Flying Island

    Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 1.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have two contributors in poetry. We hope you enjoy this issue. Get your submissions ready! February is a fee-free submissions month for Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction. Looking forward to reading your work! Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors & Readers POETRY Shari Wagner, "The House of Juliet" Norbert Krapf,  "Sidewalk Cracks" Follow us! Twitter: @JournalFlying Instagram: @flyingislandjournal Are you a writer who is from the Midwest or has close ties to the Midwest? We'd love to read your work. Submissions info in the tab above.  Support the Indiana Writers Center!

        The House of Juliet           Juliet V. Strauss 1863-1918 “Strauss not only advised her readers to find beauty  and spirituality in their own lives, but she fought to protect  it in her own life through her successful effort to preserve Turkey Run’s grandeur.”      —Ray E. Boomhower, The Country Contributor:          The Life and Times of Juliet V. Strauss In Ladies’ Home Journal , I extolled  the unsung pleasure of rolling out a cobbler crust  or pulling sun-dried laundry from the line.  But my heart’s domicile   was the wilderness near Rockville, where as a child I turned handsprings on canyon floors and shimmied up sandstone walls  to lichen-covered cliffs fringed by ferns.  Papa praised my questing spirit, and when he died, a young man,  with hands gnarled from carpentry,  the wind i...

      Sidewalk Cracks The boy who didn’t want to step on cracks in the sidewalk played a brilliant organ and the big company in the small town hired him to show how beautiful their organs could sound. His fingers had the touch to make those organs sing but the sidewalks had so many cracks he could not keep up with his job of stepping over all of them. He had nightmares about what would happen if he stepped on a crack. In his recurring dreams he saw so many cracks coming at him that eventually his fingers stiffened and he could no longer make the organ sing. Sadness froze across his face. He lost  his job with the company and one day he disappeared             into a crack that opened so wide he could not step over it. Nobody knows where he is.     Norbert Krapf, a former Indiana Poet Laureate, has published fourteen collections, the latest being Indiana Hill Country Poems and Southwest by Midwest . His collecti...