#33: Poetry by Bruce McRae

WRONG-HEADED PROPHET I’ve a face like a torn curtain. A face like a punched wall or rat’s dinner. Like a smoking battlefield. What Shakespeare would tag rudely stamped and curtailed of fair proportion.   A stranger in stranger times, a frightener of small children, I’m not the prettiest angel in the choir, my face like […]

#32: Nonfiction by Alicia DeFonzo

THE TURK The funny thing about war is, even though you’re in it, half the time you don’t know where you are. It’s a foreign land with strange names. Anyone involved in intelligence or strategy knew, but the GI had no idea. You don’t try to remember where you are during the war. You have […]

#31: Fiction by Leyna Krow

DUST GIVES IN Mason followed his brother through the woods, asking questions he knew were irritating.  “Why do octopuses need eight legs when squid get by with six?”  “What happens to the tide during a lunar eclipse?”  “Why do kids say ‘olly olly oxen free’ when it’s safe to come out from hide and seek? […]

#30: Poetry by Lynne Potts

MONDAY BEFORE TUESDAY Monday cold oatmeal a shadow-puppet mother waving from the door—   night before bathtub water turned marble gray   outside swilling eddies forming a snow day— you wish, you wish   smell of lead pencil shavings in your new haircut Gilbert Baily in the coat room   Monday—a smudged dwarf trudging forest […]

#29: Poetry by J.R. Solonche

HOW DO YOU TALK TO A PERSON How do you talk to a person who looks like a corpse? How do you exchange pleasantries? How do you say, “What a beautiful day?”  So I say, “What a beautiful day.” How do you say, “It looks like rain?” So I say, “It looks like rain.” How […]

#28: Fiction by Marco Etheridge

THE IMMEDIATE WITHIN You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I have a time bomb ticking in my head. I may seem like a normal person, but I’m a walking dead man. Most folks view death as an abstract idea, something that hovers on the horizon of a distant future. For me, death […]

#27: A Near-Death Experience by Sheldon Lee Compton

I Saw Absolutely Nothing When I Died I have a bad heart. A really crappy, beat up, scar-covered, and weak heart. It’s flat-out not any good and even up-and-quit entirely on me seven years ago. That year, on Father’s Day, I had a massive heart attack. Flatlined. Was paddled back to life and had a heart […]

#26: Nonfiction by Leonard Henry Scott

THE CADAVER ROOM “Let’s go to the Cadaver Room.” This happened a long time ago. The three of us had all started college together. Now, I was in my fifth year of a four year undergraduate program. Jack had dropped out at the beginning of the previous year and worked for the Post Office, the greatest repository […]

#25: Fiction by Ben Tanzer

UNFOLDING “Get out!” You don’t hear it as much as sense it. It’s the movement, a shadow somewhere behind you, a fracture, and a puncturing of your world from that of a parallel and adjacent one.  You are coasting down a sidewalk.  You are filled with a kind of joy, contentment. Work is done. Freedom […]

#24: Poetry by Ryan Blosser

TEAKETTLE MEDITATION Silver crescent sliver smiles sideways at sunset. The wind could sweep me up to the top of that maple.   Oh, St. Francis, if I were Catholic, my dog would hear my sermon.   Whine, teakettle, wail on. Show September crickets, that’s/it’s your voice cadencing moon across sky.   It is said that […]