splashing in the shallows. The fall migration brings a cacophony of birds and waterfowl but since early this morning there has been silence. A stark contrast to the fury of the breakfast table argument. Her words were harsh, accusing, biting. I yelled back, inches from her face. ...
12 tags
A Design for Life by Emma Jones
Raining again. I can’t remember the last time I left my umbrella at home. Never mind, I’m spending most of my day indoors and have much more pressing worries at the hospital. The traffic light turns green. So many decisions, so many varieties of perfection. Like a kid in a candy store…
I want blonde hair, not too light, but more of a caramel colour with a slight wave that will drizzle itself...
11 tags
On Parmenter St. by Lenea Grace
“Where’s the parade, boys?” Jimmy’s scooping up the slush, as usual. I tell him nobody wants a goddamn slushie on a cloudy day, but he don’t listen. As usual.
“Haw. Haw. Joker.”
Fat Morty thinks Jimmy is a regular comedian. This guy. I tell you. It’s been fifty years of this and Morty’s still snorting when he laughs. This guy. If he weren’t my cousin, he’d be yours.
So we sit and take...
12 tags
Til Next Year by Judith Mercado
Stuart walked out his front door. His olive corduroy slacks and dun-colored cable-knit sweater were as ordinary as any Fall day. Only the burnished red coat of the toy poodle scampering beside him indicated that this was someone worth noticing on Halloween, that most exotic of all holidays.
Everyone did notice. Green munchkin or desert soldier, each child walking past—or just as likely his...
February 2011
4 posts
12 tags
Some Night by Suzanne Bump
He was wagging his cigarette at its reflection in the tip jar, the cigarette blooming each time it tilted towards. The world through a fish-eye, Dave behind him at the grill looking miniature and fuzzy. He pulled himself up, glancing past the few empty tables and window-bar outside. Wind ripped up from the lake, fighting the snow that spun from streetlights.
“Alright, let’s close her up,” he...
12 tags
Detour by Carey M. Adams
Looking back, you remember you were heading home but not where you had been. You remember that at some point, instead of turning off at the exit to head north, you took a detour into the city. Straight off, that little voice in your head spoke up, the one that nags at certain key points. You ignored it.
When he answered the door, you could tell he wasn’t happy to see you but you stayed...
12 tags
Of Flowers That Dare to Dream by Zino Asalor
A wild flower was born in the cemetery, of all places she was born amongst the dead. Sired to forever brighten the days and nights of the un-living. As a toddler, her eyes spoke of journeys to lands unknown, but “home is home,” Mama said sternly. “Home is home”, Papa nodded in agreement.
She dreamt of how different the world would be if life was lived amongst the living, to be smiled at, smelt...
9 tags
The World is Dripping in Mud by Rob Lavender
Red will leak. Wait and see what I tell you, boy. Every morning five past ten. Here he comes, wrapped in those bandages. Be-bopping in those draws he ain’t ever filled. Standing in the square sun, streaming through the kitchen window above that raggedy-ass table you bought from Timmy. What? Bring it on. Let me sing. Strap on that guitar, boy. Get in here. Don’t stand there in the Christian’s...
January 2011
7 posts
10 tags
A-Z Blues by Dan Luby
An unassuming envelope, no return address, so he opened it.
“Bernie, I’m pregnant,” the letter read.
“Could be yours, Bernie, I’m not 100%.
Do you know, I’m actually eating again?
Even cut out the whiskey, I can’t anymore, because of the baby.
Four months along now and they can hear his heartbeat with a stethoscope.
Guess you heard about Tim, the...
11 tags
Kalik by Dan Luby
Mary and Stu, affluent and humble, weekly saw Kalik, a homeless psychotic. It was their wont to comfort the deprived woman with the overflow of their gilded cup: money, meals, and warm talk. On one such visit, Kalik revealed the fact that she had a child years before. Her shaky, spotted hands trembled with a yellowed photograph.
“Juniper,” she told Mary and Stu, whose hearts bled. ...
9 tags
Squatter by Kevin Frazier
At night he smoked in bed, tapped ash and cinders onto the tattered sheet and the beer-stained mattress.
He was still a squatter. They’d been kicked out, all the squatters, seven years ago. Now he lived in a trailer along one of the Berlin canals, but in his mind he had never left the squat.
With his free hand he touched his face. He fingered the long wood spike in his earlobe and the small...
9 tags
Hope Tied With Spiderwebs by Emily J. Lawrence
After the flood, the door opens to their last supper washed on the walls. Meatloaf shelved with books, bread caked to the T.V… A comb of yellow cake makes a hotel for the ants. The boy picks corn from the blinds while his mother walks to her bedroom and closes the door behind her.
