Mulberries grow in deep pockets of my memories. The sepals turned fleshy and purple, tight as brains. As children, my brother and I made clubhouses in the mulberry shrubs on the campus where our father taught. Curtained and cool in the heat of the quad. My brother, who never made it out of childhood, believed the shrubs were time machines, taking us back to a time before sidewalks and cut lawns and flagpoles, before mail in the post office box and paninis at the campus cafe. He’d push the …
My car is parked but when I pass the sign that says ‘Slow Down’ and shows a picture of children playing I obey instantly, naturally, all too ready to put the pace back. I keep watch for cracks in the sidewalk, the wrinkles that indicate an aging path, tiny fault lines of friction that might help these heels rediscover their talent for dragging. Shane Schick has poems appearing or forthcoming in LEON Literary Review, The Lake and South Flordia Poetry Journal, among others. He lives with …
To celebrate the release of Issue 6 and our Blurred Genre contest winners, we are hosting a reading over Zoom on May 10 at 6:30 pm PST. *** See full details below and RSVP at this link! …
Read the flash pieces at the links below: 1st Place: The Pasture by Enchi 2nd Place: Neo–Jerusalem by Chinedu Gospel 3rd Place: The Balloon Game by C. J. Anderson-Wu Finalists: Pretending by Chris Clemens and Girlfriend as DiVine, from Disney World by Brady Alexander Honorable Mention: "Crooked Love" by Anastasia Jill"An Absurdist's Lament" by J. J. Steinfeld"Sitting on the Grass After the Last Spring Exam in Golden Valley, Minnesota" by Emily Brisse"Tethered" by Amy …
Rosy’s baby is chestnut-colored and bow-legged. She wears spots like scars. There’s a splotch in the center of her forehead like, in another life, she was shot dead. There’s one on the soft part of her neck like, maybe once upon a time, something took a bite of her. There are some at the bottom of her skinny legs like, perhaps, she crawled out of the Earth while something tried to pull her back in. Rosy’s baby can’t moo, so her mama has become acquainted with the sound of her baby’s hooves on …
1 A bird drifts ashore from the sky with a song hung loosely between its beak. ² But, the doors of our hearts have no keyholes. ³ Surely, every other thing will evacuate, except silence. ⁴ There's a century that sits between my incisors, aching. Like a virus, ache becomes a plague when it overstays the night. 5 So in this poem, I shove history into my belly & glory in the fullness of its grief. 6 Once, in my thirsting, I drank the Atlantic Ocean & spelled pain in the long swallow. 7 …