Flying Island

Little Detroit by Michael Brockley The factory by the railroad tracks where your grandfather built McFarlan sedans is shuttered, its windows broken. Its doors jimmied open by scavengers. At Independence Day parades, undertakers once pulled floats along Grand Avenue in their vintage Auburns and Duesenbergs while county fair queen hopefuls waved and tossed butterscotch candies to the crowd. For the city sesquicentennial, the married men modeled the beards and mustaches of Civil War generals. Your clean-shaven father let muttonchops stubble his jaw. Then won a sawbuck for the way he favored General Burnside. Tom T. Hall played for tips in Sue's Diner, the same place you bought sausage-and-egg sandwiches on Saturday mornings. Where you daydreamed over exotic paragraphs in a discarded Grit . Hall sang of giving $7.80 to a waitress for her rent. Of catching catfish in the Whitewater River. Folks said when fog rose from the Whitewater, a phantom McFarlan accelerated along the center ...

  Harmonic Convergence of the Prose Poem Indianapolis, 2018 by Tracy Mishkin   Ten thousand prose poets, fans, and groupies converge at the Crossroads of America. David Shumate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fogging the Monocle , keynotes the Convention Center. Just months since Indy hosted Super Bowl LII Below and Andrew Luck fired a frozen rope to Fleener for the win. Is the prose poem by nature a revolutionary genre? In Shumate's hands, it is liquid anarchy. We've seen poems on tractors and football helmets. The reunification of Korea via prose poem diplomacy. The Theory of Evolution declared fact by the Southern Baptist Convention. In three months, Time magazine will call 2018 "The Year of the Prose Poem." For now, we're happy with an autographed Robert Hass t-shirt and a copy of The Rooster's Wife . Bio: Tracy Mishkin is an MFA student in Creative Writing at Butler University. Her chapbook, I Almost Didn't Make It to McDonald...

How to Steal a Piano: A Prose Poem by Thomas Alan Orr Carefully, of course.   Keep this in mind: you must not be tempted to play “Heart and Soul” or “Chopsticks” as you lower her through a window on pulleys at two in the morning.   Don’t let her bang against the side of the building on the way down lest she belly forth with fragments of Chopin or Jelly Roll Morton.   Most say the stronger man should stay above, working the ropes, but you need more muscle down below in case a wind comes up and she starts to kick and buck.   You don’t want to waste time picking up sharps and flats on the street.   Tuck her into the bed of the truck and wrap her well. Nobody likes a chilly upright or a cold baby grand.   Wool socks on the pedal lyres keep her quiet.   And don’t drop the fallboard on your fingers or else you’ll be singing.   Driving through rough streets, avoid the potholes or the whippen will come loose, composing melodies to charm a ghost. ...