April 2016 | poetry
Children huddle in front
of glowing TV boxes
and are told to pray
by pale godless people
who look like cigarettes.
Hatred is a hard thing
to comprehend at this age.
Turns out, so is God.
So instead some stare at
or through
or into
the scene before them
and feel simply happy
to be here-
huddled in this corner
in this classroom
far away and alive.
Jacob Louis Moeller
Jacob Louis Moeller is a poet, screenwriter, and server living the nightmare and chasing the dream in Los Angeles, California by way of Tucson, Arizona. Sweat and saguaros remind him of home.
April 2016 | fiction
Each day he chooses which view the dome’s artificial windows will show him. At the press of a button he can be in the middle of the desert, or overlooking a square in Paris, or surrounded by high-definition rainforest. Most often though, he chooses the marina. He likes to watch the sun ease up over the horizon as he sets to work each day. All that space. All that sea and sky.
It’s a tough gig, working at the bottom of the sea. As the deployment lengthens he finds himself longing for the surface. It’s not human company he misses so much as the chance to run somewhere that’s not a treadmill. The chance to be outside, with nothing above him but sky.
Some days it’s hard to bear. Some days he sits watching the marina for hours at a time, face inches from the glass, weeping freely. He slopes around the station, banging implements together, cursing underneath his breath. His daily reports become terse: ALL WELL. ALL WELL. BORED. ALL WELL.
One day he presses his face against the window so that there’s nothing else to see. It’s beautiful. If only he could break out through the window glass. Dive through into the sunlit blue water of the marina and swim towards those boats. He sits for hours, face cupped against screen. Watching. Hungry. Then he fetches the fire axe. He lines it up with the window. He’s been down here too long. He wants to sail.
Krishan Coupland
Krishan Coupland is on the Creative Writing PhD programme at the University of East Anglia. His writing has appeared in Ambit, Aesthetica, Litro and Fractured West. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2011, and in his spare time he runs and edits a literary magazine. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk.
January 2016 | nonfiction
I saw you today. You’d been left behind. Caught in the act of unzipping your old skin. There among the husks of your siblings, you gripped the maple tree, your body the color of new leaves unfurling. I saw your convulsive twitch, your jointed limbs. I witnessed your struggle to be born. That moment of leaving your armor.
We are not strangers. I know you from your song, August’s soundtrack, that vibrating sine wave. Your evening crescendo rises in the ears of joggers, gardeners, children at play on browning lawns. We shout to be heard from under the trees—or fall silent altogether.
I know you from your shell, torment of my childhood. Yesterday I lifted your kinsman’s carapace from a raspberry. My fingers shivered to do it. Recalling crackly monsters my brother left on my bookshelf, my pillow, my light switch.
I know you from your jittering bounce on the ground, a curiosity for the dog, an opportunity for the cat.
Once you appeared at my back door after I wrote a poem in which you starred. You looked up at me as if to say, You rang?
But I’ve never seen you like this, freeze-framed in the act of vaulting into your new shape.
Does it hurt, this slow-mo backflip into freedom? It looks like it would hurt.
Maybe it hurts like a foot gone to sleep, the flow of blood returning. Maybe you sense that soon, very soon, your new wings will dry.
Do you look back at your exoskeleton once you’ve juddered free? That hull too small to contain you?
I look into your unblinking eyes, and I think not. Perhaps it’s more like this: You climb, you rest, you open your wings.
The buzzing symphony pulls you to the treetops. You ready your instrument.
by Shawndra Miller
Mennonite by birth, mystic by nature, Shawndra Miller is a writer and community organizer who lives in Indianapolis. She is coauthor of Sudden Spirit: A Book of Holy Moments and is currently working on a nonfiction book about community resilience. Her work has appeared in Edible Indy, Indiana Living Green, Farm Indiana, and Acres USA, as well as Boiler Journal and Lavender Review.
January 2016 | poetry
Electrons circle
protons, neutrons
of an atom’s nucleus.
Radio signal, steady
beeps fade out, long
distance voyager.
People talk as their
electric and magnetic
fields converge.
Atoms bond together,
make molecules that
form everything.
Lone dog left
in a cage wonders
what he did wrong.
Biosphere clings
to lithosphere’s roll
round an elliptical.
by Steve Hood
Steve Hood is an attorney and political activist. His work won an award from the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association and has been published in many places including Crack the Spine, Maudlin House, and the anthology Noisy Water. His chapbook, From Here to Astronomy, was published by Pudding House.
January 2016 | poetry
I once walked calmly through the cold, dark woods
Not afraid of what could have lied ahead
Strapped to my cold back were my gear and goods
Far away from any cottage or bed
I went to be alone with just my mind
Needing some time for me to clear my thoughts
It was not long before my head aligned
And I finally got what I had sought
Walking this path taught me one simple fact
That in a place where dark and evil creaks
You always find what always seemed abstract
And you find out that you are not so weak
A place alone is a place to find peace
A place alone is for your mind’s release
by Trevor Tyma
