Flying Island

The Heart Remains by Hiromi Yoshida My heart was a broken compass again—this time, propelling me away from Annie’s memorial service site down Walnut Avenue—till I begged diners at a Chinese restaurant for GPS directions, (I was a bicycling buzzard) my own lunch their sympathetic fortune cookie hearts (paraphernalia  of necessity).  My  vigil candle  refused to light up among the others at the Unitarian Universalist Church, but when I stood at the pulpit  to read “Fishtailed Cherub,” the afternoon sun  flowered into radiance—rekindling within me Bloomington’s communal love,  and my heart was a fixed compass  (no longer the dull feast of buzzards), and Lotus bloomed before us all, curling red petals into the warm Bloomington night. Hiromi Yoshida is a winner of multiple Indiana University Writers' Conference awards. Her poems have been published in The Asian American Literary Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Evergreen Rev...

Bluebells             (for Greta) by Amy Genova Every April someone suggests 24 Let’s meet on the 24 th … My frontal lobes thicken Bulb with 2 and 4 before I remember why Your birthday, April 24 th Today, I walk through woods masked in bluebells No one planted them They roll out by the hundreds an undulating comet tail I bend, stroke my hand through their buds— The brevity of bells break over the forest floor Twilight drizzled down and shattered in blossoms a mad clarity against lead sky A singular tune—bluebells low to ground to grave For an instant I roll in their wave Their delicate tongue 1000 songs—or maybe 24 Amy Genova has been published in a number of journals: The Bad Shoe, 3Elements, R.E.A.L., Spry, etc. She also won the 2015 James Nash prize. She has strong ties to Indiana, having lived there and raised her family from 2000-2010. She now lives in Olympia, Washing...

The Cistern by Nicole Brooks I couldn’t keep myself from every so often getting on my knees, lugging aside the steel cover and staring down into the cistern. It was lined with bricks and smelled of musty old water. One day I looked too long and fell in. When I had been down there a few days a man walking by heard me wailing. I asked him to send my baby down. “How about some water?” he said. “That works, too,” I said. “Where is the baby?” he said. “Somewhere in the house,” I said. He sent down a bucket of water and another bucket with the baby. I remembered then the daydream I used to have about placing the baby at the bottom of the cistern. The thought had always scared me but I recognized it for what it was, a reckoning of all the things I could or could not do to the tiny baby. “ I should bring you and her up,” the man said. “ You and what army,” I said. “I will get help,” he said. Back in the house the baby ate while I ate and then we dozed. “...

Willem McArthur by James Matthew Lee Wilson Long into August, Willem McArthur walked the firm, determined gait of a young man intent on beating the afternoon rain. He’d been down this mountain road once before, half his life ago when at the age of ten, he’d ridden with his pa down the valley corridor to fetch his withering Grandmother from the train station. Thereafter, young Willem had often dreamt of a return trip to civilization; perhaps to pick up a great aunt or some other distant kin traveling by rail to pay their last respects to Gran Jo. But a decade later, Josephine McArthur had proven near immortal in her years, and accordingly, the road, as well as the world beyond, had remained known yet unexplored folds at the tapestry’s edge. Willem wiped the oppressive heat from his brow and tugged at his collar. Above, the sky hung an unbroken slate of blue, unblemished in its terrible beauty save for the scorched spot through which the white-hot brilliance of t...

Garage Fumes by Stacy Post This poem wants to be the grass blade of longing when you pull out the mower in Spring and see leaves from last fall still clinging to the deck. This poem wants you to lift the mower and sharpen that blade. Remove the dark underbelly of memory with unsteady fingers as you recall our last walk to the creek— tiny pliant maples sticking to our shoes, how we paused to remove them, held them up to the sky, how we stopped for the colors but not for each other. Stacy Post is a Midwestern writer in multiple forms. Her poetry chapbook, Sudden Departures, debuted in 2013. Her poems have appeared in Quail Bell Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Flying Island, Midwestern Gothic, Pearl, Iodine Poetry Journal and others. A Pushcart Prize nominee for short fiction, her stories have appeared in CHEAP POP, Boston Literary Magazine, moonShine review, Fiction365, Referential Magazine and others. Her short pl...