Issue Twenty-One – Winter 2013

Buffalo Moon

By Claire Gebben

Serena clunked shut her car door in front of her darkened apartment building. The light of a full moon cast intricate patterns across the two story facade, shadows from sentinel utility towers in the field. The smells from the power line right-of-way, dew-damp

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It’s All About Teeth, in the End

By Brian Doyle

And while I am on the subject of elementary school holiday music productions, which I feel should be regulated like any other controlled substance, I am reminded of the Easter pageant, again at Saint John Vianney School near the Atlantic Ocean, when another one

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Surviving the Sixties

By Mariana Damon

We were sitting in Dena’s house in Eugene, drinking coffee and reminiscing about the sixties and how we’d all barely gotten out alive. Back then, the four of us had been closer than sisters; we’d lived together, danced together, and cried together. Forty years, marriage, careers, and raising children had separated us. Then my

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The Last Days of Camelot

By Erin Pounders

Morty Adler had fallen down next to the coffee table. For the past ten minutes he had been unable to get up, lying on his side with one cheek resting on the carpet. He held the cordless phone to his ear and listened to the 911 operator as she told him to stay on the line

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The Mustache

By Sarah Goffman

For every day that went by since Mara Shi had gotten her period and Ariel still hadn’t, Ariel became more and more convinced that she was probably a boy. She’d read articles about hermaphrodites whose inside-out penises looked exactly like vaginas until one day they

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In Amber

By Susi Lovell

It’s easy now. Her body has remembered. Her legs fly like they used to years ago when she won the sprint in fourth grade. Her lungs heave. Not long now, Ellie tells them.

She passes the statue of the old man gazing up into the sky, a look

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Luggage Check

By Brandon McNulty

The best thing about being the first guy off the plane is that you get first crack at the luggage. And since I only brought a backpack, I’ll look completely inconspicuous when I roll off with someone’s suitcase. To be honest, I don’t even care what’s inside. Hotel

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Hollowed Ground: A Hole In Borneo

By Nancy Penrose

The boatman switched off the motor and we floated in the silence of the swamp. In the light of near sunset, I lifted my binoculars and traveled the leaves of trees until I latched onto gold-red fur that resolved into the body of a proboscis monkey. Nasalis larvatus.

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Where a Real Muscle Car Took Me

By Judith Shadford

It’s such a weird story I really haven’t told many people…even in bars like this. Almost nobody’s drunk enough to believe me and the ones who nod and say, “Yeah, dude”, I know they’ve never even heard of Johannes Brahms or Franz Liszt, much less George Sand. Ms. George

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Exposure

By Angelique Stevens

In Kompong Chnnang, two hours outside Phnom Penh, a Vietnamese woman paddled me through the largest floating village on the Tonle Sap River. I sat camera in hand, uncomfortably squat-kneed, on an old wooden longboat that threatened to topple us if I shifted. I peered

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Epitaph for an Evening

By Indy Zoeller

A week ago, when Matt Granderson told me he was coming to Orcas with some people, he made it sound like Stephen Fincher had a cabin and maybe five or ten people were going. Just a few college friends getting together – a campfire, laughter, stories.

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Fading

By Judith Gille

It is a year of dead and dying cockroaches. I wake up each morning, my bedroom floor a battlefield of tiny reddish-brown corpses, with a few near-fatalities scattered in between,their six-legs flailing in desperate attempts to right themselves.

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Discharge

By J. A. Bernstein

When the war came,
it came to him in flashes,
abruptly, like something
convoluted

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Dionysiou Areopagitou Street

By Loukia M. Janavaras

ancient marble frames
wide cobblestone,
hills and trees
as if
a painting

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The Daily Wheel

By Tom Piekarski

I can’t deplane from the daily wheel,
grime glued to its ball bearings.
That wheel turns trapezoidally
and squawks louder than a thousand bats!

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Molecules

By David Hornibrook

She sounds like cobblestone when she sleeps
but wakes early, before the grass the burning
bushes or tiger lilies, only the roots of our
willow are awake at this hour breathing,

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For what it’s worth

By Rachel Riebe

If you want to measure your salt, bake.
Bake until you develop a crush
on the green ceramic knife and
linger at the kiss of good chocolate

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The End of Things

By Robert Joe Stout

So tired she
can barely pull
her suitcase
down the airport

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Just Past Wisconsin Ave. on 4th St.

By Jenny Morse

I want to be someplace else
like the restaurant my father
drove us to when I was twelve,
downtown with fish tanks

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Plums

By Bobbi Sinha-Morey

Language has a flavor.
Imagine tasting peaches
and listening to the canary’s
acoustics; me on the porch

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Poem for Ishi

By Scott T. Starbuck

Imagine being the last survivor
of the United States of America,

your people bounty-hunted
by invaders from across the sea

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Triolet for a Sailboat

By Carolyne Wright

You took us out in your hand-built, gaff-rigged sloop.
You showed us how to trim the jib, hoist sails,
tack into wind, or run through the rip-tides’ hoop.
You showed us the ropes on your hand-built, gaff-rigged sloop.

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Words Taking on the World

By Jeremiah O'Hagan

By Jeremiah O’Hagan Co-editor for prose We sat and smoked in the 2 a.m. December cold. It was windy and clear at the edge of Gasworks Park, and across Lake Union’s chop, Seattle blazed, a constellation of lights and lives arranged into a cityscape. High cloud cover glowed silky silver-yellow, the city’s reflection smeared across […]

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Works

By Nancy Bingham

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