She peels off her clothes and wrecks herself on the floor with the trees and telephone lines. She becomes dozens of...
12 tags
Wormholes by Walter Campbell
Andy casually tells me that the sole scientific justification for wormholes is that the idea of a wormhole doesn’t break any universal physics laws. He says it as though it’s not a big deal, as though it’s not completely earth shattering.
“You’re a liar,” I yell, jumping to my feet like a soldier in basic training. “And your mother’s quite loosely moraled,” I say, knowing I’ve just pulled off a...
11 tags
17th and Calloway by Jessica Rae Hahn
Before my brother kicked out the rear window of a police car from inside and said, “there, now you have a reason to arrest me,” I was lounging against a fire hydrant, picking at hangnails, watching as he and my mother fought it out, he claiming he had every right, she, bleached hair frazzled and electric in the glow of street lamps, demanding to know where he was getting the stuff, which was a...
12 tags
The Ages of Women by Kathleen McClain
“She must have been very beautiful when she was young,” visitors to Exeter Manor would say.
Clarisse’s hair had been as black and glossy as a starling’s wing, her skin as white as the finest linen, her eyes so violet they made a man’s soul quake.
She took her first lover when she was fifteen, he a student at the music conservatory. She accepted as her due his adoration of her body and reveled...
December 2010
3 posts
7 tags
Murdering Flowers by Brittany Michelson
Alexander tried to light a flower on fire once. His parents assumed he wanted to test the boundaries. The police officer from two doors down said he was a Pyromaniac. His teenage cousin Luke congratulated him for being a rebel. His hippie aunt, who was a flower child back in the day, remarked with a wistful sigh that he was murdering flowers. If that were the case, Alexander reasoned, his older...
14 tags
Red Panties by Bernadette Adams Davis
Someone found Victor slumped over in his truck in a parking lot on the eastside. At a sushi bar you’ve passed by on your way to the beach.
That’s all the doctor told you. He said they are still trying to figure out why your husband is unconscious.
You would be able to see him soon, the doctor promised. Victor is in transit from the ER to some test and then to a room on the fourth floor of...
15 tags
Raptured by Dixon Hearne
“There’s no other word for it, friends—BLASPHEMY!” The tent preacher snatches up the Bible in his right hand and draws his left into an angry fist, shaking it at the gap-toothed, bug-eyed crowd. “Ain’t no use trying. You can’t run away from your sins—Holy Jesus!” A round chorus of Amens washes over the sweaty congregation—hand fans are totally useless on such muggy Delta nights. Weaker stock...
November 2010
4 posts
15 tags
The Fine Grammar of Cats by Mary McLaughlin...
She checks the foyer mirror before she peeks again. It’s a steep climb, but his stocky legs mount quickly. Suddenly he stops, distracted by the clump of scarlet peonies.
He ruffles the petals like little heads, and she fancies she hears the catch at the back of his throat. Then he stoops, fascinated by the columns of ants running up and down the stems. They remind her of the children one is...
13 tags
The Organ-Grinder and The Reckless Dancer by Tane...
The aged monkey stood askew, leaning on the door frame. A burnt out cigarette dropping silted black dust across his hairy chest. He sauntered over to the bed, almost tripping over a broken theremin on the floor. His dark brown eyes sunken into his skull, pirouetting back and forth, scanning for any sign of life.
A woman – a bog-standard beauty, blonde and buxom – lay across his bed in a...
10 tags
The Consequence Is What's Real by Wende Crow
You let him buy you a sandwich at the bus station, and you let him carry your bags to the bus. Sit in an aisle seat and close your eyes and listen to The English Patient dubbed in Spanish. Open your eyes later and not know how much later and look out the window at the twin volcanoes belching smoke. Listen to endless violins in the desert.
You wake up earlier than everyone else for five weeks...
11 tags
Stains by Caroline Bennett
The stains seem to have their own smell, separate from the rest of the room, which seemed rather pleasant after the cleaning. But the stains went nowhere. Long yellow claws down the wall.
She talks to them. “Well I wonder how these got here?”
A logical question. Scrubbing for minutes and they only look worse. Yellow brown scratches with broadening edges. Ammonia does not absolve the...
October 2010
5 posts
13 tags
Kim Asks About Her Future With Ernesto by Dan...
Ernesto and Kim were watching TV.
“I want to ask you something,” Kim said, propping herself a bit higher in the bulky recliner. “But I need to demonstrate something in order to ask.”
After Kim’s marriage busted up, she’d come to stay with her friend Ernesto.
“Okay,” Ernesto said.
“I’ll have to touch you. So stand up.”
