by Charles Rafferty
It floats there like an asterisk
shining down
from the page of night,
making me feel
like a footnote. I cannot be
sure what I am meant
to clarify. I am
the fine print Continue reading
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Filed under Poetry
The Digging
by A. J. Perry, an excerpt from the novel The Old People (Thames River Press, 2014)
And then it might occur that just when it seems to the Old People that things cannot get any worse–when it seems that nets can get no emptier nor the river any drier–things can in fact get much worse. That the rains will continue to not come–not just through the rainy months of this year but through the rainy months of many years. And that the wood carver in his search for his digging tool will have gone from one end of the river to the other–from the top of the mountain to the edge of the sea–without finding the digging tool that was buried. And that each of the knot makers is still holding to his own way of knot tying such that in time the knots will cease to be tied at all. And the waters will cease to flow. And the holes of the island can no longer be dug. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Akamu, the Fisher King
by Apryl Skies
Akamu, the fisher king
whose name knows no age,
only the touch
of man to earth,
tide and bind
He crouches at shore
with line and hook
held as moon against
an ocean’s abandoned sky Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Seeds
by Sandra Sidman Larson
I walk by a garden pool
where water lilies glide
slowly with the afternoon breeze,
showing off their creamy faces.
Once in a fit of rage I tore
alameda vines I’d grown
off my back yard fence.
Someone else lives there now, Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Bouncing the Porpis
by Charles Harper Webb
We’re bouncing The Porpis, / Bouncing The Porpis,
Bouncing The Porpis, / That is what he likes.
I made the song up for my son—porp (derived
from Shakespeare’s fretful porpentine) being
the fullness of human emotion—fear, rage, hunger,
need for love and diaper-changing—he conveyed
in cries, shrieks, coos, and general fuss
as I bounced, at 3 a.m., on waves of sleep. Continue reading
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