Flying Island

All This Chaos Bricks are flying and folks are crying, cursing  at cops who barricade the streets and chase fleeing protesters with tear gas and faces masked and buddy sticks raised with arms aloft, seeing that the straight blue line pushes forward against the masses they perceive as unruly. Lest we miss the point of all this chaos, the injustices pile up from time immortal and grievances are rife with grief and tears. Mothers have sobbed into dank, dark spaces; wives and offspring have cursed their losses, cried and begged for God’s saving graces. Marjie Giffin is an Indianapolis writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has recently appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly , Flying Island , The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, The Saint Katherine Review, The Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Through the Sycamores, The Blue Heron Review, and the anthology The Lives We Have Live(d) . One of her plays was produced in the I...

End Road Work A line of traffic cones arcs toward the berm, where an orange sign reads “End Road Work.” Good idea, I think. This fixing things is getting in the way of doing them. Hard to get somewhere when your path is constantly in repair. And anyway, lately things have been fixing themselves. The car stopped making that noise. The birdbath stopped leaking. And I’ve finally started sleeping more than just an hour at a time. But I don’t want to think about what’ s really going on. That the squeaky piece is quiet now because it fell off somewhere along the road, and the whole driveshaft is just waiting to drop out. That crack in the birdbath is plugged with built-up rust and crud. Rest- less bodies will run out of fuel eventually. I’m grateful for the sleep. There is no end to roadwork. But I know nothing about tarmac or car parts. When your child is so hurt that he lies down in the street, what tool or piece can m...

Epithalamion from the ferris wheel, with birds Which summer was it I lost    my kid brother at the carnival? I spent                        my quarters like clouds spend rain. When I could not find him, fire-slaught sluiced through me, his name from my throat like the sounds           rising off the tilt-a-whirl, lifted higher than the carriage            of the ferris wheel. I ran the fairway. Please , I panted,                          and this is the part repeating in me like a robin’s song. Lover, I’m still greedy, still at the trickster’s stand trying              for th...

  Privileged by Sara No ë           Today, I faced my white privilege in the mirror for the first time.           Today, I decided I didn’t want to be the silent spectator in the history books, the one who had to live with the guilt of watching injustices happening but holding her tongue, who shook her head in sadness at humanity’s lack of empathy but was too afraid to fight for change. Throughout my school career, I’d always wondered what I would have done during the darkest times of our history. Would I have been brave enough to speak out? Now, the pages are being written before my eyes. Change is happening, and this is my chance to finally know the answer to that question.           Today, I attended my first protest. I’ve yearned to protest issues in the past, but my courage always failed me, because in this America I’ve come to know, mass shootings are so normalized that I barely blink at...

Kitchen Romance Leave the dozen roses to their cellophane sleeve. Bring me instead a bouquet of late summer produce: the folded hands of the last lettuce leaves; the vintage tomatoes blushing purple, yellow, oranges at even the hint of sauce. Let lemon cukes roll joyous in the bushel basket, carousing with potatoes the size of solstice hail. Turn your head, but watch from the corner of your eye as the zucchini and yellow squash neck like geese. Tuck in tomatillos to await my fingers divesting them of their paper- lantern jackets. Serve me strawberries by the bleeding handful, and I will fill your mouth with blackberries from a handkerchief stained beyond salvation. Whisper every unspeakable unspoken that is the Vidalia.   And let fan the jungle stalks of rainbow chard, not cooling this mad air of August, but stirring it everywhere about. Bethany Brengan ’s poetry has appeared in various publications, including Contemporary...

Negative Space The wild honeysuckle bullied its way into every square foot south of my driveway. I’m unwieldy with the pruning saw, but as branch after branch falls away, I anticipate flourishing in the negative space, now open for the butterflies and robins, and hollowed high enough to stand full under the canopy of fragrant leaves. I wrangle the teeth of the saw against the neck of a branch grown wayward, while listening to a podcast suggest that   solitude and loneliness are more like distant cousins than identical twins. Or maybe, sometimes, loneliness is solitude, atrophied. Well muscled, it takes me to the dark room, and after drowning me in a wash of burning restlessness, it waits for my shadow self to slowly imprint my drying, developing counterpart in relief. Andrea Lee Dunn is from Indianapolis by way of the Texas-Mexico border and North Carolina. She studied creative writing at Texas Tech University an...

Loaded        Back then he showed me how to assemble the farm tool I did not want to touch: a small gauge rifle. My hesitation surprised him: his mother and sister shot well, their loyalty to homegrown food justice enough for dealing death to fat groundhogs or teenage racoons.   I could see the logic of knowing what every farm kid knew, but I didn’t like any of it, not aiming at a can on a bloodless fence post, not pulling the trigger.   Laurel Smith lives in Vincennes, Indiana, and happily participates in projects to promote literacy and the arts. Her poems have appeared in Natural Bridge , New Millennium Writings , Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island , English Journal , JAMA: Journal of the AMA ; also in the following anthologies: Mapping the Muse , And Know This Place , Visiting Frost.

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...

Pilgrims The old zinnias sway in  the garden bed, shoulders  hunched and heads bowed,  their bright garments tattered  and stained from wear, as  the sun shifts its sleepy gaze over the front yard. Still,  every flower is gamely doing  its job, gathering the light  and casting it up at our faces.  Who minds a missing petal like a broken tooth, or a brown smudge amid the gold?  Certainly not the bee, who  nuzzles every blossom, who blesses each splayed and faded  circlet, each discolored array, clasping the hands that are raised to her as she moves, saint-like, among them,  humming imperceptibly as she goes.  Joel Showalter , no longer a Hoosier by residence, has deep ties to Indiana. He was born in Marion and spent the first 24 years of his life in that part of the state. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and writing from Indiana Wesleya...