by Pui Ying Wong
On the day when nothing happens
windmills nod in the haze,
cars sprint to the ramp
like mice on running wheels.
In the geometric space between two
arching branches, the sun broods. Continue reading
Soap
by Joseph Han
I’ll start when I still had the blue car. Karen, these are all the things I wish I told you before you broke up with me because maybe it would’ve changed something at least.
The parties I went to. At first it was just to be away from all those people I went to high school with. Even now when I run into them, these ghosts in new clothes, it’s a game of seeing how long you can ignore or avoid that person until courtesy gives. I’d hang on the walls leaning like a crooked painting, going whole nights not saying anything, just sipping on my beer with my mouth and words getting dry. Me not actually talking to other people, especially girls. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
June in the Badlands
by Rachel Jamison Webster
Submerged in sun, white
as from a flashbulb—
a faded Ford truck blue on gray road,
a driftwood barn splintering horizon.
We are not the blindly enduring, we are
those who won’t lay down our burdens Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
The Beaches Of
by Johnathan Harper
In the divide of pavement and sand stands a sign with a stick-figure drowning under white waves, the words: “Beware of Riptides.” Parents keep their children close, distract them with scarping shells from the strand, the salt grime wrapped to their fingers. Two brothers sit in ankle deep water, the one that’s seven has his arms wrapped around the waist of the younger to anchor him. They try to tug against the tide, where the ocean sucks them in, inch by heaving inch. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
The Man Steps into Nettles on the Way to Mass
by Tobi Cogswell
Dressed in his “church pants”, he cuts through a field
like a rabbit on skates. Late as he often is, he’ll get “the eye”
from some chuntering old usher—get nothing but grief
from postman to pub to his mother and wife,
who left ahead of him–early–gently walking the road,
the sway of her contentment like a velvet metronome. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