“Okay.” Ernesto smirked and nervously grasped one hand with the other...
8 tags
Blooming by Patty Somlo
The narrow aisle reeked of ammonia and old dust. My coat brushed the counter’s edges. I could feel the merchandise leaning in my direction. No one noticed me slip a bottle of Be Delicious and a fake pearl necklace stapled on velveteen into my pocket from my hand.
I glided one aisle over to the eye shadow blooming in tins and palmed two into my bag. The lint-filled corners of my life began to...
13 tags
These Days by Leslie Clark
Yesterday afternoon I went down to the stadium to sit on a concrete bench and watch the spectators leaving the basketball game. Braids, Bape and backwards caps, furtrimmed jackets, fathers holding apple-cheeked babies aloft on their shoulders. My breath clouded from between my clattering teeth as a fat man blew out his cigar. High school boys re-enacted plays. “Did you see when-”...
14 tags
Working Not Working by James Sandham
Awoke with a start only to find myself exactly where I was. Beside me the papers lay exactly where I’d left them. The room buzzed with cold fluorescent light and the radio, on the ground beside my desk, murmured vague portents of simmering calamities forthcoming, as it always did, and as it always had done. I looked about me. As usual, there was no one else around. They’ve forgotten me, I...
14 tags
Pianos Falling Like Angels by S. Magpie
Sun and Moon collided one day as Bird tried to gather them both to its breast. It was a Terrible Disaster.
This is how it happened. Sun and Moon loved Bird, but there was too much love, and it began to swell in their stomachs. It began to rot and give them ulcers and heartburn and aneurysms.
She was a safe distance away, she and the stars that were swinging through on translucent vines as...
September 2010
7 posts
15 tags
Shooting Dogs by Sezin Koehler
Asha had been living on Pine Ridge Reservation for one month, and most of the Lakota still weren’t able to pronounce her name. The variations of Asher, Aisha, Alisha, Ashley, left her on alert and answering to all of them. When her mum would phone on Sundays it was a drink of spring water to hear her name with its “aaaa” sound coming from across the ocean.
The only person who said her name...
16 tags
Into Orbit by Adam Jeffries Schwartz
My brother looks like an alien. His hair is gone, eyebrows also. Morphine and other poisons have made his eyes transparent; it’s painful to look at him.
Dad stays with him during the day, because he doesn’t work. I stay with him at night because I don’t sleep and mom doesn’t come at all because she pays the bills.
Narcissistic families look fine from the outside,...
8 tags
Headlights by Marc Justin
His car came up the driveway and stopped in front of the house. He sat there with the headlights on. Mom died six years ago. I went back to bed.
“I walked to Rollins point, Betha.” That was Mom’s name, we never used it in the house. His arm fastened around my ribs and his leg chicken-winged across my thigh. “There was a couple sitting not too far, early twenties, nice looking. The girl had a...
17 tags
Flounder by Lyzette Wanzer
He could not remember how to surface.
The water folded over Daquan’s head as he sank. His limbs, leached, flopped like dead fins, lesson and memory a decade removed. Crawl, breaststroke, backfloat. Swimming was supposed to be like bicycling, never forgotten.
For bicycling, it was true.
Just last week, he had straddled Miguel’s ten-speed Diamondback at the senior graduation party, skimmed off...
14 tags
Two Poets by David Massengill
The two young men walked the trails outside the town in the morning, and they often crossed paths on the hill with the weird evergreen. The tree had a curving trunk and drooping limbs, yet still it looked healthy. Mark and Alfred rarely communicated more than a nod. They both wrote poems, but Alfred only saw Mark as the sports columnist for the local newspaper, and Mark only saw Alfred as the...
14 tags
Bleeding Man by Vanessa Carlisle
Turning the corner on my walk home from work I see a van at a wrong angle, a boy on the phone as he kneels next to his victim, a bleeding man lying in the street, and a dirty grey sweatshirt picking up gravel as the bleeding man tries to roll over from his side. He’s bleeding from the head. It’s a lot of blood, pooling.
The only thing I could use for a compress is my nice Balinese scarf. Then I...
17 tags
Tear Me From Her Torn Self by Roberta Allen
The woman crouching in underpants at the top of the worn stairs cannot be who I think she is, cannot be who I want her to be, even though I recognize the coarse voice asking in Dutch, “Who’s there?” I want to shout in the voice she hasn’t heard for forty years, It isn’t me! But it’s too late. Too late to retrace my steps, walk past her house, pretend I haven’t seen her. I climb the narrow...
August 2010
9 posts
15 tags
Drive by James A. Gollata
To drive all day. I would say fair. Rain and traffic and rush. Sometimes bad tips and sometimes no tips. People are all mostly the same. I drive.
