Flying Island

Underfoot by Kassie Ritman The afternoon sun cast its golden glow across our city as we traveled the narrow-laned streets between buildings. We were getting close. Ahead, shining in the same autumn light, I saw our destination—Lucas Oil Stadium. I’d collected both my husband and a close friend from their respective offices along the route towards downtown. I was driving them like one of my children’s carpools. The three of us were headed to the Colts’ stadium to watch a Friday night high school football game. Trying to finish up his workweek, my husband was busy answering emails as I turned into the parking garage. My friend and I had chattered nonstop since she’d gotten into the car. Our erratic conversation consisted of endless topic shifts and unfinished sentences. The babble was a welcome distraction from my downtown-driving phobia. Now here we were, deep in the city’s center where business, government and industry all converge with trendy housing—a far cry from our sa...

Even This World Is Enough When Starlings Shimmer on the Grass by James Owens First dawnlight imagines my hands out of the dark, this ache to press the air scrubbed after last night’s storm aside like a door. And all have risen in sleep. We ply out into the sky, gliding, hovering, climbing again as if we loved the far moon --- until the body tugs, insists on the earth, and the dreamer turns, spirals, regains the muddy shell and casts about for a word to crack open the dark, for threshold in the tongue of angels. Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Ind.

thankless by Tony Brewer I ignore every spare-change addict I encounter except when I have post-restaurant doggy bag. I hope they like Thai food but expect them to throw it away – it’s not money and I have no booze or drugs or sex in my pocket for them tonight. I don’t discriminate. I hate money, the wall between who we are and what we want. Some people only know how to make bricks – be mortar. Mental illness reduced to cardboard sign like politics squeezed onto bumper stickers. It works but then the light turns green. There is nothing to be taught in that moment of potential exchange. Nothing gained or saved or prolonged except a great societal guilt trip – that we measure our level of civility according to how we treat our least – that these unfortunates might be damaged or lost or running – that desperation has no home or destination but a look. Wrinkled ones and coins passed hand to Styrofoam act as mile marker...

Dandelion Is not only the buttery froth of bloom, strut and defiance and sex, pulse, sap, heads one morning in the grass, eager little sun-warm erections, nor yet the gray spiritual fluff clocks, sketching their skeletal longing away from the earth, that shiver toward the wind and go, but the downward clot of root, unkillable, fibrous, that sucks wet from the dirt, breaks upward, digs in like teeth and chews the stone. —by James Owens Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Ind.

First Jazz Solo by Nancy Pulley Curly hair trills to my son’s shoulders and his boyish  face sprouts the dark grace notes of a struggling beard. His quick jazz improv sounds like footsteps running away or laughter in another room, an independent dance with just a hint of uncertainty— and that is the part of the performance that steals my heart, his need a different rhythm, a syncopation that turns the talent into pure jazz,  the irregular beat of his pumped heart sounding in the stops and starts of the trombone slide, his young man’s lips pursed on the mouthpiece as if kissing someone goodbye. Bio: Nancy Pulley is a graduate of Indiana Central College—now the University of Indianapolis. Her poems have appeared in The Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, Humpback Barn Collection, A Linen Weave of Themes, and The Tipton Poetry Journal, as well as other journals and publications. She w...