Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.25 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Margaret Fisher Squires , James Engelhardt , Daniel Lockhart , and Mary Ann Cain . 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 All images are sourced from the Canva library from various artists. 

Mercy of Errand I walk into the co-op grocery carrying two empty tote bags and the weight of the world. The weight of my clients’ fears and pain, their failing marriages and troubled children, their parents’ cruelty and indifference.   The burden of knowing that my friends and family  and body  ageing  will become burdensome. The pressure of worrying whether the money will last as long as our bodies do. The crushing rush of despair as democracy’s weaknesses and climate change engulf us, our damaged body politic   too puny and confused to lift  even half-filled sandbags into place. I run into friends. When is the next trip to the lake? Whose album release party comes up next? Did you know that  to remove the smell of skunk from your dog you need baking soda and laundry soap and at least a gallon of hydrogen peroxide? I eat lunch. Sweet pulled pork, creamy ravioli, lima beans with raisins, a rich...

Never Just a Game she tells me as we sit at the table,  the board before us a map of choices, a rack of identities to try on  and take off like a coat once loved, now thread-bare, pockets loaded  with memories like stones. Do we play against each other or the game? Easy enough to place my pieces wherever I want, sweep everything aside, but desire is hottest when it’s thwarted the tension building with each move weighed,  considered—the flirting comment,  the quick look down, a glancing touch butterfly soft along the curve of back. Almost the story of when we met,  the story we take with us like a scarf through meetings with friends, colleagues,  the familiar piece we can display and say,  Why, this unlikely thing?  We’re trying out new paths new ways to test and rest against the other, to find this small success or that as territories shift and pieces web their way across the board. We choose. And each choice tangles  with the others unt...

Nkata Lënapeowsi “I am [an] Indian and in this town I will never be a saint.” - Joy Harjo “Santa Fe” Here the waters and the people move shielding themselves from the gentle folding of land, trees, and water. Here we came to rest. And the trees and the land and  the waters have been folded beneath, resting as unkempt streets, odor heavy Bradford pears sterilize it all. Rest, the end of our ongoing exile, unreached as we dissolve like ink  blotches into settler denuded land. Relentless need to move along through lands we recognize as fractured, sense they were once familiar. Linger over bone fragments of extinct pigeons, burrowed roots of deceased chestnuts. Our days dogged by historians,  lawyers, petty poets, who circle praise of their murderous kin. Each word, each fiction, flash-bangs to chase out their guilt, us. Sainthood over reparations, over simple healing. Nkata. Perhaps for the flash-bangs to stop. To hear spoken the truth of our relationship. Nkata....

To be Held by a Horse You of the global eyes  mounted sideways on your long, sturdy face.  How is it that I may stare longingly at you, my straight-ahead  predator eyes fixed  on your round haunches, sleek  neck, and wind-tossed mane  without even a flinch or flicker  from your flanks? You trust my human more than I  trust myself, more open than I could be in the face of such threat.  Somehow, I think, it’s not my arms  squeezing you close like some forgotten toy,  nor my worshipful gaze into your long-lashed,  beauty queen eyes. I doubt you much care for my human touch, or perhaps you do seek that rhythm, the drawn-out, tender strokes,  the searching that reveals  how you, too, have been moved  by a strange and persistent hand.  Darling pony face, in all our glide, rock, and whisper,  in the stretch of my hips over yours,  in the muscular rise and fall of your back between my open thighs burns an ...