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First Funeral
His brother’s casket had been closed because
the injuries he suffered were extreme.
Even his sister, a registered nurse,
didn’t look to identify his corpse.
Instead, his rings and his drivers license
testified as to his identity. -
Jurassic Park Is A Warning About AI
By: Davor Mondom
This September, I read Jurassic Park for the first time. I don’t know what took me so long — I remember buying a paperback copy when I was a teenager, but I never got around to reading it and at some point I got rid of it. Earlier in the year, my wife and I rewatched the original trilogy of movies to prepare for Jurassic World: Dominion. With dinosaurs on my brain, I resolved that this year I would finally read the book that started it all.
-
I find a thousand words for happy
the feeling of lostness
two or three streets from home
the sweetness of doing
nothing all Sunday -
Big Tree
I spent childhood days
climbing the pecan tree
that overhung our pool
memorizing its notches and scent
as it waited for the right time
to drop its leaves into
the cool water -
Old Soul
I simply knew,
Someday, and real soon,
I would become a fool
To your vivacious moon.
Because an old soul -
A Sabbath of Unknowing
By: Dr. Jon Tilburt
Everything’s more casual out here in the West. The proximate parking, the summer-weight clothing, first-name basis with the CEO. Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
Wednesday, clinic day, I walk the halls with an apparent ease, like I’m comfortable in my skin, competent, experienced. My navy suit and bowtie around my neck. Pomade fixing my coiffed salt-and-pepper hair.
7:45 sharp, I rehearse my mantra at the door, rub sanitizer back and forth on my hands and knock, take a deep breath, peek my head in the exam room, and step into another’s story.
“Melissa, I assume,” I say, extending my hand. “Welcome to integrative medicine.”
-
Invisibility
Shadow of solitude
A speck on this planet
Unknowingly tries to be an extrovert
Conquering her introversion
Yet she loses herself along the way. -
Ed
I first saw Ed
hanging at Nicollet Isle
on his wedding day, oven-hot.
The hippie couple hit the wall,
turned middle class,
and were looking good. -
Rooted
What little boy comes to stay
at his new foster home
with a boxful of trucks and toys,
and has absolutely no idea how to
imagine what they
might be doing? -
Every Halfway
Even the night comes to an end someday.
But what will be the price I pay?
When morning breaks across your skin,
will she still sleep where I should have been? -
Journey Through Addiction and Back
I once was the perfect example of how easily
into peer pressure you can be sucked into,
which led to that first drink, which led to many more,
first from the glass and then the whole bottle.
Which led to that first high, -
Cascade
in between,
i step onto our back porch, concrete slab piled high with tired coffee tables and
paint-spotted mugs. the robin sitting on the telephone wire begins to sing.
and at first i cannot place it. and i am filled with a desperate longing, a sort of
memory-cascade, and i recognize the sparrow’s lilting as Frank X Gaspar’s poem Nausicaä. -
The Blind Woman and The Television
By: Adnan Adnan
She was blind and I did not know her name.
We were watching the film, The Old Man and The Sea, on TV. It was a late afternoon summer on a Friday, in the late 1980’s, in Jessore, Bangladesh. Our drawing room was dark, crowded with the furniture and other decorative pieces. The old ceiling fan did its best to keep us cool. Still it was too hot to put on a shirt. I was in my shorts. She sat on the sofa in her green Saree. I felt even hotter just by looking at her. I had no idea how she could bear that heat. I was seven. We had been waiting for this film for over three months ever since I read about it on the TV-Guide.
-
White Pearls
beneath the cobble, my working
shoes shift between
the cracks, sticky sweet
a bird’s breakfast. -
Padding Slowly
up the path
I have time to smell the sap
of the pine trees, to try
to decipher the bird trills
above me, to linger by the pond
watching the turtles
engage in Tantric sex
on the high end of the log. -
Fumiko-San
Five years have passed and now it is the year 5769
I wrap the ghost of my mother into an Origami swan
-white as pond lilies in JulyI fold her neatly again like a fetal embryo & stuff her into
my left shirt pocket – along with six months of losing
lottery tickets -
Scooter Dude
I wish I had known the version of my father
that others did:
Scooter Dude on the sidewalk,
pretending he was gonna run over
children’s feet,
them squealing with glee. -
Pines
Franco came to power through a coup, to
prevent leftist reforms from trickling through
the government. He came from the same town as
my great-grandfather, Ito, though the area has
since exiled Franco’s remains. His body was taken
from the Valley of the Fallen and forsaken
to a small plot of land near Madrid. They tried
to erase his memory after half a million died
in the civil war—including three of my great
uncles, who fought to prevent a fascist state. -
In Abeyance of a Grand Mal Seizure
By: Patrick Johnston
When he was fifteen years old, Atticus Johnson discovered that his brain was capable of making mistakes in ways he had not yet imagined. His mind had made lots of mistakes, both minor and more serious, up until that point, but it was when he was fifteen that Atticus Johnson became aware that his brain, as opposed to his mind, was capable of making mistakes.
-
The Last Legacy
By: Donna Faulkner
(A hybrid work of fiction with Creative Nonfiction)
“…Of course I was livid. They had bastardized American Gothic …but my lawsuit was thrown out. The judges claimed no one would have actually believed that those were my bare breasts on the cover of Hustler. But when I first saw it…” Nan clutched her chest, “it nearly gave me a heart attack.”
I’d worked at the retirement home for years, for as long as Nan had been here. I washed and helped Nan get dressed, carefully applied her cherry lipstick, and we chatted as I gently brushed her fine hair.
