Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 8.25 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Martha Christina , Elaine Fowler Palencia , Chris Dean . 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

Ornamental When the young sharp shinned hawk lands on the feeder,  the small song birds have already fled. It settles on the top,  immobile, almost  ornamental. Those who know  more than I about  hawks assure me  disappointment is a human emotion, not something a hawk feels, left alone with only sunflower seeds. Martha Christina was born and raised in Indiana, 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 appear recently in Crab Orchard Review , Star 82 Review, and Tiny Seed Journal . Image: Cyanotype of British Algae by Anna Atkins (1843)

Twilight Lexus “The last car I will ever buy,” you said, and we laughed at this flimsy excuse to spend on luxury, for once in our lives, and drove ninety miles past winter-parched fields to Peoria to be schooled in the new vehicle’s bells and whistles pat the old car goodbye and be handed key fobs we didn’t understand. My father used to say such things— the last suit I will ever buy,  the last big trip we will take, my last lawnmower. He had a PhD in lugubriousness. On the way home, the winter sun sinking, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel  and observed how much of the wall “art”-- boxy cardboard letter files, stoneware jugs, stern ancestors discomfited in oval frames, augers, potato mashers, rusty hand saws,  cast iron cookware, mantel clocks— are still part of our daily lives, and we noted the main demographic:  women in late middle age  eating with an aged parent  who was taking most of the meal home for later and whose liver spots matched ours, and I thoug...

afternoon gardening I arch my feet, working tendons, bones and joints that seem to be slowly reshaping themselves into gnarled roots. My hands twist and curl more daily; stiff, bulbous knuckles no longer so much fleshy fingers as knotty branches. I pause to stretch, toes dug into earth and arms open to the sky. In the warmth of the sun, I feel the continuity of my Mothers flow through me like sweet sap. As I joyfully sway in the wind, I smile at the thought my body isn't really aging, I'm simply becoming the Family Tree.  Chris Dean , a writer from Indiana, began writing poetry in 2018. They were the featured artist for May at the Columbus Area Arts Council Monthly Open Mic Night. Their work was published in The Whiskey Mule Diner Anthology . Image: Plant forms, an Impression Figure by Margaret Watts Hughes, pigment on glass, date unknown. Courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

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...