Tag Archives: Spring 2019

Return To My Old Neighborhood by Yvonne Leach

color photo of empty street of old neighborhood and brick storefront
 

As I pass the willow-lined pond, the wheels on my bike click over new cement cracks from the toll of winter’s thaw. How is it that not much has changed? The arms of the same cedars droop over the same sidewalks. Patches of drenched lawn sprout through snow, and the two-story houses still sit clotted in time. The early spring sun braids through the pine-dotted park. I turn the familiar corner toward my elementary school; the now-faint rain paints a black scrawl across the playground. The old oak we climbed, stark gray trunk blotched and … Continue reading Return To My Old Neighborhood by Yvonne Leach

Gemini by Charlotte Morgan

Photo of stars on sky avove a tree
 

When that technician pointed out two heartbeats and two precious teensy penises on the screen, I was over the moon. Buddy leaned over and kissed me and cried real quiet-like, like he wasn’t actually crying, but I knew he was. Right away the names Elvis and Jesse popped into my head—Mama raised me on Elvis—but I didn’t say that out loud. Buddy would’ve immediately made frying egg sounds and said in a high sissy voice, “This is your brain on baby.” I’d been a total ditz when I was pregnant with Kayla, but so far … Continue reading Gemini by Charlotte Morgan

In My Dream by Stuart Gunter

Purple sky with lightning bolt
 

For Steve Gray, in Sarasota The pine tops burn orange, loud and strange: a train screaming on burning tracks into the full moon. The moon flutes sunlight to my upturned eyes: I am as unable as the stars to look away. The cinder block wall crumbles over the table of smoked meats, fire in the brazier casting tiny orange stars that drift toward the white moonlit clouds. The cows low. And I am crying. I am holding my life together with bubble gum and paper clips. I cannot hear the music coming from the basement. … Continue reading In My Dream by Stuart Gunter

Cold Beds by Michael Sandler

Photo of man gardening in muddy bed
 

Lobster mitts might cushion the ache, my hands numbed by these cold, rain-wet stalks. The stakes tenacious, anchored in beds slimed here and there with rot. Cut twine and a vine collapses, limp as kelp. Tug upward and a tired length slips from its dimple of earth dangling a matted root. I weeded, watered, pruned and came to believe I had claim to a red firmness slicing so cleanly it would flake onto my sandwich—I tried to persevere…But the fruit was blighted. The stems now lie in a composting reef—bed of bladder-wrack more fecund than … Continue reading Cold Beds by Michael Sandler

The Young Man at the Gym by Martha Woodroof

Photo of inside of church with vaulted ceiling
 

“I seem to have become an outrage addict,” I say to a young man at the gym. I’ve just glanced at the TV screens mounted on the wall in front of the aerobic equipment. As usual, CNN is in full eek mode, and so—like one of Pavlov’s well-conditioned dogs—I am eeking away. The young man is tall, thirty-ish, with dark, curly, blunt-cut hair. I am tall, seventy-one, with long, greying, ash-brown hair that stays permanently ahoo. We are both serious weight-lifters, albeit his free weights are a lot heavier than my Cybex stacks. “I gave … Continue reading The Young Man at the Gym by Martha Woodroof

Salmonella Summer by Suzanne C. Martinez

Photo of person in sky hanging from a parachute
 

I spent four days and nights smashed against a bus window in transit to my first husband’s family reunion half nauseous from breathing in the diesel fumes and the aroma of the chemical toilet a few feet behind us. The vinyl seat stuck to the back of my thighs, as he seeped into my half of the bench I was sharing with him. He was a big guy, Swedish-Norwegian and a lapsed Mormon. Six months earlier he’d announced it was necessary for him to move out so he could enjoy anonymous sex, drugs, drinking and … Continue reading Salmonella Summer by Suzanne C. Martinez

The Moth and My Neighbor’s Wife Leaves, 2 poems by Sharon Ackerman

Color photo of a moth near a porch light at night
 

The Moth It would be too simple to describe its motives as a flame off course, a light mistaken for sun. Loveliness is complicated, a white body against darkness, the night’s counterfeit just beyond a screen, as yet untorn. Pale wing, sees what it wants to see, half-witted and happy for a few wild moments, reeling beneath the cold eyes of relentless stars.   My Neighbor’s Wife Leaves She returns for her things, bright strips of clothing billowed down like prayer flags over boxes. I almost miss the small object in her hand. She hurls … Continue reading The Moth and My Neighbor’s Wife Leaves, 2 poems by Sharon Ackerman

Garbage Pails by Terry Barr


 

“Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank nailed across the door frame at knee level to keep anyone from falling out.” ( Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, 61)   In our family album there is a picture of me taken by my Dad using his Brownie camera. The date is March 1959. I am standing in our back yard, about twenty feet from a … Continue reading Garbage Pails by Terry Barr

Beaten by Victor Altshul

Color photo of green meadow looking up a mountain with wooden fence
 

A once resplendent roan lying on its side, legs flailing, as if it thought— as if, in its final moment it could think at all— that it was still running, wild and free. So disdainful, so high-spirited, breathing patrician defiance with its last sad wisps of breath… Could it have known that its kind master whose gentle sweetness I, a fourteen-year-old city boy, once had longed to emulate, had sought only to tame its wilder excesses, crashing the wooden club down on the very top of its skull, to oppose the highest point on the … Continue reading Beaten by Victor Altshul

Broken by Alison Thompson

Stairway in a teal hallway
 

On the third visit, they kicked his stomach and broke his thumbs. The bones cracked like an electrical charge shooting through his entire body, exiting via his skull, as if everything he knew, everything he had ever perceived, was wiped clean. For those few moments, the world flashed white, then just as quickly, his whole reality dumped back down on him, a furious writhing mess he could not make sense of. Then he blacked out. When he regained consciousness, he was lying in a pool of his own blood-tinged vomit. He had two thoughts; one … Continue reading Broken by Alison Thompson