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Issue 78

April 2016 · 30 pieces

Cover of Issue 78Print edition on MagCloud ↗

Lifeless

April 2016 | nonfiction

Nonfiction · Issue 78I found myself at deaths door.  Looking up at the reflection of the stars that mirrored an image of what I once thought was my life. It seemed that violence followed me, or was it that I have been chasing it all along. Maybe the fact is that I enjoyed its company. It was my way of escape into the dark realms of the other side of me. But I was trapped and I wanted to get out. How is it that I fought with everything inside of me but nothing was good enough? I became helpless, hopeless, and distraught.

Roly-Poly Elegy

April 2016 | nonfiction

Nonfiction · Issue 78An April morning, or maybe March, my children and I were enjoying the medium-low sunlight, when my son, Jacob, found a roly-poly. We congregated and proclaimed it a fine representation of its species, clumsy in its armor, as if playing dress up in its grandfather’s old army coat, and concluded that it was most likely on its way home from a sleepover, whereupon I returned to my writing, they to their explorations. A few seconds later I turned my head to a quick succession of three strikes: the first soft, the second and third with a consecutively sharper snap. Jacob crushing the roly-poly with a golf ball to a gray paste.

Strange Sugar

April 2016 | fiction

Fiction · Issue 78It was her parents dying in a tragic accident downstate.  It was being sent off to live with a grandfather she’d never known existed.  It was working at his funeral parlor in an old Victorian house by a lake the color of desert glass.  It was assisting the grandfather in a softly lit basement room of tiled walls and shining metal tables with round black drains.  It was being ten years old and manipulating blue-tinted flesh and pliant muscle.  It was peering into faces that had been rendered void, it was fitting small plastic cups under the lids of dehydrated eyes.  It was inserting needles into veins and replacing syrupy blood with fine clean embalming fluid.  It was applying makeup to silent women and shaving greasy five-o’clock shadow from the men who no longer cared about being nicked.  It was combing little boys’ matted hair and knitting cheery bows into the tresses of little girls.  It was repairing bullet holes and stab marks and burned flesh and flayed flesh and flesh that had gone missing.
Burningword

Burningword Literary Journal publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art three times a year, in January, April and October, on the web and in print. Established 2001.

ISSN 2161-8992 (print) · ISSN 2157-7366 (online)

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