Flying Island

How We Know Things by Helen Townsend It is strange to see the sky dismantled and lowered toward the ground. Pieces of fictional sky in the real sky, each billboard chunk hangs from a cord. As I imagine a blue topaz dangling from the thinnest of white gold chains, that’s when I make eye contact with you And I wonder are eyes eyes Yours like green glass held up to the sun Perhaps you see a green sea of milk, a turtle floating there with a universe on its back is grief grief Did you howl in the corner of the orchard the day you understood divorce means Daddy is leaving Like I did in the shower the day I left my Dad’s prostate-ridden body in a bed someone would too quickly clean for another old man to die in is wonder wonder Did you delight in the exquisite taste of a pumpernickel bagel the day after your first time with love and are you convinced this new space in your body is big enough to hold many worlds, to carry truth everybody can see Bio: Helen ...

by Bryn Douglas Marlow             The minister signed our marriage certificate with a flourish, then said, “One of you needs to sign here as ‘husband’ and one over here as ‘wife.’” It was 2005. Dave and I were wed in Canada on our ninth anniversary as a couple, soon after Ontario legalized same-sex marriage—so soon that gender-neutral forms were not yet available.             When we returned to the U.S. our marital status lodged in the Twilight Zone. It’s still there. We believe we’re married. A whole vast country north of us believes we’re married. But what happens in Canada stays in Canada. According to those with saying power, Dave is married to nobody. Guess what that makes me.             Being nobody wears on a person. Researchers have long documented the negative effects of the stigma of homosexuality on ...

Dusting Antiques the Day We Buried You by Helen Townsend           “Death is the opposite of time.” --Deng Ming-Dao I wish instead of laying you in a hole we could tuck you into this tall-as-a-man, weigh t- driven German-designed clock. Eight copper alloy layers like a cake reserved for grand events the middle tiers hold silver doors and dancers enter, exit, twirl on the hour, each like a moon flung around a single, familied earth. If I knew alchemy I could haul you from that pine bed cast you to handheld size, tune you to metal clockwork, watch you keep the time as you go on defying it. Bio: Helen Townsend lives in Indianapolis. “One of my favorite things is sitting down to write or revise, and when I look at the clock, hours have gone by. Everyone who writes or makes art or has a great conversation has experienced that. It feels like a glimpse of eternity.”

By Robin Lovelace I have a black cat named Sphinx. Actually, she is Antoine’s cat. But Sphinx still lives here, Antoine does not.   A three year marriage and I loved Antoine, truly loved him, but he didn’t believe me. He said I couldn’t really love him . . . or anybody else for that matter. I met Antoine when I needed a lawyer to defend me from a hit and run charge. Yes I was guilty. Yes I hit someone and left the scene. Only because I was late for work and I didn’t need an arrest on my record and I sure didn’t need the insurance problems. Later on, we discovered the guy I hit was drunk. He was riding a moped. Swerved out in the street before I could push on the brakes and I had no previous record. The drunken moped driver lived but had to be in a wheelchair. Actually, it worked out pretty good for him. He didn’t die and he was eligible for disability checks so he could sit in his little house and drink up the rest of his little life. I got six months suspended and had to pa...

How Faith Works by Brian Beatty My granny always tithed what remained of her Social Security check at the end of each month to a few of her favorite radio evangelists — to help them reach out across the AM airwaves to touch more souls with their holy healing powers. But I never saw her seal one cent into an envelope addressed to any of those charlatan TV preachers she watched just as religiously on a black-and-white set balanced in the window ledge of her rent-controlled senior citizen apartment — no matter how often they asked for her prayers. “You wouldn’t see Lord Jesus prancing around the front of a church in a fancy suit like that fool’s,” she told me more than once. “Not up in my idea of Heaven, you wouldn't, anyway.” How her gold brick of President Reagan’s government-issue cheese turned blue in the back of her fridge I remember now, too. Bio: Brian Beatty was born and raised in Brazil, Indiana. He received his undergraduate...

I Am Fat with poems unwritten. They came uninvited and bred like rabbits. They clogged my heart and smothered my throat. They impacted my gut— it no longer worked. They crammed my hippo thighs until I became an elephant. Elephants don’t write. My pachyderma expanded and expanded and expanded until it cracked and words seeped out— One thin poem at a time. Bio: Bonita Cox Searle lives in Noblesville, Indiana, where she writes poetry, short stories, memoir, and mystery novels. Her first published story, "Murder on Potter's Bridge," won The First Annual Armchair Detective Story Contest sponsored by the Polk Street Review. It will appear in the 2014 fall issue.

Thumbs by Helen Townsend I have my father’s thumbs. I first noticed them o n a summer road trip, when no teenager wants to ride cross country in a Ford Taurus with Mom and Dad. From a bored stare from the back seat I first saw the thumbs on the hands grasping the steering wheel were the thumbs on the hands holding my book. We pray to remember who we are. That’s what Sr. Christina taught from inside her cavern of black fabric under reprints of Jesus and Mary. I didn’t know yet that I carry my icons on me. Bio: Helen Townsend lives in Indianapolis. “One of my favorite things is sitting down to write or revise, and when I look at the clock, hours have gone by. Everyone who writes or makes art or has a great conversation has experienced that. It feels like a glimpse of eternity.”

By Dan Carpenter I am fresh from an online debate with bookish friends about one of America’s most celebrated living poets when death comes to a family member who shares the poet’s name by sheer coincidence and shares a trademark quality of her favorite subject matter: Non-humanity. No sooner do I vent my weariness with Mary Oliver’s incessant animal poems than Oliver dies on me; and I must try, against all hope of achieving poetry, to write him a decent eulogy. He earned it; he gave a pet’s perfection in his six willful and sporadically violent years, and he may have lasted his full feline half score and five had it not been for my lassitude, my complacency, my wishful thinking that his profound lethargy and pitiable crying of the last day was just one more occasion for a tough little guy to barf out his troubles and trot on. Probably poisoned by some plant or refuse he ingested, the vet surmised. Who knows? Who springs for a $100 autopsy for a cat, especially if it might y...

Humanity by George Fish             I have often felt a bitter sorrow             at the thought of the German people,             which is so estimable in the individual             and so wretched in the generality.                                                 Goethe Is this not true of humanity as a whole, and not just of the Germans, both in the generality and the individuality? Are we not, as a species, plagued by halfwits, fools and idiots? Does not our own stupidity undermine us? Is it not true that the study of hum...