I was husked tonight, hollowed out, and ground to powder. The dry leaves of a barely ripened fruit ravished lies in agony beneath a blazing galaxy. I can feel the stars and their enormity, the light of a billion eons glaring down on my chest where patches of broken blood vessels advertise my shame. Cotton …
Grief is a prankster, a child who cheats at hide-and-seek. I tip-toe around it, quiet as snow, while it counts to ten. I know that my stealth is useless because that grubby liar always peeks through its fingers. I never even asked it to play, but once it muscled into the game, it became a …
Continue reading “To Mourn the Living” By Jennifer K. Kowalski
I waited. There was nothing I could do. I knew that. But I wished their eyes got me against the wall, and that their questions punched the air out of my lungs. I wished they squeezed me dry of answers I never really had, that they asked me questions that compounds all the doubts I …
We stop at the abandoned tire factory because you said it has five stories of good energy. I volunteer to try the ladder up to the roof because that’s the kind of thing my best self would do. My best self is never shy, timid, and rarely questions what I do but gives the rungs …
That was the name of a paint can from J&M Hardware. With sweat lingering on her face, she colored her room. Tinted now like insides of ripe plums, like perfect grapes. When the sizzling lemon sun dropped from heaven...night became moist and black. Her fan whirled thick air stained with cigarettes coffee, turpentine, white wine. …
We weren’t allowed in the rec room yesterday. A crew of painters came in and smeared the walls with a nice, if somewhat cloying, robin-egg blue. If I’m being honest, I preferred the gray, but I’m not the one in charge here. I guess the paint is dry now, otherwise they wouldn’t have let us …
there are mice running down idle/barren winding roads plump mice that know lightning will never strike them they stall and listen to thunder but proceed faster or slower, wet, they slip easier into pipes and underground tunnels that they have made, precisely for moments such as these, when the lights have gone out, and they …
In the stealthy, secret, small world of his very young self, he watches his parents’ eyes; his father’s go dopey, droop, then wide, then lidded, open, and finally, finally closed. But not yet, he can’t do it yet. Soon, his father is sleeping in his chair, snoring a light burr like his mother slumbering in …
I want to bite down so hard upon a diamond ring that my front teeth shatter. My molars were meant to grind together, My tongue to curl up and wither in the back of my throat. My lungs have been trained to take in more than they let out. What an image it would be …
Continue reading “The Miller’s Engagement Photo Shoot” By Jane A. Horvat
To Anh Osan, South Korea I. You rest your head on my shoulder, I tell you I love you, and cherry blossoms leap from the branches above us like tiny pink acrobats, swinging in the air and landing low onto our laps. In the months after this moment, you will have had two miscarriages, …
Burnt Pine 