Flying Island

Bird Strike Analysis by Stephen R. Roberts A bird strikes the back door window, a pluff of feather on glass. There’s a little mark on the pane to mark where the pain came from. The bird’s ok. Though I’m dizzy, confused in thoughts of flying The bird’s up, wobbling across the concrete. I try to help, stretching my arms perpendicular to my torso, as if wearing a cloak of feathers. I flap. The bird watches through the clear sky he just smacked into. He perceives that unseen accidents may be where or when it ends. There’s a look in his eye as he tilts his head, and I tilt mine in the opposite direction to show I understand or have no qualms or questions about attempts to crash through new dimensions to reach kitchens or space-time continuums with vivid possibilities. After all, spring will be here soon or sometime after, and windows should be foiled or hung with ribbon marking entries to new worlds, so they can be avoided or prepared for ahead of time without the head

your summer at fernwood by Jeffrey Owen Pearson because men were forbidden in your room we camped deep in the hardwoods where two streams slipped into one it always rained and skin stuck to skin in a glorious sweat you joked every time I came the blankets were a tent and you need bring no poles at first light when we walked among the wild bergamot and prairie blazing stars hummingbirds suckled near your breasts late summer the rocket grass fired red like a beautiful disaster Bio: Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s poems appear in So It Goes, Reckless Writing Anthology, Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island and Maize. His chapbook Hawaii Slides was published by Pudding House Publications. A member of the Midwest Writers Workshop, he lives in Muncie.

Lunaticular by Stephen R. Roberts It’s always up there waning and waxing. Making faces out of shadows or vice-versa, cheese, or no cheese. Hiding rodent-like by day. Peering down at night, a big eye during harvest, or maybe later in the season, after heavy snow, with silver fantasies ricocheting off every branch. Yet ricochet isn’t the right word; it’s too reminiscent of bullets. And there was only one silver bullet. The Lone Ranger had it. Or was that his horse? In a moonstruck language, Tonto’s greeting may have been the word for werewolf. And werewolves can be killed by silver bullets. Or is that vampires? No. It’s normal looking people sprouting coarse hair from every pore, and blossoming into wolves when the full moon rises. There’s a poem about it the old gypsy lady chants as clouds drift over the pock-marked surface, and Lon Chaney Jr. rips his shirt to shreds. It’s something about wolfbane blooming, which must be lovely for all the syncopated loser

Driving to the Stardust Buffet by Richard Pflum I remember the tick of the beginning, now hear the tock of the continuing, and from between the tock and the tick , a more rhythmic pounding of the nothing . I have gone out to gather in my sustenance: some ions, neutral atoms, many neutrons and protons with a limited number of quarks and the rare and very small boson. Electrons and positrons have been combined into rich sauces and beside them are the colorful and sparkling quanta, garnished with neutrinos. It is all laid out on a black presentation board on a counter top: this stuff I am and need, things some stars                                       no longer have any use for. Still, I feel sometimes that I am a byproduct of some other more generous nature as I drive into the parking lot, very crowded now with its rolling ambience of charged bodies blinking their lights on and off as a crowd awaits beside the event horizon gate and a doorman, liveried wi

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Mortality by Anne Haines It was the hottest summer anyone could remember. I know Texans laugh at twenty, twenty-one days of ninety but some afternoons the air was so thick with humidity you could have spread it on a birthday cake. Animals died at the county fair, the grand champion hog smothered in his own incipient bacon, lambs panting behind the lemon shake-up stand. Even my sunflowers, bobbing and weaving in the front yard like stunned prizefighters, let their leaves wither, collapse like old women’s hands that have given up on prayer. Seasons like that, everything feels like a warning. And when the nights are no relief, the dark air limp and lowering, we lie as still as possible in separate beds listening to the dense hum of crickets, listening past them to the distant yip of a coyote, past that to the slow machine of weather churning in the distance, in the moonlight’s steam, in the unavoidable swelter of August’s