Flying Island

August There is a rip in the clouds where morning  begins, in slow motion, to unwrap  the night, shifting the sky from coal  to ash to sand, telling the quick brown bat  to go home. Air remains motionless, cowering  in silence as daylight presses its hot,  heavy body against the earth, a wet moan  sliding up my neck, mosquitoes like fingertips  teasing where they don’t belong.     Skye Nicholson is a part-time poet and founder and CEO of Soul's Truth Coaching, empowerment coaching services for women. She lives in Columbus, Indiana, with her husband and two children. Her first book of collected works, published December 2021, is entitled Unexpected Alchemy: Poems of Addiction and Awakening .

Punchy & Pissed I was born, quickly, in a thunderstorm—a  red, mottled projectile. Thunder and lightning shook the walls as the doctor held my single mother’s flesh.   I was born in 1979 to hillbilly shame—a backward blame. Even the Tribune couldn’t be bothered with my birth.    I was born in a rusted automobile with a half tank of gas and a hole in the floor. The carvings scratched in the door read Jesus Save s! I had heard bastards didn’t count.   I was born wailing, railing, at our socio-economic class, shouting into the wind, into the void, to anyone who would listen. I would be different! I would not stand on the backs of my ancestors–those ancient idiots. I would rip their heads off and roar.    I was born to a house full of German women. Themselves, born on the hard side of life—they had piss in their souls. Cause grandpa had whiskey on his breath and meanness in his fist. And grandma was a hag with a cigarette coated tongue. But, like our house, their frames were sturdy.  T

Rain Momma always said you can smell the rain before it even hits pavement before the sirens blare with full wiper clearing off a torrent of tears Momma wasn’t there the day you gasped for a breath that almost never came, when your sister said you looked like momma right before she never came home, right before she hollered help me to our son five hundred miles away, but frankly to me, you never looked more beautiful than when I touched your hand and let them take you and when they flipped on the flashing lights, I knew home was just as far as our son was the day Momma died, the day our yard was a river and you were the bridge   Kevin LeMaster lives in South Shore, Kentucky. His poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, The Slipstream , Triggerfish Critical Review , Route 7 Review , West Trade Review , The Big Window Review , Santa Clara Review Dead Skunk Magazine and others. He has work forthcoming in Internet Void , Main Street Rag and Coffin Bell Journal. His work in Rubic

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 murmuration. We have yet to travel through the flatte

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 Critical Review , Route 7 Review , West Trade Review , T

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 Sheila-Na-Gig.