by Chrys Tobey
which used to be our house, the key I’ve offered to return, but
you insisted, Keep it in case you want to visit the cats, and since
Since I Still Have the Key To Your House
Dominion
by Jen Michalski
“We’ll come back some other weekend,” your mother says. You sit in the parking lot, all four windows of the Subaru open, because your mother, in her quest to get the best gas mileage, doesn’t believe in air conditioning.
“We’re turning around and going home?” You look at her in disbelief. About three miles before the exit for Kings Dominion, you’d discovered, while rooting for Tic Tacs in your mother’s purse, that the discounted tickets she’d bought a month before at the grocery store were missing. Not missing–you could see them very clearly in your mind, at home on the dining room table next to the electric bill where she’d left them. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Haulover Beach
by Orlando Ricardo Menes
Winter waves strew seaweed on tarred sands.
Threadbare clouds vagabond in calico skies.
We wake in that backseat freckled with burns,
Your sun-bleached Nova stranded overnight
By the coconut trees, and kiss with dry lips, Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
My Life in Turtles
by Allen Long
When I was a boy in Arlington, Virginia, in the Sixties, I owned a box turtle that came when I called him. His name was Grover, and he lived underneath the evergreen trees in our backyard. I stood in the middle of the lawn, holding his meal of raw hamburger and iceberg lettuce and shouted, “Grover.” Within seconds, he sprinted at turtle-speed to where I stood, and he let me crouch down and talk to him while he ate his meal. I was gentle with him, he allowed me to hold him without protest, and he never retreated into his shell on my account. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Once Upon a Time
by Deborah H. Doolittle
She began and we knew it
was a fairy tale, and that
before the happy ending,
the story would be far from
happy. Sad, in fact, maybe
even horrifying. It’s
not like we hadn’t heard it
before. That tiresome rake Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
