Flying Island

North Shore  This beach is all sound, a crescent bay where  boundaries converge— birch and balsam, rhyolite and basalt, pink stone and water.  Opposite forces  layer the shorescape  in waves and shoulders. Resonance surrounds. Listening to it sing, I try to separate voices in the cacophony but hear braided together  the tone of the lake’s liquid muscle and the timbre of solid rock. Each tentative step  on such uneven terrain  takes focus and care.  Round stones slide, tumble perpetually, crashing surf surges out of the depths. Echoes, turbulence  amplify yearning  for profound quiet, for a walk beyond  our mad divisions  into a vaster space . Charlotte Melin grew up in Indiana and returns to visit. Retired from the University of Minnesota, she lives in Northfield and has published widely about German poetry, the environmental humanities, and teaching.

To One In Hell for a stroke victim One hand raised, the other grips the walker you push slowly  forward. You have forgotten  again if the piano  is on the left or right as you wheel your way to the bathroom. Robbed of sight, of most memories, you can still  get up unassisted,  can walk but only if  you keep to a very  narrow circuit that starts  with one recliner and ends  with another, a route, devoid of stairs. A route kept clear at all times. You move  counter-clock wise through rooms you once knew so well. Your tongue is often shocked by what  it says; your word-perch now a raucous roost. There should be a switch someplace, if you  could only find it, that turns the lights back on. A key  you fumble for day and night that just might unlock yourself.  Nick Conrad ’s poems first appeared in the 70’s/ 80’s in journals such as Green House, The Cumberland Review , and the TLS , with more than190 published since. His ...

Lee Street Beach Sun rises over Lake Michigan,  ignites a liquid field of sparklers through which a silhouette  of a woman skims the rippled surface, her muscled  strokes point to the shore lined with mussel shells. Algae bundles tangled green smell of wet nets. Wind whips a basso from towering oak and pine that watch like lifeguards, leaning toward the sun. Christie Chandler Stahl is an emerging poet, former librarian, teacher and college instructor. She has published in Midsummer Dream House and an anthology. She visits Lake Michigan almost daily, and lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband John.

Cedars on Bluffs at Table Rock Lake Trolling the shoreline in a jon boat, you will see these flaggy stones,  time stacked, rain pitted, lightning cracked  slabs of limestone holding in place  craggy bluffs that rise cantilevered  into the hills, clutching in clefts and crannies  scrub cedars arching toward the light,  their taproots divining a few droplets  of moisture to leech from the porous stones.  More bush than tree and dry as bones  in a desert, tendrils splay over rocks and twine into knots as big as your fist  as though uncertain of a foothold.  Thirst their only lifeline. James Green is a retired university professor and administrator. He divides his time between his home in Muncie, Indiana, and Mae Hong Son, Thailand, where he serves as a volunteer with the Jesuit Refugee Service. You may learn about his poetry at his website, www.jamesgreenpoetry.net

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 12.27 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Annette Sisson , Mary Sexson , Shelley Smithson , and Dan Carpenter . Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers

Still Frames at Friendship Hollow Did the bobcat descend from leafy ridge, kits stowed in tree hollow  or under muddled brush? She lopes  past the trail-cam, ears white,  cocked. Is she stalking prey— mice for babes, for her a sleeping  rabbit, squirrel in tree-fork’s drey?  She seems not to notice the pair of eyes flicker, electric, hunkered beneath the cabin’s warped deck. Whatever it might be—raccoon  or opossum—it’s large, wedged in  tight. Shrouded by thicket, folded  into long grass, a doe suckles  mottled fawns. Phoebes take  shifts, rest in a mossy nest tucked into rafters, smooth white eggs speckled brown. The heavy  opossum slinks from cranny, angles for trunk, clambers up. This valley’s life whirrs, unfurls to the rhythm of trees, bud to leaf meal.  A raccoon clings to shadowed branch, silent bobcat rounds the night. Annette Sisson ’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth...

The Artist She paints the room in her underwear freeing her arms from the confinement of cloth, loosening the notion of sleeves and muttering while she swathes the walls in the new colors of autumn. There are no boundaries to this canvas, and the paints that she brushes on are unending, as if she has called in all her markers, and whatever debt was owed her was paid in oils and pastels, a palette of tempera, and golden acrylics. Her movement is sustained by this, as if she is fed on the uncertainties of time mixed with paint.  She knows the minutes need to be counted, the brush strokes calculated as she turns to another empty wall. Mary Sexson is an award-winning poet with two full-length books and two collaborative chapbooks. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, and she has participated in many public poetry projects in Indiana. She has poems archived in the INverse collection of Hoosier Poets, at the Indiana State Library. Sexson has six Pushcart Prize...

I Never Knew You You are like a shadow In the window, the reflections Getting in the way You are the neighbor mowing your yard The scent of grass trailing you Behind your unsteady gait You are that man on the bench in town Hanging with your cronies Heads bent to shelter what you say You are fighting for your life Cells in revolt course through you Engaged in unruly play You were the decent man next door I never tried to get to know And now you’ve died only steps away Shelley Smithson is a psychotherapist living and working in northern MI. She studied at Earlham College in Indiana and Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. In her free time she loves to spend time with family and friends, write, do political volunteer work and roam beaches in Michigan.