Welcome to the January 2021 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! FICTION Sara McKinney: "Itemize, Deduct" Dan Carpenter: "Getting On" POETRY Jenny Kalahar: "The Dolls of 2020" F. Richard Thomas: "Assemblage" Jennifer McClellan: "A Weakness In My Eye" Joseph Kerschbaum: "Portrait of an Afternoon with my Daughter" CREATIVE NONFICTION Brian Garrido: "Sowing the Seeds of Love: Taking Care of Martin Luther King Jr. Park and Peace Memorial" Jeff Rasley: "Healing the Heart of America" READ FOR FLYING ISLAND Flying Island Journal is seeking readers to join our staff. We care about representation and are looking to diversify our team and the work we publish. What is a reader? A reader is an invaluable member of the editorial team. Readers help read submissions and recommend work for Flying Island to publish. What is involved? This volunteer position will take roughly four hours a month. Readers will be assign
It is January 31, and the accountants, still smelling faintly of furniture polish and printer toner, sit at their desks with hands clasped, hands sliding fresh ink cartridges into fountain pens, hands balled into eager, moistening fists. The men wear black blazers with blue ties and the women blue blouses, a blue that is the shade of cornflowers and baby blankets, of sugar sand beaches and Silicon Valley. They are professional yet approachable, classic yet modern. For weeks, they have subsisted on wheat germ, watercress, juiced vegetables, cleansing their bodies of toxins and excess oils, freeing their minds of desire and bad intentions. The waiting room has a new Boston fern and three glass tables, their tops wiped clean of fingerprints. Outside, the sun refracts off last night’s snow and paints the wall with golden tracers. The year is still, so new you can smell the plastic of its wrapping. In tentative trickles, we come to fill the sensible black waiting chairs, tap our feet, cl