“The Meatloaf Sighting” by John Michael Flynn


In Sears one Saturday afternoon, I took a second glance until certain of it and then my sternum collapsed and I blew out a mournful sigh. I was gawking at the rock star Meatloaf in jeans and a denim shirt, his hair still long but graying. Alone at a mall in the allegedly modest burb I called home, the original Bat Out of Hell sat and looked nervous on a green John Deere riding mower. A young salesman was assuring him he could drive and control it with ease. I doubted the salesman knew who this customer was.

Soft forms of misery aroused heartburn that bubbled into my throat as I remembered the cruises and make-out sessions I’d enjoyed while the hit song “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” played on a cassette in my car. I remembered midnight showings I’d attended while drunk and in costume with my friends, shouting “Not meatloaf again” whenever he appeared on screen as Eddie in Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Now this titan of operatic teen angst and a monument within the landscape of my personal iconography was sitting on his rather sizeable rump and testing a machine that would cut the grass around his estate home. Didn’t he have dozens of minions to run such prosaic errands for him? I’m sure he did, but this was what I liked about him. In spite of his fame, he was still a regular guy.

It wasn’t the mighty who had fallen. It was I, just another faceless middle-aged white dude out shopping with his kids. Having melted on the spot, feeling battered and flabby, I went after my three boys, each of them with their little gadgets and little fingers pushing little buttons. I moved them out of hardware toward shoe racks where it was easier for me to forget memories of nights on dirt roads when a new album-rock ballad on the radio kept my fervidly carnal predilections charged and actualized.

How had I grown so old? Was it as simple as time passing? Apparently so.

What to tell my boys? I decided to keep quiet. They linked meatloaf to ketchup, not high school sex, and their Mom cooked it for them usually once a week.

They didn’t link cars or Daddy to rapturous acts of connubial bliss, conception, and excessively strident pop music. Nor did they view time as a thief who sneaks into your deranged idealism and shows you how much a faded picture in a wobbly frame a whole chapter in your life has become.

I had to figure this one out on my own, and boy did it feel lonely. I tried not to stare over my shoulder, but I did so just the same. He was still there. I felt relieved that I was too far away to see him well. I thought about my wife who was in another part of the mall getting her hair done. I would be merciful and not tell her. She no longer looked like the girl I’d mounted in that Dodge late one night on a deserted farm road, Meatloaf crooning at full volume, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.”

She disliked feeling her age even more than I did.

A message in this had been aimed at me. I had to embrace it, to consider my marriage, career, my boys and how far I’d come – not how far back I went.

Did my sons realize I adored them? It remained hard to say. It was a constant process, wasn’t it? It would never end, not until I was one with the very nocturnal creatures that Meatloaf’s tunes had once stirred out of my imagination.

I stood there dazed. I watched as Meatloaf nodded, getting his questions answered, which were no doubt about cost and maintenance and how long such a machine could be expected to last.

One of my sons leaned against my legs and whined that he was bored. The other groaned saying he had to pee. The third started nagging me to buy him expensive sneakers.

I brought them together and led them out of that Sears, saying it was time to head back to see Mom in her new hairdo. I was a lucky man. I had everything I’d ever wanted.


John Michael Flynn was the 2017 Writer in Residence at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara, in North Carolina. He’s published three collections of short stories, his most recent Off To The Next Wherever from Fomite Books (www.fomitepress.com). He teaches at TED University in Ankara, Turkey. Visit him at www.basilrosa.com.

“On Having Children” by Matt Dennison


Given the choice
of never needing to
eat, with the resultant
suffering no greater
than mild curiosity,
boredom, or a slight
distaste as one watched
the others going through
the motions of feeding
the beast that, once roused
through sensual pleasure
will not lie down until
death, I would have to think
long and hard. But, oh!—
how the aroma of garlic
and onions sizzling in butter
makes the whole house sing!


Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) His work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven and Jutta Pryor.

“Familiar Task” by Jeff Burt


Who was going to pick up the dead mouse drowned in a paint bucket left upright by mistake full of rainwater and catkins was always clear.

