Watching the News

by James Hartman

I stood at the window, still watching those bare limbs on that birch tree along the slope of bright snow in the dark because I wanted to believe I saw one flutter a little red.

“Oh, Jonathan,” my father called.  “It’s there, right?  One has finally come?!”

Cardinals were my father’s favorite animal.  When they were younger he and his brother used to set bird feeders throughout their backyard, strategically placed according to what they had learned from their Audubon book.  My father always talked about them.  He always believed they meant the return of something.
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Not Yet

by Jim Tilley

Cracked pottery houses the pink begonias,
hairline fracture not yet grown large enough
to cleave the pot in two, the soil drained Continue reading

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Icarus Rewritten

by David M. Alper

You were never the boy who fell. You were the boy who
jumped. Let them call it hubris— you call it hunger. Continue reading

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Signs

by Scott Ortolano

The shadows cast by the tall trees seemed to mock them with the illusion of coolness in the simmering Florida afternoon. A constant drone of singing cicadas, or what his Uncle Rupp called a swamp chorus, was only broken here and there by the rustle of lizards startled into saw palmettos by this pair of mid-afternoon intruders. Nothing else stirred—or would for hours. Continue reading

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Emancipation

by M. Anne Kala`i

I.

Mother didn’t teach me how to garden.
She taught me to pack up a house
after the water turned off,
then the lights. Continue reading

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