Flying Island

Ellos realizarán mis sueños. ¿En cuál de los tres se verterá el caudal que les dejo flotando en el aire? Eso lo verá el mundo, y yo, yo habré sido su madre. My sons will realize my dreams. From which of the three will pour forth the stream I leave floating in the air for them? He will see the world and I; I will have been his mother.    (Amanda Junquera Un hueco en la luz )      I will never forget the first time I stared up at the names on the vaulted ceiling of the reading room of the National Spanish Library in the capital city of Madrid. Cervantes. Calderón. Quevedo. The names of dozens of illustrious Spanish writers that any knowledgeable student of Spanish literature would immediately recognize lined the high ceilings. Unsurprisingly, all of the great canonical writers whose names I could see from my vantage point were men. The legacies of these male writers, playwrights, and poets exude literary tradition and consecrate the large room of numbere...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 10.21 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have three contributors representing poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. We hope you enjoy this issue. Be on the lookout for fee-free submissions after the new year! We'd love to see your work. Check back at the end of November for the next issue. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors POETRY Eric Chiles, "Watching squash grow" CREATIVE NONFICTION Heather Dawn Frankland, "Retrace" FICTION Susan Kisinger, "A Split-Second, 1962" Follow us! Twitter: @JournalFlying Instagram: @flyingislandjournal Are you a writer who is from the Midwest or has close ties to the Midwest? We'd love to read your work. Submissions info in the tab above.

     Watching squash grow I lashed the bamboo tripod for pole beans to crawl but a squirrel-planted mystery hijacked the mound then exploded in late summer with sandpapery umbrella leaves and muscular vines. When it sprouted five-pointed orange star blossoms we guessed the rodents harvested pumpkin seeds from last year's jack-o-lantern for a winter snack, and we started to plan Thanksgiving dessert. The hose-like vines snake through the garden over taking tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, string beans, basil, tendrils creeping up the fence, a green pyramid whose leaves cast a jungle-like shade. Bumble bees pollinate the plate-sized flowers which in a day curl in on themselves. A small green ovule swells at their base getting plumper, yellower day by day, swallowing the shriveled petals until they are brown flakes at the globe's bottom, its girth bulging from bulb to yellow balloon almost before our amazed eyes. In the morning just yellow, by dusk green radiates down the curves...

Picture One There is a screen door open and a strange sense of light that looks both warm and eerily green. Vines knit through the doorway and small seedlings grow in the floor and walls. The window was broken out a long time ago, and the punctures appear like stars within the glass. You can see the paneled wood floor and almost make out its lines—like it is also meant to tell you a story of past lives.  Uncle Larry, the youngest of the seven Michels’ kids, watches out for this house and the property around it. He doesn’t try to keep the house up to par but lets nature claim it, like the Navajo belief that old pottery shouldn’t be preserved but return to the clay particles from which it came. The house is a white farmhouse. It has exactly two stories. The second story is where the Michels’ kids lived, one big room. It is supposedly haunted from a boarder Great Grandma Michels’ once kept during the Depression. My grandma, the fourth oldest of the seven children, laughs a...

TW: suicide           Here's the thing you need to know. It’s a blistering cold night in January and my daddy is dead. I know it must be true because Brother Sixteen-Ounces told us. His real name is Brother Ernest Pound and he’s our preacher. When he arrived at church last year Larry laughed and said, “That’s sixteen ounces. You know, sixteen ounces in a pound? Get it?” So, all the church kids call him “Sixteen-Ounces.” Anyway, he wouldn’t lie. *** We had just finished eating the hamburgers Mommy made for her first boyfriend since the  D-I-V-O-R-C-E.  Jim said he’d help clear the table if Larry, my brother, would find the deck of cards. He taught us gin rummy a couple weeks before, and now the four of us play almost every night. Tonight, I think I hear a soft knock at the door. “Hey Emmie, how about I shuffle, and you can deal,” Jim says.  I agree because I like his handsome smile. “Me and Mommy are a team and you and Lar...