Issue Twenty-Two – Summer 2013

Inheritance

By Lindsay Wells

Sometimes you sit on a patch
of deadening grass
overlooking the river
and wonder
what it would feel like

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Plow Horse

By Mary Wlodarski

A steady giant, dappled
graying. Turning grass
into narrow furrows. Boy
leaning with all his weight
works his father’s fields.

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Size 8

By Holly Day

I will know I have lived a good life
when everything I own
at the time of my death
can fit into a shoebox
you can slip under the bed

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A Little Green

By Kathleen Holliday

I hoped to burst into leaf
(Having read it worked for her)
My toes sunk deep into brown carpet,
Arms branching toward the ceiling –

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Stride

By Joan Colby

At one point in the gallop
All four feet are off the ground
And the horse is for the moment
Airborne the way an angel

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Arapahoe Pass

By Tim Grassley

Up the dust and indian paint brush afternoon
the sun rolled like a stone
between my fingertips.
Even with the columbines
and valleys sprouted high green,

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Memento Mori

By Kathleen Holliday

It is time for putting away – and yet,
An aura lingers over a photograph,
A card or two.

Of himself, there is hardly a sign;
Red roses in the vase blacken

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Twice Unlucky in Love

By Craig McVay

Twice unlucky in love, Grace
never said a word about the dazzling blue tumors
bubbling in her stomach.
Proud Ohio stock, she disbelieved in doctors.
No hospital, no morphine.

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Career Change

By Tana Young

The air is gamy and thick.
My skin slick blisters
with sweat. Mosquitoes
drone in a ditch. Dragons
fly above a murky Mekong,

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Almost Like Steve McQueen

By Lou Gaglia

It wasn’t just his aching tooth that made him call twenty different dentists in the hope that one would see him on a Sunday. It was his chance to show that he was no chicken when it came to sitting in a dentist’s chair—that those days were over.

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Her Crown on My Head

By Jessica Barksdale

Sitting next to Miss Sweet Senior Sunshine in the tour bus is dangerous, but she’s rarely given me a choice, finding time on each drive to scoot me over and plop down, leaning close, a tanned claw on my pale wrist. Sharp and hard, the pins on her beauty contest winner’s sash and the plastic points of her bejeweled silver crown

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Borderlines

By Jim Gearhart

The edge between land and sea may be the world’s oldest border. Walking by the shore, where the ocean grinds against sand and rock, you see how life thrives along this boundary. Algae grow on the rocks, seaweed grows in the shallows, and animals feed on both.

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February

By Amanda Leahy

The mule deer come so close to the house during winter that you notice their coarse hair and the thinness of their legs. They have descended from the higher elevations to forage in hay fields and to knock birdseed from our feeder. When they are this close, you see the physical marks of their season-to-season existence, scars from barbed

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Two for the Price of One

By Wayne Cresser

Whenever Neva drops by, I think she has come to get her turkey out of my freezer. She bought two for the price of one a year ago for the holidays, and since she had no room in her fridge for an extra turkey, the bird___ all frozen, featherless, and pimply-skinned___ came to live with me. I hardly knew her when she asked me if she

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Mirrors

By Wayne Johnston

The gun had always been there, in the brown leather shaving kit on the top shelf of the linen closet. I think he put it there when we moved into the house and we kids were small enough that we couldn’t reach it. Then he forgot about it. It wasn’t even his. It had belonged to my mother’s father, and it had history that was better

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The Thief

By Maya Borhani

When I stepped out
into the purpled night air
even the rain smelled like you,

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The Currency of Human Consciousness

By Jeremiah O'Hagan

The first time I met Brian Doyle, he said, “To catch and tell stories: it’s so holy.” I’d heard people call stories many things, but I’d never heard someone call them holy. Never divine or near God.

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Visual Art

By Colin Goode

UntitledMixed media on canvas

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Visual Art

By Anne Puotinen

Nightmare, 2013Charcoal and oil on canvas46” x 58”

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