There are no heroes, only gritty survivors with take-no-prisoner attitudes: stranded, abandoned, unraveled & revealed. A sharp salvo of pity-seeking pleas hits deaf ears, then dissipates into an unforgiving atmosphere, silent radar restored to street corner tranquility. Help is a matter of interpretation under pressure, the little pains that annoy and undermine, a collective signal …
Continue reading “Invisible with liberty & justice” By Gary Glauber
splashes there right there in front of her thoughts (eats away as a migraine on a sunshine morning yellowbright with shadows scratchy hurt steals sleep) if she drank Corona with lime until she puked it would spew open you they he would see be surprised leave she guards it continues deaf and refusing to Go …
I was six, standing on the bathroom counter counting bruises on my thighs in the mirror and the days until summer would end. I wore a baseball cap like my father’s, down over my eyes, and I wouldn’t cry because boys don’t. In the creek, I rinsed dirt and gravel from scabbed knees, watched minnows …
Cars usually worked well. Joey or Alan would decide which way to go, and I would run away, try to angle a path to my house, hoping I would outrun them at least to my yard, believing I would be safe there. Getting beaten up felt like a hobby I had taken on, not of …
Onward to knighthood, gold, and glory, glittering in the armor of Armani suits, Rolex and tanned bodies reflecting the sun. They find amusement in lance and parry, trampling others under their steeds, these 1 percent, aligning with the 5, conquest and dominion their thrill in being alive. The throng beneath the glitter is gifted with …
Continue reading “The Circle We Share” By S. Michael Kozubek
Too swift, she says, too insatiable. Don’t you know these things take planning? Father was salt-skinned and whiskey; built coffins in the mustard plants, in the hard mud. Chopped boards from the porch. From my bed-wall, my exorbitant spine. Back to river, bones to fish: perfect thief, I started small: sticks of butter from the …
“Try the coffee.” The suggestion was a simple one, delivered warmly by an attendant in a Turkish restaurant in the heart of Istanbul one July day. But what she didn’t know was that I wasn’t a coffee drinker. I shook my head and pointed to my half-finished cup of warm Turkish tea instead, the drink …
Down in the woods you must go to find where the thing doth grow! Through the fields and past the weeds far from the trees that lay their seeds. Deep in the forest dark and dim growing in the strangest grim. Hidden from a hobbit’s view fully crispened in the dew. Tender to thy …
Continue reading “Hobbits Sing a Mushroom Song”By Angelica Kingsley
And so we pull off the interstate, not because Evelyn and the kids care in the slightest what St. Ignace, Michigan looks like in July but because she needs a breather after white-knuckling the Mackinac Bridge in driving rain. When she thinks I’m not looking, she shoots her not another word eyes into the rearview …
I always dream of Oregon. Trees, so many trees, unbroken until suddenly they open onto choppy black ocean, enormous and filled with enormous things. And, I stand on the edge of a cliff, arms outstretched like I’m trying to embrace the whole of the salty air, but I’m small, so small compared to the trees, …
Burnt Pine 