Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.28 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish a nonfiction piece by Albert Hoffmann and poems by  Laurel Smith , Mary Sexson , and  Katherine V. Wills . Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers

Keeping the Sabbath           My worship is a blue sky and ten thousand crickets in the deep wet       hay of the field.  My vow is the silence under their song.                    –Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Dawn The sycamore laughs, her new leaves confident before       the storm, her limbs stretched like a dancer’s ready for thunder, clapping for rain. Noon Jasmine—the real thing, though I’m still learning its first        name from bees in love with those blooms, swirling breath and nectar for their jubilee. Moment The hours fill, then spill then fill again: time itself   fluent as a cloud or tree or pebble speaking to a friend longing to listen.  Evening By the creek, a blackbird stops on the wild grass.  Does he       pause to scavenge seed or signal his mate or scan heaven for a ...

Wild Peacocks Eight-thousand miles can take a toll, even on an iPhone, and so your voice echoes, fades in and out as you tell me about the wild peacocks, their call, their strutty selves walking the grounds where you are staying.                   Our son guides you each day through this maze of newness. You, who clung to home as if it were your lifeboat, now wander on evening walks with him in the dust and heat   of southern India, washing your clothes in a bucket and scooping your food with your hand.                   I wonder at the sound of it, whether I could navigate such a distance, could listen to the peacock’s call. Mary Sexson is the author of the newly released Her Addiction An Empty Place at the Table (Finishing Line Press).  Her other books include the award-winning 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press), and Company of Women, New and Selected P...

Clear Cut: Forester  I told him to hire Amish loggers  Because their horses pull   Heavy logs and stumps  Not like machinery   Or skids that ravish  The forest floor.  These stout men  Read the trees,  With their loyal Bucephalus  Cutting and clearing side-by-side.     “Ya ya yaa, gee up”  Horses billowing breath  Hooves precariously slip sliding in mud.  The forester’s horses were named  Moonlight, Midnight, and Adam.    Years later you decided to trim  That one thick branch overhanging  The pine decking.  With your chainsaw hungrily   Growling into the resistant lateral,  With an engineer’s geometry,  By all dead reckoning,  The branch should have fallen  There.  You and I escaped into heartwood—  Only the beating heart of the felled tree.   Katherine V. Wills ( Katerina Tsiopos) is an English professor at Indiana Uni...

When I tell people that I have cycled unsupported nearly 3,000 miles of winding roads along the west coast of the United States, along entire river paths of the South Korean peninsula, or up hopelessly steep mountains and volcanoes in Costa Rica, a common response from non-cyclists is simply, “Why?” The question echoes from voices of incredulity, faces skeptical of my motives, my self esteem, and especially my sanity. That sounds painful, like hell, they say. And there are moments in every journey in which their dubious instincts are correct, in which dehydration causes cramped, twitching quadriceps, when saddle sores on my ass burn like hellfires of my own creation. But after each of these trials, the destination comes with an enormous sense of accomplishment accompanied by the bittersweet knowledge that the journey is over. Unlike cycling, few people ask a writer upon writing their first novel, “Why did you do it?” There seems to be an automatic admiration for the talent and dedicati...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 6.23 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition, we publish the third place winner of our Short Fiction Contest,  "The Long Dark" by James Matthew Lee Wilson ! In this edition, we also have three new poems and a nonfiction piece by Tony Armstrong. Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers

On a bright summer morning, smelling fresh of rain and honeysuckle, I lay in my bed, listening to the sounds of my grandmother's kitchen. Down the hall, a cabinet opened and closed. The kettle clanged into the basin and then water from the faucet rushed in to fill it. Footsteps tracked over to the stovetop. My grandmother hummed to herself, but she was not alone. "I wonder what Bill will do now that Esther is gone." A familiar voice. Joe Camacho; forever sweet on my grandmother. He came most mornings but never on Sunday. On occasion, he brought flowers, which she would fuss over before placing them in a vase. But most days they would sit at the kitchen table, sip their coffee, and chat the morning away. To my knowledge, it was never anything more than that. "I imagine Bill will stay. Don't see him as the leaving type." My grandmother answered, confident in a way that only a long-term resident of a small town can be when speaking on local matters. I heard the...

Ducklings For David Ferry I met some ducklings on their way to somewhere on the river: three stopping by me calling to them, my sporadic quacking likely strange but curiously stopping by on their way hurriedly anywhere as long as it was forward, maybe lost and looking for other ducks, maybe paddling away from other ducks. Who can know? Only they were very eager in their searching maybe a little desperate to be stopping by me on the river speaking poorly their mother tongue. Was it company they needed? I must have confused them saying over and over the same phrase so they felt sorry for me, big broken duck who had forgotten how to speak. Paddling quickly along they passed me by, swept along in the current of words, searching for someone else to talk to on the river. Joshua Kulseth earned his BA in English from Clemson University, and his MFA in poetry from Hunter College. He is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are...

What’s Remembered, What’s Forgotten On the first day of summer camp, the counselor introduces her two newly-adopted sons, biological brothers from Brazil. They’re 6 and 7, old enough to remember their former lives.   My son volunteers that he is Inuit, and recently new to our family. I choose not  to embarrass him, not to contradict him with my memory of his birth, our bodies parting ways. I leave him with his story intact, a child’s imagined  version of a different life,  the true story of small boys,  who remember the journey  from before to now . Martha Christina was b orn and raised in Indiana.  She earned a BA in Spanish from IU Bloomington, and married in Beck Chapel there.  She now lives in Bristol, RI, but considers herself a Hoosier-at-heart. She has published two full-length collections, Staying Found (Fleur de lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press), both of which contain poems set in Indiana. Individual poems appe...