Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have two poems to share with you in this issue. We hope you enjoy this issue. Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? Submissions are free for the summer! For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Links to each piece in this edition below. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers POETRY Charlotte Melin, "In the Wisconsin Arboretum" and "Flock" 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.  Support the Indiana Writers Center!

In the Wisconsin Arboretum A sea of horsetails under the boardwalk and blue flags bloom in the marsh. A pair of sandhill cranes browses the pond edge, wild indigo waves white in the distance where wet prairie paths are closed. Under the trees, the confetti of  yellow-orange petals seem inexplicable  until I see leaf hands waving above— a tall tulip tree, farther north than I thought possible until  we encounter another and  expectations are overturned. The twisting drive here made  my head spin like a gyroscope. Now when you look at the trail map, I’m disoriented, feel my brain refuse to make sense of markers and turns. Yet, even unable to orient myself  to a chart, I notice the clues left by petals, like breadcrumbs  for our way back to Indiana.         Flock Driving home from Indiana we finally see the blackbirds I’ve missed all fall, feeding in stubbled cornfields. Later another flock shapeshifts south in migration, a mesmerizing...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 6.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have three contributors in poetry. We hope you enjoy this issue. Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? Submissions are free for the summer! For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Links to each piece in this edition below. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers POETRY Kevin LeMaster, "Carry" Roger Pfingston, "Asana" John T. Leonard, "The Orange" 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.  Support the Indiana Writers Center!

Carry He wears the world  like a torn coat uncomfortable with how the sleeves ride to the elbow how tight the shoulders feel when he moves too much. He dreams of when a 42 long, fit comfortably and tattered things were something told that didn’t seem like lies, this world,  a swallow of dry leaves.  He dreams of the day when  black men can live without the fear of a bullet tattooing the chest of everyone they love, their necks bent toward hell,  a day when no one will walk into a supermarket and open fire in the produce section behind the deli. He is like a boy with a tiny wounded bird cradling the world in his arms, stroking its tired feathers and nursing  it back to health so  it can raise more white sons to kill again. This coat grows smaller with each wear, full of holes and bleeding the same red.     Kevin LeMaster lives in South Shore Kentucky. His poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, The Slipstream, Triggerfish Critica...

Asana     a posture in hatha yoga Who can deny the stippled beauty of spring trees budding green, or fuller yet, summer’s flourish     becoming the safe fires of autumn, the cold bonfires of hills and forests, mountainsides burning  to a bareness of dance and pose,          the annual asana of leafless limbs revealed thick and thin, multi- angled, jutting out from trunks barked according to species,                         their skeletal reach a held  grace deserving human pause.    Roger Pfingston is the author of Something Iridescent , a collection of poetry and fiction, as well as five chapbooks, the most recent being What’s Given , available from Kattywompus Press. He has new poems in The American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, 85 South, and Sh...

The Orange     after Wendy Cope There were shards everywhere for a while but then I climbed through the red clay of restoration.   You brushed me off with a straw broom and we played the game  of gratitude and looped our favorite park five and a half times.   We walked through the door of our home with a bag of new books,  artisan fridge magnets, the caffeine shimmers—an entire day  ahead of us. Sometimes I’ll be packing my lunch and realize, for the last three days, everything has worked out.  The way an orange is pre-sliced for whoever wants to eat it.  The way the soft white glow of the moon falls on the rain gutters, as silent as the hidden sparrows in our neighbor’s ailanthus. I think I was meant to share this sentiment, to piece it out like an orange and give a little slice to everybody—to keep enough for myself, but give  most of it to you.  It feels so new, to draw an arrow of peace from my chest to our g...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 5.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have three contributors in poetry. We hope you enjoy this issue. Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? Send us your work! Submissions info can be found in the tab above. Links to each piece in this edition below. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Poetry Editor & Readers POETRY Becca Downs, "Peace Offerings" Aydin Akgün, "White" Cloe Watson, "Flash" 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.  Support the Indiana Writers Center!

Peace Offerings it’s early enough windows still black I see myself when I flip the switch so quiet I can hear faint buzzing of kitchen light heat cranks on, down the street a dog barks to be let inside I can’t hear the door but it’s quiet again and I imagine her at the foot of a man outside the wind presses its face to my kitchen window, envious of steaming coffee and my gentle aloneness– I can’t see him  but I know his scent, feel his cheek on mine I’m reminded of doves how they’re never late, not really, and the odor of olives rotting, shriveled on a branch half-forgotten, perhaps in a box in my closet. I stand at the window so long my face fades with pre-dawn black, morphs into a fence,  a small tulip tree budding like a teen, a garden plot waiting. Becca Downs is a poet, freelance writer, and MFA candidate with the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. Though currently residing in Denver, she lived in Indiana for 30 years and still considers herself a Hoosier at hear...