The pager on my belt squeals with familiar tones. Tom, the 911 dispatcher, sounds stressed while declaring there’s a boy missing at the Fox Hall development. The mother can be heard in the background screaming, “I want him found now! You find him now!” It is an unusual blistering July afternoon on San Juan Island.
Continue reading...Issue Twelve – March 2008
All We
By Anita Leigh Holladay
Hands converge
towards top
of clock on kitchen wall. Beneath,
table full of dips, smoked salmon,
Comeona’ My Kitchen
By John Sangster
Push back the chrome dinette.
Slow dance on my linoleum
(clock radio knows the hits).
Tonight we cookin’.
Flat Poem
By John Sangster
This the
Flat-ass truth. Cruisin’ down
Flatbush when Boom!
Flat tire. Gets out, hears music—third-floor
Guitar Propped Upright in My Study Corner
By John Sangster
Mother’s violin waits in the attic,
wondering if it remembers how to sing.
Father’s songs (It meant he was happy)
hang in the air.
A Visit in West Haven
By Judith Miller
If I could say where I had been today,
describe a room holding its breath behind drawn, faded drapes,
hoarding its hope against the cruel demands of light.
If I could name the pleasantries punctiliously observed,
Stealing
By Kip Robinson Greenthal
She steals from her parents’ house. Twelve porcelain plates with cobalt trim, a dozen wine glasses wrapped in her polar fleece jacket, and two gold lamps with painted roses on their bases. Her hands sweat holding these things, as she rushes from the house worrying that the front door will slam shut before she comes back for the second load.
Continue reading...Warding Off Eclipses
By Chrys Buckley
I am albino. Albinism is a recessive genetic condition characterized by lack of pigment and legal blindness. My skin and hair are paler than pale, and my eyes are a translucent blue that sometimes looks red in the light. Since albinism is recessive, I’m the only one in my family with the condition.
Continue reading...Thank You, Miss Barney
By Oak Boesky
Thank you, Miss Barney
For not giving me credit
For those one thousand pages
For ten one hundred page books
Living in Her Hands
By Iris Graville
First she was Steamboat Pottery. Then Redwing Pottery. Now it’s just Nancy Bingham and a business card with a graphic of a pair of hands. A potter for forty of her fifty-eight years, Nancy says, “My hands are my best sense organ. I feel an amazing amount of stuff. I live in my hands.”
Continue reading...Pendarvis
By Richard Carter
Pendarvis was an unlikely hero. To begin, there was his name: Arthur Pendarvis, Jr. Why didn’t adults realize it’s dumb for two people to have the same name in one family? One of them always gets called something else, and it’s never the adult. Why not give the child his own name in the first place?
Continue reading...Facing Turtleback
By Anita Leigh Holladay
Great mountain, gold
and green! Look at you,
looming above small farms
where island boys grew to manhood
Cloud Creek
By Weyshawn Douglas Koons
The world, as I know it, changes for me in 1973.
It changes for others in different ways. Richard Nixon is inaugurated to serve a second term as President of the United States of America. Things will soon change drastically for him though because Watergate begins months later. Nixon will submit his resignation the following summer to avoid the insult of impeachment.
Continue reading...
Remington
By JoEllen Moldoff
I heard a rap at the door.
There it was, suspended
like a do-not-disturb sign.
Mother’s old portable turned up last night.
Continue reading...Nuestra Senora de la Salud
By JoEllen Moldoff
She is becoming
more beautiful each day
like ripening fruit.
The yellows, oranges,
Write On!
By The Editors
Writing the stories in our heads takes us into our souls. It lets us dive into the deep waters of the unconsciousness to plumb whatever it is that lives there, lets us find out what needs attention as well as what we can leave to lie still forever. Writing our stories takes us on a profound inner journey where we learn about our world and ourselves. Writing our stories also opens windows into other lives. Writing our stories connects us.
Continue reading...