Flying Island

Epithalamion from the ferris wheel, with birds Which summer was it I lost    my kid brother at the carnival? I spent                        my quarters like clouds spend rain. When I could not find him, fire-slaught sluiced through me, his name from my throat like the sounds           rising off the tilt-a-whirl, lifted higher than the carriage            of the ferris wheel. I ran the fairway. Please , I panted,                          and this is the part repeating in me like a robin’s song. Lover, I’m still greedy, still at the trickster’s stand trying              for that enormous unicorn stuffed with nothing but rannygazoo. I’ll vow it: I know so little of how love works, how it starts, stays, soars over the cherry orchards like a flock of starlings, flits and         ripples and settles in the forlorn stalks of corn. My brother         wandered out the 4-H hall, loped toward me             with a fist of popcorn. What I mean is I remember

  Privileged by Sara No ë           Today, I faced my white privilege in the mirror for the first time.           Today, I decided I didn’t want to be the silent spectator in the history books, the one who had to live with the guilt of watching injustices happening but holding her tongue, who shook her head in sadness at humanity’s lack of empathy but was too afraid to fight for change. Throughout my school career, I’d always wondered what I would have done during the darkest times of our history. Would I have been brave enough to speak out? Now, the pages are being written before my eyes. Change is happening, and this is my chance to finally know the answer to that question.           Today, I attended my first protest. I’ve yearned to protest issues in the past, but my courage always failed me, because in this America I’ve come to know, mass shootings are so normalized that I barely blink at yet another headline. It’s a cycle of “thoughts and prayers” followed almost immediately by a

Kitchen Romance Leave the dozen roses to their cellophane sleeve. Bring me instead a bouquet of late summer produce: the folded hands of the last lettuce leaves; the vintage tomatoes blushing purple, yellow, oranges at even the hint of sauce. Let lemon cukes roll joyous in the bushel basket, carousing with potatoes the size of solstice hail. Turn your head, but watch from the corner of your eye as the zucchini and yellow squash neck like geese. Tuck in tomatillos to await my fingers divesting them of their paper- lantern jackets. Serve me strawberries by the bleeding handful, and I will fill your mouth with blackberries from a handkerchief stained beyond salvation. Whisper every unspeakable unspoken that is the Vidalia.   And let fan the jungle stalks of rainbow chard, not cooling this mad air of August, but stirring it everywhere about. Bethany Brengan ’s poetry has appeared in various publications, including Contemporary Ver

Negative Space The wild honeysuckle bullied its way into every square foot south of my driveway. I’m unwieldy with the pruning saw, but as branch after branch falls away, I anticipate flourishing in the negative space, now open for the butterflies and robins, and hollowed high enough to stand full under the canopy of fragrant leaves. I wrangle the teeth of the saw against the neck of a branch grown wayward, while listening to a podcast suggest that   solitude and loneliness are more like distant cousins than identical twins. Or maybe, sometimes, loneliness is solitude, atrophied. Well muscled, it takes me to the dark room, and after drowning me in a wash of burning restlessness, it waits for my shadow self to slowly imprint my drying, developing counterpart in relief. Andrea Lee Dunn is from Indianapolis by way of the Texas-Mexico border and North Carolina. She studied creative writing at Texas Tech University and no