Jim Ross

January 2024 | visual art

Barn on a Stormy Day 4

Barn on a Stormy Day 5

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage Magazine, Sweet, and Typehouse. Recently nominated for Best of the Net in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.

Faultless Weapons Handling

January 2024 | poetry

ankle-winged Word Thief flutters ~

orbiting The Muse

wicker creel on shoulder

stealing words off succumbing tongue, from depraved pink lips

collecting manifestos, dispatches, commands, lexeme-threads for unborn poems.

deliciously spilled onto insatiable empty page

deciphering their tangled satisfying meaning

blustery afternoons, elven queens, entangled roots, deep set red brick walls, swim in halo eyes outside time and space, float and dream, bask in caressing warmth, a vision, possibility, sensuality. Mythological building blocks held down on the table ~

kaleidoscopic paper spun round

allowing entry inside

to new worlds.

 

Gleipnir bindings hold winged ankles fast to Little Deaths.

faultless weapons handling in niche darkness.

stiff bow

arrow loosed

raining towards purposed destination

crossing through streaks of bright light

fleshed out totemic monument pierces orienting Dionysian-natured North Star

drowning inspirational beacon in gratification

 

seeking simultaneous orgasmic release of the lore-neuron

greedy minds shine with mythic legend veneer

wandering the halls around midnight

for satisfying heights of pleasure

organic and ever-changing panoply of wonders and sensations

lingering into daylight-crippling twilight delight

 

intent on breaking prey

the beast is afoot, baiting; heavily armed with unpredictable body language.

safe, at a distance

summoning strategic Sun Tzu’s ancient wisdom

the way, the weather, the terrain, the leadership, the discipline

coding memories of my nightmares, my fantasies.

 

verklempt knight walks seven unlit blocks to doors that can’t be closed after opening.

tectonic plates shifting under pace-worn leather boots.

Paineater stills the chaos

disarms the shadows

guards the spiraling-wanderer.

 

J. M. Platts-Fanning

J. M. Platts-Fanning is an award-winning writer nestled within the woodlands of the wave-tousled coastline of Prince Edward Island. Recipient of a PEI Writers’ Guild2022Island Literary Poetry Award, 2020 Island Literary Short Story Award, the 2022 Battle Tales VII Champion and 2nd place winner in the Humans of the World 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge. Publications include, The Dalhousie Review 2024, Burningword Literary Journal 2024, Pownal Street Press’ 2023 anthology, Fiona: Prince Edward Island Accounts from Canada’s Biggest Storm, Toronto Metropolitan University’s White Wall Review 2023/03, 2022/11, The Write Launch literary magazine 2023/08, 2022/08, 2022/06, Prometheus Dreaming cultural magazine 2022/11, Artistic Warrior’s 2022 Dribbles, Drabbles and Postcards anthology, Common Ground 2020/03 and GIFt Horse anthologies Vol 1 through 5. Her plays have appeared on various theatrical stages, including her dystopian fable, “Apple Bones” performed at the 2021 PEI Community Theatre Festival, “An Answer to the Question on Death” staged at Fridays with Fringe in 2019 and “Held to the Fire” chosen for Watermark Theatre’s 2018 Play Reading Series.

Cecil Morris

January 2024 | poetry

What Does Persephone Want?

 

Our daughter Persephone comes and goes.

She plays peek-a-boo with Oxycodone

and Ambien.  She likes it in the dark,

a paradox for when she goes she takes

our sun with her and leaves us only night.

 

When she returns, she brings pallor and chill

and slumps in sleep like asparagus boiled

to limp defeat.  She carries bruises, too,

as if she wrestled with demons or gods

and did not quite escape their fiercest holds.

 

We welcome our daughter, this almost ghost

who does not smile or speak, who barely lifts

her head.  We feed her favored fruits and honey,

make evident (we think) our love, but she—

she sleeps and only sleeps as if the weight

 

of waking crushes her, as if she has

become her great grandmother, embodiment

of death who waits (asleep) to take the last

step from this world to the next, as if done,

done, done, and unwilling to wrestle more.

 

We Have to Let Persephone Go

 

Our daughter Persephone went down to death

to see what it was like and liked it well enough

to stay the whole season in darkness and damp

 

in that underground of hidden things and worms.

