Flying Island

Every morning you woke before me ahead of the sun you brushed your hair and chose your clothes for work: the muted red sheath with matching sweater or a skirt  with white blouse, stockings, loafers— your look more collegiate than school marm. You’d go downstairs and make coffee, toast, then set out lunch bags prepped the night  before, our kitchen radio playing Top-40 tunes: Motown or John Denver drifting up to us  as we took turns in the bathroom to start the day. Is that why mornings hurt now, why you push a button before dawn to call staff to your side? No easy songs to hum as the sky lightens. The red dress long gone. Laurel Smith lives in Vincennes, Indiana. She finds the best poetry by listening, especially listening outdoors. Smith’s poems have been featured in New Millenium Writings , Flying Island , Natural Bridge , Tipton Poetry Journal, JAMA, English Journal, and Mapping the Muse.

Midsummer  After the evening shift  we walked the trail  circling the small lake, past the pink fireweed to woods flanked by rocky slopes covered with blueberries and lichen. Midsummer in Oslo  and the sky stayed light,  the sun drawing a continuous arc  along the horizon that curved up after midnight. As we watched endless day fade to shadows under the conifers,  the darkest place,  we came face to face  with something that stopped us  in utter silence— a European elk crossing the path. All these years later at dawn when loud warbling fills the trees, I think about the moment before the creature vanished,  about the shared dormitory room  that went with the temp job,  the foraging we did thriftily, about Nixon resigning then on flickering black-and-white TV and insurrection hearings now, about our return flights home to a country we hoped had changed into a place where we might find  a lifetime of experiences filled with love and idealism rather than turmoil  and be at times speechles

Coming of Age In the end, mother, I crawled out of your door like I crawled out of your womb with a fire in my belly; hungry, angry, alone. Displaced, desperate for the unknown. Wailing into the morning light, I flailed,  then, I didn’t. Suckling on the sun, I looked at the world with kitten eyes.  Then, I made the world look back at me. On your front porch,  on a county road in Indiana,  on God's command.  I made my way out of  my Coming of Age  with the past in my pocket  and  now in my hand.  A brave child. I was eighteen.  Megan Bell is privileged to have served Fort Wayne, Indiana as a reference librarian for the past decade. When she is not working, she spends time with her husband and two children. They enjoy the outdoors – riding bikes, hiking, and swimming. She digs all 70s singer/songwriter music, any cat she meets, and she saves all her extra pennies for travel.

  Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.26 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Rebecca Longenecker , Brian Builta , and Roger Pfingston . 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

Washed in the blood Samantha and I went to Christian camp each summer. We flung marbles from slingshots waded through creeks, caught crawfish, were baptized and received into white, sun-warm, cotton towels. During Bible study, we’d catch  in cupped hands the daddy long legs loping  across the lichened rocks, enthralled with our  mettle for touching something so disgusting.  We didn’t kill them but instead plucked one, two, three, even (greedy) four legs  from their brown bodies to watch them in jolts drag themselves out of the sun. And we laughed and ran to play carpet ball with our friends, our limbs cartwheeling madly, as if boasting.   Rebecca Longenecker is a former resident of Indianapolis. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work has previously been published in Flying Island as well as Havik; Bridge Literary Journal ; Wilderness House Literary Review; Rhubarb Magazine; The Pointed Circle; Prospectus; Eclectica; and Montana Mouthful.

Tuned Every Night Soon as I’m up my upper right eyelid resumes twitching  and not in time to Here Comes the Sun.  My toothbrush teases my tongue tip.  Any instant can open the door for despair.  As in a cackle of hyenas.  As in a swan without her wedge.  As in the lead dog eaten by four teammates. Then nightfall, a loose uncertainty. As in fitting a projection into a recess. As in the beast breathing heavy again outside the window.  Despair like holding a bag of shit without a dog in sight,  like kids screaming from too much fun or from being murdered,  hard to tell from over the fence.  Like a business of ferrets eating your final meal. Each morning I light a candle, sit in a blue club chair  and begin the meltdown procedures.  I had the job once of ringing the E-flat bell  every time someone died. There was a long list.  My wrist got tired. My ear bones got confused.  Some of us are no good at making money, piano tuner turned cookie inspector,  forklift driver turned bank teller mass

Fawn This morning, still gray with early dawn, having stepped out for today’s headlines, I found a fawn in our front yard, not poised for quick exit, rather folded to a roundness as if asleep in the safe density of high grass, still dreaming the return of its mother. Partly eaten, something had brought it down where it lay or possibly dragged its dark mound from the woods across the road. Given the few choices of Indiana’s carnivores, it could’ve been a bobcat or coyote, maybe a dog, but I think not. The cunning, the raw mix of blood and fur, bones still gleaming freshly stripped, apropos of natural instinct…and yet, done with a kind of crude propriety, some semblance of order and arrangement as it rose, sated, and assumed the slowness of the bobcat that appeared years ago from the woods out back as I sat on the deck, thinking at first a domestic stray with facial ruff, the tuft of pointed ears, no hurry, a beast in charge of the moment as it took the narrow path between the neighbors

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 6.28 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Zoe Boyer , Doris Lynch , and Joshua Kulseth . 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