An online journal for small literature
A stranger sitting next to me on the plane
offers me a strand of my own hair.
“Is this your natural color?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I dye it”
I can see she’s slightly disappointed.
This interaction feels like so many others.
I wish I had lied
I was already pretending, after all.
Olivia Johnson is an archaeologist living in Austin, Texas, who writes poetry in farm fields when she should be looking for artifacts. She spends her free time reading, writing, playing music, and laughing with friends.
Leave me wanting
That way you stay perfect
Just a peak to reveal your beauty
But a quick cover to hide your intricacy
Leave me wondering what could possibly be
A blank tablet to write the tale
A clean slate not burdened by history
A mind free to create the perfect reverie
An intimate touch that will last forever
Not in reach of my fingertips
Vivid in my mind’s eye
Cherished until it’s nearly recreated
Let me be. Don’t let my seductions tear you away
Stay true to your duty, the better off you’ll be
For if you succumb, it will only be a moment
Leave the memory of me chaste, the better off I’ll be
Andrea Recasner is a divorced black female, 53 years old. She was born in Detroit, Michigan and was raised and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has over 30 years of experience working as a mechanical engineer. She is the mother of a 25 year old daughter who is studying education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I sat upon a dark green carpet of grass with pen and pad in hand.
It was there among the trees at the edge of the treeline,
I was surveying the valley, such a serene and peaceful stretch of land.
I was there alone and the only thoughts there were mine.
As I sat among the trees,
I began to reflect on these.
I could look left and right, there were plenty trees to see.
As I looked at them individually I saw quite a variety.
I saw the Maples, Elms, Oaks and a Cottonwood grove very near.
I counted a few Cedar trees that in the winter have branches that are never bare.
Trees I can regard like good silent friends that don’t mind listening to me.
I can say what I want as loud as I can and none of the trees there will care.
As I sit among the trees as I often do, I can talk of how I would like things to be.
I can dream my wildest dreams, the trees don’t mind.
I can rant and rave sometimes, venting stress but peace in time to find.
I don’t think the trees listen or really pay attention,
but neither do they talk back and give me any dissention.
It’s for these reasons and many more,
it’s to these woods with all these wonderful trees,
I come here as often as I can my thoughts and ideas to explore.
To reach a state of serenity, to clear my mind and think what I please.
Among the trees in that welcomed solitude,
I can address my problems and adjust my attitude.
When you’re among such beauty it’s hard to have an ugly thought.
Some calming meditation to sooth my soul as I settle into my green grassy spot.
If I’m not there physically, I often go there in my mind and I can see,
Me among the trees with pen and pad in hand writing more poetry.
After a successful career as a Senior Engineering Designer working with international mining companies, William David is retired now and living with his wife Diane of 36 years in Tucson, Az. He likes spending time now devoted to his passion: writing and reading poetry. William writes for his pleasure and for the pleasure of those who might read his poems.
We’ve been on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Summer heat just slows me down and this year was no exception. But we should be back to normal in a few days. Hope you enjoy the stories and poems.
How will I know her when she returns? Will she still be my terrible home? So much has blown down and scattered since she retreated. The surface of my world juts, prickly and bare now. When she first pulled away I wanted it to be because she was dead. That, however searing, would have been easier to bear in the end than the certainty that it was because she didn’t want me and couldn’t take it back. There is an old black and white photograph of her reclining on the stone patio of my grandparents’ house. Her full skirt is plumed grandly around her, her loose ankle an elegant line emerging from the skirt, beautiful toes extended in an open sandal dropping toward the ground. My grandfather’s dog, Zoo Zoo, is trying to lick her face and she is laughing and dodging his advances. The tight, smooth bun and one dark curl, neatly flattened to the corner of her forehead, belie this moment of playful abandon. This woman is careful; constructed. After she was diagnosed and moved back to my grandparents’ ranch there was no more vain spit curl. She had gone slack in some way that confused me. It was as if I should be able to get to her–she did seem softer somehow–but there was no way I could find to get in, to happen to draw her attention and then lay back there.
In those days I walked the three miles from second grade along the rows and rows of dark-leafed orange trees with winter white blossoms and a fragrance so frantically lovely I grieved in the pall of it. Many afternoons, as I turned, finally, into the dirt drive that led between the groves to the little red house I could hear her cackle; loud, with an abandon both vulgar and infectious. A gush of regret would tackle me in these moments for having turned my heart against her. Damn her! God damn her! And then the familiar, dreadful slick of longing would sluice out into my belly, slogging my bare knees; a congestion of thwarting. I’d stand outside the garage in the dry dirt and fallen oak leaves, so still now, live, wondering how to go in there. Some afternoons I’d steel myself and sneak in silently, below the television blare, for the big spoon of peanut butter that consoled me. Others I would turn from the door and climb into the hammock under the grand old oak whose branches gnarled over the roof to slowly sway in the rhythmic creaking until I was sure that in outer space none of this was actually happening; that, since no one knows how much it hurts, it can’t actually be hurting. The cool, shaded blank of this custom gave something to me that I needed to walk back into that little house and remain invisible there. But even if she had noticed me I’m certain the strain of being seen would have pushed me back out into deep space.
Marla McFadin is a trained psychotherapist interested in transitions into and away from connecting to the expected world. She grew up in a small, progressive town in California where she carried the natural environment into her way of understanding traumatic relationships. She is moved by expressions of yearning.
We’re asleep on the couch.
