Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 8.21 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! For this last edition before fall arrives, we have two contributors in poetry and one in creative nonfiction.  We hope you'll fall in love with the language of each of the pieces as much as we did. From the sounds of hens mourning to the images of land transforming from summer to fall and the lyrical rhythm of a braided personal essay, it never ceases to amaze us how writers capture language for seasons, events, and moments in time and form them into prose and poetry. We hope you enjoy this issue. We invite you to submit your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction (link in the tab above). We publish new issues the last Friday of every month. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors POETRY Liz Whiteacre, "Portrait of Mourning in the Coop" Michael Brockley, "The Butterfly Garden without Mariposas " CREATIVE NONFICTION Leah McNaughton Lederman, " The Day He Sang...

Portrait of Mourning in the Coop The hens coo softly, low in their throats like your quiet sobs in the dormitory when you first learned your  grandfather died. They know too: death is quick on sunny days whether foraging worms or reading in lawn chairs. Three hawks who’d  been stalking the flock  patiently for weeks— an untended moment, all our guards down. Imagine their alarm, duck and cover, sisters racing under pines, into their shed, through low arbor vitae and talons quietly tearing chests, wings, throats —downy underfeathers floating in chill air. It is silent when we head to collect eggs that were not laid, see white, black, brown feathers littering the yard, carcasses discarded unceremoniously. It is silent like the dark ride to the airport for your solo flight to his memorial. Silence until the two hens  coo in the coop, comforting each other in a corner, a dirge for their sisters. They know too: death is quick to leave silence, proprioception wheeling, read...

The Butterfly Garden without Mariposas The giant sunflowers of August can no longer resist the pull of September gravity. The rust petals list toward the sun while the golden ones crash in silence onto the last flowers of late summer. Black-eyed susans. Chalice-like crocuses. Throughout the garden, husky bumblebees stumble through the harvest of zinnias, their black-and-yellow flights growing ever more erratic as their pollinating missions wane during the humid afternoon. In this cycle of decay, swamp roses push forth a new bevy of blooms, and Mexican sunflowers, volunteers to this butterfly garden without mariposas , claim these days before the tenth month to flourish. As if the wayward patron saint of unsung beauty, having rested overnight beneath a wilted sunflower, plucked a pinkening love apple to leave in her wake before resuming her odyssey.     Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Hobo Camp Review ,...

He was coming around the side of the house, naked to the waist—naturally, since it was over sixty degrees—swinging a wrench in one hand. That’s pretty standard, too. The only thing different this time was that I heard my husband before I saw him.  And he was singing. The voice that boomed through my childhood was my father’s, calling up the stairs, shouting through the halls of the church, loud and sharp, sculpting the air like a putty knife on clay, then lower and more resonant, rhythmic and honest, enunciating each word to make a point—a necktie on each syllable.  My own alto caw never got me anywhere but the chorus, despite the hopes of a callback audition senior year. I didn’t get the part and the girl who did flubbed the high note. I’ve never forgiven her for it. I belted the same song mercilessly from behind the safety of my seat belt, bowing to an imaginary audience at the red light. Burnt out and second-string to begin with.  Like anyone else, I met my husband’s ...

      Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.21 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have four contributors in poetry and one in fiction. The season of summer often brings us into moments of reflection. The four poems in this edition bring us nostalgia in "Love Letters" with images of mango tea and a first car; bring us images of a Midwestern summer with kernels and August corn fields in "Corn Truck Overturns On Main Street"; bring us a nature walk in "Note to Erin from the Hathaway Preserve, Wabash, Indiana," with raspberries and filtered light through leaves; bring us memory and grief among water in "The Flicker."  The fiction piece, "The Triumph of Mitch," shows us how friendship can reflect the growth, or lack thereof, we see in ourselves and our lives. We hope you enjoy this issue and don't forget to submit your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction (link in the tab above). We publish new issues the last Friday...

      Love Letters A love letter to the sweet pleasure of sipping mango tea beneath the fern's elongated fingers, where her spliced tendrils mesh with hair grown to my knees and the finches hop along the sill with their gentle thud, thud, thudding . A love letter to my father's neighborhood back home,  to the man who set time on a loop until he fell into the deep sleep one cannot attain by natural means, the bells chiming noisily on their seven minute march.  An alarm clock for the downtrodden and free. A love letter to my first car, with her shakes and shivers and inability to quit the endless trudge forward. To the wasp who came to visit on the highway, to the oil seeping out behind, bread crumbs to guide you home. To the eight hundred dollars invested as an act of self love. The millions of curbs we've kissed, the stickers melting on the dashboard, the girl in the back playing heavy metal drums on the headrest. A love letter to the steering wheel who held me,...

  Corn Truck Overturns On Main Street Semi trailer filled from silos, tidal wave of last year’s golden crop. Traffic stopped, doorways blocked, old men in the coffee shop tapping their canes on glass excited to be trapped. Baby in its stroller, wide eyes filled with so much yellow, some yahoo in a four wheel drive plows in, does doughnuts, spraying kernels like hail and bullets, sheriff stays in his cruiser remembering a convoy and a roadside bomb. Someone flies their drone to document this news  where news never happens, climbing up above camera sweeps around to capture endless fields freshly tilled, waiting to be planted, and down on the road a pastor on his bike, heading out of town on a long ride to get his sermon right, imagining August, his favorite month,  with tall corn for miles and miles, hot and sighing with Nature’s breath. Steve Brammell ’s poems, short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Alabama Magazine , Birmingham Magazine , RavensPerch , Northwest I...

      Note to Erin from the Hathaway Preserve, Wabash, Indiana I walk alone today. Near the best raspberries, a doe crashes off into mossy shade.   Here, we met two farm dogs who loved us.  Here, you left a handful of crackers so the sick,  tottering possum would not die cold in the belly.  Here, a blacksnake swam over the limestone stream bed, a true and dark idea in a clear mind. Now, flakes of eight-minute-old sunlight fall through palm-sized gaps in the canopy of leaves,  reflect off ripples and back up, onto the leaves'  ribbed undersides, pulsing like pale,  banked embers, exactly this far from the sun. James Owens 's newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Grain , Dalhousie Review , Presence , Queen's Quarterly , and Honest Ulsterman. Originally from Virginia, he lived in Indiana from 2003...

    The Flicker I offer memory, and the pain burns colder. That morning, sleet, hail, fog, love – nothing edible defiled  our lips. Even the air invoked weight. Swallowing became privilege, the fruit of scarcity. Still, I wanted to take, to pocket that blur. Driving through the gray, I imagined dying. I imagined a flicker at the end of a long tunnel, the beginning of anger, of want. I could almost see you reclaiming shape, form. Water relies  on deceit for its color, breaking white, then clear, summoning early visions. What is past has passed. Blue exits your mouth in waves. Robert Okaji is a displaced Texan seeking work in Indiana. He is the author of multiple chapbooks, including the 2021 Etchings Press Poetry Prize-winning My Mother's Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m. , and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Book of Matches , Juke Joint, One Art , Clade Song , Vox Populi , Indianapolis Review , and elsewhere.