With her, she took her secret toys and our joy

and left for us her sad-eyed terrier mix,

 

her unfinished business, and a disco wig

of purple tinsel that seemed to spark with light.

We imagined her scrubbing her hair with dirt

 

and soaking in rejuvenating mud baths

then returning more youthful and radiant

than before, our one daughter renewed, re-born.

 

When it became clear she was not coming back,

we offered to visit her there, to bring her

the red cinnamon candy she preferred

 

or that frozen yogurt sold by the pound

and layered with multi-colored sprinkles,

but she said we could not come, could not yet pass

 

the needle’s eye as she had done.  We were left

bereft as when she went to college but more.

 

Cecil Morris

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in English Journal, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

The Coat

January 2024 | fiction

She saw the coat. Its colors and its wool and its plaid and its extremely careful collar rounded to fit a grown-up man and make him happy—all this contained in the glass storefront window—and its dryness in the humid air yet its ability to contain the magic charge of the moisture and the dryness of the air—and to keep scents and aromas of the body, and of rooms the wearer had been in, the scents of other clothing stored in his closet on sad lonely hangers—excited her. She imagined the perfect person to wear the jacket, a person who was completely soft and restful in his life, was only waiting for the strange and somewhat painful junctures of travel to change his life, his trajectory in the world. And then, would he return? Or never come back?

We were all once creatures underwater, she thought to herself. Yet we never wanted to go back to water, except to splash around in it briefly, or lie on a beach and feel the wind and hear the lonely seagulls which made you feel less lonely in comparison.

School was tomorrow and a chance to see him again, the boy who could grow up to wear the jacket and to stay in the town or travel far away from it and never return.

For days she would be what people called high, whenever she thought of the warm camel color at the base of the plaid, and the coolish dark green and dark red working through the camel color, as tightly wound and woven threads which traversed and simultaneously anchored the camel color. The camel color was caramels, almost an edible color, but also the forever color of sand.

His parents, everyone said, had given him the new car. Of course they had given him the car, of course he had never had a job, and would not bother with part-time jobs: he had better things to do. Plotting out his future. Or letting his future be plotted out, by gravity of boredom.

She was sending submissions to magazines called things like The Sun—it was fun to send a submission (only poor people submitted; rich people laughed at the idea of submitting, surely, as the word submission indicated your willingness to be a slave to something, namely, your poverty). Her last submission had begun Dear Mr. Sun—

Rebecca Pyle

Stories by Rebecca Pyle appear in Pangyrus Literary, The Third Street Review, The Lindenwood Review, The Hong Kong Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Guesthouse. Also a frequently-published poet and visual artist, Rebecca’s fiction has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently living in France. More information about Rebecca and her work can be found in rebeccapyleartist.com.

Madrid

January 2024 | poetry

Tang of ammonia, the yellow bins outside our apartment.

Fetor of urine, cardboard sheets in an abandoned doorway.

The girl who brushes past us in the cathedral,

sweat, cologne, and the sweet remains of her night

lying in her lover’s arms.

 

Didn’t the men who toiled to erect this cathedral,

laying stone on stone,

understand that stone is but hardened muck?

Foolish petitioners, standing before eternity’s bolted doors,

the soil from which we have been fashioned

hard-caked under our nails.

No, for us awaits no heaven,

no chaste and shitless Elysium.

 

Better to return to the stews of grimed clothes

we leave about our rented rooms,

clothes we faithfully launder,

and faithfully foul again,

sinks of dishes we faithfully scrub

and faithfully dirty again.

 

Rising from my dinner,

this warm Madrid night,

I go to lie in my lover’s arms,

my hands smelling of roast flesh and oil,

of lemon, butter, and basil.

 

Robert McKean

Robert McKean’s novel, Mending What is Broken (Livingston Press, 2023), has received coverage from Kirkus Review, Largehearted Boy, KRCB, Author2Author, and more. His short story collection I’ll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition (Livingston Press). His novel The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was awarded first-prize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest and declared a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Recipient of a Massachusetts Artist’s Grant, McKean has had six stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His website is www.robmckean.com.