Though my mother pretended it was a familiar task that I should not shy from, being eighteen, I could see her eyes fidgeting, glancing, which meant the retrieving of the mouse was no small thing. So I pinched the tail with thumb and two fingers and like a sunken ship raised by a winch, brought it up slowly into the air without a wriggle, spasm or twitch.

My mother looked away to the west as if drawn by some important bird but the trees were empty, her jaw set in a clench that would have broken branches, hands trembling from the daily grief, darkness and depression that surrounded her.

She hoped that the mouse didn’t have young that would be lost, she said, but I had become old enough to know that she was no longer speaking about a mouse.


Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He grew up in Wisconsin, Texas, and Nebraska, and found a home in California, the the Midwestern landscape still populates his vision.

“An Ode to Dishes” by Alexandra Chapa-Kunz


Cylindrical drinking vessels shout
indignation over brown ringed stains.
A memory of warmed hands,
a sip of rich lava down a yawning mouth.
Generous helpings scraped noisily
passed from smallest graceful hand,
clumsy as a fresh hatchling,
to the firm grasp of weathered experience.
Left to soak after a morning meal,
frenzied stacks of plates argue
the latest political maneuverings.
Small forks whine in distress,
soothed by exhausted dinner forks
longing for the solace of a frothy pool.
Gossiping spoons whisper of secrets
gathered at the mouths of matriarchs,
dispatched with unsolicited advice.
Pots and pans sullenly soak,
desperate for the family vacation.
Pruning hands bring blissful exfoliation,
bemoan the endless accumulation.
Fluttering sighs hover over neatly
stacked pristine cupboards, shrouded
in anticipation of the next meal.


Alexandra Chapa-Kunz is a graduate student at CSU Bakersfield working toward a teaching credential and Masters in English. She lives in Bakersfield with her son and their spoiled pit-bull named after a velociraptor. She is an avid reader and loves to find new and upcoming authors to support with her reading habits. Her “to be read” pile is a constant evolving mountain she aims to conquer.

“La Traductora” by Ran Walker

She was known throughout the industry for translating renowned books from the Spanish language, but few knew of her failed attempts at getting her slim English-language novel published in America. 

Publishers regarded the length as too short and the plot as too whimsical. And there was no point in getting started on the magical realism that seemed to leap from every other page.

So the translator decided to slap a pseudonym on her miniature manuscript and developed a story that it was an unearthed, previously unpublished work by a Borges protégé, whereupon she easily sold it in under a month.


Ran Walker is a husband and father who loves to write. Formerly an attorney, he is now a writer and creative writing professor. He is glad that his six-year-old daughter knows him for his work in the latter area rather than the former.

“perennials” by Cora Hyatt


Three years ago,
I made a disastrous,
ill-fated mistake;
I planted two tomato seeds.

Little did I know,
those two seeds made a promise,
or perhaps a pact,
to carry out a cruel legacy upon my garden.

The following year,
I planted bell peppers.
They never saw the light of day –
the tomatoes had survived the winter and the frost.

Their monarchy established,
they choked out sprouts before they could bloom;
their army of vines
forced strawberries to surrender.

Now,
they’ve claimed divine right to the sun,
any plant that suggests they share
shrivels and fades in the shade.

I know that once I’m buried deep under,
looking up at my radishes from below,
those tyrants will continue to have their way,
and they will make sure the radishes rot with me.


Cora Hyatt is a poet, student, and Indiana transplant presently living in Portland, Oregon. If delivering flowers, send red carnations.

