Flying Island

  Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 9.22 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! We have three pieces to share in poetry and a new Craft Corner piece by our Creative Nonfiction Editor, Michael Gawdzik. We hope you enjoy this issue. Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Links to each piece in this edition below. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers POETRY Logan Chace, "Moths and hummingbirds" Martin DeAgostino, "In Memoriam" Julie L. Moore, "White Women's Tears"  CRAFT CORNER "Go for the Eyes!" by Michael Gawdzik 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!

Moths and hummingbirds Little things. The way airborne swarms of dust find their way, like moths, to the stale light of mid-afternoon sun filtering through a window, a wobbly pile of books, a scattering of papers, a lake collecting rain, always remind me of the summer I spent trying to clean out Maggie Harper’s house and barn. I was sixteen. The lilacs were still in bloom, but on their way out, swooning over the backyard fence. Life smelled of cut grass, distant grill fires, honeysuckle dizzying the air. Summers still felt almost endless, like the slow roll of a wave, not like the hummingbirds, fluttering, floating, pulsing, then disappearing before you even notice. Logan Chace received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Hollins University, and currently teaches English and Creative Writing to high school students in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Previous publications include Versal Magazine , The Meadow , Plain Spoke , THAT Literary Review , The Bookends Review , Buddy, Brushf...

            In Memoriam for Elie Wiesel Slowly the minister read a description of hell, an exercise, he said, in the reach of God, his realm. It was not the squalid grotesques of Hieronymus Bosch nor Cotton Mather’s flame and ash nor even Dante’s cruelly calibrated fosse. It was a child thrashing at the end of a rope his hollow, sallow frame too slight to quit the agony of Auschwitz. Minutes passed. More. An anguished voice cried from the yard Where is God? Where is God? God is here. Later, after bacon and eggs, I leafed quickly past the inked accounts of barrel bombs of bruised and battered children and the wretched petty deaths of local homicides until at last I reached the crossword puzzle and did not weep.     Martin DeAgostino is a late-life convert to poetry whose only defense is that he got there as soon as he could. He lives in Fall Creek Place in Indianapolis.

     White Women’s Tears                     for Felicia We have fallen at the slightest hint of black-boy threat or smoky censure wafting its way from the candid mouth of any woman of color. We are reflex. We seek redress. We police pale cheeks, congregating in the center of some nerve. Call us any damsels’ names you wish: Sarah, Mary, Carolyn . In their distress, our dew drops from the glands of fear, clear as any whistle or stolen spotlight. Look how we whet the appetites of men we weren’t designed to indict. Our sister is spit. We never run out. Julie L. Moore , a Best of the Net and seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon , which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review , Alaska Qu...

  “Go for the Eyes!”     Michael Gawdzik Let’s face it, eyes cause nothing but trouble…Medusa, the Eye of Sauron, Polyphemus, The Three Stooges. Heck, if Indiana Jones hadn’t controlled his peepers when the ark was causing trouble, we would’ve never seen him and Sean Connery punch Nazis in the desert. But in the galaxy of prose, we have another issue, the dreaded “I.” It just sits there, resting against whatever punctuation may be next to it, or it just teeters, haplessly, supported by whatever words go near it. A light breeze can turn it into an underscore in an instant.  It is elusive and boring and wholly dependent on the other twenty-five letters in the alphabet to make it remotely interesting.  As writers – specifically creative non-fiction writers – we have become too dependent on this vertical line to do a lot of work for us. As a non-fiction editor, a CNF reader for multiple lit mags, and a writer myself, nothing twists my stomach more than seeing an und...