by HOWIE GOOD I dreamed the other night that dreaming had been outlawed. Anyone under suspicion was promptly visited by special police. In my dream, an officer woke me with a blow to the heart. I saw to my horror that a traveling guillotine had already been assembled. Then, with the officer providing a running […]

Read More Blow to the Heart

by JEFFREY HERMANN The mayor doesn’t live in the mayor’s mansion. I think because it’s too close to the river which is loud and full of waste. Statistically, it always contains a corpse or two, which are not waste. They are people and deserve better. They deserve a clear sky. They deserve a big house and someone to […]

Read More That Always Sounds Funny to Me

by AMY BARNES It makes me mad I can’t fly. I feel feathers under my skin, tingling reminders of long-forgotten flight. I tried when I was six and ended up with a broken leg and a mother that had to come home from work early to scoop me up off the ground like a broken […]

Read More When Girls Had Wings

by KAPKA NILAN Remember that year when the apple trees did not bear any fruit, and the rose did not flower, then suddenly blossomed in December. When they came to prune the trees in spring and asked for you, I could not bring myself to say you’d been gone so I lied that you went […]

Read More Anomalies

by AMY BARNES My veins turn wooden one day in October. The doctor that cuts them out of my legs to make me look prettier for my husband, gives them to me on a napkin to take home to show the husband of the root leg wife as I am known to our curious neighbors. […]

Read More The Zen of Inosculation

by TIM FRANK I have a power that means images of taste and colour swirl through my mind. Colours in sound, music in perfume. The alphabet glowing. Numbers singing. But then there’s the pain that follows, because I’m alone with this strange force, and as I feel more, I hurt more. I have never known […]

Read More The Music of Dirt

by SHEREE SHATSKY My grandmother tumbles dice from her lucky red martini shaker. The crowd at the Delray Beach American Legion Hall call my grandma the Queen of Craps. She rolls snake eyes. “Crap,” she says. “A pair of bloody pips.” She shoves the dice at me. “Blow on these quick. For luck.” I cringe. […]

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by DAVID P. BARKER . When I saw you there Bathing in your home. I did not mean to. I was not peeking. I was just getting air And I saw you. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I knew instantly that you were something I must have Someone I must possess And I […]

Read More On David and Bathsheba

by TIM FRANK By the white cliffs of Dover near a choppy sea, a painted shaman wore a cloak of mobile phones that rattled like the displaced pebbles on the beach, and as he swirled and twisted on the balls of his feet he bashed a bucket with a handful of reeds blessing babies from […]

Read More Urban Shaman

by JOHN B. RILEY The one thing my father told me that I want to believe is that when he served his time at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary he had the honor of being housed in a cell block with Don Vito Genovese, the mafia kingpin who ran the Greenwich Village Crew when he was […]

Read More Boss of Bosses