by Ian Johnson Rosie sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of her empty living room, unassembled furniture parts strewn around her like small towns at the base of a big mountain. She held an Allen wrench in one hand, the assembly pamphlet in the other. The tip of her tongue…
by John Benner At the Lincoln Memorial, throngs of tourists in neon T-shirts streamed off buses, laughing and sometimes even singing as they surged up the steps to stare at the statue of the long-dead president until the oven-hot air tamed them into the sodden crowd that trudged back down…
by Lisa Harris Nothing is unreal as long as you can imagine like a crow. ~ Munia Kahn Crows don’t wear watches. Time is not measured by irritating tic-tocs or marked off with Xs on calendar squares. Time as experienced by crows is an open window and omnipresent as air….
by Kayla Miller “Don’t remember me,” I said to each of them, “I surely won’t remember you.” But I lied. My life as a tumbleweed left no space, even in a deserted place, for people like them. They flowed together like waterfalls but their vessels never strayed from a permanent…
by Phil Temples, John sat hunched over the ancient “mill” typewriter with uncomfortable headphones covering his ears. His receiving station occupied a corner of a small, underground bunker in a remote section of Landsberg Air Force Base, West Germany. The concrete bunker was designated as the Security Service Signals Post, but most people called it the…
by Holly Day she says she wants me to drive her far, far away, out past the tall gray concrete city buildings, past the picturesque farms with shiny silver grain silos and peaceful black-and-white cattle munching on bright green grass, past the tumbled-down beat-up mobile-home park guarded by junkyard dogs…
by George Freek When young I was carefree. I drank the strongest wines. I never touched tea. Mother you raised a fool. Now you are dead, and I am old. Reaching seventy, as stars sharp as scimitars spin like mad dervishes in the night, what good for me to scold?…
by Phil Temples I was giddy with excitement the very first time I experienced the phenomena firsthand on that hot, humid summer morning on McKinney Road in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. Michael Slattery was my longest and dearest childhood friend. He claims he was the one to first discover it. Mikey,…
by John P. Kristofco He had grown accustomed to the dark, the silence, candor of the rock around him, echo of his sisters’ tears, his friends, promises they made as if to fool the truth, when he heard the stone removed, the wind, the words “Lazarus come forth,” and he…
by Carolyn Light Bell It was one of those bright winter days. Glorious! Sun dancing so hard on the snow, I thought I would burst. My eyes blinded by millions of crystalline mirrors, my lungs happily inhaling each fresh breath, my feet strong as I pounded down the snowy walk….