Feeding The redpolls arrived like Christmas cards scattered beneath our backyard feeder, little red seals atop their heads like wax on parchment. What might be the medieval message they brought to the business of consuming suet beneath our window-sheltered gaze, and what dominion sent it? As if hunger were the lord of all, the redpolls thrust their weightless breasts against the immigrant sparrow population and stayed on, their numbers increasing, establishing a colony. We watched them as we raided the fridge looking for protein, roughage, vitamins we didn’t even think about needing, propelled by a … Continue reading Feeding and What the Birds Know, 2 poems by Mark Trechock→
Poetry and publishing: two topics that seem diametrically opposed, if you look at them under the perspective that’s the norm in the USA—that of business, capitalism, popular culture. Shake off that norm, however, and publishing can be re-imagined as aural/oral, visual, textual, cinematic, digital, interactive…who knows? When a reader begins to deepen her understanding of creative literature, she will also find it necessary to widen the concept of publishing. Some folks say this is a new world. Or they’ll claim things were better in the old days. Curmudgeons and prejudices abound. In my lifetime, I … Continue reading Creative Publishing by Ann E. Michael→
The familiar constriction arose in her chest. She followed the dark echoes of her husband’s steps; his gait sober as cold coffee. Heel, toe. March. She giggled at the image of her husband as a soldier. His shoulders were still square, but his chest was sunken, and his paunch tightened his shirt. The pain moved into her shoulders as she held her breath against hiccups. “I can drive,” she said, exhaling. “You can hardly walk,” he said. “Try to keep up.” “Try it in heels!” That image caused her to smile. “What’s your hurry? … Continue reading Each in One Piece by Bradley M. Radovich→
I was typing my alternate ID number into the keypad at my (formerly) favorite grocery store when the perky cashier asked if I qualified for Senior Discount Thursday. My finger froze midair. “Excuse me?” She repeated her question, louder this time, for the people over in the produce aisle. I smiled à la Kellyanne Conway when somebody brings up her husband’s tweets, and gave the wrinkle-less clerk ample opportunity to say something like, “You look far too young, of course, but we are required to ask everybody. Even school children.” She didn’t. Granted, I’m almost … Continue reading Getting Carded. And a Love Letter by Erika Raskin→
I have removed my shirt and am kneeling in a pit looking up at a man pointing a rifle down at me. Quiet, everything is eerily quiet now, the morning’s hissed commands and scrape of shovels long gone. Why will he shoot me? He will shoot me because he has learned he eats better if he does what he is told. He has learned when he drives to the assigned work site and sees along the way twelve vultures competing to rip apart a deer corpse, in the afternoon when he returns he will see … Continue reading Near Biržai, in the Astrava Forest, 8/8/41 by Ben Sloan→
Clichés abound this time of year. It’s the one season in which it’s OK to speak of holiday magic or lapse into sappy memories like those that surfaced recently when I ran across a 1956 photo of 4-year-old me on the lap of Santa Claus. Understand, I’m talking about The Santa Claus—not some run-of-the-mill helper who brings up the rear in an annual Christmas parade. I mean he who sat upon the throne-like chair in Richmond’s Miller & Rhodes for the latter half of the 20th Century. Whole books have been written about his reign, … Continue reading A Visit With Santa by Priscilla Melchior→
In his 1971 memoir, Me and the Orgone, Orson Bean recounted his life-changing experience undergoing orgone therapy, a body-mind psychotherapy developed eighty years ago by Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. Reich and orgone played a role in my life, too, beginning in the 1970s when I embarked on an eventually abandoned plan to become a psychotherapist. While studying Gestalt therapy and bioenergetics at Associates for Human Resources (AHR) in Concord, Massachusetts, I learned that these therapies are partly derived from different phases of Reich’s career. As a psychoanalyst in the 1920s, Reich developed a new approach … Continue reading Miles and the Orgone by Miles Fowler→
After I die, prop the bones of a beautiful bird in my mouth. Call a medicine woman back from my home star. Offer tobacco, cedar, sage, sweet grass, the seven silent petitions of passage. For all these words are only feathers that fall from the dark hollow of my throat. Plumes which wait for a wing, a way to lift, rise, fly. To soar from the lips, the fingers, to become a prayer of fire hitching a ride homeward. Sherrell Runnion Wigal is a poet originally from Roane County, West Virginia, now living along the … Continue reading Untitled by Sherrell Wigal→
My name is Mario Loprete. I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Grecia,” rich in culture and history. I also travel a lot. I rent a house in European cities that could inspire my work and consolidate some work relationships with galleries and collectors that I began on the internet. Artistically, I am self-taught, studying the history of art in Catanzaro and the great masters of art—Mattia Preti, Caravaggio, Rembrandt—without external contaminations. I studied at an art shop … Continue reading Italian Artist Shares New Concrete Ideas→
Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death. A short story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: Ernestine Goes to Heaven by Susan Heeger Follow us!
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