Flying Island

Full Circle My mother has gone Home, some would say. No; her travels are ended. She wanted to die in her own small brick house and not in a garish hospital. A registered nurse, she knew better than to be played offstage by hissing machinery. Despite her wishes, her 85 year-long course was mapped from obstetrics to ER. A judgmental woman, our lives together were full of argument. A religious woman, she feared I would regret my atheism. A loving woman, she cared for, and buried, two husbands. These black letters, this white page cannot hold any of her laughter, her shouts, her angers, her sadness, her joy, and painful tears will not recover a single instant of her long life. Finally, we take our secrets with us when we go. Alone, my mother has either met her god, or suffered a simple mechanical failure. She alone knows, or knows nothing. Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana where he works at the Indiana Univ...

Antelope by Keith Welch The big sign said "Missile Range--  Call this number before crossing" Bob and I were lost on miles of  pitch dark New Mexican dirt road making good time, we caught up with a  panicked antelope, leaping like a dancer in our auto-footlights the animal must have leapt the roadside fence we became its chase-car in a desert marathon both car and animal trapped in a single barb-wire path; the antelope bounding all terror and grace the car creeping along, my eye on the gas gauge  our little parade crawled for miles until the beast lunged into the barbed wire thrashing like a hooked trout broke through into the unseen landscape leaving us the empty track somewhere under the unblinking stars the antelope ran unhindered wounded but free beyond human borders Keith Welch  lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he works at the IU Herman B Wells Library. He has poems published in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Writers Resist...

The Rainy Day by Keith Welch The rain on the roof                   The rain helps hide drums a soothing rhythm.          us from the soldiers. It's a good day for                      all our belongings are sodden reading or perhaps a nap.         and heavy- the mud slows us. I curl in my armchair                 Our food is wet-in two days with book and teacup.               it will be exhausted. The rain rolls off the                  Maybe the rain will extinguish roof, down the gutters.              our burning houses. My eyelids are heavy; it's          The river is swollen; many will a good day to stay in....