Flying Island

Like Memories In Mid-Air by Frederick Michaels We have grown to be so old (right before our very eyes), yet, despite the years compiled, not emerged as very wise. We let time just melt away, pass right by without disguise. In a steady drip of hours, years have dematerialized. We’re like footprints we impress into freshly fallen snow, leading backward through our past There’s no better place to go. What we are, or might become, none can tell and none can know, as our tracks begin to vanish, oft times fast, sometimes slow. And the snowflakes fall like memories in mid air, concealing lives which were not really there. You Give Them A Cookie ... by Frederick Michaels Deer crowd into my doorway, peering right into my kitchen like a posed Norman Rockwell, but with a plaintive, hungry gaze. A doe and three curious fawns, in great Halloween costumes. Kids have a dumbfounded look as mom ventures inward alone. I im...

Today (July 2) would have been the 86th birthday anniversary of Richard Pflum, a longtime fixture in the Indianapolis poetry community. He died on March 15. Several friends and colleagues honored him by submitting poems. Dick, as close friends called him, was a founding member of the Writers' Center of Indiana (now Indiana Writers Center). He ran the semi-monthly Poetry Salon, a feedback group for poets, and emceed the monthly An Evening With the Muse, which featured a guest poet and an open mic. He loved to frequent open mics in the city, often garnering respect from spoken-word artists. His collections of poetry include  Richard Pflum: A Dream of Salt (Raintree Press), A Strange Juxtaposition of Parts (Writers' Center Press, Indianapolis), The Haunted Refrigerator and Other Poems (Pudding House Press), Listening With Others: Poems Under the Musical Influence (The Muse Rules), and Some Poems to Be Read Out Loud: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Besides poetry,...

Villainy of a Villanelle by Frederick Michaels I spend long days in poetic hell seeing my best wrote rhyme and verse tortured at length by a villanelle. Pushed near a suicide farewell, suffering pain from this writer’s curse, I spend long days in poetic hell. In twists that gypsy-read palms foretell, words written simple take turns perverse, tortured at length by a villanelle. Poem cut lean like an empty shell, or still rife with fat — I’m not sure the worse. I spend long days in poetic hell. Words have life, why don’t they rebel? Verbs have a calling inaction subverts, tortured at length by a villanelle. Rigors of my art to this form still compel despite endless drafts toted off in a hearse. I spend long days in poetic hell, tortured at length by a villanelle. Bio: Frederick Michaels writes in retirement from his home in Indianapolis. His poetry has appeared in Flying Island, So It Goes Literary Journal, The Boston Poetry Journ...

Lorraine by Frederick Michaels Sweat rolls off the bridge of my nose. I can taste a salty Main street flavor as I catch it's 90° on my tongue tip and share the brief liquidity with my lips. It's just 25 minutes to the Lorraine, but it surely feels like a long, hot way from 1968 and the news on the TV. I heard it plain then, but didn't feel it. Comfortably unafflicted by deprivation, cul du sac'd with like-minded faces, insulated by middle class tunnel vision, I was still numb and dumb from JFK in '63. Now half a lifetime gone, the images from my grainy black and white memory, emotionless and a million miles removed, snap into focus and I see all at once: I am the hands on the rifle I am the blood on the balcony I am America unseen behind a veil of indifference; and as I peer through my view finder I wonder how we do that to one another. I wonder how we survive as men and a bead of water drips down the le...

Sing It, Buffy Sainte-Marie by Frederick Michaels Crimson flesh and onyx flies— a vicious scar across the plains. Breath stealing rotted air chokes off slaughtered vision. Wagons heaped of black hides snake away in morning haze to rail heads and all points east, into seamstresses' tiny hands. Feathered men with teared eyes knew the truth foretold by stars— bloody knives will change lives, gone nature's gift of food, clothes. Arisen such time unwilled, lament dead bison naked to your gaze. Now governments become beasts, a whole world the land despoiled. Bio: Frederick Michaels draws a good deal of his poetic inspiration from the land and history. A retired engineer, living in Indiana for nearly 40 years now, this expatriate New Yorker once thought the land was in parks, and history was in books. He knows now that both are in the mind and heart of the poet. Editor’s note: “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” a song by Buffy Sainte-Marie: https://www.youtub...