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...