The Very Next Season The woman asked me if I could move out of her way.A variety of people came into the subway car. Some were overly friendly. Others were insane.I looked around for someone that I knew. It was then I discovered that some of my friends had grown very old.I quickly changed trains at DeKalb and rode all the way to Coney Island. I walked past the frozen Ferris wheel out onto the beach.The winter rains reminded me that the very next season was Spring.   Michael Cooney has published poetry in Badlands, Second Chance Lit, Bitter Oleander, Big Windows Review and other journals. His short stories have…

{The Crows of Dresden} My mother dreaded anything with a beak. Eagles and doves no exception. When the windows were open and a house sparrow flew in, she ran. Ran for the door, the fields out front and the forest behind our house. The earth filled with feathers. My mother fretted. She shuddered with coughs. I ran to soothe her, but in her head, birds circled, flocks conspired. Any head-under-wing left Mother open-jawed: the raven, the hawk, even the black-capped chickadee, with its common coo-coo. I yelled for Father who came with a broom. Mother flailed her arms like a wide-winged fowl. I held her and whispered: The black crows…

Orphans, Old In Prague they remembered the old orphansWho came to their house, pretending to beReligious people, or famous writers.He sat on a big pillow, and sheTook the favorite chair. AnotherCame with band-aids on hisFace and his science fiction.Others liked dressing up andPretending to be a professor or aDoctor of writing. They smiled and gaveThem tea and wine and cookies and cheeseAnd ten years later half were gone, unfindable,But we remembered how they made up namesFor themselves, pretended to be lightning-strickenWith great truths, by agents fighting for their works—Everywhere! And always attended astronomical eventsWhere crazy old men gathered with great large telescopes.   Rebecca Pyle is living in France this…

Observer’s Paradox When I was eight I watched my cousinget hit by lightning.                                   It felt likeI made it happen.Lightning                  drew on him: Lichtenberg figuresthe startling henna, a map of his veins. Everyone who looked at himcould see his blood,                  could follow where it went. If people pray it makes me                           uneasy, but the statueof the virgin of Guadalupewith plastic flowers             …

My Body My body smells old Leaves overturned and wet Bark peeling down to limb Wine dried in tumblers left on the counter Sunday papers disintegrating in the rain   Barbara Miner holds the position of tenured Professor and Chair in the Department of Art, at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, OH. Her mixed media sculptures, installation works, paintings, and writings, informed by the nexus of human/nature iteraction, and the practice of meditative repetition, have been exhibited nationally (Maine to California) and internationally (Sweden and Poland) in over 107 exhibitions.

Humming Throats Did the fly drown in the cup already?Every existence is a digestion—furniture grazes skin likefingers soak clouds Let’s wait for all fliesto cross the swallowingwe can work with what’s left.   Madina Tuhbatullina is an international student from Turkmenistan, receiving a Creative Writing MFA degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Madina’s work has been published or is forthcoming in New Note Poetry, PubLab, great weather for MEDIA’s anthology and elsewhere. Madina is an alumna of the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop and Tupelo Press Manuscript Workshop.

For Sean When I was a boyI was so often on a plane in the empty skybetween my parentsin the indistinct careof flight attendants that when I handed youover to the systemof the hospitalit felt like Ihad put you on a plane I imagined yousmall in your seatwatching a screenwatching the cloudsthe nation belowlike a pincushion where were you goingin that thin bright airI walked to the vending machinesthey made a darkkind of center the smallness I wasin those hourswas what I’d thoughtmy parents becamewhen I was gone I tried to readin my vinyl chairwhile you were therein that parentless place but also insidethis bit of my childhood which couldn’t…

Leaving You remember most the empty house,how it centres to your point of view,and looking back you see its shape,the cresting roof, the attic glass that brokethere once and fell away, and dimly,still, the rows of sleepers withempty rails, which led you somewhere,you suppose, though nowhere you could name. Now and then the place returns to youlike this: the dazzled porch, the empty field,the bedroom windows staring back throughdarkened shades, and where the ridgelinegutters down, a finial still rises up to pinthe sky, as if to make it yield.   Epitaph My father never gave adviceand often he would say to me,remember not to let your housegrow higher than the…

Trespass Western Lake, WA In secret I climbed down to the tweaker’s habitat to the owner’s absence or oblivion. In the pea green doublewide a pit bull barked and whirled, scratched and whined, trash-eating scourge of the lakeside neighborhood—though the lake is gone now. The abandoned, sallow watchdog couldn’t watch me through the green pitted door, but could he smell, could he scent me in the wild hedges? Is that what made him scratch and whinny and bark bark bark? Could he tell of the branches nobody owns, the greenery and brambles with their teeth? Shiny with hunger, with greed and without black art I tore through the blood sisterhood…

Sketching I like the idea of you,those lines I penciled in,the shading of your eyes,the curve of your cheeks,just a bit too gaunt,the subtle angled jauntof your adobe red beret;I like the shading,the slight blurring of charcoalthat gifted youa devil-may-care grin;I want to meet you,to brush back the bangsI swept across your foreheadand plant a kiss on the tipof your Romanesque nose.   Fade to Black Languish is so close to anguish,is it not? The way the two lieside-by-side:a wasting away,the way my face contortsin a concerted effort to hold back tears,the way your hair comes out in clumpsand coats the inside of the shower,the way I wipe it away…