Flying Island

Ten Cows      for Nancy who saw it first In a fenced pasture,   after brunching   the morning away      under October sun, ten black cows relax   at noon in a folded posture,  favoring a lean to the left while chewing their cud   in a state of ruminating  indifference—the white noise of Highway 46,  the stacked panorama             of cumulus clouds— all in all the signs of a  healthy herd just outside Ellettsville, Indiana. And that’s good enough.  A retired teacher of English and photography, Roger Pfingston is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. He has new poems in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Tipton Poetry Journal, American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, South 85 Journal, and Midwest Review . His latest chapbo...

  October                               We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. –Gwendolyn Brooks   Weary green makes way for every shade of fire:     limbs of maple, beech, and oak, shrouded all summer, now sway in a bright wind.   The dance of death , they say, but no one is grieving:     not the harvest moon, not sunshine on frostbit grass, not dreamers eager for the dark.   Let’s find atoms that we share, here in the raucous     foliage of you, me : essential as water or air, the bountiful mess of us. Laurel Smith lives in Vincennes, Indiana, and happily participates in projects to promote literacy, the arts, social justice, and public health. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Natural Bridge , New Millennium Writings, English Journ...

August There is a rip in the clouds where morning  begins, in slow motion, to unwrap  the night, shifting the sky from coal  to ash to sand, telling the quick brown bat  to go home. Air remains motionless, cowering  in silence as daylight presses its hot,  heavy body against the earth, a wet moan  sliding up my neck, mosquitoes like fingertips  teasing where they don’t belong.     Skye Nicholson is a part-time poet and founder and CEO of Soul's Truth Coaching, empowerment coaching services for women. She lives in Columbus, Indiana, with her husband and two children. Her first book of collected works, published December 2021, is entitled Unexpected Alchemy: Poems of Addiction and Awakening .

Punchy & Pissed I was born, quickly, in a thunderstorm—a  red, mottled projectile. Thunder and lightning shook the walls as the doctor held my single mother’s flesh.   I was born in 1979 to hillbilly shame—a backward blame. Even the Tribune couldn’t be bothered with my birth.    I was born in a rusted automobile with a half tank of gas and a hole in the floor. The carvings scratched in the door read Jesus Save s! I had heard bastards didn’t count.   I was born wailing, railing, at our socio-economic class, shouting into the wind, into the void, to anyone who would listen. I would be different! I would not stand on the backs of my ancestors–those ancient idiots. I would rip their heads off and roar.    I was born to a house full of German women. Themselves, born on the hard side of life—they had piss in their souls. Cause grandpa had whiskey on his breath and meanness in his fist. And grandma was a hag with a cigarette coated tongue. But, like our h...

Rain Momma always said you can smell the rain before it even hits pavement before the sirens blare with full wiper clearing off a torrent of tears Momma wasn’t there the day you gasped for a breath that almost never came, when your sister said you looked like momma right before she never came home, right before she hollered help me to our son five hundred miles away, but frankly to me, you never looked more beautiful than when I touched your hand and let them take you and when they flipped on the flashing lights, I knew home was just as far as our son was the day Momma died, the day our yard was a river and you were the bridge   Kevin LeMaster lives in South Shore, Kentucky. His poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, The Slipstream , Triggerfish Critical Review , Route 7 Review , West Trade Review , The Big Window Review , Santa Clara Review Dead Skunk Magazine and others. He has work forthcoming in Internet Void , Main Street Rag and Coffin Bell Journal. His work...

Carry He wears the world  like a torn coat uncomfortable with how the sleeves ride to the elbow how tight the shoulders feel when he moves too much. He dreams of when a 42 long, fit comfortably and tattered things were something told that didn’t seem like lies, this world,  a swallow of dry leaves.  He dreams of the day when  black men can live without the fear of a bullet tattooing the chest of everyone they love, their necks bent toward hell,  a day when no one will walk into a supermarket and open fire in the produce section behind the deli. He is like a boy with a tiny wounded bird cradling the world in his arms, stroking its tired feathers and nursing  it back to health so  it can raise more white sons to kill again. This coat grows smaller with each wear, full of holes and bleeding the same red.     Kevin LeMaster lives in South Shore Kentucky. His poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, The Slipstream, Triggerfish Critica...

Asana     a posture in hatha yoga Who can deny the stippled beauty of spring trees budding green, or fuller yet, summer’s flourish     becoming the safe fires of autumn, the cold bonfires of hills and forests, mountainsides burning  to a bareness of dance and pose,          the annual asana of leafless limbs revealed thick and thin, multi- angled, jutting out from trunks barked according to species,                         their skeletal reach a held  grace deserving human pause.    Roger Pfingston is the author of Something Iridescent , a collection of poetry and fiction, as well as five chapbooks, the most recent being What’s Given , available from Kattywompus Press. He has new poems in The American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, 85 South, and Sh...

The Orange     after Wendy Cope There were shards everywhere for a while but then I climbed through the red clay of restoration.   You brushed me off with a straw broom and we played the game  of gratitude and looped our favorite park five and a half times.   We walked through the door of our home with a bag of new books,  artisan fridge magnets, the caffeine shimmers—an entire day  ahead of us. Sometimes I’ll be packing my lunch and realize, for the last three days, everything has worked out.  The way an orange is pre-sliced for whoever wants to eat it.  The way the soft white glow of the moon falls on the rain gutters, as silent as the hidden sparrows in our neighbor’s ailanthus. I think I was meant to share this sentiment, to piece it out like an orange and give a little slice to everybody—to keep enough for myself, but give  most of it to you.  It feels so new, to draw an arrow of peace from my chest to our g...