Issue 6: Cosmology

Issue 6: Cosmology (Jan-Feb 2016) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

Three Crows and a Storm

by on Jan 21, 2016

Looking out and up from my front window I saw a yellow sky, darkened by the ominous promise of an afternoon storm. As I watched, three crows flew onto the strip of sidewalk near my yard. The large one, Leader, preened his feathers, cawed orders at the others and punctuated his pontifications with sharp pokes of his beak on the backs of his fellows.  A crow’s visit. What was it I had heard? As I watched I recalled—a group of crows is called a murder of crows.

The trio began pecking at the stubble of grass around them. A bolt of lightning cut through the yellow mists followed quickly by the rumble of thunder. Leader and then his followers raised their heads to the sky, opened their beaks to challenge the thunder with their own raucous cries. In reply, with sniper precision, sharp, large drops of water began to pelt the crows.

Lightning flashed and a curtain of water dropped from the sky. The lightening continued drawing bright victory swaths through dark sky. Thunder cheered storm’s ferocity.

The crows persisted, strutting, screeching, cawing at the sky. One tremendous flash of light sliced into the ground across the street. The house shook. Crow leader opened his wings and flapped upward. His companions followed, raucously cawing a threat to return before disappearing into the dark-again sky, flying toward the woods at the end of our street.

The summer downpour halted soon after. A bit of blue edged out from behind the clouds–yellow air gone. The crows were gone. Yet I remained uneasy. For a time.

Eventually summer’s brightness pushed away the malaise. Heat gave way to clear cool of autumn, the bright cold skies of winter, and the hazy blue skies and rainbows of spring, I completely forgot about the dark harbingers’ visit.

However, when summer’s heat again pressed hard upon me and blue skies yellowed with storms, the memory of the last crow’s shrill shriek sounded in my soul. In the space of a month that summer, one neighbor’s child died of a heart condition.

Our dear friend’s son, crumpled over in the shower and died before his father could get him to the hospital. “Undiagnosed  ‘issues’ related to a birth defect.” They said.

I waited, holding my inner breath for a third sad shadow to step across my spirit. Months passed. Just when I was sure that bad would not come in threes this time, that the number of crows had been a coincidence, a phone call shrilled near midnight on March 26, breaking the quiet of an early spring evening.

Like the crow’s caw, the call screeched out the news that our son had stepped in front of a car on a darkened campus street near his dorm, crossing subsequently into paradise. Harbingers of the angel of death had visited–a murder of crows, indeed.

 

—
Joan Leotta has been playing with words since childhood. Joan recently completed a month as one of Tupelo Press’ 30/30 poets. She has published or has work forthcoming in Red Wolf, Thynks, Knox Literary Magazine, A Quiet Courage, Eastern Iowa Review, Silver Birch and Postcard Poems and Prose. In addition to her work as an award-winning journalist, short story writer, author, poet and essayist, Joan performs folklore and one-woman shows on historic figures. Joan lives in Calabash, NC where she walks the beach with husband Joe. She collects shells, pressed pennies and memories. Find her online at joanleotta.wordpress.com and on Facebook.

Chesapeake Beach in October

by on Jan 20, 2016

fields of dried queen anne’s lace
& ripe corn along the empty highway

butterfly weed pods split apart
pulling their stalks down

chokeberries shriveled
tangle of dusty roots

gray clapboard barns
filled with hands of tobacco

roadside stands
with pumpkins, green tomatoes

& baskets of gourds
on splintered gray tables

smell of burning leaves & brine
as we approach Chesapeake bay

& the running tide
leaving mermaid’s purse & sea walnut,

moon jellies with sunfish in their tentacles
high up on the beach,

oystercatchers & laughing gulls
swooping across the breakers
in the cool moonlight

& past midnight
as we unpack the car

we smell rain
heading in our direction

 

—
Andrea Wyatt writes poetry and fiction and is the author of three poetry collections and co-editor of Selected Poems by Larry Eigner, Collected Poems by Max Douglas, and The Brooklyn Reader. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BY&BY, The Copperfield Review, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose and Blast Furnace.

Memories

by on Jan 19, 2016

A friend brings me two books about India from his mother’s house and two small brass candlesticks with a swastika at their base. He also brings a bottle of her homemade mango chutney. The talk revolves around the significance of the swastika in India, Japan and Germany. I have come full circle with the Indian meal I have cooked for my host family in Plattsburg.

overcast sky
a pale sun quivers through
a rabbit’s  ears

 

///

Author’s note: The word swastika came from the Sanskrit meaning any lucky or auspicious object

 

—
An eye surgeon by profession, Angelee Deodhar is a haiku poet, translator and artist from India. Her haiku, haibun and haiga have been published internationally in various books, journals and on the internet. Reviews of Journeys 2015, an anthology of International Haibun edited by Angelee Deodhar, can be read here and here.

Cosmology

by on Jan 15, 2016

When I was small, my world was flat
and the night sky was a basket, woven
from stripped leaves, uprooted grasses,

placed inverted over every space my
feet remembered at the end of day,

creating dark in which to sleep. But
I had my secret: I would peek through
this thatched lid, through small spaces

where fibers shifted, have my glimpse
of the beyond, the realm outside where

it was always daylight, always sunlit,
ever bright. I was too young yet to live
upon a globe, did not believe in what

my elders called the stars.

 

—
Laura M Kaminski grew up in northern Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. She is an Associate Editor of Right Hand Pointing, and the author of several poetry collections, most recently Dance Here (Origami Books, an imprint of Parrésia Press Ltd, Lagos, Nigeria, 2015).

Ghosts of Home

by on Jan 14, 2016

We were warned at seventeen that home will always haunt us. We tucked the notion in our pockets with our parents’ worry and headed East to begin. The ghosts we kept stretched long inside us, threatening to break wide the circuitry of concrete cities. Eager at twenty-five to forget how long a voice roars through miles of open space. But we couldn’t be held back from the whitest of winters, when even midnight gleams. All the shrouded land shrieking light into the night. We were stirred not by the stars, but the hollows between them. We fell flat-backed in cold fields, noses to the sky, baying at every phase of the moon. Will they say we’ve settled when our bones turn to dust?

 

—
Kim Mannix is a poet, journalist, and short fiction writer living in Sherwood Park, Alberta. More of her writing, and many of her rambles, can be read at makesmesodigress.com.

Frost Flowers

by on Jan 13, 2016

They break when touched –

so delicate and temporary
we only harvest them with our eyes.

Hairline cracks in weeds seep
an aura of bluish ice

like miniature glaciers inching
against the frozen grass.

Our breath is a curtain
we hide behind. In this field,

our suffering is white and hollow,
bitter in the space between us.

All night the world evolved
and we just sat there, waiting

for crownbeard and ironweed
to wind some brittle shard

of memory out of the sky
and spool it back upon itself.

Stems burst and ice pours out
in petals. Slowly, over the hours

we count the morning
and think ourselves lucky

as we stand in the curling dawn.
It really did

take this long.

 

—
Sandy Coomer is a poet, mixed media artist and endurance athlete. Her poems have most recently been published or are forthcoming in Clementine Poetry Journal, Apeiron Review, and Hypertrophic Literary Magazine, among others. She is the author of two poetry collections: Continuum, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press, and The Presence of Absence, which won the 2014 Janice Keck Literary Award for Poetry. Visit her website at sandycoomer.com.

On New Year’s Day

by on Jan 12, 2016

On New Year's Day

 

—
Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, The Dream Patch, a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia and Glimmer Train, among others. His photographs can be seen in his online gallery. He is currently compiling a book of photography prompts for writers, From Vision to Text.