I’m no bigger than a football
and his arm is around me
the only time I know.
My blond wisps are poking
through black here and there,
through the same strands that found
the gentle hands of another son
and a woman who is not my mother.
Zach Thomas is a recent graduate of Virginia Tech’s MA in English program. His latest work appears in Archarios and Rock Music Studies.
Soon after sunrise,
After some coffee, and I’ve opened up my eyes.
I stroll out to the patio,
I’m looking for that spot,
The one that’s warm with a golden glow.
Soothing and pleasant, and not too hot.
While a gentle morning breeze begins to blow,
I know I’ve found the spot that’s just right,
Where I will contemplate what I shall do today.
Here in my sunny spot in this early morning sunlight,
Sometimes I think it’s the best part of my day.
After a successful career as a Senior Designer working with international mining companies, William David is retired now and living in Tucson, Az. He likes spending time now devoted to his passion: writing poetry. William writes for his pleasure and for the pleasure of those who might read his poems.
These woods,
my church,
these words,
my sanctuary.
Standing in the uncertain light,
My ears ring with this noisy silence,
racket of birds, wind, water.
I breathe fully,
feelings surging,
heart full.
My body is brimming with spring,
I feel transparent and green.
Again, this feeling in my chest,
upwelling love,
rushing joy,
I throw my eyes at the sky.
And wheeling through blue, tightly,
a murmuration,
controlled,
synchronous.
I kneel in the muck,
plant life crushed beneath me,
unsettled restlessness dissipating,
uncontainable, at peace.
Tanya Fenkell is a Toronto-based writer and artist working primarily in watercolour. Currently, she spends most of her time raising three sons. Her paintings are held in several private collections in Canada and the United States.
I heard they were calling for poetry at the edge of the world but I knew they did not want my verses full of the songs of women. They had banned high voices years ago and chose to start every argument in an empty room. This required artistry from people better known as piss artists and so they promised to rely on the grass to remember the songs when the people rebelled. Really, they just wanted it to cover all the spoilt places
I sit in the weeds—waiting. Studying the ladder of my thumb I mourn my dragon mother. I whisper an elegy to the wind about how she puffed silk cut smoke from her nose. When I was little she wrapped me in ancient threads, spinning each pattern into a song of women’s endurance, loss, and birthing. I would watch the glowing tip of her cigarette, a monster’s eye, pulsing in the darkly tent—my weird nightlight. We lived in the high chinks of the Kush alongside the tarnished Stone Loaches, their spotty silver backs mirrored in the jewelry dangling from my mother’s neck and doughy lobes. It took slow seasons for us to hear the inching sound of metal screaking all around us. My mother begging the fish to save my voice, to hide me with the mudlarks but they were always bony specimens and liked to drive a hard bargain. My mother had to barter her iridescent scales to cover their spindly bodies before they would hold me in their mouths and swim away with me. She had been left naked and bitter but her last kindness to me was to smother my father and brothers. She could not bear to see them turn to dust so, she shaped them into icy lapis lazuli.
I am the keeper of our songs and when I raise my voice I smash things. Around my neck, I have hung a locket of bright blue so it will be close to my throat as I sing. Listen in the dawn and you will hear the gentle noise of women and know that this is what you once called feeling.
Adele Evershed is an early years educator. She is originally from Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. She writes poetry and prose in a room overlooking a wood.
I grow flowers, and shrubs, and even several trees. I do not take credit for their achievement, even as they rely on my efforts, the watering, the feeding, and removing the invasive weeds that also seek my attention. Those weeds are masters of mimicry, often flowering, acting as if they could add something to the display. The authentic plants poke through the supple soil, then grow, then reach for the sun, only to die, hide and repeat the circularity, which would happen without my help. My help is not natural, but it seems that way.
There was a time when she would walk these gardens, pointing out the weeds I had missed, playfully, because she knows it will somehow hurt my feelings if she sounds dismissive. Never contemptuously; just perfunctorily suggestive. But not this year. The air is different, inside and out, and the late February freeze followed by the early March snowfall did little to help a garden wanting to exist as it had in the years past. These plants are here because of me. I broke the clay, and it was I who removed the recalcitrant sod. This tended plot of once rebellious land is not where they were born.
She assumed as the snow lingered well into the second week, dirty clumps of what was once silent whiteness remain visible, remnants of that desultory effort, that there would be no flowers. And then I notice it. Not the seasonal discursiveness. On the other side of the street, in a home where the man with the memory issues was moved to a place where memories go to die, slowly, I saw it.
If flowers could appear prepubescent, it did. But I could tell, even still encased in green sepal, a floral chrysalis, the blossom beneath would be red.
I took a wet paper towel and stuffed it into a fluted champagne glass we no longer seem to use. We no longer use it as intended. We find it celebratory just to be alive, even if ten thousand bubbles rising was not present to help. I arranged the tulip I had stolen from the man’s abandoned yard and stood it in the glass.
It bloomed, and I watched his yard, every day, many times as the clock wound from one darkness to another. He never came back for it, never missed it. She enjoyed it. The stolen tulip did bloom, red, with white lace frills along the petal, suggesting coquettishness as it revealed its sexual self in an inverted skirt.
Four days later, the weight of the tulip bent the pedicel, a head bowing in reverence, or homage, or perhaps in thanks.
A.M. Mann is an emerging writer currently querying novel-length works. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife of thirty-six years and a blue-eyed dog.