Standing in the maroon bathrobe that is his daily outfit since the oncologist told him the chemo wasn’t working anymore, Alberto Bartholdi stares out the screen door, waiting for that nice real estate woman who will arrange the sale of the place he has called home for three decades and at a price she said …
Continue reading “The Scent of Gardenias” By Michael Anthony
You lived on rooftops but, to your dismay, it still wasn’t close enough to the clouds. You thought you would be able to reach up your hand and float away to the other end of the Earth and sleep like you wouldn’t fall through. The idea was so impossible and we tried to explain to …
A girl, wheat-stalk slim, dances with the wind in a sunny meadow. Her only garments, a summer dress made of stratus, and the dark veil of her hair. She pirouettes, languid as water, from the sway of her hips to the flow in her arms. The black stream flies to and fro as her fingers …
When you came around, A smile to split the sun flowers budded and pushed apart my skin. Lily-green and violet vines, thriving on blood shoved aside to grow, thready and clinging to the pale trellis of my collarbones. Those plants swayed towards you, My light …
It was, even among other undesirable qualities, an ideal place to hunt. There was no way to camouflage the risks and jeopardy of the snow-rimmed forest floor, no way to dress in guise the steep, bowing drop-offs or the crick-crack of crunching ice that struck the air with the toll of a bell. Even the …
the sheets were thrown by a twister of hands and feet, and rivers of sweat paved down the skin of our spines, and lightning ran from bed post to bed post, and thunder and whispers of creaks and unsaid I love you’s filled the empty space between, I kissed you like a stranger and dragged …
Nothing about Rueben’s appearance betrays what he is. What he’s done. The knot in Scarlett’s stomach tightens as she sits at the table picking lint from the sleeve of her sweater, and watches him from the corner of her eye. Her gaze travels up the familiar curve of his arm as he reaches for his …
After a boy shucked the virginity from my body like guts from an oyster shell, I became a slut, a whore, a tramp stamp for my school to wear on its backside as I loitered by shallow tides and waited for someone else to come inside of me. But all that changed when I had …
because of your twitching hardness, the eagerness of your tongue, and I felt my father hovering behind the closet door beside my robe, the blue one with torn collar— his memory watches from between the scarves you buy me, which I never wear; you know I hate things twined around my neck. because he is …
Continue reading “Concerning the morning I would not make love to you” By Jennifer K. Kowalski
Ten months ago I met someone. Eight months ago he left me. For these past eight months I've lived in suspended animation and now wonder if I've reached the point of diminishing returns. The thought circles endlessly as I sit here on his roommate's sofa, staring out past the fire escape at the building across …
Burnt Pine 