Flying Island

Washed in the blood Samantha and I went to Christian camp each summer. We flung marbles from slingshots waded through creeks, caught crawfish, were baptized and received into white, sun-warm, cotton towels. During Bible study, we’d catch  in cupped hands the daddy long legs loping  across the lichened rocks, enthralled with our  mettle for touching something so disgusting.  We didn’t kill them but instead plucked one, two, three, even (greedy) four legs  from their brown bodies to watch them in jolts drag themselves out of the sun. And we laughed and ran to play carpet ball with our friends, our limbs cartwheeling madly, as if boasting.   Rebecca Longenecker is a former resident of Indianapolis. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work has previously been published in Flying Island as well as Havik; Bridge Literary Journal ; Wilderness House Literary Review; Rhubarb Magazine; The Pointed Circle; Prospectus; Eclectica; and Montana Mouthful.

Tuned Every Night Soon as I’m up my upper right eyelid resumes twitching  and not in time to Here Comes the Sun.  My toothbrush teases my tongue tip.  Any instant can open the door for despair.  As in a cackle of hyenas.  As in a swan without her wedge.  As in the lead dog eaten by four teammates. Then nightfall, a loose uncertainty. As in fitting a projection into a recess. As in the beast breathing heavy again outside the window.  Despair like holding a bag of shit without a dog in sight,  like kids screaming from too much fun or from being murdered,  hard to tell from over the fence.  Like a business of ferrets eating your final meal. Each morning I light a candle, sit in a blue club chair  and begin the meltdown procedures.  I had the job once of ringing the E-flat bell  every time someone died. There was a long list.  My wrist got tired. My ear bones got confused.  Some of us are no good at making money, piano tuner turned cookie inspector,  forklift driver turned bank teller mass

Fawn This morning, still gray with early dawn, having stepped out for today’s headlines, I found a fawn in our front yard, not poised for quick exit, rather folded to a roundness as if asleep in the safe density of high grass, still dreaming the return of its mother. Partly eaten, something had brought it down where it lay or possibly dragged its dark mound from the woods across the road. Given the few choices of Indiana’s carnivores, it could’ve been a bobcat or coyote, maybe a dog, but I think not. The cunning, the raw mix of blood and fur, bones still gleaming freshly stripped, apropos of natural instinct…and yet, done with a kind of crude propriety, some semblance of order and arrangement as it rose, sated, and assumed the slowness of the bobcat that appeared years ago from the woods out back as I sat on the deck, thinking at first a domestic stray with facial ruff, the tuft of pointed ears, no hurry, a beast in charge of the moment as it took the narrow path between the neighbors

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 6.28 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Zoe Boyer , Doris Lynch , and Joshua Kulseth . 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

Heatwave Fever breaks, sun slipping behind the peak,  earth’s brow sweating off a last bead of light.  Cool air is a spell compelling me from the  bed’s burning sheets to the balcony door where the silhouettes of cafe chairs sit angled in  quiet communion and the dome of stars is  planetarium-bright; I can almost hear a voiceover intoning,  to the naked eye, Venus appears… The neighbors have made a nightclub of  their garage, the yawning door letting loose their  raucous whoops, a drunken belt of  Piano Man .  This is all we can ask of a heatwave, housebound  until moonrise, then these few hours respite folded  between the tight seam of blaze and black, the moon  a spotlight on the driveway’s stage as neighbors  emerge from the wings, mountains hulking  darkly now the houselights have dimmed, and from the cheap seats, all the pine trees are waving.  Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosa pi

Ballet with Kimono and Underthings After a Photo by Dorothea Lange: “Wash-Day 40 Hours Before Evacuation of Persons of  Japanese Ancestry from the Farming Community" They gave us only two days to pack and store or give away our valuables, to notify bosses  and bill collectors, to drape our furniture  into animal shapes, to lock our houses  and apartments. They urged us to wash laundry  first, warning us of dusty conditions at Manzanar.   Deep in the armoire’s darkness, I shrouded  our Sunday best.  Next, I washed the everyday things— stirring with a pole in the sixteen-gallon wooden pail,  scrubbing stains with a bristle brush, the remnant bar of Ivory.   Through tears, I hung on the line my husband’s shirts  and pants, my oldest kimono, two skirts, a half-slip, a few underthings. Though there was much to do--scrub floors,  give away perishables, feed and release the cats,  I found myself twirling by the irrigation ditch  watching my blue and gladiola-flowered kimono,  and my hus

Nisus and Euryalus In winter shut behind doors we’d shoot  contests from the foul line: a game           of who could make most in a row. Beginning again and again until our arms ached, when dinner was called           we walked back to the common room as slow as we liked, practically touching we were so close, jostling one another,           gravel sliding underfoot. I watched you in a game of pickup, moving between defenders,  cutting to the basket; it was like they were           fumbling in the dark— you made it look that easy, and I loved you. On the court  unstoppable; we swatted the ball,           fluid in our moving together. You caught me up into yourself cracking  jokes when I wanted to cry, taking me on walks            or to the courts to beat me again; you beat me at everything. It broke me  to lose you in the dark, in the brambles where I tried           retracing my steps, you in the enemy’s camp, captured or defected I couldn’t tell. I wept over leaving you alone to

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 5.31 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Janet E. Irvin , Zachary Danker t, Susan Mason Scott , and Nancy Botkin . 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