The one and only time I put a knife in my pocket heading out to church was on Sunday, December 13, 1981. My mother, a single parent, was working a night shift, and my job at age eleven, in a true latchkey-kid fashion, was to get myself and my seven-year-old sister to holy mass. That was far from unusual. I was in charge on most Sunday mornings at that age. I’d usually wake up early, turn on channel one (of two), and watch cartoons for a few minutes before anything else. That morning, instead … Continue reading Writing Through Autocracy by Karol Lagodzki→
It was a flat grey stone, the kind you found in tourist shops, with pre-set words. What a strange gift from Andrea, I’d thought, and plunked it into my pocket—carelessly. Only later, I found my hand often curving around it, feeling its weight, its contours. Where was she now? All those nights I found myself awake, throwing on some clothes. Inside my car, I cruised through the dead-quiet night streets. Sometimes, the streetlights, or the cold probing lights left on in closed stores, allowed me a glimpse of a huddled shape under a doorway, or … Continue reading A Stone by Debbie Bennett→
This is the light of stillness after everything has been said and thought, after the day has been brought to its knees once more, after the excuses, the bargainings with self, conversations that started so hopefully, but stopped. Don’t expect the darkened maple to turn over a bright leaf, find its own breeze. What pours in through the blinds is unmoved as the numb paw of your hand half opened or closed on the snow bank pillow, cold as the truth of its sleep. Let that radiance lift me weightless, timeless, into its night, and … Continue reading Moonlight by Ronald Stottlemyer→
At three, Brooke Major picked up a paint brush and rode her first horse. Her path was set. “My grandfather had riding stables and I fell in love with horses as a young child in Clayton, a small town in the North Georgia mountains,” Major remembers. She started riding frequently, and by six, she had her first pony and began jumping lessons in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta. “As for painting, the passion started at the age of three when I drew on absolutely everything I could find, most of the time … Continue reading The Sculpted Paintings of Brooke Major→
If ‘silence is golden,’ why do we squander it so foolishly? If you try finding ‘peace and quiet’ in contemporary life, you will be gob-smacked to encounter it. We praise the sounds of nature: babbling brooks, whispering leaves, bird song. And granted, there are buzzing mosquitos and growling bears, but it has been shown that humans need the restorative powers of the outdoors. When nature takes a destructive turn, we anthropomorphize its “nasty: weather, “raging” floods or describe (the sound of) tornadoes as a fast approaching freight train. Which brings us to the notion … Continue reading The Dying Art of Silence? by Fred Wilbur→
In a dark subway tunnel between stations, a concave safety niche holds a grotto of graffiti unseen unless you happen to glance out when the train lights hit it. The moment you notice its radiance you’re past it, though if you close your eyes a vision of its brash vision remains. Someone braved the trains and third rail and cops to spray what graffiti artists call, considering the danger involved, a Heaven Spot. A Heaven Spot that tags you— in your own private grotto— like a dangerous dream. Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous … Continue reading Heaven Spot by Mark Belair→
I am in an abusive relationship again. This morning was the first time it occurred to me to label it as such. Not a lover or husband, or friend, but the memoir. My own. A book I have been writing—too embarrassed to confess for how many years. And like one of these kinds of relationships, it’s been on again off again. I have finished a tweaked and polished draft, some of it quite good but there seems to be a problem. So, the other day I’m sitting in C’ville Coffee with Susan, Mitzi, and Nancy. … Continue reading Once Upon A Memoir by Trudy Hale→
When he woke it was with awareness that it was his birthday and thus with an ebullience lacking on most other days when waking and rising were almost painful, at least relative to the contoured comfort of the womb-like bed that held him gently and all but captive. The hardwood floors were cold in the new apartment, so when he entered the kitchen, bed-headed and still rubbing sleep from his eyes, he was sure to stand in the narrow slats of morning light that shone through the westerly wall’s window. She saw him, smiled … Continue reading Birthday Boys by Will Underland→
For your birth, metal instruments sing you and your fluorescent halo into being. At your baptism you are pressed by the hands of power into stale water against your will. This is your first day of school: sick with the bus’s diesel fumes, tripping on the toes of giants. For your wedding the family dynamite flies in. Their coat tails trail with thick fuses that you navigate in your blue shoes you keep your fire to yourself as hornets sleep in the palms of your roses. In midlife, your parents leave you in explosive fashion. … Continue reading Cursed by Tess Matukonis→
Cristina is an artist with an eye to humor, the ironic and social commentary. She started creating art for fun at the age of six, painting random objects and landscapes. Her early experience sparked a lifelong fascination with the visual world, a curiosity that continues today. Cartoons – from Disney’s Mickey Mouse and the Simpsons to Charlie Brown – colored Cristina’s childhood, “I spent countless hours immersed in these fantastical worlds which fueled my imagination and nurtured my sense of storytelling,” she says. “In fact, cartoons were a big part of how … Continue reading Cristina’s Pop Art→
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