Flying Island

Little Detroit by Michael Brockley The factory by the railroad tracks where your grandfather built McFarlan sedans is shuttered, its windows broken. Its doors jimmied open by scavengers. At Independence Day parades, undertakers once pulled floats along Grand Avenue in their vintage Auburns and Duesenbergs while county fair queen hopefuls waved and tossed butterscotch candies to the crowd. For the city sesquicentennial, the married men modeled the beards and mustaches of Civil War generals. Your clean-shaven father let muttonchops stubble his jaw. Then won a sawbuck for the way he favored General Burnside. Tom T. Hall played for tips in Sue's Diner, the same place you bought sausage-and-egg sandwiches on Saturday mornings. Where you daydreamed over exotic paragraphs in a discarded Grit . Hall sang of giving $7.80 to a waitress for her rent. Of catching catfish in the Whitewater River. Folks said when fog rose from the Whitewater, a phantom McFarlan accelerated along the center ...

The Tremor for Liza and Maggie A daughter goes off to school sensing she is entering the end of one phase of her life soon to begin another. Her mother stands at her side amazed at what her daughter has become and will become even more. A tremor of love passes between them like the pitch of a tuning fork whose sound waves displace the silence in their opening ears.                         —by Norbert Krapf Bio: Norbert Krapf, a Jasper, Indiana, native, was Indiana Poet Laureate 2008-10, received a Glick Indiana Author Award 2014 (Regional), and held a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis 2011-12 to combine poetry and the blues. His latest of 11 poetry collections is Catholic Boy Blues: A Poet's Journal of Healing (ACTA Publications, In Extenso Imprint, 2015). He collaborates with bluesman Gor...

Lorraine by Frederick Michaels Sweat rolls off the bridge of my nose. I can taste a salty Main street flavor as I catch it's 90° on my tongue tip and share the brief liquidity with my lips. It's just 25 minutes to the Lorraine, but it surely feels like a long, hot way from 1968 and the news on the TV. I heard it plain then, but didn't feel it. Comfortably unafflicted by deprivation, cul du sac'd with like-minded faces, insulated by middle class tunnel vision, I was still numb and dumb from JFK in '63. Now half a lifetime gone, the images from my grainy black and white memory, emotionless and a million miles removed, snap into focus and I see all at once: I am the hands on the rifle I am the blood on the balcony I am America unseen behind a veil of indifference; and as I peer through my view finder I wonder how we do that to one another. I wonder how we survive as men and a bead of water drips down the le...

Tintinnbulation by Jo Barbara Taylor I Wind chimes wrinkle into timely pitch to report a windwhipped stir in the air. (you've heard them tingle)  When the tornado trespassed in Richmond,  (those days before sirens) the chimes on Main Street screamed and one block over, dead silence.     II The carillon holds dear twenty-three bells to give us this day every morning, (you've heard them quiver) our matins in precise pitch tuned (morning reminder) to stir a sleeper or a sinner, soothe the souls of the dead. III In Scranton church bells speak our daily bread. When the Marias toll, (you've heard them shudder) Aunt Lizzie chants Hark, hark, the dogs all bark.   (call to confession) Repentance digs in hard coal, lungs of the living, legacy of the dead. IV Winter, sleigh bells answer the call of school bells and cowbells, rhythms of daily habits (you've heard them shiver) when snow cloaks the p...