Folks at church think it be a sin just to pause by the basement doorway where that type music flowed raw. Our hymns was crumbs compared. But I took me a sip of saxophone, a gulp of jazz piano, and drank myself to heaven. Was blind but now I see.
Beverly C. Lucey prefers to write short pieces because she is always getting interrupted. Her work has been published online and in anthologies.
He asked, “What kind of music do you like?”
She thought, Well, there’s Duke, Dizzy, and Miles. Can’t forget Errol and Oscar. Bop, Modern, and Cool. Maybe I should just say:
“Jazz.”
He said, “I like jazz too. I actually just got a new Kenny G. CD.”
She said, “Oh.”
Robert Iulo’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Epiphany, Culinate, Deep South, Museum of Americana, Story Teller, Gastronomica and others. He’s had a special feature published in The Mississippi Sun Herald about his volunteer work on the Mississippi Coast after Katrina.
All great jazz players stop here first in after-life: the Swansong Island Lounge. McCoy’s coming soon; the Steinway might not survive his hammer-handed tenure.
After it goes, no more instruments. Silence.
God installed these mechanisms,
walked away, and let be be.
West of the Moon, notes carrying over shoreline surf
Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appears in The Lake, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thema, Blue Collar Review, Right Hand Pointing, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review and Eunoia Review.f