by Jay Carson
Just in case you think
I got screwed up only recently,
let me tell you about the fire:
My wife in those days was a candle maker
as well as a crazy maker, like many artists,
just good enough to be impossible.
Luminary
Filed under Poetry
The Daubati
by Mara Mahoney
She is ancient, this woman.
Lines cover her body.
Some the result of time
and others etched onto her skin from a time long ago.
I can barely tell them apart.
Filed under Poetry
To Their Grinning Altars
by Marvin Shackelford
The Bible means more, but the brick is heavier. The brick is the only loose piece from the home they built together, a failing of the mortar along the porch, but the Bible has the family tree. It branches back before them to Ellis, to gangplanks dropped against New England rock. It singles down after them to son and daughters and has begun splitting and grafting away again. Their life a still, narrow point. She can dig on into the Bible and turn up the roots of all mankind. She can stumble through vows chanted and sworn and inscribed. She sits and thinks. She sits and drinks wine from the wedding, dusty from the cabinets. Too soon for it still, really. It’s wrapped up, the Bible, in black leather stiff with age and scoured smooth by fingers.
Filed under Fiction
Gas Station Dinner
by Jake Greenblot
Mom had just killed a dog in the dining room. An arc of arterial blood had splashed against the glass double doors of my father’s special, never-to-be-touched-if-you-want-to-continue-sleeping-indoors oak cabinet, and a pool was forming on the floor around my younger brother Chris’s Superman cape, red on red. So much blood, and that red so impossibly bright. Too much to be inside one dog, it seemed. Memory can magnify these things, I’m sure.
Filed under Fiction
Health Care
by Dick Bentley
On this hill, in this clump of trees at the edge of the golf course, I sit with the wind swaying the daisies. Now distant, Bernardini’s milky eyes are focused on the golf ball as he bends down before putting. He studies the ground. He analyzes the lie, the turf, the wind. Bernardini is the President of the Health Group that has denied me treatment. The treatment is too experimental for my tumor, the bean counters said. So I am to die.
Filed under Fiction
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