She once was sand, her body a swirling phantom. Her old haunt, the gaping maw of a ship.
Harvested on a Tuesday, melted on a Wednesday, molded on a Thursday. He made his perfect piece. Fragile, transparent—no hidden crevices.
He gripped too hard. Shattered, she took blood as reparation.
Helen Curran is a University of Cincinnati student with published poetry in East Fork: A Journal of the Arts. She thinks dogs are cute and sometimes she’s not lazy, actually sitting down to write (rare).
Can we meet at yours instead? My table slurps the coffee rings; the coat rack shrugs off polyester; the fridge wakes at noon and is off weekends. Only yesterday I had to beg the sofa to spit out the neighbour and no I’m not just giving excuses. What’s your address?
Paula is a student and is always looking for a good book to read.
The plane hangs like a cross in the sky. It climbs uncertainly, laboriously, precariously. A finger of fire rises briskly up to meet it, to stab it down from the clouds, back to earth. I watch the fragments fall, scattered like forsaken prayers, and wonder if we’ll ever rise again.
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He arrived here from a parallel universe, where he was the most famous author of his generation. Sick of fame, he now seeks obscurity and his current standard of writing pretty much guarantees that.
Mitchell’s tears dropped onto his mac and cheese. “We’re not chasing tornados on vacation,” his parents said. They knew they’d let him watch too many storm-chaser shows.
They promised Mitchell an adventure. Just a safer one.
He looked up, bright-eyed: “You mean there’s another way we can get to Oz?”
Elizabeth lives on Long Island, NY, and has a green thumb for African violets. Find her at ElizabethZahn.com.
On my nightly route, my headlights caught you on the expressway shoulder, waving a white flag beside a green Pinto. I stopped. Your sister was giving birth. You wanted a cop, but you got a farm boy. I figured, How hard can calving be when the calf weighs seven pounds?
Jim Anderson lives in southeast Michigan with his wife and five cats. He blogs at JimTheWriter.net.
Today’s task: finally clean out the jewelry box
Three piles: Keep Recycle Discard
A gold ring swathed in pink yarn still fits
Still evokes the peak of joy, then the nadir of despair
A hole where his initial is absent
As he often was
Decision: discard pile, definitely
…Next time
Carol Tymann, a retired kindergarten teacher, loves to read and write.
For my first personalized rejection, I received a postcard with a single handwritten word. “Sorry”. On good days, I think of it as an apology. On bad days, I’m sure it was a critique. But on any day, it’s better than nothing, because an editor read my work and responded.
David Holloway lives in Savannah Georgia and has had work published in Gargoyle, The Antihumanist, and Agnes and True.
The story of the week for July 11 to 15 is…
Butterflies by Deborah Tapper
Angela volunteers for Waterfront and argues with campers over lifejackets from sunrise until dusk. She hoses off the sailboats, the rowboats, the canoes. Angela loves archery, not boats. But even more, she loves Dev, the advanced-beginner swim teacher, dutifully instructing adolescents, directly next to the boat lagoon.
Chara Campanella is an Emmy-nominated writer/ producer whose work can be seen everywhere children have eyeballs. See more at yawpshop.com.
The boss’s boss wishes to see me regarding a promotion, or to fire me. Buzz of each featured in breakroom discussions. I straighten my clothes, exhale before heading into the big cheese’s inner sanctum. Ready and willing to lead the Midwest division. Or box up my desk. People are talking.
Todd Mercer won a Dyer-Ives Poetry Prize (2022) for “Overextended” and had “The Drive to Experience Weightlessness” long-listed for this year’s Micro Madness Awards at Flash Frontier. Recent work appears in Best of Plum Tree Tavern, Dunes Review, and Spartan.