Flying Island

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...

On Memorial Day by Lylanne Musselman I’m on another bored walk, pacing a treadmill in Toledo, Ohio, and the TV flashes Jim Nabors singing Back Home Again in Indiana, his ritual right before The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, where men and women go 500 miles around and around in the Circle City, and sudden goosebumps rise— sentimental over my Indiana, where I was born, educated, grew to be me, left family and friends behind—with the sycamores and moonlight on the Wabash, when old Gomer sings “I long for my Indiana home,” memories come racing back, days spent staying with my beloved grandparents— long gone, the carefree antics of my youth—long gone, loves I left or never thought would leave— long gone. Before long the song is over, balloons lift, engines roar, my heart beats fast, as I walk in place, through the blur of tears and race cars— my life in Indiana, given the checkered flag. Bio: Lylanne Musselman is a native Hoosier with many family, fri...