“Lament of the Female Kind” by Kiana Rezakhanlou


About suffering they were never wrong,
those poets of old, masters
of the quill. How intensely they understood
the human condition towards conformity,
hexameters, spondee after dactyl, anceps to wrap up the mind
neatly. Sphragis for a ribbon tied round. We still love praising
ourselves.
And how much they thought of
women, it seems, with distorted faces towards empty seas,
deserted shores and wretched kin. Lion-hearted and spouted
from Scylla and Charybdis and howling for pity,
miserere nobis was their cry, if you could manage to feel any
pity for an artificial plurality. Women were not rules,
they were the exception, the bastardised, the barbarianised,
othered even still on a funeral pyre.
Burning burning burning burning.
Betray a brother and you shall have no fleece to keep you warm.
Beating of breasts and ripping of hair, a mother’s cry can set a whole town
alight. It can end a whole Book of strife.
Masters know how to observe art. A Bacchant Brawl.
Poets can pile on detail, loosening of dress, fleck in cheek, gloss of eye, but they cannot forget
that women must sacrifice, must suffer. And we must feel for them, when no one else
does — immemor are those men, mindful are we.
You, you! they can cry, perfide! in desperation, rage, sorrow, in letters, laments, accusations, but
recusatio and rhetoric will not help them,
when their girlish feet get stuck in the sand.


Kiana Rezakhanlou is an Upper 6 student from London, hoping to embark on the next stage of her academic journey at Oxford University, come October, whether by Zoom or amidst the colleges themselves. She is interested in all things linguistic, literary, classical and philological, and can often be found waxing lyrical about the poets Goethe or Ovid, sometimes within one sentence of each other.

“A Birthday Party” by Ramces Ha


These rides, these blasts through the atmosphere, this guilt-thickened sea, this captain, this name, this balaclava’d god, this string of gray hair, this playing to the crown, these feather-capped fists and mountainous scams—like those who lay before us in these squared-off banks, it is now my name written on your tombstone tongue.

Except this is a birthday party, equipped with pointy hats and chocolate cake, surrounded by friends and family alike. Even though you’ve picked me out of the crowd, ostensibly because it’s my time, I need you to wait. At least until my daughter blows out her candles—because nobody knows what she’s going to wish for, and maybe that will buy us some time.

“A pony,” she says. “I wish for a pony!”


Ramces Ha is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas El Paso. He currently resides in Aledo, TX.

“Messing Around in Eden” by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

For Val Healey


Val sees me in the garden
and dangling her rubber snake
Mr.Squiggles, in her gnarled hands
asks me for the twenty second time
in the four years that we’ve been neighbours
if I am afraid of snakes
and I tell her that I most certainly am
even the fake ones creep me out
like her Mr.Squiggles here

and then I know it’s coming –
I’m listening to her story again
which I now know scene for scene
but always make it a point
to look interested
like I’m hearing it for the very first time –
that story of Val aged eight
somewhere up in the Blue Mountains
picking vanilla lilies in the summer
when an irate tiger snake
lunges for her heel in the bushes

Val being nimble-footed and badass
swiftly snatches it by its tail
lassoes it around in the air
and flings it far into the undergrowth
and the snake is briefly cock-eyed
scramble-brained and nauseous
like its Biblical predecessor
on the day it was caught mischief-making
messing around in Eden
and eight year old Val stands arms akimbo
watching the critter slither away
more draconian in scare tactics
than good ol’ God of the Old Testament
then blowing me a kiss
laughs and wiggles Mr.Squiggles
and ambles back to her unit.


Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a Sydney artist, poet, and pianist, of Indian heritage. She holds a Masters in English and is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project and Authora Australis. Her recent poems have been published in several print and online literary journals and anthologies. She likes to write about everyday experiences. Her superpower is making people laugh. She has a terrible weakness for chocolate, and is obsessed with painting magpies. www.poetry.oormila.com

“Bind” by Meryl McQueen

    (after Georges Mathieu’s Le Duc Charles épouse la Duchesse de Bourgogne)

now a hawk’s eye, now a
falcon’s nest:

nine royal days, blue
and bold in

union, palm read
swirls begun in

urgent defense
against a king’s

own challenge
more brash than

bridled, more swap
(land/point/power)

than sweeping
anyone anywhere

meeting in the
middle (her) stooping

for a kiss and still
geography, with

its elbowed strokes
on his side, hers

feather-tipped
and fading

they rise, reveal:
they reel and rise


Meryl McQueen is a global nomad, space science geek and tree-hugging polyglot with a PhD in linguistics. She believes in creative community solutions to intractable problems, civic social responsibility, and systematic acts of kindness.