Flying Island

III Poems from a Stormy Evening after the storm’s peak                          tossing earth and walls passed leaving a snail’s trail                gleaming furrow carved  white and shades of gray                    their empty heads rang screaming and moaning               crying over missing persons behind the dark horizon               where strangers live and die there was only quiet                          in rooms beneath stones except for our breathing           sharing damp air over raw lips bodies shining damp              falling limp slack deeply relaxed  she held me in her arms            ...

Butterfly Wings No one sang me lullabies. Cradled in a splintered crib, I was lulled to sleep  by the sound of my own silent cries. My lips were sewn shut – stitched  in awkward zigzags. I ripped those stitches wide, my mouth becoming a perfectly shaped O. Butterflies tried to flutter from my mouth  even though their flesh still tasted of caterpillar. I tried to vomit them out, but they were one with my tongue. Maybe that is why they had time for a metamorphosis.  Too bad I missed mine – there I was – a baby  with little to no chance of gaining my butterfly wings, too. Angela Jackson-Brown is the author of the award-winning poetry collection House Repairs and five novels. In addition to her creative work, she serves as an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, and as a member of the graduate faculty at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University. Her dual roles as educator and writer continually inspire her expl...

Winter on the Blues Trail I’m on the Mississippi Blues Trail with my wife Katherine and we go to Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale to listen to Jimmy “Duck” Holmes. Katherine perceives that Anthony Bourdain is there also enjoying himself so she moves her chair closer to him and he smiles. She loves cooking Cajun and maybe she tells him so and he smiles more. The great lover of foods in so many places seems also to love the blues in Red’s Juke Joint. Some years after our Winter Blues Trail trip is over our daughter, who married a Franconian in Germany and loves to cook calls us, all upset with the news that Bourdain took his life. So sad, but I’m glad we saw him savoring the red-hot blues in such a friendly place as Red’s where so many people are very happy to be and thoroughly enjoy Red’s grilled meat and the red hot blues of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and the whole night was so memorable and my iPhone caught Anthony smiling while my wife sat near him. But, sadly, the blues could not keep him...

Cocoon For no good reason, a multi-colored silk dress spills from the cocoon      of a brown paper bag and      leaps into the bright blue wind,           never to be seen again. Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review among other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 20...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 1.31 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Charlotte Melin , Nick Conrad , Christie Chandler Stahl, and James Green . 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

North Shore  This beach is all sound, a crescent bay where  boundaries converge— birch and balsam, rhyolite and basalt, pink stone and water.  Opposite forces  layer the shorescape  in waves and shoulders. Resonance surrounds. Listening to it sing, I try to separate voices in the cacophony but hear braided together  the tone of the lake’s liquid muscle and the timbre of solid rock. Each tentative step  on such uneven terrain  takes focus and care.  Round stones slide, tumble perpetually, crashing surf surges out of the depths. Echoes, turbulence  amplify yearning  for profound quiet, for a walk beyond  our mad divisions  into a vaster space . Charlotte Melin grew up in Indiana and returns to visit. Retired from the University of Minnesota, she lives in Northfield and has published widely about German poetry, the environmental humanities, and teaching.

To One In Hell for a stroke victim One hand raised, the other grips the walker you push slowly  forward. You have forgotten  again if the piano  is on the left or right as you wheel your way to the bathroom. Robbed of sight, of most memories, you can still  get up unassisted,  can walk but only if  you keep to a very  narrow circuit that starts  with one recliner and ends  with another, a route, devoid of stairs. A route kept clear at all times. You move  counter-clock wise through rooms you once knew so well. Your tongue is often shocked by what  it says; your word-perch now a raucous roost. There should be a switch someplace, if you  could only find it, that turns the lights back on. A key  you fumble for day and night that just might unlock yourself.  Nick Conrad ’s poems first appeared in the 70’s/ 80’s in journals such as Green House, The Cumberland Review , and the TLS , with more than190 published since. His ...

Lee Street Beach Sun rises over Lake Michigan,  ignites a liquid field of sparklers through which a silhouette  of a woman skims the rippled surface, her muscled  strokes point to the shore lined with mussel shells. Algae bundles tangled green smell of wet nets. Wind whips a basso from towering oak and pine that watch like lifeguards, leaning toward the sun. Christie Chandler Stahl is an emerging poet, former librarian, teacher and college instructor. She has published in Midsummer Dream House and an anthology. She visits Lake Michigan almost daily, and lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband John.