On the way to the hairdresser on a hot day they say turn the windows up and on the way back they say the same.
They go to bars friendly on the way out and more friendly on the way back. I get tips then.
People give you tips for different...
19 tags
Juche by Maghan Lusk
In a whitewashed apartment building in Yanji, Kim Sang Kyu turned on his computer and unzipped his pants.
“You are Chinese,” his mother had said. “Joo-cheh. Each one chooses a path. My family in North Korea chose theirs. I chose mine before I met your father.”
He was a boy then. His father, a Jilin statesman, disappeared on a diplomatic trip to Pyongyang and left behind a great deal of money....
16 tags
While You Were, I... by Sharon Erby
While you were sewing, you paused. “Stop staring,” you said. I wasn’t staring — not at your face. It was the way your fingers guided the material that mesmerized me. White billowed around you, making you look like you were in a cloud, and I thought any moment you might ascend. The way you were pedaling, playing it like it was an organ in a cathedral, it could’ve happened. I wanted to...
15 tags
Tending the Fire by Sharon Erby
Every year, he started getting ready for winter in August and he wasn’t done until the following June. People could talk, but this wood business wasn’t easy. After all, he couldn’t wait until the temperatures plummeted to cut wood. He’d decided on the outdoor wood burner because their home sat on wooded property. His wife said they had wonderful trees. Each, after he’d felled, chopped, and...
14 tags
A Wax Nose by Kenneth Pobo
A half a mile from Bob’s and Mark’s house is a huge mall. Bob says, “It looks like grief with bright lights.” Mark says, “It looks like joy a la mode.”
Bob: “I’m an extremist when it comes to practicality. It’s my religion.”
Mark: “Oh don’t be dumb. We live now. Cherry pie. Sambas.”
Christmas. “No,” Bob says, “there’s no way that you’ll get me into that poisonous mall. So what if...
14 tags
Walking to Ohio by Susan Solomon
“There are colors on the street Red, white and blue.” -Neil Young
It was early in the early 21st century and they lived as the fucked. Occasionally they woke up feeling fine, but morning clarity again brought the crushing realization of the still-fucked. The shroud of a never-ending hangover engulfed their spirits. On good days the darkness lifted with the sun, only to return, an...
13 tags
Blue Moon by Susan Solomon
The hour of the blue moon approached. Under the black summer sky, the he-gull rested on his mosaic-covered balcony, the balcony he had covered with hundreds of mirrored tesserae. As he waited for the moonrise, the he-gull caught a glimpse of light across the courtyard in the townhouse that had been vacant and dark for many seasons.
A she-gull appeared on her balcony. Her favorite pastime was...
14 tags
Divide or Die by Kathryn Megan Starks
There are eleven different Megan Starkses on Facebook. We are a private people. We like to keep our profiles locked to ‘friends-only’ status, and one of us (the lawyer) doesn’t even have a public avatar to view.
From the profile pictures that you can see, notably, several of us are fat.
Two of us play softball, one for a Christian university and one for the Callway Co. team...
12 tags
The Ride by Belle Crawford
We ride the one that inches upward while it ticks, the one that holds you still over the bodies moving around below with their cotton candy, their sticky apples, their tattoos and cigarettes. It’s the one with red lights flashing, the sirens pushing their way into your skull, breaking glass there until you know it’s a mistake.
“He’s the smartest in his school,” his cousin Anita said when I...
July 2010
4 posts
11 tags
Alexander the Great by James Brantingham
Spider, no spider. Where did the spider go? Open the other hand and there is the spider. Close hand again and look: white pebble, black pebble, white pebble. It’s magic. Feather to flower to feather. His hands are too fast.
Alexander can’t talk. Or won’t talk. Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t talk at all. Some autistic kids can calculate numbers, some name any date and day in any year, or some can...
12 tags
The Water Doesn't Stop by Robert Hill Long
Gray morning, I come down to the kitchen and find it flowing through the clean steel sink, like someone sleep-walked here, drank, walked away. Once when my parents were drinking late with friends, I sleepwalked into the room, crawled under my mother’s legs and croaked, “Thirsty, thirsty.” I was five years old. My father picked me up and I flooded his shirt with urine. The drunken laughter was a...
12 tags
Onan, Low Tide by Robert Hill Long
What can a wave do but surge, like the last surge yanking it shoreward by a wind-colored rope? On midnight’s couch, without moving, I’m being rushed toward some scene of hysteria and collapse. Tell me what to retract, books. Tell me why, black bowl full of my father’s ash. On the north end of Shell Island I’d lie, naked, twenty-three, reading books thin with the bleached...