Flying Island

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 2.28 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Jonathan S Baker , Angela Jackson-Brown , Norbert Krapf , and  Jason Ryberg . 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

III Poems from a Stormy Evening after the storm’s peak                          tossing earth and walls passed leaving a snail’s trail                gleaming furrow carved  white and shades of gray                    their empty heads rang screaming and moaning               crying over missing persons behind the dark horizon               where strangers live and die there was only quiet                          in rooms beneath stones except for our breathing           sharing damp air over raw lips bodies shining damp              falling limp slack deeply relaxed  she held me in her arms            ...

Butterfly Wings No one sang me lullabies. Cradled in a splintered crib, I was lulled to sleep  by the sound of my own silent cries. My lips were sewn shut – stitched  in awkward zigzags. I ripped those stitches wide, my mouth becoming a perfectly shaped O. Butterflies tried to flutter from my mouth  even though their flesh still tasted of caterpillar. I tried to vomit them out, but they were one with my tongue. Maybe that is why they had time for a metamorphosis.  Too bad I missed mine – there I was – a baby  with little to no chance of gaining my butterfly wings, too. Angela Jackson-Brown is the author of the award-winning poetry collection House Repairs and five novels. In addition to her creative work, she serves as an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, and as a member of the graduate faculty at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University. Her dual roles as educator and writer continually inspire her expl...

Winter on the Blues Trail I’m on the Mississippi Blues Trail with my wife Katherine and we go to Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale to listen to Jimmy “Duck” Holmes. Katherine perceives that Anthony Bourdain is there also enjoying himself so she moves her chair closer to him and he smiles. She loves cooking Cajun and maybe she tells him so and he smiles more. The great lover of foods in so many places seems also to love the blues in Red’s Juke Joint. Some years after our Winter Blues Trail trip is over our daughter, who married a Franconian in Germany and loves to cook calls us, all upset with the news that Bourdain took his life. So sad, but I’m glad we saw him savoring the red-hot blues in such a friendly place as Red’s where so many people are very happy to be and thoroughly enjoy Red’s grilled meat and the red hot blues of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and the whole night was so memorable and my iPhone caught Anthony smiling while my wife sat near him. But, sadly, the blues could not keep him...

Cocoon For no good reason, a multi-colored silk dress spills from the cocoon      of a brown paper bag and      leaps into the bright blue wind,           never to be seen again. Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review among other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 20...