Flying Island

  Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 7.26 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Rebecca Longenecker , Brian Builta , and Roger Pfingston . Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers

Washed in the blood Samantha and I went to Christian camp each summer. We flung marbles from slingshots waded through creeks, caught crawfish, were baptized and received into white, sun-warm, cotton towels. During Bible study, we’d catch  in cupped hands the daddy long legs loping  across the lichened rocks, enthralled with our  mettle for touching something so disgusting.  We didn’t kill them but instead plucked one, two, three, even (greedy) four legs  from their brown bodies to watch them in jolts drag themselves out of the sun. And we laughed and ran to play carpet ball with our friends, our limbs cartwheeling madly, as if boasting.   Rebecca Longenecker is a former resident of Indianapolis. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work has previously been published in Flying Island as well as Havik; Bridge Literary Journal ; Wilderness House Literary Review; Rhubarb Magazine; The Pointed Circle; Prospectus; Eclectica; and Montana Mouthful.

Tuned Every Night Soon as I’m up my upper right eyelid resumes twitching  and not in time to Here Comes the Sun.  My toothbrush teases my tongue tip.  Any instant can open the door for despair.  As in a cackle of hyenas.  As in a swan without her wedge.  As in the lead dog eaten by four teammates. Then nightfall, a loose uncertainty. As in fitting a projection into a recess. As in the beast breathing heavy again outside the window.  Despair like holding a bag of shit without a dog in sight,  like kids screaming from too much fun or from being murdered,  hard to tell from over the fence.  Like a business of ferrets eating your final meal. Each morning I light a candle, sit in a blue club chair  and begin the meltdown procedures.  I had the job once of ringing the E-flat bell  every time someone died. There was a long list.  My wrist got tired. My ear bones got confused.  Some of us are no good at making money, piano tuner turned cookie inspector,  forklift driver turned bank teller mass

Fawn This morning, still gray with early dawn, having stepped out for today’s headlines, I found a fawn in our front yard, not poised for quick exit, rather folded to a roundness as if asleep in the safe density of high grass, still dreaming the return of its mother. Partly eaten, something had brought it down where it lay or possibly dragged its dark mound from the woods across the road. Given the few choices of Indiana’s carnivores, it could’ve been a bobcat or coyote, maybe a dog, but I think not. The cunning, the raw mix of blood and fur, bones still gleaming freshly stripped, apropos of natural instinct…and yet, done with a kind of crude propriety, some semblance of order and arrangement as it rose, sated, and assumed the slowness of the bobcat that appeared years ago from the woods out back as I sat on the deck, thinking at first a domestic stray with facial ruff, the tuft of pointed ears, no hurry, a beast in charge of the moment as it took the narrow path between the neighbors