Edie Noesser
Cemetery
Edie Noesser
Edie Noesser lives on Balboa Island, California. She is interested in nature, bird watching, and urban scenes, bringing her camera along as much as possible.
The Mother Between Us
Grandpa would say go outside I can’t hear myself think and if the air was clear and bright the mother between us said run, let your lungs gobble that good air, get your Vitamin D, and sometimes the air was thick with low-lying fog by the river, and the mother was shrouded, warning of slippery rocks, stray dogs, of Mr. Bob—who couldn’t live near a school—and sometimes the air was searing and the mother shimmered, drew us to the shade, silent while we bickered—having long understood that we did it for sport—and sometimes the air was sharp as icicles and the mother between us said put your scarf over your nose and mouth and sometimes the air held something sulfurous from downriver factories or—worse—that funk from the rendering plant and she said go inside, go drink some water, go help your Grandpa for a change you know he does his best, he’s just doing his best.
Michelle Morouse
Michelle Morouse’s work has appeared recently in Vestal Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gemini, Midwest Review, Prose Online, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction, The MacGuffin, and Unbroken. She is a Detroit area pediatrician and a Pushcart nominee.
The Doctor’s Office
There is nothing more that we can do.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
His face composed like laid brick.
Her every nerve thrumming.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
Her every nerve thrumming.
So it would be now.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
So it would be now.
No more tomorrow.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
No more tomorrow.
How will it be?
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
How will it be?
There will be nothing.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
The pores on his nose looming large.
There will be nothing.
And there is no God.
The pores on his nose looming large.
His white coat like hardened snow.
There is no God and
There is nothing more that we can do.
Elizabeth Hill
Elizabeth was a Finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Contest, with her poem also appearing as Poem of the Day on February 20, 2023. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize by Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Boomerlit, SAND, and Catamaran, among other journals. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge who was responsible for suits between learning-disabled children and the school system. She lives in Harlem, NYC with her husband and two irascible cats.
Kathy McConnell
Belly of the Space Needle
Kathy McConnell
Kathy McConnell is an award-winning photographer who teaches cell phone photography and writing at Walla Walla Community College in Walla Walla, Washington. She posts regularly on her blog, Box of Tales. The photos submitted for this edition were edited with a Samsung comic filter. Her philosophy of photography is to look for patterns and sightlines. Comic mode generates images that appear as hand-drawn illustrations.
Courtney Hitson
Mural: St. Croix
A sailboat and its white hull floating on the water like a grimace or lopsided moon. How the banana daquiri’s implosions of flavor echoed on my tongue while the bartender stuffed a blender with five bananas for my 2nd. Tom and I. How our kayak-oars were conduits as we stuck them into waters aspark with bioluminescence. Squares of honey cake swelling with flavor. So many abandoned cars in the jungle and their decades of rust—a museum of automotive osteology. Eight fathoms down a wall of reef: the divemaster skewering a lionfish and the nurse shark’s path, vacillating maniacally like a soundwave, to claim it with his big-mouth snatch. How scuba collapsed the world I knew, like a theatre curtain dropping to reveal hallways of stages. Submerged parts of the pier’s pillars coated in reef—outgrowths of webbed rock and branches of staghorn coral grasping at schools that meander by. How most days people ask are you on your honeymoon and chuckling to each other, full of fourteen years. The blue of that ocean, impossible to recreate like something from a dream—as if blue were ethereal or majestic or supernatural—certainly not of this earth. A blue-I-couldn’t-believe and repeatedly blinked at, waiting for it to resemble a more familiar shade. 10 PM, in the kayak, falling back into Tom’s arms to stare upwards at a night that churned with sprays of stars, the ocean beneath us aswirl with glittering sediment, eager and alive.
Mural: Three years in Key West
Conchs everywhere but the beach. Bruise-blue crabs scuttling the estuary’s woods. The muse that is Key Lime Pie and each local chef’s interpretation realized in three-story displays of crust, tang, and fluff, peaked into mountain ranges burnt into the mallow. Mammoth iguanas straddling the prehistoric and domestic, clenching to branches of manicured bushes. A life-size cutout of Judy Blume. Frogs no bigger than croutons bounding on walkways, their translucent sacs of bodies pumping with tiny organelles. A high school with entirely outdoor passing periods. Our calicos discovering—reveling—in the back porch’s liminal space of sun and carpet. Plush algae affixed to boulders like thick, emerald embroidery on stonewash denim. Coy pelicans with that dreamy and bashful, blue-eyed gaze. My husband and I—how our love doesn’t abide entropy, gaining energy the longer we’re together. The sky ever-heaping in a stack of contrails as if a pile of bones on a blue x-ray. The massive, sapphire and yellow swimming heads of queen angel fish. Art galleries featuring kitsch-pop art full of unsubtle commentaries on an afflicted humanity. Colonial homes painted in egg-shell-varieties of blue or pink or yellow. That freakish amalgamation of stingray and crustacean realized in a scuttling horseshoe crab. A Hemingway cat’s fat-pawed grasp on my thigh, while sitting in the backyard of the writer’s famous mansion.
Courtney Hitson
Courtney Hitson holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including DMQ Review, Wisconsin Review, McNeese Review, and others. Courtney and her husband, Tom (also a poet), reside in Key West, Florida with their two cats.
Print & Digital Issues
Featuring:
Issue 113, published January 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Linda K. Allison, Swetha Amit, Richard Atwood, Rose Mary Boehm, Daniel Brennan, Maia Brown-Jackson, Hyungjun Chin, Amanda Nicole Corbin, Kaviya Dhir, Jerome Gagnon, Jacqueline Goyette, Julien Griswold, Alexi Grojean, Ken Hines, Minseo Jung, Sastry Karra, Joy Kreves, E.P. Lande, Kristin Lueke, Robert Nisbet, Yeobin Park, Dian Parker, Roopa Menon, Ron Riekki, Esther Sadoff, Chris Scriven, Taegyoung Shon, Mary Thorson, John Walser, Julie Weiss, Stephen Curtis Wilson, and Jean Wolff.
