Flying Island

With My Grandson on Thanksgiving by Jeffrey Owen Pearson He says he is grateful for his father. His father is dead and he is grateful for him. He doesn’t talk about him except from those moments that seem to come from dreams. I remember him, too, every day. Some days I cry. My father used to measure everything, but I have no measure to reach him. The boy has no measure other than gratitude. Some places are pure. Pools so clear we will never understand. Our first meal. The last. Grateful for the bounty our hands planted in the earth and the earth gave back. A plate at the dark end of the table for the absent father. Father. The boy is grateful. Father. I am. From Jeffrey Owen Pearson: “ 'With My Grandson on Thanksgiving' began in a circle of friends and family. I was devastated by my grandson's gratitude for his father, it was such a pure and ethereal sentiment. His dad's birthday is the last day of November.”

Heading South by Jeffrey Owen Pearson As the plane skirts the coast heading south to Ft. Lauderdale, I fool myself into seeing a marlin leap from the ocean and, for a moment, look me in the eye as if something holy. Because all things are holy. From this height I see the blurring of sea and land. Of a place where people struggle for footholds. I know who loses this game. Because we all always lose in the end. When my feet hit the tarmac I already feel foreign. Like a soldier who retreats from death or will be swallowed. I have come to claim the dead. Whose atoms will soon mingle into the fire of a last sunset. How odd the familiarity of gray streets moaning in the rising mist after a rain shower. The tangle of unusual trees and boulevard names. The unfriendly neighborhood facades with no one I know. Easy in, easy out, they say. Except the way grief sticks everywhere. Like gum stuck on the pavement, cooking in the...

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,...

Gravity (A Solstice Poem) by Jeffrey Owen Pearson When asked what he would miss while travelling in space, the astronaut said, gravity. And though we reach for the stars, and though it yanked Icarus out of the sky, gravity is like that mother who flicks our ear to put us in our place. It’s that thing that pulls the sun, now at its farthest station, back toward the earth. That dark hand that reminds each plant and animal and man that winter is a time of earth and root. That godlike thing who doesn’t see but watches everything we do and brings us together where we belong. Bio: Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s poems have appeared in The Best of Flying Island, So It Goes, Reckless Writing 2014 Anthology, Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, and Maize. “I have fallen asleep again reading Homer” placed third in the 2014 Writers Digest Poetry Awards. Pudding House Publications published his chapbook Hawaii Slides. A member of the Midwest ...

your summer at fernwood by Jeffrey Owen Pearson because men were forbidden in your room we camped deep in the hardwoods where two streams slipped into one it always rained and skin stuck to skin in a glorious sweat you joked every time I came the blankets were a tent and you need bring no poles at first light when we walked among the wild bergamot and prairie blazing stars hummingbirds suckled near your breasts late summer the rocket grass fired red like a beautiful disaster Bio: Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s poems appear in So It Goes, Reckless Writing Anthology, Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island and Maize. His chapbook Hawaii Slides was published by Pudding House Publications. A member of the Midwest Writers Workshop, he lives in Muncie.

Memorial Day, 1955 by Jeffrey Owen Pearson That picture of you in our 1953 Pontiac parked outside the Chicago brownstones It was after the cemetery on Decoration Day After Aunt Florene’s cigarettes After Uncle Tony’s Stag beer You in your ribbed t-shirt flexing your muscles Sent you outside by Mom’s scowl— or maybe the heat— where you listened to the 500 on the radio with the car doors open Someone’s racecar went over the back wall You went over the fence Mom swore you’d be back by dark Tony brought wine and Italian bread from the basement refrigerator— we called it Hunka-Bunka bread— As you waltzed in and spun Mom to “Fly Me to the Moon” The moon itself leaning like Sinatra at the end of a long, long alley above all the red and the white and the blue Bio: Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s poems appear in So It Goes, Reckless Writing Anthology, Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island and Maize. His chapbook Hawaii Slides was published by Pudding House Publicatio...