Flying Island

  Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 10.25 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Laura Schwartz , Jared Carter , and George Kalamaras . 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

Sanctuary Before entering the woods alone along  resolved riverbed, I hid my bicycle behind the creek’s bridge. Softened under spring’s worm moon, braced for nettle’s greetings,  I hopped over cracked clay mud, under canopy of cottonwoods, and in the shade I would walk  those hours, whispering my poems. Now under  late October hunter’s moon, this arc, this sanctuary  still silences me, and my shadow passes easily  along the trace as curious clearweed. Again  to pause, small among the sycamores, where  a cacophony of crickets, the stuttering trilling  of frogs, form a chorus of prayers from the marsh. Laura Schwartz is a librarian in Geneva, Indiana, a small town along the Wabash River surrounded by remnants of the Limberlost Wetlands, so she spends much of her time with books or exploring the nearby nature preserves, especially Rainbow Bottom.  She graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a BA in Comparative Literature, and has always enjoyed reading and writing poetry. S

Teratoma Parasitic twin—unknowing,           abandoned quark— Little Matroyshka, still growing         within the dark Dimensions of your flesh. Almost           aware, you feel A strange malaise, not quite a ghost           but something real— A sibling that has lost its way           inside of you, And really only wants to play           at peekaboo. Jared Carter lives in Indianapolis . 

At the Pawnee National Grasslands Colorado Eastern Plains The only sound out here is wind pouring through wind. This is where the sun and moon scrape into one another and blur. The Chalk Bluffs. Buttes seemingly rise             out of their own stone coffins. Mice bone cracks             the mouths of owls. The world of the dead collides             with the world of the dead. Hammerblows of wind pummel the dusk,             batter the buffeting at my feet. The buffalo grass keeps bending             toward me, ploughing, pleading, knowing it must go on, certain it will             one day get in. Get into me and through. George Kalamaras served as Poet Laureate of Indiana in 2014 and 2015. He is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry (fifteen full-length books and nine chapbooks). One of his recent books, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me (Dos Madres Press, 2023), just received the Indiana Poetry Book Award for the two-year period 2