Issue 13: Once Upon a Linear Time (Aug-Sep 2017) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.
The desire to be seen is
transforming.
Slide a mirror to me,
under the door,
here in this dark room,
and I will find a way
to flash semaphores.
—
Anna Kander, MSW, earned her social work degree in the Midwest. Her poetry and fiction are slated to appear in Breadcrumbs, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere. Find her at annakander.com.
After it’s over
I’ll count my spoons
and line the plates up
and swear no one ever
took anything from me
I wasn’t ready to give.
If I do this well enough
I might even convince myself.
But I feel the cracks
spreading underneath
my fresh plaster,
and the pipes are leaking
somewhere in the cellar.
I don’t think I’ll get away
with my pretense
of order smooth as an egg
without a cloud or question
to mark its perfect surface.
I think I must go down
with all the other
tatterdemalions
too rough and raggedy
to let in the house,
too mad to expect
anything less.
—
Mary McCarthy has always been a writer, but spent most of her working life as a Registered Nurse. She has had work published in many print and online journals, including Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, Verse Virtual, and the Ekphrastic Review. Her electronic chapbook Things I was Told Not to Think About is available as a free download from Praxis Magazine.
Trees are eating a road near Chernobyl.
They have rooted through asphalt like insanity
and hunger, and have cloned many more willows
full of birds. We hope all of this is the health,
the recovery, three times more like a new heaven
baptizing itself in the songs of wrens and kingfishers
at the edge of starlight. Yes, the trees feed
shadows to the nests, and a few stray tabbies
claw into the scents and voices, so we learn.
Yes an old woman follows us, and relinquishes
her name because it was carved into a small tree
by her first lover more than seventy autumns ago.
The name is illegible now inside her mind.
—
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, VA with his wife Kendall and thier son Alan. Kendall illustrated a book of his poems that has just been published: Fiddling At Midnight’s Farmhouse (Cedar Creek Publishing).
you
painted
my head
white
soft hands
planted roots
on my scalp
spring warmth
cherry blossoms
in your laugh
petals
on our tongues
—
James Croal Jackson’s poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Rust + Moth, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. His first chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017) is forthcoming. He is the 2016 William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest winner in his current city of Columbus, Ohio. Visit him at jimjakk.com.
i don’t believe in space wormholes, time travel, events unravelling counter-clockwise. what is becomes what was. time is an arrow. resurrection comes only in memory, the rising of the dead, the rolling back of the stone in mind and dream. this is the dimension of ghost where physical laws don’t rule and time isn’t an arrow shot from a bow. the constant struggle to keep from slipping into randomness. forces weakening until connections loosen like petals falling from the autumn flower. although once upon a linear time everything was as simple as leaping over a puddle in spring.
the lilac not yet
in full bloom and already
florets in decay
—
Marianne Paul is a Canadian poet and novelist. She won the 2016 Jane Reichhold Memorial Haiga Competition multi-media category, and the 2016 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku International, Canadian division. To learn more of her work, visit mariannepaul.com and literarykayak.com.
first day of school
the sun’s warmth
in my lunchbox
—
Anthony Q. Rabang finished his BS Biology at the University of the Philippines – Baguio in 2015. He started writing haiku, senryu, and haibun while soul-searching in January 2016. He has poems published in the Asahi Haikuist Network, The Mainichi Failed Haiku, World Haiku Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cattails, Wildplum, Akitsu Quarterly, Akisame, Makoto, Presence and Under the Basho. Website: Short Pauses.
