Raindrops—
Vanish
As they
Descend:
You
And
Me.
Image by Adam Strong
Poetry by S.F. Wright
S.F. Wright lives and teaches in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Hobart, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Elm Leaves Journal, among other places. His short story collection, The English Teacher, is forthcoming from Cerasus Poetry, and his website is sfwrightwriter.com.
Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, non-fiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: ‘Lying Down With The Dead’ and ‘There Is A Beauty In Broken Things’.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
The child’s howls merged with the mother’s shrills. The infant hammered the ground and rolled into a ball like a fearful armadillo. I forced her metallic shell open, removed the blood-soaked bandage, and cleaned the wound. A smile unfurled when I hung my white coat for the last time and slipped on a smock.
Pointer fingers lifted out of their holsters. I squatted just in time —phew—and dripped paint like Jackson Pollock. A mélange of cinereal, cobalt, and claret cascaded over stethoscope/paintbrush debates.
***
My ex-husband pushed me in front of a mirror, grabbed my plump breasts, and won an erection. His fingers curled when my left breast died, and the right sagged. His fingers extended to sign divorce papers.
Pointer fingers scurried down dictionary pages, but I wrote to the editors. Beautiful can also mean scabs, stitches, and survival.
***
Summer dresses didn’t disguise unevenness. Scabs and stitches littered the space where my left breast used to live. A woman brushed her fingers gently across that space and planted a kiss where a nipple poked out like a cuckoo clock.
Pointer fingers drew XX+XY on misty morning windows. Vinegar mixed with dishwashing liquid works wonders on stubborn streaks.
Flash fiction by Isabelle B.L
Illustration by Adam Strong
On the perambulated promenade,
Men of my own Chinese animal pass by.
They are not weighed down by life,
Dutifully pushing again, the womb fruit toward sunlight.
I once false circled their orbit before truth re-entered.
Lonely has a certain gravity to it.
These equations come with no solution
I am the remainder.
Poem by Algo Gourley
Image by Adam Strong
Video and Illustrations by Adam Strong
The flashing sign of emergency faint
no sirens screeched through the air
for the wretched remains.
Surrounded by the glamour of gentle days
collecting a thick dust of ages on the baby grand
altar to a simple glory never noticed.
Loved by one she could not recognize
well beyond the years he was gifted
her eyes roll to a shy photograph
On the out of fashion smart phone
like her passed to a faded reflection of
technicolor dreams in CGI hero costumes.
Not a sound of sorrow nor a crowd of mourners
just a sigh in the night as she slipped
gently into her own abyss, and no one knew.
Poetry by Fabrice B. Poussin
Image by Adam Strong
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.
The dark hard hands belonged to my father. With them he mixed mortar and laid bricks and made possible the bread on our table. Mother’s blue eyes floodlit the room when she was very happy or angry. Likely brighter in the latter instance, the blue of hot sapphires, as she seethed. I’d feel it in my belly, in my spine. Dark hands pounded the table. Something disagreed—with him, with the moment. The ceiling flaked, falling like yellow snow, mixing with the parm cloaking my fragrant spag bol. Harsh words I don’t know, bad words forbidden to me clash and fly. My sister withers under the table, her whimpers weaken my throat. Too al dente, I hear. Then: Too al dente! The dark hands flatten on the table. Then the right hand grasps the glass, lifts it to the mean mouth, and turns it. The empty glass floats in the air before thumping to the table. Who are these people? And who am I, between them, spineless, gelatinous? Mother lifts her plate. Don’t do it, Ma. Don’t do it. But va fanculo she will not be disrespected, not in this life or the next …
Prose by Salvatore Difalco
Image by Adam Strong
Salvatore Difalco writes out of Toronto, Canada
You return to the town where you grew up. You take your kid to see your old elementary school. You remember it as an enormous, open, free space filled with trees and a jungle gym, surrounded by a vibrant and colorful garden. You remember the stone steps you climbed with anticipation every August, holding your mother’s hand, to find out who your new teacher would be as soon as the lists were posted on the doors. You think about the tree house and the fort you made with your friends and the wooden clubhouse your father built for you in the backyard so you’d have a haven to imagine and dream. You look out now and see two armed guards at the school, and you see a group of kids leaving, not talking to each other, eyes glued to their cellphones. Your child looks up at you, rightfully asks why you loved this place so much. You’re still tethered to the idea of school as sacred space, and you’ve tried to impart that to your child. Together, you look up, see a white egret land near that group of kids, startling them. You’re finally startled again, for good reason.
Deborah J. Cohan, is a Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort and the author of Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption.
The nurse trainee administered numbing drops to my left eye only. Three days earlier, I had seen black letters of the Hebrew alphabet outlined in fire in the sky. The room where I now writhed in the exam chair was uncomfortably warm. As the doctor bent over me, I thought I heard him use the vague but sinister phrase “tattooed mind.” An object is never so closely attached to its name that another can’t be found for it. For example, my dad. He tried to kill himself three times – well, four if you count the time he fell asleep smoking in bed and woke up with the world in flames.
Howie Good is the author most recently of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022. His previous poetry collections include Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
Poetry by Howie Good
Image by Adam Strong
The sea before me has buried countless dead bodies, and concealed untold more moving bodies. A violent wave hits the shore and I feel the sand slowly piercing my body. Every pore is clogged with fragments of what once was.
The Sun is looking at me eye to eye, putting yellow-orange carpet on the surface of the sea.
The horizon is inviting me to walk until the end is nothing but an eclipse of essences that shouldn’t be together.
As a child I remembered looking up at the sun and it was blinding. I remembered it as God who provided nourishment and extinguished any dark corner of the Earth.
Then I remembered the Sun looking down at the moving coffin elevator of the dead body of hers. As if mocking mortality. As if the Sun waited for this exact moment just to give its faint-flare chuckle.
Prose Poem by Ci Ree
Image by Adam Strong
Backwards Trajectory 